As Tom Wheeler pointed out at CTIA Wireless IT show a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas, the use of SMS in the US has gone from 30,000 sent in June of 2001 to over 1 Billion this past June. Sounds like the reverse percentage growth of my stock portfolio over the same period. In pushing a new US/old worldwide trend, Tom took SMS messages from the keynote audience and asked his guests in real time. That's a great idea, IMO, as many great questions are lost due to shy engineering weenies afraid to stand up. In the photo on the left, Intel CIO, Doug Busch's shows a fab guy in a bunny suit wearing a Xybernaut computer with a wireless LAN link. Well, 15 years ago when I designed ICs I thought putting on those bunny suits was hard enough...I cannot imagine adding a Xybernaut computer on top of that. Sounds harder than an Apollo space suite - without the diaper.

At any rate, I sent Tom and SMS to ask Doug, which he did, which basically asked "are you comfortable using IM in the office?"...my question was prompted by the security concerns the IT manager had a company I used to work for who used security as a convenient excuse to shut down IM - of any form. While higher ranking technical people in the company were vehemently in disagreement, he convinced the President (she is not an email or IM person...she is a voice mail and meeting person...otherwise put, how to "maximize ineficiency" with technology) and others to shut it down...and down it went. Anyway, Doug had no problem with IM and said that it was extremely common at Intel. In a related note, AOL announced that it was releasing an enterprise version of AIM...others will follow.