Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and inventor of the Web; Cambridge, MA

"I would like to see the Internet reach people in rural areas and help alleviate poverty. I would like to see more people reaching the Web from devices big and small, fixed and mobile. I look forward to more voice technology--in hands-busy scenarios such as driving, and also to increase accessibility (e.g., for people with low vision). The long tail of video on the Web is creating a new market of direct access to independent films and also has the potential to help with literacy issues. I hope for the proliferation of Linked Open Data: the Semantic Web 'done right.' I hope that governments will open their data stores to all citizens. A mashup sphere will feast on a wealth of Semantic Web data and herald the next wave of progress and creativity on the Web."

Vint Cerf
Vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google and co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet; McLean, VA

"There will be higher-speed Internet access by fiber and wireless media. Seventy percent of all mobiles will be Internet enabled in 10 years or less. Gigabit speeds in wired and wireless modes will be more widely available. Many more appliances (home, work, car, on your person) will be online. IPTV will offer radical new consumer-controlled advertising opportunities. IPv6 will be the dominant mode of access and use of the Internet. Multi­touch and voiced interfaces will be very common. Devices will discover each other when they are local and interact in a P2P fashion."

Richard Stallman
Main developer of the GNU/Linux system and founder of the Free Software Movement; Cambridge, MA

"No one can see the future, because it depends on you. But I see a danger in the Web today: doing your computing on servers running software you can't change or study, and entrusting your data to U.S. companies required to give it to Big Brother without even a search warrant. Don't risk this practice!"

Bjarne Stroustrup
Professor at Texas A&M University and designer of the C++ programming language; College Station, TX

"The total end of privacy. Governments, politicians, criminals, and friends will trawl through years of accumulated data (ours and what others collected) with unbelievably sophisticated tools. Obscurity and time passed will no longer be covers."

Mena Trott
President and cofounder of Six Apart; San Francisco

"With the popularity of blogging and online video and photo sharing, we already know that people want to publish significant portions of their lives online. In 10 years, I can easily see someone putting 75 percent of their day online. But it won't all be public. The ­majority will be for that person's eyes only; it will be more a record for that individual."

Leah Culver
Cofounder of Pownce; San Francisco

"Open standards will always be the future of the Web. Developers should be able to rely on their programs' running well on multiple platforms. Simple and open API standards such as Microformats, ­OpenSocial, OAuth, and OEmbed will help developers build the next generation of Web applications that we love."

"The future of the Web may be its past: an abandonment of open standards and services (like the collective hallucination that is our distributed e-mail system) and a return to the gated communities that offered consistency and security--and also lock-in. To avoid this future, application developers must pressure the makers of cool new platforms like Facebook and Google Apps (or the iPhone, for that matter) to abandon their ability to kill any apps at any time for any reason."