Network Server
"Voice over IP is a capability, not a service that people want," says Carly Fiorina, who just topped Oprah on Fortune's list of the most powerful women in business. Even so, the group president of Lucent Technologies' Global Service Provider business division isn't the type to toot her own horn. "Beating Oprah's just a reflection of the health of this industry," she demurs. Still, Fiorina controls a $19 billion division that accounts for 70 percent of the network giant's revenue. And that only stands to increase with the integration of data and voice, wireless and wireline, and packet and circuit networks. "The next five years," she surmises, "will make the last 20 seem like a lazy river on a hot summer day."
The System on Trial
"Right now I'm spread a little thin," says Joseph Grundfest, understating his condition slightly. After serving as a commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission for four years, Grundfest became a professor of law and business at Stanford and has recently launched Financial Engines, a software company that puts market-analysis tools in the hands of investors. He's also busy redesigning Stanford's Securities Litigation Clearinghouse, the world's first attempt to post on the Web all documents relating to class-action investors' suits. Perhaps most significant, Grundfest is set to release a beta version of Project Local Motion, a threaded discussion platform judges can use to replace oral arguments in the courtroom. "In 15 years," he forecasts, "you'll have electronic argument, posting, and filing."
Amiable Azoicist
Hans Moravec is the John the Baptist of the coming robot kingdom. He spends his days at Carnegie Mellon's Mobile Robot Laboratory, teaching machines how to generate navigable 3-D snapshots of the world using wide-angle stereoscopic images. By night, he writes about the impending robot transcendence. In his new book Robot (see review page 226), Moravec predicts mechanical minds are about to replay the evolution of biological minds. Soon mech warriors will take over the entire economy, launch themselves into space, and leave humans to live a happy, if dull, existence on the nature preserve known as Earth. "I'd like to have a machine I can have a high-level conversation with," Moravec says. "As a storage medium DNA has run its course. The iMac doesn't have floppy disks; our descendants won't have DNA."
Wonder Funder
"Cambridge had some brilliant scientific thinkers," says venture capitalist Hermann Hauser, who in 1978 cofounded Acorn Computers in the English city. Acorn, maker of the world's first commercial microcomputer, was also parent to Advanced Risc Machines, which produced the first low-cost RISC processor. "But no one taught us how to build businesses," he says. Lesson learned: Through his venture capital firm Amadeus, Hauser has since helped build more than 25 thriving companies, sinking billions into the area's burgeoning tech community. This winter he will launch the Cambridge School of Entrepreneurship, an independent academy created to teach geeks how to meet the bottom line. "Silicon Valley is a bit overheated," he says. "There's so much money there, everyone is getting funded - even those that shouldn't." By contrast, he says, Cambridge has "nothing but upside."
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