Entrepreneurial people, for example, "have ideas about everything all the time, " says Jonathan Kaplan, inventor of the Flip pocket camcorder, an idea that sparked a boom in personal videos a few years ago.

WSJ: Tactics to Spark Creativity

With its new generation of Atom chips, Intel is hoping to spark a boom in the development of smart, pocket-friendly devices.

FORBES: Ditch Your Laptop For These Gadgets

In September 2004, years before the iPhone app boom, the service launched a mobile version for PDAs running on Microsoft Pocket PC 2003 and using Wi-Fi which, at the time, was a very rare commodity.

BBC: Profile: How Skype connected