For instance, without Corning's flawless and thin flat glass, electronics companies couldn't make those small, sleek televisions that hang on walls.

FORBES: Glass Menagerie

If U.S. buyers who love their foreign cars start patronizing those brands for their SUVs, and SUV demand stays flat, Detroit's overcapacity--and already thin profits--could deteriorate further.

FORBES: Guzzler Glut

They coated the array with a thin film of gold and placed it above a flat, gold-coated sheet of glass.

BBC: 'Cloaking' idea traps a rainbow

Even more fundamentally, the digital economy's infrastructure has advanced basic material science and classes of machine tools that have led directly to the new high-power electronics (enabling hybrids) and to big, cheap flat-panel, thin-film PVs (derived from the massive thin-film machines that make flat-panel-TVs).

FORBES: Bubble Energy?

With ultra-thin, flat keyboards now the norm, many users find them uncomfortable and awkward to type on.

ENGADGET: Matias Quiet Pro claims to be the 'world's quietest mechanical keyboard'

The truth is the ISP business is characterized by wafer-thin margins, low barriers to entry, flat-rate pricing, intense national competition and high customer support costs.

FORBES: Mom-and-pop Internet

In his 50-year career, Ovshinsky received more than 400 patents in the U.S. and more than 800 foreign patents covering a range of technologies, including nickel-metal hydride batteries, rewritable CDs, DVD optical discs, flat-screen liquid crystal displays, hydrogen fuel cells, thin-film solar cells and others.

FORBES: Stanford Ovshinsky, Battery Genius Behind Smartphones And Hybrids, Dies At 89

And the advance guard of this revolution is neither a console nor a computer, but a flat, thin, palm-sized piece of plastic.

CNN: ASIANOW - Asiaweek

Overall it has undecorated flat surfaces with a plate of glass on the front all the way out to a very thin rim and a blank back.

ENGADGET: Apple publishes 'Samsung did not copy' statement through gritted teeth