10 Innovations, Areas to Keep An Eye on
Changing the Look of Living Rooms, Phones, Jets

By P-I Staff Members Todd Bishop, John Cook, Dan Richman and James Wallace

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 31, 2004 -- From rapid advances in airplane materials to steady progress by open-source software, companies in the Seattle region remain at the forefront - and in the firing line - of some of the world's major technology trends. Here are five of those trends to watch in the coming year.

HOME ENTERTAINMENT CONVERGENCE: Is that device in your living room a television, a stereo or a personal computer? Five years ago, the answer would have been more clear.

But the lines between the dominant avenues of home entertainment are becoming increasingly blurry. The trend is already reshaping the computer and home-electronics industries, and it promises to continue.

In the middle of the fray is Microsoft Corp., traditionally known for personal computer operating systems and productivity software. The company this year debuted a third iteration of its Windows Media Center PC software, with a remote-controlled interface designed for watching and recording television and other media on a PC.

"Clearly, we're taking Windows and the PC and making them the best multipurpose device," Microsoft's Bill Gates said as he introduced the new version of the Media Center PC software earlier this year.

Whether the mass market buys into Microsoft's "multipurpose" view remains to be seen. Sales of Media Center PCs remain a small fraction of the home PC market.

And some industry analysts aren't convinced that a large percentage of consumers will embrace the concept of PC as home- entertainment hub.

Hedging its bets, Microsoft is also approaching the market from the other direction, offering software to run inside set-top boxes from cable TV operators such as Comcast.

And there's no shortage of competition for the Redmond software company on the home-entertainment front.

TiVo, Sony Corp. and others are increasingly offering consumer- electronics devices with characteristics of PCs, including hard drives for storing digital content.

COMPOSITES: Lightweight and stronger than metal, carbon-based synthetic compounds known as composites have been widely used for decades in products including golf and tennis clubs and military aircraft.

Now, the aerospace industry is about to take a quantum leap in the use of composites on commercial jetliners.

The 555-passenger Airbus A380, scheduled to enter service in 2006, will have about 22 percent composites by weight. That is far more than any commercial jetliner flying today.

But The Boeing Co. is pushing the composite envelope much further. The company's 7E7 jetliner, scheduled to enter service in 2008, will be about 52 percent composites by weight. Nearly the entire airframe of the 7E7 - wings, nose, tail and fuselage - will be composite. It is the same material used on the tail section of the 777, Boeing's last all-new jet developed in the early 1990s.

In addition to the substantial weight savings that composites offer, which means better fuel mileage and cost savings for airlines, the extensive use of composites on the 7E7 will dramatically reduce the amount of maintenance needed on the jetliner. Composites do not wear or corrode like metal. Boeing says it has never had a maintenance issue with the composite empennage of the 777.

Given the efficiency gains of using composites, Boeing says it can't imagine that it will ever again build a jetliner airframe out of metal.

VOIP: Voice-over-Internet Protocol, or VOIP, offers the promise of low-cost phone service over the Internet, using conventional phones. It's a growing phenomenon. In early November, there were more than 600,000 U.S. subscribers to VOIP, up from about 130,000 last year, according to the Yankee Group.

Several national companies offer VOIP locally. AT&T Corp. sells it for homeowners in some Western Washington cities. Qwest Communications International Inc. is offering its OneFlex VOIP service, for business owners, in some metropolitan areas. Comcast has said it will make VOIP available in Seattle and elsewhere by the end of 2005. Verizon already makes VOIP available to Seattle-area customers.

Among local companies, Seattle's Speakeasy began offering residential VOIP in September. TeleSym of Seattle said it's working to make more secure software used for mobile VOIP.

In October, Bellevue's AccessLine Communications introduced VOIP service for businesses. And Microsoft this year released "Istanbul," software for office workers that works with VOIP, traditional telephones and other forms of communications.

WIMAX: Just what the high-tech industry needed, another arcane acronym. But WiMax -which stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access - is a wireless technology worth watching. And that's not just because big names such as Dell, Fujitsu, Intel and Motorola have tossed their weight behind it.

Often dubbed "Wi-Fi on steroids," WiMax promises to deliver high- speed wireless Internet connectivity up to 30 miles. That means a laptop user could buy a book on Amazon.com at the zoo, check e-mail at the coffee shop down the street and then on the drive home pull up a restaurant review - all without losing an Internet connection.

WiMax is still in the early stages of development, with some predicting that it will be another year or two before it firmly takes root. Others claim that it is massively overhyped. But the technology could help solve a problem that has plagued the communications industry for years, getting high-speed Internet connections cheaply into homes and businesses. With WiMax, there is no longer a need to dig up city streets to lay fiber-optic cable. It also could provide high-speed Internet service for small towns that have been bypassed by the phone or cable giants.

Dozens of entrepreneurial companies are jockeying for position in the WiMax market, including Kirkland-based Clearwire and Seattle- based Speakeasy. Both companies, which are backed by Intel, have said they plan to roll out WiMax networks that cover entire cities or counties. Speakeasy will begin testing a forerunner to the WiMax technology next month, with a wireless network that covers most of downtown Seattle. Clearwire, which operates proprietary networks in Jacksonville, Fla.; St. Cloud, Minn.; and Abilene, Texas, plans to roll out wireless broadband networks in 20 cities in the next year. Over time, both companies plan to transition to WiMax-enabled equipment.

OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE: Open-source software, created by communities of programmers who freely share the results of their work, isn't a new trend. But it is a growing one.

Microsoft has devoted much of its attention in this area to the competitive threat posed by Linux, the open-source alternative to the Redmond company's dominant Windows operating system. The company's strategy includes trying to show that the total cost of installing, maintaining and running Linux can often be more than the total cost of using Windows.

The stakes are high for the company, as Windows in its different forms continues to reign as Microsoft's biggest moneymaker. The company's success in fending off Linux has been mixed so far, with some customers, particularly governments, adopting or seriously considering the open-source alternative.

In the meantime, another open-source program looks to be gaining ground on a different Microsoft product. Mozilla's open-source Firefox browser has been slowly chipping away at the huge market share enjoyed by Internet Explorer, partly because of security concerns associated with the Microsoft browser.

To find this and other great articles by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, go to their website at www.seattlepi.com.