Why are Context Aware Systems Important now?

Well, some of you may be asking that Bill et. al. have been talking about this for last 17-18 years. So, what is new? Is this just old wine packed in a new bottle?

Its true that Contextual/Ubiquitous Computing has been talked about for more than a decade and a half now. But there were three key elements that have come together recently that will lead to an explosion of systems, applications and services that will make Context Aware Systems mainstream.

(1) First, there are now more than a billion smartphones with inexpensive sensors embedded in it.
(2) Second, these smartphones are connected 24x7 to "cloud" i.e. large banks of servers that can grow computing/storage on demand and in an elastic manner. So, all the data that the sensors are producing can be stored/crunched on phone/on cloud.
(3) Lastly, we have seen Machine Learning/Data Science applied to "Big Data" and primarily driven by web in early part of last decade but now more and more mobiles/sensors and Internet of Things will drive the Big Data generation, storage and analysis.

This trifecta or triple play has really caused the perfect storm.

In the next post I will talk about various types of contexts and what they mean. Stay tuned!