If you think the world is connected now, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

That was the gist of the opening panel on innovation at ITEXPO Vegas in August. The session featured James Brehm of Compass Intelligence; Phil Edholm of PKE Consulting; Carl Ford of Crossfire Media; Larry Lisser (News - Alert) of Embrase Business Consulting; and

Peter Bernstein and Erik Linask of Technology Marketing Corp.

HTML5, M2M, WebRTC, and the move from IPv4 to IPv6 – which will support the wearable technology and connected machine movements – will all be game changers that will enable us and our stuff to be connected in a much bigger way, said Bernstein.

Ford noted a car advertisement that talks about how the vehicle can help prevent collisions and added that high-end cars commonly have about 200 sensors.

Edholm added that smart TVs from Samsung (News - Alert), for example, are now also connected. He also talked about how we can expect more change in the exploding area of personal devices, which tend to see a sea change every three to four years.

“So there’s an incredible amount of change coming in terms of devices,” said Edholm.

One of the more interesting ideas from the panel came from moderator Rich Tehrani, TMC’s (News - Alert) CEO, who said that in the future our lives will become like never-ending reality TV programs in that they will be captured on video and available for consumption by others. This concept was jarring to some, but while today’s adults might find this idea uncomfortable, the younger set is probably completely comfortable with this idea.

Brehm indicated that the always-on lifestyle and wearable tech will “push us over the edge.” Linask said, perhaps, but it won’t have that effect on our kids, who have been raised in a connected world.

Agreed.

I have a 13-year-old daughter. She uses Instragram, Kik and Skype (News - Alert) to some extent, but would probably use this a lot more if their use was more seamless to her interests and lifestyle. We spend a lot of our time at her softball and soccer events. Most of the other kids and parents I know are similarly engaged in heavy schedules involving their children’s baseball, climbing, dance, softball, soccer, and other athletic pursuits.

These kids are already using texting and social networking to share their athlete successes (sharing tournament win pictures, for example). But it would be really cool if they could go the extra yard and share their winning goal kick or homerun hit or lights-out pitching. Wearable technology could enable cameras to be built into helmets or headbands or cleats to capture this kind of thing. Then, that video could potentially be aggregated to softball or soccer online channels at which sellers of appropriate sporting goods and services (I’m seeing a lot of young athletes at the physical therapist these days) could advertise their wears.

OK, just spit-balling here.

In addition to discussing wearable tech, the panel talked about contextuality, personalization and personal privacy. As part of this discussion, Brehm mentioned that the cellular operators recently have changed their terms and conditions to enable them to aggregate customer information and sell it in bulk to third parties. The next step, he said, will be for them to sell identity information individually. When Brehm asked an executive for the value of an individual’s identity information, he said, that exec quickly responded $108.

Rather than allowing others to sell your information, or offering it up for free yourself, Brehm suggested that individuals could take that data to the bank.

 “You yourself can sell that,” said Brehm. “You have value. You’re worth a whole lot more than you believe you are as an individual.”