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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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APRIL 5, 2005
In the Internet's High-Speed Lane [Page 2 of 2] DOGGY IN THE WINDOW. The experience can be exhilarating. "It's amazing to see how many people think about the same things as me," says Jason Berman, a 23-year-old New Yorker and a regular on social-networking powerhouse Friendster.com. Berman recently blogged about his insomnia, and people from as far off as the Philippines flooded him with advice, ranging from taking melatonin to reading a calculus book at bedtime. A fellow New Yorker wrote to say she saw a Halloween picture of Berman in an Indiana Jones get-up on his blog, and that she's a huge Jones fan, too. The two then met and went to the movies. Marketers are jumping onto the social-networking bandwagon as well. "We see a lot of interest in marketing soft drinks, fast food, cereal, and health and beauty products to teens," says Charlie Barrett, vice-president for advertising sales at Friendster.com. That's why the site, which caters to an over-18 crowd, is currently developing a special site for minors. Pioneers such as Neopets.com, which offers children the opportunity to create and care for a "virtual pet" as well as correspond with more any of more than 9 million other virtual pet owners, have earned revenues from advertising sponsors such as McDonald's (MCD ) and Disney (DIS ). Marketing on Neopets.com has been linked directly to purchases of the sponsors' products. Plus, sponsors can sell merchandize such as music downloads or books directly through the free site. Neopets.com is now working on providing access to its site via cell phones with fast connections. GLOBAL CLASSROOM. Educational Web sites are also seeking to take maximum advantage of the speed, social-networking possibilities, and technological wizardry afforded by broadband. Consider that 40% of parents who sign up for broadband access do so with the intention of helping their kids with schoolwork, according to research firm Grunwald Associates in Bethesda, Md. Examining the move from dial-up to broadband, Grunwald found that 13% of parents and 23% of youngsters report that students earned better grades as a result of the broadband connection, according to Grunwald's 2003 study of 2,300 students, ages 6 to 17. The study also showed that, with broadband, children end up spending 20% more time doing homework, despite all that online chatting. Expect to see continuing major improvements in distance learning, too. Computer-networking gearmaker Nortel (NT ) is developing a system that will allow students to watch, say, an archeologist located at a dig site across the world in real time, says Walt Megura, the company's general manager of broadband networking. They would be able to talk with the professor and fellow students as freely as they would have done in a real-life classroom. Thanks to the drive to socialize, gaming is also becoming much more interactive. For several years now, gamers could play against each other over broadband connections to their PCs or video-game consoles such as Microsoft's (MSFT ) Xbox. This year could also see a rise of broadband games for cell phones and TVs hooked to the Web. Already, gaming developer Tournament One is testing its multiplayer golf, fishing, and bowling games with wireless carrier Sprint (FON ) and cable operator Comcast (CMCSA ). The games will allow users to chat via IM while playing. "MILLIONS OF SOCIAL NETWORKS." That's just the beginning. In a few years, kids might play a football game within one window on their TV screen, watch an actual game in another, and check to see which of their friends are watching which shows in a third window, says Michael O'Hara, general manager of service-provider business at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. As youngsters embrace online social networks, adults likely won't be far behind, and the number of social networks, now pegged at 350, is expected to surge. "We won't have a million people in 10 social networks," says Marc Canter, CEO of social-portals design consultancy Broadband Mechanics. "We'll have millions of social networks with 10 people in each." Of course, setting up social networks, especially for young people, isn't quite that simple. To protect young users, Neopets.com had to develop special, patent-pending software that catches bad words in e-mail. In addition, its team of human moderators constantly reviews e-mail for content the software finds questionable. BIG BUCKS. Still, as more and more young people flock online, such problems will be solved. And plenty of entrepreneurs are working overtime to transform the way everyone shops, learns, plays games -- and, of course, socializes. In this special report, BusinessWeek Online explores the changes in lifestyle, technologies, and communications wrought by expanding broadband access, and it explains how everyone from cable companies and telcos to Microsoft and Madison Avenue ad gurus are seeking to take advantage of this transformation, which promises above all to be highly lucrative. Tomorrow: BusinessWeek Online looks at how broadband Internet access is changing the way cable and telecom companies compete and explains why broadband adoption in the U.S is falling behind the rest of the industrialized world.
 By Olga Kharif in Portland, Ore.
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