by Alan Forray

Created on: January 29, 2008   Last Updated: March 19, 2008

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. (Peter Drucker)

Wi-fi is everywhere. Well, actually, it's not. Not even close. But the suggestion that it soon will be is neither speculation nor assertion. It is an immutable fact. The only questions are how long it will take, what format will reign supreme, and who will be the major players.

For those seeking positions of dominance in both hardware and access, the rewards could be enormous. With the convergence of mobile phones, MP3 players, cameras, digital video, PDAs, and computers, the future of Wi-fi will likely see nearly half the world's population cutting the cord by 2009.

Though the big guns like Cisco, Palm, Lucent, and Motorola are aggressively pursuing this market, some recent start-ups and micro-caps are jockeying for position with innovative approaches and technologies that could easily propel them to superstar status just as it did for the most innovative dot-coms such as Google and Yahoo.

And the key will be connectivity. Currently, wireless users are either on a fixed LAN at home, at an Internet caf, or driving around looking for hotspots where they can hop on the Net using somebody elses system. All of the foregoing are limited in range, offering decent connectivity for up to about 200 yards.

Enter WiMax, the next generation in wireless connectivity, which extends the range of hotspots from feet to miles. Both of these approaches comprise our immediate future, and both offer opportunities.

WiMax, which has recently completed testing in laboratories in Spain, is just rolling out in a few test markets and really won't begin to be noticed until the second half of this
year. Having ironed out most of its format problems (at least domestically), the clock has begun ticking on what is likely to be the next revolution in wireless communication. With the future of electronic media being 100% wireless (no doubt about it) it only remains to be seen how wireless will be delivered to both fixed and mobile devices the world over.

FON, which is less about a year old, is a company with an interesting concept that is attracting considerable attention from industry insiders. The brainchild of Spanish media entrepreneur, Martin Varsavsky, FON is intended to be a sort of wordwide wiresless users club in which "Foneros," (the name given to members) gather end to end in clusters of community hotspots that keep expanding in size as more and more

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