With unemployment at its highest point in nearly a decade, workers have been reluctant to leave the jobs they have. That will change as the economy picks up. According to various studies, as many as one-third of employees, and one-half of middle managers, are ready to defect to a new employer. So instead of expecting their employees to be happy to have a job, companies will have to face the reality that the top performers will have their choice of job offers. We'll tell you how to keep your best employees from leaving.

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Since the arrival of both the Intel Pentium and the original Apple-IBM PowerPC chip for the Mac in the early 1990s, mainstream computing has been a 32-bit affair. But that's all about to change, and the consequences will be profound. This year, the G5 Mac and the new AMD Athlon 64 processors are moving us into the world of dramatically more powerful 64-bit computing. Just since this summer, the world's fourth most powerful supercomputer was built from 2,200 G5 PowerPC chips, and a 64-bit edition of Microsoft Windows was announced to support the AMD chip. Soon these processors will start appearing in high-end servers and PCs aimed at "extreme video gamers." We'll examine how this technology is likely to advance, and some of its key implications.

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As the Trends editors predicted in 1996, VOIP is literally going to become a "killer app" as the Internet becomes more reliable and faster. And the victim of this killer is going to be conventional telephone service. In 2003, the business is $1.2 billion, but we'll tell you why we expect that it will grow to $9 billion in 2007.

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Companies in North America and Europe are increasing their investments in industrial robots, according to a United Nations report. This trend is being driven by the labor shortage, and by a steep decline in the price of the machines, which sell for just 20 percent of the cost of a robot made in 1990. The growing deployment of robots in factories will be vital to keeping the West competitive in the face of cut-throat competition from China and India.

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Even as we gear up for the coming "nano-tech revolution" that's going to hit the world like a tidal wave by the end of this decade, micro-electromechanical systems, or MEMS, are already transforming many industries. They are bringing together silicon-based micro-electronics with micro-machining technology, making possible the realization of complete systems-on-a-chip. As such, MEMS allow the development of smart products by combining the computational ability of microelectronics with the perception and control capabilities of micro-sensors and micro-actuators. As we'll discuss, MEMS are already on the way to revolutionizing nearly every product category.

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A breakthrough treatment called antiangiogenesis offers hope for cancer patients - and potentially huge profits for companies that commercialize it. Revenues from this treatment are expected to go from $0 to over $10 billion by the end of the decade and save millions of lives in the process, as we'll explain.

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Marketers in the United States spent more than $1 billion last year on focus groups, the results of which guided about $120 billion in advertising, as well as untold billions more in package and product design. But most focus groups fail to provide any insights into whether an ad campaign will succeed or bomb in the marketplace. The reason is that human beings cannot tell you what they feel about a product of a commercial because they don't know their own feelings. Now, a revolutionary technolgy promises to transform marketing by literally getting inside people's heads and revealing their real emotional reactions. We'll explore the underlying facts and the broader implications, as well as where this trend is taking us.

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Nearly 80 percent of U.S. companies admit they "keep tabs on employees by checking their e-mail, Internet or telephone connections, or by videotaping them at work." Why? To prevent theft of trade secrets certainly, but also to limit liability: Companies have lost millions of dollars in lawsuits stemming from inappropriate e-mails sent by employees. And last year, five Wall Street brokerages were fined $8.3 million for failing to retain their e-mails. The key to preventing such losses is for companies to have written e-mail policies that are communicated to employees through training and enforced with "policy-based content security software." We'll examine the "how and why" behind this important trend, as well as some of the cost and benefits. We'll also look at the legal implications and the threat to morale, as well as where this trend is likely to lead.

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Companies can no longer hide shady accounting practices, abuses of employees, or declines in the quality of their products and services. There's a new emphasis on scrutinizing every practice of today's corporations, and stakeholders are demanding - and getting - information that some businesses would prefer to keep secret. We'll examine the five forces that give executives no other option but to run a "naked corporation" that is totally transparent, and we'll also tell you how to establish trust and transparency in your business.

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