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Innovations in the field of electronics, telecommunications and information technology has created a digital economy, thus being responsible for a very progressive world but the progress was interrupted by the collapse of the dot com bubble, which highlighted the drawbacks of the new technologies. In the future, it is necessary to identify and facilitate breakthrough technologies, develop these technologies, design development friendly policies and maintain the right to intellectual property and prevent piracy.

Behavioral telehealth innovations promise increased opportunities for access to psychological services. Technological advancements are making available inexpensive interactive televideo (IATV) applications for the provision of mental health services. The emergence of IATV brings with it a new environment that is experienced quite differently than face-to-face interactions. Human communication in the IATV medium is unique. It is subject to different rules and cues. This article explores variables that affect IATV applications toward the development of an optimal IATV environment for effective therapeutic endeavors.

Rapid and far-reaching technological advances are revolutionizing the ways in which people relate, communicate, and live their daily lives. Technologies that were hardly used a few years ago, such as the Internet, e-mail, and video teleconferencing, are becoming familiar methods for modern communication. Telecommunications will continue to evolve quickly, spawning telehealth applications for research and the provision of clinical care in communities, university settings, clinics, and medical facilities. The impact on psychology will be significant. This article examines the application of developing technologies as they relate to psychology and discusses implications for professional research and practice.

Commercial exploitation of digital audio broadcasting (DAB) will depend on the industry's ability to convince listeners to invest in digital radio sets. The technology of DAB enables significantly greater amounts of information to be transmitted with improved accuracy. Digital radio sets need to become available at prices consumers consider reasonable for this technology to become commercially viable.

The creation of bottlenecks and service degradation due to the success of the Internet, has prompted communications companies to move away from flat rate tariff structures. There is a need to redefine and readjust the Internet model and the public telecommunication operator model to secure the benefits of the new Internet Protocol/Asynchronous Transfer Mode's (IP/ATM) environment. A new pricing scheme should be developed to facilitate the transition to IP/ATM broadband environment..

The generalized Weyl symbol (GWL) formalizes the freedom in the definition of a time-varying transfer function. The GWL can only be applied to underspread linear time-varying (LTV) channel systems. The application of the GWL in underspread LTV channel systems is similar to its application in the linear time-invariant (LTI) systems. The GWL fails to possess the essential features of the time-invariant transfer-function of LTI systems, in case of overspread systems, which makes it inapplicable to these systems. Proof for the validity of the transfer function calculus for underspread systems is presented.

The ability to communicate anytime and anywhere has both positive and negative effects on business, society, and human values. Technological changes can put disabled and disenfranchised individuals on level with those who have on-line capabilities. The introduction, use, and the acceptance of new technologies are linked to the societal needs since there is a feedback mechanism between technology and society. However, these changes invade people's privacy. Employers who wish to increase productivity must still differentiate between work and personal time.

New lifestyles and unique working patterns that are likely to exist in the next millennia make a recapturing of radio, especially in the business sphere, a necessity. The emergence of the new modes of radio use, and the ensuing new technologies and services, will affect business operations as well as economic structures. This means that the radio spectrum's values can be assessed only by the new economic indicators. Though traditional methods will become obsolete, new methods of allocation of spectrum are in the offing.

Competition in the telecommunication industry has a significant positive effect on innovation. The innovations provide better and easily accessible telecommunication services to people. A cross-sectional statistical analysis of the data collected from the Organization for Cooperation and Development countries confirms this observation. Innovation depends on the financial state of the telecommunication industry. An analysis of the effect of local loop technologies is given.

As the telecommunications industry evolves over the next decade to provide the products and services that people will desire, several key technologies will become commonplace. Two of these, automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis, will provide users with more freedom on when, where, and how they access information. While these technologies are currently in their infancy, their capabilities are rapidly increasing and their deployment in today's telephone network is expanding. The economic impact of just one application, the automation of operator services, is well over $100 million per year. Yet there still are many technical challenges that must be resolved before these technologies can be deployed ubiquitously in products and services throughout the worldwide telephone network. These challenges include: (i) High level of accuracy. The technology must be perceived by the user as highly accurate, robust, and reliable. (ii) Easy to use. Speech is only one of several possible input/output modalities for conveying information between a human and a machine, much like a computer terminal or Touch-Tone pad on a telephone. Et is not the final product. Therefore, speech technologies must be hidden from the user. That is, the burden of using the technology must be on the technology itself. (iii) Quick prototyping and development of new products and services. The technology must support the creation of new products and services based on speech in an efficient and timely fashion. In this paper I present a vision of the voice-processing industry with a focus on the areas with the broadest base of user penetration: speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, natural language processing, and speaker recognition technologies. The current and future applications of these technologies in the telecommunications industry will be examined in terms of their strengths, limitations, and the degree to which user needs have been or have yet to be met. Although noteworthy gains have been made in areas with potentially small user bases and in the more mature speechcoding technologies, these subjects are outside the scope of this paper.

Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch of the CNN and the Fox network, respectively, are consolidating their hold on program content which is crucial for success on the information highway. The outcome of the conflict between cable and telecommunication companies may depend on owning popular programs which attract viewers to specific channels. Their outlook on the electronic highway is based primarily on economic considerations.

The last three decades have witnessed an acceleration in the use, demand, and need of telecommunications, data communication, and mass communication transmitted and, increasingly, integrated into networks. This acceleration can be explained by a synthesis of the modernization theories of Giddens (the concept of time-space distantiation) and Beniger (the problems of control in a complex society). A central theme is the unity of scale extension and scale reduction that can be perceived in all spheres and at all levels of modern Western society. Extending Beniger's thesis of a control revolution at the last turn of the century, it is suggested that the present acceleration in communication and information is part of a second communication revolution.

The conference, organized by the Munchener Kreis, on the market for telecommunications in the United European Market aimed at exchanging ideas on the European telecommunication sector. Changes were suggested to harmonize the regulatory policies of member states to achieve a homogeneous system of telecommunications.

A policy debate, to be held before the end of the 1990s, will discuss the interconnection of telecommunication networks to meet the increasing demand for telecommunications. The networks will be capable of interconnecting telephone, radio and television services through a common access point. However, the sights of access to such a network remain obscurely defined and this must be remedied if the access to the global network has to materialize by the end of the 21st century.

The emergence of systems integrators in the field of telecommunications will be of great benefit to end users. Systems integrators will provide various services customized to the specific communications needs of customers and will operate using a least-cost-routing system. These integrators will eventually become interconnected, making changes in telecommunications regulations necessary. These regulatory reforms will most likely concern the integration of competing systems, adapting traditional regulatory systems to the new environment, correcting potential problems in integrated systems and identifying outmoded areas of regulation.

Developments in transport and communications technology have led to political changes in Greater Central Asia. The development of sea transport and railways between Europe and Asia weakened Central Asia. Afghanistan became a region of counter-political activity between Britain and Russia. Communication devices such as the telegraph helped to spread information or suppress it. Improvements in Afghanistan's infrastructure after World War II, the end of the Iranian revolution and the Soviet-Afghanistan War, as well as Russia's new 'glasnost' policy, have encouraged European trade with Central Asia.

The fast pace of technological development has engendered new services hitherto unimagined. In the telecommunications world, the evolution of technology has seen the appearance of integrated services digital network (ISDN) and an increasingly complex network of services that may have been intended to make life easier for users but only succeeded in confusing them. New technology should therefore be geared towards user friendliness, reliability and cost-effectiveness. As laudable as it might be, the cost of simplification may be too prohibitive and the operational advantages of new technology may be sacrificed.