The Netscape IPO wasn't really about dot-commerce. At its heart was a new cultural force based on mass collaboration. Blogs, Wikipedia, open source, peer-to-peer - behold the power of the people.

Ten years ago, Netscape's explosive IPO ignited huge piles of money. The brilliant flash revealed what had been invisible only a moment before: the World Wide Web. As Eric Schmidt (then at Sun, now at Google) noted, the day before the IPO, nothing about the Web; the day after, everything.

Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the Web's core idea - hyperlinked pages - in 1945, but the first person to try to build out the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson who envisioned his own scheme in 1965. However, he had little success connecting digital bits on a useful scale, and his efforts were known only to an isolated group of disciples. Few of the hackers writing code for the emerging Web in the 1990s knew about Nelson or his hyperlinked dream machine.

At the suggestion of a computer-savvy friend, I got in touch with Nelson in 1984, a decade before Netscape. We met in a dark dockside bar in Sausalito, California. He was renting a houseboat nearby and had the air of someone with time on his hands. Folded notes erupted from his pockets, and long strips of paper slipped from overstuffed notebooks. Wearing a ballpoint pen on a string around his neck, he told me - way too earnestly for a bar at 4 o'clock in the afternoon - about his scheme for organizing all the knowledge of humanity. Salvation lay in cutting up 3 x 5 cards, of which he had plenty.

Although Nelson was polite, charming, and smooth, I was too slow for his fast talk. But I got an aha! from his marvelous notion of hypertext. He was certain that every document in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the links between them visible and permanent. But that was just the beginning! Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what he called the docuverse. He spoke of "transclusion" and "intertwingularity" as he described the grand utopian benefits of his embedded structure. It was going to save the world from stupidity.

I believed him. Despite his quirks, it was clear to me that a hyperlinked world was inevitable - someday. But looking back now, after 10 years of living online, what surprises me about the genesis of the Web is how much was missing from Vannevar Bush's vision, Nelson's docuverse, and my own expectations. We all missed the big story. The revolution launched by Netscape's IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history.

Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don't see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.

You've likely heard stories about the birth of the PC: of Xerox PARC as the Mecca of computing; of its creation of the Alto, Ethernet, and the laser printer; of the Homebrew Computer Club, the MITS Altair, Bill Gates and the theft of his Micro-soft Basic; of Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, the founding of Apple, and the Jobs visit to PARC that inspired the Macintosh.

But what you may not know about is the really early history. The stories of Doug Engelbart and John McCarthy, of the Augmentation Research Center, and of the early days of the Stanford University AI Lab (SAIL) are not well known. Yes, you may have heard that Engelbart invented the mouse, and that SAIL and Stanford led to companies like Sun and Cisco. But there are better stories, great and old ones from the early days of computing, about the events that led to personal computing as we know it.

In his wonderful new book, What the Dormouse Said..., John Markoff tells these stories.

Just think how eerie it would be, yet also how peaceful - people all around having conversations on their mobile phones, but without uttering a sound.

Thanks to some military research, this social nirvana just might come true. DARPA, the US Department of Defense's research agency, is working on a project known as Advanced Speech Encoding, aimed at replacing microphones with non-acoustic sensors that detect speech via the speaker's nerve and muscle activity, rather than sound itself.

One system, being developed for DARPA by Rick Brown of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, relies on a sensor worn around the neck called a tuned electromagnetic resonator collar (TERC). Using sensing techniques developed for magnetic resonance imaging, the collar detects changes in capacitance caused by movement of the vocal cords, and is designed to allow speech to be heard above loud background noise.

In this expanded interview transcript, inventor Ray Kurzweil discusses birth, death, and the potential offered by non-biological thinking processes.
By: Lucas Conley

Fast Company: First off, without death, CEOs will never give up their jobs. There won't be any succession plans.

Ray Kurzweil: I don't think we need to kill people off to provide opportunity for new leadership and creativity. The marketplace of ideas and technologies is going to expand -- it has been for years. Look at the computer industry. 60 years ago it was a handful of research projects, and now it's a trillion-dollar industry.

FC: But biotech? Who's to say how quickly it will advance?

Kurzweil: A lot of people say you can't really tell the future, and there are certain things that are hard to predict. What will Google's stock be three years from now? That's hard to predict. But if you ask me what it will cost to sequence a base pair of DNA in 2010 or the cost to move a megabyte of data wirelessly in 2015, those things turn out to be remarkably predictable.

Altair's Developments Pave the Way for a New Generation of Rechargeable Batteries

RENO, NV. – February 10, 2005 – Altair Nanotechnologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALTI) announced today that it has achieved a breakthrough in Lithium Ion battery electrode materials, which will enable a new generation of rechargeable battery to be introduced into the marketplace, as well as create new markets for rechargeable batteries. These new materials allow rechargeable batteries to be manufactured that have three times the power of existing Lithium Ion batteries at the same price and with recharge times measured in a few minutes rather than hours.

"It is unlikely that future technological inventions are going to have the same kind of transformative impact that they did in the past."

When history takes a look back at great inventions like the car and transistor, they were defining technologies which ultimately changed people's lives substantially.

But, says Nick Donofrio, senior vice-president of technology and manufacturing at IBM, it was not "the thing" itself that actually improved people's lives.

It was all the social and cultural changes that the discovery or invention brought with it.

When I taught at a university, I worked with the wireless laptop programs that are replacing computer labs on campuses.

Once students began carrying laptops everywhere and using them in class, an interesting dependency developed. There were times in class when I asked a question and students would glance helplessly at the machines, as if to say, "The answer isn't in my carbon-based brain, but I know I got it right here, on silicon."

Or, if the answer wasn't stored in their notes on the hard drive, it became a contest in which students would search the Net madly to compete for extra credit points.

It was always a sad day for the ones who showed up with a dead battery and no power cord, a busted keyboard or loose wireless card. They watched the rest of the class in a flurry of activity, frustrated and feeling like half of their brains -- more than half for some students -- was missing.

Marshall McLuhan -- the prophet

Amazingly, the late media theorist Marshall McLuhan saw this coming in the 1960s. Many things he predicted about television did not appear until the appearance of the Internet and portable computers: so-called "ubiquitous computing."

McLuhan believed our senses become extended outside of our bodies. He suggested that a book was an extension of your eye and a car, an extension of your foot. He would say the Internet is an extension of our central nervous systems.

New technology soon could transform all objects in a room into touch-sensitive remote control devices, even if they do not run on electricity, French scientists told United Press International.

The idea is every sound wave "contains all the information to locate where its source was," said physicist Mathias Fink at Université Paris 7.

In experiments, the researchers found touching an object, such as a window or a table, generates vibrations that are easily detectable with one or two acoustic sensors placed on the item in question.

(DANNY HILLIS:) I have always envied Alexander the Great, because he had Aristotle as a personal tutor. In those days, Aristotle knew pretty much everything there was to know. Even better, Aristotle understood the mind of Alexander. He understood which topics interested Alexander, what Alexander knew and did not know, and what kinds of explanations Alexander preferred. Aristotle had been a student of Plato, and he was himself a great teacher. We know from his writings that he was full of examples, explanations, arguments, and stories. Through Aristotle, Alexander had the knowledge of the world at his command.

Of course no one today knows all that is known, in the sense that Aristotle did. Now there is far too much knowledge for that to be possible. The scientific revolution, and the technological revolution that followed it, led to a self-reinforcing explosion of knowledge. The explosion continues. Today not even the most highly trained scientist, the most scholarly historian, or the most competent engineer can hope to have more than a general overview of what is known. Only specialists understand most of the new discoveries in science, and even the specialists have trouble keeping up.

This problem isn't new. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an essay for Atlantic Monthly about out the problem of too much knowledge. He wrote,

Lounge chairs and couches are as common as desks among the glass-walled rooms of the Thomas M. Siebel Center of Computer Science, the University of Illinois' newest high-tech marvel. An espresso bar in the hall keeps screen-weary students going as they work on laptops, many wirelessly connected to the building's network.

The laid-back approach to the $80 million center, officially opening Friday, is part of a strategy to foster creativity and interaction among students and their professors, said Marc Snir, head of the computer science department.

Even the building's common areas can serve as mini-classrooms, complete with Internet access and whiteboards so students and professors can share ideas, he said.

"We really want to change the way our department is acting—fundamentally making it into what we call a computing habitat or living lab, not just an environment which supports our research and education but an environment which is shaped by our research," Snir said.

Club-goers in Spain get implanted chips for ID, payment purposes.

Being recognized has never been easier for VIP patrons of the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona, Spain.

Like a scene out of a science-fiction movie, all it takes is a syringe-injected microchip implant for the beautiful men and women of the nightclub scene to breeze past a "reader" that recognizes their identity, credit balance and even automatically opens doors to exclusive areas of the club for them.

Nokia Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) and Sony Corporation establish the Near Field Communication (NFC) Forum to enable the use of touch-based interactions in consumer electronics, mobile devices, PCs, smart objects and for payment purposes. Touch-based interactions will allow users to access content and services in an intuitive way by touching smart objects and connecting devices just by holding them next to each other. The new forum will promote implementation and standardization of NFC technology to ensure interoperability between devices and services.

Motorola Inc. will bring a revised ultrawideband (UWB) proposal to a meeting of the IEEE 802.15.3a task group in Orlando, Fla., this week, along with what it says is proof that the new scheme offers a tenfold efficiency improvement — at very short ranges — over a competing technology vying for the nod as the IEEE UWB standard.

The altered proposal reflects Motorola's be-lief that the application sweet spot for UWB is no longer full-room networked video distribution over distances of up to 10 meters, but wireless links for handheld devices and peer-to-peer cable replacement applications within a range of about 3 meters.