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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DaveMG who wrote (20357)	12/23/1998 1:01:00 PM
From: Jeff Vayda	Respond to of 152472

DaveMG: ...It is better than Q's reaction so far. Jeff Vayda

To: DaveMG who wrote (20357)	12/23/1998 1:01:00 PM
From: straight life	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Can I have 6% please?

To: DaveMG who wrote (20357)	12/23/1998 1:46:00 PM
From: DaveMG	Respond to of 152472

Surfing Those Web Waves With Style -- Conversa Catches The Cool One Oliver Rist While we're still laboring under the burden of the name, we felt that the Coolest of the Cool award was a necessary backup to Best of the Best because that award recognizes only finished and high-scoring products. We also wanted to award companies and innovators that introduced new technologies in 1998 that stood out for pushing the technical envelope-products that might not be the best this year, but were certainly promising contenders for the future. You can check out our short list at the Review Bunker Web site (www.reviewbunker.com), but we'll run through them here as well. You'll notice right away that there's more software on this list, probably because software has a much more fluid development cycle than hardware does. In that vein, while we didn't wind up thinking they were the coolest, both Qualcomm Inc.'s Eudora 4.1 and Metrowerks Inc.'s CodeWarrior products wowed us enough to nominate them. Qualcomm seems able to top itself endlessly, as the previous version of Eudora released earlier this year was a landmark event as well. Eudora 4.1 pulled further ahead, achieving a level of user-friendliness we've almost never seen and a tool chest of mail management tools that is unequaled. Metrowerks' CodeWarrior was nominated less for features excellence but more for reliability. Java development tools were a special focus this year. The one commonality was a tendency to crash at just the wrong moment. CodeWarrior stayed competitive with everyone else in the field but seemed amazingly solid and uncrashable. Definitely cool for the harried Java programmer. More authoring coolness came from Macromedia Inc. and its Dreamweaver product. Dreamweaver once again redefined HTML ease of use, taking the WYSIWYG development concept to new levels, not just in terms of ease of use but also in the way it handled even the most advanced HTML technologies. Its ability to generate readable script for hand coding also was cool and was immediately emulated by many competitors in the field. But that's not to say that hardware wasn't cool this year. Cobalt's Qube, for example, has kept us entranced ever since our review. The Qube is just that: a Cobalt blue cube designated as a one-box combination of Internet access gateway and thin server. The Qube can handle the Web demands of any small company, including both Internet and intranet duties, as well as e-mail, discussion groups, shared file access and even its own form of groupware and workflow. 3Com's Palm III handheld personal organizer was another nominee, and well deserved, since its coolness has achieved cult status among techies the world over. More than one InternetWeek staff member has succumbed to this product's combination of ease of use, organizational utility and just plain cool geekiness. With its support for "beaming" data between units and the simplicity of its integration with desktop PCs, the Palm III would have been cool enough. But with the slew of add-on organizational, entertainment and connectivity products that 3Com has spawned, the Palm III threatens to become a mini-industry all its own. On a more heavy-duty scale, we thought that Compaq's ProLiant 6000 server was another very cool product and one that almost made it into the Best of the Best short list. This box combines sheer processing muscle with just about complete component modularity, meaning you can design a system redundant enough to withstand World War III. This is all packed in a case that seems to have perfected ease of access, and it comes with management tools that tell you just about everything you want to know. Optivision Inc.'s LiveSystem was another cool hardware contender, combining NT-based server and high-end video graphics hardware with sophisticated and flexible video management software. The result may not be cheap but it can literally manage just about any video-serving need in the world. Expect to see the LiveSystem used more often in our system tests to provide advanced video traffic. Now we're down to a few finalists. IBM's DB2 Universal Database version 5.0 was a top consideration. Databases may make many of us yawn, but DB2 stood out early this year in terms of power, support for advanced standards and Java integration, and sheer scope. Combined with the rest of IBM's amazingly robust database products, DB2 can scale from the laptop to the enterprise in any way your heart desires. Even more cool, IBM just released a port of DB2 to Linux. Which brings us to another finalist: Linux. What dropped it into second place with the rest of the pack was that we wanted Coolest of the Cool to be about technical excellence, and what we thought cool about Linux was mainly its sudden and amazing political and market presence. Any product that's free, open and can still make Microsoft sweat is definitely cool in our eyes. On a technical level, though, it still has a way to go in terms of ease of use and cross-platform support. Which finally brings us to our winner: Conversational Computing Corp.'s Conversa Web. Conversa Web leads a product line that lets users not only surf the Web and navigate applications solely via voice, but its Lingo member lets both programmers and nonprogrammers develop conversation scripts for their PC. Lingo allows users to converse quickly and naturally with the PC, letting it perform any action you can presently manage with keyboard and mouse. Building a script is surprisingly easy and the end result just has to be seen to be believed. You owe it to yourself to try Lingo when the beta becomes final, and it is certainly 1998's Coolest of the Cool. Oliver Rist is contributing technical editor at InternetWeek and technical director at Grand Central Networks Labs. He can be reached at orist@grand-central.net. Copyright ® 1998 CMP Media Inc. techweb.com