It's alive! Or to put it more correctly, it's coming alive. For those who have followed the fortunes, or rather misfortunes, of the telecommunications companies vying for a piece of the broadband pie, the recent announcement of a new deal made by Bermuda-based Global Crossing comes as a surprise.

The company announced last week that it had signed a deal with the Dutch National Research Network to connect telescopes in eight European countries on its fibre optic network to create a grid for what is being dubbed as a virtual radio telescope.

The bandwidth available through Global Crossing's network allows the radio telescopes from the different countries to link up, creating a virtual telescope with a diameter of thousands of kilometres, according to the company. Using the network allows the processing of weak radio sources previously unavailable to any one of the telescopes on the network operating as a single unit.

Global Crossing as an entity is essentially dead after filing for bankruptcy in January, but the company's worldwide fibre optic network remains, waiting for the expected gold rush as high-capacity services come online.

At this point in time many of you are a little bleary eyed about such forecasts. Perhaps you even got burnt on the stock market through investing in telecommunications firms. However, I believe that Global Crossing and others of its ilk were ahead of the crowd when it came to creating a worldwide broadband network. They crashed before they could cash in.

Now the company's only hope of salvation lies in being broken up into bits and sold off to appease creditors. The virtual telescope deal is an example of what's to come, in a world in which you and I will be able to watch television broadcasts or movies on demand, and companies will be able to hold online conferences without having to set up an elaborate and expensive system.

-- I was visiting a couple I know in Toronto, Canada this week and they showed me a system they bought that allows them to load 120 music CDs into it, and then simply program a playlist of the CDs in any order.

Since I've started storing my photographs and other data on CD-ROMs, I wondered if a similar device was available for the computer.

Sure enough, KDS PC has manufactured the CD Organizer, into which you can load 75 CD-ROMs and call them up at any time.

The CD Organizer stands 20 inches tall and houses 75 individual trays. The CD Organizer attaches to your computer with a USB cable and the software allows you to keep track of which CD is in which tray.

Forget about piles of different CDs sitting in various boxes near your computer.

I've got a couple boxes for CDs with my photos, another box for the CDs that are absolutely necessary to keep (for example the Windows reinstall disk), and a pile I should throw away because they are full of free games I'll never play.

The organiser sells for US$139 in the US. Like many people, I'll continue to use my normal low-tech method of shoe-box storage.

But I can see this equipment would be handy for the many computer professionals who need to access a variety of discs throughout the day.

You can get the specifications for the product at www.kdsusa.com.

-- For anyone else who wants to be ahead of the curve, Forrester Research has identified what it says are six emerging technologies businesses can use to “improve competitiveness and boost business results”.

The six technologies are adaptive supply networks, Web services, organic information technology (IT), innovative Web site design, extended relationship management (XRM), and executable Internet services.

Now of course these terms are the sort of buzzy words consultancies like to use in making grunt IT work and business services seem more daunting than they are, leaving the executive no option but to hire a consultant to explain how these services work.

The report, and the explanation of terms is available at the Forrester site, but I wanted to comment on the description of Web services, which sounds as if at least one researcher went to see Minority Report, Steven Spielberg's new flick.

In the Web services arena, Forrester notes that some car dealers are using Internet notification services to send alerts and recall notices to MSN, the online portal owned by Microsoft, which in turn will notify consumers through their channel of choice - email, SMS, or phone.

Forrester also notes that retailers like Safeway and Staples are currently attempting to combine Web services and wireless networks to make offers to electronic store shelves and shopping carts.

For example, when a frequent Huggies buyer walks by the diaper shelf, a storewide system will read the shopper's profile and notify him that he qualifies for a loyalty-based discount.

In Spielberg's movie a key scene has the hero, acted by Tom Cruise, running past a long line of advertising billboards that identify him by using lasers that scan the pattern of his retina. The scan allows the computers to make personalised product pitches.

Do we want this? And do we have a choice of whether we want the system turned off? In this dismal future will we have the choice of turning off or tossing out our identification tags? When I start getting scanned as I walk along a street or go into a store, I'm moving to Vanuatu.

lIf you have any comments on gadgets or issues dealing with technology you can contact Ahmed at editor@offshoreon.com.