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Microcap & Penny Stocks : SSOL / SSOLW -- SmartServ Online Services -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: blebovits who wrote (50)	11/14/1999 11:12:00 PM
From: Savant	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 266

Economist, Nov. 13-19............ Perhaps the Internet?s most dramatic shift will be to extend computing beyond the PC. The first to log on will be smart phones and wireless Palm Pilots, but other devices will follow. Engineers may take a few years to come up with transmitters, receivers and sensors cheap and tiny enough to put into the appliances of the networked home. But almost everything that can usefully transmit data will eventually be able to do so, including refrigerators that automatically reorder what has been taken out of them and car keys that tell the Internet (and you) where you left them. Some devices may use an operating system from Microsoft, but the majority will not. Most of their intelligence will lie on the network, which means that operating systems will matter less than standards. These standards are mostly already defined. They tend to be open, precisely because millions of devices from thousands of firms will be connected to the Internet. One of the most important, called Bluetooth, is the work of more than 500 firms, led by Ericsson, Nokia, Toshiba, Intel and IBM. Bluetooth defines how devices should transmit data to each other.The idea is to replace the cables that tie devices to one another with a single short-range radio link. Within two years, about 80% of mobile phones will carry a $5 Bluetooth chip that can connect them to similarly equipped notebook computers, printers and, potentially, any other digital device within about ten metres. As well as defining how these devices find and talk to each other, Bluetooth also ties into existing data networks, including the Internet. In future, you might tap out an e-mail on your Palm Pilot or Psion, tell it to make the Internet connection through your mobile phone, print a copy on the printer upstairs and store another on your PC. Standards are also open because customers and suppliers have learnt to be wary of being locked in to someone else?s technology. Several firms have defined their own standards to adapt the Internet for the small, monochromatic screens of handheld computers and smart phones. Such gadgets are not suited to the lively, colour graphics on most web pages?let alone bandwidth-devouring multimedia and animation. Worse, they have neither keyboard nor mouse, and lack the computing power and memory they need to run modern browsers. But proprietary efforts have not got far. Wireless Internet access will take off only if there is a single, open standard for delivering suitable content to wireless devices. That is the job of something called WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). This allows mobile devices to gain access to the Internet using a ?microbrowser?, which displays web pages specially formatted for tiny screens. Nokia?s first WAP telephone will be available soon; Ericsson has just launched a WAP-based wireless notebook computer. Handelsbanken, a Swedish bank, has extended its Internet banking service to mobile devices. Using WAP, the bank?s customers will soon be able to look up stockmarket prices, buy and sell shares, consult their accounts, transfer money and pay bills?any time, anywhere. Within a few months, Motorola will be selling WAP telephones in America, where firms such as AirTouch and Sprint PCS have announced new services. As wireless bandwidth increases, the only limit on what they can do will be the size of the screens. Like Bluetooth, WAP is supported by the largest firms in the business. It will work with any of the mobile networks across the world, and eventually with proprietary operating systems likely to be in smart-phone handsets, such as the Symbian joint venture?s Epoc (from Psion) or Microsoft?s own Windows CE. In effect, WAP lays down the rules for the wireless incarnation of the web. Like the web, it is not owned by anyone, yet it is the standard everyone will follow.