Coloring the Future Fax

Several innovations are occuring in the fax industry for both the business person and the general consumer. For example, the use of color for business documents has already taken place in computers and copy machines, and it seems the fax industry will be no exception.

Color faxes will reach the market as soon as engineers overcome the technological challenge of image compression at a workable cost. A color image must be compressed electronically in order to transmit it within a reasonable time over existing telecommunication networks. Without compression, transmission of a color fax page over a voice-grade line could require six hours.

A U.S. company, StarSignal Inc. of Campbell, Calif., has developed an image compression process that allows the transmission of a high-resolution color replica of a magazine cover in four minutes over ordinary lines. As a secondary benefit, compressed images may effectively increase the capacity of computers to store images--perhaps by as much as 100 times.

A more recent innovation from the fax industry involves the merger of voice response and fax. Several companies have introduced systems that retrieve and transmit stored documents in response to user requests entered through touch-tone telephones. Up to 500 pages of text, graphics and images can be stored in these systems in any combination.

Such a system would be of particular interest to a company that needs to respond to inquiries for products and company literature. Callers to the system would hear a greeting and a menu of documents from which to choose. Using a touch-tone phone, the caller would make a selection with a single keystroke. After a selection has been made, the caller would be prompted to enter the number of the caller’s fax machine, where soon the selected documents would be transmitted.

Cycles of the Semiconductor Industry

Since the 1950s, the U.S. semiconductor industry has witnessed three waves of company start-ups. Each wave has lasted about 15 years, which suggests the length of the industry’s cycle from initial research to commercialization and decline. It suggests that the next wave of start-ups will begin in five to 10 years.

During the first wave, companies such as Fairchild, Schockley Transistors and Texas Instruments rose to prominence; in the late 1960s, it was AMD, Intel and National.

The present wave, which began in 1977, differs greatly from previous start-up generations because of the sheer variety of products and number of companies. In just 12 years, from 1977 to 1989, approximately 170 semiconductor companies started up. The wave crested in 1983 when 37 companies opened.

Three years later, venture capital funding for semiconductor start-ups slowed in the face of an industry recession. The industry recovered in 1987 and attracted some new venture financing; that year saw 22 new semiconductor companies enter the industry.

Since then, however, venture capitalists have shown declining interest in the semiconductor industry and the wave has now entered a phase of consolidations, mergers and failures as niche markets become crowded and companies search for new directions. In the past two years, there have been only nine semiconductor start-ups.

Even though during the past few years there has been a general increase in total venture capital funding worldwide, without a strong stock market as a means of recovering investment costs, many venture capitalists are choosing to stay out of the uncertain semiconductor market.

If the fourth wave follows the same cycle, it is likely to begin in the mid-to-late 1990s. The new semiconductor start-ups, some of which will become the major technology drivers of the next century, will be involved with emerging technologies.