主题：【文摘】Seven New Technologies That Change Eve -- 林木森森

What makes a technology insanely great? Miraculous inventions come along all the time, yet precious few are destined for greatness. Personal helicopters? Laser discs? Microsoft's (MSFT) Bob? They all were touted as tomorrow's technologies, they all seemed dashingly clever, and they all amounted to nothing.

In hindsight, this is obvious. But in the present tense, it's notoriously difficult to identify the great technologies of the future that are actually here today. "Breakthroughs are disruptive for a reason," says Alex Pang, research director at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. "They sneak up on us even when we try to prepare for them."

That's certainly what happened in 1990, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first Web browser. Today we all know that his invention created a new medium, sparked a historic stock market boom, and provided a platform for businesses with $100 billion in revenues this year alone. Yet it wasn't until 1993 that the New York Times first took notice of the World Wide Web, mentioning it in passing as a tool that "makes available physicists' research from many locations."

To really succeed -- to truly change the world -- a technology needs to disrupt an existing industry or create a new market. It needs to solve a critical problem, or perform a task better and more cheaply, or create new business opportunities where none existed before. The most profound new technologies manage to do all of those things. Thomas Edison changed everything when he introduced his dynamo in 1881. Henry Ford did it when he perfected the assembly line. And Steve Jobs did it when he helped create the original "insanely great" Macintosh. Edison commercialized electricity, Ford made automobiles affordable, Jobs made computing accessible, and life has never been the same for any of us since.

We set out to look for cutting-edge innovations that could appear on tomorrow's lists of great technologies. Ideas that are merely cool didn't make the cut; we searched for emerging technologies that are inherently disruptive. We decided to pass on inventions that exist only as fanciful ideas; our candidates have working prototypes and products in the pipeline. We also insisted on a clear pathway to commercialization, an obvious customer base, and the use of a technology that poses a clear threat to existing industries. Since all of our finds are in early stages of development, we then asked an artist to visualize how they might look as products a few years down the road.

All this culminated in our list of seven promising innovations, spanning fields as diverse as renewable energy, diagnostic medicine, manufacturing, and consumer electronics. Will all of them really change the world? It's certainly clear that each has the potential for greatness. And to ignore them would be, in a word, insane.

1 ― ENERGY ―

Plastic Power

NEW PHOTOVOLTAICS WILL PROVIDE AN EFFICIENT AND FLEXIBLE WAY TO GENERATE ELECTRICITY FROM VIRTUALLY ANY SURFACE EXPOSED TO THE SUN

Solar power: How long has that little paradigm shift been just around the corner? Even after decades of development, silicon-based solar cells are expensive to manufacture, awkward to install, and relatively inefficient, converting just 12 to 15 percent of the rays they collect into electricity -- which explains why it costs 22 cents to produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity using today's solar technology, compared with 4 cents at a coal-fired plant.

The good news is that next-generation technology will finally make solar power competitive. The new photovoltaics use tiny solar cells embedded in thin sheets of plastic to create an energy-producing material that is cheap, efficient, and versatile. One startup, Massachusetts-based Konarka Technologies, has developed a process that coats strips of plastic film with titanium dioxide and light-absorbing dye. Power is produced when light hits the dye and the electrons in the titanium dioxide get revved up. Konarka expects to deliver its first commercial solar cells, designed for use with consumer electronics like laptops, by year's end.

The big names in power generation are also taking a look at plastic solar. Siemens has developed technology that melds nanoscale buckminsterfullerene molecules with conductive plastic polymers. General Electric (GE), meanwhile, is adapting organic light-emitting diodes for use as light collectors in plastic solar cells.

Such technology will make it possible to convert almost any material into an energy collector. Solar mats could be woven into briefcase walls to recharge mobile devices. Solar panels integrated into automobile bodies could power electric motors. Roofing tiles coated with photovoltaic material could transform every home into a self-sufficient powerhouse.

The stakes are sky-high: The $220 billion power industry has long resisted change, thanks to the advantages afforded by ownership of electric plants and distribution networks. If plastic solar cells enable more and more of us to live comfortably "off the grid," the industry won't be able to fend off change forever. -- D.P.

2

― MANUFACTURING ―

A Factory in Every Home

AN ADAPTATION OF INK-JET TECHNOLOGY CAN BE USED TO "PRINT" MECHANICAL PARTS AND ELECTRONIC DEVICES.

Ever since Adam Smith first described the workings of his pin factory, manufacturing businesses have focused on three goals: mass production, centralized assembly, and labor specialization. Printable mechatronics has the potential to offer consumers far greater product variety, while eliminating the need for factories altogether -- a change that would revolutionize the $1.4 trillion manufacturing sector, which accounts for roughly a sixth of the U.S. economy.

Teams at Cornell University, MIT, and the University of California at Berkeley have been quietly developing processes that adapt ink-jet printing technology to build ready-to-use products, complete with working circuitry, switches, and movable parts.

Consider the classic problem of the lost TV remote control: Armed with a set of digital blueprints downloaded from the Internet, a home mechatronic printer could squirt out a replacement remote -- one layer at a time -- using cartridges filled with polymer and other specialized materials. "You'd pay for the plans, not the product," says UC Berkeley professor John Canny, who leads a team of researchers working in the field.

Though scientists playfully refer to mechatronic printing systems as Santa Claus machines, their potential is no joke. Plastic Logic, a London-based firm that makes electronic gear out of plastic, is hoping to make computer display screens using the technology, and NASA engineers envision using mechatronic printers to create spare parts for astronauts en route to Mars. -- M.M.

3

― PHARMACEUTICALS ―

Brain Boosters

NEW MEDICINES WILL IMPROVE HUMAN MEMORY OR REVERSE DISEASES SUCH AS ALZHEIMER'S.

Anyone who has ever spent a late night cramming for a final exam has probably fantasized about popping a pill that would quickly burn vast amounts of data into the memory banks. The company that invents such a memory pill will earn billions -- while also rewriting the rules of senior citizen health care. The fight against Alzheimer's is providing a focus for the research effort. The disease afflicts an estimated 4.5 million Americans and will strike millions more as the baby boom generation ages. Last year alone, the care and treatment of Alzheimer's patients consumed over $100 billion. "With the graying of America, smart drugs could become some of the industry's biggest sellers," says Harry Tracy, publisher of "NeuroInvestment," a biotech newsletter.

Therapies in development for Alzheimer's target the buildup of plaques in the brain that are thought to reduce mental acuity. Techniques to enhance memory are more diverse, but most rely on compounds that seem to improve the performance of neural connections in the brain.

The private sector is pouring billions into research and development, and dozens of companies are testing more than 120 Alzheimer's-related compounds. Human clinical trials of one promising therapy, Alzhemed, from Canadian pharmaceutical firm Neurochem, began this June. Big pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly and Novartis are also working in the field, while other industry giants are said to be watching the upstarts closely.

A separate crop of companies is developing memory-enhancing drugs for healthy people. Pennsylvania-based Cephalon has sold $750 million worth of its Provigil, an alertness drug that's been approved as a remedy for narcolepsy and other sleep disorders. Drugs with other properties are on the way. With everyone from truck drivers to software coders clamoring for a safe, effective boost, demand for memory and alertness drugs will be huge -- a fact no one in the industry ever forgets. -- G.P.Z.

4

― CONSUMER DEVICES ―

Terabytes to Go

TINY NEXT-GENERATION HARD DRIVES WILL OFFER VAST STORAGE CAPACITY AND LOW POWER CONSUMPTION

Moore's Law, Schmoore's Law. Over the last six years, hard-disc manufacturers have doubled the capacity of their drives every single year, whipping the chip industry's standard of doubling every 18 months. Five years ago, 250-gigabyte drives were out of reach for most computer users; today they sell for about $250. Good thing too -- the popularity of digital music and photography means that the market for consumer storage devices is expected to grow from $1.4 billion in 2003 to $4.3 billion in 2008. "Can you ever have too many closets?" asks Amy Dalphy, manager of Toshiba's disc-drive manufacturing business. "Hard-drive space is similar -- you never have enough."

Recently, however, hard-disc capacity increases have slowed to roughly 40 percent. The problem? Today's technologies are simply running out of room.

Enter an obscure technology called perpendicular magnetic recording. Today's hard drives store bits of data horizontally, like stalks of freshly cut corn. PMR stores them vertically, like cornstalks standing in a field. With perpendicular storage, each bit occupies less space on the surface of the disc, so more data can be stuffed into a smaller area. In addition, because the data is more densely packed, the read-write heads don't shuttle around as much, so PMR drives draw less power from overworked batteries.

PMR drives are 18 months from initial production, and the first models will be used in top-of-the-line corporate storage systems. But it's easy to foresee what this means for the future of gadgetry: As storage drives add capacity and shrink in size, more and more mobile phones and PDAs will come equipped with hard drives. And once the price of a 2GB drive drops below $80, PMR drives could start to give flash memory cards (now found in most digital cameras) a run for their money. Within two years, look for 2GB mobile-phone hard drives that sell for less than $100. Music lovers may be able to carry more than 4,000 albums on a 200GB iPod. And by the summer of 2010, it should be possible to buy a portable media device that comes with a full terabyte of storage -- enough to store the entire Disney animation library and a few seasons of SpongeBob SquarePants, with room left over for a month's worth of music. -- O.M.

5

― HEALTH CARE ―

DIY Tests for Deadly Bugs

"LAB ON A CHIP" PROCEDURES WILL QUICKLY AND INEXPENSIVELY DIAGNOSE DISEASE OR DETECT BIOWEAPONS.

It's 2006, and the guy next to you on the flight from Hong Kong is drenched in sweat and coughing violently. With a new strain of avian flu ravaging China, he's making a lot of people nervous. That's when a flight attendant reaches into a diagnostic kit and politely asks the sick flier to put a plastic stick in his mouth. She places the stick in a device the size of a thick credit card, and two minutes later, after a green LED begins to glow, she reassures her passengers: Breathe easy. It's not the fatal flu.

Today, only specialized labs can perform the tests required to identify viral diseases or pathogens. The tests can take days or weeks to complete, and they can cost hundreds of dollars apiece. Worldwide spending on diagnostic tests tops $20 billion a year. Microfluidic tests can eliminate many of these lab procedures while vastly speeding diagnoses

Microfluidics is the science of moving fluids through tiny channels the thickness of a human hair. In microfluidic tests, blood, saliva, or urine samples are analyzed after coming into contact with tiny amounts of a chemical reagent.

The first microfluidic test kits are already on the market, with sales of $300 million projected for this year. So far, the government is the biggest buyer. The U.S. Postal Service is installing microfluidics-based detection systems created by defense giant Northrop Grumman and Silicon Valley upstart Cepheid that will sniff for anthrax at major mail-processing centers. Maryland-based Akonni Biosystems offers an instant tuberculosis test and is working on a SARS test that could be ready in two years.

As the size and cost of microfluidic tools drop, tests are likely to be sold in drugstores -- creating a market that could reach $10 billion by 2010. As Akonni CEO Charles Daitch predicts, "Tests that are now performed by technicians will be done in the future by almost anyone." -- G.P.Z.

6

― TELECOM ―

Extra-Broad Broadband

INTEGRATED OPTICAL CHIPS WILL MAKE IT MUCH CHEAPER TO BUILD HIGH-SPEED NETWORKS.

Broadband Internet connections are a fixture in 50 percent of American homes, but the infrastructure used to provide those links -- clunky coaxial cables or aging copper telephone wires -- remains primitive. Running fiber directly to the home would provide faster, more reliable service, but that's expensive: nearly $1,300 per household.

Micro-optical chips promise to end the tyranny of tiny pipes by slashing the cost of building high-speed networks. Micro-opticals are integrated optical circuits that combine the functions of several discrete optical components onto a single chip -- an innovation that will alter the economics of the telecommunications industry by making it much cheaper to distribute very large quantities of data.

Optical components that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars will be reduced in size and sold for 90 percent less. "Micro-opticals will bring PC-style economics to telecom networks," says Hemant Bheda, president and CEO of Parama Networks, a Santa Clara, Calif., firm that has developed a $5,000 chip to replace the $50,000 add/drop multiplexers used to manipulate optical data streams. Says Michael Howard of Infonetics Research, "This is a disruptive technology."

The first micro-opticals can already be found in high-end transmission systems sold by Infinera, while Parama is selling its products to Movaz Networks, an Atlanta-based equipment maker. Though the market for micro-opticals should be worth billions by the end of the decade, the technology will always remain hidden from consumer view. But it will hardly go unnoticed, particularly if, within 10 years, downloading high-definition movies at home becomes as routine as watching ESPN on cable today. -- O.M.

7

WIRELESS ―

A Revolution in Roaming

NEW SOFTWARE WILL ENABLE MOBILE DEVICES AND TWO-WAY RADIOS TO ACCESS ANY TYPE OF WIRELESS NETWORK

The world of wireless communications is a tower of Babel. Cell phones, Wi-Fi base stations, military radios, and public safety networks can operate only on the frequency bands burned into the hardware at the factory. Most of the time, this is merely a nuisance; it's why American CDMA phones don't work in Europe and many European GSM phones are useless in Japan. Yet it can also be deadly, as rescue teams learned on 9/11 when police and firefighters were unable to coordinate evacuation efforts because their radios were incompatible.

To eliminate this rigidity, startups such as Sandbridge Technologies and Vanu are putting the finishing touches on a technology to replace radio hardware with software that can be programmed to communicate over a broad range of frequencies, bandwidths, and transmission standards. Want to drive cross-country while maintaining a persistent Internet connection? Software radio will make that possible by taking advantage of any available communications network, from analog cellular and 3G to Wi-Fi and Wi-Max.

Software radios "solve the problem of multiple standards and interoperability," says Allan Margulies of the Software Defined Radio Forum, an industry group that's hammering out standards for the technology in collaboration with more than 100 companies, including Intel (INTC), Motorola (MOT), and Qualcomm (QCOM).

There are still bugs to work out: Today's software radios require heavy-duty chips, they suck up lots of power, and they're expensive. Nevertheless, the Pentagon spends almost $15 billion on communications each year, and the defense market is already jump-starting demand for software radio gear. In July, General Dynamics won a $1 billion order to build software radios that will allow Army soldiers, Navy sailors, and Air Force pilots to exchange information in the heat of battle. Consumers will have to wait a bit longer, of course. But in five years, software radios will be a $31 billion business, and you should be able to buy a phone that will work on any mobile network, anywhere you travel. -- O.M.

Change the World

After the Internet bubble burst, people stopped thinking about the transforming powers of technology. And technology companies were forced to stop crowing about how they were set to change the world. Instead, they ate crow -- and concentrated on staying alive.

But technology didn't stop evolving and maturing, no matter what the Nasdaq did. Imaginative researchers and engineers, by their nature, aren't very good at throttling back to a conservative idle.

So while shareholders nursed their battered portfolios and big companies chiseled away at their cost structures and employment rolls, these innovators kept working. They kept trying to develop technologies that would represent giant leaps forward, not just incremental baby steps.

We set off in search of those people who were bold enough to think that the world might at some point be ready to take a giant leap again and to believe that innovative technology can still put serious distance between a leader and the rest of the pack.

In such places as Mooresville, North Carolina; La Jolla, California; Hawthorne, New York; rural Connecticut; and Manhattan's SoHo district, we found companies that are developing or deploying technologies that could change the world. Each will have a different impact -- from smart tags that will allow products to be tracked through the distribution network to bio-simulation software that is speeding the path of safer, more effective new drugs to pharmacy shelves. We sent back these five postcards from the edge.

The ThermoJet printer outside of Scott Campbell's office looks like a big Xerox machine, although at $49,000, it's a bit pricier. But instead of cranking out color prints, the ThermoJet produces 3-D wax models of car parts and body designs for the Penske Racing NASCAR team, headquartered in Mooresville, North Carolina.

Penske is obsessed with technology that will help it leave competitors in the dust. (The team has notched more than 45 wins in the NASCAR Winston Cup Series.) And Campbell says that 3-D printing, which allows the team to turbo-charge its design process, is just such a technology.

"It used to be a long process to sculpt things by hand," says Campbell, a senior engineer for the Penske team. "Now we design things on the fly and make lots of incremental changes, because we can just print them out and see how they look."

Three-D printing is changing the world of product design. These printers typically shape objects by laying down materials, such as wax or plaster, one layer upon the other. A small model can take as little as an hour to create, and some printers can create objects in full color. Three-D printing is being used to design everything from children's strollers at Graco to running shoes at New Balance and Reebok, allowing designers and engineers to show their work earlier in the process, make changes with less fuss, and get new products to market faster.

The Penske team's printer, made by 3D Systems, a publicly traded California company, churns out models of such things as suspension components and brake caliper mounts, as well as complete car bodies. Once a part has been printed and approved, the model can be sent to a foundry to be cast in steel or titanium and eventually installed on one of Penske's two race cars. (Most NASCAR vehicles are entirely custom-built.) Models from the 3-D printer can even be tested in a wind tunnel -- something that Toyota has done with parts such as side-view mirrors for its production vehicles.

As 3-D printers drop in cost -- Z Corp., an MIT spin-off, offers a low-end printer for $29,900 -- they could even start showing up in places like Kinko's, allowing customers to do not just desktop publishing of documents, but desktop publishing of objects.

Already, the Penske team appreciates the advantage of being able to turn out prototypes -- and make changes -- quickly and cheaply. (A small model of a car costs about $160.) "We're looking for every performance edge we can find with our design and manufacturing techniques," Campbell says. "We don't show up at a race to lose."

Rather than fall victim to simple viruses, the Linux servers in Dr. Richard Ho's labs are supposed to contract more serious diseases.

Several of the computers at the Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical R&D facility in La Jolla, California, suffer from Type II diabetes. Ho, the head of medical informatics at the facility, expects that other servers will eventually come down with debilitating diseases of their own.

"When you're trying to develop a new drug, there's a lot of guesswork involved," Ho says. "You'd work on a new drug candidate in the lab, and eventually test it on animals, and then test it on humans, but you might not have a good idea of what the drug would do at any of those stages."

That's where Ho's sick servers come in. By creating mathematical models of diseases such as diabetes, obesity, asthma, or arthritis in a computer, researchers can run virtual tests of their new drug candidates -- much in the way that an aeronautical engineer uses a computer simulation to imagine how an airplane design will perform once it's built. Often called "biosimulation," the approach compiles everything that is known about a given disease -- even down to the activity that takes place inside a single cell. And the computer models can be updated as scientists learn more about how the diseases work.

Researchers can anticipate bad reactions before they give a drug to animals or humans, and they can run many more tests on a computer than they could run in the real world. Ideally, biosimulation will help Johnson & Johnson and other pharmaceutical companies focus their efforts on the drug prospects that are most likely to succeed.

"Even by the time a drug candidate gets to Phase III clinical trials -- the last stage before it reaches the market -- the failure rate still approaches 50%," says James Karis, the CEO of Entelos, the Foster City, California, company that supplies biosimulation technology to Johnson & Johnson. "That's after eight or so years of research. Those failures are very expensive." (Today, the standard figure for bringing a drug to market is between $800 million and $1 billion.) Simulation software will make those failures less painful and help pharmaceutical companies find useful drugs sooner.

Ho's team used biosimulation to reduce the amount of time and the number of patients required for the first phase of clinical trials of a new, as-yet-unannounced drug for Type II diabetes. (Ho estimates that the software, in its first outing, saved between six and eight weeks in trials.) Using sick computers as a stand-in for sick humans is still a new idea that will have to prove its value by contributing to the development of important new drugs. But eventually, Ho predicts, "this will become commonplace. It's a tool we never had before."

Nagui Halim believes that there are few constants in the world of computing. Chips get faster and more powerful, storage gets cheaper, and communications bandwidth keeps increasing. But one thing doesn't change: Our computers are still horrible at coping with problems.

"People are excellent at handling changes in the environment, or in their own body," says Halim, the director of distributed computing at IBM's Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York. "If you have too much work, you know how to prioritize and do the work that matters most. If you're feeling sick, you might lie down for a while." But even the most sophisticated computers aren't self-aware enough to know how to handle stress, or react to their own health problems.

Halim is part of a group at IBM that's working on what the company has termed "autonomic computing": developing computers that are smart enough to configure themselves, balance intense workloads, and know how to predict and address problems before they happen. At IBM, the leader in the field, the annual research budget for autonomic computing approaches $500 million. And the quest to develop systems that take care of themselves isn't just an abstract research initiative: Its fruits have begun creeping into Big Blue's product line.

"We've already got storage management software that can tell you when a storage device will fail before that failure happens," says Alan Ganek, vice president of IBM's autonomic-computing initiative. "And we're selling database software that can recommend a configuration based on the hardware environment you're running it in. Most database administrators had previously done that by trial and error."

The long-term promise of self-aware computers and software is greater reliability with fewer human baby-sitters. Right now, Ganek says, IT staffs at large companies are swamped with the tasks involved in "managing, maintaining, upgrading, and the care and feeding of their systems. That work squeezes out any innovative projects that they'd like to be doing to establish a competitive advantage."

Imagine, Halim says, a system that is smart enough both to see that online orders are spiking as the holiday shopping season approaches and to temporarily commandeer a bit of extra processing power from the human-resources server so that it can handle the influx of orders. Personal computers might know when a software upgrade became available and install it themselves. But as Adam and Eve discovered, self-awareness and sin often go hand in hand. A key challenge for IBM will be imposing restraints on this smarter generation of computers, so that your PC doesn't go out and spend $100 upgrading to Windows 2005 without your permission.

Guests don't go to the glitzy Mohegan Sun casino and resort, in central Connecticut, to see the fuel-cell center that's housed in an old fire station on an access road. And they don't ooh and aah over the dozen hydrogen storage tanks on the fire station's roof.

But the fuel-cell center, which is designed to provide the casino with reliable, clean backup power, may be one of the most glamorous things going at Mohegan Sun. Eventually, on-site power generation and storage facilities like Mohegan Sun's could change the structure of the country's power grid. The concept is called "distributed generation" (or sometimes, "decentralized generation").

Today, the way that power is generated in the United States looks a lot like the old world of mainframe computers, says Chip Schroeder, CEO of Proton Energy, the Connecticut company installing the hydrogen system at Mohegan Sun. A few big, clunky plants are connected together in what's known as "the grid." In some ways, that system is efficient -- it's the cheapest way that we know to produce and distribute electricity -- but in other ways, it's terrible. Electricity is lost as it's transmitted over long distances. No one likes living next to a massive power plant. And the huge capital investments mean that old, expensive plants keep running long after cleaner, more efficient technology becomes available.

Schroeder says that the new power network will look a lot more like the Internet than the outmoded mainframe model. Smaller generating facilities -- some using solar, wind, and other renewable energy technologies and others using scaled-down gas-fired turbines -- will be widely distributed and placed closer to where the power is actually being used. They will be more easily upgradeable. The power will be more reliable, because most outages are caused by distribution problems, like a downed line.

The installation at Mohegan Sun is one of only a few tentative steps toward this Internet-like power network. "But you need to prove that this can work before more people will adopt it," says Dan Reicher, a vice president at Northern Power, recently acquired by Proton. And other projects are popping up. Later this year, Northern Power will be starting a demonstration project in Vermont that will be the world's first "microgrid." This web of generating technologies will serve an industrial park and a few nearby residences, and even feed surplus power back to the main power grid. A similar microgrid is being built in downtown Detroit by DTE Energy, a subsidiary of Detroit Edison.

"It may take awhile, and we're probably biased," says Schroeder, "but we think this is the future."

The glass door of the dressing room at Prada's Epicenter store in SoHo slides shut.

I hang a $450 gray patterned shirt on a rack inside, and suddenly, a color flat-screen display on the wall lights up. The dressing room has "recognized" the item I've brought in, then suggests other sizes and materials that it comes in and even shows a picture of a much-better-looking-than-me model wearing the shirt in a Prada fashion show.

Attached to the shirt, along with the stratospheric price tag, is a piece of clear plastic the size of a business card. Embedded in the plastic is a coil of bronze microchip circuitry, which contains information about the shirt and conveys it to a reader built into the dressing room. This is a smart tag (or RFID tag, for radio-frequency identification), made by Texas Instruments and sold for about $3. It can be made much smaller -- about the size of a fleck in a snow globe -- and for as little as 10 cents.

The promise of smart tags is that they could serve as an advanced version of the omnipresent UPC bar code, providing information about not just what a product is, but also where it is, where it has been, and how it has been handled. A smart-tag reader in a warehouse, truck, or store can "query" all of the smart tags in its vicinity, taking inventory without human help. Smart tags are also being affixed to refrigerated containers to make sure that food is stored at the right temperature.

Gillette uses the tags to track cartons of Venus women's razors through a packaging and distribution center in Massachusetts, and may buy as many as a half-billion tags over the next two or three years. The tags could also tell retailers how many cans of its shaving cream sit on their shelves at any given moment. Seven million tags are already attached to the keychains of drivers who pay for their gas with ExxonMobil's SpeedPass system. The tipping point for smart tags will likely arrive by 2005, when Wal-Mart will require its top 100 suppliers to attach them to each forklift pallet of products they deliver to the retailer. (Privacy concerns could slow things down. The fear: You could be traced through your clothing or possessions.)

"You'll see a lot of diverse uses," says Bill Allen, Texas Instruments' e-marketing manager for RFID products, "because not only can you store information on the tags, you can also rewrite it." In Iraq, the tags were used on a Navy hospital ship to track the location and triage status of injured soldiers. "And then," Allen says, "in peacetime, you've got a company like Prada, using [smart tags] to improve the customer's shopping experience."

the bottom line is that innovation is the key of winning in competition, technological advance is where the value comes in. we just have to constantly challenge ourselves to do better. good article, thanks for sharing.