It works. The five-ton bronze, steel and cast iron contraption is operated by a crank handle and can calculate the results of elaborate trigonometric and logarithmic functions with 31 digits of precision. What's more, it has a printer which stamps the results of its calculations on paper and on a plaster tray, which could be used to create lead type for printing books of mathematical tables.

The high-powered camera can detect hidden objects from up to 80 feet away and is effective even when people are moving. It does not reveal physical body details and the screening is harmless, the company says.

The technology, which has military and civilian applications and could be used in crowded airports, shopping malls or sporting events, will be unveiled at a scientific development exhibition sponsored by Britain's Home Office on March 12-13.

"Acts of terrorism have shaken the world in recent years and security precautions have been tightened globally," said Clive Beattie, the chief executive of ThruVision.

"The ability to see both metallic and non-metallic items on people out to 25 meters is certainly a key capability that will enhance any comprehensive security system."

Researchers looked at 500 Israelis who had developed the condition and compared their mobile phone usage with 1,300 healthy controls.

Those who had used the phone against one side of the head for several hours a day were 50% more likely to have developed a salivary gland tumour.

The research appeared in The American Journal of Epidemiology.

Numerous studies have focused on the risk of tumours among those who use mobile phones, and overwhelmingly found no increased cancer risk.

But researchers at Tel Aviv University say these have tended to focus on brain tumours, and often did not include long-term users.

Toshiba showed off a PC that you operate with hand gestures. Hitachi Metals had a product in their booth called "Magic Waters." You wave a wand and point it at a fountain and the waters jump, sort of like the fountain at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas.

Sharp has a screen that will let phone manufacturers put on an iPhone-like interface. Citizen Watch showed off a glove that lets you control certain things. And Pioneer has a car navigation prototype that relies on finger gestures. Flick a 3D hologram-like image of a gas station pump and the car navigation system points out all of the gas stations in the vicinity.

Zink is a spin-off from Polaroid that has developed an inkless printing technology. The ink is in the paper in the form of special dye crystals that turn different colors when heated. By getting rid of the ink cartridges and associated printer heads, this will allow for the creation of compact, mobile printers that can be embedded into digital cameras, laptops, and even cell phones.

The key to the billboard's capabilities is a layer of digital paper that is embedded with electronics.

This is printed with conductive inks, which, when applied with pressure, relay information to a micro-computer that contains recorded audio files. Sound then streams out from printed speakers, which are formed from more layers of conductive inks that sit over an empty cavity to form a diaphragm.

This functional layer is sandwiched between a thick sheet of extra-strong cardboard and another sheet of paper that is printed with the billboard's design.

The billboard contains a paper layer with embedded electronics

"This pilot project could be used for stands in shops and in other marketing displays," said Dr Gulliksson.

At present, the displays are expensive to produce, but the researchers are aiming to find ways of lowering the costs to make the boards easier to change and replace.

A Surface computer is able to recognize physical objects from a paintbrush to a cell phone and allows hands-on, direct control of content such as photos, music and maps. Surface turns an ordinary tabletop into a dynamic surface that provides interaction with all forms of digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects.

The new product is aimed directly at hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues and should be commercially available towards the end of the year.

It's an interesting product in that it's completely out of left field. Microsoft gives examples of ordering a beverage during a meal with just the tap of a finger and quickly browsing through music and dragging favorite songs onto a personal playlist by moving a finger across the screen. Build this into a bar and you'd get one-touch beer service although I'm not sure if they've found a way to work out when your beer glass is empty so replenishment becomes automatic, maybe in a later version.

Comcast Corp. Chief Executive Brian Roberts dazzled a cable industry audience Tuesday, showing off for the first time in public new technology that enabled a data download speed of 150 megabits per second, or roughly 25 times faster than today's standard cable modems.

The cost of modems that would support the technology, called "channel bonding," is "not that dissimilar to modems today," he told The Associated Press after a demonstration at The Cable Show. It could be available "within less than a couple years," he said.

The new cable technology is crucial because the industry is competing with a speedy new offering called FiOS, a TV and Internet service that Verizon Relevant Products/Services Communications Inc. is selling over a new fiber-optic network. The top speed currently available through FiOS is 50 megabits per second, but the network is already capable of providing 100 Mbps and the fiber lines offer nearly unlimited potential.

The technology, called DOCSIS 3.0, was developed by the cable industry's research arm, Cable Television Laboratories. It bonds together four cable lines but is capable of allowing much more capacity. The laboratory said last month it expected manufacturers to begin submitting modems for certification under the standard by the end of the year.

Imagine being in two places at the same time. Impossible? Well, maybe, but with the advances currently being made in videoconferencing technology you might well believe you can be in two places at once.

It's called telepresence and it is so life-like it's been installed in restaurants in the US so that diners can eat together even if they are in different parts of the country.

"It means that if you're on the East Coast you can be eating dinner while someone on the West Coast is having lunch," explains Aaron McCormack, CEO of BT Conferencing. "It's just like having a meal together except you're thousands of miles apart. The only thing you can't do is pass the salt."

This might sound like something out of a 1950s sci-fi novel but it really is happening. Telepresence isn't just a camera, microphone and a TV screen. Those taking part see life-size images of people who can be on the other side of the world. The image and sound quality is so good, it's as if you're with them in the same room.

Media-Saturn group - Europe's biggest retailer of consumer electronics, with operations in 14 countries - has recently agreed to adopt BT's telepresence service called BT Unified Communications Video. It enables people from different countries to hold virtual meetings of unprecedented technological quality, with those taking part seeing life-size images of one another. The images are so realistic that people believe they really are sitting at the same table.

One person who's already used the service described it as being "virtually indistinguishable from a face-to-face meeting". It's clear that telepresence solutions are going to revolutionise the videoconferencing industry and have a real impact on the way people communicate in the future.

Nada Kakabadse, a Professor at the Northampton Business School, said: "Your judgement is impaired. Equally your decision making processes are impaired.

"It's like losing your spatial judgement, so instead of walking through the door you walk into it. You're more prone to have a car accident if you drive."

Prof Kakabadse added: "It's addiction to portable technology, which you take with you practically to bed, the cinema, to the theatre, to a dinner party. The symptoms are, like with any other addiction, that people spend more time using their technology than spending it in socialising or in family time."

The growing importance of the issue was highlighted at a gathering in Geneva, Switzerland, for the LIFT 07 technology conference.

One of the conclusions reached by experts was that "tech overload" is the price people have to pay for always-on communication, where the line between work and play has become blurred.

First, I took a seat in front of two scanners -- one for each side of my face.

The faceScan III projected a series of light and dark bands to establish the contours of my face. The scanner's optoScan software used that information to generate a slightly patchy 3-D image of my noble visage.

The resulting image file was then passed along to a row of digital artists who primped and tweaked it before sending it to the rapid prototyping machine that would ultimately generate my miniature bust.

(My data could have been further enhanced using a SensAble Technologies Phantom, a haptic sculpting tool, and its accompanying FreeForm software. Together, these allow you to "mold" 3-D images as if they were made of physical clay, painlessly filling out those thin lips and removing any unsightly boils. Alas, my image was left in its natural, sorry state.)

A prolific inventor with a seemingly never-ending thirst for knowledge, his pioneering developments spanned from the Golden Age of Television into the High-Definition Era, earning him more than 180 U.S. patents. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published his most recent patent application, for advances in touch-screen technology, on Feb. 1.

Dr. Adler's six-decade career with Zenith Electronics Corporation began in 1941 when he joined Zenith's research division after receiving his Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of Vienna in 1937. He was named associate director in 1952, vice president in 1959, and vice president and director of research in 1963. He retired as research vice president in 1979, and served Zenith as a technical consultant until 1999, when Zenith merged with LG Electronics.

"Bob Adler was an unparalleled technical contributor, leader, adviser and teacher," said Jerry K. Pearlman, retired Zenith chairman and CEO, who knew Dr. Adler for 35 years. "His gifts and passions were many, his mentoring matchless and his ego totally nonexistent."

In the consumer electronics field, Dr. Adler has been widely recognized as the co-inventor (with fellow Zenith engineer Eugene Polley) of the wireless TV remote. Dr. Adler's "Space Command" ultrasonic remote control for TV sets was introduced by Zenith in 1956. He received the 1958 Outstanding Technical Achievement Award of the Institute of Radio Engineers (now the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or IEEE) for his "original work on ultrasonic remote controls" for television.

Among Dr. Adler's earlier work was the gated-beam tube which, at the time of its introduction, represented an entirely new concept in the field of vacuum tubes. The use of this tube greatly simplified the sound system in television receivers, markedly improving reception by screening out certain types of sound interference while lowering the cost of the sound channel.

University of Central Florida Chemistry Professor Kevin D. Belfield and his team have developed a new technology which allows users to record and store massive amounts of data on a single disc using their Two-Photon 3-D Optical Data Storage system. Belfield's team figured out a way to use lasers to compact large amounts of information onto a DVD while maintaining excellent quality. The information is stored permanently without the possibility of damage. The process involves shooting two different wavelengths of light onto the recording surface. The use of two lasers creates a very specific image that is sharper than what current techniques can render. Depending on the color (wavelength) of the light, information is written onto a disk. The information is highly compacted, so the disk isn’t much thicker. It's like a typical DVD.

The era of desktop manufacturing is upon us, thanks to advances in 3-D printing technology. Just as laser printers in the 1980s moved from service bureaus into homes, sparking the desktop publishing revolution, 3-D printers — which render computer files in three-dimensional plaster — are poised to reshape how many products are designed and made.

"I definitely think we're really near that tipping point," says Dina Braun, VP at Alchemy Models, a company that makes architectural models. "Machine prices are going down and output quality is going up."

Alchemy Models specializes in architectural rapid prototyping, converting computer models of buildings into physical ones.

"For architects, their whole world is visualization," says Braun. "If they show a blueprint drawing, the client looks at them like a deer in headlights. When they can give the client something to hold in their hands, turn around, see how everything is placed, then the client finally gets it."

Instead of using acoustic vibrations, the team's system exploits the resonance of electromagnetic waves. Electromagnetic radiation includes radio waves, infrared and X-rays.

Typically, systems that use electromagnetic radiation, such as radio antennas, are not suitable for the efficient transfer of energy because they scatter energy in all directions, wasting large amounts of it into free space.

To overcome this problem, the team investigated a special class of "non-radiative" objects with so-called "long-lived resonances".

When energy is applied to these objects it remains bound to them, rather than escaping to space. "Tails" of energy, which can be many metres long, flicker over the surface.

"If you bring another resonant object with the same frequency close enough to these tails then it turns out that the energy can tunnel from one object to another," said Professor Soljacic.

There is, however, something going on that has the potential to change that, and quickly. Not coincidentally, a team of core developers from Netscape's early days is now developing the equivalent of a virtual world browser for MMOs. Called Multiverse, the company includes the same portentous entrepreneur noted above: Bill Turpin. His team includes Netscape veterans known throughout Silicon Valley, if not the world at large: Rafhael Cedeno and Robin McCollum, who built critical Netscape server technology still in use today, and co-creators of RSS; Jeff Weinstein, who coded the world-changing SSL; and Corey Bridges, Navigator product manager who then went on to launch companies like Netflix and Zone Labs. On the entertainment side, ex-physics major and film director/producer James Cameron, of Terminator and Titanic fame, has thrown his lot in with Multiverse, joining its board of advisors.

Their plan is to provide virtual world creators the client, server, and development tools to create an MMO world. The entire technology platform is free for non-commercial use, so academics are paying nothing to create economic, architectural, sociological and other simulations. For-profit enterprises would pay royalties, but only when their games or other applications collect money from consumers, not before.

This is significant because, until now, creating a complex virtual world required tens of millions of dollars in initial development costs alone. The Multiverse technology, currently in beta-testing, claims to lower the cost of virtual world production to a fraction of its current stratospheric level. For many purposes, such as personal online spaces, there would be no cost at all.

Imagine being able to check instantly whether or not statements made by politicians were correct. That is the sort of service Google Inc. boss Eric Schmidt believes the Internet will offer within five years.

Politicians have yet to appreciate the impact of the online world, which will also affect the outcome of elections, Schmidt said in an interview with the Financial Times published on Wednesday.

He predicted that "truth predictor" software would, within five years, "hold politicians to account." People would be able to use programs to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct.

"One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting 'is this true or false.' We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability," he told the newspaper.

According to research from Nielsen/NetRatings, people are buying cutting-edge technology but often don't understand the terms that describe what their device actually does.

So while 40% of online Britons receive news feeds, 67% did not know that the official term for this service was Really Simple Syndication.

Terms such as podcasting and wikis are still meaningless to many.

"In the relentless quest for the next big thing when it comes to new forms of digital consumption, there is a significant tendency for the industry to over-estimate consumer's knowledge and understanding of the seemingly limitless new terms and products out there," said Alex Burmaster, internet analyst with Nielsen/NetRatings.

The Pew report on the future internet surveyed 742 experts in the fields of computing, politics and business.

More than half of respondents had a positive vision of the net's future but 46% had serious reservations.

Almost 60% said that a counter culture of Luddites would emerge, some resorting to violence.

The Pew Internet and American Life report canvassed opinions from the experts on seven broad scenarios about the future internet, based on developments in the technology in recent years.

By 2020 an increasing number of people will be living and working within "virtual worlds" being more productive online than offline, the majority of the respondents said.

Ben Detenber, an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University, responded: "Virtual reality (VR) will only increase productivity for some people. For most, it will make no difference in productivity (i.e., how much output); VR will only change what type of work people do and how it is done."

A couple days ago we pointed to Mooglets widgets, the creation of Rome-based Mad4Milk.net. It was a neat product made on the cheap, so we joked, "somebody give these guys some millions!" Today we are shocked to learn that Mad4Milk has been acquired by Freewebs.

They have names such as Kiko, Tribe, Imeem, StumbleUpon, Meebo, Eyespot and Twitter. Sounds like the cast of Pee Wee's Playhouse: The Next Generation.

There is so much coming so fast from so many corners that nobody can possibly keep track, much less ever, ever try using it all.

Money is flying into ventures that most people east of Palo Alto, Calif., would find incomprehensible. Dash Navigation got $17 million from high-profile venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Dash bills itself as a "social network of traffic data" — allegedly getting cars to wirelessly talk to each other about where they are and reporting to the network if they're wheezing through bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Hard to say if it will work, but if you add "social network" to anything right now, you can get $17 million. Walk into a venture firm's office and say, "I've got a social network for hermits." Boom. Seventeen million dollars.

The device, called AMOEBA (Advanced Multiple Organized Experimental Basin), consists of 50 water wave generators encircling a cylindrical tank 1.6 meters in diameter and 30 cm deep (about the size of a backyard kiddie pool). The wave generators move up and down in controlled motions to simultaneously produce a number of cylindrical waves that act as pixels. The pixels, which measure 10 cm in diameter and 4 cm in height, are combined to form lines and shapes. AMOEBA is capable of spelling out the entire roman alphabet, as well as some simple kanji characters. Each letter or picture remains on the water surface only for a moment, but they can be produced in succession on the surface every 3 seconds.

Funny to think now how it all started so innocently. Then suddenly, phones became mobile, CD players gave way to MP3s, computers found new life on the internet and DVDs made tapes obsolete.

Your relationship with gadgets quickly gained pace, gathering into obsession. But sooner or later there comes a time when you must ask yourself: has our relationship moved to a new level? Am I and technology more than just friends?

IRobot Inc. Chief Executive Colin Angle said one group of soldiers even named its robot "Scooby Doo" and grieved when it was blown up after completing 35 successful missions defusing improvised explosive devices.

"Please fix Scooby Doo because he saved my life," a soldier told repair technicians, according to Angle's account at last week's Future in Review technology conference.

The company, which is best known for "Roomba," the robotic vacuum cleaner, and "Scooba," the floor-mopping robot, envisions a machine that would instill similar feelings in civilians.

***

Angle did not hesitate when asked if he thinks the bond soldiers have formed with his robots is normal.

"I think it's very rational," he said. "(Scooby Doo) was someone, something, that was doing a great service for them and thus when they brought it back, it was viewed not just as a loss of a machine gun or a piece of body armor or a helmet. It was a loss of a contributing member of the team."

Microsoft's next chapter in its battle against the iPod and ITunes begins this week, as the company releases Windows Media Player 11 to the public. Additionally, Microsoft will promote heavily a test version of the URGE music service, a project it co-developed with MTV.

Seeing that a seamless ecosystem is what has propelled the iPod to its iconic status, Microsoft has also taken a page from the Apple playbook and co-developed a portable player called the "Clix." The new device is a project between Windows-based player market leader iRiver and the Redmond company.

The deluge of media-related announcements is seen by some as an indirect admission that the company's previous strategy of allowing freedom among its partners to do as they wish in the digital media space was a failure.

Companies like Creative have struggled to succeed in a crowded market where more than a half dozen major players plus dozens of smaller outfits compete for less than a fifth of the market. The result has been a disaster not only for most of these companies financially, but for Microsoft in the minds of the consumer.

Hursti's findings suggest the possibililty of other attacks, not described in his report, that are even more worrisome.

In addition, compromised machines would be very difficult to detect or to repair. The normal procedure for installing software updates on the machines could not be trusted, because malicious code could cause that procedure to report success, without actually installing any updates. A technician who tried to update the machine's software would be misled into thinking the update had been installed, when it actually had not.

On election day, malicious software could refuse to function, or it could silently miscount votes.

Google already has Google Earth, a 3-D mockup of the planet generated from satellite photos. But Google wants you to do more than just zoom through its virtual Earth. The company wants you to add on to it, too.

At the end of April the company released, for free, a popular 3-D modeling program it bought called SketchUp. Google is encouraging developers to use SketchUp to build 3-D layers on top of Google Earth. There's even a website Google provides called 3-D Warehouse, where you can demonstrate what you've built in Sketch Up.

The notion that you can create objects and buildings and place them in a virtual world makes Google Earth sounds less like a mapping tool and more like a metaverse. What's a metaverse? Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson introduced the term in his seminal 1992 novel, Snow Crash. The metaverse was Stephenson's name for a virtual world where his characters play and do business. It was a black ball 1.6 times the size of Earth, with a giant street running around its equator.

Minka Wiltz, an actress in Atlanta, has tried to answer her phone to the thrrrrup, thrrrrup, thrrrrup of a truck bouncing down a pothole-pocked street.

Others say they thought they heard phones ring while taking a shower, using a blow-dryer or watching commercials. What they are hearing is a barely discernable sound — perhaps chimes, a faint trill or an electronic bleat — that they mistake for the ringtone of their cellphone, which isn't ringing. This audio illusion — called phantom phone rings or, more whimsically, ringxiety or fauxcellarm — has emerged recently as an Internet discussion topic and has become a new reason for people to either bemoan the techno-saturation of modern life or question their sanity.

Some sound experts believe that because cellphones have become a fifth limb for many, people now live in a constant state of phone vigilance, and hearing sounds that seem like a telephone's ring can send an expectant brain into action.

"My experience has been hearing just a few notes that are similar to my phone's ring, my brain will fill in the rest," said David Laramie, a doctoral student at the Los Angeles campus of the California School of Professional Psychology, who is writing his dissertation about the effect of cellphones on behavior.

But Guy Moore, an assistant professor of physics at McGill University in Montreal, said human ears do not do a good job finding the source of sounds around 1,000 hertz using either method, so that a noise in that range seems just as likely to be coming from the television to the right as a purse sitting to the left.

Skype, which was bought last year for $2.6 billion by online auctioneer eBay Inc., said it has nearly doubled in size from September 2005 when 54 million people were using the service.

Founded by the creators of Kazaa, the free music-sharing program that riled the music business, Skype gives away software that lets people talk for free from computer to computer, or pay a small fee to place and receive calls from regular phones.

Internet phone providers like Skype are creating upheaval in the telecommunications industry and putting pressure on traditional operators.

Though it debuted only five months ago, YouTube.com attracts 6 million visitors each day to watch two-minute video clips that amount to the Internet's version of "America's Funniest Home Videos" meets "American Idol." Every day, users stock the site with 35,000 homemade videos of lip-syncing, dancing, silly animation and commentaries on any topic, all of which are commented on and rated by viewers.

Fast Internet connections and digital video cameras are giving average people a new avenue to fame. With other homegrown phenomena such as Web logs, or blogs, and radio-style podcasts, the Internet is changing people's relationships to the media and putting more power into the hands of consumers.

Big corporations want in on the action, and giants such as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., AOL LLC and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN have launched video sites of their own. But YouTube's do-it-yourself popularity, fueled by word of mouth, catapulted the site past its bigger competitors in months. That success is drawing the attention of mainstream media.

"Marketers are already interested in looking at how to invest in it," said Lucian James, president of Agenda Inc., a brand marketing firm. "It comes at a perfect time when brands are looking beyond the 30-second commercial and are looking for new ways to connect to their audience."

Advertisers determined to resist paying for ads skipped with DVRs can find new ammunition in Nielsen's new minute-by-minute ratings. An analysis of the so-called "commercial ratings" obtained by MediaDailyNews reveals that virtually no one stops to view a commercial when watching a program in time-shifted mode.

For top network programs, the data reveals that "commercial ratings" are practically the same when shows are viewed "live" as when they are viewed via DVRs ("live plus seven day"), meaning that people are making good use of the fast-forward functions during the ads.

***

"American Idol" posted a 12.1 in "live" numbers during commercials and a 12.2 in "live plus seven day," meaning that less than 1 percent of DVR viewers stopped for the ads. The same tiny increase goes for "Desperate Housewives," which saw a 10.2 during commercial breaks in "live" viewing and a 10.3 in DVR viewing.

Podcasts are to bloggers what MySpace sites are to teens: All the cool kids have one. So Forrester probably expected a big reaction with a new report that claims podcasts are not exactly taking the wired world by storm.

The research firm's new study claims that only 1 percent of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts.

Forrester analyst Charlene Li says on her blog that while there's definitely a business case for podcasts, companies "shouldn't be dashing out to create expensive original content for a small audience--unless they gain value from being seen as innovative."

If you look at this office, there isn't much paper in it. On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you'll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.

The screen on the left has my list of e-mails. On the center screen is usually the specific e-mail I'm reading and responding to. And my browser is on the right-hand screen. This setup gives me the ability to glance and see what new has come in while I'm working on something, and to bring up a link that's related to an e-mail and look at it while the e-mail is still in front of me.

When pollsters for Ipsos Insight recently asked 6,500 people in 12 countries whether they had used the Internet in the past month, 68 percent of South Koreans said yes. That ranked No. 4, behind Japan (89 percent), Canada (72 percent) and the United States (71 percent).

(For those who track Asia's fastest-rising economies, China had a rate of 50 percent, while India showed just 15 percent — though Ipsos researchers only queried people in urban areas in those countries.)

South Korea also didn't own the top slot in time spent online. The survey found that Korean Internet users, on average, were online for 12.7 hours each week, behind those in China (17.9 hours a week) and Japan (13.9). Canadian Web surfers clocked 12.3 hours each week and Americans were fifth at 11.4, followed by Mexicans at 9.2.

Today, broadband is mainstream, online shopping is commonplace, everyone has a wireless device or two, and Apple's latest music player was - for the fifth season in a row - the must-have holiday gift. The Internet and digital media are clearly not fads. Over the past decade, we've started to live a life only imagined in mid-'90s business plans. As a result, some silly bubble-era ideas are starting to actually make sense - perhaps a lot of sense.

Free phone calls over the Internet? That's Skype, which eBay just bought for nearly $4 billion. Online virtual communities? Now a global phenomenon in the form of massively multiplayer online games. Free music sites? MySpace, which rivals Google in traffic. (The boom's ultimate echo: The owner of Dog.com just paid $1 million for Fish.com, in hopes of starting what amounts to a new Pets.com. Just so long as it doesn't ship 50-pound bags of chow.)

The second reason that this boom is so different from the last is that the sunk costs of the dotcom era make the economics of entrepreneurship more favorable. In the bad old days, companies bankrupted themselves building out their fiber-optic networks. Bad for investors, good for everyone else: We're now enjoying supercheap bandwidth. So, too, for storage, screens, and a host of other technologies that are benefiting from profligate '90s-era investment and research.

Meanwhile, open source software has come of age, and computer hardware will soon cost less than the electricity it takes to run it. The result: industrial-strength servers that are cheaper than desktop PCs (sorry, Sun). Or, if you prefer, you can buy hardware and software even more cheaply as a hosted service (there's that inexpensive bandwidth again).

The small Canadian company NTP, Inc. has been judged to be the owner of the technology that powers Blackberry handheld devices, and that Research In Motion, Inc. ("RIM") stole said technology. After that ruling, NTP demanded that RIM's Blackberry operations be shut down, which was within its rights. But joy reigned this afternoon as the two companies made peace and the naughty thieving corporate pirates at RIM reached a settlement in which they will pay NTP $612.5 million for licensing its technology.

The little guy wins and gets money. Millions of Blackberry users get to keep their favorite gadget. Everyone wins. Don't you just love a happy ending?

Driven by ubiquitous broadband, cheap hardware, and open-source software, the Web is mutating into a radically different beast than it has been. And that is leading to the creation of entirely new kinds of companies, new business models, and oceans of new opportunity.

We are in the early stages of what might be better thought of as the Next Net. The Next Net will encompass all digital devices, from PC to cell phone to television. Its defining characteristics include the ability to interact instantaneously with any of the more than 1 billion Web users across the globe -- not by, say, instant messaging, but by evolving instant-voice-messaging and instant-video-messaging apps that will make today's e-mail and IM seem crude.

The Next Net is deeply collaborative: People from across the planet can work together on the same task, and products or tools can be rapidly tweaked and improved by the collective wisdom of the entire online world.

The new era is also creating a realm of endless mix and match: Anyone with a browser can access vast stores of information, mash it up, and serve it in new ways, to a few people or a few hundred million.

The government provided a list of 138 agencies that may need to be excluded from a shutdown, along with their related contractors. The list includes the Central Intelligence Agency, the Army and the National Security Agency.

The government left the door open for an injunction that would leave the network in operation but stop sales of new BlackBerries to private users.

For its part, RIM has agreed with the Justice Department that it would be difficult to separate government from private BlackBerry users. In a filing Wednesday, it also argued that public interest in the network extends beyond government users. For example, it said, the financial services industry relies heavily on the devices.

Google charges users nothing to search the internet; neither does Yahoo nor Microsoft MSN. E-mail? Instant messaging? Blogging? Free. Skype, the Luxembourg-based company that is now a multibillion-dollar division of Ebay, offers free VOIP - Voice Over Internet Protocols - telephone calls worldwide. San Francisco-based Craigslist provides free online classified advertising around the world.

In America, the Progressive insurance group gives comparison-minded shoppers free vehicle insurance quotes from its competitors. Innumerable financial service companies offer clients free tax advice, online bill payments and investment research. Michael O'Leary, Ryanair's colourful founder, predicts his discount carrier may soon offer free tickets to his cost-conscious euro-flyers.

Of course, Milton Friedman, the Nobel economist, is right: just as "there's no such thing as a free lunch", there is also no such thing as a "free innovation". These "free" offerings are all creatures of creative subsidy. Free search engines have keyword-driven advertisers. Financial companies use cash flow from profitable core businesses to cost-effectively support alluringly "free" money management services. Ryanair counts on the lucrative introduction of in-flight gambling to make its "free tickets" scenario a commercial reality. Innovative companies increasingly recognise that innovative subsidy transforms the pace at which markets embrace innovation. "Free" inherently reduces customer risk in exploring the new or improved -- and bestows competitive advantage. To the extent that business models can be defined as the artful mix of "what companies profitably charge for" versus "what they give away free", successful innovators are branding and bundling ever-cleverer subsidies into their market offerings. The right "free" fuels growth and profit. Technology has successfully upgraded King Gillette's classic "razor & blades" business model.

Sling Media's first product, the Slingbox, is a consumer electronics device that turns existing cable and satellite TV feeds into packets and then sends them across the Internet. Slingbox allows consumers to select regular TV programming they see at home and see it on any Internet-connected Windows-based laptop, smart phone or PDA.

The product is popular among business travelers, who, for example, can watch their hometown sports team while on the road. The device costs about $250, and there is no ongoing subscription fee to use the service. Slingbox is already sold in more than 3,000 retail locations.

For example, 33% of teens predicted that gasoline-powered cars will go the way of the horse and buggy by 2015. Just 16% of adults agreed.

Meanwhile, 22% of teenagers predicted desktop computers will become obsolete a decade from now, while only 10% of adults agreed.

Adults, on the other hand, were far more certain about the demise of the landline telephone by 2015 (45% made that prediction) than teenagers (17 percent).

The teens queried also said new inventions - over any time frame, not necessarily by 2015 - can solve such global problems as unclean water (91 percent), hunger (89 percent), disease (88 percent) and pollution (84 percent). Adults were less optimistic about hunger, with 77% saying technology will play an important role.

"In recent years millions of people have become comfortable downloading and enjoying digital media, including electronic books. But until now, there has not been a good device on which to read them," said Ron Hawkins, senior vice president of personal reader