More than a decade after its invention, Mark Weiser's vision of ubiquitous computing finally seems to spark many research activities world wide. This article reviews the ideas behind ubiquitous computing and puts them into the context of the technical possibilities of today and tomorrow. The lack of appropriate software engineering approaches is identified as a major obstacle on the route. Following the discussion of open software engineering issues in general, multimedia related issues are emphasized. The five-step UbiMedia chain is proposed as a reference model for the reconciliation of ubiquitous computing and multimedia.