E-Mail in Your Kitchen

A woman cruising down the highway sees the gas gauge on empty and at the same time realizes she's hungry for a Whopper and fries.

No problem. She zips over to the service station, touches the Burger King ad on the electronic pump screen and drives through to pick up her order after filling her car with gas.

That evening, musing that she'd like a new chicken recipe, she taps on the microwave door and--voila!--up pop cybertips for cooking a Perdue roaster.

Uh-oh, there's only a spoonful of Cherry Garcia in the freezer. Before tossing the empty container, she waves the Ben & Jerry's container over the bar code scanner by her freezer door, which adds it to the shopping list being compiled by her Web grocery service.

Some of these scenarios that seem to come out of The Jetsons are happening now. Gas pumps, refrigerators, and microwave ovens can, in theory, be linked to the Internet. Gurus expect similar everyday gadgets will eventually become commonplace Internet-enabled devices, just as handheld computing devices are today.

Some of these applications will run on the Palm Computing operating system; others will rely on Microsoft Windows CE or Sun's Jini or Java. Some devices will truly be thin clients, with only minimal processing power, memory or hard-disk space.

Some in the industry say that Web-enabled renditions of everyday products may even displace the pioneer of all renegade contraptions--the desktop PC--for some tasks.

Coming to a Kitchen Near You

Internet appliances are Web-enabled digital tools that can do a few discrete tasks more easily, cheaply, and efficiently than PCs can. CMi Worldwide's Advantage 2000 "kitchen resource center," for example, is a kitchen-proof interactive TV/PC/CD player built on Hitachi's SH3 chip, Spyglass's Device Mosaic browser technology, and VxWorks, a non-Windows operating system from Wind River Systems.

The $200 countertop and $1500 built-in units encourage cooks to download recipes from the Web, spam friends with their favorite menus, or watch Julia Child dish up her specialties on TV.

International Data Corporation forecasts the U.S. market for non-PC consumer Internet appliances--including Net TVs, Web phones, gaming devices and smart handheld devices--will grow from the 3 million shipped last year to almost 28 million by 2002. By 2001, IDC predicts, Internet appliance shipments will exceed those of desktop consumer PCs.

Of course, computer hardware and software makers don't plan to be left behind. Intel is designing new chips for low-power appliances, and Microsoft is developing software for set-top TV boxes and automobile navigation systems. Sun's Jini software could well become the common language for those new devices, while the company positions JavaOS for consumers as the operating system for devices such as set-top boxes, interactive TVs, Web phones and automobile navigation systems.