Analysts say email volume is likely to grow 45% this year, up from recent annual growth rates of 40%. Much of that volume is already junk mail and things are not expected to be different throughout 2002. "Even more time is going to be sucked away" from people's lives by dealing with spam, says Joyce Graff, an email analyst for the Gartner Group technology research firm. By some estimates, workers with email accounts spend an estimated one hour per shift dealing with their incoming messages. The spam attacks detected by Brightmail, an anti-spam service, have soared from 2,000 a day in mid-2000 to 28,000 during one day at the end of last year. Each attack could include tens of thousands of individual email targets.
BOSSWATCH
As civil rights advocates express concerns about managers snooping on their workers' online activities, a labour union in Australia has hit on the idea of letting workers find out more about what their bosses are up to. The New South Wales Labour Council has launched a website called Bosswatch, which tracks links between apparently separate companies and executives. The site offers an interlinked corporate database, whose main aim is to highlight networks of influence operating behind the scenes with players including company directors, shareholders and subsidiary companies. "Bosswatch will be a campaigning tool for workers who want to know who is exerting influence on their employer," says Labour Council secretary John Robertson. The information presented is publicly available, but has never been linked through a single database.
1GHz FOR LAPTOPS
Intel's biggest rival in PC processor manufacturer, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), has started selling a faster chip for inexpensive laptops, turning up the competition in the laptop processor market. AMD introduced a 1-GHz Duron chip that sells for US$160 in volume shipments. AMD, whose processors have grabbed sales from Intel in consumer-desktop PCs, is trying to build on that success with new chips for laptops. Chief executive Jerry Sanders told the industry that he wants the Sunnyvale, California-based company to have 50% market share - up from just 1.8% in March 2001. Compaq will offer systems with the new Duron chip right away, and the machines will be available in retail stores shortly.
MUSIC FINGERPRINTS
By the end of the year, Royal Philips Electronics, the Dutch electronics giant, will start licensing "Audio Fingerprinting". The technology allows mobile phone users to retrieve, within seconds, a song title, and artist and album details by holding their mobile phone to a stereo speaker for three seconds when the song is playing. The cell phone sends the fingerprint to a database that matches it with the identifying codes of almost every song ever recorded and released. Less than four seconds after dialling the service number, up pops a text message on your cell phone with the song's ID. Microsoft and other companies are developing similar technology. Philips researchers say background noise or poor sound quality should not prevent the server from recognising a song. The technology, if proven, could have a variety of applications. An internet service provider could offer the service to customers who frequently download MP3s to help them organise music collections stored on their hard drives.
A SMALLER YEAR
The world will amble towards wireless technology in 2002, say analysts, after the overpromises of a wireless world by the end of last year. MP3 players will be even smaller, but more powerful, the pundits predict. Mobile phones will double as personal digital assistants (PDAs). Predictions are that devices such as PDAs, mobile phones and combinations of the two will increasingly come with built-in wireless web access. And in good news for laptop users who have invested in wireless technology, there will be more places that offer wireless services as a critical mass of users is built. "Expect to see more evolutionary, rather than revolutionary devices," says Andrew Johnson, a market researcher with Gartner Dataquest. And with Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's Game Cube launched, analysts predict game consoles and games will sell well in the coming year. There may be déja vu, too, as internet appliances that had short shelf lives in 2001 reappear in other forms. "They just morph," says Michelle Abraham, senior analyst at Cahners In-Stat Group market research firm. "The technology doesn't go away. It just gets recast in another type of product."