Earlier today CNET published an interview with Marc Andreessen, in which the Netscape founder and influential VC outlines his personal vision for where tech is heading in the near future. His new tagline, from a piece he wrote for the New York Times, is “software is eating the world”, a blunt reference to how software increasingly appears out of nowhere to utterly consume a traditional practice or business model—be this in commerce, the social realm, or just about everywhere.

Andreessen asserts that this affect will only accelerate in the future because of the explosion we are experiencing in mobile computing:

Most of the people in the world still don’t have a personal computer, whereas in three to five years, most people in the world will have a smartphone…. If you’ve got a smartphone, then I can build a business in any domain or category and serve you as a customer no matter where you are in the world in just gigantic numbers–in terms of billions of people.

This new scale of mobile is something we’re only beginning to see, but it is becoming clear that the change this brings about is going to be profound. Mobile computing is very interesting to Layer 7; watch our for some interesting new developments coming out of our labs early in the new year.

I discovered a similar indicator of mobile interest using Google’s Insights for search. Pete Soderling and Chris Comerford, from Stratus Security Technologies, gave an excellent talk back in 2010 at the RSA show about REST security. They illustrated how the zeitgeist around distributed computer communications was changing over time by comparing search volume for “SOAP Security” (blue line) and “REST Security” (red line):

Try this out for yourself here.

What struck me about this was not that REST came up so fast—you’d have to be living under a rock to have missed that one—but that the two approaches have been tracking roughly equivalent over the last year. This mirrors our own experience at Layer 7, where we support both SOAP and REST security equally. We see similar patterns of interest coming from our customers.

What is even more interesting is what happens when you add “Mobile Security” (yellow line) to the mix:

Try it here.

The future indeed, will be written from a hand held device.

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