June 7, 2005...While those of you who attended BLUE 2005 received your email messages last Friday announcing that the presentations were now available online, there are scores of others out there in Internet land who are "singing the blues" because they didn't get to attend. Obviously, if you didn't personally attend this annual power meet for the blue spectrum LED and LD supply chain, you're in the dark as to what went down. If you did attend, and you're sitting in front of your computer trying to remember the exact phrases, statistics, prognostications or laments from one of our world famous presenters, you and the password you received via email can simply go to www.compoundsemi.com/blue2005/presentations/ and Voila! There you have it, right at your fingertips. Each and every PowerPoint presentations, in living color. I don't know of any other meeting in our industry that provides that type follow-up service. Beats dragging out and lugging around the bulky binders, that's for sure.

And because we have that "Great Library in the Sky" type attitude here at CompoundSemi Online, attendees can view the presentations anywhere, anytime, for years to come. Wherever you go, all you have to remember is your user name and password. Cool, huh? Heck, we still have the BLUE 2003, and BLUE 2004 presentations accessible online on our site for those who attended, or paid to have the privilege of post-event access! Simply click on any of the above, then on "agenda" and you'll be reminded what's in those event presentation archives. They're definite keepers. What was presented never gets old, it simply becomes classic. Seriously, you'd be surprised how often these get accessed. It's clearly because of the caliber of our presenters, all of whom we again want to thank for their participation.

If you're one of the ones singing the blues because you didn't get to go to Taiwan for this extraordinary event, for whatever the reason (your boss wouldn't let you... you ran out of money... your dog ate your plane ticket...) worry not. Simply send an email to: "contactblue2005@sslighting.net" and Tom Griffiths will get right back to you with the details on purchasing access to those proceedings, which varies depending on your member or client status with CompoundSemi Online, SSLighting Net, or LIGHTimes.

Speaking of "The Great Library in the Sky" and the notion of online access to information you couldn't so readily access, I caught an especially interesting one hour chat between the famed PBS interviewer, Charlie Rose and Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google. In case you don't already use Google (and who doesn't by now), that's the dot com that survived to rule the world. The company's initial stock offering a few months ago was priced at $100 and today it's nearing $300 per share. Dr. Schmidt laid out his vision of what's to come of the Internet, and Google's mission. That mission is straightforward. The company wants to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. That's not unlike our mission, on an obviously much smaller scale. We want the outside world to be able to access all the information possible about compound semiconductors and solid state lighting. One of the joys to me is when our articles are cited as the top recommendations when doing a Google search. And now they have a nifty desktop search function that sorts through everything in your personal computer.

If you're not already a Google fan, simply go to www.google.com and get acquainted. It's what the online future is all about. Google, by the way and according to the company, is a play on the word "googol," which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Kasner and James Newman. It refers to the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web. The company was started by two Stanford computer science grads when they were still in their 20s. Fairy tales truly do come true in the wonderful world of high technology.

The kinds of things Charlie Rose and Eric Schmidt talked about for that hour last week called up all sorts of reflections for me. Google was still just a student dream when we got things rolling in 1996 as the very first online communication source for the compounds, the old MOCVD.com "newspaper". In my days at Stanford in the early '60s, the first computer science majors were close friends. They had to prepared their own questions for their PhD orals for the math and statistics professors because nobody outranked them at the time. But the recollection most relevant to Google's mission and ours was fostered by Nolan Bushnell, the inventor of the first video game, Pong. I had a television show in Silicon Valley in the late 1970s called The New Breed that featured Nolan shortly after selling Atari for $28 million. He went on to establish a number of subsequent businesses, and is revered for his incredible ability to innovate and motivate. Nolan fostered in me the notion of "The Great ROM in the Sky" making what would eventually be the Internet and Web sort of like an ethereal deity. The fact that we can do more than simply read what's in memory (ROM) makes a library a more apt analogy.

In addition to discussing the obvious, like what sorts of things are being innovated now at Google (maps, uploading everything in the world's major libraries, lots of language translation tricks), Charlie asked Eric how he envisioned the future of the Internet. He described much of what we're trying to do here at CompoundSemi Online. This includes promoting the notion of narrowcasting, versus broadcasting. Eric reminded Charlie that people have very unique needs and tastes, and when combined, it amounts to a horrendous amount of information transmission and transfer. But it's what Eric didn't say that intrigued me. He didn't touch on what my vision of the Internet, and what international news, information and industry resource sites like ours envision.

We communicate in these pages with people who live and work in probably every country in the world, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Our BLUE event in Taiwan, which marked the first visit by Wu Ling to Taiwan. She's the general secretary of mainland China's esteemed Solid State Lighting Alliance (ref: June 2 news coverage). Her presentation was highly anticipated and very informative. What BLUE represented, with Wu Ling, with our Korean and Japanese attendees and presenters, USA, Germany, England, you name it and they were there, as they are every day as readers of these pages. The incredible mix of languages and cultures that makes up our prestigious compound semi and solid state lighting industries is the wave of the future.

Alvin Toffler described the challenge years ago, with his insightful writings (Future Shock, Third Wave, War and Anti-War, et. al...). Every time I compose a document in Dreamweaver, the html editor so many of us in online publishing rely on, I think about the future of the Internet. What I envision to better serve everyone in the world is to make all online words hot. Not only would you have hotlinks, like the underlined words in all my columns and in so many documents you read that are embedded with the http://... you need programmed in to take you to "more information" I'd like to have it where anybody could right click on any word and see an option that would provide a menu that would provide options such as how that individual word is pronounced and defined correctly... in any language. Not only would you have instant translations of whole documents, something else that Google is working on, but you'd have an educational aid that would mean that people of any age, any walk of life, speaking any language could glean all the information they could phathom from the document.

If all online words were hot, at the very least, all our readers would be able to understand my lame jokes and myriad of metaphors. Just imagine what else it could mean. One distinguished, lovely woman being able to leave mainland China to deliver an important message to her colleagues at a conference in Taiwan is just the beginning. There are so many people in countries all over the world that still are not communicating openly and freely with one another, most often because of an inability to truly understand one another. If the world can truly open up, at least online, many previous differences can be overcome, and that world will surely become a better place to raise our future generations... of humans and other living things.

I look forward to what giant leaps we'll be able to report from BLUE 2006 next year, in Taiwan in May. Meanwhile, you can catch up with what went down a month ago by simply clicking on: www.compoundsemi.com/blue2005/presentations/ if you were an attendee in person, or if not, by sending a request for purchase details to: "contactblue2005@sslighting.net".