Home is where
your cell phone is

Our Office Genius is already living in the future while we're stuck in 2001. It was just logic to her, but she's brighter than most of us. She has no home telephone. She does everything on a cell phone.

She figured that for a few dollars more a month, she could have a communications device that travels with her, takes messages and can be turned off when she wants peace. And -- here's the futuristic part -- when her address changes, the phone number doesn't.

A mobile society demands mobile connections. A permanent cell-phone number is the talk equivalent of the domain name on a Web site: it doesn't matter where it's hosted or physically resides; you can contact the site at that address.

When the online industry finally allows Web addresses assigned to individual people -- and that's just around the corner -- expect an explosion in truly personal "home" pages. The kind of home that travels with you. Permanent, personal cell-phone numbers are just the tip of truly gigantic communications iceberg coming our way. But for the time being, the Office Genius still needs a home-bound cable to hook up her computer.

Burl Burlingame

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