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Scenario 1: You give each of these people your business card, and they give theirs to you. Said cards get shuffled in with countless others as the conference draws to a close; they may get lost, worn or forgotten on the way back to the office where -- assuming they make it that far -- they may end up in a Rolodex file. Not very promising.

Scenario 2: You give each contact a Digital Business Card. No flimsy piece of paper to lose or damage, this is a business-card-size CD-ROM containing a 1-minute multimedia presentation. It could be a small clip with information about your company, or it could be a short film in which you introduce yourself. In any case, after viewing the presentation, your contacts can click on a link that automatically launches their Web browsers and brings up your company Web site.

Sounds a little better, doesn't it?

That scenario is possible today with 3D Solutions Inc.'s Digital Business Card. The devices hold up to 39MB of data and fit into the inner circle of a CD-ROM drive. "The days of handing out traditional business cards and collateral material are gone," says Mike Myatt, director of Internet services at 3D Solutions in Beaverton, Ore. "Having the ability to hand someone a business card that contains a 5-minute commercial that links back to your Web site is truly powerful."

Customers can choose the length of presentations on the cards as well as the shape of the cards themselves; Myatt notes that a baseball organization, for instance, could request a baseball-shaped card. 3D Solutions then handles production of the presentation and creation of the CD-ROMs. Pricing for the CDs runs about $1 each for the average customer; production of the presentation generally begins at about $5,000, Myatt says.

For more information, visit www.go3dweb.net or call 888 GO3DNOW (888 463-3669).

ROBOTS It might not be up to par with The Jetsons -- not quite, anyway -- but robotic technology is moving into the forefront of innovations designed to make life easier and more fun. Indeed, several new robots have been announced recently that make Rosie, the Jetsons' mechanical maid, look positively mainstream.

Cye, for example, is a compact, personal robot produced by Pittsburgh-based Probotics Inc. that can retrieve your mail and vacuum floors. Measuring 16 by 10 by 5 inches and weighing 9 pounds, Cye runs on rechargeable batteries and is controlled via a wireless radio link with a PC. Users operate the robot using Map-N-Zap, a graphical user interface that can be loaded onto any PC with a speed of at least 133MHz. To make Cye move, users simply drag its icon onscreen; it moves about 3 feet per second. Using Map-N-Zap, users can map out a path for Cye and program it to operate according to a schedule-delivering mail at 10 a.m., say, and bringing dirty dinner dishes from the dining room to the kitchen at 7:30 p.m. According to Probotics, it takes roughly 15 minutes to charge the robot, load the Map-N-Zap software onto the PC and start communicating with Cye.

Cye was first released in May in limited quantities for $695. The robot is available in yellow, orange and black; optional accessories, priced at $89 each, incclude a wagon attachment and a vacuum attachment that can be hooked up to an upright vacuum cleaner. Henry Thorne, CEO of Probotics and inventor of the technology used in Cye, says that by mid-August the company had shipped some 151 robots, mostly to wealthy patrons "who love tinkering and high-tech gadgets." Future innovations, Thorne says, will include a cordless vacuum attachment and voice recognition capabilities.

Cye comes with several user tutorials, including "CyeServe: Have Cye bring food and drink to your friends" and "CyeGuide: Have Cye meet visitors and lead them to your office." For more information on Cye, visit www.personalrobots.com.

A robot better suited, perhaps, to purely entertainment purposes is Aibo, a robotic pet released by Sony Corp. in May. Aibo, a $2,500 dog-shaped robot complete with floppy ears that double as microphones and eyes backed by color cameras, includes artificial intelligence software that allows it to respond in a doggie way to human commands. At a press conference introducing Aibo last spring, the proto-pup did not perform quite as snappily as your average show dog, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. (It apparently failed at first to play with a ball offered by a Sony executive.) To its credit, however, Aibo does get up after being knocked over and can detect edges, so it won't walk off a table.

That's more than some of us can say.

For more information about Aibo, visit www.world.sony.com/robot.

-- Mindy Blodgett

SPAM BUSTERS If you're like most people, you start your day by wading through a flood of e-mail. It wouldn't be such a nuisance if the e-mail were all relevant to you, sent by coworkers about important things. But no, it seems an ever-increasing proportion of the e-mail barrage is made up of spam -- useless, shameless and often tasteless junk mail sent out in mass e-mailings.

Rather than just sit and fume quietly as you hit the Delete button again and again, there's now something you can do about it: Send your junk e-mail to the "recycling bin."

The Spam Recycling Center (www.spamrecycle.com), launched earlier this year, is a public education and antispam awareness effort sponsored by ChooseYourMail.com, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (CAUCE), the Forum for Responsible and Ethical E-mail (FREE), and SAFEeps, the American Computer Group's e-mail preference list system. The effort encourages people to send the center their junk e-mail; it then forwards the messages to Federal Trade Commission authorities who use it to develop antispam software. By late July, the center had collected and forwarded almost 200,000 unsolicited commercial e-mail messages. Among them were messages promoting pornographic Web sites-accounting for roughly 30 percent of the spam received -- and dubious moneymaking proposals, also accounting for about 30 percent. The junk e-mails were sent not only to the FTC but also to U.S. Rep. Gary Miller, author of the "Can Spam Act," in an effort to encourage federal action to ban spam from the Internet.

"If you give consumers the power to control what messages appear in their mailboxes, when they appear and when they stop, they are welcome participants in the growth of e-commerce," says Ian Oxman, president of Chicago-based ChooseYourMail.com. "However, if spammers are allowed to bombard the Net with offensive, unwanted messages, they will continue to poison the well for all Internet marketers."

NETWORKING It's 11:30 p.m. An executive checks into a hotel room after a long day of travel and begins to download 100 e-mail messages and three sales reports ovver her laptop's 56Kbps modem. She doesn't get to bed until 2 a.m. The following morning, she goes downstairs to a meeting and tries to demonstrate the efficacy of the company's e-commerce Web site over the same modem. As CIO, do you want to be in this woman's line of sight when she returns to the office?

If Wayport Inc. has its way, these scenarios will soon be as outdated as System 34 minicomputers. The Austin, Texas-based company wants to outfit every hotel, resort, airport lounge and business center in America with one tiny amenity, one that's already in your office: an Ethernet jack. It's even got a little logo of a figure carrying a laptop that it wants to emblazon on every port so that executives like yours will start looking for it. Plugging in connects users to a nationwide T1 network. That way, instead of using the modem and standard telephone lines, road warriors can use their Ethernet cards to tap into a network that's as much as 50 times faster.

The Wayport jack is already available in several luxury hotels in Austin and Dallas, a couple of executive suites in Austin and San Antonio, the Hershey (Pa.) Lodge and Convention Center, and in O'Hare International Airport's Laptop Lane. The sites generally charge users roughly $8.95 for unlimited connectivity during a 24-hour stay, and a portion of that goes to Wayport.

Plans call for the company to outfit 80 to 100 hotels by the end of this year and hundreds more by the end of 2000. For travelers, that's a good thing. Jeff Rasco, president and owner of Rasco & Co., a corporate meeting service based in Wimberley, Texas, frequently speaks to travel industry groups about technology. Says Rasco, "I've been begging for something like this for years."

-- Howard Baldwin

MOST CIOS WILL dodge a bullet in the new millennium, since the first two days of 2000 fall on a weekend. But some entities still work weekends -- for instance, the National Football League. Like any prudent organization, the NFL has given a lot of thought to Y2K. Of course, if you reaped about $130 million in TV revenues alone in a single week, you'd pay attention too.

In October 1998, the NFL asked each team to survey its critical third parties involved in putting on a football game. The goal was to find out if there was any possibility of a Y2K glitch, whether in the scoreboard or concessions or electrical power. The response was that there is no reason not to go forward with the games in the first week of 2000, according to Jodi Balsam, NFL counsel for operations and litigation in New York City, who headed the league's Y2K preparation. (An interesting fact: With the exception of the games that were canceled during player strikes in 1982 and 1987, the NFL has never canceled a regular season or championship football game prior to kickoff; teams even played the weekend after JFK was killed.)

Actually, the NFL had already started worrying about the first weekend of 2000 back in 1997, but not for the reason you might suspect. Often, the first weekend of a new year means NFL post-season wild-card games. Every seven years, however, New Year's Day falls on a Saturday. To avoid conflicts with the television networks -- some of which have contracted to broadcast traditional college bowl games as well as wild-card games -- the NFL pushed the start of the 1999 season ahead one week.

But that's also why you've got games in venues that may seem odd if you're worried about Y2K affecting utilities and civic services like snow removal. Why in the world would the Arizona Cardinals be playing in Green Bay Jan. 2? For the same reason Miami is playing in Washington, Tampa Bay is playing in Chicago and San Diego is playing in Denver. Those teams' home venues are the sites of college bowl games that weekend.

But Balsam is confident, based on feedback from teams, that Jan. 2 will ccome off without a hitch. In fact, the only concession the NFL has made to Y2K is telling visiting teams to fly Friday, Dec. 31, in order to avoid any air-travel glitches. The only exception: The San Francisco 49ers are permitted to fly to Atlanta Sunday, Jan. 2, for their Monday night game.

Coming next month: Why the 49ers have the most to lose from Y2K.

-- Howard Baldwin

FOLKS RUNNING fast-growing technology companies have rosy expectations for world economies over the next 12 months -- and they expect their own businesses to grow steadily in that time frame. And why not? Margins are improving and plans are underway to spend more on IT, e-commerce and new product development. These are among the findings from a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of 376 executives at technology organizations undergoing rapid growth.

In survey interviews, the respondents fairly beamed about prospects for the U.S. economy over the next 12 months: 81 percent weighed in as optimistic, up nine points from the fourth quarter of 1998. And the sunny outlook was "Upcoming Investments"consistent across business sizes: 82 percent of large-business leaders said they were optimistic, up 13 points; along with 81 percent of small-company leaders, up six points. Only 16 percent overall said they were uncertain about the economy's future direction, and only 2 percent to 3 percent characterized their outlook as pessimistic.

Also notable: Some 73 percent of respondents' businesses are deriving revenue from e-commerce. In addition, 55 percent expect to make major new investments in e-commerce over the next 12 months, including 64 percent of large technology businesses and 47 percent of small companies.

Asked about roadblocks to growth over the next year, 65 percent named the ongoing shortage of qualified workers, 37 percent the softening of market demand and 31 percent pressure for increased wages. These were followed by ability to manage/organize, legislative/regulatory pressures, relative strength of the U.S. dollar, profitability/decreasing margins, competition from foreign markets, lack of capital for investment and increased taxes.

As for major new investments of capital, 69 percent cited new-product development; IT was close behind at 67 percent -- up 5 percent from the fourth quarter of 1998. (See "Upcoming Investments," above, for more on investment plans.)

A complete report on the survey, along with other PricewaterhouseCoopers "Technology Barometer" reports, is available online at www.barometersurveys.com.

-- David Pearson