On this edition of IEEE Spectrum Radio enjoy listening to Google's Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton Cerf speaking about the fiction book that powerfully influenced him - The Lord of the Rings triology by J.R.R. Tolkien. Hear why Cerf is so fascinated of the triology and what Tolkien's master piece means to his work. This is the first part of the occasional series on books, their authors and their influence on people in science and technology.

The cell phone industry is focusing on the youth segment. Multimedia features are an important buying decision for this customer segment. In the US basically the carrier decides, which phones customers are allowed to use on their network. This further limits the selection and additionally cell phone makers produce many devices not for CDMA, a wireless technology quite common in the US but not in the rest of the world, where GSM is most popular. What that all may lead to experienced Tekla S. Perry, senior editor of IEEE Spectrum, when she went cell phone shopping.

An old shoe box might be a better storage place than your hard drive. Robert W. Lucky discusses storage solutions for photographs and how the very attractive digital photography may lead in the mid-term to loss of photos. It is a good case description of the implications of hardware physics limitations to electronic solutions.

The Internet has already changed the newspaper market substantially and the future of newspapers is unclear. One big problem is that information in newspapers is basically already outdated when they got printed. However, electronic devices today have neither the convenience nor the display quality of paper and are hence a limited substitute. The Swedish mobile technology engineer Stig Nordqvist wants to change this situation by creating something like an iPod - plus connectivity - for news reading. First products partly realizing his vision are already in Europe and Asia on the market.

This program was originally broadcast on IEEE Spectrum Radio.