Internet everywhere, whether you like it or not
Tuesday October 19, 12:39 pm Eastern Time
Internet everywhere, whether you like it or
not
By Duncan Martell
PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 19 (Reuters) - Scott Arenson, a
Seattle-based marketing consultant has watched the World Wide Web mushroom from a clunky, text-based interface in late 1993 to an unstoppable global force that promises to worm its way into every nook and cranny of our lives.
Then a graduate student at the University of Southern California, the 31-year-old Los Angeles native said his friends at the time told him he was a bit off his rocker.
The Internet, they said, was really cool, but it was pie-in-the-sky to believe that within a mere six years, the most powerful business leaders and heads of state would call it the biggest thing since the Industrial Revolution.
Arenson's friends have since had to eat their words.
Now, viewers can't watch an evening of television without being deluged with advertisements that tout all manner of ``dot-com' companies. The same goes for radio, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, home to Silicon Valley.
Billboards along U.S. 101, the major artery of Silicon Valley, are peppered north to south with copy blaring everything dot-com.
``It's getting to the point where I don't want to fire up my laptop every time I want to get on the Internet,' said Arenson, a self-described technology freak.
Now he doesn't have to. He's just upgraded to a cell phone that allows him to surf the Web.
The Net, at long last and to the elation of high-tech industries that span telecommunications from TV to software, is no longer held captive by the personal computer.
In the United States, consumers can dial up the Web and zap e-mails across the globe through their television sets. 3Com Corp.'s best-selling Palm handheld organizer lets users send e-mail and surf selected Web sites with its Palm VII, which boasts a wireless connection to the Internet.
And Sprint, which recently agreed to be acquired by MCI Worldcom Inc., just announced its Sprint PCS wireless service lets the ``must have it five minutes ago' crowd get stock quotes, weather and news headlines through their wireless phones.
``Like it or not, the Internet is definitely a phenomenon that's changing people's lives,' said Rich Repetto, a Lehman Brothers Inc. analyst who covers online brokerages.
Late in 1993, students at universities and hard-core geeks were just getting started with a text-based interface called Lynx, which used HTTP, or hypertext transfer protocol, to help users ``jump' from one page and site to another.
That was a far cry from today, where a surfer with a fast enough computer and super-fast Internet connection can watch video, listen to audio, download music in a flash and organize it into personal albums that they can transfer to portable digital music players.
Now, the Net is moving beyond the office and home PC. Analysts said that, with many a new technology, entrepreneurs as well as large companies are throwing all sorts of ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Seagram Co.'s Universal Studios appears to have decided their new theme park in Orlando, Fla., doesn't seem to have enough stimulation on its own.
So the company is teaming up with No. 1 online company America Online Inc. to pepper the park with AOL kiosks, letting park-goers check and send e-mail, among other features.
``Much of technology can indeed be a fad,' Repetto said. ``People will take it to its maximum potential but not all these technologies are going to become as popular as people think.'
In the latest example of Internet everywhere, Internet media giant Yahoo! Inc. recently outfitted 10 San Francisco taxicabs with a garish purple-and-yellow paint job plastered with Yahoo's logo and a laptop attached to a wireless modem. Mizran Rahman, who drove the first Yahoo cab, said he now gets calls asking specifically for his Internet-enabled taxi.
``As soon as they get in my cab, they ask where the computer is,' Rahman said.
Whether it's a Web-enabled taxi, cell phone, refrigerator or toaster, the bottom line is all about bits -- pure information. And how those electrons are zapped or beamed around is becoming less and less important. Intel Corp., for one is getting the religion, agreeing last week to buy wireless chipmaker DSP Communications Inc. And PC software giant Microsoft has been touting its Windows CE operating
systems for handheld devices and set top boxes for two years now.
``When it comes down to it, you're really just talking about accessing information,' said Arenson.
``What's happening to cell phones now reminds me of the beginning of the Internet browser back in '94.'
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