In his keynote speech, Yoichi Morishita, president of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., outlined the adaptation of digital technologies to home appliances. Excerpts of the speech follow:

Early this year, I sent a message through the Internet to more than 900 Matsushita offices around the world telling group staff how I felt about the beginning of the new millennium.

When I received immediate responses to my message, I realized anew that the whole world is indeed wired through an invisible web and can communicate in real time.

The Internet is like a dream tool that creates time and space warps.

Before the invention of this tool, human beings went through the Industrial Revolution and the information age. Advances in computer technology have enabled the transformation of the top-down structure of companies to a flatter, more horizontal one.

After the Internet was thrown open to business activities in 1991, the information, broadcast and telecommunications industries all made impressive advances to usher in the network age.

Internet home appliances represent revolutionary progress from the so-called control appliances with microcontrollers and media appliances such as CD and DVD players. Internet appliances will enable consumers to buy, on the spot, products and services they see demonstrated on their televisions and will permit children all over the world communicate freely with each other. Such appliances will offer services that abolish the limits of time and space.

The Internet will be the key factor that will transform people's lifestyles. While personal computers have been the main access tool until very recently, now various services tailored to Internet-capable home appliances are expected to emerge.

In our efforts to connect our home appliances to society as a whole, we have created a concept we call Home Information Infrastructure to offer new services and solutions.

In the Internet society, there should be a seamless link between households and society at large.

It is now possible to easily access the Internet with a mobile phone. Even more diverse services will become available with the development of high-speed telecommunication infrastructure, non-satellite digital broadcast systems, wireless mobile phones and other networking technologies.

Advances in information technology and networks will help create new working environments that are beyond anybody's imagination today, and should lead to the emergence of what I call the ubiquitous Internet society, which can be accessed whenever and wherever you are.

Information on tap

In addition to "whenever" and "wherever," another challenge is "whoever," which means Internet devices have to be simple enough that anyone at all can use them easily.

Konosuke Matsushita, the late founder of the Matsushita group, used to say he wanted to help create an affluent society where people have to pay very little to use products whenever they need them, just as they only have to turn on the tap for water.

The Internet, by providing abundant and useful information freely, like tap water, could be used to fight poverty and environmental degradation.

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