MOBLE PHONE FUTURE
Thirsty and don't have any money on you? You're in luck if you happen to be in Finland and standing in front of a Coke machine with your mobile phone. Just dial the phone number on the Coke machine and it will dispense an ice cold can of pop for you and charge it to your cell phone bill. Car washes and jukeboxes are some of the other services that can be ordered via a cell phone. One person even has the front door of his home set up to open when he calls it!

Finland leads the world with the highest per capita use of mobile phones. 75% of its citizens currently use cell phones and the percentage continues to increase. It's cell phone revenues exceeds that of the traditional local fixed-line use. The United States ranks number 12 in the world with less than 25% of the population using cell phones. Cell phone use in the US is not expected to reach 50% until at least 2007. (Wired, January 1999)

PUNCH CARDS
Remember the punch card? They were the widely used method of storing data back in the 1960's and early 1970's. Would you believe that they are still in use? Cardamation is still making and servicing equipment used to punch and read the cards. Their customers include the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Cotton Division, a few Fortune 500 companies, defense contractors and country clubs. There are still a few paper companies making the punch cards. The largest manufacturer of punch cards is producing over 5 million cards per month.

The first use of punch cards was an automatic loom designed in the middle of the 18th century by Jacques de Vaucanson. The U.S. Census Bureau used punch cards for the 1900 census, replacing the sheets of ledger paper used for the previous 10 censuses. Use of the punch card has declined from its peak in 1967 when approximately 200 billion cards were used. IBM closed the last of its nine card making factories in 1984. (Source: Wired, March 1999)

INFORMATION PLEASE
What are people doing on the Internet? A recent survey of 100,000 North American households showed that most people use the Internet for email and to access information. The top ten reasons for accessing the Internet were: sending email (88.4%), accessing the World Wide Web (84.5%), going to search engine sites (76.9%), visiting company or product sites (51.1%), conducting research about a product purchase (46.6%), getting weather information (46.1%), using reference sites (39.9%), reading magazines and newspapers (33.3%), getting stock quotes (27.4%) and making purchases (26.1%). The survey was conducted by Forrester Research, Inc. (Source: Wall Street Journal, 3/22/1999)

WEB SITE OF THE MONTH
America's Job Bank www.ajb.org offers the job seeker and employers a wealth of information about careers, wage and labor market information, job openings and job seeker's resumes. On March 30, 1999, there were 559,985 resumes available for review by employers and 961,662 job openings listed. The site also provides links to the state's employment service and other employment sites such as newspaper want ads. America's Job Bank is operated by the U.S. Department of Labor and the service is free.
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Technology Tidbits is published monthly by Jerry Price, Eau Claire, Wisconsin
© 1999 Jerry W. Price

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