DVD drives could begin outselling CD ROM drives by the end of the year. They should catch on fast because they offer better video and up to six times as much content. [Lonnie Brown, NYT. SJM, 03May98, 4E.]

Motion Factory Inc. (Fremont, CA) is a "software robot" factory started by David Zhu and other Stanford roboticists. They supply scriptable animated 3D characters for computer games and websites. "You can direct them as you would a real actor," with instructions to walk, sit, grasp, or even react intelligently to sword thrusts. See examples on the 3Dfx website this June, or in next year's Prince of Persia 3D. [Steve Hamm, BW, 04May98, 158C.]

The CrossPad notebook from Cross and IBM is a convenient way to get handwritten notes into your computer, but it's also expensive. The pad is $399, plus another $39 if you lose the [somewhat top-heavy] pen. (Subsequent pens are then $79.) You also have to remember to hit the "Next Page" button every time you flip a paper page; otherwise the electronic texts will be superimposed. CrossPad's "Ink Manager" software is convenient, but word recognition is only about 90% accurate (and worse for block lettering). You might find yourself better served by a sheet-fed or flatbed scanner for under $200, such as the PaperPort from Visioneer . Visioneer also sells software to organize handwritten files, much like Ink Manager. [Mike Langberg, SJM, 03May98, 1E.]

The Internet boasts plenty of cool technologies, but one that's making a difference is RealAudio (and RealVideo, and RealFlash animation). These streaming technologies were developed for to overcome Internet limitations, and we still don't have enough bandwidth for their widespread success. Still, the fifth generation of RealAudio (in three years) gives you passable sound at 28.8kbps, better at 56kbps, and "downright enjoyable" at 80kbps. Meanwhile, a large developer community has been growing around the RealNetworks conferences. More than 1K developers and exhibitors showed up recently, at $895 each. (Gee, TCC is such a bargain by comparison! :-) 48 companies exhibited related technologies for creating, storing, serving, and selling multimedia content. They're building new browsers and a new industry around streaming. 35K sites already carry RealNetworks media, up from 8K last year. Barriers to entry are small, enabling anyone to join. The big players, though, are the old media companies. [David Plotnikoff, SJM, 03May98, 1E.] (From which Microsoft will no doubt purchase whatever companies it wants.)

You can check out the latest buzzwords on Wired magazine's Encyclopedia of the New Economy, . A-to-N is available, with O-to-Z by the end of this month. Can you define "disintermediation," "coopetition," and Grossman's paradox? [SJM, 04May98, 1E.]

Excite has agreed to pay Netscape about $70M over two years for the privilege of putting up an Excite-based search page under Netscape's logo. (Weird, no?) Netscape already offers links to Excite and other search services (for which it earns $40M/year), but expects to make an additional $30M from sponsoring a search page more directly. Excite expects to make $100M from increased traffic and higher advertising rates. [David L. Wilson, SJM, 05May98, 1C.] (Meanwhile Lycos is linking up with AT&T, etc. Too bad the deals are based on audience share instead of best search technology. I'll stick with AltaVista and occasionally Hotbot.)

Silicon Valley realtors are still charging 6%, despite quick sales at very high prices. (Average sale time was 31 days in Mar98.) Commission rates are negotiable, but sellers are apparently satisfied with the returns they're getting. Columnist Dan Gillmor suspects that prices will come down as brokers lose control over listings information. The Internet is making it much easier for homeowners to do their own listings, possibly reaching an even wider audience. Technology may also encroach on other broker services, such as comparing offers and getting documents in order. Brokers will still be involved, but their fees should approach their true cost of doing business. [SJM, 21Apr98, 1C.]

To see how some of that technology may work, check out the special report "Good-bye to Fixed Pricing?" in the 04May98 Business Week. It profiles Internet auction sites, online exchanges, "won't be undersold" discount services, and even Coke vending machines that can alter price based on inventory and air temperature. Bargaining power is shifting to consumers, but with economies for producers, distributors, and sales people as well. In the past, it could take months for a large company to implement price changes. Now this "menu cost" and time are near zero. Electronics help us get back to buyer/seller negotiation, which is how prices were set before railroads and canals permitted wide distribution of goods. Electronic markets are especially compelling for fire-sale bargains, unique items (e.g., famous paintings), and perishable commodities such as airline seats, phone capacity, and desktop computers. Used cars have been selling well -- 6K/month -- at AucNet, with sellers typically getting more than they would on a used car lot. (That's due partly to consumer confidence in a quality inspection system implemented by AucNet.) Fluid prices may soon spread everywhere, and companies will have to start compete via custom packages, personalization, and loyalty programs. [Amy Cortese, BW, 04May98, pp. 71-84.]

87% of 30 tracked consumer items could be purchased more cheaply on the net than in stores, according to a recent survey. "Bots" in the Lycos, Yahoo!, and Excite shopping services are helping people find the bargains. They use spiders and search engines developed by InfoSpace, Junglee, and Netbot. (Excite bought Netbot for $35M.) AgentSoft is another company helping others build bots. Early bots had to deal with a hodgepodge of data formats, but retailers will soon be using XML tags to help them out. A next generation of bots will be able to negotiate prices based on time constraints and other variables. Even better sales bots are needed, to avoid price wars that ignore all product/merchant features except price. [Heather Green, BW, 04May98, p. 84.]

Graphplan/SATPLAN: "blackbox" planning system, in C.

Santa Fe Ant solutions: data for ant algorithm optimizations.

QDStat: user-friendly statistical analysis package.

NICO 1.0: NN toolkit for speech applications.

fuzzyTECH/fuzzyLAB: microcontroller development system.

BrainSport: shareware foreign language trainer for Windows.

SurfSaver: Web clipping/bookmark organizer.

Genetic Programming and Data Structures: book by W.B. Langdon.

2nd On-line World Conf. on Soft Computing in Engineering Design and Manufacturing (WSC2): proceedings.

The Encyclopedia of Jasmine - Book 1: OODB book from Sirius Press.

Betriebswirtschaftliche Andwendungen des Soft Computing: management book ed. by Biethahn et al.

Neuron Simulation Environment: summer course at SDSC.

Just for the heck of it, Dave Babcock is writing an IBM 1620 emulator for his PalmPilot. The 1620 was an $80K machine back in the 1960s. It had to load arithmetic tables into memory before doing calculations, so Babcock has simulated that. The PalmPilot is still a lot faster, though. Also a lot smaller and cheaper. [Chris Nolan, SJM, 04May98, 1E.]

Molecules are capable of much greater diversity and complexity than we have yet tapped with wires and silicon surfaces. Genetic engines can build tiny electrical and mechanical systems from components with rich interaction modes. (Those interactions are problematic for us now, but will ultimately be useful.) Indeed, biological life itself can be so engineered, as far as we know. (No word yet on the creation of souls, although cloned sheep and test-tube babies show difficulties to be unlikely.)

Biotechnology companies are on the verge of breakthrough technologies. It cost $2.5M to sequence a gene in 1974; now the cost is $150. Monsanto used to try about 60 new potato genes per year in the 1980s; now it can try 10K/year. Gene data libraries are doubling every 12-24 months, in the same range as Moore's Law for semiconductors. This knowledge, plus corporate acquisitions and mergers, may soon produce biotech companies larger than Microsoft and Intel. Leaders include Monsanto, DuPont, and Novartis (in Switzerland, formerly Sandoz and Ciba Geigy). [NYT. SJM, 02May98, 1C.]

The Drake Equation is a way of estimating how many intelligent civilizations our galaxy may currently host, to within a few orders of magnitude. It includes estimates such as ten stars forming per year, half of all stars having planetary systems, a couple of those planets being suitable for life, etc. If life commonly evolves on such planets and if 1% develop to intelligence, we can estimate that the number of technically advanced civilizations in the galaxy is about 0.1 times the average lifetime of such a civilization. Thus if an average civilization lasts a million years, there could be 100K such civilizations in our galaxy.

Now consider the pace of evolution. Human intelligence depends on a complex brain, which has quadrupled in size (although probably not in connection complexity) over the past 3M years. Call that a doubling time of 1.5M years, which is astonishingly rapid development for such a structure. However, note that our microprocessors and other chips are doubling in transistor density (or "complexity") every 1.5 years, or a million times as fast. It's harder to measure our progress in algorithms and intelligent systems, but certainly their improvement is also spectacular. (Look at speech recognition, for instance. A PC can now respond to more commands than can a dog or chimp.) By the year 2000, Intel expects 100M-transistors chips able to execute 2B instructions per second. It seems likely that we will soon -- in 100 to 1,000 years? -- create artificial intelligences. A significant fraction of other intelligent species will do likewise, given enough time.

We can further suppose that artificial intelligences will help their biological creators survive, or will at least endure and spread beyond the limits of their creators. Hence civilizations that develop artificial intelligence are likely to be the longest-lasting and most wide-spread in the galaxy. They greatly increase the number of civilizations we could encounter. When we do meet our neighbors, it is likely that they will be very old civilizations, and most likely they will be non-biological. [Efram E. Goldstein , comp.ai, 30Apr98.] (Perhaps they will be biomechanical hybrids: cyborgs. Or we may find the distinction irrelevant, as molecular components replace our bulk technologies.)

-- Ken