NEW EDIG

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November 22, 2003
The Best New Technologies of 2003
A number of broadly applicable technologies with the potential to change the home and workplace have been selected by Business 2.0 as the best new technologies of the year. Canon, Cornice, Hitachi, and Rio are marketing or developing micro hard drives that can store more data in smaller packages, which promises to dramatically boost the data storage capacity of personal digital assistants, cell phones, and camcorders, as well as increase computing's mobility. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), which have started to show up in automotive systems and consumer electronics, are being driven by cheap, simple fabrication methods; the technology has the potential to penetrate the medical industry as drug delivery systems and the telecommunications sector as tools to lower the cost and complexity of fiber-optic networks. Voice-Over-Internet Protocol (VOIP) now competes with traditional circuit-switched calls in terms of voice quality, due to breakthrough data compression and prioritization software that reduces lags and voice distortion. In addition to costing far less than circuit-switched calls, VOIP boasts an easier switchover process. The 64-bit computing age has been ushered in with the introduction of new chips such as Apple's G5 and AMD's Athlon 64, which are capable of processing up to 16 billion GB of data at a time; this means that companies with large databases will be able to significantly reduce their IT costs, while researchers and visual-effects experts will benefit from 64-bit computing's expanded memory. Business 2.0 also lists a set of promising technologies that could make their market debut next year, including LED light bulbs, ultrawideband, magnetoresistive random access memory, bioinformatics, gecko tape, organic light-emitting diodes, effective antispam software, WiMax wireless broadband, micro fuel cells, and radio frequency identification tags.