Think about using Palm devices to enable waiters to take food orders. This might seem like an abuse of technology, but it makes sense to have centralized inventories constantly updated, to be able to instantly spot trends in customer demand and to be able to more easily manage the food preparation process. On one hand, you could use simple Palm devices like the Palm m100 to capture order information, go back to a central location, HotSync the information, and have it distributed to the appropriate databases. On the other hand, wirelessly enabling such devices would allow waiters to spend more of their time serving customers and less time running back and forth to the kitchen.

There's a third class of applications that might be part of our pervasive computing mix. These are the dedicated computing applications. A few years ago, my friend Theo called the Palm device "the world's cheapest terminal," and he was right. At less than two hundred bucks, the Palm device is definitely a very cheap, easily deployable, general-purpose computing device. It can be mounted virtually anywhere. Buy a couple of strips of Velcro and you've got a mounting mechanism.

You might imagine a Palm device used to monitor a temperature system, an alarm system, or any other industrial machine. I'm personally fascinated by this use of Palm devices. If you're using a Palm device as a dedicated computing device, drop me a note at david@palmpowerenterprise.com. Let me know what kinds of neat things you're doing with Palm devices.

Recently, I've become aware of another class of applications. These are more marketing in nature and seem to recognize that many consumers carry Palm devices wherever they go. They seem to fall into two general categories:

• Sending marketing messages to handheld devices;
• Making the shopping/consuming experience more pleasant and productive.

I'll be honest. I really don't like the first approach. I think that if I walked into a mall and all of a sudden I was bombarded by IR signals beaming advertising to my Palm device, I'd be seriously annoyed. And I tend to ignore kiosks, special deals, and coupons. So I'm not too sanguine about using handheld devices as recipients of mobile marketing messages.

But I do think there's another approach that could be incredibly powerful. It's using handheld devices to make the shopping experience more productive. Let me give you an example. Both supermarkets and drug stores baffle me. I have never figured out how they're organized.

Let's assume you're in your local market and want to get some blue cheese. Where do you go? You might say the cheese aisle, but I've found that's sometimes not the right place. Sometimes blue cheese is in the plebeian cheese section (you know, where all those packaged Kraft cheeses hang out). Sometimes blue cheese is in the first-class cheese section (which might be at the completely opposite end of the store) with all those cheeses with strange sounding names like "Pave de Chirac." For those who might care, Pave de Chirac turns out to be a mountain farm product. It's very soft and pliant with a light blue mould and a delicate, subtle, lingering taste.