All too often, the realities of life tarnish the utopian rhetoric about our interconnected information society. Try checking your e-mail or surfing the Web on your portable PC in a hotel room, and you'll experience the annoying gap in the fabric of the wired world.

Help is on the way. A consortium that includes most of the leading computer and telecommunications companies is devising a standard that will enable all manner of gadgetry to communicate across short distances through radio waves. The initial specification for the "Bluetooth" standard is expected to come out in July, and Bluetooth-enabled products should be on the market in the first half of 2000.