While GIS technology has long been used by governments to track hurricanes, viruses, population trends and military initiatives, it's increasingly being tapped by private firms to manage power failures or equipment, for example. Sears, Roebuck and Co. uses an advanced GIS application running on rugged laptops (with GPS tracking) to route and manage schedules for its 10,000 home-repair technicians nationwide. It sometimes saves 30 minutes a day, which is enough time to handle another call. The latest feature verbally directs drivers on turns and routes.

"Technicians were still using paper map books and manual data tracking," recalls Daniel Bowman, Sears' Smart Toolbox program manager. "If these paper-based methods could be replaced with digital information tools using a simple yet effective interface, technicians could work more efficiently and have greater flexibility in their daily activities."

And watch for more GIS, probably on cell phones and other mobile devices with Web connections, for workers in the field, Maguire says.

Applications with streaming volumes of time-sensitive data -- notably on Wall Street -- are prime candidates for stream-processing visualization tools such as those from StreamBase Systems and RiverGlass.

But even greater opportunities lie ahead with the plummeting prices of microsensor technologies, says Michael Stonebraker, chief technology officer at StreamBase. "Being able to report every [status] and every location means a lot more firepower," he says.