Cool tools - trends in computing technology - Brief Article

Let these experts guide you toward the future, where you'll talk to your PC, see in 3-D and maybe even wear your computer.

From wearable PCs to web-enabled alarm clocks, from three-dimensional virtual desktops to ever-faster Internet access, the next millennium's new technologies are already at hand. The question is: Will these and other technological trends truly make your work more efficient or just add to the amount of stuff you have to lug around?

"We'll see a lot of cool gadgets in the future, but what does a person need to be more productive?" asks Phil Hester, chief technology officer for IBM's Personal Systems Group in Austin, Texas.

Hester and others who track technology say the business computing challenge of the future will be separating toys from tools. Asked to sift through the cool technologies and hot trends, these experts identified three trends - spontaneous computing, central hosting and ever-greater customer service - as ones to watch as the millennium turns.

They also point to several technologies, from speech recognition to Internet-linked appliances, which are looking less like futuristic dreams and more like workplace realities for the 21st century.

Kiss Your Desk Goodbye

Soon, employees will no longer have to sit at their desks to do useful work; in some cases they won't have to use a keyboard. They'll enjoy what the Gartner Group, a technology research firm based in Stamford, Conn., calls "spontaneous computing": Wherever they are, they will be able to do whatever they want.

New kinds of devices will emerge, new kinds of applications will be possible and the line that separates work from home will get fuzzier than it is today.

Low-cost, universally accessible wireless capability will drive spontaneous computing, according to Gartner Group analyst Jackie Fenn. She predicts that over the next eight years or so, "any time, any place" access to information and messaging will be provided through highly portable or wearable systems and will be supported by access to information via voice recognition.

"Instead of being the center of attention, information processing will be a secondary activity that can be done while the user is performing some other task," Fenn says. That means spontaneous computing is likely to have a profound impact on work styles.

"The original purpose of a desk was to provide something to lean on while reading and writing, but people will be able to capture content without needing something to lean on," Fenn says. Other functions of an office, such as providing a place for concentrated thought and for interaction with others, can be met by alternative set-ups, she says.

Another implication of spontaneous computing is that people may spend more time in meetings, but meetings will be where work gets done, not where people go to get away from their work. "Secondary tasks of accessing and creating information can be done as part of the meeting workflow rather than as separate, dedicated activities," Fenn says.

Plugging into Customer Needs

Technology also is bound to make new kinds of working relationships possible. "The big change that's under way is that organizations are shifting their focus from internal to external," notes Steve Cole, an analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. "Organizations are creating and maintaining [better] relationships with customers and forming trading networks with their suppliers.

"Problems that remain to be solved inside the walls of organizations have a lower priority than getting in touch with customers and discovering ways of delivering more value," Cole says.

One key to creating better customer relationships is to understand each buyer's decision-making criteria. "In our organization, for example, we used to have one person who bought office supplies. Now, all 400 of us are responsible for buying our own," Cole explains. "We all have access to the web site of the office supplies company we use. That company has an opportunity to get to know our individual preferences, to meet our individual needs."

On a broader scale, technology is making it possible for organizations to get their arms around all communication with a customer, whether by phone, fax, e-mail, regular mail, web site visit or face-to-face meeting.

"It's still all separate now," says Cole. "Companies have to build bridges. No one's doing it all now, but expectations are beginning to rise, and those that aren't part of this trend toward collecting and digesting information and communicating back to customers and suppliers will eventually start to fall by the wayside."

No More Hard Drives?

Anyone interested in the future of workplace computing needs to understand the significance of a debate now brewing in the computer industry. There's significant controversy over whether desktop computers should continue to be general purpose, standalone devices or become professionally managed network resources.

The consensus among technology trackers is that, eventually, applications will be hosted at a central location, whether at a software vendor's web site or at a corporate information technology department.

Advocates for central hosting are fond of illustrating their point by drawing an analogy between desktop computers and telephones. You never have to reboot your telephone or install any software on it. You pick it up and immediately are productive. Some experts believe that personal computing should be a similarly managed resource, with the productivity but not the box right on your desk.

In essence, hard drives would vanish from desks and be replaced by central resources. Your personal calendar, address book and files, as well as any software you need or want, would be located at a service provider's site. If your PC crashes, or you are traveling, you need only find another PC to get to all your information and software.

Today, you still have to dial a number to make the telephone work for its intended purpose, but that's changing. The telephone is morphing from a single-purpose communication tool ("Hello?") to a data-entry device ("Press one for ...") to an Internet access device. The need to dial a number could be optional, thanks to speech recognition. The same kinds of changes are in store for the PC as it morphs into an anytime, any-place resource - not just a tool bound to a desktop or laptop.

Tidy Your Virtual Desktop

The most significant change to computer desktop functionality is likely to be greater use of three-dimensional (3-D) information display, according to Len Schulwitz, strategic marketing manager for the Information Management Initiative at Intel Architecture Labs in Hillsboro, Ore.

"Other than for computer-aided design, businesses have yet to take strong advantage of 3-D, but in the future it will be commonplace," Schulwitz says. Three-dimensional display makes information easier to find, share and understand.

"We think spatially," Schulwitz notes. "Users will be able to link various kinds of documents together, create a context for them and make them all available at once in a representation that looks a lot more like a real desktop," he says. Like a virtual stack on your virtual desk.

"It will be easier to organize documents so as to give others a better understanding of the documents' content," he says, explaining that with 3-D, it's easier to make more important information stand out.

Although not suitable for every application, speech recognition also will become more common. It's now being used in health care environments and other industries where hands-free computing provides advantages.

Speech recognition is good for more than dictation, Fenn says. Look for a new generation of applications that are far friendlier than today's interactive voice response.

"When you want to book a flight, for example, the system can ask you where you want to go," she says. Rather than using the telephone keypad to spell out a destination, you might say a city's name and the days and times you want to fly. The system's voice-recognition capability hears and translates your requests without your having to tap out options on keys.

"We're seeing the first of these applications now, and they're being designed by experts who really understand human factors," Fenn notes. "The danger arises when the technology reaches the point of mass adoption, and it's being used by people who don't understand or appreciate human factors."

When systems do not take users into account, the systems can end up frustrating users, as some complicated voice-mail systems already do. Designers of the more complex voice-recognition technology have to be sure they do not make the same mistakes.

Hester predicts widespread use of adaptive display capabilities. Adaptive display gives a system the ability to detect what screen content is commanding a user's attention at a given moment and then to collect and display additional information in the same genre.

"Suppose someone in purchasing is doing some price-checking on a supplier's network," Hester explains. "The adaptive display detects the direction of the employee's eyes and senses that she's interested only in a particular kind of item. So, rather than displaying unrelated data on other portions of the screen, the display and search engine will use the rest of the screen to present information that's related to her search."

Hester also believes Internet appliances will have an enormous impact during the next decade. He predicts a proliferation of such special-purpose, wired or wireless, web-enabled devices. Internet appliances will be simpler, lower in cost and more limited in performance than today's PCs.

An example of what Hester means by an Internet appliance is a web-enabled alarm clock. Such a clock might sound silly - unless you're a tired traveler. The clock could enable you to catch an extra hour or two of sleep if it can link automatically to your airline's web site and determine whether or not your flight is departing on time, then reset itself accordingly. That kind of convenience is what the future holds.

"Technology is increasingly going to be working behind the scenes to make our lives more productive," Hester says.

Look, No Hands

IBM also has developed a wearable PC that has the processing power of a laptop computer. The processor, which is about the size of a deck of cards, clips onto the user's belt. The PC's display is held in place, a couple of inches from the user's eye, with a headband.

The device uses a reflective surface to make the display image look like that of a desktop computer. Data can be entered using a microphone or a pointing device, akin to the remote-control pointers used in slide presentations, wired to the processor. A conventional keyboard is optional.

Perhaps it's not for everyone, but it could be a blessing for those who need it, such as law enforcement officers, who usually are safer when they have both hands free.

IBM has adapted its reflective display idea for use on what it calls a cyberphone, a cellular telephone with high-resolution web access.

"There are applications in warehouse inventory management, law enforcement and elsewhere that can benefit from hands-free computing," says Hester. "And, it's likely that devices like the wearable PC and the cyberphone will be available in different configurations. There'll be a significant amount of experimentation as the market for Internet appliances evolves, just as it took several tries before personal digital assistants achieved the right combination of size, cost and ease of use."

Finding Needles In Cyberstacks

With the cyberphone, as with the web-enabled alarm clock and other technologies, the Internet is the common theme. In the not too distant future it will be easier and faster to find the information we really want on the Internet without having to wade through thousands of extraneous documents.

Relevant information will be more accessible despite the fact that the "infoglut" - the huge amount of stuff on the Internet - is growing at an alarming rate, doubling every 72 days, Schulwitz estimates.

Internet access will get faster, but it's not a simple problem to solve. Overall speed is a function of the speed of the individual's Internet connection, the performance of the Internet backbone through which all web traffic flows and the performance of the web servers that deliver each page a user requests, explains Hester.

"Right now, the connection to the phone line is the bottleneck," Hester says.

Today's telephone modems operate in a range from approximately 28,800 to 48,000 bits per second. In contrast, a digital subscriber line (DSL) runs from 256,000 to 1.5 million bits per second, and a cable modem operates at 5 million bits per second. The majority of U.S. Internet subscribers (92 percent) go online via dial-up lines. Approximately 5 percent access the Internet via cable. Less than 1 percent use DSL.

"If everyone got DSL or cable modems overnight, it could cause a breakdown elsewhere in the Internet chain," Hester says. "Improvements in each area are moving ahead at pretty much the same pace. Right now, Internet speed depends largely on the user's location and the site she's accessing."

As the Internet grows, finding useful information becomes more difficult. Agents and Internet service providers (ISPs) can help. Agents are tiny software modules able to search the web on your behalf. They exist today but haven't yet been perfected, according to Hester.

"Agents will not only be able to help us find information on the Internet but also help us sort through information on our hard drive or corporate server or our e-mail in-box," Schulwitz says.

"Tools will be 'trainable.' We'll start them off by dragging and dropping items into categories, and from there they'll learn how to do that for us."

Today, we either have Internet access or we don't. According to analyst Rob Enderle of Giga Information Group in Norwell, Mass., there may be an advantage to paying more for less access.

"ISPs may compete, in part, by providing more focused services," Enderle says. "A chef, for example, might want to subscribe to a custom service that just provides information related to food preparation. That won't be true for everyone, but if we want to, we'll be able to purchase information services that conceal the complexity of the Internet and make [users] more productive."

Those who already travel with a laptop, a pager and a cell phone might say that we're already too connected. Does work time ever end? Hester believes the answer to that question is up to the individual.

"A century ago, it was common for shopkeepers to live above their stores," Hester says. "If a customer knocked on the door after hours, the shopkeeper had to decide whether to open the door or ignore the knock. The responsibility rests with those who use technology to use it responsibly. Just because you can take a phone call on the golf course, for example, or check e-mail when you're at home with the kids, doesn't mean you have to, or even that you should."

John Day is a freelance writer and consultant based in Stone Mountain, Ga. He contributes regularly to several technology trade publications and writes a weekly column on Internet advertising.

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