Sheridon, who expects the first Xerox offering to emerge next year, reckons that an 8 1/2 x 11-inch sheet might cost less than three dollars and be reusable up to four million times.
8. His Master's Voice
Speech Recognition ETA: 3.5 years
Star Trek seems positively quaint when Mr. Spock loads data onto a floppy disk and hands it to a crewman. But more than 30 years after the Vulcan issued his first voice commands to the ship's computer, most of us are still tapping away at keyboards.
Nevertheless, speech recognition is slowly catching up with its promise. ''We're at the point now where we have real applications, real communication products,'' says Nelson Morgan, director of the International Computer Science Institute, a research center affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley. But, Morgan adds, ''They're the low-hanging fruit,'' such as dictation products.
Audio mining, the ability to search and retrieve chunks of spoken data, is a bit further up the tree, according to Morgan. Currently, the technology works best in a controlled environment, with careful use of microphones, and with expensive equipment. But in a few years, it's possible that two finance managers could chat in an airport lounge, record the text on their PDAs, and search it back at the office.
Voice Signal Technologies Inc., based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is working toward embedding speech-recognition technology in a variety of appliances, from cell phones to automobiles. And researchers at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science have developed a half-dozen voice-driven applications that provide everything from weather information to airline schedules.
Of course, the Holy Grail of speech recognition is speech-to-speech translation -- the target of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute in Pittsburgh. The institute's Janus system translates from English or German into English, German, or Japanese. Commercially available systems that allow users to move beyond narrowly defined subject matters are still several years away. But speaking into a telephone in English, and communicating, at least in a rudimentary way, with someone who speaks Mandarin, now seems possible. In time, such technology could be a boon for companies that sell globally over the Net.
9. Parallel Parking
Holographic data storage ETA: 4 years
Information is now the customer's No. 1 asset,'' says Bill Monahan, CEO of Oakdale, Minnesota-based storage technology provider Imation. ''They will need more storage, better management capability, and new services.''
Certainly, graphics, images, video, and sound are maxing out traditional storage devices. Even though densities of two- dimensional media (magnetic disks, optical disks, and magnetic tape) have increased more than 60 percent annually in recent years, those gains have come by packing and stacking individual bits of data closer together. That approach may fast be reaching its limit.
Storing information in three dimensions, using holography, can increase capacity dramatically. Essentially, a hologram is produced when a laser reference beam interferes with another beam reflected from the object to be recorded. The pattern of interference is captured by photographic film, a light-sensitive crystal, or some other optical material. Illuminating the pattern with the reference beam reproduces a 3D image of the object.
A block of photo-refractive material a few millimeters thick can record and store hundreds of images at different angles, without cross-interference -- individual angles provide a different view of the same object. Holographic data storage works the same way, with each angle storing a different page of information.
Imation is collaborating with Lucent Technologies to develop holographic drives. Imation management reckons the company will produce a 125-gigabyte disk by 2003. Future disks should hold about 1 terabyte, or eight times as much data.
One caveat: Holographic technology is analog. Therefore, corporate users will need some serious processing power to read the massive amounts of data stored on the drives. It's likely, therefore, that first-generation holographic storage devices will serve to complement magnetic storage methods. But for companies looking for high-speed access to massive data warehouses, 3D storage could prove to be an immediate solution.
10. Wired and Emotional
Human-computer interaction ETA: 5 years
Dan Russell is a man with a plan. Russell, head of user sciences and experience research at IBM's Almaden Research Lab in California's Silicon Valley, wants to make the relationship between humans and computers, well... more personal. After all, the basic computing experience hasn't changed much since PCs first showed up on workers' desks. ''The best analogy I can give is that the design of amusement parks took a major shift when Disneyland opened [in the 1950s],'' Russell says. ''Until that point, amusement parks had been assemblages of rides, but Disney designed an experience.'' Computing is like that, Russell says. ''Right now, we've got a motley assembly of applications on the desktop, laptop, wherever. There's no reason they can't be more coherent.''
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