Heather Clancy

Arranging to get from point A to point B has become a whole lot easier with the help of widely used travel-planning websites such as Expedia, Hotwire, Kayak, Orbitz and Travelocity. Indeed, among U.S. business travelers, 45 million are online--40 percent of whom are bookers--according to a survey conducted by Forrester Research earlier this year.

But what if you also need to stop at point C or point D along the way, or need a restaurant for dinner that's within walking distance of your hotel and quiet enough for a business negotiation? Such a trip could take hours to research and book yourself.

According to data released in early 2008 by Forrester Research, 45 percent of companies are evaluating or planning to buy disk encryption software to protect against information theft. The impetus for this shift is simple: Not only does encryption technology make it harder to pluck confidential information off purloined technology, such as laptops, but state disclosure laws regard these thefts differently.

"If it's encrypted and it's stolen, you don't have to report it," says Cherie Mitchell, COO and principal at LuciData, referring to state privacy laws that require companies to disclose the theft or loss of unprotected notebook computers that may contain sensitive, personally identifiable information that could be linked to a specific individual. Due in part to disclosure laws, LuciData, an internal management and computer forensics consulting firm, adopted whole disk encryption, aka full disk encryption, which encrypts every bit of information contained on a company's hard drives.

Some people took to texting on their mobile phones like concert pianists. Others, however, are all thumbs with their thumbs. For the latter group, there's a new generation of software and services that make use of a much more logical interface to control functions on your phone: the human voice.

These applications, from upstart companies including Jott Networks, Nuance and Vlingo, use spoken commands to handle an array of organizational tasks--from managing e-mail and voice mail to controlling calendars to capturing ideas while they're still top of mind. Several market research firms have described the next three years as a turning point for this sort of speech recognition technology. Opus Research, for one, believes the market for speech recognition capabilities in mobile devices will reach $239 million by 2011--a five-fold increase over 2006.