First of all I am happy to see that some of us are coming to our senses. Let's face it, we all got a little carried away there for awhile. I will admit even I got caught up in all of the dot-com frenzy. Hell, I bought The Globe.com at $20 a share (ouch!). So how does the dot-com shakeout affect all of us in the handheld market?

 1. We finally got ourselves some more programmers.

2. Finally VC's seem to have come to their senses.

3. We've weeded out all the "old family money" investors, or "neuvo-geek" as I like to call them, who thought it was cool to slum with us techies.

I am sensing some reluctance to my thoughts and I hear some of you saying, "But Alan, now that the worm has turned against the net, how do we get back to where we were? How do I cash in on the handheld revolution?" Glad you asked that question. How can the handheld market avoid the dot-com dilemma? There is the old adage of looking at the past to prevent future disaster. Let's look at the Internet and examine what happened first, before I tell you how to strike it rich in this market.

Sensory Overload!

First of all, consumers bought all the Internet hype. Big surprise, huh? Aldous Huxley called it cattle mentality and we all followed the great Digital Moo-gration. We all ran out to buy new computers, we all caught the 33k to 56k to DSL bug, we all built web-sites, we all started passing around viruses with our e-mail jokes and e-cards and even tried web personal ads (I have a doozey of a story). What did we learn from all that? That the Internet is a full of ridiculous concepts and over-inflated egos. You can defend all your pet supply sites, browser based word processors and Internet hard drives all you want. It won't change the fact that they are dumb ideas with a life span of about six months, depending on their cash reserves.