Hot Stuff Millions of people: How do you get to them? Endless opportunities: How do you take advantage of them?

It used to be that the ubiquitous "hot lists" were more hype than hot. But these days, who needs hype? Sure, the hype is full-blown and millennium-powered. But for once, the pure reality is many degrees hotter than the hype.

Consider one of our hottest trends, e-commerce. What can we say about e-commerce that isn't surpassed by the technological miracles we see daily? While much of the furor over the year 2000 is egocentric vapor, the Internet will prove to be our rock-solid legacy. It's our version 2.0 of the Industrial Revolution, with one major improvement: The revolutionaries aren't factory-running capitalists-they're entrepreneurs running corporations from their desktops. E-commerce isn't merely hot; it's history in the making.

Simultaneously, the eve of 2000 finds us hitting a high note in consumerism. Drunk with the fruits of a strong economy, many people have more money than ever before and are itching to spend it. To better determine what's hot to the all-important consumer, we examined this year's trends according to demographic groups. And we found these groups are more than the sum of their catchy monikers-Generation Xers, tweens and the like are savvy consumers and major economic drivers.