"An indescribable conglomeration of beauty and ugliness, " the late San Francisco columnist Herb Caen once wrote.

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It was a period when conglomeration was a popular business strategy, and Mr. Johnson became one of its leading apostles.

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There is obvious scope for this in Europe, where the degree of conglomeration is still far higher than in America.

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This is not the kind of conglomeration you see at, say, Tyco.

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Hype Machine is sort of a conglomeration of Pandora and last.fm.

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The seeds for this conglomeration of scientific talent were a cluster of research institutes like Salk, Burnham and Scripps, all near La Jolla, plus the University of California campus.

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But everybody knows that pooling-of-interest accounting, which tends to inflate reported earnings after a merger, helped encourage the conglomerate craze of the late Sixties, and that changing those rules made conglomeration much less attractive.

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Started in 1987 as a local music show, SXSW has grown into an amazing conglomeration of music, film and interactive shows alongside conferences that run the gamut from gaming to design to TED-like talks.

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On Thursday, executives from Lycos, Excite and Infoseek will speak on a panel called "In the Eye of the Internet Networks: The Power of Conglomeration" at CES' Digital Hollywood, a kind of a show within the show.

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Some of these customers are to be found just up the road, part of the dense engineering conglomeration of this most industrious of towns, but others, such as Boeing Aerospace, for which Pietro Carnaghi has built a machine to shape the top of Delta-4 rockets, are in America.

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