By Gregory McQuerter ilicon Valley may still be the technology epicenter of the world, but the fault line clearly runs down the coast to San Diego, where a thriving telecom community is leveraging Qualcomm and its spin-offs to lay legitimate claim to becoming a power in its own right. Following is a snapshot of the dominant tech trends for the near future, along with the local companies that may hold considerable sway in these matters. 1.) Urge to Merge: The watchword for the new year is "convergence" -- the fashionable term for the slicing and dicing of voice, video and data into the digital gruel that runs, increasingly, through the Internet. Where once trickled a stream of arcane nerd to nerd science speak now courses a data deluge that threatens to engulf us all. It spills onto the airwaves, downloads into the home office, trickles through copper and cable lines and turbocharges along fiber backbones. The benign-sounding "Internet Protocol" -- a packet-switching network layer that's proven to be amazingly versatile and robust -- underlies it all. Things will never be the same. 2.) Demise of the PC: Take a long, last, loving look at your general-purpose PC (GP PC). Yes, it will continue to be your word-processing, spreadsheet-crunching workhorse, but little else. For the Internet will continue sucking back much of the intelligence and content that your GP PC now owns (or haven't you noticed?). In its place will appear a "hollowed out" version -- more a pipe to the Internet than your previous be-all-to-end-all compute engine. Slowly but surely, Web servers and search engines are reclaiming what the mainframes gave up. The Internet is becoming one Big Kahuna computer. 3.) Embedded Systems: Those who fear Big Iron need not agonize, however, for there is a countervailing movement. Some say the GP PC is not upsizing but downsizing to a billion tiny computers. That it's leaping nimbly to the TV settop; reappearing in the chipset of your smart phone; lurking in the myriad controllers of your car. They say that the home PC, precisely because it never has found its killer application, is breaking up into a thousand killer "applets & appliances," all powered by embedded computers. Proof is found in the digital cameras, dedicated e-mail devices, electronic books and consumer bar code scanners offered in this year's Christmas catalogs. 4.) Killer Apps: But back to the Big Kahuna, which is getting bigger as we speak. Who would have thought five years ago that the second "killer application" (behind e-mail) for the Internet might be voice? Certainly the big telephone companies have for years been using IP-switched fiber to carry long-haul voice, but now Joe Consumer can originate end-to-end calls to Timbuktu from his kitchen Mac. San Diego's USA Talks.com (a recent USCD Connect Most Innovative Product winner) is a voice-over-IP long-distance service with a nifty voice-recognition interface, so a subscriber can call from any phone, any time. The system recognizes the voice, approves the call and handles billing. On the business side, local company Nuera provides a very cost-effective voice-over-IP solution that allows corporations, including their branch offices, to keep voice and fax traffic within the corporate data LAN, avoiding telecom charges that would accrue over public networks. 5.) E-business: Or will the second coming of the killer app be e-commerce, as Baby Boomers begin shopping for books, skis, mortgages -- even golf tee-times -- online? As the Internet pipes expand to monstrous yawing mouths, attendant technologies are emerging to mediate the feedings. Dynamic load balancing for highly trafficked Websites (such as Schwab and Fidelity) is coming into play, with San Diego-based IPivot's "Qos Broker" leading the charge. And as the "horizontal" portals of AOL, Yahoo and Excite begin to lose their luster, affinity-group "vertical" portals will begin to dominate -- for sports enthusiasts, gourmets and other special interests. As these new portals come online, powerful new Website development tools that enable heightened interactivity will come into play, such as Carlsbad's Elemental Software's "Drumbeat." 6.) The Pipes: More to the point, the backbone pipes themselves must swell dramatically to handle the multi-gigabit payloads. Locally, fiber-optic player Silkroad says it has found a way to pack dramatically more data into a single light color (wavelength), leapfrogging current capacities of 30 to 40 gigabits per second to attain 100-gigabit-per-second throughput. But let's not forget the billions of dollars of telco wire that's already in the ground. Some call it a copper cage that is trapping us in the past, but Sorrento Valley's Copper Mountain doesn't agree. Its "digital subscriber line" access devices enable much faster Internet throughput via this legacy plant, and may give cable a run for its money in some sectors. As for the cable settops, our own Sorrento Mesa-based General Instrument is in the catbird seat to provide the boxes for the coming age of broadband media into the home. 7.) Smart Terminals: Overlooked are the Net's wireless end-points. Foremost among them are the emerging "road warrior" devices -- the personal digital assistants (PDAs) and Smart Phones (Qualcomm's hybrid "pdQ," for example) that promise to create mobile knowledge workers of us all. Operating system battles for these powerful tools now rage across the continents. Will market forces choose San Diego-based WirelessKnowledge (joint venture of Microsoft and Qualcomm) which will offer Windows CE? Other camps claim CE is more complicated than necessary for computing on the fly. They point to the now-dominant Palm OS, or the Psion approach (Ericsson/Nokia/Symbion venture), or some future stripped-down version of Java, as the future of this segment. Only time will tell. 8.) Small Faces: New operating systems that move away from the current "WIMP" approach -- windows, icons, menus and a pointer -- may give way to interfaces that can be managed with one hand (briefcase in other, charging through the airport, one assumes). Touch screens, jog dials (Sony of San Diego developed this), scroll wheels and application buttons will arise. But even they may be short-lived, giving way to more natural "touchless" controls -- voice recognition for enhanced car safety, even "gesture analysis." 9.) Commodity Wireless: What is clear, however, is that we're rapidly shifting into a "just past second" generation of wireless communications. Now that the POWTS (plain old wireless telephone service) nets are built out, carriers are looking to add vast new and advanced data services, retrievable only from this new generation of smart terminals. (No, they're not nearly ready to look at 3G -- third-generation wireless services that tout movie downloads while aboard a 90-mph bullet train.) 10.) Bluetooth: Speaking of road warriors, what of the cable mess that now tethers mobile phones to laptops to PDAs to hotel room modems to God knows what else? A new initiative called Bluetooth claims to solve this with a specification that will create a wireless LAN connecting all such devices within six feet of each other. San Diego's SiliconWave is reported to be developing chips for this global spec. Until then, you can at least hope that San Diego-based ATCOM/Info has beaten you to your next hotel room, and has provisioned it with their "IPORT" T-1 facility software, which can stream virtually anything you can squeeze out of your laptop onto the Internet. It won this year's MIP Internet award, and is another sterling example of the ingenuity that continues to keep San Diego's tech love affair going and going and going. Gregory McQuerter, CEO of the McQUERTER Group, has been providing marketing support to San Diego's top high-techs for more than a decade.