How are you getting ready for all of the disruptive technologies that will fuel the "telecosm"? If you're unfamiliar with the concept of the telecosm, perhaps you need to join the "Gilder Age." Coined by bestselling author, economist, and technology guru George Gilder, the telecosm is a world with an abundance of bandwidth and a scarcity of transistors, due to the ever-decreasing size of handheld devices.

Perhaps the best way to get to know this new world is to attend the annual  two-day Gilder Telecosm Forum venue, sponsored by Gilder  Publishing and Forbes. There, you'll find hundreds of CEOs, technology entrepreneurs, engineers, academics, investors, and money managers coming together to learn about all of the technologies that will make the telecosm possible. Many of these companies have appeared in the Gilder Technology  Report.

Of course, Gilder's tech visions might not emerge next week or even next year, but he always seems to be right about predicting what could happen a decade or two down the road. He's the bestselling author of Wealth  and Poverty. And, his collection of tech and business books include  Recapturing  the Spirit of the Enterprise, Microcosm,  Life  After Television, Telecosm,  and the Silicon  Eye. A frequent contributor to Forbes and The Economist, Gilder pioneered the formulation of supply-side economics when he served as chairman of the Lehrman Institute's Economic Roundtable.

Enterpriseleadership.org recently spoke with Gilder about the ins and outs of  the telecosm. Here's what he had to say:

EL: What's at the heart of the telecosm?

GG: The telecosm revolves around what we call the "exaflood." It's the overwhelming flood of 1018 data onto the Internet, caused by the increasing transformation of video form standard low definition, such as VGA, to increasingly high-definition forms. For example, when YouTube.com goes high definition, Internet traffic will rise 100 fold.

EL: How do you go about selecting the portfolio of companies you  report on and invite to your annual Telecosm venue?

GG: We work through my paradigm. For example, we've seen a 1,000-fold increase in video traffic on the Internet, along with an inexorable increase in video resolution. Once people go to high-definition television, they don't go back to low-definition images. As a result of these developments, we're seeing more emphasis on video worlds, such as MySpace.com and YouTube.com. Analog images or analog sounds are now being rendered and transmitted as IP packets and Ethernet frames. Ordinary Intel processors have not kept pace with the movement of this type of data across the Net.

The telecosm has to adapt when the exaflood of data produced each year hits. We try to figure out what companies can readily adapt to change. For example, graphics processors fit the bill. Other good candidates include companies that code and decode various image standards. A real-time processor has to be at least 30 frames a second or, better still, 60 frames a second to give a true immersive experience. Enter Sigma Designs.

The IP Ethernet transformation at 10 gigabits per second moving to 100 gigabits per second made us look at companies offering fiber-speed devices. We think EZChip has the best network processor. It hollows out the router by performing the router function in hardware similar to the way the Intel processor performs in the IBM PC. Other functions, such as security, also have to be performed at fiber speed. Raza MicroElectronics, Cavium Networks, and NetLogic Microsystems process packets  at wire speed.

EL: What innovative technologies can CIOs get their hands on to bring  the telecosm to their organization?

GG: Trusted platform  modules, a technology that has been around for a decade, are now being  incorporated into PCs. For example, little vault chips from Wave Systems sit on the edge of the network, performing a range of security functions, such as encryption and decryption. This development changes the entire structure of the network and the industry. You can have established authentication through various biometric schemes. With a trusted platform device, you also have absolutely secure authentication on the edge of the network. You don't need to have security devices and security processes attached to routers and other devices in the middle of the network. These devices actually create new opportunities for attack, rather than shielding machines from attack.

The Trusted Computing  Group, a not-for-profit standards organization for the trusted platform technology, comprises companies such as Hewlett Packard, IBM, and others that have adopted this technology.

EL: Where does optical networking fit into the telecosm?

GG: Most of the optical networking advances that began before the dot.com crash have been resurrected, and are making the network faster than the backplane of the computer. This transformation in computing has brought the demise of the wired LAN, the theme of Telecosm 2007.

Optics is one of the technologies where we've seen a 100-fold rise in network traffic just through that transformation. Optics is going to play a big role in transmitting photo-realistic images and video across the Internet. The capability of optics has been expanding three times faster than electronics for the past decade.

EL: To create the telecosm, what types of technologies are we seeing  with networks and network devices?

GG: Meanwhile, storage and bandwidth, which we call storewidth, has also been expanding at this pace. This development makes it possible for a lot of devices to connect to 10-gigabit networks, a move from the current Ethernet gigabit. All the electronics have to run at fiber speed, not finger speed.

Across the network, these devices have to convert from 10-gigabit streams into electronic processing, pass them over, route them, switch them, and classify them. All of the various functions that have to be applied to packets across the network need to run at a very fast speed. They require new architectures and new kinds of devices. Those are the companies we're looking at. Luxtera handles all of the optical  functions, short of the laser on CMOS microchips.

The network processor we focus on can perform millions of steps on packets coming in at 10 gigabits a second. We look at all of chips, devices, systems, and computer architectures, and new materials needed to couple all of the devices on the network edge.

EL: With the telecosm, you reduce the number of transistors. Can you  talk more about this?

GG: Terry Turpin, an optical engineer who has spoken at Telecosm about the fibersphere, has found that you can have as many as 14,000 of these wavelengths on a fiber without deterioration of the performance. The performance of fiber improves with the multiplication of wavelength paths down the fiber. This phenomenon of optics repeats the Moore's Law phenomenon in silicon. In other words, the more closely together transistors are on chip, the easier it is to produce faster, less expensive and better chips. That's the magic of microelectronics.

Meanwhile, microchips are moving to copper metalization from aluminum metalization. Because the transistors are closer together, you can accelerate the speed of the electronics three, to five fold. This transformation immediately affects the type of copper you can have. We focus on all the companies that are enabling that change.

EL: Are you working on another book?

GG: I'm 80 percent of the way through a book called  Analog. It's about two CalTech professors, Carver Mead and Richard  Feynman, who a taught a course on the physics of computation. Their body of work produced an entire series of books. Feynman eventually joined Thinking Machines to work on massively parallel computers. Carver Mead, the Gordon Moore Professor at CalTech and co-founder of Intel, has either launched or done design work  for more than 25 semiconductor companies. Mead researched and named Moore's  Law.

EL: Some CIOs say they don't know how they would use virtual worlds  such as Second Life. What would you say to them?

GG: A transformation in communication is underway on the Net. You're going to experience a new type of video conferencing and collaboration. You'll enter a virtual space where you'll be present in a physical-like way in that space. Here, you'll experience the richness of a face-to-face exchange, rather than through avatars. Everyone will be able to see you write on a virtual white board or to project PowerPoint slides. You'll even be able to run executable programs as desired within your space. This is where the technology is moving to.

EL: What are the key technologies that will enable these realistic  virtual worlds?

GG: One of the technologies we're stressing at Telecosm includes graphics processors. They're everywhere. The graphics processor in your cell phone uses the same ATI instruction set as a supercomputer. To this end, you have a  universal instruction set that's about as common as the X86 instruction set in graphics processors  These graphics processors will be able to create virtual worlds, such as Second  Life and the forthcoming CitySpace.

Using a 3D programming language called OTOY, and the instruction set of the instructor processor, Jules Urbach, in a matter of hours, was able to create photo-realistic figures at 30 frames per second for the Transformers movie. He would have taken days to do the same thing with some of today's technologies. With OTOY, the CPU hardly plays any role in the activity. You can use it with anything from a supercomputer to a cell phone, which can be scaled to accommodate a big screen immersive environment.

We have the gaming industry to thank for the development of the massively parallel graphics processor. This technology has moved three times faster than PC microprocessors. Think about it. AMD bought ATI. Intel has a project  underway that uses massively parallel graphics processors. Look at what Nvidia is doing.

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Elizabeth M. Ferrarini is a free-lance technology and  business writer from Boston, Massachusetts. You can reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.