You've seen the commercials. Soon you'll be doing business on the beach, complete with audioconferencing and instantaneous access to the latest sales data from the office. What this vision of a wireless future disregards, though, is that high-end portable devices have a voracious need for power because each application requires its own silicon chip. Maybe wireless computing has a future, but it's only going to last as long as your batteries do.

Silicon Valley-based QuickSilver Technology, one of many startups working on the problem, has found a way to drastically cut power requirements by making a single silicon chip that can reconfigure itself on the fly to understand different wireless signals. Developed in partnership with BellSouth and scheduled for midyear release, QuickSilver's first chip will be able to decode incompatible cell-phone standards so that a user can access different phone networks instead of just one. Eventually the company expects to have chips that can run multiple applications, switching from audio to video to text processing-all on the juice of a cell phone. "What we're really doing is building a container," says Paul Master, vice president of technology at QuickSilver. "The value is the software you pour into it."