7 Great Ideas that Haven't Worked -- Yet

(MoneyWatch)  TechRadar calls out seven brilliant tech ideas that completely flopped:

1. wireless USB connections
2. speaking to your PC
3. Fold-away keyboards
4. Internet voting
5. micropayments
6. WiMax
7. the standalone PDA

But this list shows more opportunity than failure. At least three of these technologies are too early to kill off.
Most of us may never dictate to our computers all day, but speech recognition is being used as an interface for more kinds of things, particularly now that cell phones are so widespread. Micropayments are actually working very well in some international markets. WiMax, like any technology that aims to improve the communications infrastructure, will need a long time to roll out. People were just as skeptical of WiFi or CDMA, once upon a time.

A fourth, the argument against PDAs, is weak. Just because we don't beam data at each other like the Palm commercials promised doesn't mean something is a failure. The organizing utilities of a PDA should have morphed into just another feature of something like a cell phone. That's exactly what they've done. And who is to say that today's teenagers, or tomorrow's, won't in fact beam information back and forth?

A fifth, wireless USB, will probably become cheaper over time and may still succeed.

What we have here is the kind of list Thomas Edison would have loved -- not failures, just things that haven't worked yet.