George Gilder: The Rise of the Teleputer

George Gilder: The Rise of the Teleputer (Windows Media Player)

People imagine a computer to be a CRT, like a television set, connected with a big keyboard and a mouse, tied to a hard drive -- and that model is going away, it's being replaced by what I call the 'teleputer' which is a small handheld device that resembles a cell phone and as a matter of fact incorporates a cell phone through which the screen dissolves into a display from Microvision which actually, you wear glasses that actually project onto your retina, the whole image at a resolution higher than in your existing CRT. Higher resolution, better response than ordinary CRT connected to what you think of as a cell phone that also has a touch pad on it and has effectively has all your mp3 songs in it and also is a camcorder from Foveon Corporation and all these capabilities come from a company called Synaptix.



So, the cell phone really becomes your computer. And it's a better computer with more features and more capabilities than your old desktop clunker with its Windows and its viruses and its other problems which currently afflict the old computer model which is expiring today.



This is real technology, Microvision is selling these things in volume to the Army now, these are the headsets that write the image onto your retina. Foveon is selling its imagers into Sigma cameras and shortly into Polaroid cameras that have full motion video capabilites, 30 frames per second at VGA quality today.



All these capabilities of the cell phone are now here. The key software model is Java, which is Sun's new kind of software model that is more robust and reliable and easier to write and yields applets rather than huge applications, these are applets and they are a robust system and combined with Java is a system called BREW which Qualcomm has developed which works with Java and which also allows developers, and there are 10s of thousands of them, to write programs for your cell phone and collect money from them, and so this is a business model for developers that's emerged from Qualcomm which also designs the hardware that's internal to the best of these teleputers along with Synaptix and Microvision -- Microvision does the heads up screen and there are all these other developments that are enriching your cell phone form factor into a computer that's better and richer and more robust than the one you use in your office.