By Steven Levy

June 7 issue - In the '90s, people went bananas over wireless. Electronic communications once thought to be permanently bound to the world of cables and hard-wired connections suddenly were sprung free, and the possibilities seemed endless. Entrenched monopolies would fall, and a new uncabled era would usher in a level of intimate contact that would not only transform business but change human behavior. Such was the view by the end of that groundbreaking decade—the 1890s.

To be sure, the sepia-toned hype of those days wasn't all hot air. Guglielmo Marconi's "magic box" and its contemporary inventions kicked off an era of profound changes, not the least of which was the advent of broadcasting. So it does seem strange that a century later the buzz once more is about wireless. And once again the commotion is justified. Because changes are afoot that are arguably as earth shattering as the first wireless transformation.

Certainly a huge part of this revolution comes from untethering the most powerful communication tools of our time. Between our mobile phones, our BlackBerrys and Treos and our Wi-Fi'd computers, we're always on and always connected—and soon our cars and appliances will be too. While there's been considerable planning as to how people will use these tools and how they'll pay for them, the wonderful reality is that, as with the Internet, much of the action in the wireless world will ultimately emerge from the imaginative twists and turns that are possible when digital technology trumps the analog mind-set of telecom companies and government regulators.

Wi-Fi is a shining example of how wireless innovation can itself shed the constricting cables of conventional wisdom. At one point it was assumed that when people wanted to use wireless devices for things other than conversation, they'd have to rely on the painstakingly drawn, investment-heavy standards adopted by the giant corporations that rake in the dough through your monthly phone bill. But then some geeks came up with a new communications standard exploiting an unlicensed part of the spectrum (which the wonks at the FCC called "junk band," stuff designated for techno-flotsam like microwave ovens and cordless phones). It was called 802.11 and only later sexed up with the Wi-Fi moniker.

Though the range of signal was usually no more than a few hundred feet or less, Wi-Fi turned out to be a great way to wirelessly extend an Internet connection in the home or office. A new class of activist was born: the bandwidth liberator, with a goal of extending free wireless Internet to anyone venturing within the range of a gratis hotspot. Meanwhile, Apple Computer seized on the idea as a consumer solution, others followed and now Wi-Fi is as common as the modem once was.

Another unplanned bonus: more powerful variants of Wi-Fi, with exotic descriptors like WiMax or mesh networks, have now emerged as top contenders to finally hook up the recalcitrant or remote areas that have so far resisted broadband. As Kevin Werbach, former FCC counsel for new technology policy, notes, because "it's low cost and doesn't require a big upfront infrastructure investment," wireless technology is the means by which previously unwired chunks of civilization will get plugged in to the cyberaction. Consider the MIT Media Lab project to install Wi-Fi base stations on intervillage buses in India: when the vehicles stop to pick up passengers, computer users within range can use the signal to download files or send e-mail.

Wi-Fi is only one of dozens of variants of wireless in this spiraling movement. You might know GPS and satellite radio, Bluetooth and RFID, but do you know ZigBee? Got you there. (It's a way to network lots of appliances.) The important thing to remember is that as these methods pile up, the result is less and less about losing the wire and more and more about making way for activities that were previously unimaginable.

When you install cameras in telephones, for instance, photography shifts from a producer of flat illustrative artifact into a means of communication. The ease of distribution becomes a force in itself, pushing networks to handle more bandwidth. And the sudden addition of hundreds of millions of instant eyes to the global network provides its own challenges (thus the devices are banned in locker rooms and at the U.S. Supreme Court).

All over the planet, wireless is making waves, from the text-message-mad teenagers outside Tokyo's Shibuya station to a Wi-Fi-equipped McDonald's in New York City to Everest climbers calling home from the summit. With dizzying rapidity, wireless innovations move from the cutting edge to the routine. Just like what happened with Marconi's magic box during the first wireless revolution.

June 7 issue - One hundred nineteen hours, 41 minutes and 16 seconds. That's the amount of time Adam Rappoport, a high-school senior in Philadelphia, has spent talking into his silver Verizon LG phone since he got it as a gift last Chanukah. That's not even the full extent of his habit. He also spends countless additional hours using his phone's Internet connection to check sports scores, download new ringtones (at a buck apiece) and send short messages to his friends' phones, even in the middle of class. "I know the touch-tone pad on the phone better than I know a keyboard," he says. "I'm a phone guy."

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In Tokyo, halfway around the world, Satoshi Koiso also closely eyes his mobile phone. Koiso, a college junior, lives in the global capital of fancy new gadgets—20 percent of all phones in Tokyo link to the fastest mobile networks in the world. Tokyoites use their phones to watch TV, read books and magazines and play games. But Koiso also depends on his phone for something simpler and more profound: an antismoking message that pops up on his small screen each morning as part of a program to help students kick cigarettes. "Teachers struggle to stop smoking, too. You hang in there," the e-mail says one day.

Another few thousand miles away, in Frankfurt, Germany, Christoph Oswald is winding his way through his favorite nightclub, busily scanning for women who are his type: tall, slim and sporty. The 36-year-old software consultant is doing this by peering into his cell phone. Before he reaches the bar, Oswald's Nokia starts vibrating, and a video of an attractive blonde appears on the color screen. "Hi, I'm Susan, come find me!" she says. Oswald scans the crowd and picks out the blue-eyed financial adviser he'd glimpsed in the video. She has seen his picture, too. The proximity of their two phones has activated a service called Symbian Dater, which compared their profiles and decided they were compatible. Soon they are laughing, and Christoph is buying Susan drinks.

Technology revolutions come in two flavors: jarringly fast and imperceptibly slow. The fast kind, like the sudden ubiquity of iPods or the proliferation of music-sharing sites on the Net, seem to instantly reshape the cultural landscape. The slower upheavals grind away over the course of decades, subtly transforming the way we live and work. The emergence of mobile phones around the world has been slow but overwhelmingly momentous. AT&T rolled out the first cellular network in 1977 for 2,000 customers in Chicago. The phones had the approximate shape and weight of a brick.

Those phones sit in museums now, and half a billion sleeker, colorful new mobile sets are sold each year. Sales of mobile phones dwarf the sales of televisions, stereos, even the hallowed personal computer. There are 1.5 billion cell phones in the world today, more than three times the number of PCs. Mobile phones are so integral to our lives that it's difficult to remember how the heck we ever got on without them.

As our phones get smarter, smaller and faster and enable users to connect at high speeds to the Internet, an obvious question arises: is the mobile handset turning into the next computer? In one sense, it already has. Today's most sophisticated phones have the processing power of a mid-1990s PC while consuming 100 times less electricity. And more and more of today's phones have computerlike features, allowing their owners to send e-mail, browse the Web and even take photos; 84 million phones with digital cameras were shipped last year. Tweak the question, though, to ask whether mobile phones will ever eclipse, or replace, the PC, and the issue suddenly becomes controversial. PC proponents say phones are too small and connect too sluggishly to the Internet to become effective at tasks now performed on the luxuriously large screens and keyboards of today's computers. Fans of the phone respond: just wait. Coming innovations will solve the limitations of the phone. "One day, 2 or 3 billion people will have cell phones, and they are all not going to have PCs," says Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot and the chief technology officer of PalmOne. "The mobile phone will become their digital life."

PalmOne is among the firms racing to trot out the full-featured computerlike phones that the industry dubs smart phones. Hawkins's newest product, the sleek, pocket-size Treo 600, has a tiny keyboard, a built-in digital camera and slots for added memory. Other device makers have introduced their own unique versions of the smart phone. Nokia's N-Gage, launched last fall, with a new version to hit stores this month, plays videogames. Motorola's upcoming MPx has a nifty "dual hinge" design: the handset opens in one direction and looks like a regular phone, but it also flips open along another axis and looks like an e-mail device, with the expanded phone keypad serving as a small qwerty keyboard. There are also smart phones on the way with video cameras, GPS antennas and access to local Wi-Fi hotspots, the superfast wireless networks often found in offices, airports and cafes. There's not yet a phone that doubles as an electric toothbrush, but that can't be far away.

The smart-phone market constitutes only a slender 5 percent of overall mobile-phone sales today, but the figure has been doubling each year, according to the Gartner research firm. In the United States, it's the business crowd that's primarily buying these souped-up handsets. "What makes [the smart phone] so much better than the computer is that it's always with you, always up and always ready," says Jeff Hackett of Gordon, Feinblatt, an 80-member law firm in Baltimore that recently started giving its lawyers Treo 600s instead of laptops.

In Asia, it's not the boring professionals driving the newest innovations in the mobile market but what the Japanese call keitai-crazy kids. Teens sit in Tokyo's crowded plazas, furiously messaging each other, reading e-mail magazines and playing fantasy games like Dragon Quest. In South Korea, phones are so cherished by youngsters that in a recent survey of elementary-school kids, half said they wanted a phone as their gift for Children's Day, a national holiday. Dogs got 22 percent of the vote, PCs a meager 10 percent. Many Asian phone manufacturers think the next killer app for all these kids is actually 75 years old: television. In May Samsung announced it would launch a phone that receives 40 satellite TV stations.

Super Cell Phones and Privacy

In the near future, at least, new phones won't look anything like PCs. "The industry is figuring out that a wireless handheld is a different beast," says Mark Guibert, marketing director of Research in Motion, maker of the popular BlackBerry e-mail device. Mobile-phone watchers say that handsets in the next few years will pack a gigabyte or more of flash memory, turning the phone into a huge photo album or music player and giving stand-alone iPods a run for their money. For several years the industry has also talked about "location-based services," built around a phone's ability to detect its exact location anywhere in the world. With this capability, phones will soon be able to provide precise driving directions, serve up discounts for stores as you walk by them and expand dating services like the one Christoph in Frankfurt enjoyed.

But not all mobile technologists think the ultimate promise of the mobile phone ends there. Could your phone one day actually perform many of the functions of the PC, like word processing and Web browsing? PalmOne's Hawkins thinks so. The inventor of the Palm Pilot and the Treo keeps a desktop PC and a thin Sony Vaio laptop in his office. Yet he waves at both dismissively, as if they were heading for the dustbin of history. Within the next few decades, he predicts, all phones will become mobile phones, all networks will be capable of receiving voice and Internet signals at broadband speeds, and all mobile bills will shrink to only a few dollars as the phone companies pay off their investments in the new networks. "You are going to have the equivalent of a persistent [fast] T1 line in your pocket. That's it. It's going to happen," Hawkins predicts. The computer won't go away, he says, but it might fade to the background, since people prefer portability and devices that turn on instantly instead of having to boot up.

Defenders of the PC react with religious outrage to this kind of prophecy. Laptops allow another kind of mobile computing, they point out, particularly with the emergence of thousands of Wi-Fi networks around the world over the past four years. By the end of this year half of all laptops shipped will be Wi-Fi-equipped, allowing laptop owners to set up temporary offices in the local cafe or public park. Then there's the matter of simple practicality: mobile phones are small and getting smaller. Humans are not. "Hundreds of millions of people are not going to replace the full screen, mouse and keyboard experience with staring at a little screen," says Sean Maloney, an executive VP at chipmaker Intel, which is investing heavily in both Wi-Fi and mobile-phone technology.

Yet mobile-phone innovators are working to solve that tricky problem, too. Scientists are continuing decades of research into speech-recognition systems and have recently introduced the technology into PDAs. Users can control these gadgets with simple voice commands. Phones don't have enough processing power for speech recognition yet, but Moore's Law—the inevitability of annual improvements in computing power—will help phones get there soon, provided that battery life can keep up. Other innovators are working on improving the keyboard instead of scrapping it altogether. Canesta, a five-year-old firm in San Jose, Calif., is working on a product called a "projection keyboard." A laser inside the phone emits the pattern of a large keyboard onto a flat surface, and the phone's camera perceives the user's finger movements. Canesta's first products for phones will be available as plug-ins later this year, but one day they could be cheaply integrated into handsets.

Cell phones aren't likely to take the fastest road to this bright future. Innovation in the mobile industry is full of zigzags and wrong turns, often because no single company completely controls the device in your pocket. Carriers like Sprint and AT&T sell the phone to customers, provide billing and run the phone network; device makers like Sony, Nokia and Samsung design the phone itself and outsource the actual manufacturing to factories in China. Another challenge is that, unlike the Internet, the phone world has no open and single set of protocols for programmers to build around. Software written for one kind of phone won't work on all the others. The uncoordinated, noncommercial programming that led to the quick evolution of the Internet hasn't taken hold in the world of mobile phones.

But what if you could sidestep those business barriers and, limited only by your imagination and by the feasibility of existing technology, design the Phone of the Future from scratch? NEWSWEEK wondered, and asked Frog Design, a 34-year-old Silicon Valley firm that helps build phones for companies like Motorola and Nextel, to work on the problem. Over the course of a month, four professional tech designers produced the specifications for the "petfrog," a sleek, enticing prophecy of things to come. The phone's touch screen can display any interface, from keypad to keyboard to mouse pad or game console. A second, higher-resolution screen can slide out of the unit for video chats and Web surfing. Thin, insertable cartridges can turn the phone into an MP3 player or a camera, or add extra memory or a large keyboard. "This phone will be your alter ego," says Frog founder Hartmut Esslinger.

The only drawback is that the petfrog doesn't really exist—yet. But Esslinger says it would take only two or three years to build. "The challenge is to get companies to think beyond the boundaries of their businesses," he says. Incongruously, he is demonstrating the petfrog on his ultra-thin Vaio laptop, exactly the kind of personal computer he believes we will all one day leave behind. But for now, that doesn't matter. In this vision of the next frontier, we are all phone guys.

Wireless isn't just for high-tech hubs anymore. We chose these cities and towns to show the variety of ways people are using this new technology

John Clark for Newsweek

The Wi-Fi tower at Main Street and Highway 395 in Hermiston, Ore.

June 7 issue - Phones, No. Wi-Fi, Yes
HERMISTON, ORE.
Population: 13,200
Why: Rural areas need the Internet, too
Fact: Thirty-five towers and 75 antennas broadcast a signal that covers the whole county

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The phone and cable companies ignore the towns along the Columbia River in northeast Oregon despite the prevalence of farms, food-processing facilities, power plants and military installations that crave high-speed Internet access. "Sometimes it seems like we live in a third world out here," says Fred Ziari, founder of EZ Wireless, the 23-employee company in Hermiston, Ore., that decided to do something about it. EZ Wireless built the country's largest regional wireless broadband network, a 600-square-mile Wi-Fi blanket, and activated it this February. The network of high-power Wi-Fi towers and antennas allows users anywhere in the county to surf the Net at speeds equal to those of fixed lines like DSL. But users can also take their laptops on the road, driving 20 miles across the region while maintaining a connection the whole way—a trick Ziari proudly demonstrates by watching a "Lord of the Rings" movie trailer while cruising down the road.

The Sunny City Where It All Began
SAN DIEGO, CALIF.
Population: 1.2 million
Why: In the third unwired generation
Fact: Employs the highest concentration of workers in the wireless field in the United States

If wireless technology has a birthplace, it's San Diego. In 1968, University of California, San Diego, professor Irwin Jacobs founded a company called Linkabit to create the world's first digital wireless-communications network. Today, spinoffs like Qualcomm and Leap Wireless, as well as the U.S. branches of international giants like Nokia and Sony Electronics, popu-late the region. San Diego has about 150 wireless firms and the highest concentration of wireless workers in the country. A special program at UCSD even offers a degree in wireless communications.

So it's not surprising to see the city on the cutting edge. Last year Verizon chose San Diego as the second city (with Washington, D.C.) to deploy its new, third-generation "EV-DO" high-speed wireless network. A 250-member community group called SoCalFreeNet is trying to make wireless Internet access available for free, installing a dozen public nodes around the city and in the suburbs. Some of the most interesting action is downtown. In One America Plaza, an office building that opened last year, tenants on all 36 floors get free wireless Web access. And atop the building, a company called XO Communications has installed a base station that blasts wireless broadband at speeds up to 20 mega-bits per second to subscribers within a five-mile radius.

Old Town, New Zeal
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND
Population: 370,000
Why: Right on top down under
Fact: Eighty cellular sites around the city provide potential access to 1 million residents

Auckland is famous for sailing, aquariums, Maori culture and dinosaur skeletons. But wireless Internet access? In most cities around the world, connecting to the Internet means scoping out a Wi-Fi hotspot and sitting with your laptop in one place, or surfing the Net at slower speeds over a small, pocket-size phone with an uncomfortably tiny screen. Six months ago, Auckland became one of a few communities to deploy a single high-speed wireless network that blankets the entire city. Users can surf the Net at high speeds from the beach, their office, their homes or even a moving bus.

Upstart telecom firm Woosh Wireless developed the network. The four-year-old startup has challenged the city's entrenched land-line telco by installing three powerful wireless base stations around town. "Our vision is that in any corner of the city you can open your laptop and get megabit speed," says Jon Hambidge of IP Wireless in San Bruno, Calif., which provides Whoosh with the equipment.

Ethan Hill for Newsweek

Anne Martinez (left) and Brent Childress at the Wi-Fi-enabled Hitchin' Post Motel and RV Park

Never Be Outstripped
LAS VEGAS, NEV.
Population: 515,000
Why: Phone, cable cos. can't match demand
Fact: Sin City has only four hotspots per 100,000 people—but the number is rising quickly

Even inveterate gamblers need to check their e-mail once in a while. Hotels on the Strip like the Rio, Circus Circus and MGM Grand are joining the worldwide wave of hotels offering guests Wi-Fi access in their rooms, usually for a daily fee of about $10. Dozens of cafes, Subway stores and Panera Bread bakeries will let you log on while you munch. And chances are, if you're visiting Vegas for one of its many industry confabs, some enterprising company has turned the country's busiest convention center into a free Wi-Fi hotspot. Perfect for blogging during boring presentations.

Like many cities with exploding population growth, Vegas is outrunning some of its utilities. You've probably read about the water shortages. Now Sprint and Cox cable can't keep up with demand for Internet access. So local start-ups like Verde Communications are trying to plug the gap with wireless access. Verde's clients include the food court in the MGM Showcase mall, a bunch of neighborhood restaurants and, most interestingly, many of the city's recreational-vehicle parks. One, the Hitchin' Post RV Park and Motel, which opened in 1970, uses Verde's Wi-Fi technology to hook up its peripatetic residents for $36 a month. "It's a huge asset that drives customers to my property," says manager Brent Childress. It's not, however, much of a moneymaker. Verde divides the revenues with clients based on how much they contribute to building the network. Childress says Wi-Fi "brings in a little bit, but probably not enough to pay the tire bill."

For a Safer England
LONDON, ENGLAND
Population: 7.4 million
Why: Crimefighting enters the wireless era
Fact: Soon, cops will watch over their entire stomping grounds on laptops and PDAs

Police Sgt. john Baldock had spent many evenings staking out the doorway of the family-run Italian eatery Rosticceria Rusticana, where drug dealers plied their trade away from the surveillance cameras that dot London's trendy-cum-seedy Soho neighborhood. His big break came when the Westminister City Council's nerdy information-network manager, Andrew Snellgrove, stuck a tiny wireless camera in a lamppost across the street. A week later Baldock had enough evidence to arrest several crack and heroin dealers.

Police are about to turn Soho into the first wireless law-enforcement district in London. Over the next six months, Snellgrove will install 50 wireless cameras and sensors around the neighborhood. They'll take videos good enough to be admissible in court, and sensors will monitor noise and send out alarms when levels exceed normal. Because the cameras won't be fixed, police will be able to move them constantly, creating the impression that every inch is under surveillance. Crooks, beware.

June 7 issue - The Untethered Apple
NEW YORK, N.Y.
Population: 8.2 million
Why: Lots of industry, lots of techno whizzes
Fact: Lower Manhattan has one of the heaviest-used Wi-Fi networks in the world

The Big Apple has something new in the air, mixing with taxi exhaust, the smell of honeyed peanuts and the blare of honking horns: Internet connectivity. Traffic police in the borough of Queens ticket cars with handheld scanners from Symbol Technologies. Carried by the cops, the devices link via Wi-Fi to portable printers and also transmit the tickets back to central computers. The city says it's saving millions a year with the $2,100 gadgets by reducing errors, and it will order 500 more this year.

There are 112 coffee shops, 60 McDonald's and hundreds of hotels all offering subscription access to Wi-Fi networks. But New York is also one of the best places in the world to log on to free wireless hotspots. Networks cover the Columbia University campus, Bryant Park, Union Square and the Chelsea Piers Sports Complex on the West Side of Manhattan. Grass-roots groups are also trying to cover their own neighborhoods with free connectivity. One group, Evill Net, stitched together a network that operates from rooftops in the East Village.

Boundless Baseball
BAY AREA, CALIF.
Population: 7 million
Why: The technology capital of the U.S.
Fact: All three regional airports offer Wi-Fi coverage, so road warriors can polish presentations

Here's another reason to envy San Francisco: along with beautiful vistas and relatively clement weather year-round, the Bay Area (S.F., Oakland and San Jose) was chosen this April as the most unwired "city" in America in Intel's second annual survey. Researcher Bert Sperling, who conducted the survey, says that "tons of interesting things are happening" in the country's technology capital. All three regional airports offer nearly ubiquitous Wi-Fi coverage. This spring, city officials in San Jose, the hub of Silicon Valley, launched a free service that covers three downtown public spaces (including the convention center). And at least 40 cafes in San Francisco and seven in Berkeley offer free Internet access, forgoing the Starbucks model of charging users for connectivity. Even the Giants' ballpark is a hotspot, giving fans the opportunity to pretend they're at the office when they're catching a game. They should probably turn off their laptops when Barry Bonds comes to bat, though.

Not Just Senators
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Population: 572,000
Why: Test city for a new technology
Fact: The nation's capital, though geographically small, already has 344 commercial hotspots

When you think of D.C., you envision lobbyists, limos and windy politicians—not a center of cutting-edge wireless technology. Washington is one of two cities (the other is San Diego) where Verizon is testing a new high-speed wireless network called EV-DO, the so-called third-generation wireless network. Users stick a PC card into their laptop (and, soon, into optimized mobile phones) to surf the Net anywhere in the city at about the same speed as a DSL connection. Verizon vice president Bill Stone says the service is targeted at business users who can do "everything on their laptops they normally do on their desktops, and they don't have to go hunting for a Wi-Fi hotspot." Washingtonians have other ways to cut the cord. Last month—with help from volunteers—private donations and equipment provided by Silicon Valley wireless firm Tropos brought free wireless Internet access to the eastern corner of the National Mall. Next: unwiring the entire two-mile-long Mall, Capitol Hill and all.

Don't Get Hung Up
TOKYO, JAPAN
Population: 12.4 million
Why: Many types of mobile technology
Fact: There are 82 million mobile phones in Japan, 20 percent on high-speed networks

Chika Matsumoto rarely puts her cell phone down, even when she's hanging out with friends at a hamburger shop or soaking in the bathtub. The 17-year-old high-school student is constantly e-mailing her friends. "I want to be aware of what's going on with my friends and not to be left out," she says. Her mother wonders: is this an addiction?

Just about every person over the age of 12 in Tokyo owns a mobile phone, of which a fifth are high-speed 3G phones that are Internet-enabled. "In terms of the variety of ways mobile technologies help shape people's lives, there's no other place like Tokyo," says Hiroshi Miyanaga, the country's lead-ing telecom expert and a pro-fessor at Tokyo University of Science. Blame teenagers for creating an ever-changing culture around the phenomenon. "They pushed cell phones to get better and more fun, and the girls and mobile handsets are just inseparable," says Yasuko Nakamura, president of marketing firm Boom Planning.

From Parks to the Local Starbucks
AUSTIN, TEXAS
Population: 700,000
Why: Strong grassroots movement
Fact: The capital city has 11 hotspots for every 100,000residents, including 50 free ones

Austin is only the fourth largest city in Texas, but it stands out in one category (besides being the state capital and the home of the Longhorns): it has more free hotspots per capita than anywhere else in the country. Users can pay to hook up to the Internet at Starbucks, Kinko's, Borders or Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. Or they can hop online in any of the city's 50 free hotspots—downtown parks such as Republic Square and small independent stores such as Flipnotics Coffeespace and the Lovejoy Tap Room.

Credit a strong grass-roots wireless movement for helping to unwire the town. Since last year volunteers of the Austin Wireless City Project, a group that meets monthly, have been coordinating the city's free networks and helping residents and visitors get online with a single user name and password anywhere on the network. And "if there's trouble at one hotspot, instead of driving all the way over to investigate, we look at it online, see the status and fix it remotely," says founder Richard MacKennon.

—Brad Stone, Kay Itoi and Emily Flynn; statistics courtesy of Bert Sperling of Sperling's Best Places

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June 7 issue - There it is, that good old pale blue dot in all its earthly glory, right there on your computer screen. It's a familiar sight, even from a sky-high perspective experienced only by astronauts and angels. But hold on. By mousing around and clicking, you swoop like Superman, down, down, down, to a location on terra firma. Coastlines and rivers come into view, then cities, houses and even cars. And then, with another mouseclick, you can see the roads labeled, highlight the high-crime areas and locate the nearest Chinese restaurant. (The photography is provided by a combination of satellite images and pictures from aircraft flyovers.) If an alien flying-saucer jockey ever had an urge for chicken in black-bean sauce, this software would come in handy.

This particular Web-based program is called Keyhole and costs under $100. (Spy agencies used to spend millions for this, and they didn't even get the restaurant overlay!) But it's just one impressive product of many in an area marked by furious innovation. Digital mapping is about to change our world by documenting the real world, then integrating that information into our computers, phones and lifestyles. Roll over, Mason and Dixon: spurred by space photography, global satellite positioning, mobile phones, search engines and new ways of marking information for the World Wide Web, the ancient art of cartography is now on the cutting edge.

"The whole area of mapping is exploding in a lot of different directions," says Tom Bailey, an exec at Microsoft's MapPoint division. Millions of road-trippers download custom maps from Web ventures like MapQuest and Yahoo Maps. You can now Google things by location: type in a ZIP code and "laser surgery," and you'll find the closest places that can fix your vision. Carmakers offer GPS navigation systems as a built-in option; cell-phone and PDA users can find the nearest lavatory or pool hall; and a mobile application called Dodgeball lets you know if any friends—or friends of your friends—are within 10 blocks.

But just over the azimuth is the holy grail of mapping, where every imaginable form of location-based information is layered onto an aggregate construct that mirrors the whole world. "I call it the Virtual Globe," says Jack Dangermond, founder of Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), a Redlands, Calif., company that pioneered what's known as Geographical Information Systems. "It combines the World Wide Web with geographical information like satellite images, roads, demographic information, sensors ... and then you're modeling the planet as a living system."

Dangermond knows this turf well. When he started ESRI in 1969, geography was an uncool academic pursuit, and using computers for mapping was, well, uncharted territory. But at Harvard years before, he had been among the first to experiment in creating virtual maps that "layered" quantitative information from databases onto them. Though sometimes complicated to use, these efforts in "digital geography" were incredibly powerful, and were invaluable to customers in corporations (notably energy companies looking for an edge in exploration) and the government. ERSI's products were used, for instance, to find the best location for a new mining town in Venezuela and the placement of ski runs in Utah. But in the 1990s, Dangermond understood that ERSI's original model of a closed, proprietary system wasn't going to work when geographical information became widely distributed on the Web and routinely integrated into thousands of applications and services. The company spent $340 million to change its system to conform to open standards, to make ESRI's software open to developers who write what Dangermond calls "maps for your apps."

Of course, now that the mapping field is expanding from the traditional players to the mass market, Jack Dangermond's strategy pits him against Bill Gates. Microsoft's MapPoint division has 150 engineers, including many cartographers, creating simple ways for developers to put mapping information into their software applications. And, of course, Microsoft isn't the only competitor: a slew of major tech companies, from IBM to AOL to Oracle, "are all involved in a big way," says David Schell of Open GIS, a nonprofit consortium that promotes open geographical-information standards. "It's now one of the key components of the Net."

Adding a geographical dimension to an existing application not only increases its utility but sometimes produces a level of information that's downright scary. For instance, the Federal Election Commission's requirement for digitally logged campaign contributions hadn't really caused much controversy—until Michael Frumin, a researcher for a nonprofit arts-based technology firm called Eyebeam, decided to "geocode" the information—assigning the precise latitude and longitude to the addresses. This allowed users of the Web site he set up, called Fundrace, to type in an address and see which candidates their neighbors were supporting, and how much they gave—you could virtually canvass the neighborhood to see who gave what. An extra bonus was that the contributions came with addresses that were sometimes otherwise unlisted. (There's Ben Affleck! And he gave to Dennis Kucinich?) The consternation of suddenly exposed donors may be a harbinger of complications to come when innovative mapping pegs hitherto obscure information to a specific location. In short, we're at the beginning of the age of geo-voyeurism.

We can soon expect even more powerful ways of extracting location data from everyday information. John Frank, the 27-year-old founder of a company called MetaCarta, has a method to "geo-parse" documents and files, extracting any mention of a place. (What's more, Frank says a location need not be an address or population center but "anything that's bolted down"—a physical landmark or even a fire-alarm box.) When the word "media" appears in a document, for instance, his software uses the context to determine whether it refers to the news business or one of the nine U.S. localities that go by that name—and if it's the latter, which one. Then it tags the information with the geographical coordinates. So when someone does a MetaCarta search for a town in Iraq, a stretch of roadway or an area rich in crude oil, it searches its hundreds of geo-parsed databases (including research papers, news articles and 800 million Web pages) to come up with every document that refers to that location. Right now MetaCarta's customers are mostly in government (it's funded in part by the CIA) but similar technology will probably wind up being common on the Web.

Clearly, we're headed toward the day when any reference to a place gets tied to the actual location—and vice versa, as GPS-equipped voyagers enhance their travels by accessing the secret history of the ground beneath their feet, as well as discovering what's on the road ahead. Because commercial databases only go so far in supplying that information, a number of independent, open-source-style projects are encouraging a participatory approach in providing digital annotations to the physical world. For instance, one project collects and maps interesting examples of graffiti in the streets of San Francisco. A scheme called GeoURL encourages bloggers to tag location information to their Weblog entries. (This allows people to keep track of what's going on in their area.) Eventually, between the databases, the parsing and the geo-hackers, millions of places will be digitally annotated, and the experience of traveling the world will be akin to visiting a museum with an exquisitely informed guide.

Companies like Keyhole hope to become the substratum upon which all this information is layered—fighting Microsoft, ESRI and others for the honor. (Keyhole CEO John Hanke boasts that it already has a program to allow amateurs to post their own layers to the maps.) Ideally, they'll all coexist: think of these supermaps as the equivalent of Web browsers yielding the world's knowledge through the lens of location. They'll spur companies and governments to make better-informed decisions and enrich the experience of just plain people as they take a walk through the city, hook up with their friends and hunt for Chinese food. These will be maps that change the territory.

A Few Who Got Us Here

June 7 issue - We know Bill Gates as the father of Windows, Steve Jobs as the man behind the iPod and Sergey Brin and Larry Page as the geeks who brought us Google. When it comes to the new wireless revolution, however, many of its pioneers aren't even as well known as "American Idol" reject William Hung. Here is an eclectic mix of communications gurus who helped transform our lives.

ANTHONY TOWNSEND
COFOUNDER, NYCWIRELESS
Like many ideas that changed the world, this one began on a college campus. As a graduate student in urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late '90s, Anthony Townsend, through his friends at MIT's renowned Media Lab, became turned on to the possibilities of what we know today as Wi-Fi. On his return to New York City in 2000, Townsend became obsessed with the idea of free, shared wireless connectivity in public spaces. A year later he and a dozen other like-minded New Yorkers founded a nonprofit called NYCwireless, cajoling coffee shops, office buildings and neighborhood parks into making Wi-Fi signals freely available to the unplugged masses. "We got the initial idea from groups in other cities," says Townsend. "But our unique contribution was staking a claim to the wireless mind-share of public spaces. We were afraid that commercial companies would do it first, but if we could stake our claim to places like Bryant Park, they wouldn't be able to. Just as park benches and drinking fountains are free, we felt we could turn Wi-Fi into a public amenity."

Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, became NYCwireless's most visible success. Townsend and another founder, Marcos Lara, approached the park's directors and convinced them that it would be the perfect place to launch a public wireless network. Today scores of students and office workers on lunch breaks sit on benches and surf the Web in the noonday sun.

But for Townsend, now 30, that's old hat. As public Wi-Fi access has taken off around the globe, he's focused on bigger issues. He and NYCwireless are lobbying the FCC to gain public access to unused parts of the radio spectrum. They're raising awareness of security flaws in Wi-Fi. And they're encouraging gearheads to come up with more compelling uses for wireless. "What's shocking to me is that there are almost no local applications for Wi-Fi," says Townsend. "Right now the killer app is accessing the Net. We're looking for interesting things to do with Wi-Fi that help build local communities, not help people escape them." The revolution, it seems, will be digitized.

MIKE LAZARIDIS
PRESIDENT AND CO-CEO, RIM LTD.
Mike Lazaridis was up in the middle of the night with his newborn son when the idea struck: wouldn't it be great if parents could check their work e-mail while they were at home, on a business trip or even coaching a Little League game? It was back in 1995, and Lazaridis, the president and CEO of Research in Motion, a nine-year-old company that specialized in the then tiny niche market of wireless data transmission, started scribbling. Three years later he had another new baby to share with the world. He called it the BlackBerry (a corporate-branding expert suggested the name, in part because the keys looked a little like berry seeds)—and e-mail has never been the same.

Lazaridis's interest in wireless began in high school in the late 1970s, when his electronics teacher advised him not to get too "distracted" by computers, which were then in their infancy. "He thought the future was in wireless," says Lazaridis, now 43, "and the real key would be in combining the two technologies." At the University of Waterloo in Ontario, he became fascinated with the idea of e-mail. "Even then I understood that it was going to become a dominant form of communication," he says. "It linked people in different time zones when it was convenient for them."

Just a month before graduation, Lazaridis dropped out. With a $15,000 loan from his Greek-immigrant parents and a small government grant, he and a friend launched RIM and got to work on wireless data transmission. RIM went public in 1997, the year before the BlackBerry hit the market. With his midnight dream now a reality, Laziridis can manage his wireless empire from the sidelines of a soccer game—or wherever else in the world he might be.

LEE KI TAE
PRESIDENT OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS, SAMSUNG
With a military background in communications, Lee Ki Tae naturally gravitated toward Samsung's transistor-radio division when he joined the company in 1971. A decade later, as color-television sales boomed, most of his colleagues switched to what they saw as the wave of the future. But Lee stuck with radio, which he saw as his "destiny"—and thus was in a perfect position to take over Samsung's cell-phone division, just in time for it to become one of the company's most important products.

Lee, 55, weathered some difficult times. The low point was in 1995, when chairman Lee Kun Hee, disturbed by reports of quality problems, ordered the public burning of 150,000 brand-new Samsung phones. Since then Lee Ki Tae's division has emerged as a worldwide leader in cell-phone quality and technology. The company has roughly 12 percent of the world market, behind only Nokia and Motorola.

With a near-captive domestic market in cell-phone-crazed South Korea, Samsung has been able to engineer, test and roll out new features before many of its competitors do, and to command a premium price for its phones as well. It was the first company to introduce cell phones with televisions, cameras, camcorders and MP3 players. The company is still scrambling to stay ahead of the curve, envisioning a future in which the cell phone "will no longer be a phone," as Lee puts it, but "the hub of all gadgets, for watching television, listening to music or surfing the Internet." Of course, makers of notebook computers and handheld communicators think the same thing, but as far as Lee believes, the cell phone has already won the war.

RAJIV MODY
CHAIRMAN, SASKEN LTD.
The next time a New Yorker dials 911 on a cell phone and his location pops up on the emergency operator's screen, the caller should thank an unassuming software engineer thousands of miles away in Ban-galore, India. The man is 46-year-old Rajiv Mody, founder and chairman of Sasken Ltd., one of the world's leading providers of wireless-communications software. When Japan's NEC looked for a way to provide two-way wireless video-conferencing, it turned to Sasken, and so have companies like Ericsson, Intel and Sharp as they sought to upgrade their products' multimedia capabilities.

This icon of Indian technology was founded, oddly enough, in a Silicon Valley garage, on about $40,000 of Mody's savings. Two years later, in 1991, Mody—who was born in Gujarat state and educated at Brooklyn Polytechnic—moved his fledging company to Bangalore, a daring step at a time when Indian bureaucracy and currency regulations laid down a formidable barrier to international business. But it gave him an edge in hiring the best graduates of India's technical universities, and helped infuse Sasken with an austere corporate culture. Everyone works in identical cubicles and flies coach class—modesty inspired by Mody's two great heroes, Mahatma Gandhi and Warren Buffett. Austere but, at the same time, ferocious: "Everybody in this country has fire in his or her belly," Mody says. "We have a great future before us."

June 7 issue - FEELING KIND OF BLUETOOTH

1. CONCORD EYE-Q GO2000
Capture photographs and video clips alike with this camera, then send them to your Bluetooth-equipped printer, PDA or mobile phone. The 2.1- megapixel Eye-Q Go has a 1.6-inch LCD screen to preview your pictures, which can be stored on its seven megabytes of internal memory, SD or MMC flash memory cards. The 4.0X digital zoom isn't impressive compared with other cameras, but we like the fact that it can double as a Webcam in a pinch. concordcam.com; $149.

2. LOGITECH DINOVO HUB
This sleek keyboard features an array of advanced buttons that serve as hot keys, while the stand-alone numeric keypad has a built-in calculator and also works as a remote control for the music and movies stored on your PC. And in an especially nice touch, the recharger base for the cordless optical mouse serves as a hub for all your other Bluetooth gear. logitech.com; $250.

3. HP 450WBT PRINTER
Take this thermal inkjet printer on the road and leave the cords behind. It can print at a speedy nine pages per minute, and if you load it up with photo-quality paper, it will turn out prints up to 4, 800-by-1,200-dots-per -inch resolution. hp.com; $350.

4. CARDO SYSTEMS ALLWAYS HEADSET
Responsible motorists know that they should get a headset if they plan to dial and drive. The sound quality is quite good, thanks to its noise-canceling technology, and it even comes with an attachment so users with eyeglasses can clip the headset right on their frames. allways1.com; $100.

Damien Donck for Newsweek

WI-FI? WE SAY WHY NOT.

1. PALM TUNGSTEN C
There's no need to weigh yourself down with a laptop computer when this nifty PDA will do the trick. You can surf the Web, clicking on links with the stylus, then switch to the built-in keyboard when you're ready to bang out an e-mail or instant message. And if you absolutely must get some work done, the bundled Documents to Go software will let you work on Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. palmone.com; $399.

2. SONY LOCATION-FREE TV
If you can't wait for the commercials to take a bathroom break, have no fear; this 12.1-inch LCD monitor can receive the TV signal that's beamed from the included base station. sony.com; $1,500.

3. LINKSYS PRINT SERVER
If you've got two printers—say, a laser for black-and-white text and an inkjet for photos—you can connect them both to your home network with this add-on. And if some friends drop by with their Wi-Fi-equipped laptops, they'll be able to print, too. linksys.com; $235.

4. CREATIVE SOUND BLASTER
Don't settle for tiny PC speakers. Use this plug-and-play device to deliver your MP3s from your computer to the booming stereo system in your living room. creative.com; $200.

5. BELKIN DESKTOP ANTENNA
This accessory transforms your computer into a hub for all your Wi-Fi equipment by extending the range of your wireless coverage up to 600 feet. belkin.com; $25.

Damien Donck for Newsweek

BEST OF THE REST

1. BLACKBERRY 7280 HANDHELD
Captain Kirk wishes his old communicator did as much as the beloved BlackBerry's triband PDA/Web browser/mobile phone, which can operate in North America, Europe and Asia. blackberry.com; $600.

2. LG VX4600 HANDSET
It's the first U.S. mobile phone with an exterior organic electroluminescent display—which is brighter than an LCD but consumes less power—that lets users be notified of incoming calls, voice mail and text messages without having to flip open the handset. www.lgmobilephones.com; $70 with two-year Verizon contract.

3. NIKE MP3 RUN
Get your run on with this training aid. Just clip it to your shoe before you hit the road, and it will track the speed, distance and pace of your outing. nike.com; $299.

4. KENWOOD HTB-S610
Tired of tripping over your rear speaker cables? This 5.1 surround-sound system comes with a pair of RF wireless speakers that are easy to set up. kenwoodusa.com; $600.

5. SENNHEISER RS 110 HEADPHONES
That noisy late-night action flick won't keep the rest of the family awake if you've got these wireless, battery-powered headphones. sennheiserusa.com; $90.

6. SUUNTO GPS WATCH
A man with this watch is a man who has asked for his last set of directions. In addition to GPS, this stylish timepiece features a compass, altimeter, barometer and thermometer. www.suunto.com; $770.

June 7 issue - We're all too familiar with the concept of technology as a double-edged sword, and wireless is no exception. In fact, the back edge of this rapier is sharp enough to draw blood. Yes, the idea of shedding wires and cables is exhilarating: we can go anywhere and still maintain intimate contact with our work, our loved ones and our real-time sports scores. But the same persistent connectedness may well lead us toward a future where our cell phones tag and track us like FedEx packages, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes when we're not aware.

To see how this might work, check out Worktrack, a product of Aligo, a Mountain View, Calif., producer of "mobile services." The system is sold to employers who want to automate and verify digital time-logs of their workers in the field. The first customers are in the heating and air-conditioning business. Workers have cell phones equipped with GPS that pinpoint their locations to computers in the back office. Their peregrinations can be checked against the "Geo Fence" that employers draw up, circumscribing the area where their work is situated. (This sounds uncomfortably like the pet-control technology, those "invisible fences" that give Rover a good stiff shock if he ventures beyond the backyard.)

"It they're not in the right area, they're really not working," says Aligo CEO Robert Smith. "A notification will come to the back office that they're not where they should be." The system also tracks how fast the workers drive, so the employer can verify to insurance companies that no one is speeding. All of this is perfectly legal, of course, as employers have the right to monitor their workers. Smith says that workers like the technology because it insures they get credit for the time they spend on the job.

Worktrack is only one of a number of services devoted to tracking humans. Parents use similar schemes to make sure their kids are safe, and many drivers are already allowing safety monitors to keep GPS tabs on their travels (OnStar anyone?). Look for the practice to really explode as mobile-phone makers comply with an FCC "E911" mandate dictating that by the end of 2005 all handsets must include GPS that pinpoints the owner's location.

The prospect of being tracked "turns the freedom of mobile telephony upside down," says Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. His concern is government surveillance and the storage of one's movements in databases. In fact, if information from the GPS signals is retained, it would be trivial to retain a log of an individual's movements over a period of years (just as phone records are kept). An even darker view is proposed by two academics who wrote a paper warning the advent of "geoslavery'." Its definition is "a practice in which one entity, the master, coercively or surreptitiously monitors and exerts control over the physical location of another individual to routinely control time, location, speed and direction for each and every movement of the slave."

My guess is that the widespread adoption of tracking won't be done against our will but initially with our consent. As with other double-edged tools, the benefits will be immediately apparent, while the privacy drawbacks emerge gradually. The first attraction will be based on fear: in addition to employers' keeping workers in tow, Mom and Dad will insist their teenagers have GPS devices so parents can follow them throughout their day, a human equivalent of the LoJack system to find stolen cars. The second stage will come as location-based services, from navigation to "friend-finding" (some systems tell you when online buddies are in shouting range) make our lives more efficient and pleasurable.

Sooner or later, though, it will dawn on us that information drawn from our movements has compromised our "locational privacy"—a term that may become familiar only when the quality it refers to is lost. "I don't see much that will bring it about [protections] in the short term," says Mark Monmonier, author of "Spying With Maps." He thinks that that we'll only get serious about this after we suffer some egregious privacy violations. But if nothing is done, pursuing our love affair with wireless will result in the loss of a hitherto unheralded freedom—the license to get lost. Here's a new battle cry for the wireless era: Don't Geo-Fence me in.