The usual suspects in the search for the next big thing may hold some potential, chief among them wireless. It's hard to argue that mobile devices won't play a larger role in our lives going forward. But will we pay as much for these services as their providers expect us to? It's hard to say if being notified about a discount sale at a nearby shop qualifies as a "killer application." Broadband is another common answer.

Superficially, broadband is desirable: highspeed, always-on Internet access. It will change our lives. Or maybe not. Broadband is already available in some places, and multimedia content is plentiful on the Web, yet personal surfing habits have changed little. Broadband users still go online to read their e-mail, gather information, or transact. The reason why the answers above may fail is because they are technology-centric. "Third-generation" wireless, or 3G, is a technology, and so is broadband. Killer functionality must build upon some fundamental human characteristic. No human desire is more central than that to communicate with other human beings. Arguably, this is what has led to the growth of AOL, Yahoo! and eBay, perhaps the most prominent names of the Internet revolution. As The Economist magazine wrote recently, online content is other people. There are other traits deeply embedded into human nature that can serve as a foundation for successful business. This should be where most of the money islikely to be made, rather than in niche technical solutions. Should peer-to-peer applications such as file sharing emerge as a chief bandwidth-hungry application, for example, this adoption would tell us more about ourselves than about broadband. In fact, the technology needed to make possible popular applications (Napster, ICQ, Hotmail) is often very simple. Their success is based on an appeal to our fundamental desires rather than on any great technical merit. The problem, however, is that technology is becoming an inward-looking, brainwashing-prone cult, which tends to ignore the lessons of history, economics or anthropology. Leaving the cult ain't easy. There are more legitimate, highbrow versions of this religion and low-brow versions-what I'll call Pop Technology, or Pop-Tech for short.

Pop-Techies read the Industry Standard, Fast Company, or Red Herring (which is no crime) and then repeat snippets of them to others as if they were gospel (which may come close to a crime). In Pop-Tech circles, the exotic names of young companies are bandied about as if they were successful, solid models worthy of imitation. PopTech also has its own jargon. The demise of the dotcom phenomenon has apparently made little discernable difference to the cult. Pop-Tech is still running full bore despite its weaker economic legs.

To state the obvious, technology is made up of many constituent parts. Some Pop-Techies do their best to keep themselves updated on developments within these parts, which isn't easy given their complexity. But few in the Pop-Tech community, in my experience, try to step outside of technology to look for broader insights into how technology and it's supporting parts will develop. We are a fairly introverted group. What technology should not be is a self-contained ecosystem.

But, you say, the benefits of specialisation from Adam Smith onward, are clear. Am I putting forward some multidisciplinary "Renaissance man" model? Yes and no. The issue is whether focus makes us overlook interconnectedness.

What's driving technology is seldom within technology itself. More often, it's how technology fits into the larger scheme of things. While understanding technology is fascinating, monitoring demand, which has more to do with consumer spending, is key.

The next killer ideas, therefore may not come from data compression, billing software or flip-chip packaging, all promising technologies in and of themselves. The fundamental drivers, in Asia, may be the emergence middle class and a consumer society in places like China and India. Or it may be the corporatisation of industry, the rise of "new economy"-enabled, shareholder-oriented specialist enterprises, instead of traditional family-dominated conglomerates. All of these things will have their reflection in that broad space that we call technology, and will stimulate demand: Internet access, Web solutions, data centre-the list goes on.

A key realisation of the last few months h been that the "old economy" isn't as dead irrelevant as once thought. This is therefore good time to exit the technology cult and rejoin the real world. It's bound to pay off.

(Mr Mihalca, based in Hong Kong, is head of Internet research at Merrill Lynch (Asia Pacific). He writes here in a personal capacity)