Start Reading To Keep Your Edge on Tech
By Fred Barbash
Sunday, May 14, 2000; Page H01
I can't predict the direction of this market. But let's face it, friends, the easy part is over. It's getting ugly out there.
Gone are the joys of yesteryear (or was it just last year?), when every tech stock we touched prospered.
Now, I fear, we have to know something. In the coming decade, companies will fail because they fail to master new technologies. I suspect the same is true for investors.
In that spirit, allow me to propose a better use of our time than sitting around waiting for our portfolios to "do something"; or finger-pointing at Alan Greenspan; or looking at the Bollinger Band; or, for that matter, at Maria Bartiromo's band on CNBC--though I've got to admit, that's some rock she's wearing.
Do you want an edge? I suggest you choose a field of technology and learn it. That doesn't mean you have to go to engineering school. Just start reading so you can be ahead of the pack when evaluating tech companies.
Read what? you ask.
For starters, I recommend that you check out Technology Review, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's "magazine of innovation," which is the clearest and most ahead-of-the-curve tech publication I've seen. It costs $20 a year for six issues. You can view some articles on its Web site (www.techreview.com).
As for subject matter, here are a few suggestions, my favorites, not meant to be exclusive or predictive, merely full of possibility. Any reference to companies, public or private, is for informational purposes only. I draw your attention to some reading matter, but nowhere near enough. Search the subject at Google.com and at CNet.com for many more possibilities.
* Bluetooth technology. Bluetooth--named after Harald Blatand, a k a Bluetooth, a 10th-century king of Denmark--is the standard, or protocol, adopted by the electronics industry to be built into devices so they'll all be able to communicate with one another over short distances.
Bluetooth should rid us of the cable spaghetti behind our PCs. It may also mean I'll no longer have three separate remote-control devices in my living room--one for the stereo, one for the VCR and one for the TV--not to mention the incompatible beamers for my Palm and my laptop.
Bluetooth, if it works, will substitute small radio devices that detect other Bluetooth devices to do what has to be done. Cameras equipped with Bluetooth chips will be able to send pictures to your PC or your printer. Bluetooth-equipped laptops will send your e-mail in the airport through a Bluetooth-equipped phone.
While that's happening, your Bluetooth Palm can be checking you in electronically at the airline counter so you don't have to wait in line.
Bluetooth is not a company. Don't try to buy it. About 1,600 companies belong to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. The prime movers have been Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia, Toshiba, 3Com, Lucent Technologies, Microsoft and Motorola.
For more information, see www.bluetooth.com. A book, "Bluetooth: Connect Without Cable" by Jennifer Bray and Charles Sturman, is scheduled for publication in August by Prentice Hall.
* Telematics. This is the technology that's creating the connected car, filling it with global positioning devices, wireless phones, and various security and "Help me, I'm lost!" gadgets.
This stuff is already happening. But if you've looked at it, you see how much more work remains, first to make it practical and second to make it cheap.
At the moment, as far as I can tell, the call-for-help device on the ceiling of the car is what you use after you've had an accident because you were talking on your cell phone while trying to read directions while booking a hotel over the Internet.
Progress in voice-recognition software is crucial.
At the same time, I suspect that at some point in the not-too-distant future, many of these items will be standard, along with radar or infrared guidance systems to prevent the accidents in the first place.
Among the better telematics explanations I've seen is at www.atxtechnologies.com/telematics/future.asp. The automakers' Web sites also feature information on telematics.
* Fiber optics, also called photonics. You know about this too--the transmission of data via light across glass fiber, faster than a speeding DSL line, by far, but not as fast as it will be someday.
That's in part because fiber optic networks employ a variety of electrical and mechanical devices to direct and amplify the signal. This requires conversion and reconversion of the light, slowing it down.
The challenge--for labs both commercial and academic--is to create the "all-optical" network. While some argue that this is unnecessary, fiber optics still has a ways to travel and it might be worth traveling with it.
There is also a hot optical-networking competition among big companies such as Nortel, Cisco Systems and Lucent that want to distribute optical components throughout the World Wide Web infrastructure and to squeeze ever more transmission capacity onto a single strand of optical fiber.
The May issue of Upside magazine contains an excellent article on this subject. Also, check out a publication called Lightwave (lw.pennwellnet.com) and Telecommunications Online (www.telecoms-mag.com). A critique of the need for all-optical networks is made by Doug Green in that publication (www.telecoms-mag.com/issues/200002/tcs/all-optical. html).
* Internet data storage. Where do all those Web pages go? Where do they come from? How will the World Wide Web manage if it runs out of space?
The answers all depend on the progress of companies that have developed technologies to store the bits that make up the Internet. The commercial need is enormous, as demonstrated by the stock prices of the companies that are doing well in this field already, such as EMC and Network Appliance (NTAP).
But the competition among different approaches to storage is as yet unwon. The contenders--which are too complicated to explain here but will form the subject of a future column--include "network attached storage" and "storage area networks."
George Gilder's book on this subject, "Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World," will be published in June by Free Press. "The Holy Grail of Data Storage Management" by Jon William Toigo and Margaret Romao Toigo was published by Prentice Hall last August.
* Molecular nanotechnology. Think small. Really small.
And think long-term, seriously long-term.
You've probably read stories recently about how, in the next 10 to 20 years, things that we now make laboriously from the top down, starting with a clump of, say, silicon, will be made from the bottom up, starting with atoms and molecules.
"Things" means all sorts of things--frictionless ball bearings, powerful semiconductors, computers, microscopic motors, fuel that could power rockets, not to mention lifesaving medical devices.
The uses of nanotechnology are literally limitless. So will be the hype.
For further reading, see "Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation," by K. Eric Drexler, published by John Wiley & Sons, 1992. Also see www.nanozine.com and, if you can get them, back issues of Technology Review--perhaps the clearest journal of new technology for lay and professional readers alike.
So far, while research activity is well underway at Bell Labs, IBM, Duke University, Caltech, the University of Wisconsin and elsewhere, no product is close to coming to market.
Everyone who knows about it wants to invest in it, but they're having trouble finding the right company. Indeed, one, Zyvex, has a Web site that explicitly discourages immediate investment, proclaiming that it has quite enough money and that the yield is too far into the future.
So watch that space.
Some of these fields are well stocked with stocks--about which I will write in future columns. Others are largely the province of labs and small private companies. Never buy any stock just because it's the only one in the field. Wait for the best.
In any of these areas, someone may tell you that you're either too late or too early.
Don't be deterred. Let that be their problem, not yours.
Fred Barbash can be contacted at barbashf@washpost.com. Of the companies mentioned, he owns shares of Cisco and Lucent Technologies.
washingtonpost.com
************
AMZN taking pre-orders for Gilder's book.
Happy M-day CB and other SI mothers.
Jack |
