Researchers are close to a number of breakthroughs in nanotechnology, which is focused on atomic-level manipulation of substances. Every industry can end up being affected by these advances. For example, a company in North Carolina will sell you a virtual reality-equipped nanomanipulator for $85,000. Manufacturers have created nanotubes of carbon that are 100 times stronger than steel. And IBM has created transistors from nanotubes only 10 atoms across, promising fantastic supercomputers the size of a dime.

MIT’s Auto-ID project was originally sponsored by Sun, Procter & Gamble, Gillette, International Paper and the Uniform Code Council. A goal of the center is to identify technology and standards that place unique electromagnetic identification on each individual manufactured product. This, together with short-range wireless scanning technology, will replace the current UPC or bar codes. The standards and technology can enable a machine to scan and identify a product and access crucial information about it such as when and where a product was made, from where it was shipped, and how it should be handled, prepared and safely used. The result will be products that can talk to the devices in your home — like a frozen dinner that tells the microwave how to cook it, or medicine that tells the medicine cabinet to reorder. This will also revolutionize the supply chain as products can be tracked and managed throughout their life cycle.

In B2B, radio frequency labeling is already a reality, and the Holy Grail of cheap RF tags is being pursued with a vengeance. Arising from this will be all kinds of decision support applications that help you track your inventory from birth through delivery.

The downside lies in the potential privacy aspects of RFIDs. Some consumers are wary of how this tracking technology might be used for more than commerce.

Regardless of the OS, PDAs are increasingly being seen as an enterprise computing platform despite the dramatic decline in PDA sales — Palm declined by 9 percent, year over year, HP’s shipments fell 31 percent and Handspring’s shipments dropped 30 percent.

The rise of alternate devices will end the reign of the PC, and the PC’s demise as the center of B2B computing will have far-reaching effects. As the environment becomes more intelligent, it will become more important to be able to do business anywhere, via PDA/phone convergence, TV/PC convergence, or other, unforeseen (and unseen) convergences. This means virtual desktops accessible from anywhere and the accelerated migration of computing power and content to the network.

Internet access is not necessarily the killer app, but, besides voice, no one’s figured out what is. So they’re throwing everything and the kitchen sink into converged devices that cost less and less. Video Blogging might come out of the pack to take the lead.

But it will take the improvement of voice recognition and control services such as predictive text input to make wireless phones viable for B2B.

The convergence of wireless access with Personal Digital Assistants and other forms of mobile computing will finally set office workers free of the office. Ubiquitous computing will be here by the end of the decade.

The technology spawns a new acronym: PAN (Personal Area Network). Bluetooth aims to replace all the wires that tether you to devices, such as headphones, printer cables, and PDA synch cords. Despite the release of new Bluetooth-enabled devices, this trend is still a bit shaky due to the failure of an interoperability demonstration at the recent CeBit and concerns for Bluetooth’s propensity to interfere with other wireless networking protocols. Plus, hard competition from 802.11b standard, which uses the same radio spectrum, could contribute to a lack of acceptance for Bluetooth.

P2P involves making use of the idle resources represented by your computer and millions like it. The typical Internet-connected computer is idle a great deal of the working day, and probably switched off at night. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing aims to put these idle resources to work by creating pools of processor power, disk space, and bandwidth that can be harnessed to achieve significant results.

Despite the hype deflation, P2P is an idea that has come to stay, in our opinion. More on P2P in our white papers Peer-to-Peer Computing and Business Networks: More Than Meets the Ear and The Buzz About Hive Computing. Also, we track the P2P market with our P2P for Business Directory. You can get the latest P2P news as well.

If the ILECs aren’t careful, the providers will find other ways into the home, bypassing their lucrative local loop. Fixed wireless could be a big winner in this case. Fixed wireless involves setting up antennas on houses and running the 802.11b, WiMAX, Motorola’s Canopy or other wireless networking protocols over it to give high bandwidth access to the Internet.

Personalization, up until now primarily a B2C phenomenon, will spread to the B2B world. Everything from the daily news feed to decision makers to customized procurement Web sites will incorporate this technology. The flip side, profiling, will finally enable B2B market research to blossom, producing a syndicated market for information on procurement preferences.

Once a Wireless Wallet standard become ubiquitous, all manner of micropayments will be made wirelessly. Nokia is testing its SmartCover service, a payment service joint development with Visa, and a secure credit card payment service with IBM.

Tracked here since May 2000, and supported by Sun, IBM, Aribaand others, the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (“UDDI”) project aims to design XML-based open standard specifications for how B2B trading partners can interoperate. The effort operates a registry that helps integrate business-to-business electronic commerce sites and Web services together. With dozens of applications and incompatible standards in B2B e-commerce today, connecting with trading partners can be difficult. The UDDI Universal Business Registry is live now, and contains information on how businesses of all sizes describe themselves and what their preferred means of doing e-commerce is. The project allows anyone to access a UDDI site from anywhere in the world via the Internet to look up all business services listed in the UDDI registry at no cost.

The rise of P2P has brought increased awareness to the importance of reputation assessment in public networks, with several writers predicting the rise of reputation servers. UDDI could morph into that space.

People have been trying to extend the capabilities of the Web almost since Tim Berners-Lee invented it in 1989. Developers complain that the HTTP protocol lacks interactivity and the HTML language lacks powerful formatting features. Over the years a variety of technologies have been introduced to try to remedy these shortcomings. Cookies and JavaScript try to address the interactivity deficits. Cascading Style Sheets and Dynamic HTML attempt to remedy the formatting limitations. Now, several efforts have sprung up to try to remake the Web completely.

Regardless of the implementation, there is a growing feeling that the Web isn’t cutting it, that it’s time for the next evolution. Some are worried that commercial interests might step in and make the New Web a proprietary, money-making solution. Others are worried that too much power will be given to decentralized, peer-to-peer interactions, circumventing centralized control of business uses. Whatever happens, it’s likely that the Internet will fragment, at least temporarily, as various competing schemes spring up with their Balkanizing plug-ins and helper applications.

Cable modems and DSL are becoming mass-market phenomena. This will drive down bandwidth prices for businesses as well. Fixed wireless looks to become a major player in the B2B market. By 2005, expect 4G networks running at 5 Mbps to 10 Mbps.

Typosquatting is the practice of registering near-miss domain names and getting visits from unsuspecting, fat-fingered Web users. The World Intellectual Property Organization awarded Yahoo Inc. 36 domains such as “ayhoo.com” and “myahoo.com” that had been registered and used by typosquatters. A mini-trend within the trend is the growing trend of “selling clicks.” The clickstream is becoming very valuable, and the battle over look-alike and type-alike sites has just begun.

Anyway, in the home of the future, everything will talk to everything, and you can control it all from the comfort of your easy chair, or from your computer at work, or from your cell phone on the way home in the car. Sounds great, but there is a down side: lots of opportunity for folks to obtain data about the way you live and then market their goods and services to you.

Popular Power and Distributed Science bit the dust. InfraSearch got bought by Sun for what one analyst called “fire sale” prices. Plenty of naysayers are elbowing each other out of the way to climb on the P2P Bust bandwagon. Beware of these wagon riders as well as the curmudgeons who insist, “There’s nothing new about P2P; that’s the way the Internet started.” Also beware those who claim security and reliability problems will make P2P impractical. These people are just as wrong as the starry eyed pumpers who forecast nothing but blue sky for this new technology. The answer is likely to be in between: P2P will turn out to be a great technology for some applications, and not so great for others. It will be one of many techniques in developers’ bags of tricks. We track the P2P market with our P2P for Business Directory.

This trend was removed because it is quiescent at the moment, and not an emerging trend. It was on the list since January 2001, and was tracked for 13 months.

A Top Level Domain (TLD) is the last part of a Web server’s name, like the .com in Yahoo.com. There a currently a handful of Generic TLDS (gTLDs), including .com, .net, and .org. The corporation that controls their use, known as ICANN, decided to add seven more gTLDs due to popular demand. They include .biz, .firm, .info, .pro, and .name.

This trend was removed because the scramble is over, although it was never a huge trend. It was on the list since February 2001, and was tracked for 2 years.

This trend was removed because it is now a fact, not an emerging trend. It was on the list since July 2000, and was tracked for 9 months.

This trend was removed because it is now a fact, not an emerging trend. It was on the list since July 2000, and was tracked for 12 months.

This trend was removed because it is now a fact, not an emerging tren – witness Kazaa, Morpheus, and other filesharing services.  It was on the list since July 2000, and was tracked for 12 months.