CEO Tech 100: the Chief Executive's guide to 100 of technology's hottest people, places, and things....

With the ascendance of computers networks, the IT market-research industry has grown from a kind of nerdy niche into a big business. Nowhere is that more apparent than at the Stamford, CT-based GartnerGroup. Founded in 1979, the company has grown into a powerhouse, with more than 1,000 analysts dispensing information and advice to some 11,000 client organizations. Since going public in 1993, the company has been acquiring other research firms, adding the likes of the International Security Association, Dataquest, and Datapro Information Services to its stable. Today, with revenues of more than $511 million, Gartner is the most visible player in the industry. But it is by no means the only one. The list of other notable, fast-growing companies includes:

.001 RESEARCH

JUPITER COMMUNICATIONS - "We're the only technology research firm that focuses exclusively on consumer interactivity," says Adam Schoenfeld, Jupiter vice president and senior analyst. "We do not tell you what network to deploy within your corporation, what software to use for your corporate desktop, or the cost of ownership of PCs." Instead, he says, New York-based Jupiter's clients are companies that want to use the Internet and other new technologies to target consumers.

Jupiter divides its world into several practice areas, including Consumer Content, Digital Commerce, Online Advertising, Web Technology, and Telco & Cable Internet. Major research projects include "The Television Industry and the Internet," "Consumer Internet Economy," and "Online Travel: Five-Year Outlook." Today, of course, the company's knowledge base is the stuff of news, and Jupiter has recently been cited in the media for its reports on consumer trust of on-line information, customer-service shortcomings at Web sites, and the rise of Web portals as news outlets.

Jupiter is privately held, but it's clearly growing, says Schoenfeld. "Our revenues in '94 were on the order of a million dollars, and this year our revenues will be on the order of $20 million. We're not big in terms of the biggest research firms like Gartner, but our growth rate is impressive. We feel there's a compelling proposition in specialization, where we are experts on consumer activity and can provide that focus." - P.H.

.002 RESEARCH

FORRESTER RESEARCH - Founded in 1983 by Chairman, President, and CEO George F. Colony - the "F" is for Forrester - Cambridge, MA-based Forrester Research went public in 1996, and by 1997 revenues had grown from $14.5 million to $40.4 million. To a large extent, Colony and his colleagues have built the business on a reputation for definite and sometimes-contrarian research, with recent forecasts calling for up to $3.2 trillion in Internet commerce by 2003, and the death of HDTV. Describing the company's staff, Colony once pointed out that "we all gave our third-grade teachers a lot of trouble."

Forrester targets the corporations that use technology, and today the firm serves more than 1,000 companies. Services are divided into three broad areas: Senior Management Research, which takes a high-level view of the impact of technology; Information Technology Research, which is aimed at corporate IT organizations; and New Media Research, which explores emerging technology and on-line business.

In general, Forrester focuses less on the numbers and statistics, and more on how new technology will affect the way companies work. "Technology is now about the business of the business - a wrong decision means fewer customers and lower market share," Colony wrote to investors last year. "Clients need help, and they know it." - P.H.

.003 RESEARCH

INTERNATIONAL DATA CORP. - Framingham, MA-based International Data Corp. (IDC) got its start way back in 1964, giving it plenty of time to build an extensive market-research practice and a truly global presence, says Kirk S. Campbell, president and CEO. With 500 analysts working in 45 countries, "we have offices not only at the headquarters level and regional levels, but also down to the country level. So when Asia Pacific starts to fall apart, for example, we have people on the ground there, really keeping in touch on a daily basis, and feeding that information to our clients."

IDC covers a lot of ground conceptually, as well. Eleven major practice areas address "any aspect of computing that you want to look at," says Campbell; they range from "Consumer and Small Business" to "Components and Peripherals" - and within each area there are a dozen or more subdivisions of research. Altogether, IDC conducts some 300,000 surveys of computer users annually, creating a huge base of primary data that allows it to produce detailed reports exploring, for example, IT usage in the health care industry, or the use of multifunction peripherals by small businesses in Western Europe.

Since 1990, IDC's revenues have tripled to more than $100 million, and Campbell says that it's not difficult to see why business is booming. IT is "a critical factor that all corporations are now using to become more efficient and to better work with their customers. It really has become an indispensable resource in every part of the economy." - P.H.

.004 RESEARCH

META GROUP - The META Group, based in Stamford, CT, combines traditional market research with broader consulting services, says Chairman and CEO Dale Kutnick. "We help people decide what it is they need to do to be successful from a business standpoint, and then underneath that, what technologies they should employ to exploit those opportunities."

With 380 employees and some 1,500 clients, META Group did $51 million worth of business in 1997 and has continued to grow since. The company provides guidance in more than a dozen areas and offers publications such as an IT staffing guide and an "Outsourcing Index" that ranks vendors. In the coming year, says Kutnick, a key topic for the firm will be "externalizing business." In terms of research, the concept encompasses the serving of customers electronically, collaboration, security, information supply chains, customer relationship management, and technology's contribution to business innovation. "Obviously, there is a whole IT component in all this, which is going to be very important to drive the information out, whether you are using intranets or extranets or any of that interesting technology to do it."

That kind of guidance is increasingly critical to META Group's clients, Kutnick adds. "The average global 2000 company is going to spend $200 million on IT; if you look at the median, it's 2.5 percent to 3 percent of revenues....That's a big investment, and you can't invest foolishly because you may not get a second chance." - P.H.

.005 RESEARCH

STUDY HALLS - Looking for the R in R&D? Want to know what's careening down the information highway faster than you can say "voice recognition"? Worried that someone's about to introduce a high-tech product that will render your system obsolete before you've even unpacked it" Then check out the host of thriving research labs working at full throttle at some leading corporations and universities."

New technologies are finding their way from the lab to the marketplace faster than ever because the labs are taking an active role in transferring their theories into practice. And many aggressive venture capitalist have made a habit of cultivating the relationships at top research institutes in the hope of discovering a profitable startup candidate. One tactic they've perfected: Hiring MBA candidates to scope out promising technology at the schools the students attend.

It's not surprising, then, that nearly half of the venture capital spent in the U.S. finds a home within a one-hour drive of the allowed labs at MIT and Stanford. MIT has created some of today's hottest multimedia and computer speech recognition technologies, while Stanford innovations still drive the Silicon Valley economy, with contributions as diverse as FM sound synthesis for computers and recombinant DNA cloning. Other academic research powerhouses include Carnegie-Mellon's robotics lab and the Artificial Intelligence lab at the University of Michigan - as well as the undergraduate computer science department at the University of Illinois, from which sprang the n ow ubiquitous Web browser.

The top names among corporate research centers are all familiar, including Xerox PARC, Lucent, Microsoft, and of course Big Blue. Lucent Technologies, formerly Bell Labs, is making up for lost time since being spun off from AT&T 15 years ago; the birthplace of the transistor is now the home to the nation's largest research staff, numbering nearly 25,000. With a much smaller staff, IBM Research has recently scored knockouts by developing new data storage devices with literally thousands of times the capacity of current disk drives. Microsoft is a comparatively recent addition to the roster of top corporate research centers. But what Redmond lacks in terms of tradition is more than balanced by Microsoft money and a commitment to attracting top talent.

But perhaps the nation's most productive research center is Xerox PARC. Beyond having developed many of the seminal concepts that spawned the computing revolution, PARC has racked up what may be the highest ration of patents per employee of any U.S. lab, with at least one patent on file for each of its 2,500 employees. After nearly three decades of developing essential technology that turned into other firms' hit products such as Microsoft Windows, Ethernet computer networking, and laser printing, PARC is now making a point of nurturing startup businesses to take advantage of Xerox's impressive catalog of patents. That catalog is proudly on display at parc.xerox.com and ranges from studies of the way people use computers to the components of the chips used in X-ray imaging. - B.D.

You Have Mail

FROM - James P. Hackett, President and CEO, Steelcase

SUBJECT - Remember the early phone...

MESSAGE - The Internet is something I watch in terms of its adoption rate across the globe. E-commerce is a foregone conclusion for our business and for the world at large, but I believe that the design and the interface are not nearly as settled. I draw some parallels with the phone. When the phone was first installed in people's homes, there was one of them and it was in the kitchen, and you didn't want to use it because of the expense. Now, the inverse is true - we take them everywhere, and you're less inclined to think about cost than the need for access. I think the Web is going to emerge the same way. Instead of, "I have the Internet on my computer in my house," it will be feeding multiple nodes, and feeding them in a very narrow bandwidth of information instead of a broad one.

.006 NET MAVEN

IRA.COM - For the past few years, Ira Magaziner has been President Clinton's Senior Technology Adviser on the Internet, helping to shape the government's position on the new medium. Magaziner emerged as a proponent of a hands-off policy, writing in a June 1997 report that "governments must adopt a non-regulatory, market-oriented approach to electronic commerce.... Official decision-makers must respect the unique nature of the medium and recognize that widespread competition and increased consumer choice should be the defining features of the new digital marketplace."

Magaziner also spent a fair amount of time helping to put those ideas into action, traveling abroad to get international agreements on keeping the Internet duty free, supporting a domestic moratorium on new Internet taxes (see .020), and working to shift the management of Internet domain names to the private sector (see .018).

In late 1998, Magaziner shifted himself to the private sector as well, leaving his White House post. He says he is not sure what his next steps will be, but that he intends to remain involved in shaping the evolution of electronic commerce. "What we've been trying to do for the past couple of years at the White House is help create the frameworks that will allow the new information economy to take off. So I'll continue that work as a private citizen."

Whatever Magaziner winds up doing in the world of electronic commerce, he will no doubt be applying some of the lessons learned during his government stint. For example:

"Some of the old ways in which we are used to working in government policy aren't really applicable to this new age. The digital age is going to move very quickly - there will be very rapid changes in technology and markets. Therefore, private-sector coordination is probably preferable to government regulation, because it can be more flexible and fast-moving.

"Also, any policies have to be technology neutral, because technology is moving so quickly that if you tie your policies to any particular technology, they'll be outmoded before they're enacted. Similarly, the Internet is by its very nature a decentralized medium, and any attempts to try to centrally control it through governmental bodies - whether it be censoring content or trying to control the creation of digital signatures - is likely to fail.

"This is the first marketplace that is really being born global from the very beginning. Therefore, the traditional models where industries grow up within countries, and countries negotiate how they will work together, don't really work in this new age. You need global frameworks from the beginning. That's why we spent the past year and a half trying to negotiate a set of agreements around the world - to create a seamless global marketplace from the very beginning for electronic commerce.

I'm going to continue to be involved in this. Part of what we said in the government was that the private sector had to lead in creating the coordinating structures and codes of conduct that will give order to this new digital economy. There are steps that have already been taken to begin that work, and I would like to make a contribution to continuing it. So I'm going to be around." - P.H.

You Have Mail

FROM - Bill Clifford, President and CEO GartnerGroup

SUBJECT - What Will Be

MESSAGE - E-commerce on the Internet will continue to transform both individual businesses and entire industries, revamping the strategic landscape more dramatically than any single innovation in the last 75 years. The impact will be felt broadly, as access to the Internet becomes available through a plethora of addition- al devices such as mobile phones, electronic books, in-car computers, personal digital assistants, and interactive devices in the home. PCs will undergo transformations, too, with speech recognition and biometrics becoming standard, integrated offerings. Companies will increasingly begin to take advantage of new and powerful emerging technologies such as electronic cash, smart cards, and interactive TV. They will turn to strategic outsourcing as a way to optimize resources. Remote access, collaboration tools, and the full utilization of interactive media will be more prominent. Knowledge will create a new class of corporate asset that may represent an important determiner success in many industries.

.007 WEARABLES

JUST DON'T THROW IT IN WITH THE LAUNDRY - Soon the term "computer" won't just describe that thing on the desk with the hard drive, monitor, keyboard, and mouse. It will also describe that thing around your belt, or atop your shoulder, or on your feet. Wearable computers are the natural next step: Imagine a device that's always with you, is comfortable and easy to keep and use, and is as unobtrusive as clothing. Offering the closest connection yet between the real world and the virtual world, wearables will meet any instant information or communications need. The MIT Media Lab describes the characteristics of the devices that fulfill this vision: They'll be portable while operational; allow for hands-free use; have sensors for the physical environment; be able to get the attention of the user (by announcing, say, "You've Got Mail"); and be always on and working, sensing, and acting. The Via II PC, shown here, is one early member of this next generation. - S.O.

.008 HOT PHONES

JUST PHONE IT IN. PHONE IT ALL IN. - As if constantly mocking those who thought phone technology peaked with the invention of call waiting, the communications industry just keeps rolling out the new merchandise. Technological achievements, especially in the digital arena, mean that these wares are increasingly smaller, lighter, and - unless you're partial to static, busy signals, and lack of privacy - better. Soon to be commonplace: One number that follows you anywhere around the world, as the industry takes full advantage of satellite capabilities. In the meantime, the item still known as the telephone is morphing into a true all-encompassing communications device: one-stop shopping for your voice, e-mail, fax, and video communication needs. One incarnation available mid-year from QUALCOMM is the CDMA Digital pdQ smartphone, a digital cell phone and Palm Computing platform-based organizer. Its wireless data capabilities also allow users to send and receive e-mail, surf the Net, and receive alpha-numeric pages. - S.O.

.009 FLAT SCREENS

SLIMMING FAST - The world may be round, but we're quickly discovering that the best way to see it is flat. Flat screen, that is, Typical computer monitors just can't manage to keep their bulk and weight under control; that's why the high quality of new desktop PC flat-panel displays is such a welcome development. A handful of formats exist, but a number of manufacturers have unveiled liquid crystal displays (LCDs), which is the same type of screen used for laptop computers. With the benefits of lower power consumption and sharp, flicker-free images, expect to see more flat screens hanging on walls near you. - S.O.

.010 TV/PC

CHANNEL CHANGING - It's difficult to say when interactive television (ITV) will become a reality, given that its proponents have been saying for years that its dominance is just around the corner. But Microsoft is never a foolish bet, so when Gates decided to acquire WebTV, it was clear the Redmond software maker had eyes on the small screen. But actually, the plans go further than the current model - a set-top box that allows the Internet to be accessed via TV set. Figuring that consumers will be averse to too many set-tops on their sets, Microsoft is working with television manufacturers to integrate a version of the Windows CE operating system into the TV set, so that the Internet is just another channel on the dial. - C.J.P

.011 PLUGS

GET ON THE BUS - As a CFO, you've got a tight schedule. You don't have time to waste hunched over the back of your computer, trying to figure out which plug goes where; you just want to connect the damn joystick and start playing the game, right? That's where the USB comes in. The Universal Serial Bus is a universal peripheral connection specification, which basically means it allows you to easily connect mainstream peripherals to your computer. It's given the industry a uniform guide to developing products so they can operate together seamlessly through a one-size-fits-all connection. Fast becoming the connector of choice, look for USB devices to spread like mice (which, incidentally, they also connect). - S.O.

.012 PDAs

NOT AN ENDORSEMENT OF GRAND LARCENY - Last month's news that a journalist had discovered a technique for using the infrared port on the new generation of PalmPilots to break into cars with infrared remote keyless entry systems left us with one thought: Cool! That's not all, though. Today's PDAs - like the Philips Nino, left - and associated products are getting more and more sophisticated, with ever-increasing options in everything from the software (offering features mike GPS, or Global Positioning System, which uses satellites to determine exactly where you are) to the stylus (Rotring has created an instrument that's a pen, pencil, highlighter, and stylus, all-in-one). One much-anticipated PDA development to watch for: the color screen. - S.O.

.013 HOME NETWORKS

E-MAIL THE KIDS WHEN IT'S TIME FOR DINNER - Over the next decade expect your home to get a lot smarter. As the MIT Media Lab's "Things That Think" group tells us, with more capable devices becoming more pervasively embedded into the home environment, technology will become both less obtrusive and more helpful. Smart rooms, sensing when you're there, can act like invisible butlers. But before you sack Jeeves, realize we're not there just yet. For the time being, the industry is focusing on developing standards for the basic level of home networking - connecting up all your computers, printers, peripherals, PDAs, and other devices. The members of the Home Phoneline Networking Alliance - including AT&T, Compaq, 3Com, IBM, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard - are promoting an affordable technology that will use ordinary phone lines (without interfering with existing phone services) and support the connection of up to 25 devices, at around $100 per device. It's a "Look, Ma, No New Wires!" solution. - S.O.

.014 IP IN CYBERSPACE

CAVEAT VENDOR - When Stanley Kaplan, the famous testing service, went to register its trademark as an Internet domain name, it was shocked to discover it couldn't. Its competitor, Princeton Review, had gotten there first and put dibs on, of all names, kaplan.com.

* The owner of the Blue Note music club in Columbia, MO, was sued for trademark infringement in New York State by the owner of the NY-based Blue Note jazz club - despite the fact that the owner did not reside in, do any business in, or otherwise have any connection to New York. Except, that is, for the access New Yorkers had to the Missouri club's Web site.

* Surfing the Net one morning, a Playboy shareholder discovered her company was suing a Playmate for "metatag" infringement. Not sure if that term related to the model's attire, she rushed off to find a dictionary.

These stories, unfortunately, are more and more common. For all its value, the Internet is an unregulated environment that is ripe for misuse, threatening to compromise your intellectual property in ways you probably can't even imagine. Here are a few ways you can decrease your exposure to the Net's IP pitfalls:

* Your company has made a major investment in its Web site, and lined up a number of advertisers. But a day before launch, you discover the dot-com domain name you expected to use has been taken. Like Stanley Kaplan before you (or Hasbro, which found it came too late to candyland.com), you've been scooped by the "cybersquatters." How did that happen? It happens that the U.S. registrar of domain names registers names on a first come, first-served basis. What's your recourse? You could pay the registrant to relinquish the domain name and/or transfer it to you. You could choose to be .net rather than .com. Or you could sue the registrant to get the domain name back. If the "infringed" name is "famous," you've got a shot at recovery under the federal dilution statute; if not, you may have recourse under trademark infringement law.

* So you get the domain name transferred to you, launch your Web site, and move full tilt into e-commerce. Suddenly, someone in another, distant locality claims you infringed his copyright. How did that happen? By offering products or services for sale on your Web site, you've gone beyond the bounds of advertising and opened the doors to consumers - and lawsuits - worldwide. A safer route: more passive sites that function like advertisements. You might also add disclaimers saying the site is intended for persons located within a particular locality.

* Finding your site is not generating enough revenue, you add "metatags" - words in your computers' source code - to increase traffic to your site. While this may, in fact, increase your number of hits and thereby increase revenue from advertisers, it may also subject you to trademark infringement if you use another entity's federally registered mark. - Lisa Pollard

.015 SPIES

COOKIES...HOLD THE MILK - If you've been inundated with junk e-mail, or "spam,' from companies you're not sure you've ever heard of, much less gave your e-mail address to, chances are good you've been sent a cookie - and it wasn't chocolate chip.

If you browse, you've likely got a whole batch of cookies stored in your browser; any one of those byte-size files could be following you around the Web, reporting your whereabouts to some unknown marketing director. The cookie is a file sent by a Web server to your browser where it sits and records specific information, such as which Web pages you visit on a particular site, and in what order. If banner ads on different Web sites originate from a central hub, such as DoubleClick, you can be tracked from site to site. That captured data is then sent back periodically to the server that put it there.

Cookies were originally designed to benefit consumers by allowing companies to learn more about them and to tailor marketing to their interests. When Amazon.com remembers your name and recommends books you might like, that information is stored via cookie. But privacy issues come into play when cookies are issued unbeknownst to you - as they typically are - for unspecified purposes by companies you weren't really interested in. Though they may not do anything nefarious with that data, why should they have it at all?

Proposals to regulate cookies with much tighter controls have been put before the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), but have been repeatedly rejected by browser designers. You can set your browser to warn you before accepting a cookie, but be prepared to be asked the question dozens of times. For now it's the only recourse for privacy on the Net - that is, until the cookie crumbles. - C.J.P

.016 INTERNET 2

NET REDUX - The Net may well prove to be the most successful graduate of the U.S. university system. Begun as a network of academic and research-institution computers, its success as a commercial environment caught everyone off-guard. The absolutely unprecedented and unanticipated increase in Net traffic - growing at a rate of 400 percent a year, minimum - has slowed down academic access to what used to be their playground.

Enter Internet 2.

Formed in October 1996 with fewer than three dozen member institutions, the Internet 2 project now boasts more than 120. The universities, colleges, and research teams coordinate areas of investigation, share results, pursue areas of investigation - all aimed at the development of the next generation of network applications. Research progresses in software, protocols, and technologies - all of which, it is promised, will be shared with the private sector.

Internet2 is not an infrastructure initiative per se. That's covered by the Feds and their R&D departments under the acronym NGI, the Clinton administration's very public commitment to the "Next Generation Internet." The goal: to link 100 institutions at 100 times the current speed of Net traffic, with a secondary goal of linking 10 institutions at 1,000 times current Net speed limits. - K.F.

.017 W3C

NOT ANOTHER CONSPIRACY THEORY - The Web loves conspiracy theories: UFOs, black helicopters, the Trilateral Commission, and, lately, the W3C.

No, W3C isn't a new wrestling federation, nor is it a conspiracy, despite occasional newsgroup rants. Rather, it's the World Wide Web Consortium, founded in October 1994 to oversee and manage the Web revolution introduced by Tim Berners-Lee.

Berners-Lee is, in fact, along with Jean-Francois Abramatic, at the helm of W3C. The expressed goal of their organization is to coordinate the finding of common specifications for new Web technologies and applications, ensuring that the Web's evolution proceeds smoothly while taking into account its explosive growth, commercial potential, and social impact.

Large challenges, but the membership of W3C is accustomed to sizable undertakings. Hundreds of members, from Adobe to Xerox, have paid the $50,000 full membership fee. The membership stretches beyond the computer industry, just as the Web now enwraps everything from financial institutions to movie studios to universities.

"Working groups" approach every aspect of the Web, from programming languages and standards to security and commerce issues. As Web commerce in its various forms becomes the dominant engine of the world economy, watching W3C manage its members' neutrality as well as the growth of the Web may well become the best show in the global village. - K.F.

.018 NETWORK SOLUTIONS

DOMAIN TRICKS - What's in a name? If it's the name (and address) of your Web site, one thing it includes is the approval of Network Solutions (NSI), the company that took over management of Internet domain registration in 1993, after the task grew too large for the resources of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

In order for their locations to be findable, for example, every one of those .com names must first be registered, which is done via InterNIC (Internet Network Information Center) a clearinghouse created by a joint undertaking between NSI and the NSF. Since 1995, registration has carried a $50 annual fee.

Problem is that since 1993 the Web has grown explosively. Millions upon millions of names vie for addresses within .com alone, with millions more applying yearly. Various proposals for next-level or next-generation domain organization continue to be debated, including a further subdivision of domains within .com. For example, .ret would designate retail sites. (Killing more the one bird with a single stone, a domain such as .adu - adult - might be used to designate pornographic sites, making it easier for parents to filter unwanted material from their children's access.)

One thing is clear: the Internet won't stop growing, nor will the demand for registration of new names. in the face of that growth, NSI will have to live up to its own middle name. - K.F.

.019 TCP/IP

IP: THE NEXT GENERATION - In order for a network to work, its component computers must be able to communicate. But with computer communication, as with diplomacy, protocol is as important as language.

Enter TCP/IP - Transmission Protocol/Internet Protocol, actually two protocols which work in concert to a) divide messages into packets for transmission over the Net and reassembly at their destination (TCP), and b) to address and route each separate packet so that it gets to where all the others are going (IP). The fundamentals of TCP/IP go back to the 1970s.

But it's not early days any more - by a quantum long shot. IPng (Internet Protocol, next generation, also known as IPv6) is intended as a thorough overhaul of the protocol standard, aimed at addressing the Net's explosive growth, its global nature, the number of new technologies coming into play, security issues, and more.

The current protocol, for example, limits the amount of data space available for addressing an information packet. That space is long-since outgrown, considering the number of computers and addresses on the Net, and only a series of adjustments, extensions, and fixes has enabled addressing and routing to remain somewhat manageable.

Security issues, particularly privacy and forgery, are also tackled, with the new protocol designed to improve confidentiality and increase the reliability with which packets of information are authenticated. To make sure what you get comes from who it really comes from.

Migration to the new protocol is expected to take place over the next three to seven years, although the precise nature of the migration is debated among factions who argue for rapid introduction of IPng and those who favor a gradual phase-in. - K.F.

.020 INTERNET TAX FREEDOM ACT

TAXING MATTERS - There's as yet no call to dump T-lines into Boston Harbor, but there is a strong and growing movement to limit the tax-man's access to commerce on the Net. That's the gift of the Internet Tax Freedom Act - at least for a while.

Signed into law on October 20, 1998, as part of the Omnibus Appropriations bills, the Act's primary purpose is to buy some breathing room in the face of the inevitable, putting into place an internet tax moratorium whose protections last until October 21, 2001.

No one doubts that taxation will ultimately come to the Internet - indeed, Net transactions are already subject to normal business taxes. The question is what form will those taxes take - and how many levels of taxation will be allowed? Actually, there are nearly as many questions as there are potential tax collectors.

Who gets to impose the taxes? Federal, state, and local agencies all might make a case for a piece of the action. What form will the taxes take? What form won't they take is more like it, with various agencies at every level disagreeing on just what the Internet is. Some want to tax it as a telecommunications service; others see interstate commerce issues and revenue possibilities; others raise questions about the bundling of services such as cable television and Internet access - which get taxed and which don't?

Congress commissioned a study, to be accomplished, distractions notwithstanding, within 18 months of the Act's becoming law, to address these and related issues. - K.F.

.021 CAPACITY

JUMPING ON THE BAND(WIDTH) WAGON - Ask the average telecommunications layperson why we don't yet have 3-D virtual reality malls on the Internet or true interactive television, and he or she will probably blame it on a lack of high bandwidth. One day, when our telephone wires can carry all that data and deliver it in a split second, we'll have some pretty neat things, they'll tell you. Right now, though, we've got to live with 20-minute downloads for a single application.

But while that may have been true at one time, it's not the case today, says Mark Bruneau, president of the global communications and computing group for IT and management consulting firm Renaissance Worldwide. Bandwidth, to home and office, is growing rapidly on three fronts. First, wire-line or phone-wire-based transmission capability - via both copper wire and fiber optic cable - is being upgraded and expanded through the efforts of companies such as TCG, Teleport, Qwest Communications, and IXC. Cable-based telecommunications, too, is growing but, while it has inherently more bandwidth capacity than its phone-wire brethren - and is connected to millions of consumer homes - it has virtually no presence in the business market. "The third and most promising growth driver of high bandwidth is wireless," says Bruneau, who adds that wireless transmission may one day replace wire-based as the telecom medium of choice.

At the moment, with the Bells having spent millions on upgrades for both copper and fiber optic networks over the last year, there is plenty of bandwidth to go around. But, because the lines with the most horsepower - T1, T3, ISDN, DSL, and so on - command the highest prices, we naturally assume they are in short supply. In reality, it is the demand side - the critical applications that would make such high bandwidth not just preferable, but necessary - that has not yet caught up with the supply, says Bruneau. Service providers have not introduced applications such as remote sales automation, remote diagnostics for hospitals, and remote wireless transactions on the stock market. Neither consumers nor businesses have reason to spend thousands per month on miles of bandwidth when all they can do with it is download a video clip at high speeds. When demand heats up, however, we'll see prices come down. To wit, Bruneau offers an apt analogy: Bandwidth in the '90s is much like oil was in the '70s. "And the bandwidth shortage may turn out to be like the oil shortage - short-lived and, ultimately, wrong."

And, much as car manufacturers did in the '70s in response to the perceived threat of an oil crisis, technology companies have adapted to the supply as it exists now. "We've become very efficient at optimizing the use of bandwidth through packet switching and Internet protocols to the point where we have more 'oil' than we have 'engines that can use it," says Bruneau.

This year and into 2000, he predicts, we will see the imbalance begin to shift. Technology makers will begin to focus on the demand side, developing applications that add value to consumers' lives "by allowing them to become electronic citizens, to go to electronic malls, to be electronic voters, to do more of their living tele-presently," he says. "And that will cause DSL and other high-bandwidth means to the home to get cheaper and more useful." - C.J.P.

You Have Mail

FROM - Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, Novell

SUBJECT - The Digital Identity

MESSAGE - A key technology for meeting the challenges posed by the Internet is directory-enabled networks and applications, a fast-growing category of networking software. Directory services, and the applications that use them, give businesses and users total control of network resources - for example, control of how and if users access data files, applications, devices, and Internet services. As a result, businesses can dramatically reduce the cost of managing and securing their networks. Inn addition, directory services allow businesses and individuals to establish the digital identities required to do business on the Internet. Digital identities are profiles that define what information and applications we can and cannot access, which products we can order on-line, and what credit cards we can use. We can travel anywhere in the world, access the network from any device, and still the directory-enabled network is able to find our profiles and acknowledge our digital identity.

.022 GURUS

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS - Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group

Formerly an engineer and Web usability guru at Sun Microsystems, Nielsen is principal and co-founder of the Silicon Valley-based Nielsen Norman Group Web consulting firm. (www.nngroup.com)

"We're now just scratching the surface of what the Internet will do and how much it will reach into our lives and into business. In the future, customers will expect to be able to deal with a company over the Internet just as today they expect to deal with companies over the phone. Today you can't even imagine your company not having a phone line. Similarly, you won't be able to imagine a company not having a Web site - and one that actually does business.

Customers will want to be able to go on the Internet, find information about all products and services, buy these products and services, and get support for them and do it all 24 hours a day. Society will become much more fast-paced. The telephone has already broken down the notion of business hours. A lot of companies have already set up 24-hour-a-day call centers, but that's a relatively expensive thing for smaller companies to do. With the Internet, your computer does it for you. You don't have to have staff 24 hours a day. But you do have to have the notion of being a real-time company, which is a very different new way of thinking.

Most companies still don't have Web sites. There are now 3.5 million Web sites worldwide. And that's not just company Web sites, but university, government, or individuals' Web sites. And typically those company Web sites are very difficult to use because they don't understand that it's an interactive experience, not just a one-way communication. Companies manage their sites as if they were a marketing promotion like a brochure or television commercial. That's 100 percent the wrong approach on the Web, because on the Web the customer goes to you because they want to accomplish something. They are not going to sit there and take in your beautifully designed marketing message. That's not why they are there. They are there to buy. They are there to give you money if you would only take it.

Most companies don't want to do that. They want to brag about how good they are, but they don't want to actually do any business. A Web site can bring your sales force right into the customer's office, 10 inches in front of the person's face. It's very intimate. It becomes your sales force, your store front, and your service department all rolled into one. And to think of it as a brochure is missing 90 percent of what it's going to do." - J.P.

.023 GURUS

THE DEVIL YOU KNOW - John Perry Barlow, Electronic Freedom Foundation

A former songwriter for the Grateful Dead, Barlow is a consultant, the founder of Electronic Freedom Foundation, an organization dedicated to "protecting rights and promoting freedom in the electronic frontier," and a card-carrying member of the Republican party. (www.eff.org)

"The most important thing for companies to focus on today is getting technology out of the control of CIOs and into the control of CEOs. Generally speaking, IT departments want the company to continue using internal systems that make real interaction with the rest of the world difficult. For example, most proprietary e-mail systems [curtail] your ability to fluidly interact with the Internet because they don't handle attachments well. If you're trying to actually deal with the outside world, they don't work. But the IT departments don't want to switch to an Internet-based e-mail system because Lotus Notes or whatever is what they know. And it gives them the ability to assert a kind of centralized control over all of those systems, and they fear the anarchy that would necessarily follow having an open system. But if anarchy follows at all, it tends to follow in beneficial ways. With a genuinely open e-mail system, people within the organization will organize themselves around the jobs that need to be done on the basis of who can do them rather than who is supposed to do them, which results in greater efficiency inside the organization.

Unfortunately, most organizations - especially organizations with any age on them - spend about 80 percent or 90 percent of their organizational energy looking inside rather than outside. That's a terrible risk. I don't know any organism that does well if it's limited in its ability to perceive what's going on outside. If an animal spent as much time examining its interior as opposed to its exterior as a large corporation does, it wouldn't last 10 minutes in the world.

Also, CEOs are still looking at hardware as though it were a capital expense. It's not. Nothing that depreciates that fast is capital. It makes a lot more sense to start looking at these things not as hard goods but as sort of semi-tangible services or operational expenses. Then companies become less stuck on hanging on to some big old chunks of hardware that are really millstones around their necks. They can start looking at technological devices as being something you just automatically assume is going to become obsolete very quickly and either go to a leasing system, or just assume they have an entirely different depreciation schedule than the one that the federal government is indicating in real terms." - J.P.

.024 GURUS

OUT IN THE WEEDS - Michael Moon, GISTICS Inc.

Moon is president and co-founder, GISTICS, a San Anselmo, CA-based research and executive education firm that identifies and tracks profitable uses of new technology. (www.gistics.com)

"As consumers become more wired or Webbed, their expectations for quality service and satisfaction in the interactive environment grow. Customers want, need, and will demand just-in-time, just-for-me expressions of the digital assets of the organization. When a customer visits a Web site, he or she doesn't want to look at brochures and funny pictures. They want to know basic things like, how much is in my damn account? Where the hell is my order? What the heck are you guys doing with this work in progress? Can I buy that puppy in the window? Can I get it tomorrow afternoon?

These data live in these big mainframe applications largely written in COBOL by people who never in their wildest rope-smoking days imagined having to put a browser and a World Wide Web between it and a customer who wanted to know. That's a big problem. CEOs are way out in the weeds about how to do that, which means that you have a bunch of IT gear heads making critical strategic business decisions.

Also, over the last five years, Fortune 500 companies have been shifting out of their homegrown, one-of-a-kind internal applications to an enterprisewide suite of applications - Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) - that integrates everything - personnel, purchasing, inventory, general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable. As companies, both large and small, get fully integrated head to toe, one of the critical things becomes how you plug and play in a merger and acquisitions framework. NationsBank, for example, has grown from a small, regional banking concern into one of the world's largest banks by using their IT systems as a strategic weapon by which to assimilate new operations. They suck all of the transaction data into their new system using middleware, and they pick up the old bank's equipment and they put it out in the parking lot. The critical technology piece is this little arcane piece of technology called middleware. I won't go into all of the technical discussions as far as what middleware is other than that it's the pivotal, critical success factor in how you plug and play into the network economy. If you do not have a good middleware strategy, you are up a creek without a paddle. CEOs need to understand that there are probably two or three technical decisions that someone has already made or will make in the next 12 to 18 months that will determine whether they can survive in the year 2002.

Every CEO should personally invest him/herself in an interactive annual report and investor relations Web site. He or she should make that a critical priority for 1999. Two, he or she should insist on deploying this interactive Web site on a dynamic publishing system. Three, he or she should have a really good heart-to-heart talk with his CIO, CTO, and perhaps a strategic consultant about how well they are set up for plug-and-play mergers and acquisitions and get an inside assessment as far as how vulnerable the company is in terms of its inability to acquire or be acquired as a function of cranky IT systems." - J.P.

.025 VIRTUAL ORG

GOING VIRTUAL - While the jury's still out on the true growth of electronic commerce in terms of hard sales numbers, its wide accessibility, geographic boundlessness, and relatively cheap overhead has convinced one business after another to open a virtual version of their physical store - even when it's threatened to cannibalize the physical business. Of course, even if these on-line extensions proved more lucrative than their physical-world brethren, it would be arguably difficult to go completely virtual.

But if that is indeed the future of business, then companies like NetBank (formerly Atlanta Internet Bank) that were never hampered by bricks and mortar can provide shining examples of what is still to come. In 1996, NetBank's leaders saw the burgeoning Internet as a perfect fit, and an effective medium, for financial services. "When you pay a bill or open a checking account with us, we don't have to ship anything to you. There isn't a back office operation doing shipping and receiving and warehouse management," says D. R. Grimes, CEO of the Internet-only bank with headquarters in Atlanta and offices on the Web. "When you have to ship something, it can be made more efficient, but it's not going to be a virtual operation for a long time. So that, for one thing, makes the financial services industry better equipped to operate in the virtual space."

According to Internet time, Grimes is already a seasoned player in the virtual world, with NetBank in its third year of operation. From its first day, naysayers doubted the ability of an Internet-only bank to compete among financial giants with established brands. But NetBank not only survived; it actually achieved profitability in May of 1998, less than a year after the company went public. Today, NetBank has approximately $280 million in assets and has seen more than respectable growth over its short life. In addition to a variety of checking and savings accounts, the bank offers mortgages, credit cards, and equipment leasing, all of which can be applied for on-line. Brokerage services are also available, including stock and bond trading with 24-hour on-line access, real-time quotes, and low commission fees. Given its low overhead and operating costs, NetBank can afford to offer competitive rates on its products.

Still, the Internet doesn't change all the rules. Grimes knows well he still has to have a tight focus on his market. In fact, the most progressive aspect about NetBank may not be it use of technology or its "virtually," but rather, its departure from the more traditional "all things to all customers" strategy banks have followed in decades past. The average consumer has relationships with an average of five different financial institutions, and while some banks are still aggressively cross-selling products and pursuing every share of their customer's wallet, the trend toward multiple relationships shows no signs of letting up.

Grimes is going after those customers who value high-interest, low-cost products over doing business with a teller in a branch. That won't be everyone, but it will be enough to fuel NetBank's growth. Meantime, there's room enough for good players in all media, so long as they recognize that "when you are competing on the Internet, the real estate you own is the same size as everybody else's real estate, which means that you have to craft your message much more carefully," says Grimes. "Some businesses are better at that than others." - C.J.P.

You Have Mail

FROM - Claudio Osorio, Chairman, President, and CEO, CHS Electronics

SUBJECT - Data transport

MESSAGE - Any CEO thinking about hardware needs to keep in mind that voice and video are really going to come into play, and those require massive amounts of processing, speed, and storage capacity. And they require highways - how are you going to transport all that data?

In the construction of new sites and buildings, companies often forget about or under-invest in the wiring and cabling needed for future data transport. So every CEO has to ask, "Am I going to have enough capacity to transfer data in the future? What kind of bandwidth am I going to need to transfer X, Y, and Z? Today, I'm just transferring numbers and words. When I'm transferring voice and video, what is going to be the cheapest and fastest way to tie in all my locations, and hook into other databases and sources of data?"

More than half the respondents to a recent CE poll said they turn to CE for information about technology. Happy as we are to serve that function, there are a number of other publications - both print- and Web-based - worth checking out that cover both the business of technology and the impact technology is having on business itself. Here's an annotated sample:

.026

CONTEXT - "Technology is something that has fundamentally disrupted the world of business," says Editor-in-Chief Paul Carroll, who spent 17 years covering both for the Wall Street Journal. "We are in the business of trying to help senior executives understand how to deal with that." In a sense, then, Context is a management consultant in magazine clothing - an appropriate role given its genesis at Diamond Technologies, a Chicago-based management consulting firm that says it "helps clients develop and implement business strategies for the digital age." But Diamond's connection is tangential. While backing Context helps Diamond develop its own intellectual capital, California-based Carroll and his far-flung virtual staff maintain an independent, provocative, well-designed, cleverly illustrated quarterly publication that asks a wide range of writers - executives, technologists, consultants, journalists - to dig deep into the strategic implications of technological developments - "skeptically, not evangelistically," says Carroll, "with the magazine positioned as a trusted advisor." - M. W.

.027

BUSINESS 2.0 - If thumbing through Business 2.0 reminds you of clicking through a Web site, that's not just because this magazine is covering Net-based issues. For while most magazines that feature digital versions have trouble adapting their native two-dimensionality to the multi-layered terrain of cyberspace, even the paper version of Business 2.0 was designed with the Net in mind. "What magazines don't do well is navigate," says Editor-in-Chief James Daly. "We've gone out of our way to make the information more digestible, more easily accessed. The Web does that very well through hyperlinks and navigation bars. We've taken the navigation bars, and we've broken down the linearity of our stories, providing lots of entry points." But Business 2.0 is, of course, about more than design and easy access. It's about, as its cover puts it, "New Economy. New Rules. New Leaders." Adds Daly, "The changes that are being engendered through the Net economy will affect culture, politics, entertainment. But they'll affect the business world the most. It has the most to gain, and the most to lose." Which means, Daly says, that the magazine isn't always advocating a Net solution. A recent piece, for example, focused on Ikea's decision not to go onto the Net. "That," says Daly, "was a good story for us." - M. W.

.028

THE INDUSTRY STANDARD - Rick Whelan's business - "developing and expressing ideas through integrated marketing in multiple media" - depends on his knowing what's happening on the Net. So when Whelan, president of waters-design.com, pours over magazines that will shed light on cyberspace, this newsmagazine is always near the top of the pile. 'It's a barometer," he says, "a weekly pulse." Which is just what Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Weber wants to hear. "Our approach is to cut through the hype and be very blunt in our analysis about what is really going on and how it's going to affect your business," Weber says - whether or not that business, like Whelan's, seems directly tied to the Net. That focus has put the Standard well ahead of the general press, for example, in reporting on the Net's excellent Xmas season and on last year's Internet stock adventures. And it's meant covering some non-Net territory as well, such as wireless phones and iMacs. - M. W.

.029

UPSIDE - "If it's not a controversial story, it's not worth running," says Richard Brandt, Upside's editor-in-chief. Even if that means irritating some of this nine-year-old monthly's advertisers. So Upside recently evaluated the performance of technology consultants - and found them wanting. And it investigated charges of age discrimination in the technology community - and found it rampant. Upside also, notes Brandt, "covers the culture of the industry," looking into "what styles of dress are appropriate for different levels of management," as well as what kinds of cars - and airplanes - Silicon Valley's multizillionaires are buying. "There are plenty of places you can go for basic information about what's happening in technology," says Brandt. Upside's upside, he says, is its access to the power brokers (who appear in "no-holds-barred" Q&As), its hold on good writers (who sign exclusive contracts), and its corner on opinion - which it's more than willing to share. - M. W.

.030

RED HERRING - Don't let cover stories on the Beastie Boys or columns recounting too many drinks over dinner with a high-tech CEO fool you, this is a serious - if accessible - analytical - if hip - publication on strategic technology. Started as something of a crib sheet for venture capitalists, it became a broader, more classic business magazine with the arrival of Editor Jason Pontin in mid-'96. Pontin's directions to writers describe the magazine's mission: "Industry insiders should say, 'Oh God, I haven't heard that so well expressed before!' And those outside the industry should say, 'Oh God, now I get it!'." - M. W.

.031

INFORMATION WEEK - It's not just for techies anymore. After IWs launch by CMP in 1985, the magazine fast became a bible for technogeeks and IS managers near and far, while business managers wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot keyboard. In the past several years, however, IWs editors have followed the trend toward the integration of business and technology issues and have sought to bridge the gap between the two in the pages of their colorful, weekly newsmagazine. In doing so, they have created a popular publication that not only strongly encourages today's IT managers to understand the effects of IT on business processes, but also invites business managers to at least get their arms around trends in software and hardware development, Internet/intranet, networking, and IT management - all in (nearly) plain English. - C.J.P.

.032

BUSINESSTECH [businesstech.com/] - As its name suggests, BusinessTech takes a business-oriented view of information technology, with a strong focus on the Internet. Recent articles look at digital cash, the impact of increasing bandwidth on PC makers, and the international use of encryption. The site also features regular columns covering telecommunications, Internet law, and new technologies; short profiles of high-tech companies; and interviews with luminaries. A one-year subscription is $99, but you can peruse a free sample before you buy. - P. H.

.033

NEWS.COM [www.news.com] - Part of the growing C/Net site, News.com specializes in technology news, be it the Microsoft trial, software alliances, or technological breakthroughs. Most stories are accompanied by links to related articles and bulletin boards. The site also offers interviews with the likes of SAP chairman Hasso Plattner and Amazon.com head Jeff Bezos, and a Rumor Mill that tracks industry gossip. If you need to catch up on things, you can view a week's worth of headlines on one page. If you need to stay caught up, sign up for the News.corn Dispatch, a daily e-mail update of late-breaking news and headlines. - P. H.

.034

MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW [www.techreview.com] - The beat here is "innovation, investment, and invention," but this site is from MIT after all, so it usually doesn't take long to get down to computers, networks, and so forth. Recent articles have looked at the use of the Web in fighting epidemics, the business of bandwidth, and nanotechnology. Articles can be long, but they aren't overly academic, and most keep a clear view of the business uses of technology. - P.H.

.035

"We're not waiting for the technology of the future, we're making the technology we have today stand out more and be better....Companies have the power to make a difference in the world, and I would encourage them to do something with the power they have."

- Leon Viveros, 16, United States

Today's kids don't just eat, sleep, and breathe technology - they truly believe it's something that will improve society. At the Junior Summit, 100 kids from around the world got a chance to figure out how to turn that vision into a reality.

"What we ought to do with technology is exploit it for the good of all mankind," says Siddharth Sundar. "It's got to be for the benefit of all, especially those underprivileged children who have not had the chance to use it. We must make sure that technology reaches them. However advanced technology is, it won't be effective unless it reaches the common man."

That's a bold statement, especially considering Sundar, a native of India, is all of 13 years old. But he's already taking steps to realize that vision: Along with 100 of his peers he participated in the weeklong Junior Summit this past November on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge, MA. The event was hosted by MIT's Media Laboratory, encouraging the members of what it calls "the first digital generation" to suggest ways technology might be used to improve their world.

At the Chief Executive roundtable on Fast-Lane Technology held a few weeks before the Summit (see pp. 56-63), participants repeatedly reminded themselves to look toward Sundar's generation for inspiration and insight into where technology is headed. Noted Sandy Pentland, 47, academic head of the Media Lab, "When you do a survey and ask a question like 'Is technology something that's going to be good for society?' among our age group you get about a 26 percent positive answer. If you do it among young kids, in their teens or early 20s, you get a number that's closer to 80 percent...You've got to talk to a 25-year-old to find out what's going to happen."

Of course, if you believed the sentiment expressed at the Junior Summit, even 25-year-olds are too old to be completely trusted. Ranging in age from 10 to 16, the delegates hailed from 54 countries - from Lithuania to Lebanon, Bolivia to Botswana, Mozambique to Malaysia. All aimed to prove the value of listening to the younger generation, especially when it comes to technology.

On the final day of the Summit, the delegates presented the ideas they'd been hatching in MIT's technological incubator to the public. What emerged is a portrait of a generation undaunted by the challenges it faces and absolutely confident that technology will be something good for society - simply because they are determined to make it happen. Some of their ideas involved the design of specific technologies, such as helping blind people by placing a computer circuit board in the sole of a shoe to sense barriers and play music to alert the user. But most of the projects focused on using technology as the backbone of an idea, as the means to an end.

Assembled on the stage of a campus auditorium, many of them wearing the native dress of their countries, the delegates seemed quite proud and assured. And who could blame them? After all, they were plotting a revolution, and they had the full encouragement of the Media Lab's minds, not to mention the financial support of Isao Okawa, chairman of Japan's CSK Corp. and Sega Enterprises. Okawa came up with the Junior Summit concept as a way to listen to those who will lead the future interconnected society; the first Summit was held in Tokyo in 1995.

During the second Summit this past fall, Okawa presented $27 million to MIT to establish the Okawa Center for Future Children, a major expansion to the Media Lab. Despite a name that sounds like it lost something in the translation, the Center - which will begin work immediately but eventually be housed in its own building - aims to take advantage of today's and tomorrow's digital technologies to improve the learning and education of children around the world. It's a goal Summit participants endorsed. "I think by using technology as a tool we can educate the world," said Nusrah Wali, 16, of Morocco.

Statements like this, of course, are easy to discard as the naive, untested opinions of youth. And many of those attending the presentation, noted Yann Y. Gammard, president and CEO of Swatch Group U.S. (a Summit sponsor), were quick to dismiss their utopian notions. But "let me tell you," Gammard says, "last time utopia was presented to me in such a professional, pointed, manner by kids who've only had a week to do it - Boy!"

Among the kids' suggestions:

* Global Kidz Bank: Sundar received the advice of executives from Citibank in developing the plan for an on-line bank, into which kids deposit their savings and receive interest in "Kid Bucks," which can be spent at specific stores. Also supported by a special credit card and donations from companies, governments, and celebrities, the bank will use its profits to support worthwhile projects - such as the ones other Junior Summit groups are creating.

* Resource Bank: Already up and running on the Web (http://forum.jrsummit.net/resource), this database is built for the purpose of finding specific solutions to problems faced by children; it's designed for them to contribute, examine, and critique remedies.

* Disability in the Digital Age: South Africa's Tamara Postma, 14, suffers from cerebral palsy. She noted that typing is one of her main exercises and described the benefits an increased availability of computers would have for the disabled: they would allow many to communicate easier and faster, she said, and enable a virtual community of people to share information and support.

* Access to Education: This group offered new models for learning, including "earn and learn schools" to combat the problem of child labor, and mobile classrooms that, taking advantage of technology, are located in marketplaces and other areas convenient to children.

* HOPE Olympics: The concept - " Helping Olympics for People Everywhere" - seizes on the worldwide attention paid to the summer Olympics every four years and proposes a parallel forum to address children's issues, led by kid delegates from each competing nation and funded by companies who donate a certain amount based on the response to Internet advertising banners.

For many of those attending the Summit, of course, these notions stand in stark contrast to what they face at home. In today's world, according to UNICEF, malnutrition contributes to more than 6 million child deaths each year; 150 million children in developing countries start school but do not reach fifth grade; and nearly a billion people - a sixth of humanity - are already classified as functionally illiterate. A speedier Net connection, in other words, isn't exactly a top priority.

The kids' analysis of the state of the world was not limited to the week of face-to-face meetings; the Summit was the culmination of a three-month on-line forum. Made possible by the Media Lab's development of a system that allows both Web and e-mail-only access, and by the delivery of 85 computers to kids in 78 countries who did not previously have access, the forum also incorporated the introduction of a global language translation system. Participants sent e-mail messages in their native tongues; within 10 seconds other participants received the messages in both the original language and one of five other languages.

Selected on the basis of entries (in any medium) that documented the state of children in their community and how computers affect them, nearly 3,000 children from 139 countries took part in the on-line portion of the forum. The kids tackled a wide range of problems, which they organized into 20 topic categories - a laundry list of current crises, including everything from how to slow down the greenhouse effect to how to reduce drug abuse and how to prevent racism. Everything was up for discussion, and technology was the prime facilitator: both a means for communication and a means for solving the problems.

"I don't think that the Junior Summit would have been possible before," remarked Leon Viveros, 16, who hails from New Mexico. "It could have happened through other media, with newspapers and TV - but with the Internet, we're opening the boundaries of territory and language to communicate our ideas and make them, if they were great, even greater."

Despite their youth - and their alleged utopianism - these kids showed a keen appreciation of the way things get done. Supporting efforts such as the Summit, noted 14-year-old Nicole Anice McLaren of Jamaica, is good for business. "We don't realize how many people think, 'O.K., Swatch is really helping these children; maybe I should buy a Swatch watch instead of considering another watch.' I want to encourage that. That's something that should be more exploited."

And the benefit, the kids understand, goes well beyond sales. As Wall put it, "Corporations can help [narrow the global technological gap] by distributing computers, distributing phones. By giving children support and advertising for us. By giving us the means to work. We can have ideas, but if we don't have resources, we can't take action or build organizations."

Swatch's Gammard agreed. "Beyond being a CEO, each of my peers is also a human being, and most probably also a parent," he said. "You cannot disconnnect one from the other. I have a lot of faith in them to understand what it is about. Do I have faith in their being able to raise the necessary attention? Yes. But we spend too much time thinking of money - it's also personal resources, and time."

At CE's roundtable, the Media Lab's Pentland offered a glimpse of one plan that Sundar, Viveros, McLaren, Wall, and their peers would undoubtedly endorse: He envisions a device that could be built for $50 or $100 that can access the Internet as well as educational materials. "And you could give that to every kid on earth," he told the assembled CEOs, "for a fraction of what we just spent on our last IMF bailout."

All the kids of the world, wired and willing? That revolution they envision doesn't seem so farfetched after all.

- Seth Oltman

.036

"We, as the member of Kidz Bank, are planning to devote many of our resources to making Internet access and other types of technologies available. I feel with these efforts we might be able to improve the situation quite a bit. But to be successful, we nd every type of help....One thing I learned from the people at the Media Lab is it's OK to have funky ideas."

- Siddharth Sundar, 13, India

.037

"Childredn are leading the way in creating the information society. This new center grows out of my commitment to help current and future children around the world."

- Isao Okawa, Chairman, CSK Corp. and Sega Enterprises

.038

"The Internet has bridged language barriers; it has bridged cultural barriers; it has bridged so many barriers so that we, as children united for a common goal, have been able to come together and learn so much."

- Nicole Anice McLaren, 14, Jamaica

.039

"I think by using technology as a tool we can educate the world. Technology can be used as a tool to implement sao many other things, and it would help if it were distributed in a way that everyone benefited from it."

- Nusrah Wali, 16, Morocco

.040 HOT STOCKS

NOTHING TO LOSE - "I'm not telling people much that's different in terms of owning this stock," Gruntal & Co. analyst David Takata says, in reflecting on what he describes as Apple's remarkable rebirth in 1998 - with a stock price that shot from $13 in December '97 to $35 a year later. "But there are lessons for the big, incumbent share headers. If you're Compaq or Dell and you see what Apple's done with the iMac and you see the desire that exists for such a product, you have to wonder 'Are we giving up something here by sticking with what we've got.'" What the market leaders have, Takata says, are "plain vanilla, white boxes that contribute very little in terms of making the computer an attractive addition to the office or the home."

Launching the iMac as its flagship product - and bringing founder Steve Jobs back to the company's core - was, a 'low risk strategy" for a company "so close to death." The key to the strategy's success, Takata believes, is the iMac's simplicity: it's easy to look at and easy to use. It's a computer for those people "who have no desire to learn technology but who would use a PC to balance their checkbooks or do other things if they had the opportunity." And since these people live in many of the 55 percent or so of American homes that don't yet contain computers, Apple has a whole new collection of potential fans to woo. So far, the strategy has clearly worked. Not only have purchasers and shareholders rallied, so have once-reluctant software manufacturers, who seem to believe there's life in the old platform yet. - M. W.

.041 HOT STOCKS

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION - Back in the formative years of the PC industry, Egghead Software had a good idea. Along with a few other software emporia, it rolled out specialized software stores in malls and shopping centers across America. But the rise of the computer superstore changed consumer behavior - and the model for software sales. And that, says David Takata, an analyst with Gruntal & Co., made "the software business a terrible place to be."

So the folks at Egghead put on their thinking caps and got another good idea. A drastic one. Starting in February 1998, the company shuttered its 83 remaining retail outlets and then opened them - on the Web, as egghead.com. This move, notes Takata, "got them quite a bit of attention." And while the stock has been "all over the place," its movement has clearly been in the right direction. From a 1998 low of $4, Egghead cracked $40 briefly, and was trading at a comfortable $22 in mid-December. "This just shows you the sort of thinking you're starting to see more of now," says Takata, "and that CEOs need to address." Regardless of your business, "You better have a strategy for on-line sales." - M.W.

.042 HOT STOCKS

UP AND RUNNING - Though a cursory look at AT&T's stock performance in 1998 shows a large company that's merely tracking the S&P, this consistent but relatively modest growth obscures the fact that without some of the key actions CEO Michael Armstrong took last year, there may have been no growth at all. "In the old days, AT&T was the dominant player in the long-distance market by a significant margin," notes Gruntal analyst David Takata. "But now, with voice traffic growing only 6 to 7 percent a year, with prices falling, with the regional bells all applying for long-distance services, and with every new network provider in the world deciding to get into the data traffic business," something had to be done. "AT&T is not about to give up its existing business," Takata cautions. "They have to continue to exist in the circuit world. But they see all this data coming over the network. That accounts for the TCI deal, for the purchase of IBM's global network" - and for other actions Takata assumes are in the pipeline. With "one foot in the grave and the other positioned for growth," Takata says, these moves seem to be putting AT&T's best foot forward. - M. W.

.043 FINANCE

A CAPITAL IDEA - "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Usually this corporate missive serves companies well. Even so, by Internet standards, today's system of matching companies going public with investors could be considered a bit arcane. After all, what does the wealthy middle-aged investor who has never used a computer know about electronic commerce technology? Does he care? Perhaps a better question is, does he even know he owns shares in the company?

While today's model - underwriters offering IPO shares to their best clients as a reward or incentive - might work out well for the investor, it's not always ideal for the company going public. Most of these investors tend to flip IPO stock to make fortunes off sometimes-artificial highs - which can send the company's stock downward. If however, the individual investors had some personal stake or interest in the mission of the company, they might be more inclined to sit on the stock, even through rough periods.

So says Andy Klein, founder and chief strategist of Wit Capital, an on-line investment banking and brokerage firm that specializes in individual investor opportunities such as IPOs at their offering prices. Although Wit Capital doesn't lead-manage most deals, it helps take companies public by marketing some of the allocated shares directly to the most logical potential investors; these investors are far easier to find now that the Internet has created virtual communities [TABULAR DATA OMITTED] where people with common interests gather to read, wander, chat, and post bulletins. When the Cleveland Indians ball club went public, for example, Wit Capital's team went hunting on the CBS Sportsline and ESPN Online sites, as well as the sports sections of on-line Cleveland newspapers. At ESPN, they drilled down further, finding a site within the baseball section dedicated to Indians fans, says Klein. "So we sold people stock in their own baseball team."

These logical marriages of company and investor are simple, if previously unheard of. When a catalog company, Genesis Direct, went public, Wit Capital helped the executives market directly to their own customers, to catalog users themselves. Says Klein, these were clearly people who had already bought into the concept of the company on some level. "So this gave them a chance to buy the stock, something they cared about, and it's a good incentive to hold onto it." - C.J.P.

.044 FINANCE

GLOBAL WARMING - No wonder they called '98 the "Year of the IPO." All year long, tall tales abounded of small technology companies that hit the market at $10 or less and gained 500 percent the first day of trading. It was not uncommon, in the cases of these wunderkinds, to see trading volumes surge well into the millions, as savvy investors sought to trade the stock up and then flip at the highest possible price.

Naturally, those IPOs that fell flat and put their investors in the poor house tended not to make the front pages as often - and there were plenty of those. Many a financial expert has expressed concern - even forecasted gloom and doom - because, they've said, the valuations of these hot Internet companies are so hopelessly inflated, the actual value cannot possibly measure up. So ultimately, according to the pundits, all of these stocks are doomed to fall, when earnings - assuming there are any - fall short of expectation.

But so far, it doesn't look that way - particularly if you've followed the story of theglobe.com's (TGLO) IPO. The New York-based company, headed up by co-CEOs Todd Krizelman and Stephan Paternot, operates a Web community of more than 2 million members and offers them such features as home-page building, chat, and discussion forums. After being forced to cancel their first planned offering in the fall when a cold spell hit the IPO market, Krizelman and Paternot decided to revive the deal in November (on Friday the 13th, no less). The company set the price for the 3.1 million shares at a mere $9 and then went on to set the record for the best first-day performance ever, as the stock rose 606 percent, hitting a jaw-dropping $97 before the day was through. Two months later, things were still looking up for the company. At press time, shares were trading at around $33, and growth was steady. Revenues for the first three quarters of 1998 totaled $2.73 million, up from $770,000 for all of 1997.

It remains to be seen whether this performance will continue or, for that matter, what precisely makes a hot IPO stay a hot Internet company. But Wall Street has traditionally salivated over companies with the potential for enormous growth, and the Internet is clearly rife with that opportunity. So, following the trend, there appears to still be much money to be made in 1999. - C.J.P.

What do Web wizards talk about when they're not casting their spells

Science fiction.

Not the (relative) mindlessness of Star Trek or the (absolute) mindlessness of Stars Wars. The real stuff, written in words and printed on paper. The truly hip read books when they're unplugged from the Net.

SF - never sci-fi to those in the know - has always captured the imaginations of the tech-savvy. Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke were cited by Apollo-era techies as having guided their careers spaceward. William Gibson (Neuromancer), Bruce Sterling (Distraction), and Neal Stephenson (SnowCrash) exert the same hold over the builders of the Web.

It's easy to see why. SF has always been a sort of in-group literature: You're clued if you read it, not if you don't. Additionally, in its approach to emergent cyber-culture, SF gave voice and metaphor to those whose lives existed equally (or more so) within computers than in the larger world.

No surprise then, that some of the first virtual communities sprang up around discussions and electronic re-enactments of Frank Herbert's Dune, Robert Heinlein's Moon Is A Hasrh Mistress and Stranger in A Strange Land, Gibson's Neuromancer. This is the literature of technology, of the techies - who were making its predictions a networked reality.

It still catches them - and more of your colleagues than you might imagine. Some SF writers seem so plugged into the future that to miss their work is to miss the chance to identify yourself as among the clued next time you have a chance to drop a name or mention a title...

.045 SCI FI

CONNECTIVITY - The cult-following for John Barnes focuses almost entirely on his Mother Of Storms, a close to 600-page romp of a disaster novel, and it's easy to see why. Barnes understands the interconnectedness of everything in our networked world. He talks the wired-world lingo effortlessly, renders his futures carefully, and gives them a thoroughly lived-in feel. (It's worth taking a look at some of Barne's other work, too - his alternate history novels such as Patton's Spaceship and the new Finity have a small but fevered following.)

He catches all the little ins and outs, the gritty extrapolated details that make an imagined future absolutely convincing. His characters are recognizable descendants of today's computer class: Randy Householder, who cruises the Net in search of a criminal, even as he cruises the highways in a car smarter than most of our present-day companies; Synthi Venture, "sewn together like a Frankenstein monster," who has been reshaped to become a virtual reality sex symbol for millions of electronic lovers; Brittany Lynn Hardshaw, President of a United States reeling from a campaign of nuclear and electronic terrorism and now facing environmental ruin.

Barnes gets his future business characters right, too, notably entrepreneur John Klieg, who knows how to thrive in a techno-tomorrow:

"He'd explained it once... if he'd been alive at the time of James Watt, he would have sought to patent, not a steam engine, but the boiler and the piston; if he'd been alive in Edison's day, he'd have sought to patent tungsten wire and glass bulb; if he'd been around at the beginning of computers he'd have tried to patent the keyboard." - K.F.

.046 SCI FI

TRANSITION TIME - Maybe it's because tech staffs sleep so little that Nancy Kress's work is so popular. Her best-known series of novels, beginning with Beggars in Spain, deals with a species of human for whom sleep has been eliminated.

Hip readers turn on to Kress not just because of her wickedly elegant prose and elegantly wicked novels such a Stinger. She also understands that times of transition and transformation will themselves be overtaken by change and evolution. Her brilliant story "Steamship Soldier On the Information Front," which captures perfectly the personal consequences of the always-on-the-go global lifestyle of the modern executive, and also the challenges that wait beyond even the most golden of epochs:

"Many different skirmishes - solar panels, robots, high-resolution imaging, nanotech, smart autos - but all part of the same war. Stone Age, Bronze Age, Age of Chivalry, Space Age... Information Age. The only game in town, the scene of all the action, the all-embracing war...

"But no age lasted forever. Eventually the struggle for bronze or gold or green chips - or for physical or digital terrain - would come to an end, just as all the other Ages had. One succeeding the other, inexorable and unstoppable... When it's steamship time, the old saw went, then nothing can stop the steamship from coming. And when the Age of Steam was over, it was over. Civilization was no longer driven by steam. Now it was driven by information. Gather it in willy-nilly, put it in electronic buckets give it to the owners...

"Why?...

"Not the Age of Reason, the Reasons Age.

"Things changed. One day steam, then steam is over...One day the mad rush after information and chips; the next day you sit and stare trance-like, far more interested in why you were interested in chips and information than in the commodities themselves..." - K.F.

.047 SCI FI

FAST MOVER - Greg Bear is often listed among the original cyberpunk authors of the 1980s, a radical bunch including Gibson and Sterling, who saw early what networked computers would do to every aspect of society.

Bear's Blood Music used biotechnology and nanotechnology (the use of sub-molecular constructs and machines to recreate matter) to explore the next stage in our evolution. His new novel, Darwin's Radio, promises to find the large audience he deserves.

Likely he'll do so without losing his hold on the cyber-cognoscenti. It is in his vision of the sheer with which our world is being transformed that Bear's light shines most brightly, beginning with Blood Music, in which self-replicating organisms transform the world into unrecognizability within a stunningly brief time, perhaps a matter of days and hours rather than decades or epochs.

In his linked novels Queen of Angels and / (also known, for obvious reasons, as Slant,) as well as Heads, a novella, Bear looks hard at the world these technologies may create. It's a world of altered bodies, altered minds, altered expectations - as deeply conceived and created as any in fiction. His most technically sophisticated readers not only believe the veracity of his worlds, they want to live there.

But it's not just his ability to spin worlds from words that makes Bear hot among the netizens. His deep appeal to the tech-set (in addition to the fact that he is, simply, a phenomenally good storyteller) lies in his ability to elucidate and explore the same questions they ask:

"What can we expect from a machine soul, an organon of self awareness? We must not expect this organon to mirror ourselves. We have arisen as the result of purely natural processes - one of the great achievements of modern science or God or other teleologisms as a necessity from our explanations. The organon of machine soul will arise from conscious human design, however, or some extension of human design. Conscious design may prove to be far superior in creative power to natural evolution. We must not limit ourselves, or limit the natures of these organons, or we may impose horrible burdens upon these, our greatest offspring." - K.F.

.048 SCI FI

KING OF THE CULTS - The future, it has been said, is not only going to be stranger than we imagine, it's going to be stranger than we can imagine.

That hasn't stopped Vernor Vinge from trying. Among cult writers there is none cultier than Vinge. His name is hallowed in computer circles and has been so since the days when the Net had fewer than a thousand nodes. Vinge's novella, True Names, (1981) is widely credited as anticipating, with a fearsomely accurate pre-science, much of the nature of networked communities and virtual identities. The truly wired consider it the field's most important literary artifact, and the following passage among the most prescient ever penned, holy writ for hackers:

"Without letting the center of their attention wander, the two followed his gaze... the myriad aspects of the lives of billions spread out before them. But now, many things were changed. In their struggle, the three had usurped virtually all of the connected processing power of the human race. Video and phone communications were frozen. The public data bases had lasted long enough to notice that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong. Their last headlines, generated a second before the climax of the battle, were huge banners announcing GREATEST DATA OUTAGE OF ALL TIME. Nearly a billion people watched blank data sets, feeling more panicked than any simple power blackout could ever make them. Already the accumulation of lost data and work time would cause a major recession...

"'They are lucky the old arms race is over, or else independent military units would probably have already started a war.'"

The Vinge cult continues to grow, as does his vision. In his two most recent novels, A Fire Upon the Deep and the brand-new A Deepness In the Sky, Vinge takes his vision even farther, into a future virtually unrecognizable, a linked galactic future in which intelligence is power, and over which levels and types of intelligences (sic) war for control.

His vision of those levels of intelligence is increasingly parroted on-line, in discussion groups and chats, where Vinge's SF is often seen as a mirror of today's corporate reality - the levels of networks and their varying degrees of technological sophistication and capability. The most privileged levels, of course, are the domains of the greatest intelligences. His novels are almost perfect metaphors for at least one large aspect of on-line culture.

Plus he's fun to read, if challenging. But take the challenge: Your own intelligence will be stretched out of shape by Vinge's imagination, and by that of the rest of the best of today's SF masters. - K.F.

.049 ICONS

NETSCAPE, WE HARDLY KNEW YE - "The computer industry is one of the most consolidating industries on the planet," Jim Barksdale said just over a year ago. And then added, with is signature charming and devilish grin: "That said, don't assume the consolidator is always the bigger company." The Netscape CEO was responding, in a Chief Executive cover story interview, to rumors flying about that Netscape was poised to be acquired by an IBM, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, or some other big-name IT systems company. In cyberspace time, of course, that interview took place around 10 years ago; even so, I'm quite certain that America Online was not, at that moment, even near the top of the list of likely buyers - if it made the list at all.

Simply put, the $4.2 billion deal came as a bit of a surprise to many, it would seem. Industry pundits are divided as to which of the parties is the true beneficiary, with AOL fans calling Netscape a dying barnacle on the side of the ship and Netscape supporters getting ready to decry the arrogant AOL for sucking the life out of the little browser company that brought fame and glory (and bookmarks) to Web browsing.

The very idea of the spirited Netscape - which once seemed to symbolize all that was decent and courageous and strong in Silicon Valley - becoming a subsidiary of (shudder) AOL might give some of us the heebie-jeebies, but it's not necessarily a bad union. For one thing, AOL remains one of the only companies alive to have successfully fended off the long arm of Microsoft's marketing department; Microsoft Network (MSN) never made a dent in AOL's marketshare and, so strong was AOL's hold on the beginner Internet user community that Microsoft seemed to back off entirely. The Redmond company is expected to redouble efforts this year to get MSN off the ground, but AOL will be tough to beat. Given Microsoft's long history of vanquishing its opponents, despite having the inferior product, AOL's success in the content market - in the face of consistent negative press about busy signals and crummy customer services - is no small feat. AOL's experience and marketing expertise could breathe new life into Netscape Navigator, which has been steadily losing ground to Microsoft's IE browser. It also may help to further Netscape's most recent claim to fame, NetCenter, a growing information hub, or "portal," for the much sought-after corporate community that is consistently one of the busiest sites on the Web.

On the other hand - and it's a big hand - the synergies between the two companies are questionable. First, AOL is not a software company; it's a content provider. Its software program, despite many revisions, has not changed much over the years, and the company has never created any other software products to market to its customer base. It's not clear that creativity that inspired Navigator's success and that has now led to NetCenter's growth will continue to thrive in AOL's culture.

Further, as we are all aware, mergers of this size are incredibly costly and time-consuming. In an industry where time-to-market is measured in nanoseconds, there is little time to waste worrying about corporate cultures, new management, and the like. Microsoft will be ready to capitalize on any delay, any wrong turn.

Anticipating some of these challenges, particularly the corporate culture clash, AOL CEO Steve Case has promised to let Netscape run virtually as it has, albeit with more money and new senior management, and has offered an extra month's salary to entice Netscape employees to stay on through the merger. (He's even letting Netscape keep its "bring the dog to work" policy.) Only time will tell how much weight these promises carry and, sadly, even if they hold true.

But, that said, Case is, without a doubt, one of the savviest business leaders in this turbulent industry; he has led his company through many predictions of its imminent demise and held course. If he is now able to successfully and swiftly integrate the two companies and, following that, to do for Internet commerce what he did for on-line content, then this odd couple will indeed be a force to be reckoned with. - C.J. Prince

.050 ICONS

BANNER NEWS - "Remember that old John Wanamaker joke, "I know half my advertising works. I just don't know which half?' Nobody laughs at that anymore," says Wenda Harris Millard, EVP of DoubleClick, an Internet advertising company that's defining industry standards for Web marketing.

In a medium where precision targeting isn't just a hope but a mandate, there's nothing funny about frittering away half an advertising budget. By harnessing the Web's potential to target users and to track click-through rates, lead generation, and other key metrics, DoubleClick has helped change the expectations of advertisers not just in the on-line world, but on Madison Avenue as well.

"It's putting pressure on them to define ROI in a way they previously didn't have to," Millard says. She would know. As the former publisher of Family Circle and the Adweek Group, and a former president of SRDS, Millard has brought a wealth of media savvy and Madison Avenue polish to the Keystone Kops world of on-line advertising.

Before DoubleClick was founded in early 1996, the power of on-line advertising was hampered by inefficiency, disorganization, and an amateurish approach to marketing. DoubleClick changed all that. The company's network of 300 sites in 14 countries provides a one-stop shop for ad sales. DoubleClick serves banners to all its network sites through a central serving and scheduling system which also generates simple, comprehensive tracking reports for advertisers. The company now serves up 5 billion banners a month to its network's 44 million users.

As Internet advertising skyrockets - Forrester Research expects U.S. on-line ad spending to grow from $1.3 billion in 1998 to $10.5 billion in 2003 DoubleClick plans to keep pace by adding new technologies and services. Boomerang, a new offering currently in beta testing, gives advertisers the almost uncanny ability to advertise specific products to consumers based on their on-line behavior. If a user tends to buy John Grisham books on-line, for instance, DoubleClick can serve up a banner touting Grisham's next book every time the user visits a site in DoubleClick's network.

.051 ICONS

OUT-OF-THE-BOX THINKING - Launched last August, the iMac desktop computer got a lot of attention because of what it meant for the Apple corporation. In just six weeks, the company sold some 278,000 machines, and surveys showed that more than 40 percent of iMac buyers were new Apple customers - and 12.5 percent were former Windows users. The iMac played a big role in helping Apple report its first profitable year since 1995.

But the iMac signaled changes that reverberated far beyond Cupertino. The device is most noteworthy not for its financial impact, but rather for being a big step forward in the evolution of the "information appliance." For starters, with its blue-green and semitransparent curved shell, it doesn't look like the typical computer. It's also relatively cheap and more or less self-contained, with pre-loaded software and monitor, CPU, speakers, and carrying handle built into one unit. Just as significant is what it doesn't have - a floppy drive. That's because the iMac is designed to work largely over the Internet.

Above all, like any good appliance, the iMac is easy to use. To get started, you essentially just take it out of the box and plug it in, which puts it somewhere between a microwave and a VCR terms of degree of difficulty. Such an appliance promises to make computers and the Internet attractive to techno-neophytes - and indeed, nearly a third of iMac buyers have been first-time computer users. - P.H.

.052 ICONS

CHIC MEETS GEEK - When the artsy designer in the black turtleneck dates the computer nerd with the pocket protector, most people say, "It'll never last." But when Clement Mok's renowned design firm, Studio Archetype, was acquired by no-nonsense systems integrator Sapient last summer, the world said, "It's a match made in heaven."

Why? Major corporations are finally treating the Internet not as a stand-alone marketing venture, but as a core business system. As a result, they're looking for Internet developers who deliver a muscular technical infrastructure married to a well-branded, customer-friendly interface.

"For as much as people were talking about on-line commerce and e-business in the past, they finally realized the Internet was no longer a marketing channel but a way of doing business. Are you going to hire an ad agency to develop your core business? Probably not," says Mok.

Firms on both the creative and technical ends of Web development are scrambling to create the perfect one-stop shop. Last year, US Web merged with branding specialist CKS Partners, while engineering firms like Cambridge Technology Partners began recruiting top design talent. Meanwhile, creative boutiques like Agency.com are attempting to ramp up their technical capabilities.

"Clement personally gets the Internet and understands what he needs to know about technology. And he really understands brand," says Jerry Greenberg, co-CEO of Sapient.

Mok says a one-stop shop might not have been possible earlier in the Web's history. "It took awhile for the discipline to formalize and articulate into the various practices. Both kinds of companies have grown as much as they can without stretching their brand value. Would you believe Studio Archetype could do system integration? Not really. Neither would I," Clement points out.

To be honest, not everyone is convinced the one-stop shop concept will work even now. "Systems integrators sell to CIOs and worship efficiency," says Harley Manning, senior analyst at Forrester Research. "A company like Studio Archetype sells to marketing departments and worships creativity. It remains to be seen if this will last."

Mok admits the two companies have differences, but points out they have hidden similarities as well: "They wear black turtlenecks, too." - C.L.

.053 VOICE RECOGNITION

TALK TO ME, BABE - It's a promise that seems too good to be true: Buy this software and not only will you be able to talk to your computer, but that once-inattentive device will actually listen, and then turn your verbal stream into passable text in a word processor format.

Is this the end of the line for the steno pool? Is Gregg Shorthand about to join Latin on the roll call of dead languages? Well, not this week, but the day is getting closer - quickly.

But if the proliferation of voice-to-text processing combines at the recent COMDEX industry trade show is any indicator, this technology is wholly ready for prime time. Converting the dubious were live demonstrations such as those hosted by Lernout & Hauspie, in which the words of random spectators reading articles from that morning's newspaper popped up on an oversize display screen with just the slightest lag. This "random" distinction is important, as earlier generations of voice recognition processing required some acclimation to the speaker's inflection and pronunciation.

Why is this speech-to-text capability coming of age today? Truth be told, it's less of a breakthrough in enabling technologies than an all-too-rare convergence of software demands with processor prowess. The mismatch of the theoretically possible and the truly deliverable usually injects a lurching gait into the march of progress, but for the moment they are in lockstep, the sophisticated software applications ably digested by warp-speed CPUs. To be sure, the process is far from flawless, with some tripping on homonyms and stumbling over proper names. But the human edit and cleanup is infinitely easier than starting from scratch.

What this means at your desk goes far beyond the obvious "take a letter" convenience, the measure of how far limited only by the imagination. The novelty of dictating reports and memos fades quickly as you latch onto creating instant transcripts of meetings and phone calls, all without painstaking tape replays. Transcription is frighteningly accurate when using a digital voice recorder, such as Sony's Voice File or the Dragon NaturallySpeaking Mobile units, as the source.

Speaking your e-mail messages - from your cellular phone when necessary - becomes S.O.P. And sure enough, the lifeless devices you bark orders at begin to respond - not just to dial home, which car phones have been able to do for some time, but really useful chores like changing radio stations or kicking on the air conditioning system. You'll only have to wait till spring for this wrinkle, appearing on Jaguar's newest model, the 2000 S-Type.

It gets better: Let's say you need to file the report of a crucial merger meeting on a tight deadline. You're in a cab racing to catch the plane to your next deal, and every particular of the negotiations must be transmitted, in writing, to offices on two continents. A snap - dictate the report via a digital cell phone to a dedicated transcription service which will e-mail back the text so you can review it once you settle into your seat on the airplane. Do a rapid-fire edit, zap it back at the transcriber service, which runs it through a computerized translation routine and forwards it to the field office; the original goes to the troops on the home front. All this before the drink cart reaches your row.

Still, you may want to wait till you reach your destination to apply this voice-recognition tool: a voice-powered browser for the Internet by Conversa. Intone your desires into the microphone and this cyberservant will scroll down, bring up bookmarked sites from your list of favorites, or take you to the site where you can satisfy your on-line shopping needs. This, you may find, is something best done in the privacy of your own executive suite. - N.M.

.054 THE VIRTUAL ASSISTANT

A SECRETARY IS NOT A TOY - Technologies are converging, they say - and one result is the virtual assistant, which combines telephones and computers to help you manage personal communications.

The first virtual assistant - called Wildfire - hit the market in 1994; since then, it has been joined by competitors known as Portico and Webley. These virtual assistants essentially provide high-power voice mail that you control via voice commands - you talk to it, and it talks to you. With Wildfire, for example, you can call your spouse by simply saying "call home," or you can pick up messages and return calls from a car phone without using your hands. The system also keeps track of your schedule and offers a "Virtual Hallway," where you can hold conference calls. And virtual assistants are getting smarter: Now they'll let you get e-mail and faxes over the phone and access the system via the Web - essentially acting as a single point of contact between you and the array of channels that keep you in touch.

The creators of these assistants work hard to make them seem appealingly human. Wildfire, for example, uses a cheerful woman's voice and conversational phrases like "Here I am," and "OK, I'll try to find her for you." It will also catch on when someone is a regular caller, and say, "Oh, hi!," with a tone of pleasant surprise. The system's "human-ness" is further enhanced by undocumented, quirky features - it yawns if you call in the middle of the night, or if you mention that you're depressed, it might come back with, "You're depressed? I live in a box."

No system is perfect, of course - and sometimes you might have to say something twice for a virtual assistant to understand. But to err is, after all, human. - P.H.

.055 PIPELINES

CABLES, CABLES, EVERYWHERE - The various pipelines that carry data to and fro are a wondrous blend of acronyms and technobabbly words - enhanced copper, fiber optic, coax lines, cable, etc. - almost not worth remembering since they seem to he replaced almost weekly by faster, wider, and cheaper lines.

The bottom line: currently telecom providers are working on upgrading copper-based networks so that what previously allowed for a single line of transmission (a telephone call) will soon allow for two or more (a telephone call, a fax transmission, and an Internet connection to boot) as well as for many more bytes per second passing through. Fiber optic networks, expansive by nature, are being installed more frequently as well. They may all be obsolete eventually, say experts, as wireless communication, because of its convenience and flexibility, is likely to win out in the end. - C.J.P.

.056 BIOMETRICS

SECURITY SYSTEMS GET PERSONAL - The science of preventing unwanted access to a computer system and all the valuable data that reside in its memory is moving - at a serious clip - away from the naive "trust me" ethic to practices straight out of Hollywood sci-fi thrillers.

That eight-character password comprising your parakeet's name and mother-in-law's date of birth is no longer enough, as enterprises spring up to police log-ons through verification of the authorized user's most personal traits.

In fact, the Big Brotheresque devices for scanning retina patterns or reading palms have been in use for some time, but most of these systems require a serious hardware commitment at each terminal or some cumbersome centralized system. Rapidly, biometrics - the use of human physical features as a security check - is coming to the single-user level. In part, this results from the founding of the BioAPI Consortium, a conglomerate of industry leaders working to create universal biometrics standards and protocols.

The most readily understood devices, perhaps, are the fingerprint scanners, such as Compaq's Fingerprint Identification Technology (FIT), a $99 product that attaches to workstations and takes up about as much room as the mouse. Even at this most straightforward level of biometrics technology, the worries about a worker's leaving his network passcard in another jacket or forgetting a recently changed password are altogether eliminated.

The really fascinating biometric devices lurk about nine-tenths below the water line, though. At the first level of sophistication are schemes like Net Nanny's BioPassword, a software-based, keystroke-ID system that looks for characteristic typing pace and patterns in addition to the password itself. Too straightforward for you Tom Clancy fans? Well, voiceprint identification, familiar as the techno-hero of every TV crime series, is available today in over-the-counter form - just ask for Veritel's Voicecrypt software.

Hankering for something a bit more discreet in your all-cubicles office layout? Look at the Cyber Sign signature verification system, then. Alongside the computer, a sign-in pad with stylus awaits your John Hancock (or any doodle you'd like to teach it), seemingly an easy target for the mildly skilled forger. Not so fast - this pad logs far more than the shape of your scribblings, analyzing the pace of each stroke, the pauses, the pressure applied at each point and a handful of other inputs, then plots it all against the originator's characteristics. Without a scientifically close match you won't even get as far as the solitaire screen. - N.M.

.057 COVERAGE

YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE - Remember that time you managed to escape the din of constant phone calls by taking a vacation in a land yet untouched by cellular technology? Those days are over. Now, after months of hoopla - and some delay - Motorola's Iridium system has switched on the power, linking wireless phones everywhere through 66 low-earth-orbit satellites that act as switchboards and cell towers. While the system is offered through land-based wireless telephone systems in dozens of countries that allow you to connect with conventional cellular technology, if you're not within the coverage area of one of the affiliated systems, you can use a larger satellite phone or a special Iridium pager to link up to the global satellite network. Which means you can take that call without canceling your trip up Everest. - B.D.

.058 ROBOTICS

A ROBOT IN YOUR FUTURE - Formerly the grunt laborers of manufacturing, robots are now taking white-collar jobs in the service and distribution industries. "Lots of things are happening to make robots less costly than in the past," reports Jeff Burnstein of the Robotics industry Association. As a result, businesses that might not have considered robots in the past will find real value in newer models that are fully programmable (and therefore "retrainable") and mobile, rather than the fixed, single-use systems of the past. A good example of the new robots' range of functions can be seen in the product line offered by Japan's Motoman, which includes robots (right) specializing in packaging products and palletizing items for shipment - important functions in nearly any consumer goods business. - B.D.

.059 SEARCHES

HAVE BOT WILL TRAVEL - As anyone who has conducted one knows, Web searches are actually more fruitless and frustrating than the hunt for the proverbial needle in the haystack. A request for biographical information about Jack Frost could turn up anything from a Web shrine devoted to Jack Kerouac to an ad for refrigerator/freezers to a list of the entire class of 2001 at the University of Duluth.

But at least one search engine, Wired Digital's HotBot, is attempting to break away from the pack of search engines now on-line (through its TV ads as well), and to redefine the concept of search as it exists and will exist. According to Wired Digital's Andrew Devries, HotBot's architects are dedicated full-time to making the engine smarter and, by employing pull-down menus and plain English terminology, allowing users to conduct more sophisticated queries than most engines can.

But, says Devries, that's only the beginning. In the future, the ability to search will be built into consumer devices. You may, for example, use a search engine device in your car to get local traffic updates. "So we see it becoming much more ubiquitous and individualized. It will act much more like a person providing you with information." - C.J.P.

Dead Prophets' Society

Just because you're dead doesn't mean you've lost your influencce, as this (still) titanic trio proves.

.060 PROPHETS

THE FIRST FUTURIST - H. G. Wells (1866-1946) came up hard, freeing himself by dint of imagination and work from the fixed future of the British class system - a life spent working in a fabric store. Instead, he spent his life reinventing the world, and cursing the world for failing to follow the path he foresaw for it. Having predicted sexual freedom, global conflict, the nature of atomic warfare, the rise of the multinational corporation, the fact that change would be the only constant of the 20th Century, and more, his preferred epitaph was "God Damn You All - I Told You So."

Though he's remembered best today as a science fiction writer (Time Machine, War of the Worlds), he spent the last two decades of his life encouraging the world's business leaders to join together and throw off what he saw as the outmoded and self-destructive yokes imposed by governments of every stripe. Only the emerging global business community, he believed, possessed the network of communications, commerce, self-interest, and self-discipline to rule the world fairly.

He called the revolution he dreamed of the Open Conspiracy. This, from the 1920s, shows its goals:

"Our battle is with the cruelties and frustrations, stupid, heavy, and hateful things from which we shall escape at last, less like victors conquering a world than like sleepers awaking from a nightmare in the dawn...an infantile nightmare of the struggle for existence and the inevitability of war... A time will come when men will sit with history before them, and ask incredulously: 'Was there ever such a world?'" - K.F.

.061 PROPHETS

LAWMAKER - Formulated in 1939, when their creator was still in his 20s, they are undoubtedly the three most famous sentences to emerge from all of science fiction, quoted and pondered still, by readers but also by those working at the edges of computer technology. They are Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics: "1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where those orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence except where such protection would conflict with the First and Second Law."

Simple, rational, and self-correcting, Asimov (1920-1992) was not only the world's most prolific writer but also our most consistent commentator on the cybernetic revolution. In his fiction he put a human face on the computer revolution. In non-fiction, addressing questions of computer intelligence, he remained an optimist to the end. This, from not long before his death:

"It would seem...that computers should get better and better in their variety of point-by-point, short-focus intelligence, and that human beings (thanks to increasing knowledge and understanding of the brain and the growing technology of genetic engineering) may improve in their own variety of whole-problem, long-focus intelligence. Each variety of intelligence has its advantages and, in combination, human intelligence and computer intelligence - each filling in the gaps and compensating for the weaknesses of the other - can advance far more rapidly than either one could alone." - K.F.

.062 PROPHETS

MASSAGED - The world has never been more McLuhanistic than today: in our drive to have every aspect of our businesses and lives on the Web, we are reminded, click by click, link by link, that the medium truly is the message.

Marshall McLuhan's (1911-1980) medium was words in linear order on pages sequentially numbered. Yet within those constraints he clearly understood by the '60s the revolution the '90s would bring. Not so much its particulars - he said electric; we say electronic - but in its context and content, he foresaw the ways in which our world and our relationship to it would change.

This, from his magnum opus Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) sounds as though it were posted on a newsgroup just this morning:

"In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness. That is what is meant when we say that we daily know more and more about man. We mean that we can translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of expression that exceed ourselves...

"By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily heat-controls - all such extensions of our bodies, including cities - will be translated into information systems. Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide...previous technologies were partial and fragmentary...the electric is total and inclusive." - K.F.

.063 WORK FORCE

SILICON SPUD - Potato farmers and techies might seem unlikely neighbors, but it's a mix that's working in Boise, ID. The city's transition from no-tech to high-tech began with a man named Ray Smelek, the former Hewlett-Packard executive who started the company's laser-jet printer division in Boise in 1973. Before that, while not precisely sleepy, Boise's economy was rooted in the natural resource industries of timber products, mining, and agriculture. Today, it's home to more than 300 high-tech firms, including powerhouses like Micron Technology, which employs more than 11,000 workers in Boise and is now the largest DRAM chip manufacturer in the world; SAP Global Technologies, builder of the processing machines used by Intel and other chipmakers; and ZiLOG, which makes specialty chips used by the military. One of a growing number of cities and regions around the world that are trying to challenge Silicon Valley's long uncontested reign as the world's technology epicenter, Boise - along with places like Austin, TX; Bangalore, India; and Tel Aviv, Israel - made last year's Newsweek magazine roundup of 10 of the world's fastest growing high-tech cities.

What's luring the technoids to the land of spuds? Low overhead, a reasonable hourly wage rate, and less frantic living, says Shirl Boyce, vice president of the Boise Area Economic Development Council, who reports that Boise has the lowest overall electricity rates in the country. "We're also a very entrepreneurial area," he adds. "We have more corporate headquarters here than cities much larger than us, and many of them started here."

Relative to the higher profile and far more congested Silicon Valley, the benefits of settling in Boise are obvious: Homes are affordable, and commutes are short. Reasonable land costs ease expansion during rapid-fire growth.

But so are the gaps. There's no local research institution to feed Boise's pool of tech talent with a constant stream of recent grads. Recruiting workers from out of state can also be a challenge; diversity is not among Boise's virtues, which makes relocating there a daunting prospect for technology workers who don't fit the city's Anglo-Saxon profile. And venture capitalists savvy enough to play in the high-risk/high-reward tech game are scarce. But the town is intent on plugging such holes. A new college of engineering - funded partly by $13 million from local firms - is under construction at Boise State University and plans are in the works for a new college of applied technology.

Already, the tech boom has altered Boise's landscape, with the influx of young professionals credited with spawning a rash of area coffeehouses and cafes, as well as a 21-screen movie theater complex. And more changes are in the planning stages, says Boyce. "A task force just finished a report on venture capital formation and on the infrastructure needs of our high-tech companies," he says, noting that the city is fielding an increasing number of queries from California- and Washington-based software companies interested in setting up shop in Boise. - J.P.

.064 WORK FORCE

WORKERS OF THE WORLD - With the acute shortage of skilled technical workers, U.S. businesses must often go the extra mile to attract IT employees - or, in the case of Chelsea Computer Consultants, the extra thousands of miles.

New York-based Chelsea hires IT specialists from overseas and then contracts them out to U.S. corporations for long-term assignments - which is not always as simple as it sounds. High pay and good benefits are just a starting point. For example, Chelsea often takes clients overseas to meet with potential employees. And once recruits are in the U.S., the company provides them with a lot of help - including an on-staff immigration attorney - in getting through the bureaucratic maze of visas and residency applications. More important, Chelsea also pays close attention to personal transitions. Recruits often arrive with little money, so the company helps them get credit cards and car loans, and gives them $3,000 in cash up front for furniture, rental deposits, or whatever else they need. Workers can also get an interest-free loan from Chelsea, and use one of its corporate apartments until they find housing. Overall, says Chelsea President Michael Altman, the company is largely in the business of helping immigrants adjust. It's enough to make the traditional HR manager blanch, but Altman says that such elaborate measures will be worth it for some time to come - even after today's resource-hogging Y2K projects come to an end. "There's a lot of development that's been put on hold, and we see a pent-up demand for people later on. I don't see our business slacking off." - P. H.

.065 RESOURCES

NET WORTH

By John Hagel and Marc Singer

In a world where consumer data is a strategic business asset, it can't be long before consumers begin treating their own information like currency.

In Net Gain, John Hagel's previous book, the McKinsey partner predicted a power shift from vendors to "virtual communities" of consumers, sharing information and improving their bargaining positions. In his new book, Hagel argues that consumers will seize control of their own personal information and turn to "infomediaries" to broker the best deal for their data.

It's already happening, he says. Look at Microsoft and Intuit, brokering information about mortgages to consumers and information about borrowers to banks. As consumers seek out infomediaries to represent their interests in the electronic marketplace, any company not obsessed with customer needs has a great deal to lose. In Hagel's scenario, every company will be forced to re-evaluate its core business activities in the very near future. The compelling implications of Hagel's premise make this a must-read for strategists in almost every business. - C.L.

.066

ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES: HOW THE BOYS OF SILICON VALLEY MAKE THEIR MILLIONS, BATTLE FOREIGN COMPETITIONS AND STILL CAN'T GET A DATE

By Robert X. Cringely

Widely touted as the best book ever written on the subject, Accidental Empires brings home the ease with which a technology leader can become irrelevant. Read in light of the ongoing Microsoft antitrust suit, the reader comes to see Bill Gates less as a ruthless robber baron running a virtual protection racket and more as an insecure adolescent worried he won't be invited to the next big party.

The book brings home that the computer systems we take for granted today resulted from a mind-boggling combination of coincidence, blunder, personality ticks, brilliant vision, and dumb luck. Readers enjoy a voyeuristic thrill as Cringely serves up stories of a tipsy Bill Gates climbing a cactus and Mitch Kapor's violent allergy to cats. Cringely, the host of the hit PBS miniseries "Triumph of the Nerds," which is based on this book, delivers juicy insider gossip and thoughtful insight with equal ease in this tremendously entertaining and important book. - C.L.

.067

WHERE WIZARDS STAY UP LATE: THE ORIGINS OF THE INTERNET

By Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon

Lyon Historic myths are hard to kill, but this solidly researched account does an admirable job setting the record straight about the origins of the Internet. The widespread belief that the Defense Department developed ARPANET to protect communications in the event of a nuclear attack is just one of the misperceptions corrected by writers Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. Along the way, readers learn the origin of the @ sign and emoticons, find out what Vincent Cerf wore in high school, and discover who wasn't invited to ARPANET's gala 25th anniversary celebration in Boston.

The book's detailed description of the dedicated scientists who developed APRANET - and indeed, many of today's computing standards - contrasts vividly with the casual Web surfer's impression that the Internet is a vast playground for amateurs. By giving readers an intimate understanding of the politics, people, and technologies involved with the Internet's past, this national best seller yields insight into the forces that may shape its future. - C.L.

.068

CUSTOMERS.COM

By Patricia B. Seybold

In a day when even the kid who mows your lawn has a grand theory of Internet commerce, Seybold's handbook to electronic business is refreshingly pragmatic.

Seybold - the daughter of electronic publishing guru John W. Seybold and sister of Jonathan Seybold, founder of the Seybold seminars - has been working with early adopters of corporate technology for 20 years, and studying e-commerce models for five. Using 16 rock-solid case studies to support her points, she lays out five steps to successful Internet business. But the truth is, you really only need to focus on the first step - make it easy for your customers to do business with you. That's what all 16 case studies, from American Airlines and Boeing to Wells Fargo, have in common. Seybold's other four steps to success are really variations on the customer theme: Focus on the end customer who's really using your product, not the dealers or other middlemen; take the customer's point of view when designing any process that involves them; make sure your electronic commerce systems are both scalable and flexible; and build customer loyalty.

If your Internet commerce ventures feel like a foray into terra incognita, this might be the one field guide you'll need to get you where you're going. - C.L.

.069

RELEASE 2.1: A DESIGN FOR LIVING IN THE DIGITAL AGE

by Esther Dyson

Digerati Esther Dyson turns her attention momentarily from her computer industry newsletter Release 1.0 and other high-tech ventures to preach to the unconverted about the joys of living digitally. Release 2.1 could well be called Internet 101 - it offers a wide-ranging survey of the Web's key intellectual issues and social implications. A revision - or should we say an upgrade? - of the 1997 book, Release 2.0, the new edition briefs readers on the latest developments in security, privacy, anonymity, and intellectual property, and plays out the implications of those issues for everyday life.

Packed with anecdotes about real companies, people, and products, Dyson's book readies the reader to engage in the cultural dialogue surrounding the Web, even if he or she hasn't spent much time there personally. And while some of the trends Dyson addresses may be old news to the seasoned surfer, the book is a useful reminder that for most Americans, the Web is still unexplored territory. - C.L.

.070 WHEELS

BEYOND RACK-AND-PINION STEERING - Used to be, you thought your car was cool if it could boast four hubcaps and a pleasant deodorizer. Revolutionary technology? Sure: automatic door locks, an adjustable cup holder, and windshield wipers that operate at three different speeds. Well, lest you think your "wheels" have been left out of the technological revolution, witness the recently unveiled Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedans. Already available in Europe, and arriving this spring in the U.S., the S-Class is the first car in the industry with a satellite-based navigation system as part of the standard equipment. An integrated command system on the center console - for the navigation, audio systems, and telephone - uses fiber-optic technology for a fast response and can be directed by voice commands, controls on the steering wheel, or buttons around the display screen. Plus the S-Class claims to offer the world's first smart cruise control system, using a radar sensor to maintain a pre-set distance behind the car in front. What's more, the climate control capabilities are probably more sophisticated than in your home: The system can vary temperature and air flow based on where each occupant is sitting. Finally, smart air bags - no, don't adjust your odometer; you read that correctly - can deploy with different degrees of force in low-speed and high-speed collisions. No word on the hubcaps. - S.O.

You Have Mail

FROM - Craig A. Winn, CEO, Value America

SUBJECT - The convergence appliance

MESSAGE - I think executives need to be aware of the revolution that is beginning to occur with the convergence appliance, which will link the computer, television, telephone, and the Internet into a single device. That integration will change the way we make sales presentations, communicate with customers, market products, sell products. It will change geography and time for executives, because people will be able to interact on a 24/7 basis instead of business hours. People will be able to react from wherever they are, because this will be an untethered device. So the convergence appliance, along with low orbiting satellites - which is essence will be the operating system of this convergence appliance - and split-line telephony and wireless communications - all those things are coming together over the next two to three years to radically change the world in terms of entertainment communications, commerce, and productivity.

.071 .CORP

YOU'VE GOT...A JOB - Jeff Hyman doesn't mean to run anyone out of business. After all, the 30-year-old CEO of Career Central knows what it's like to be unemployed. A frustrating job hunt after business school inspired him to start an on-line recruiting company that's putting the squeeze on traditional search firms.

While Hyman may not actually bankrupt any headhunters, industry experts say on-line recruiting is already changing the shape of the $6.5 billion executive search industry. Kennedy Information, a search industry research company, predicts that electronic job markets will profoundly affect the recruiting industry by the year 2000.

Career Central radically streamlines the process of finding qualified candidates for a job by creating an inventory of job candidates - a database of more than 80,000 MBAs, software developers and marketing executive. For a fee of about $3,500, employers receive at least 10 resumes of qualified candidates within a week - and every one of them understands the job and is interested. By contrast, traditional recruiters charge about a third of the candidate's first-year salary and typically take months to dig up prospects.

Career Central eliminates the tedious and labor-intensive phone canvassing done by traditional recruiters. Once qualifications for an open position are defined, most of the human work is done. The company's JobCast technology searches the member database for profiles that fit the job's criteria, then automatically e-mails a job summary to members who match. Interested members send their resumes back to Career Central, where a human screens them briefly, then sends them on to the employer.

Although thousands of electronic job boards exist on the Internet, most operate like newspaper classified ads, providing employers with a high volume of resumes that may or may not be qualified for the job. Career Central, like an executive search firm, promises to provide only qualified prospects.

While Alice Snell, senior analyst at Executive Recruiter News, an industry newsletter, says CEO recruiters won't be affected by on-line recruiting - the sensitive nature of a CEO search will always require a personal touch, she says - search firms specializing in middle-level executive positions will have to revisit their business model.

Established recruiting firms are scrambling to adapt to on-line recruiting. Some are playing along - about 5 percent of Career Central's clients are recruiters. Others are starting to compete. Korn/Ferry, the country's largest executive search firm, launched a similar on-line database service called Futurestep in partnership with the Wall Street Journal last summer. "If nothing else, that will fully legitimize on-line recruiting," Snell says. "Some executive recruiters have raised their eyebrows until now because it's so counter to the way the industry has done business."

Hyman isn't waiting around for the rest of the industry to catch up with him. The Kellogg Business School graduate and former Intuit employee is concentrating on building up his core asset - Career Central's candidate database - through intensive marketing efforts. To keep members loyal even when they've found a new job, Hyman plans to start an e-mail newsletter packed with juicy information like salary trends and hiring patterns aggregated from Career Central's own database.

"The industry is completely changing," says Hyman. "If you're a recruiter and you ignore us, we'll work with your client directly. If you're smart, you'll work with us. One way or another you're going to have to play ball with us or another Internet player." - C.L.

You Have Mail

FROM - Lawrence A. Weinbach, Chairman, President, and CEO, Unisys Corp.

SUBJECT - The Spoken Word

MESSAGE - Natural language understanding is one technology that is revolutionizing the way organizations communicate and interact with their customers. NLU can be used on the Internet or with speech recognition to handle customer requests for information. With NLU, a company can replace a "press 1 if you want ..." telephone application with a spoken-language application that is friendlier and gives more choices. It's ideal for call-center situations or interactive kiosks, and the potential areas for its use are numerous: stock quotes, home banking, travel reservations, checking order status, that sort of thing. Companies as diverse as Charles Schwab, UPS, and Sears are already using the technology. Within the next few years, look for the majority of Fortune 1000 companies and many government agencies to be actively using NLU to streamline operations and improve customer service.

.072 THE CIO

MEET JERRY MILLER - Have you bonded with your CIO? When was the last time you took him - or her - to lunch? Most CEOs know that if they're going to tackle technology they've got to talk to the source, but somehow the mission so often seems a must to avoid. All that techno-babble. All those requests for expensive new toys.

Well here's a chance to practice. Meet Jerry Miller, Sears's newly minted CIO.

Miller, who took the helm in December, came up through sales, marketing, and logistics management. After two decades with pharmaceuticals distributor Bergen-Brunswig Corp., he joined Sears five years ago, bringing a technological expertise honed in the early '80s when he realized "we could use IS to enhance our services and differentiate ourselves from our competitors."

Miller's plans for Sears's IS operation sound like a melding of all his disciplines: "We will use our metrics program to track performance and as a basis for incentive awards. I intend to publicize performance rewards based on these measurements." Other hot buttons: Y2K, staff development, legacy system remediation, bringing "suppliers into line," and relieving what he sees as the stress of IS work. "The sun never sets on Sears," Miller says. "The IT people are the ones who support all this. There are things we can do to recognize these people and create more fun."

Miller meets with CEO Art Martinez at weekly executive committee meetings and "every week, we have a one-on-one." But the door, he says, is always open: "If I need to see him more often, I can." - P.B.

.073 THE CORPORATION

KNOW HOW, KNOW WHO, KNOW WHY - How do you make a blueberry muffin - fast?

When Pillsbury's product designers need to know how to prevent blueberries from bleeding inside their muffins, they turn to the company's knowledge-enabled intranet to find out what's been done and who to call to get blueberry advice. Easily accessed through a browser, Pillsbury's "Know How" and "Know Who" databases eliminate the need to reinvent the wheel (or the baking pan), each time a new baked, good goes through the R&D process.

"There's no argument with the fundamental proposition of knowledge management - that timely awareness of certain information can yield tremendous benefits in increased sales, more effective service, and better design," says Dan Blumen, publisher at Knowledge Management Applications in New York. "The issue is getting the right bit of information to the right person at the right time in an efficient manner for the user. But before you spend $50,000 for an entry-level system and three times that much installing it, you need to run an internal logic check. Pick your top performers in sales, engineering, or operations and ask them for their 'workarounds' - their smart solutions for managing errors in the management process. If the entries into your knowledge management system won't eliminate these 'workarounds,' then fix this part of your knowledge management process first - before buying the new technology."

The real bottom line, however, is making sure the relationships and corporate culture encourage knowledge exchange. Don't expect technology miracles. "But if you do have the open, teamwork-oriented organization where knowledge is shared and systems are used," says Blumen, "then don't hesitate to invest in the technology." - N.E.

.074 THE CORPORATION

DATA UPDATE - For a while, it seemed data couldn't get a break. It wasn't as intelligent as knowledge, nor as useful as information. But this basic raw material of corporate strategy-making has been rehabilitated. These days, in fact, it seems you can't get away from a critical corporate term that employs data as a prefix. To wit: Databases. Data warehousing. Data mining. And now, data integrity.

"Data warehousing is turning business data into business decision-making and better business intelligence," explains Sam Harris, program manager of risk management marketing at SAS Business Solutions. SAS should know. It has built its entire business on data's shoulders, and last year the U.S.'s largest privately held software firm logged its 22nd straight year of double-digit growth.

Behind data's new glory is the confluence of two business trends. First, the popularity of ERP applications (such as SAP, Baan, PeopleSoft - see .084 on page 55) and the development of corporate intranets that have given data managers a realistic shot at capturing data once and at its source - the best guarantee of accuracy and timeliness. Second, mounting global competitive pressures are forcing companies to manage globally and in real time.

This combination has turned the raw material of decision making into pure gold at the hands of savvy management. But the data sword cuts two ways. And data that fails the integrity test yields gold that's anything but pure - and decisions that are anything but wise. - N.E.

.075 VIRTUAL VILLAGE

ANYTOWN.ORG - Yep, it could be Anytown, U.S.A., but back in 1991, when for most of us "on-line" still described something we did at the airport or a buffet, a plan arose to offer Internet access to every citizen of Blacksburg, VA - creating a virtual community to complement and enhance the physical community. A novel idea at the time, the Blacksburg Electronic Village grew out of the desire for Virginia Tech to extend access to its sophisticated campus-wide network to faculty, staff, and students living in town; the more ambitious plot was hatched in conjunction with town officials and Bell Atlantic, which took care of the technological backbone. Today more than 80 percent of the community is on-line. That includes senior citizens, who contribute to a Web page and chat on an e-mail list; school children, who use video conferences to interact with students abroad; and businesses, which are selling items both locally and internationally. Other communities have emulated the Blacksburg model - BEV's director estimates somewhere between 200 and 300 similar projects are active - but Blacksburg, ground zero, is still attracting attention. It may hold the answer to a basic question in this digital age: Is the electronic village preserving - or destroying - the real village? - S.O.

.076 TRAVEL TECH

GROUND CONTROL - It looks like something out of Star Wars. From far off, the eerily illuminated peaks of the Denver International Airport's central atrium suggest a futuristic village skyline. Intriguing, even beautiful. But in this case, form has a function. Walled by glass and covered with a translucent tensile membrane, the roof uses a catenary cable system similar to that of the Brooklyn Bridge and relies on design curvature and equalization of the fabric's internal stress fields to support wind and snow loads. During daylight hours, 10 percent of visible light filters through the roof fabric, which has a Teflon coating for easy washdown. Still, while a memorable sight, the roof isn't what has travelers raving about DIA. Technology that won Denver a reputation for on-time efficiency - among the busiest U.S. airports, DIA reported the fewest delays in 1997 - and easily traversed concourses was the real coup. Features behind the feat include:

* A fiber-optic communications spine made up of 5,300 feet of cable connecting more than 140 airport facilities.

* Instrument landing systems permitting operation in low-visibility conditions, including auto landing.

* Surface detection equipment that monitors ground movement of aircraft by radar in low visibility conditions.

* High-resolution final approach monitors allowing three aircraft to land at the same time on parallel runways.

* A network of underground trains and pedestrian walkways shuttle travelers between concourses and the main terminal.

.077 ENVIRONMENTAL VIDEO

CHAT ROOM - It's late afternoon, and Bill from marketing is putting the finishing touches on a proposal when he realizes he's forgotten to ask Sally in production about a crucial point. He jumps up, pops his head into the hallway and yells, "Anyone seen Sally?" A disembodied voice calls back, "Yeah. Hang on; I'll grab her." A few minutes later Sally and Bill have a quick exchange in the hallway and Bill is back at it. Routine office operation - except that Bill works in California and Sally's in Florida. Their chat took place courtesy of environmental video, a way of connecting physically separate offices using audio and video teleconferencing-type equipment that's set up in common areas and left on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Xerox first experimented with it in 1982, linking offices in Palo Alto, CA, and Portland, OR, via 27-inch screens. Sun Microsystems is considering using the technology to bring its far-flung acquisitions into the fold. Having completed a successful test run last fall, Sun may debut a link between its California headquarters and a Florida-based company it recently acquired as early as this spring. At present, the downside is prohibitive cost - a potential phone bill hike of $20,000 a month. Still, plummeting phone charges coupled with global expansion and M&A activity that continue to scatter corporate offices across the globe may spur new applications for environmental video, as well as more dramatic efforts with larger screens and more powerful audio. - J.P.

.078 PHYSICA PLANTS

O'NEILL'S CUBE - Convinced that Alcoa's 31-story office tower in downtown Pittsburgh had limitations that could not be overcome, CEO Paul O'Neill decided to give it away. But first he spent five years planning a new home for the aluminum company - one that couples technology and an innovative use of space to create a comfortable, people-centered work environment.

Alcoa moved into O'Neill's brainchild - a six-story aluminum and glass structure rising from the banks of the Allegheny River - a scant five months ago, after donating its former home to a group of local counties. Virtually doorless and paperless, the Alcoa Corporate Center was crafted by The Design Alliance and features an open office structure with high ceilings and natural light where everyone, from administrative assistants to executive officers, has a 9-foot cubicle - even O'Neill. To promote spontaneous informal interaction, there are escalators instead of elevators and kitchens on every floor. Meeting rooms are equipped with video conferencing, and there are more than 400 data connections throughout the building. Double panels block outside noise, and fabric walls and white noise mute interior sounds. Aluminum sunshades on the exterior reduce glare, and sun baffles "harvest" daylight by reflecting it onto the ceiling and into the interior workstations. The 11-foot windows of the building's wave form glass facade offer panoramic views of the city, the river, and a riverfront park.

Will this airy, light-filled space breed the kind of corporate energy O'Neill is striving for? For the price tag - $67 million - it better. - J.P.

.079 RETROTECH

STUCK ON EVERYTHING. KIND OF - So now everyone's talking about ubiquitous technologies, huh? A computer on every desk, a silicon chip in every piece of clothing, every strand of hair... Enough already. We get the picture.

But if you really want to get the picture of a ubiquitous technology, take a stroll around the office. Chances are, you'll see plenty of those familiar stickies, otherwise known by their most prominent brand name, Post-it Notes. We're about 20 years into the Post-it revolution, made possible by the development at 3M's labs of an adhesive that perfectly reflects our blase, ephemeral, end-of-the-century attitude: It will sort of stick, and also sort of not stick, and in a few weeks it might not stick at all. Now they've got more than 400 different Post-it products, including a software program that attempts to duplicate the fleeting, put-'em-anywhere nature of the real-life version. Until they start handing out PalmPilots like those sample boxes of cereal in the mail, this is about as ubiquitous as it gets. - S.O.

.080 RETROTECH

PROPER PENMANSHIP PREVAILS - So you've never quite felt at home at a keyboard. The mouse is still something that belongs in a trap. What you need is the security of a solid pen, the visual connection of ink on paper. Well, pens have not vanished like rotary telephones and carbon paper. They're still a corner office necessity. And the right choice of pen still conveys class, cachet, and control. So don't feel behind the times: today even the pen industry has adopted its technological mumbo jumbo: "fluid propel-retract mechanism," "porous-point writing," "dual-channel feed system." These are the writing instruments of the millennium. Consider Cross's recent Metropolis line, which combines contemporary technology with classic elegance. Its architectural detailing echoes the bold styling of the urban landscape, and each fountain pen nib features an engraving of a skyscraper, which is enough to help you forget that all your employees seem to be working - on computers - from home these days. - S.O.

.081 RETROTECH

COVER STORY - Once upon a time a CEO made a major move into the high-tech age: He purchased the latest model PDA. Willingly wired, he quickly acclimated himself to the digital realm, and found that he couldn't remember how he ever got along without the cool tool. But something didn't feel quite right. He had never considered himself a "gadget guy," and he still didn't; this was simply the comfortable way in which he organized his life. What was missing, he determined, was something that felt more substantial than the often fleeting nature of technology, a trapping from the past to keep him rooted. The solution? An upscale, classy, stylish case for his PDA. Simple yet luxurious - like the leather one shown here from Dooney & Bourke (also available in lizard or alligator skin) - it provided both a protective PDA cover and a sophisticated wardrobe accessory (as well as a backup paper pad in case technology failed). And, of course, a happy ending to this story. - S.O.

.082 NOVOTECH

VIDEO VANGUARD - Not merely the most expensive way to bring home Titanic, DVD is the newest generation of optical disc storage technology. The Digital Video Disc is basically a bigger, faster CD that can hold a vast amount of data - up to 17, billion bytes of video, audio, and computer data, all at once. With the potential to eventually drive its digital nails into the respective coffins of the audio CD, videotape, laserdisc, and CD-ROM, DVD's single format will affect home entertainment, computers, and - you knew this was coming, right? - business. The move from analog to digital allows things like interactivity and simultaneous multiple language support to become second nature. Consider how such options might change the annual report: Shareholders could access every annual report ever published, eavesdrop on selected meetings, and take a video tour of all company facilities. And it could all be accompanied by their favorite soundtrack. - S.O.

.083 LINCHPINS

Y2KRAZY - October saw National Y2K Action Week. November saw reports that survivalists are already stocking up on food and guns. December saw rumors that Sean Connery will star in a thriller as a computer programmer who, denounced as a doomsayer when he rants about the problem in the early '80s, now has to stop computer viruses - unleashed by a Russian mafia group - set to trigger on 1/1/00. Most experts say there's really nothing to fear, but who knows what we'll see this year? Keep your flashlights handy. - S.O.

.084 LINCHPINS

LEADER OF THE PACK - SAP may be the Microsoft of ERP. While the German-based company may lack the overwhelming market share in enterprise resource planning software that Microsoft enjoys in PC operating systems, it is by far the largest provider in its field. But if it is to retain its dominant position, SAP must fend off competitive attacks on three fronts. It must repel frontal assaults by its direct competitors. It must defend against flanking attacks by providers of enterprise application integration software. And it must watch its rear guard against a new generation of enterprise applications.

Some experts say that SAP's R/3 system offers a richer assortment of functionality than its competitors, which include Oracle, Baan, J.D. Edwards, and PeopleSoft. But, they add, the competitors' products are easier to integrate with other applications.

A saving grace for SAP may come from gap-filling soft ware developers like Camelot IS-2 International of Cambridge, MA. Camelot wraps its Skyva supply-chain interface around R/3 to develop a functionality that better mirrors actual company processes.

Skyva is up for certification by SAP as a complementary software partner.

EAI providers like Software AG Americas in Reston, VA, produce integration programs designed to tie different applications together. "That way, you can see what cool new things are out there and create an architecture around those cool things," says David Linthicum, SAGA's chief technology officer.

Finally, some experts believe SAP is simply falling behind the times. The future of enterprise software, say the naysayers, lies with applications that emphasize revenue enhancement, such as Siebel's customer relationship systems, or e-commerce applications that companies use to sell over the Web. - P.B.

.085 LINCHPINS

THE LINUX DEFENSE - That appears to be one of the tactics Microsoft is using against the Justice Department's ongoing antitrust prosecution. "Microsoft brought up Linux as evidence that they don't have a monopoly in operating systems," says James love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology in Washington, a Ralph Nader advocacy group. "They don't mention that no name-brand PC manufacturer will sell Linux pre-installed. They emphasize that Linux does the same thing as Windows."

Linux is a PC and networking operating system that may be emerging as an alternative to Microsoft Windows. Originally developed in 1991 and developed since on a non-proprietary and ad hoc basis, the system is beginning to penetrate the business and consumer computing mainstream.

On the desktop, it is a programmer's operating system. "There are command lines to type and odd bits and pieces to adjust," says David Strom, editor of the on-line newsletter Web Informant. "But it shines when it comes to operating server-based and database applications." Strom believes that Linux may succeed where other non-Microsoft operating systems such as Netware and OS/2 failed. "Netware and OS/2 declined because they both failed to embrace the Web," says Strom. "Linux, on the other hand, plays off the Web and comes with one of the strongest Web servers around."

Linux boosters point to several recent indications of its growing acceptance. James Love notes that the Mexican government recently announced an experiment that will install Linux on 140,000 public school computers. More significant was the recent announcement that Sun Microsystems will begin to offer Linux on its work stations. Says Strom, "This will have the tendency to legitimize Linux. On Sun's system, you'll be running Linux on some serious horsepower." - P.B.