Tech, untethered

"If you rewind to Comdex 2000, Bill Gates talked about pervasive computing and wireless.

It's taken five years for wireless infrastructure to catch up," says Scott Frost, chairman of Nevada's Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology.

"The hold ups were processing power and lack of broadband availability,"he says."Now, with those two things in place, all the consumer gadgets that will hang off this network will explode."

And those gadgets will become aware of each other.Once people grant their cell phones permissions, says Frost, people could walk through a mall collecting coupons for discounts or freebies.

People might walk through a trade show and collect a batch of blind dates from birds of a feather.

It all depends on what profiles the cell phone is set to share.

No one disputes that the cell phone is the leading lady of gadgets, and another starring role in technology next year may be VoIP (Voice-over-Internet protocol).

"This year,more VoIP phones were purchased than regular phones," says Dave Archer, a marketing consultant in Reno.

The home phone won't be obsolete, he adds, as it will be able to transfer calls to your cell phone.

A similar application is IPTV, which uses the Internet to deliver ondemand television programming anywhere in the world.

Verizon Wireless has signed on as the first cellular carrier that will offer a broadcast TV network for mobile phones that Qualcomm Inc.

plans to launch in late 2006.

Already, Cingular has rolled out a broadband connection service in major U.S.

cities that lets customers use their laptops to access the Internet or e-mail, download large files and attachments, and run corporate business applications.

Next year it promises add-ons to transmit full-motion video and provide screaming streaming audio.

"My slogan is faster, smaller,more powerful," says Rafael Cappucci, founder and president of Vision ASP in Carson City, an Internet consulting company.

Cell, PDA and hand-held devices will converge or integrate, he says.Various products will be streamlined into one unit.

On the business front, says Cappucci, the watchword will be vulnerability.

Companies increasingly will conduct security assessments to ensure that their networks are secure and employees have access to what they need and only what they need.

In business, cost matters.As commercial software upgrades continue to climb in price and complexity,more look to open source software.

"There's a lot of experimentation going on with open source," says Sheri Elpern of Elpern and Associates Hi-Tech Marketing Consulting in Reno."Linux has a tremendous installed base, especially in the telecommunications field."

Elpern notes that the Linux operating system is set to grow by at least 15 percent a year for the next five years.

"People aren't aware of the productivity software that's as good as commercial software," says Elpern."New companies are creating a business around open source software."

Not all the innovation is in gadgetry.

At the Institute for Innovation and Informatics at the University of Nevada,Reno, research is under way on energy technologies, says Tim Casey, executive director.

Specifically, the research focuses on solar, geothermal, biomass, hydrogen fuel cell production and storage.

Researchers focus as well on the material sciences, particularly nanotechnology innovations in which a single layer of atoms could make a surface slicker, absorbent or reactive or non-reactive to other materials.