With more homes connected at speeds of 2 to 3 gigabits per second, a market is opening up for companies such as eBay, Salesforce.com and other Internet companies to expand their installed base.

We are seeing the beginning of things, said Reed Hastings, chief executive of online DVD rental company Netflix at the TechNet Innovation Summit in San Jose, of video on the web. Web 2.0 is broadband. Web 3.0 is 10 gigabits a second.

Now we’re seeing services and applications, said Jerry Yang, co-founder of Internet media firm Yahoo. This has been one of the promises the Internet has offered for a long time – the consumer can really be the programmer.

Companies are building ever more complex services that run over the Internet and are used through a simple Web browser. Everything is really driven as a service over the Internet, said Mark Benioff, chief executives of Salesforce.com during a panel discussion on what is next for the Web. Instead of that traditional concept of you having a data centre in your house or your business, you will use these services.

Bill Cobb, president of eBay North America added: It’s all about freedom. What the Internet does now is it allows convergence between a seller and a buyer. All these inefficiencies in the supply chain can be eliminated.