Despite a relatively small increase in the overall online population over the next five years, the number of U.S. consumers with broadband is expected to grow from slightly under half of households to about 78 percent by the end of 2010, according to a new report from JupiterResearch. "With a clearer value proposition and increasingly reasonable prices, the question people ask themselves is shifting from why would I get broadband? to why wouldn't I get broadband?" said Joe Laszlo, research director. The firm said that the U.S. broadband market will remain a closely contested race between cable modem and phone line-based DSL services, with other technologies relegated to relatively minor roles. Cable, however, is expected to remain the leading residential broadband technology in the U.S. Two key predictions: The Internet gets a little grayer. Online seniors will grow the fastest of any age group, doubling from nearly 10 million in 2004 to just over 20 million by 2010. Nearly one-half of online users will access the Internet from multiple locations, with 65 million online adults having access from both work and home in 2010.
Artificial intelligence tools for product design have largely been sold to engineering leaders as a productivity story: faster renders, quicker iterations, fewer manual CAD operations. According to the latest market study by ABI Research, the market for artificial intelligence in product design is set to grow from $628 million in 2025 to $4.3 billion by 2035; that's a 21.3 percent compound annual growth rate. The trajectory reflects a market moving past assistive tools and into a phase where AI becomes structurally embedded in how products get engineered, simulated, and validated. For executives overseeing engineering, product development, and R&D organizations, this is no longer a tooling decision. It is a competitive positioning decision, and the window to shape it is narrower than most roadmaps assume. The Ten-Year Growth Outlook Mechanical product design and simulation is the AI beachhead within manufacturing. A full 62 percent of manufacturers are already running AI projec...