(FORTUNE Magazine) – The Internet has taken off like a rocket because it's a great platform for innovation. As long as you conform to the basic rules of the Net's digital language, you can enhance it with all sorts of wild new technologies. That's exactly what Tim Berners-Lee did when he invented the World Wide Web, today the nexus of Net commerce. And it's what Marc Andreessen and friends did at Mosaic when they introduced the browser, which finally brought the Net within the grasp of the technologically impaired. Now that broadband networks are beginning to let people download data in torrents, the global audience for the Internet will grow. So you can expect to see a whole new set of technologies that will play to a more highly connected populace. Here are four that might pack as big a punch as the first two.

Voice Browsers

As more people begin to use the Web while they are on the go, a big limitation becomes manifest: It's hard to type while you are driving. But new voice-recognition technology will help make the Web accessible to anyone with a phone.

There's nothing new about voice recognition per se. IBM and Dragon Systems have for years sold shrink-wrapped voice-recognition software for applications like dictation. Large corporations have spent millions to craft voice-recognition systems that can handle customer calls. Fidelity's clients can access brokerage accounts with voice commands. AT&T's system provides directory listings without a live operator.

In the future, though, you'll be able to use voice commands to mine the Net for just about any kind of information. Small companies like Nuance of Menlo Park, Calif., and SpeechWorks of Boston have led the way in developing voice browsers, which, like Web browsers, let the user navigate the Web. Also helping is a new standard for encoding information so that it can be recognized and translated into voice.

The new voice technology is making its first appearance in free voice-portal services like TellMe or BeVocal. To use one of them, just dial a toll-free phone number, speak to navigate through the menu, and ask for the information you want--be it a stock quote, the weather forecast, or the nearest French restaurant. The system will speak back to you. That's pretty basic stuff, but fancier applications are on the way. A corporate sales manager could, in between flights at the airport, make a single phone call to hear her e-mail, update her calendar, check the status of a customer's order, find out how her stock portfolio is doing, order a book from Amazon, and get directions to her next sales call--all while standing in line at the gate. What could be a simpler way to browse?

Bluetooth

The broadband revolution isn't just about cramming more bits down the pipe; it's about making those bits easier to get when they reach the other end. That's where Bluetooth comes in. Bluetooth is a new technology standard for short-range wireless communication--under ten meters today, and up to 100 meters in the near future. It will let laptops communicate with printers, cell phones with headsets, Palms with vending machines, and each of those devices with the Internet, all through the air. (Yes, at least one company is working on a way to let people buy sodas from a vending machine simply by clicking on a Palm.)

Think of a Bluetooth device as a garage-door opener on steroids. The analogy is apt, since Bluetooth operates over the same wireless frequency as garage-door openers (and microwave ovens, for that matter). But Bluetooth permits much more than a simple up or down command. It adds built-in security and faster data rates--up to one megabit per second at first, with higher rates to come. Bluetooth has also won nearly universal backing, so that devices from different manufacturers will work together as easily as stereo components do. An IBM laptop will be able to communicate with a Nokia cell phone and from there log on to the Internet, with no wires and no fuss. "I can't think of any [companies] that haven't approved," says Steve Medina, senior marketing manager with Toshiba America's wireless products group.

Bluetooth was invented in 1994 by L.M. Ericsson of Sweden. Soon after, Ericsson teamed up with Nokia, IBM, Toshiba, and Intel to settle on a standard. The technology is named after Harald Blatand (Bluetooth) II, king of Denmark from 940 to 981 and the man who unified the Danes under Christianity.

The first Bluetooth appliances are just coming to market, most of them expensive portable devices like laptop computers. Toshiba recently began selling a PC card and software that lets laptop users set up private networks to exchange business cards, send instant messages, and transfer documents. Early next year the card will also let a laptop connect to the Internet. Over the next two to three years, Bluetooth backers will work out the myriad details of how all sorts of devices will interconnect. By then the price of Bluetooth chips should have dropped to $5 from $20 today. Then Bluetooth should take off.

Peer-to-Peer

Think of peer-to-peer computing as the Internet's great leveler. With this ever more popular technology, even the lowliest PC attached to the Net can be a repository of information for everyone else, serving up music files, Web pages, and even spare computing power to other users.

Peer-to-peer takes the centralized model of the Web and stands it on its ear. The Websites of companies like Amazon, Yahoo, and eBay are powered by large data centers containing racks and racks of servers that conduct all of the sites' computing, file storing, and transactions. With peer-to-peer, these tasks are spread among the clientele. Take Napster. Most people know Napster as a clever way to get free music. But it's also the first mass-market incarnation of peer-to-peer computing. The music files that Napster users share with one another are not stored on a central server but on the PCs of the users themselves. Napster's own server merely downloads Napster software to new users and keeps a universal directory of Napster music files, directing surfers to a PC with the songs they want. An even purer form of peer-to-peer is Gnutella, another music-sharing service, where even the directory is stored on the PCs of the users. "Napster is a spark that revolutionizes how the Internet is used," says Pat Gelsinger, chief technology officer at Intel's Architecture Group.

Indeed, peer-to-peer isn't just for sharing files. It can also help big-league number crunchers share computing power. Intel has been using peer-to-peer computing for the past ten years to design its microprocessors. Running simulations of new chips entails voluminous computations. "We were buying mainframes like they were candy," says Gelsinger. Now Intel parcels out the work overnight to more than 10,000 of its PCs, workstations, and servers, which would otherwise be idle. Instead of being in use only 30% of the time, these machines have been working 80% of the time, saving Intel about $500 million over the decade.

A project called SETI@home, part of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is one of the first uses of this sort of power sharing to involve ordinary people. SETI uses a vast array of telescopes to collect radio waves from outer space. The amount of data collected is so enormous that SETI can't process it, so it parcels up the information and sends it overnight to the PCs of millions of volunteers. The PCs perform simple scientific calculations and send the results back to SETI.

What other tasks might peer-to-peer computing perform? Ann Winblad, a partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, an investor in Napster, says it's hard to imagine: "We're still at the early stage of this." In other words, the sky's the limit.

XML

Every day the Internet holds more and more information, a trend that broadband connections will only accelerate. The trick is to make that information not just easy to display, as it is today, but easy to manipulate as well. HTML, or hypertext markup language, was the key to solving the display problem. And a new standard called XML, or extensible markup language, will be the key to solving the manipulation problem.

HTML and XML both encode information on the Internet. HTML helps create Web pages, telling the browser whether information is to be displayed in bold or italic, in a column or a row, on the left side of the page or the right. XML is much more complex. It describes the information itself, much like a bar code on packaged goods describes the price of an item, its manufacturer, and what the item is.

By encoding information in a standardized way, XML can help make the Web a much more useful and versatile tool. Many people have their financial assets scattered across a range of companies--a checking account at one bank, stocks at a brokerage firm, a home mortgage at another bank, a 401(k) account at a mutual fund firm, credit cards at yet another company. It's possible to gain access to most of this information at each company's Website, display it on your PC, and even make transactions. But it's darn near impossible to consolidate the information from all the accounts into a single spreadsheet on your PC. With XML, your browser will be able to collect all your stats and drop them into one file, because every bank, brokerage firm, and mutual fund company will encode account information in the same way.

XML will also help business-to-business transactions work more smoothly. Most companies use purchase orders, for example, and many have computerized the ordering process. But each company describes the elements of a purchase order in a slightly different way--price, date, item, location, and the like. XML will let companies encode the information in a purchase order so that it will be recognizable to every other company. "XML makes integrating the data an order of magnitude or two easier," says Charles Fitzgerald, director of business development for Microsoft's platforms group. "The Internet has revolutionized how users interact with Websites, but when it comes time for those Websites to talk to each other, they can't." With XML, the Net will finally have its lingua franca.