Hype List
| On the Rise/ In Decline| Ranking| Life Expectancy (Months)
| up| 1| 12| Home Servers
Falling margins are the mother of all creativity, at least in the computer industry. As PC prices sink below US$1,000, manufacturers frantically search for ploys to make their products seem less like commodities. The scheme you'll likely hear about most is the home server. As more households employ more than one PC, the theory goes, they will need a scaled-down version of expensive file-server computers. But the reality is that Junior wants to put his porn and pirated warez on the same server as Mom's Quicken files about as much as she wants her data infected with a virus.
<p> <strststrtstrststrData Broadcasting</stH
to closed caption information for the hearing impaired, television's vertical blanking interval is the "empty space" in transmissions that every new broadcast technology gets shoehorned into. During videotext's heyday, consumers could tune in to stock quotes and news with boxes attached to their TV sets, but a lack of standards kept that technology from gaining popularity. Now a slew of start-ups have come up with ways to broadcast Web data to PCs using the VBI. The result is the worst of both worlds: none of TV's production values and none of the Web's interactivity.</p>
| <ong>ngng>gng>ngng>Pagers</strongc
logy's limitations are usually what make it interesting. Pagers, for example, are a simple and limited mechanism for communicating. But users have evolved a baroque, almost cabalistic kind of numeric poetry for exchanging messages. Unfortunately, technology also has a way of marching over limitations with each new release. As two-way pagers become more popular, wireless pidgin may become extinct. We still have time: alphanumerical beepers remain far too large and geeky for teens to wear. But someday soon, only Luddites will send "143" to say "I love you."</p> <p
<stroup</| </s 2</| upp Management</strong> <p
omation has made incredible strides over the past five years. Software for enterprise resource planning and sales-force automation has become an industry worth billions. The newest segment of the market is supply-chain management – complex software that helps a firm track its suppliers and distributors in order to manage production and inventory. But this subcategory cuts closest to the paradox of business automation: efficiency and profit are often in conflict. Higher margins derived from scarcity are what too-literal use of automation eliminates.</p> <p> |
rong>ustrotrronrtrotrtring> <p>Ver
n-off based on research conducted at Lucent's Bell Laboratories, is proof that labs still foster a belief in technological determinism: because something is possible, researchers say, it must be useful. In Veridicom's case, that something is a tiny chip capable of identifying fingerprints. Of course, we've been down this road before – and seen it blocked by the public's fear of Big Brother. And while Veridicom argues that Net security is driving a need for this technology, the company has it wrong: there's no way to put a sensor in front of every portal to cyberspace.</p> <p> <a hr
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