• How big and mature is the market?
• Who are your competitors?
• Who are the potential customers?
• What is important to them?

• How much market share do your competitors own?
• What do they see as their competitive strengths?
• Who do they see as their most significant competitors?
• What key benefits do competitors communicate?
  

C. Identifying the primary competitive advantages of your product or service and conducting the actual testing to show your competitive advantages.

• Product Testing can include speed, power, reliability, ease of use, performance etc.
• Service Testing can include analysis of response times, accuracy, reporting, etc.

• Customized reports
• White papers
  

• Identify how and where your product (or service) outperforms your competitors'.
• See where your product falls short, so you can make engineering, packaging or service improvements, if possible.

• Independent verification from an unbiased source delivers credibility that can be used effectively in marketing campaigns and product roll-outs.
• Data can be used to create white papers, strengthen website copy, and increase the effectiveness of marketing materials.

Some of the world's leading technological minds believe that there's a lot of good news regarding the current course of high-tech R&D and the overall health of the technology sector.

In IEEE Spectrum's second annual technology opinion survey, the IEEE Fellows-an elite group of men and women representing the leaders of their professions-share their thoughts about current & future tech trends.
Here are some items of interest from the 2004 IEEE Fellows Tech Survey*:

What's Hot?

Biomolecular engineering. The Fellows believe that this field will have the greatest impact on society in the coming years. Other important emerging technologies mentioned included nanotechnology, megacomputing, and robotics.

What's happening in the technology sector?

The tech sector is turning around. Job prospects & technology investment is expected to pick up. A decade from now, things will be even better. Optimistic attitudes abound despite upheavals in the engineering workforce created by job migration and automation (which the Fellows believe on balance will have a positive effect on world economy). However, many Fellows anticipate incremental rather than radical improvement-gone are the wild spending and hiring sprees of the late 1990s.

How healthy is the tech sector in other countries?

53% expect technology investment to pick up in their country in 2004, although Fellows based in Asia are far more optimistic than their U.S. and European peers.

Who will dominate high-tech R&D activity?

A full 60% of the Fellows expect the U.S. to remain the world's technology R&D leader. Why? The country's culture and legal system encourages risk-taking and innovation, and the overall infrastructure, including excellent universities, national laboratories, private companies, and government subsidies, is hospitable to research and development.

China came in a distant second, with 18% of the vote. It's notable that 57 percent of China's college students major in science and engineering, compared to less than 20 percent of U.S. citizens in college.

Do big companies have an edge over little companies in the marketplace, or vice versa?

51% of the Fellows believe that established companies lose out to start-ups in developing new technology due to a number of reasons including lack of agility, excessive bureaucracy and a company culture that does not encourage innovation.
What advantages do established firms have? Deeper pockets, better access to markets, more research and more business alliances.

A number of Fellows observed that as a technology evolves, the company needs to change, too, and that different technologies flourish in different business environments. While their agility might enable small companies to outperform big ones in certain areas, some Fellows pointed out that fields like medical imaging functions and semiconductor processes require enormous capital investment.

Which of the big tech companies are in greatest danger of being overtaken by rivals?

Lucent Technologies and Sun Microsystems were the top two contenders-with 71 percent and 68 percent of the Fellows, respectively, citing them as vulnerable. Microsoft placed a distant third. Again, responses reflected where people work. Telecom and semiconductor types were more likely to dish Lucent, while those in computers were more apt to take aim at Sun.

Looking forward: What pressing issues need to be addressed for future growth and success?

As they gazed into the future, the Fellows saw many things to temper their enthusiasm and optimism about technology's potential. Many felt energy consumption and attendant environmental problems to be the most pressing issue.

The need for more and better engineering education was another concern. Are engineers and educators doing enough to generate interest in science and engineering at the high school level? Will the supply of engineers continue to meet demand in the future? Will engineering graduates be able to handle the increased commingling of technology disciplines? These are all important issues that cannot be overlooked.

For full text of this article, see http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/jan04/0104fell.html

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Not so long ago....

An application was for employment

A program was a TV show

A cursor used profanity

A keyboard was a piano!

Memory was something that you lost with age.

A CD was a bank account

Compress was something you did to garbage not to a file.

And if you unzipped anything in public you'd be in jail for a while!

Log on was adding wood to a fire.

Hard drive was a long trip on the road.

A mouse pad was where a mouse lived.

And a backup happened to your commode!

Cut - you did with a pocket knife.

Paste - you did with glue.

A web was a spider's home.

And a virus was the flu!

I guess I'll stick to my pad and paper.

And the memory in my head.

I hear nobody's been killed in a computer crash but when it happens they wish they were dead!

Maxims of the Internet Age

1. Home is where you hang your @
2. The e-mail of the species is more deadly than the mail.
3. A journey of a thousand sites begins with a single click.
4. You can't teach a new mouse old clicks.
5. Great groups from little icons grow.
6. Speak softly and carry a cellular phone.
7. C:\ is the root of all directories.
8. Don't put all your hypes in one home page.
9. The modem is the message.
10. Too many clicks spoil the browse.
11. The geek shall inherit the earth.
12. A chat has nine lives.
13. Don't byte off more than you can view.
14. Fax is stranger than fiction.
15. What boots up must come down.
16. Windows will never cease.
17. Virtual reality is its own reward.
18. Modulation in all things.
19. A user and his leisure time are soon parted.
20. There's no place like http://www.home.com
21. Know what to expect before you connect.
22. Oh, what a tangled website we weave when first we practice.
23. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the Net and he won't bother you for weeks.

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Astute Visionaries

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."
--Western Union internal memo, 1876.

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
--Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
--Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
--David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
--Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
--Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science,1949


"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year."
--The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

"But what ... is it good for?"
--Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
--Ken Olson, President, Chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

"There is no real need for sales people. Customers will be attracted to good products without assistance."
--Ken Olson, addressing a convention of DEC sales people


"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible."
--A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.

"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or, we' ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And, they said, 'No.' So then, we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'"
--Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer.

"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this."
--Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3M's"Post-It" Notepads.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
--Bill Gates, 1981

From http://jokes.christiansunite.com/Technology/Astute_Visionaries.shtm