Let's get small: as memory gets cheaper and smaller, it will start showing up in everything.

How low can you go? When it comes to memory--the chips and cards in computers, cell phones and, increasingly, things like credit cards--the race to the bottom has been swift.

Price points are always slippery in the electronics world, but a gigabyte on a key chain now costs under US$100. A 64-megabyte flash memory card, enough to hold 100 high-resolution photos on a digital camera--is down to $25. Desktop computers that cost under $500 come with 40-gigabyte and sometimes 60-gigabyte hard drives, a laughably vast information storeroom for most ordinary users.

You might not even need to take your computer with you. Projector makers are building slimmed-down versions of slideshow software like Microsoft's PowerPoint into their machines, so a key chain drive plugged into the back just runs the show. "I don't carry my laptop anymore, I just carry this," says Johnny Ramirez, regional sales manager for Central America, Caribbean and northern Latin America for California memory-maker Kingston Technology.

He waggles a sleek, square wand on a lanyard, no bigger than a small pen: It holds a gigabyte. A gigabyte is 1 billion bytes, a standard measure of computer data, but there's an easier way to think of it. A gigabyte is the length of the human genome, all the instructions needed to make a human. Or, as one scientist put it, the equivalent of a pickup truck full of books. A hundred gigabytes equals a library floor.

As memory gets cheaper and more efficient, it also gets small--very small. German database company SAP is promoting the industrial use of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, chips that keep track of what they're attached to, like barcodes but much smarter, since they don't require a person to scan them directly, one by one. RFID tags will revolutionize industry and retail, and quickly. Behemoth Wal-Mart is already demanding its suppliers convert to the system, on the bet that machine-to-machine tracking will drive costs out of the movement of goods from factory floor to store shelves.

They're shockingly tiny--a pile of 10 of so of the so-called passive variety would fit on your fingernail--but each one holds pages and pages of info: Manufacturing data, product details, dates, anything you might need to know. "You can immediately now scan everything" says Claus Heinrich, SAP's executive board member in charge of supply-chain initiatives. "Instead of having double bookkeeping--what goes in and what comes out, then the difference is the inventory--you can now scan the inventory with RFID."

Got all that? Now consider your cellular phone. Increasingly, phones are being run by flat, tiny smart cards, once repositories for a few basic bits of data and some numbers, but soon capable of much more.

The top end for smart cards now is 256 kilobytes, but card maker Axalto will soon introduce a 1-megabyte card--enough space for a short novel--for cellular phones, according to Erie Claudel, vice president of cards for Latin America for Axalto. "There are additional services you can provide to the cardholder with applications you can have in the chip" says Claudel. "You can have a program on the chip. You can add points to a card for free trips or free miles. These kinds of services can be implemented right into the card, thanks to the power of the microprocessor in the card."

Fraud. Next in line in the race to render human memory superfluous--credit cards. The same chip that's in your cell phone is the one on the front of most credit cards now. What card issuers want to do is eliminate the magnetic strip on the back of credit cards, which are easy to clone and invite fraud, for smart card chips which can be protected.

Europe's banking authorities are requiring a change to tougher smart cards, already in use in France for 15 years, says Claudel. "The idea is to make sure the fraud is not migrating from country to country," he says. "We've already seen Asian fraud move to Europe, and the U.S. banks are changing, too." Mexican and Brazilian banks have done testing already, and he expects a major migration away from magnetic-strip cards by May 2006.