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• News and Points to Consider, including great prose from a telecom's Darth Vader, the Washington Post backhands Penton, Google-Watch's view of Google privacy, and more
• Wolters Kluwer: Wiley or Wobbling?
• Looking for statistical data... itBulletin reviews Second Moment's helpful list of unusual links and we point out one glaring oversight
• Xenky's review of The Electric Meme... Get with the "spike train"
• Watching The Media... in between the lines
• Embedded Devices Gain Flexibility... How the Internet will come to your fridge
• Check out the first of Xenky's XP Tips in the left hand sidebar...

Want to Search Google Anonymously? Better Question: "Why?"

Searchers may want to look at the Google-Watch service and then read what the site says about search diva Google. The link is http://www.google-watch.org/proxy.html. Why? Google has some tricks up its sleeve that Google Watch presents in a clear, easy-to-understand way. itBulletin does not want to steal Google-Watch's thunder. Check it out yourself. In Xenky's next issue of itBulletin ... more anonymizer links. You will be ready for this information after a cruise through the Google-Watch site.

Washington Post Pillories Penton's Internet World

The Washington Post (3 October 2002) Tech Thursday ".com" column was headlined "Dying in Its Booths." The Economist is not the only newspaper with a good headline editor. itBulletin learned that the fall Internet World shared space with Streaming Media East, possibly the year's least attended show-within-a-show. Co-locating trade shows is routine today as promoters try to cut costs and attract as many attendees as possible. Ho-hum. The real meat of the column was buried deep in the column on page E6. The key points were:

• Cratering Attendance. The show's turnout was about 15,000, down from "roughly 40,000 a few years ago. (Xenky concluded that this was an expensive event for Penton.)
  
  
• No Newsworthy Product Announcements. Tech Thursday .com wrote, "But this year there was so little to see that a reception staged by X3D Technologies Corp to showcase software turning ordinary TV pictures and computer games into three-dimensional displays drew a huge crowd of reporters and analysts." (Xenky concluded that the product sizzle of the past was replaced with cold bacon grease.)
  
  
• Penton Craters. Penton Media Inc. itself was delisted. The sponsor of the show received "its own delisting notice from the New York Stock Exchange." (Xenky concluded that the Post kicks fellow publishers when down.)
  
  
• Bad Program Writing. Web services, intones the Post, is a "misnomer." Tech Thursday said, "A key focus of many presentations this week was a glitz-free concept known as 'Web services.'" It then added, "[Web services] is a misnomer since it's not about services at all, but emerging software standards designed to let different kinds of computer systems swap information quickly and cheaply." (Xenky concluded that one publication accusing another of bad writing was stomping on a fallen competitor's foot — stomping without good cause.)
  
  

Tech Thursday closed the ".com" column by quoting Sprint Corp.'s chief executive William Esrey who described the problems at WorldCom Inc. and other technology companies as "a lingering stench that has poisoned our industry."

itBulletin was somewhat saddened to see a once-thriving trade show pilloried. itBulletin was somewhat happy not to have attended this year. itBulletin hopes that the Washington Post does not write about Xenky.

Great Quotes: Jabbing Microsoft Again ... and Again

One of the computer industry's quip machines is Scott McNealy. At the Linux World Conference & Exposition, he said in reference to Sun Microsystems' support of Open Source, "We're doing things the attorney general couldn't do." The "things" relate to undermining Microsoft's grip on the PC market. (Xenky is not certain that $199 Linux machines at Wal*Mart and IBM's support of Linux will have the same effect as sending Mr. Gates to prison. No, Mr. McNealy, no perp walk for Mr. Gates yet.)

Did You Know ... Global Phone Freedom?

Fashion foo-foo was once confined to MP3 player manufacturers and clothing artistes in Paris and Milan. Now fashion drives mobile telephony. There are disposable phone making the rounds of trade shows. Popular magazines tout phones from Samsung and Sony-Ericsson with cameras for MMS (Multimedia Messaging Services). Sony has a tiny phone for quick-fingered 11-year-olds. The shotgun marriage of the mobile phone and the PDA (portable digital assistant) spawns tubby, almost unusable phones that combine handheld computing, dish washing, and automobile diagnostics. You get the idea.

The key point with a global phone is that it automatically or manually allows the user to connect to frequencies in the U.S., most of the countries in Europe whose names Americans recognize, and various points scattered across the Pacific Rim.

itBulletin has discovered that most global phone owners are not aware that buying the hippest mobile device is frightfully easy. itBulletin believes that telephony engineers will correct this "ease of use problem" in the future. In the meantime, global phone users can enjoy remarkable flexibility.

The first-time global phone "buyer" pays most for the chip inside the phone. To the right is a picture of what the chip looks like. Usually these are tucked beneath the battery. Xenky urges those with more than thumbs than fingers to get an electrical engineer or a nine-year-old to locate the postage-stamp sized chip, remove it, and insert it in the new device. The phone itself is a throwaway.

You can go to any phone store and select a global phone that offers the bells, whistles, and features you desire. Slip in your system interface module, power up the phone, and make calls.

On a semi-related note: VoiceStream is now TMobile (who?) Few customers in the U.S. know that VoiceStream has been rebranded to the Deutsche Telekom global brand. TMobile's new advertising campaign has — ah, how shall we say it? — has not made the brand shift well known. VoiceStream customers' phones still carry the VoiceStream logo, not the TMobile logo.

Intelligent Surveillance, Anyone?

Intelligent Enterprise (October 8, 2002) reported that the city of Tampa Bay, Florida, rolled out video surveillance cameras linked to face recognition software. Intelligent Enterprise noted that the American Civil Liberties Union issued a statement to the effect that the cameras never recognized a "single face correctly or led to one arrest." The program began in June 2001 and ended eight weeks later. (Xenky does not have great confidence in face recognition from low-resolution devices deployed in convenience stores and airports. The U.K. required several years and many pounds to get the motorway cameras to render usable images of license tags on speeding automobiles.)

Estimates that Surprise and Delight

First, from Excel spreadsheets at IDC's research department: "Worldwide spending on business process outsourcing services totaled $712 billion in 2001. The worldwide business process outsourcing market will grow to $1.2 trillion by 2006." That's roughly a multiple of two. The question — unanswered by IDC is — "Where did the $712 billion come from?" itBulletin was under the impression that there's an economic downturn going on. What business process outsourcing firm is backing dump trucks filled with $100 bills to shareholders homes and depositing a car-sized pile of cash? itBulletin wants more from IDC, thank you.

Second, Professional service firms and outsourcers make up more than 50 percent of the total customer relationship software market. The projected expansion of consulting firms will provide the cash to fuel the CRM services segment to $41.9 billion in 2007." This bit of prognostication comes from Forrester Research, whose annual corporate intelligence reporting service just costs about $50,000 per year. CRM is one of the hottest segments in the enterprise software space. If the Gartner and Forrester numbers are accurate, CRM makes up 3.49 percent of the outsourcing revenue in 2006-2007. itBulletin doesn't think the estimates make much sense. itBulletin will not ask these firms to predict the outcome of football and soccer matches. [Soccer match? Put my money down on 0-0. -- stu]

Xenky marvels at the sheer size of the numbers associated with software systems that are difficult to explain, describe, categorize, and count. Since most CRM projects end in miserable failure, Xenky has a difficult time accepting a $40 billion estimate. Lexmark dumped its CRM initiative after spending months and more than $15 million to get CRM at one location working.

Telecommunications Executive Waxes Poetic

The Financial Times (30 September 2002) ran a page one story called "Global Crossing CEO Foresaw Collapse in 2000." One high point of the story was this quote from an internal Global Crossing memorandum. itBulletin quotes this story for your poetry moment. Leo Hindery, former chief executive of Global Crossing wrote: "Like the resplendently coloured [sic] salmon going up river to spawn, at the end of our journey our niche too is going to die rather than live and prospect. The stock market can be fooled, but not forever, and it is fundamentally insightful and always unforgiving of being mislead... Without looking like we are shaking our bootie all over the world, [we should] sell our selves quickly to whichever of the six possible acquirers offer our shareholders the highest value."

Xenky believes that his seventh-grade teacher would have awarded the writing of the fish metaphor an A. Of course, Xenky attended a dreadful correspondence school taught by a defrocked priest with yellow jaundice.

Xenky Select Site Recognition

Xenky never planned to revisit the the Point (Top 5% of the Internet). Yes, one of the first sites to pioneer the for-fee backlink in 1993. But the lure of finding excellent sites and and giving them and their creators a bit recognition remains important. Search engines have become ad vehicles, and their first page of hits may or may not be germane to the searcher's query. Even government sites are beginning to experience pressure as certain agencies offer inducements in the form of fund transfers for featured placement on splash pages.

Xenky is now providing a "select site" seal to those Web sites that reflect good design, strong content, and usefulness to the online and information systems professional. Check out the review of Second Moment to see an example of a Xenky "select site." The factors evaluated for a select site include the usefulness of the information and links, the relative difficulty of locating the information on the site using a publicly-accessible search engine or directory, and the pertinence of the information to Xenky. Send sites for Xenky's consideration to ben@xenky.com. Xenky will review them, and if judged "select," create an abstract of the site and award the seal shown to the right.

Wolters Kluwer is selling its acadmic publishing properties. (By the time you read this, the deal may have closed.) Included are textbooks, hundreds of journals, an XML publishing system from iUniverse, and a stack of subscription renewals. Estimates for the price range from $500 million to $600 million. The W-K property is known as KAP, Kluwers Academic Publishing. The unit has had stable, if not spectacular financial performance in the US$150 million per year range.

Who would pay almost four times revenue for these artifacts of the 19th-century?

First, are two investment groups. One is Cinven ("inven" is intended to remind those suffering from oxygen starvation of "invention). The other is Candover ("over" — itBulletin presumes is to evoke images of rapid "turnover"). The motive is usually buy, hold, and sell for more than the group paid. Quality, however, is not the first thought that flickers across the frontal lobe of investment bankers.

The other bidder is the dwarf of the suitors, Taylor & Francis. This company still adheres to such out-of-fashion overhead expenses as staff experts and people with degrees in academic disciplines, not too many Harvard MBAs, thank you. If KAP lands here, the journals will be in good hands. Unfortunately, T&F may lack the cash to expand these properties aggressively.

The last bidder is the low-profile, very staid John Wiley & Sons, a midtown Manhattan based company that is unlikely to hire financial professionals from Enron or Global Crossing. Wiley would maintain the quality of the journals and move — slowly and methodically — to leverage the new assets.

And the target multiple — maybe 3.5 to 4.0 times revenues — is a good multiple in a grim business climate.

The better question is "Why would investors want products in what many perceive as no-growth markets? There are at least four reasons:

1. Academic text adoptions and subscriptions are generally stable and somewhat easier to project from one year to the next.
2. Stable revenues such as journal subscriptions can be monetized. In non-MBA and CFA terms, subscription revenue can be converted to collateral for loans. Borrowing against subscription revenue is less risky than trading bandwidth and energy fultures being at least.
3. Journals and academic products can provide springboards to other revenue streams. Among those used by some pubishers are for-fee online examinations and certification course, niche supplemental materials, often in print, and the odd best-seller that does on occasion slither from the groves of academe. (See issue 2 of itBulletin for reviews of two academic books that have make the leap from selling 1,500 copies to 10,000 or more.)
4. Think roll up. The idea is to collect as many titles as possible and enjoy economies of scale — a euphemism for trying to control a market sector.

Assume one of the banking firms buy KAP. KAP is probably worth more sold off in chunks than as a grab bag of separate lines of business. When the bankers begin to sell off chunks of KAP, Thomson, Reed, or one of the other global information companies will step in. Economies of scale and oligopoly are ingredients of success in the minds of some executives.

Xenky stumbled across an interesting Web site with a focus on analytics. For those who avoid business school jargon, analytics is trendy and at the most recent Microsoft conferences, an area of considerable interest for Xenky's friends in Redmond.

The site is Second Moment, sponsored and maintained by by Stone Analytics, a provider of analytical services, statistical models, and customized decision support applications. Xenky believes that Stone Analytics wants to be perceived as a good citizen in the clubby world of iterative algorithms and predictive statistics.

Analytics means counting. Those with doctorates in mathematics cringe when a discipline is boiled down to a single word. Analytics extends counting in a clever direction — the future. The idea is that buried in huge volumes of raw data are important facts that identify trends.

No one reads a terabyte of data about anything. However, certain mathematical techniques chop up data into manageable chunks. Then scripts feed data into more algorithms that identify important trends, factors, etc. These processes spit out numbers that are themselves abstractions of what the larger blocks of data contain. As these mathematical engines chug along, other processes suck in the exhaust from these software routines and produce a useful graph, table, or some other artifact for analysts and market researchers.

Analytics — sometimes lumped with data mining or text mining — is a shorthand way of taking huge volumes of data and trying to make sense of the values rapidly.

The links on the Second Moment site are grouped by various branches of statistics and descriptive phrases that mean more to mathematicians than Xenky The links themselves, however, are quite useful. The categories on the Second Moment site include General, Sampling, Multivariate Analysis, Regression and Smoothing, Time Series, Non-Parametric, Artificial Neural Networks, Statistical Data on the Net, and Contributed Papers. The selected links below are to the Second Moment site and represent those that seem of particular usefulness to the online and information community. The index to the Second Moment pointers is not on the site. itBulletin happily creates a list of pointers for readers of itBulletin. Just select a topic and jump directly to the Second Moment lists.

1. General Statistics Site Links (9 links as of October 5, 2002)
2. Multivariate Analysis Site Links (7 links as of October 5, 2002)
3. Regression and Smoothing Site Links (10 links)
4. Time Series Site Links (8 links as of October 5, 2002)
5. Nonparametric Site Links (8 links as of October 5, 2002)
6. Artificial Neural Networks Site Links (16 links identified as the work of Dr. Hal White grouped under "Introduction and General Information," "Applications," "Free Software," "Commercial Software," "Neural Network Resources and Links," and "Neural Network Researchers" as of October 5, 2002)
7. Statistical Data on the Net Site Links (40 links grouped under "U.S. Government Sites with International Statistics," "United Nations," "Intergovernmental and Nongovernmental Organizations," "Academic Web Sites," "Major Business Journals" which is arguably the weakest portion of this other wise useful set of pointers as of October 5, 2002)

One conspicuous omission is the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). These OECD data — like most statistical exhaust — must be scruntinized before being accepted as the Gospel according to Mathematicus, and are located here.

Robert Aunger's The Electric Meme, published earlier this year, is an important book. Not easy to read but significant. Write down this phrase: "spike train." Click here to jump to more information about this concept.

The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think (Simon & Schuster, 2002 ISBN 0-7432-150-7) provides a scholarly analysis of the meme. A "meme" is a word coined by Oxford biologist and featured Boxmind lecture personality Richard Dawkins. The "meme" refers to information that replicates and mutates as people communicate. The term "meme" was derived from "gene" and connotes the replicating function of a mother and father creating children.

It is no secret that publishers have cut back on their editorial staffing. Simon & Schuster may wish to do a little more work on manuscripts from Cambridge professors. Mr. Aunger yields either to the counsel of a 20-something who thinks that buzzwords make a book better or to the notion that a scholarly work is more hip with coinages (neuromemetics), references to computer arcana (MOV $0$1), marketing jargon plucked from a Cisco brochure ("digital ecologies"), and the use of weird polysyllabic words ("depauperate") when a plain word would be less pretentious.

Herewith are the highlights of the book which readers are encouraged to buy: The information professional will want to focus on pages 223 to 225 (see the short discussion of "spike train" below) and on the discussion of thought as a tangible entity (pages 282 and following).

If an idea is fungible (my $5 word), then the whole approach to intellectual property has an interesting new angle. Other reviewers of this book ignored or skipped lightly over the implications for taking an idea from one author and incorporating that idea into another article. If a meme is indeed an entity, that entity is no longer fuzzy. IP is a thing like a diamond. Things are easier to value than intangible froth like ideas.

The reader with an interest in valuing intellectual property will want to jump directly to page 325 and get a terse, cogent summary of another key idea — the meme is yet another aspect of the science of networks (see Xenky No. 2). itBulletin believes that understanding the behavior of social and technical networks is essential to success in tomorrow's world. Furthermore, the science of networks is easier to see as a driving force in innovation. The discussion of replication of ideas underscores what itBulletin intuitively accepted but lacked the academic facts to argue convincingly that the evolution of software, ideas, even household appliances is baked into being human.

In fairness to the reader, if you are in search of a "Who Stole My Cheese" or "Swimming with Oprah", skip The Electric Meme. This is a book for a person with an open mind, a couple of years of Latin and some grounding in science and philosophy. The reader will need the discipline to sit, read, and think about Mr. Aunger's statements.

More about Riding the Spike Train

The idea is that when information hits the mind, neurons fire. Certain information has specific properties. Examples include "ideas" that make intuitive sense to most humans like fire and the wheel as well as "thoughts" that rerun fragments of tunes or make owning a hula hoop a must-have item.

The word "meme" is a product of the mind of Richard Dawkins. Robert Aunger has focused his considerable reasoning and research skills at analyzing the who, what, why, when, and where of "memes."

For those interested in electronic information, the big idea is the discussion of the "spike train." In the brain, when an "idea" hits, the sequence of neurons and other brain mechanisms that fire up comprises a spike train.

A spike train can be measured using the diagnostic devices that have done much to boost the cost of health care.

The stronger the idea, the more pronounced the spike train. If Mr. Aunger is correct in his discussion of memes' impact on minds, then measuring the electrical charge associated with a spike train triggered by idea offers a possible way to measure information. What can be measured can be value according to a metric. Implications of the "spike train" range from testing music for its ability to hook the listener to monitoring the impact of a fact. (itBulletin envisions some information companies charging by the spike train unit when an online customer reads a story and has a surge in brain activity.)

Follow On Reading

itBulletin wants to be your sixth grade teacher. Read or become familiar with these books as well. Get in front of the curve with regard to measuring the "weight" of ideas and the nuances of network thinking.

• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. This is the must-read. The place where memes began. For readers who enjoy a challenge, Mr. Aunger's book includes a nearly 20-page bibliography
• Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics As a Science by Robert Aunger, editor. Quality of essays varies widely.
• The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore, Richard Dawkins. Good ideas but somewhat of a dreary read. Do not read when you want to be sharp for a meeting beginning in 30 minutes.
• Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson. Fresh, somewhat lively, and useful for looking at the big picture with regard to network behavior. This will appeal to the reader with a biological bent.
• The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen Jay Gould. A best-selling author dabbles with things memetic. May he rest in peace.
• Nexus: Small Worlds and the Ground breaking Science of Networks by Mark Buchanan. See the Xenky review in no. 2.
• Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by Richard Brodie. More accessible than Mr. Aunger's book.

itBulletin reads—er, flips through—the New York Times each day. Tuesday, October 8, 2002, struck our senior analyst, Ben Kent, as a Gothic red letter day.

He called to our attention several items:

1. Bertelsmann's Regret
   
   First, Bertelsmann offerred "regret" for its Nazi-era conduct. Ah, regret. Meaningful. Ben Kent read aloud for us the following sentence in the story: "Still, Bertelsmann's management, with its expression of regret stopped short of apologizing for the company's wartime record." Can you really apologize for the actions of a different generation and what we view as a different company?" said Tim Arnold, who coordinated the [independent commission appointed by Bertelsmann in late 1998 to investigate discrepancies in the company's account of its [WWII] wartime history].
   
   "Excellent point, Tim," growled Ben Kent. itBullentin readers may wish to keep in mind that Bertelsmann is the fifth-largest media company. It owns Random House, the Literary Guild book club, the music group BMG, and the periodical publishing operation that churns out the must-read Family Circle.
   
   What did Bertelsmann history embrace? Seems as if there is what the Times tastefully describes as Bertelsmann's "Holocaust history." (Xenky is sure that the Holocaust did happen.)
   
   Most reassuring is the discovery that during the unpleasant interval under scrutiny, the company "remained a business enterprise whose publishing decisions were based on turnover, profit, investments, and other fiscal data."
   
   Most reassuring to us at itBulletin. Money comes first. "Grrrreat," added Ben Kent.
   
   
2. Credit Suisse, Money, Research, and Money
   
   Next, on the first page of that Tuesday's business section, Ben chewed out the story headlined "Documents Suggest Credit Suisse Linked Banking and Research." He snarled, "That's distorting research to sell the bank's own financial instruments. No. No Swiss banker would knowingly manipulate data to benefit the institution, himself, and, of course, the much-loved St. Bernard dogs faithfully serving their masters."
   
   We reminded Ben Kent that temptation is a lure that even the strong must resist. Adding a word here or changing a number there is a constant battle even for the Swiss.
   
   "How can data be misrepresented!?" howled Benny. "The Swiss have such tidy stacks of firewood. Their dairy cows are scrubbed and groomed each day. Their currency is strong. Their neutrality is admirable."
   
   itBulletin had no answer.
   
   
3. Investors Question VC Firms
   
   The final article Ben flagged had the title "Big Investors Push for Disclosure on How Venture Firms Are Faring."
   
   itBulletin skipped this story. Seemed a bit obvious even to us. Mr. Kent licked his teeth and read aloud this sentence: "Some of the returns for young venture partnerships look very, very bad, but they might not turn out to be so bad."

   Okay, Ben Kent, what's your point? Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then.

Xenky's Response

itBulletin flipped to section C and circled in yellow highlighter the story with the headline "Two Magazines Are Shut and a Third Revamps."

Ben Kent looked blankly at itBulletin and asked, "So what?"

"The point," Xenky said quietly, "is that Upside Magazine is down." How sad. itBulletin contributed a story about network security in the salad days of the magazine in its salad days. Another cheerleader for the Dot Com economy has suffered a fatal heart attack. Sad.

With PC sales mired in a swamp of buyer indifference, consumer products seem destined to gain Internet connectivity. Lucky Goldstar — now known as LG Electronics — has introduced a Web-enabled refrigerator. The LCD sits next to the ice maker.

One brake on the diffusion of Internet connectivity to smart homes (think watching babies and monitoring the activities of a housekeeper) and appliances (think smart lawn watering systems that can be turned on and off via a Web browser) has been the consistent evolution of connectivity standards, communication protocols, and the other functions that have the job of making the intelligent microwave connect to the Internet.

Embedded Internet subsystems have had an engineering drawback not shared by PC-type devices, including personal digital assistants. The instructions on the embedded chip that perform the functions the consumer sees are generally stable. Recipes are displayed in somewhat standard ways. But when a communications or other systems protocol changes, the gizmo may stop working. The fix is about as pleasant as a trip to the dentist and possibly more expensive.

Communication protocols such as the waffling of the 802.11 groups about a, c, and the other flavors of wireless are one example. What this means is that the embedded chips can be programmed to deliver basic functions but when a communications protocol changes or becomes prominent such as 802.11g, the only way to solve the problem was to create a new chip set. Consumers are generally not too thrilled when they have an opportunity to pull a circuit board from an appliance, slap in a new board, and reboot the fridge.

One brake on the diffusiton of Internet connectivity to homes (think watching babies and monitoring the activities of a housekeeper) and appliances (think smart lawn watering sysgtems that can be turned on and off via a Web browser) has been the consistent evolution of connectivity standards, communication protocols, and the other functions that have the job of making the intelligent microwave connect to the Internet.

Electronic Engineering Times (September 30, 2002) carried an informative, suggestive news story about NetSilicon, Inc. This Waltham, Massachusetts-based firm has introduced what the EE Times author described as "an emerging breed of 'Net-centric operating environments."

NetCentric has not invented new technology. The company has selected a range of software from Open Sources. These technologies have been shoehorned into a development tool that has several new capabilities.

First, NetSilicon uses an "integrated system architecture." The idea is that a programmer creates the functions to make the fridge smart and codes the connectivity functions to NetSilicon's abstraction layer. This "abstraction layer" works like a look up table on steroids.

Second, NetSilicon allows the developer to update via software the communications and protocol functions in the embedded device. Java fans will thrill that this programming language makes the NetSilicon technology accessible. Programmers define variables and terms for them in such a way that any application program can understand them. With a common code structure, changes to the instructions that deal with the protocols can be made automatically within the embedded device's firmware. The NetSilicon approach opens the door for a consumer appliance or anything with a source of electrical power to function as a Java Virtual Machine. Java controls the JVM. The JVM interacts with the global store, and the need for complex C language programs in embedded devices is sent to the showers along with the need to do hard upgrades.

Third, NetSilicon creates a "global store" of these variables within the firmware. Programmers can use there objects in their programs as well as exploit the global store to give embedded devices greater flexibility and a first-line of defense against obsolescence imposed by a changing protocol. From the consumer's point of view, the smart fridge built on NetSilicon's technology will not have to be replaced when a tweak to wireless connectivity protocols is required to keep the refrigerator online and, itBulletin assumes, "inteligent."

NetSilicon is one of the first companies to introduce this type of technology. Other companies are in the market as well. Green Hills Software, Wind River Systems, and Lynux Work provide similar capabilities but as separate modules. Emware Inc. and Axeda Systems are also firms that are active in this market. NetSilicon has bundled these functions together and tossed in the abstraction layer that works around having to tear down a smart refrigerator because the child's mobile phone can't report how much ice cream is in the freezer.

The drive to connect appliances to the Internet is part of the new product development ecology starting to gait a foothold in the sterile economic climate for traditoinal computers. Internet connectivity will force hardware and software into new forms.

NetSilicon offers its tools for less than $2,000. itBulletin believes that this company may find it difficult to withstand market entry by larger firms. A goose quack of praise to this firm for its fresh, clever way of giving embedded devices more flexibiity and a longer useful life.

Look for other companies — including Microsoft and IBM — to jump into this niche. The NetSilicon approach is a better way to handle consumer devices' Intenet and communications functions. By unhooking the input sources from data structures, new features and functions can be added to embedded devices more cheaply.