If technology solves nothing else, hopefully it will at least take care of traffic problems. That's the impetus behind Dash, started by a Stanford professor often stuck in bumper-to-bumper in Silicon Valley. The original idea is pretty sweet on its own: Where most current GPS systems simply provide your vehicle's location and a map of the roads around you, Dash Express is Internet-enabled - using a GPS radio, Wi-Fi radio and a cellular radio - so it collects real-time traffic data from other Dash users around you and from third-party sources, then calculates traffic delays and provides you with the …

It was an idea that appeared way ahead of its time: nomadic media before nomadic media was even possible, let alone cool. PointCast's 1996 introduction of push technology, the first product to deliver personalized Web content to consumers' PCs, put the start-up directly in the line of sight of major media players like Rupert Murdoch. It made companies like Yahoo nervous. It seemed possible that push technology would make Web browsers unnecessary.

Not that politicians need another medium or device through which to saturate your already campaign-weary brain, but here it comes. With the advent of digital paper, they - not to mention advertisers and everyone else vying for your attention - will be able to plaster a digital message any place they can put a sticker or a piece of paper.

Can you imagine pants designed by Apple? Good-bye iPod, hello iPants. No buttons, no zippers, and just one perfect pocket that carries everything you need. You could find your keys in seconds while listening to a killer track.

Sarah Jessica Parker - or at least the shoe lust of the Carrie Bradshaw character she plays in Sex and the City - might just save the earth. Stress might. Future footwear may do more than give the illusion of a lengthened leg and sultry sexiness. They could power the world - or your own small, roving part of it.

Surface, the touchscreen technology from Microsoft six years in the making, finally debuted this April. AT&T showed it off in its stores: Customers could place cell phones on the Surface platform and get instant information about the products - information they could move around and interact with. (This technology looks so much like the computer screens in Minority Report, you get chills.) The next step, AT&T says, is to be able to place your old phone on the screen and watch as all your content spills over into your new phone. Sweet.

For all its good points, the graphical user interface (GUI) that we're so familiar with today is a poor substitute for the manner in which humans truly interact with their environment. Sure, drag and drop is a fairly intuitive action, but it does little to replicate our more primitive and adaptive behaviors for sorting and working with our hands - which is exactly the issue that tangible user interfaces (TUI) are seeking to solve.

He's broken free. Smart phones. Wireless connections. Thumb drives that hold a small library of information on a keychain. Internet cafés. With the adoption of smarter and smarter tools, consumers have leveraged their own liberation. The modern consumer is ever more mobile, untethered to media schedules, to heavy PCs, to offices, even to traveling itself. They are not physically tied to any one place: not the office, not the classroom, not the television. Consumers take pieces of increasingly fragmenting media and run with them - wherever they feel like it. They can work and play at will, whether they are …