Today’s topic is the Future of Business Technology or Teaching your refrigerator to surf the net. By now you’ve probably heard of the internet refrigerator. It looks like a regular fridge, but next to the ice maker is a display panel with built in bar code scanner. When you take an item out of the fridge and use it up, before you toss the container, you run it past the scanner. The fridge creates a grocery list and when you’re ready, you push a button and the fridge connects via the internet to your local net grocery store. You select a delivery time for later that day (within a half hour window) and your groceries are delivered. This product is being marketed in Japan right now and will be rolled out in America before the end of the year. Now I don’t know if you want your fridge on the net, but the fact is that it can be, and that’s just one small example of the changes that are coming.

Obviously technology changes quickly. In this era of gigahertz speed computers, cable modems, and phones not much bigger than a match box, the speed of change is accelerating. My mission today is not to give you chapter and verse on how this new technology works. After all, I’m not an engineer. Any of you in this room could probably explain the working of this stuff much better than I could. What I’ll do is explore the uses of these new technologies, how they interrelate and how they’ll affect your work and real life. After all, the best tools in the world are worthless if people don’t use them.

For example, look at Palm Pilots and Handspring Visors. It seems that everyone from the office worker in the next cubicle to super models are walking around with Palms these days. And folks are crowing about how great the devices are. They’re address books, to-do lists, calendars. You can even write notes in them. (providing you can learn the Palm handwriting alphabet). Now remember back to 1993. Apple Computers came out with a device called the Newton. It had an address book, to-do lists and a calendar. Plus it had handwriting recognition. It was a flop. Some people blame it’s bad handwriting recognition and high price tag, but it was essentially the same technology as the Palm Pilot. But people didn’t use it. So again the best technology is worthless if it’s not used.

But let’s take a minute and look at the Palms a little closer. Why do we even need palm pilots when we have the pocket PC. For just a few dollars more than a top of the line Palm you can purchase a windows computer that’s the size of a palm pilot. A few years ago Dataquest, a technology consulting firm, called Personal Digital Assistants, “$600 replacements for $35 day planners.” Now for $500 you get a replacement for your planner, your PDA, and your laptop computer. Or, with the Visor, by purchasing a snap on peripheral you can turn your handheld device from an address book into a cell phone or a digital camera or an MP3 player or a GPS. Or even a wireless modem for accessing the internet.

Now there’s a technology we could spend the rest of the morning talking about. Wireless Internet. A few problems right now, bandwidth and reliability being two big ones. But these are fixable. What the wireless internet is capable of doing to the way we communicate is nothing short of revolutionary. We’ll revisit this concept frequently this morning. Let’s start by looking at some of the big changes the internet has already caused….