So where do you go when you're looking for blue cheese? I've hunted all over. But if I had a map to the supermarket on my Palm V, I could just click on blue cheese and the device would tell me it's in Aisle 16, next to the olives. I don't know why it's next to the olives, it just is.

You could envision a similar directory application for a drug store (where the hell is the aspirin?), or even a theme park (where's the throw-up-your-lunch ride?). The idea behind these shopping helper applications is not that they bombard consumers with more ads, it's that they make the process of consuming more pleasant. Honestly, I suspect if I weren't so darned annoyed by supermarkets and drugstores, I'd go into them more often.

With Bluetooth technology and wireless, you could even go a step further. A customer could, perhaps, put together a shopping list at home. Walking into the supermarket, the list would reorder itself to correspond to the walking order of the aisles. Then, just like a GPS system, as you walked the aisles, the Palm device would tell you when you were close to the next item on the shelf. But because computing can be so powerful, rather than just telling you Dancing Pigs Bar-B-Que Sauce is in Aisle 9, it would tell you when you'd walked far enough down Aisle 9. In fact, as you turn to the left, it could even show you a picture of the shelves and indicate that the 18 oz. bottle of Original Dancing Pigs Bar-B-Que Sauce is on the second shelf to the left, while the 5 oz. bottle of Dancing Pigs Dry Seasoning is on the third shelf to the right.

Obviously, making this loosely coupled, very wildly distributed computing model work requires a lot of infrastructure, careful design, and dedication. But if the focus is on providing computing resources anywhere at any time, when it makes sense and proves useful, it'll be a great boon to both businesses and consumers. And perhaps if I can find all the right ingredients on one trip to the supermarket, I can duplicate my friend Steve's absolutely addictive blue cheese dressing recipe in my own kitchen. If not, I can always just send out for more sushi.

Michael Connick is a Senior Project Manager at BusinessEdge Solutions, Inc. He can be reached at mconnick@monmouth.com. You can also visit his Palm handheld oriented Web site at http://www.monmouth.com/~mconnick/palm.htm.