In Hong Kong, a popular dating service doesn’t just match up people with similar interests. It also keeps track of where they are—or, more accurately, where their cell phones are. That way, if someone winds up somewhere at the same time as a potential match, the service can call her up on her cell phone and ask, "Would you like me to introduce you to the redhead at the end of the bar?"

Now that seemingly everyone has a cell phone, companies such as the dating service are starting to find surprising ways to use them. This is when the real fun begins.

In Finland, people wanting a soft drink from a vending machine can use their phones to purchase it. They also use their phones to call up their bank balances, check the weather, and download the latest jokes. They program their phones to reproduce any musical or human sound as the phone’s ring. A musical group, Nylon Beat, released its latest single as a ring and had an instant hit. At concerts, people play their phones as the group performs the song.

Sweden’s Ericsson recently demonstrated its futuristic scenario for how a cell phone and other technology could transform grocery shopping. You would use a smart cart equipped with a touch screen that would help you navigate the store, finding items on your list and receiving special offers on things you typically buy. You could keep an eye on your children playing in the store’s kids’ corner by watching the video display on your cart’s screen. When it is time to go, the items would be scanned automatically as you wheel your cart through checkout. Your bill would appear on the screen of your cell phone, and you would press a button to pay.

In the U.S., while services aren’t as advanced as in Europe [see The Great Lie], much of the enabling technology is in place, and lots of interesting ideas are in the works. "Fetch-me" services are being developed so that someone who wanted tickets to a San Francisco Giants game that night in their new, usually sold-out park would be called if a pair suddenly became available.

Users could be allowed to set conditions on calls about perishable items, such as concert or airplane tickets. For instance, they could say they’re willing to pay only up to a certain price, in the hopes of getting a last-second bargain. They could also say they’ll take calls only until a certain hour, because they need time to make plans.

Reminder services are being developed that could, for instance, call you and tell you when it is time to take your pills. "Reminders are an important piece" of the wireless-phone-services market, says Steve Maloney, chief executive of i3Mobile, which is developing such services. "If I haven’t logged on to my computer all day, I’m not going to be reminded by an e-mail."

Advances in technology for pinpointing the location of phones may even allow the impossible: the ability to hail a cab during a New York City rainstorm. Advertisers, too, could flag down would-be customers speeding by, by offering them wireless "coupons."

"The cell phone of today is not the cell phone of the future," says Craig Mathias, a principal at Farpoint Group, which consults on emerging telecommunications technologies.

But he adds that "there are some real downsides. I don’t want my phone going off with a 50-cents-off coupon every time I get near a Starbucks." Some companies have suggested that they’ll send full menus from a restaurant to the cell phones of people nearby. But it’s time-consuming enough to wade through most menus while sitting in the establishment, let alone while driving by in a car, squinting to read a tiny screen while manipulating the small keypad.

That is where voice-activated services will come into play. This summer, Tellme Networks will offer an early version of a service that recognizes and generates speech. People will dial an 800 number and then use the system to retrieve information from the Internet. (In a test, we easily found Mexican restaurants in our neighborhood, along with a local weather forecast. However, when we tried to check the share price of our publisher, it took us three tries before the system recognized the name "Diamond Technology Partners.")

Despite phones’ current limitations, a recent survey by market researcher Yankelovich Partners found that two-thirds of respondents believe wireless phones will be used for remote e-mail access and for getting directions using Global Positioning System technology. Some 59% expect people will take pictures digitally and send them to others via their cell phones, while nearly as many think people will conduct videoconferences with their wireless phones.

"We know if there is interest, somebody will offer these things," says Delly Tamer, chief executive officer of LetsTalk.com, an on-line retailer of wireless phones and services. "We see the cell phone eventually becoming a remote control for your life."

Calling all redheads.

OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE...

With the help of technology, maybe you can fight city hall. At least that’s the promise of a Web site named E The People. It contends it can help citizens spur government into action on everything from repairing potholes to passing legislation.

Some people, feeling the urge for representative democracy, use the service to start on-line petition drives. A recent one on the E The People site had collected 5,164 signatures urging the federal government to crack down on the abuse of animals.

On behalf of petitioners, E The People sends e-mails to government agencies and presses them for responses that it posts on the site. E The People sends faxes to agencies that are backward enough that they don’t have access to the Internet. (Of course, government officials can go on-line and see whether some issue doesn’t exactly have Million Man March levels of support. In its first two weeks, one recent drive collected only 26 electronic signatures on a petition urging the Food and Drug Administration to require food makers to clearly label products as vegetarian or otherwise.)

If the biggest gripe you have with government is about your growing collection of traffic tickets, E The People can handle that, too. It lets violators pay fines by credit card. It charges a nominal fee for the service, but it’s trying to line up sponsors that will cover the fee and even underwrite a portion of the fine. E The People currently helps with paying fines in just 300 municipalities.

If you’re more inclined to contest your tickets in court, there’s information about how to do that. Visitors to the site can also get access to voter-registration forms, information about elections, and profiles of candidates.

Some 180 news media outlets carry links to E The People on their Web sites.

For more information: www.e-thepeople.com.

YOUR PERSONAL LACKEY

When you’re toiling away as a Net slave, all the stock options in the world won’t ensure that your laundry gets done. That’s why an Internet start-up, MyLackey.com, is trying to convince employers to begin doling out another precious benefit: gift certificates for services that will handle washing your clothes, reviving your plants, or walking your flabby pets.

So far, the fledgling MyLackey has convinced about 20 companies—many of them dot-coms—to reward their employees with its services. While competitors offer similar concierge services, MyLackey thinks companies are more likely to pay the freight, to attract and care for valuable employees. In addition, MyLackey typically takes on more of the coordination tasks than competitors do, meaning it cuts some of the steps out of the process of connecting a buyer with a vendor. With MyLackey, customers can do as little as choose a service and a delivery time and provide their credit-card information on-line.

MyLackey has a plethora of on-line competitors, including ServiceStop, VIPDesk, Concierge Confidant, ServiceLane, Handshake, and eFrenzy. But, with Forrester Research pegging the on-line services market at more than $200 billion by 2003, there may be more than enough business for everybody. (The market for localized services such as MyLackey represents only a portion of the overall forecast, but Forrester doesn’t offer any specific breakdown.)

MyLackey makes money by negotiating discounted rates with contractors and charging customers the full "going" rates for typical services such as car washing and house cleaning. It offers an errand-running service that starts at $40 for two hours.

The start-up’s services were initially launched in the company’s home base of Seattle, with the Portland market added in the spring. By the end of the summer, it will be available in San Francisco, San Jose, and Washington. Other markets, including San Diego, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Irvine, Calif., will be added by the end of the year.

For more information: www.mylackey.com.

PHONE-DAMENTAL ADVANCE

Every time you make a phone call to someone’s office these days, chances are overwhelming you’ll wind up leaving a voice mail rather than speaking to the actual person. But new systems are making it a bit easier to track people down.

Sweden’s Ericsson has introduced a phone system called Mobile Advantage that lets people use the same business phone number, no matter where they are. If you’re sitting at your desk, your phone rings, just like normal. If you’ve wandered off elsewhere within the office, you still get your calls because you take a mobile phone with you. If you’re outside the office, a call to your business number is automatically routed to a cellular carrier, which routes the call to where you and your mobile phone are.

The trick to Mobile Advantage is that it is integrated with the private branch exchange—the switch that most companies use to hook their phones into a network—to create a private cellular network within the office. In effect, your mobile phone behaves just like a cordless extension of your desk phone while you are on company premises.

Calls within the office cost the same as they always have. Calls connected to people outside the office carry the normal cellular fee.

Little else changes, either. If you’re sitting at your desk, you can still answer your call with your regular phone, with a headset, or with your speakerphone—in case you find any of those things easier than using your mobile handset, which is the same size and weight of a standard cell phone.

You can program the phone so that you don’t receive incoming calls when you leave the office. Or you can tell it that you only want to receive calls from certain key people.

In other words, callers will only get past your voice mail if you want them to.

For more information: www.ericsson.com.

‘AND NOW A CELL-PHONE CALL FROM OUR SPONSOR....’

Decades ago, drivers cruising down a country road might encounter a series of small red signs reading something like:

In this vale...
Of toil and sin,
Your head grows bald...
But not your chin.
Burma Shave

Those old shaving cream ads, which gave way to billboards when cars began moving too fast for drivers to read the small signs, may now be giving way to ads on cell phones. AdForce, majority-owned by Internet investment firm CMGI, hopes that cell-phone users will be willing to accept brief ads at the start of each call. In return, users would get heavily subsidized, or even free, cell-phone calls.

AdForce says users will have flexibility in choosing how many ads they hear. They could accept a few ads before every call, just one ad every third or fourth call, or whatever. The discount they receive will be adjusted based on the number of ads they’re willing to hear. The idea of subsidized calls has met with modest success in Hong Kong, particularly among younger customers looking for ways to cut their mobile phone bills.

AdForce says that, because its service has just started up, it can’t yet tell how advertisers and phone users will respond.

There is reason to wonder. A small Burma Shave sign, or even a billboard, is a lot easier to ignore than an ad on your cell phone. It’s possible to imagine all sorts of other problems, too. Suppose you’re driving and call a traffic-update service because you suddenly realize you have 20 seconds to find out whether the tunnel is jammed—but you have to listen to 30 seconds of commercials before you even begin to hear the information you’re really after. You get the picture.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that the cell-phone ads aren’t likely to be anywhere near as clever as the old Burma Shave campaign. Those ads developed such a following that the hundreds of poems were preserved in book form after the signs came down.

For more information: www.adforce.com.

BANDWIDTH TO BURN

Internet surfers, take heart. Researchers have achieved a breakthrough that could cut into the grueling waits involved with downloading information from the Web.

A new device, dubbed the "opto-chip," could allow information to be processed at 10 times current speeds within two years, the scientists say. The device should greatly speed up the backbone telecommunications systems that carry the information from Web sites’ servers to users’ computers, ensuring that delays don’t develop even as traffic continues to explode.

The opto-chip won’t solve the whole problem that has caused the Web to sometimes be known as the World Wide Wait. There will still be delays when sites’ servers get overloaded, and users operating from home will still have difficulties because they connect to the telecommunications network over slow copper wire rather than fast fiber-optic cables. But the opto-chip will, nonetheless, speed up an important part of the Internet.

The opto-chip consists of modulators that translate electrical signals—the sort you get from televisions, computers, telephones, and radar—into optical signals that can then be sent along fiber-optic cables. A single modulator can provide more than 300 gigahertz of bandwidth—enough to handle all of a major corporation’s telephone, computer, television, and satellite traffic. Each modulator is about one micron wide—roughly one-hundredth the width of a human hair—so thousands can fit on a single opto-chip.

The new modulators require very little electricity, which means they generate substantially less heat. They also create less electronic interference than previous generations of modulators. Both those facts mean greater reliability because they reduce problems that can lead to signal loss. In addition, the new modulators are easier to manufacture because they can be integrated directly into silicon chips without first being grown as crystals.

The electro-optic modulators will allow for "real-time communication. You won’t have to wait for your computer to download even the largest files," according to Larry Dalton, a University of Washington and University of Southern California chemistry professor who led the research. "This technology has bandwidth to burn."

For more information: www.washington.edu or www.usc.edu.

IN THE CHIPS

Manufacturing silicon chips conjures up images of figures dressed up in "bunny suits," looking like astronauts while working in "clean rooms" in multibillion-dollar facilities. But Bells Labs’ researchers say they have come up with a way to make chips out of plastic using a process that resembles silk-screening on paper. The result could be: chips, chips, everywhere chips.

The cheap plastic chips could be put into luggage tags that help airport personnel locate lost suitcases. The workers would just run an electronic reader over the tags, which a computer would instantly match up with the list of missing baggage. The chips could be placed on perishable groceries and could track whether they were shipped to the store under proper conditions. A shopper could use a device at the store to scan the chip and verify the quality of the food. The chips could also lead to computer displays made of plastic that could be rolled up when not in use.

The process could render existing devices, such as cell phones and hand-held computers, nearly indestructible by replacing brittle metal and glass with resilient plastic. Smart cards—credit-card-size devices packed with data—might finally develop a following in the U.S. because they could be continually reused.

The manufacturing process would be similar to printing with ink on paper, which is far less costly than the highly specialized procedures for making today’s powerful silicon chips. Thin sheets of plastic—similar to overhead transparencies—are used as the base.

The breakthrough came with the discovery of new material known as F15. It allows for the easy manufacture of a type of transistor that was previously hard to make in plastic.

For more information: www.bell-labs.com.