brightly colored bouncing balls on one side of the screen and falling raindrops on the other is a tough way to gather and act on information. It is, of course the economic model of the Web. The admonition is no longer, “Lend me your ears.” but rather, “How about I rent them for a while?” We exchange our time and our attention for the daily sports scores or a timely weather report. At some point, this becomes a bad bargain. Personal electronic devices are an emergent technology that needs to show us a way out of this morass.

In their biggest numbers, personal electronic device cores are just computers. They contain a screen, a keyboard, a microphone and a speaker phone, a central processing unit, some forms of memory and a bunch of glue-works that hold them together, both literally and figuratively. They function within the social infrastructure of the day; today’s infrastructure being the world of ubiquitous computers, worldwide networks, complex transactions and interactions and a social, legal and economic framework that has not quite caught up to the technology. The characteristics that make personal electronic devices distinct from earlier computer technology are rooted in the manner in which they are constructed and their intended use.

Personal electronic devices aim to be unyielding, yet affordable computing platforms; their very being is grounded in the concept of trust as we have previously described it. They are cheap enough to achieve ubiquity yet they are capable enough to establish a trusted platform that can launch at least our identity, but more important our personality into the cyber-world as well as into the physical world. They become part of our person in a physical sense and they subsume our person in an electronic sense. They provide a place for us to store personal information that really belongs only to us.

While not provably immune from the problems that plague other technologies that seek to fill many of the same functional niches, they possess characteristics that make them arguably more appropriate to the domain than other technologies. Their secure core is built around principles that foster the security necessary for trust to be established in their capability to safeguard privacy. For example, the connection of the secure core to the outside world is simple at its base but capable of conveying complex concepts, much like the artistic channels that we mentioned previously. This simplicity offers the prospect of defense against, if not immunity from the diseases that infect other technologies.

The most defining characteristic of the secure core of personal electronic devices is their apparent monolithic structure, as compared with other computer systems. They are quite small relative to other computers; about the size of a match-head. At the extreme, a personal electronic device can be made of just a private, secure core. In this case, it is typically called a chip card, or a smart card, or an RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) tag. Consider for example the chip card that is used for payment in many countries of the world; such devices number in the hundreds of millions. The plastic case in which they are mounted, the form that we all think of as a credit card, is a convenient vehicle for transporting them and using them; but, it is a peripheral characteristic to the genre. In this case, the form-factor of the card pre-dates the existence of the computer that we put inside. The existence of the surrounding environment that could deal with that plastic card form-factor made for a convenient entry point for this most elementary personal electronic device.

The credit card form-factor found its early footing in the arena of financial transactions, as an enabler of cash-less vending in the world of multi-national and multi-cultural economics. The size of the card is heavily based on personal ergonomics and fashion. One of the earliest, if not the first incarnation was the Diners’ Club card, circa 1950. The card was of a size that nicely fit into a shirt or coat pocket, or could be more securely carried within a wallet. The working man’s wallet, the

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