MITs Technology Review Magazine August 2005

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Contents Volume 108, Number 8
8 Contributors
10 People and Organizations Index

Social
14 From the Editor
Machines
The Hundred-Dollar Laptop The proliferation of
wireless devices,
16 Letters Wi-Fi hot spots, and
Your thoughts on intellectual property,
maps, the military, and more
easy-to-use websites
is changing how
we interact: call it
R EADM E “continuous computing.”
Read before operating this magazine Computers made us
more efficient;
17 Putting the Fun Back in Tech
now they’re making
18 Wireless Nonstop us more social.
18 Double-Helix Diet?
44
18 Computing Is a Trip
D EALFLOW BY I N V I TAT I O N
F O R WA R D
Emerging technologies in brief 33 Funding of Innovative Startups 43 Socialized Computing
Phenomix, Avidia, and more The founder of craigslist is obsessed
23 Home Smart Home By Andrew P. Madden with customer service.
Making building-automation practical By Craig Newmark
24 Global Wind Power FI NANCIAL I N DICES

Meeting the world’s electricity demands The TR Large-Cap 100 and Small-Cap 50 F E AT U R E S
26 Cosmic Competition 35 Up, up, and...which way? East. 44 C OV E R S TO RY

NASA seeks ideas from outsiders. Some Asian tech stocks look cheap. Social Machines
By Duff McDonald Computing means connecting.
27 Write Steady By Wade Roush
A PDA for people with Parkinson’s
B R I E F CAS E 54 Your Genomic Diet
28 Web Dynasty Business case studies Your genetic profile could tell you how
Ben Tsiang leads China’s dot-com surge. to stay healthy and eat right.
36 The Business of Blogging By Corby Kummer
30 Can Small Be Big Again? Could it make money?
Larry Bock has confidence in nanotech. By Andrew P. Madden 60 Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise?
And more... The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan
40 The Digital Pit Boss wants to show that modernization can
The Mohegan Sun casino goes “all in” be enlightened.
DATA M I N E on a sensor-riddled blackjack table. By Stephan Herrera
A story best told with numbers By David Talbot
32 Online Recreation 42 One Decision

A look at what we do on the Web Why Microsoft paused Halo 2
By Maryann Jones Thompson By Julie Bick
4 CONTENTS T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

Contents
DEMO G E E K AC T I V I T Y PAG E
Technology revealed 88 Web Libs
Build a content filter that rewrites the
64 Machine in Motion Web—your way, Mad Libs style!
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial By Simson Garfinkel
Intelligence Lab pushes the limits of and Peter Wayner
today’s robotic technology.
By Gregory T. Huang
R E V I E WS
64 70 Summer Stuff
TR empties its beach bag of gadgets,
DEMO gizmos, and other entertainments.
Robot Crossing
MIT’s Toddler learns from its environment.
76 The Dream of a Lifetime What’s new at
Doug Engelbart and augmenting technologyreview.com
human intellect.
By Bill Joy The Summer of Fun issue is here, and
we’re extending the good times
80 Abused Substances beyond the pages of the magazine.
The “stepfather of ecstasy” believes
After all, what good is fun technology
if you can’t take it with you?
psychedelics are unfairly anathematized.
By Alexander T. Shulgin
Senior editor Wade Roush has invited
readers into Technology Review’s
editorial process with his continuous-
M E G AS C O P E computing blog (www.
A look at the big picture continuousblog.net) and his TR blog
(wade.trblogs.com) and has now
82 Hypermotivational Syndrome produced a podcast (www.
Many young people are using drugs technologyreview.com/podcast).
60
not to drop out but to get ahead. He recorded the “Podcasting FAQ
F E AT U R E By Ed Tenner Podcast” while writing this issue’s
One Face of Happiness review of the new tools for creating
Bhutan’s take on modernization is unique. podcasts at Odeo.com (p. 70).
FROM TH E LAB
New publications, experiments, and More fun: in this issue, Bill Joy
breakthroughs—and what they mean
reviews John Markoff’s What the
Dormouse Said... (p. 76), which
83 Information Technology chronicles the birth of the PC in the
West Coast counterculture of the
85 Biotechnology 1960s. That inspired us to solicit
86 Nanotechnology
stories from people all over the
country whose work, all those years
ago, gave us today’s networked world.
Read them on our site (www.
technologyreview.com/dormouse).
About Technology Review Technology Review, the oldest technology magazine in the world,
is published by Technology Review, Inc., an independent media company owned by the Massachusetts
85 Institute of Technology. Founded in 1899, Technology Review describes emerging technologies and
analyzes their commercial, economic, social, and political impact for an audience of senior executives,
F R O M T H E L A B : B I OT E C H N O L O GY
researchers, financiers, and policymakers, as well as for the MIT alumni. In addition, Technology Review,
Bacterial Sensors
Inc. produces technologyreview.com, a website that offers daily news and opinion on emerging
They could offer a new way of sensing the
technologies. It also produces live events such as the Emerging Technologies Conference. The views
presence and concentration of chemicals.
expressed in Technology Review are not necessarily those of MIT.
6 CONTENTS T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

Contributors
Bill Joy , who in this issue reviews John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said...: How the 60s
Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (see p. 76), was the architect of Berkeley
UNIX and a cofounder of Sun Microsystems. He is now a partner at venture-capital firm Kleiner,
Perkins, Caufield, and Byers. “I loved Markoff’s book,” says Joy, “but I feel there are yet more tales to
tell—beyond those about the early West Coast origins of the PC. There are plenty of stories to tell
about events on the East Coast and the Midwest (where I’m from), and the connections between what
was going on in the different regions. I hope Markoff writes these things up too!”
When we asked Corby Kummer to write about a new field whose aim is to tailor
people’s diets based on their genes (see “Your Genomic Diet,” p. 54), he accepted, but warily. “I went
into this extremely skeptical. I assumed I’d find another miracle diet, and no backup studies, and vul-
tures eager to swoop in and cash out. But I found some very dedicated scientists who predict that,
maybe not in five years, but certainly in 10, their discoveries will change the way people eat.” Kummer, a
senior editor at the Atlantic and a restaurant critic for Boston magazine, is one of the most respected
food writers in the country. He is the author of The Joy of Coffee and The Pleasures of Slow Food.
Craig Newmark is the founder of craigslist, a community bulletin board featuring

classifieds and discussion forums that is used by tens of millions of people. In this issue’s “By Invitation”
column (see p. 43), he reveals that most of what he does all day is answer e-mail from users of his site.
“Hey, more and more,” says Newmark, “I figure that what people need is a hand just getting stuff done
and getting through the day. I never expected to be mostly doing customer service, but I’ve learned a lot
from the phone company—and do the opposite.”
The “stepfather of ecstasy,” Alexander Shulgin , believes that psychedelic com-

pounds can help us understand how the brain works. We asked Shulgin to look back on the drugs he
invented and to explain why he believes these kinds of drugs serve a serious purpose (see “Abused
G R E G P O S C H M A N ( J OY ) ; G E N E X . H WA N G ( N E W M A R K ); CA R L T R E M B L AY ( K U M M E R )
Substances,” p. 80). Shulgin, who was born in Berkeley, CA, 80 years ago, says he fell in love with
atoms and molecules by memorizing an organic-chemistry textbook while serving in the Atlantic on a
destroyer escort during World War II. “I would later spend a decade of explorative research,” he says,
“at the Dow Chemical Company, which led to my building my own laboratory, an early retirement, and
an exciting 40 years of psychedelic research that is still going on.”
Peter Stemmler did the artwork for this month’s cover. Stemmler has, since 1999,
been a freelance illustrator and designer. His work has appeared in publications such as the New
Yorker, the New York Times, Playboy, and Vanity Fair; other clients include ESPN, MTV, and the SciFi
Channel. Stemmler once served as a designer for a department store in Kuala Lumpur. He also once
served in the East German army.
8 CONTRIBUTORS T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

People and Organizations
PEOPLE Debevec, Paul, virtual lighting and . 83 Leary, Timothy, Osmond, Humphry,
Ailor, William, Denton, Nick, Gawker founder . . . . 37 Harvard flameout of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 sympathetic LSD use of. . . . . . . . . . . . 82
space-shuttle black box and . . . . . . . 29 Eagle, Nathan, on digital divination 52 LeBaron, Richard, Pang, Alex,
Ali, Rafat, MindPlay product manager. . . . . . . . . 41 on talking through computers . . . . . . 47
Elfenbein, Dan,
PaidContent.org publisher . . . . . . . . . 36 Berkeley economist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Licklider, J. C. R., ARPAnet pioneer 76 Pascal, Blaise,
Alvey, Brian, Weblogs president . . . 36 Lin, Hurst, Sina co-COO . . . . . . . . . . 28 nutritional advice of. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Engelbart, Douglas, Roberts, Lawrence,
Anagnostopoulos, Aris, computing pioneer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Lohan, Lindsay, intolerability of . . . 38
search sampling and. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Caspian Networks founder. . . . . . . . . 33
Engeström, Jyri, Lucas, George, fan-film benefactor 72
Arnold, Frances, Rodriguez, Raymond,
object-centered sociality and . . . . . . . 51 Malyj, Wasyl, nutritional-genomics on nutritional genomics . . . . . . . . 56–58
stoplight bacteria and. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Felux, Shane, fan-film maker . . . . . 72 researcher. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56–57
Battelle, John, SearchBlog author. 38 Rojas, Peter,
Fluhr, Jeff, sees nothing—nothing! . 73 Markoff, John, Engadget author, Gawker defector . 37
Beale, Russell, What the Dormouse Said author . 76, 82
smart-phone love and. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Galvez, Alfredo, Ryan, Chris,
on soy protein benefits. . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Marti, Stefan, Future Horizons analyst. . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Berners-Lee, Tim, listening to squirrels and . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Semantic Web of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Garrow, Dan, Mohegan Sun CIO . . 40 Seung, H. Sebastian,
Martin, George, MIT neuroscientist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Bock, Larry, on nanotech . . . . . . . . . 30 Gates, Bill, Microsoft boss . . . . . 42, 76 on health and wisdom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
at D3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14, 45 Sifry, David, Technorati developer . 47
Broder, Andrei, Mayfield, Ross, Sirringhaus, Henning,
search sampling and. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Ginsberg, Allen, LSD enthusiast . . 82 Socialtext CEO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52–53 circuit jet setter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Burges, Christopher, Glass, Noah, Odeo founder . . . . . . . 70 McCarthy, John, Sponberg, Brant,
audio fingerprints and . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Gore, Al, hypothetical computing pioneer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 NASA’s prize giver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Bush, Vannevar, prophecy of . . . . . 76 technophilic presidency of . . . . . . . . . 79 McNealy, Scott, D3 attendee . . . . . 45 Staller, Jack,
Calacanis, Jason, Hammersley, Ben, Metcalfe, Bob, node synergy and . 51 electronic-head shrinker . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Weblogs CEO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36–38 podcasting and. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Moore, Gordon, lawmaker . . . . . . . 76 Sterling, Bruce, author . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Campbell, Gardner, Hilton, Paris, highly trafficked. . . . . 38
Moreno, Franciso, Stolaroff, Myron,
on back-channel benefits . . . . . . . . . . 46 Hoover, J. Edgar, hippie-hate of. . . 82 psychedelic-drug researcher . . . . . . . 80 acid creativity and . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Carmel, David, Horwitz, Jay, Mossberg, Walt, Wi-Fi wrangler . . 46 Stone, Linda,
search sampling and. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Jupiter Research analyst. . . . . . . . . . . 42 computer interface expert. . . . . . . . . . 46
Mouchou, Rob, El Dorado VP. . . . . 41
Chao, Charles, Sina CFO . . . . . . . . . 28 Huxley, Aldous, LSD enthusiast . . 82 Szara, Steven, DPT discoverer . . . 80
Narendran, Nadarajah,
Chiang Kai-shek, Iyer, Pico, on paradise found . . . . . . 63 LED ceiling panels and . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Taylor, Bob, PARC founder . . . . . . . 76
Tsiang’s grandpa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Izumi, Kyio, architect on acid . . . . . . 82 Tedrake, Russ,
Negroponte, Nicholas,
Cohen, Stephen, on technology for all . . . . . . . . . . . . 14, 75 Toddler robot creator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
on doubting happiness. . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Jardin, Xeni, blogger . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
on Daily Me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Tshering, Gado,
Comyns, Matt, Jobs, Steve, Apple founder 14–15, 76
Newmark, Craig, on sickness in Shangri-la. . . . . . . . . . . 63
BlackInc Media founder. . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Joffe, Yael, dietary actuary . . . . . . . . 58 on serving the list . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Tsiang, Ben, Sina vice president . . . 28
Cuban, Mark, billionaire blogger . . 38 Keating, Mark, broken hearts and . 85 Norman, Donald, Vander Wal, Thomas,
Curry, Adam, podcast pioneer. 49–50 Kendall, John, Chipco president . . 40 invisible computers and . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 infoclouds and . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Dawson, Kevin, Kim, Shane, Ordovas, Jose, Vonhoegen, Roderick,
UC Davis informaticist . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Microsoft games manager . . . . . . . . . 42 genomic nutritionist . . . . . . . . . . . 56–57 podcasting priest. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Wang, Yan, Sina CEO . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Caltech. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Motorola . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23, 47 Skype . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49–50, 53
Wangchuck, Jigme Singye, Carnegie Mellon University . . 27, 78 NanoMarkets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Socialtext . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52–53
king of Bhutan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Caspian Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Nanosys. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Sony. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42, 71
Weiser, Mark, Center of Excellence NASA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26, 29, 76 Spaceward Foundation . . . . . . . . 26
ubiquitous-computing pioneer. . . . . . 48 for Nutritional Genomics . . . 56–58 National Institutes Stanford University . . . 24, 28, 56, 76
Weiss, Ron, stoplight bacteria and . 85 Centre for Bhutan Studies. . . . . . 62 of Health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56, 58 StubHub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Willett, Walter, epidemiologist. . . . 57 China Mobile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 National Science Foundation . . 47 Technorati . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Williams, Evan, Odeo founder . . . . 70 Chipco International. . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Netscape. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Tribal Fusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Wobbrock, Jacob, Codon Devices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Nichia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Tufts University . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56–57
EdgeWrite inventor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 craigslist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Nintendo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42, 71 Unicef . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Wolf, Peter, talking to iPods and. . . 29 Delicious. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46–53 Northrop Grumman . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Unicom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Wozniak, Stephen, Dow Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36, 45 NPD Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Apple founder. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 University of Arizona . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Druknet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Odeo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 University of California,
Zhang, Teresa, Organon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Toddler robot creator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 ETRI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Berkeley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57, 76, 85
Flickr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46–53 Osram Opto Semiconductors . . 27 University of California,
Zhang, Xiang, superlens crafter. . . 85 Davis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56–58
FM Publishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Partnership for a
Zimba, Lyonpo Yeshey, Drug-Free America . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 University of California,
on the happy factor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Friendster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Phenomix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 San Francisco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Gawker Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Philips Electronics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 University of Cambridge. . . . . . . . 86
GelCore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
O R G A N I Z AT I O N S Princeton University . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 University of Michigan. . . . . . . . . . 78
Georgia Tech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Aerospace Corporation . . . . . . . . 29 Prostate Cancer University of Southern
Google . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36, 46, 70 California . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Affymetrix. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Education Council . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Harbor-UCLA Medical Center . . 80 U.S. Department of
Amazon.com. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Proxpro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Harvard University . . . . . . . . . . .80, 85 Defense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48–49, 76
American Dietetic Association . 58 Quorum Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Hewlett-Packard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 U.S. Department of Energy . . . . . 27
American Medical Association. 82 RallyPoint. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Honeywell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency 81
Apple. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52, 76 Rensselaer
IBM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78, 84 Polytechnic Institute . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Venture Development . . . . . . . . . . 31
Asian Development Bank . . . . . . 62 IEEE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 VoiceSignal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
Rojo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Ask Jeeves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Intel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Vonage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Ryze. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Avidia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 KDDI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Weblogs Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36–38
Samsung. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23, 72
Baidu. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 LinkedIn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Sandoz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Wicks Business Media . . . . . . . . . 36
Bally Gaming and Systems . . . . . 41 Microsoft . . . . . . . . . 42, 49, 76, 82, 84 Schering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 World Bank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Bhutan Broadcasting Service . . 63 MindPlay. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Sciona . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 World Wide Web Consortium. . . 50
BlackInc Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 MIT . . . . . . . . .14, 25, 48–49, 52, 64, 78 Shanda Interactive Xerox PARC. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48, 76
Brown University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Mitsubishi Electric. . . . . . . . . . . 23, 29 Entertainment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Yale University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Bungie Studios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Mohegan Sun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Sina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Zigbee Alliance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
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12 T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005
From the Editor Jason Pontin
Mediating Poverty
n may, at the Wall Street Journal’s D3 conference out- structure is fragile and expensive to maintain. When I challenged
I side San Diego (an event attended by technology princes

like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs), I saw the elements of a
computer that, if it were built, would wonderfully im-
prove the fortunes of poor children.
Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of MIT’s Media
Lab, showed attendees the screen of the Hundred-Dollar Lap-
top, or HDL. Beginning in 2006, he said, he would build 100
Negroponte about this “hidden cost,” he conceded, “[This is] a
very real issue. We are looking at ways to spend less than $1 per
month per child.”
At first glance, Negroponte’s economics seem rational
enough. The HDL will not be sold commercially; instead, edu-
cation ministries and other government agencies will purchase
it. Profits will be very limited: merely $10 per machine for equip-
million to 200 million HDLs every year—and distribute them to ment manufacturers. Of course, building a laptop for $100 de-
the children of the poor world. Many attendees had read about mands what economists call “economies of scale.” Negroponte’s
Negroponte’s idea and dismissed it as quixotic. Hearing how an pilot project requires commitments for at least six million or-
HDL might be built, seeing a part of it, and realizing the scale of ders. So far, China has expressed an interest in buying two mil-
the project produced a rustle of delighted interest. lion machines, and Brazil one million. At least at first, the
Negroponte recently wrote to me about what he hoped the machines would be built in China, where Negroponte has been
HDL would do: “Education: one laptop per child. Whatever big talking to manufacturers.
problem you can imagine, from world peace to the environment Not everyone is convinced. On the record, few are willing to
to hunger to poverty, the solution always includes education. We cast doubt on such a worthy project, but some informed people
need to depend more on peer-to-peer and self- to whom I spoke wondered
driven learning. The laptop is one important means whether the Chinese were ac-
of doing that.” Nothing much came curately estimating the costs
Can a $100 computer be built? Maybe. Negro- of attempts made of manufacturing the HDL.
ponte does not plan to use three expensive compo- in the late 1990s to But most people, like D3’s
nents of conventional laptops: Microsoft Windows, attendees, are excited by the
a traditional flat-panel screen, and a hard drive. In-
address inequities prospect of the HDL. Why?
stead, the HDL will be loaded with Linux and other in the distribution of Because it represents some-
open-source software; its display will use either a information thing of a second chance.
rear-projection screen or a type of electronic ink in-
vented at the MIT Media Lab; and it will store one
technologies; Nothing much came of at-
tempts in the late 1990s to
gigabyte’s worth of files in flash memory. bridging the “digital address inequities in the
The HDL has a number of other, intriguing divide” is no longer distribution of information
features. Since many villages in the poor world do a fashionable technologies; bridging the
not have electricity, the machines may be powered “digital divide” is no longer a
by either a crank or “parasitic power”—that is, typ-
cause. But the divide fashionable cause. But the di-
ing. Once turned on, HDLs will automatically con- is real enough. vide is real enough for all
nect to one another using a “mesh network” initially that. According to the World
developed at MIT and the Media Lab. In the mesh network Bank, the number of Internet users per capita in the poor world
each laptop serves as an information-relaying node. Households is 40 percent that of the rest of the world. The rich world has
that have HDLs will be able to communicate with each other by three times as many computers than the poor. For more than
e-mail or voice calls. five billion people, the Internet is only a rumor. Inevitably, poor
Most importantly, Negroponte wants every mesh network to children are the biggest losers: their lives are pathetically cir-
have access to the Internet. The laptops will be loaded with cumscribed. While they need clean water, food, and health
Skype, a communications application that provides free tele- care, they also need education and more-expansive horizons.
phone calls. Consider: the most forlorn parts of the globe might Attempts to bridge the digital divide failed because there was
become part of the wider world. no bridge. Nicholas Negroponte’s Hundred-Dollar Laptop could
The most vital part of the plan is also, perhaps, the most chal- be that bridge. Do you think the HDL can be built? Write and tell
lenging. Internet access is not cheap in the poor world; infra- me at jason.pontin@technologyreview.com. Q
14 F R O M T H E E D I T OR T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005
Letters
both Lessig and Epstein missed and refinement in favoring the incumbent. In
brought needed perspective to the subject, fact, half the competitive seats in the U.S.
accomplished that. I hope that everyone House of Representatives in the 2004 elec-
who took the time to read the debate ar- tion were in one state: Iowa. Why? Well,
ticles also found and read that piece. among other factors, Iowa set rules estab-
Benjamin Philips lishing that when redistricting, “no district
Culver City, CA shall be drawn for the purpose of augment-
ing or diluting the voting strength of a lan-
Jason Pontin asserts that digital rights guage or racial minority group.”
management is “a useful innovation for Jonathan Fisher
digital economies: someone who wanted Clarksville, TN
Who Will Own Ideas? to keep an e-book, for example, could be
Lawrence Lessig seems to be champion- charged more than someone who only
ing a world that would trend toward stasis wanted to read it once.” What about Wanted: Technology Moonshots
(“The People Own Ideas!” June 2005). someone like me? I won’t know until I As long as venture capitalists get excited
Creative thinking would be the territory read/view/listen to a work whether or only by things like social networking, we
of those who were independently wealthy not I want to keep it. What about this situ- will have only lousy marginal innovations,
or premeditatedly poor. People desiring ation: I just gave away a Ken Follett book with returns to match (“Good-Bye to Ven-
to support their families would live in a that I had read twice. On beginning the ture Capital,” June 2005). Where are the
world where the norm involved applying third reading, I realized that it wasn’t “man on the moon” kinds of projects?
the equivalent of every filter on Photoshop worth it to me and I don’t want it taking Nari Kannan
and GarageBand to bits of someone else’s up space on my bookshelves anymore. Pleasanton, CA
work. Altruism may feel good in the ab- People have always been able to give away
stract, but living it rubs human nature the books legally. Why not digital media?
wrong way. If everybody owns ideas, no And what price should be charged to the The Technology of Killing
one owns ideas. And perhaps no one has original purchaser in a scenario like the I love your magazine, but I have one huge
ideas—or at least any they are willing to one I just mentioned—considering that he complaint: too often, your articles cele-
share. A generation from now, there will had no idea how long he was going to re- brate the military. I am thinking in particu-
be an underground and then a ground- tain his original copy? lar of the stories about technology used in
swell of superb proprietary software (and Marc Erickson the Iraq War (“How Technology Failed in
music and art) created by people who Edmonton, Alberta Iraq,” November 2004), development of
value their work and are not willing to cast robotic aircraft (“The Ascent of the Ro-
it into the faceless “open” sea. botic Attack Jet,” March 2005), and the
James Wish Open Source on the March U.S. Central Command (“Online at Cent-
Medway, MA There’s no basis for the mischaracteriza- com,” April 2005). The United States
tion of Richard Stallman as having an “an- spends more than every other country
There is no such thing as “free.” Some- tipathy for business” (“How Linux Could combined on mechanisms of death. I
where, someone paid the electric bill for Overthrow Microsoft,” June 2005). On want Technology Review to come out and
that education. As Americans, we have the contrary, he has always promoted the state that—and to state further that it is
built our world on our capitalist ways: you idea that free software benefits businesses wrong to work toward more-efficient kill-
build, I buy. From Disney to Microsoft, it and users alike. In fact, the GNU General ing. I am not some Berkeley hippie with
works. Even the giant of socialism, China, Public License (GPL) has specific provi- his head in the clouds, but a guy raising a
has caught on. Capitalism grows because sions for business and sets no restrictions couple kids as a computer consultant. My
people love more money (stuff). Giving on the price of bundled software—other funding of my government’s killing spree
stuff away promotes only a free-lunch than that the source code must be made makes me nauseous.
crowd. Promoting the “free” may leave us available and be freely redistributable. Jason Sjobeck
on the ash heap of history. Guy Mac Portland, OR
York T. Somerville Tucson, AZ
Pinellas Park, FL
H O W TO C O N TAC T U S
Rather than give Lessig both the first and Of Maps and Morals E-mail letters@technologyreview.com
last word in the intellectual-property de- Maps most certainly have morals (“Do Write Technology Review, One Main Street,
bate with Richard Epstein, it would have Maps Have Morals?” June 2005). For evi- 7th Floor, Cambridge MA 02142
been fairer to follow his “Rebuttal!” with a dence, just try a Google search on “gerry- Fax 617-475-8043
final counterpoint. Editor in chief Jason mander.” Modern political-demographic Please include your address, telephone number,
Pontin’s excellent essay (“Digital Proper- software has created U.S. congressional and e-mail address. Letters may be edited for both
ties,” June 2005), which raised points that districting maps of previously unthinkable clarity and length.
16 LETTERS T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

readme
Each readme presents our take on a
social, economic, or political issue
raised by an article in the magazine.
SOCI ETY
Putting the Fun

Back in Technology
Inventing the future is a even an animatronic squirrel that uses social cues to manage
your telephone calls (see “Executive Squirrel,” p. 25). But in this
difficult business, which issue, we’ve mainly chosen to draw out the social and personal
is why the Massachusetts meanings of novel technologies.
Institute of Technology— Two of our features this month—on the rise of “continuous
the owner of this publica- computing” and the promise of “nutritional genomics”—are pre-
viewed later in this section. Both are concerned with how tech-
tion—can be a rather seri- nologies can change very basic, social parts of life: community
ous place. MIT students are even serious and food. The third (a kind of fun travel story) is about the King-
about goofing off: consider the planning dom of Bhutan, a poor Himalayan nation with some unusual
ideas about how it should modernize and use new technologies
that goes into the clever hacks perpe- (see “Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise?” p. 60).
trated upon the Great Dome, the cam- Traditionally, Technology Review hasn’t written that much
pus’s architectural centerpiece. In past about society. Our subject matter is emerging technologies, and
years students have redecorated the 46- they have historically been purchased by corporations, universi-
ties, and governments. That’s because emerging technologies
meter-high dome as R2-D2 and topped used to require an extraordinary capital investment, one well be-
it with a police cruiser. yond the means of most people in their private capacities. Nor
In that spirit of serious play, we pres- did most people see the need to experiment with really novel
technologies. Thus the personal computer, the local-area net-
ent what we’ve taken to calling the work, the Internet itself were all first used in commercial, gov-
“summer of fun” issue. We haven’t, of ernment, or academic settings.
course, abandoned our focus on emerg- But this is changing. The spread of cheap laptops, handheld
ing technologies. You’ll find plenty new devices, affordable Internet access, Wi-Fi, and a dozen other con-
sumer technologies has led to a wonderful explosion of new so-
to chew on: a new algorithm from IBM cial applications for them. But here’s the really interesting thing:
that could make search engines more most of these social technologies have simple editing and pro-
intelligent (see “Smarter Search,” p. 84); gramming tools that let ordinary folks do innovative things that
risk-averse corporations and government agencies would be hesi-
genetically engineered fluorescent E. coli tant to try. We suspect that Technology Review will be writing
bacteria that can signal environmental about the impact of new technologies on society much more fre-
changes (see “Bacterial Sensors,” p. 85); quently. Besides, social technologies are more fun. Q
T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 README 17

readme
lated strategy for improving health: trying to optimize diets
based on knowledge of an individual’s genome.
COM PUTI NG Should who you are (genetically speaking) determine what
you eat? To learn more, we sent Corby Kummer, one of the na-
Wireless Nonstop tion’s top food writers, to sample the current research. In “Your
Continuous computing now Genomic Diet” (p. 54), Kummer gives a mixed review of the
44
makes it easy to share your life. emerging field. On one hand, he found that scientists such as
Raymond Rodriguez, director of the Center of Excellence for Nu-
An unexpected confluence in information technology could be tritional Genomics at Davis, are doing exciting, albeit prelimi-
the best news for computer users since the invention of the nary, work on the complex interactions between nutrients and
graphical user interface. Thanks to advances in wireless net- the genetic variants common in different population groups.
working, Web programming, and microchips for mobile de- On the other hand, Kummer suggests, the dietary advice
vices, consumers have access (anytime and anywhere) to a world dictated by nutritional genomics is mostly common sense: lots
of fundamentally social applications. Instant messaging and of soy, plenty of green vegetables, perhaps some sardines. The
Web logs (blogs) were among the first pure social-computing field is still hampered by its practitioners’ inability to cheaply
technologies, but things have gone much further. and easily determine relevant genetic variants. That will change
Members of Flickr.com document their lives through photog- as genetic tools improve, but even so, the ability of genomic in-
raphy, often uploading several pictures a day from their digital or sights to change individual eating habits may be limited. Kum-
phone-based cameras. They can annotate photos with pop-up mer, for one, concludes that he is not about to give up sweets. Q
notes, play games such as “Guess Where?”, and contribute to
group albums. Meanwhile, Delicious, Rojo, Furl, and several
other cutely named sites let surfers share commentary on the
Web pages they’ve bookmarked. Then there’s Dodgeball, a
friend-finding service recently acquired by Google. People text- I N N OVAT I O N
message their locations to Dodgeball’s servers, which relay the
information to the phones of friends.
Computing
The key ingredients in this new wave of computer-mediated Is a Trip
communication: cell phones, laptops, Wi-Fi hot spots, cellular 76 Don’t forget the radical lessons
networks, and easy-to-use websites backed by powerful data- from the 1960s.
bases. So many people now carry Internet-enabled mobile de-
vices that we need never be disconnected from our friends and This month, Bill Joy, the architect of Berkeley Unix and a co-
colleagues or from the Web. That’s why TR senior editor Wade founder of Sun Microsystems, reviews John Markoff’s book What
Roush suggests, on page 44, giving the phenomenon a new the Dormouse Said...: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Per-
name: “continuous computing.” sonal Computer Industry (see “The Dream of a Lifetime,” p. 76).
We’ve known for a while that computers can make us more Joy was there for many of computing’s formative years, but in the
efficient. Now they’re giving global reach to individual voices course of his review, he talks as much about the future of comput-
and killing once and for all the idea that togetherness requires ing as he does about its past. Not only does he enlighten readers
physical proximity. Those screens we stare at all day? They about what it was like to help make computers more personal, but
aren’t taking us away from our real lives. They’re finally becom- he reminds us that the computer isn’t done. Joy argues that what is
ing part of them. Q needed to bring about the next advances in computing is for those
investing in computer research to “find and fund the dreamers.”
Joy makes a persuasive argument. Doug Engelbart, whose
groundbreaking work in the 1960s at the Stanford Research In-
stitute helped pave the way for the PC, depended on large grants
from the federal government. And just as important as the money
Engelbart received was the freedom he enjoyed: the government
G E NOM ICS knew it was funding speculative work. Today, funding both in in-
Double-Helix Diet? dustry and from the federal government tends to be focused on
specific, short-term problems.
Nutritional genomics is promising,
54 We can’t turn the clock back, of course. Engelbart and his col-
but not yet enlightening.
leagues had the good fortune to work at a time when America
felt fresh wonder at the possibilities of technology—and had a
One of the promises of the Human Genome Project has been strong faith in the productivity of brilliant scientists. But as Joy
that it will usher in an age of personalized medicine, in which contends, we may be able to rekindle the spirit of the ’60s by
drugs will be prescribed—or avoided—based on an individual’s imagining computers that are infinitely smarter, more respon-
genetic profile. Now research groups, led by labs at the Univer- sive, and more immersive than anything we have today. By all
sity of California, Davis, and Tufts University, are pursuing a re- means, let’s find and fund the dreamers. Q
18 README T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

Forward Executive Squirrel 25
Advanced Materials on Display 27
Light Construction 27
Web Dynasty 28
Can Small Be Big Again? 30
Voices
“You bring two
things to the
table: your
appetite and
your genotype.” E LECTRON ICS
Raymond Rodriguez,
Home Smart Home

director of the Center
of Excellence for
Nutritional Genomics
at the University of
California, Davis, p. 56
“If our bloggers

are just chasing A new wireless standard could finally
traffic by
writing about make building-automation practical
Lindsay Lohan,
readers won’t
EXT MONTH, a host of new wireless gadgets designed to help make build-
N
tolerate it.”
Jason Calacanis, ings and homes “smart” will debut at the ZigBee Open House and
chairman and CEO of
Weblogs Inc., p. 38 Exposition in Chicago. Among them will be a so-called domestic
awareness system that warns you if the stove is left on or if the basement
“We’re like any starts flooding. Another lets you network your home entertainment
small company
with a niche. system with environmental controls such as light dimmers or a thermostat. The point
We must of such a setup: to automatically set just the right mood when you’re watching DVDs or
modernize to listening to music.
survive. But we Underlying these systems is a new wireless-networking standard called ZigBee.
must do it in a
way that Developed by the ZigBee Alliance—which includes Honeywell, Samsung, Mitsubishi
ensures we are Electric, Motorola, and some 160 other companies—the standard allows household ap-
not destroying
what makes
us unique.”
Lyonpo Yeshey Zimba,
Bhutan’s prime minister,
p. 62
“Skype is
going to be
the phone
company.”
Adam Curry, former MTV
veejay and podcasting
pioneer, p. 50
J O E M AG E E
T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 FORWARD 23

Forward
pliances, sensors, and other devices to talk ing cables or wires in the wall. This kind mesh networks, where each unit can re-
to each other without the need for con- of cost savings can make a significant dif- lay information to its neighbors. Mesh
necting cables. ference both to the owners of large com- networks are far more robust than their
Of course, this is by no means the first mercial buildings (which is ZigBee’s hub-and-spoke counterparts; if a node
attempt to boost the IQs of buildings and initial target market) breaks down, other nodes can automati-
homes by networking their components. ZigBee and to homeowners. cally reroute transmissions around it.
So can ZigBee finally deliver home and technology Whereas many ear- That’s a big advantage in something like
could let you
building automation? Yes, says Chris lier smart systems used a building-wide lighting system: you
install a light
Ryan, an analyst with U.K.-based Future proprietary technology, wouldn’t want one bum switch to bring
switch
Horizons who has been following the ZigBee is built on an In- the whole thing down. What’s more,
wherever
standard’s development. you want in
stitute of Electrical and mesh networking could let ZigBee sys-
“The problem in the past is that adding a building Electronics Engineers tems link as many as 64,000 devices;
thermostats, lighting controls, and envi- simply by (IEEE) global standard, Bluetooth networks, by contrast, are lim-
ronmental sensors to buildings has been sticking it on 802.15.4, similar to the ited to just eight.
expensive,” Ryan says. ZigBee technology the wall— standards that govern Homeowners’ first taste of ZigBee is
could cut installation costs dramatically by no new wires Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. likely to come in the form of adaptors
letting you install a light switch, say, or a or cables Open standards encour- into which lamps, stereos, and other
heat or moisture sensor wherever you required. age innovation and com- appliances can be plugged. The adaptors,
want in a building just by sticking it on a petition, which bring which started shipping this summer,
wall, floor, or ceiling. The device’s em- down costs. are activated by wall-mounted wireless
bedded ZigBee chip—which costs less But unlike Bluetooth and Wi-Fi net- switches or even handheld devices, which
than five dollars—would then link up wire- works, which require central hubs that means you could soon have your whole
lessly with the appropriate light fixture or distribute information to dispersed de- house on one remote control.
alarm, saving the exorbitant cost of install- vices, ZigBee allows devices to form Duncan Graham-Rowe
E N E R GY
Global Wind Power World electricity generation from

nonhydroelectric renewable sources
A new study by researchers at Stanford University has estimated the global potential 2,000
Tide/wave
for wind power at 80 meters above the ground (the approximate height of today’s wind 1,600
Solar thermal
turbines). The researchers used wind-speed measurements taken at 10 meters at 8,000
1,200 Solar photovoltaic
Terawatt-hours
locations around the world to estimate wind speeds at 80 meters. They concluded that Geothermal
13 percent of the sites had winds of 6.9 meters per second or faster—strong enough to 800
Wind offshore
make wind-based power generation cost-effective. If these locations represent a good 400 Wind onshore
sample of the world’s land area, the researchers report, there is easily enough potential 0 Biomass
wind power to meet the world’s electricity demands. In 2002, just .3 percent of the 1990 2002 2030
world’s electricity supply came from wind power.
Top 10 wind-power nations
2004 installed 2004
1–99 100–499 500–999 1,000–4,999 5,000 or greater capacity Percentage
wind-power (in mega- of world
capacity (in watts) total
megawatts)
Germany 16,629 35%
Spain 8,263 18%
United States 6,740 14%
P A C I F I C A T L A N T I C PAC I F I C
Denmark 3,117 7%
OCEAN
Estimated wind India 3,000 6%

speed at 80 meters Italy 1,125 2%
(in meters/second)
Netherlands 1,078 2%
I N D I A N
9.4 or greater United Kingdom 888 2%
8.6–9.4 O C E A N O C E A N
Japan 874 2%
O C E A N China 764 2%
8.1–8.5
Top 10 total 42,478 90%
7.5–8.0
Other countries 4,839 10%
6.9–7.4 World total 47,317 100%
S O U R C E S: C R I STI NA AR C H E R AN D MAR K JAC O B S O N, STAN FO R D U N IVE R S ITY; G LO BAL W I N D E N E R GY C O U N C I L; E U R O P EAN W I N D E N E R GY C O U N C I L; I NTE R NATI O NAL E N E R GY AG E N CY
24 FORWARD T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

Overwhelmed with phone
calls and can’t afford a
secretary? Try a squirrel.
Prototype continued on p. 27
MIT Media Laboratory

grad student Stefan Marti
has built a Bluetooth-
enabled animatronic
rodent that can manage
your calls for you. Like a
good assistant, the device
gauges how important a
caller is and how busy you
are before it decides
whether to bother you or
take a message. Marti
says that telecom
companies are interested
in the critter.
Executive
Squirrel
C O L I N H AY E S ( I L L U ST R AT I O N ); C O U R T E SY O F ST E FA N M A R T I ( P H OTO G R A P H )
1 2 3 4
In between calls, the squirrel When a call comes in on your If the critter decides you’re If you trust the creature’s
curls into a ball, making oc- cell phone, the squirrel picks too busy for a call, it sends it judgment, just press its paw
casional slight movements as it up wirelessly and weighs on to voice mail. But if the to take the call: the squirrel
if it were asleep. A wireless sensor its importance by asking the caller a call makes the cut, the device starts has a speakerphone built into it. To
network connected to the device few questions and looking up his or shimmying to get your attention; the send the caller on to voice mail
monitors the sounds in the room to her phone number on a list of more important the call, the more despite the squirrel’s advice, press
see if you’re busy or slacking off. callers you’ve deemed “friendly.” furious the squirrel’s movements. its foot instead.

Forward
What’s the point of that?
Power-supply cables are heavy. On the
Moon, you could beam power from, say, a
small nuclear reactor or a solar collector
farm to a rover or an astronaut habitat.
And the tether challenge?

Our partner on that is the Spaceward
Foundation. They’re focused on a pretty
futuristic concept, space elevators. You
put a satellite up as a counterweight, then
send a tether down to the Earth’s surface.
The elevators climb up and down.
Is building something like that really

on the drawing boards?
NASA has no current plans, but we are
very interested in breakthrough materials.
A 60,000-mile tether needs to be both
strong and very lightweight. So the contest
is a $50,000 annual prize for the highest
strength-to-weight ratio, provided the test
sample beats the previous year’s winner
by at least 50 percent.
Your biggest prizes are $250,000 each.

That’s a long ways from the X Prize.
Brant Sponberg There’s a legal cap on federal agencies’
heads NASA’s
effort to spur offering prizes larger than that. Our request
innovation with for special authority to lift that is working
cash prizes.
its way through the congressional queue.
S PAC E There’s $10 million earmarked for chal-
lenges in our latest budget, so hopefully
Cosmic Competition you’ll see some bigger prizes.
What would it take to win a big one?

For fresh ideas, NASA is turning to A lunar robotic lander. If someone can,
students, hobbyists, and hackers say, soft-land 10 kilograms on the Moon.
Actually get it there?

The $10 million Ansari X Prize compe- we need to get the efficiencies to the point Actually get it to the Moon, yes. In today’s
tition, which so spectacularly spurred where it’s practical. dollars, $10 million, $20 million, even $30
the development of commercial space million for a successful demonstration
flight, ended last year; but now, NASA’s Where exactly are contestants getting would be almost an order-of-magnitude im-
Exploration Systems Mission Director- the lunar soil? provement over similar missions that we ran
ate has jumped into the game of offer- The competition uses a simulant. It’s made back in the 1960s.
ing prizes for technology innovation. from volcanic ash, to simulate the chemical
So far, three Centennial Challenges composition of what you’d find on the Moon. A presidential commission talked
have been announced. Brant Sponberg A gentleman in Texas produces it. about offering a $1 billion prize for
is the program’s manager. getting humans to the Moon.
Another prize is for “beam power.” A billion dollars is probably a bit much. But
You’ve just announced the latest What’s that? competitions let us reach innovators who
competition—lunar oxygen? You beam power from a transmitter to a re- would never think of applying to NASA for a
It’s called Moon ROx—Moon Regolith ceiver, which is attached to a little crawling grant or a contract—folks who don’t like to
Oxygen Challenge. Contestants have eight robot. The winner is the crawler that lifts deal with the government; hobbyists or stu-
DAV I D D E A L
hours to produce five kilograms of oxygen the most mass a given distance within a dent teams; the kid who’s currently spending
from lunar soil. We know how to do it, but certain amount of time. his time hacking websites. Spencer Reiss

H A R D WA R E
Projected market for advanced displays Prototype continued from p. 25

Advanced Plastic electronics Nanotube electronics
Materials on $10
Market size (in billions)

Display $8
$6
Sterling, VA–based market $4

researcher NanoMarkets $2
predicts that two emerging 0
types of electronics will soon ’05 ’06 ’07 ’08 ’09 ’10 ’11 ’12
become common in displays:
those made with carbon
nanotubes and “plastic Projected development of advanced
electronics” made with organic displays, by application Write Steady
For people with diseases like
polymers or small molecules.
R&D Limited release Broad release Mainstream cerebral palsy or Parkinson’s,
The new displays promise to be
exceptionally thin, lightweight, Laptop computers manipulating handheld computers
bright, and even bendable, and Workstations
can be tricky. Even if they manage to
to consume much less power hold the matchstick-thin styluses
Television sets
than traditional displays. Mobile phones and
and use them to form letters and
NanoMarkets projects that other handhelds numbers, the handwriting-
Other consumer recognition software can still
sales of such displays will near electronics
$9 billion in 2012. Advertising displays translate their shaky strokes into
S O U R C E: NAN O MAR K ETS ’05 ’06 ’07 ’08 ’09 ’10 ’11 ’12 typos. A new text-entry method
called EdgeWrite could ease those
frustrations. Developed by research-
E LECTRON ICS ers at Carnegie Mellon University,
the system lets the user create each
Light Construction letter or number by following the
edges and diagonals of a square
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY study says that if homes and offices swapped their hole in a plastic template clamped
A light bulbs for white light-emitting diodes (LEDs), they could slash U.S. elec-
tricity costs by $100 billion over the next 20 years. But the LEDs themselves are
expensive enough that their use for general illumination has been limited mainly to
over the handheld’s text input area.
The edges provide stability, and
unlike other input systems, such as
high-end buildings. So a number of major LED and lighting companies—Nichia, GE PalmSource’s Graffiti, EdgeWrite
spinoff GelCore, Osram Opto Semiconductors, and Philips—are now launching an alli- does not depend on the precise
ance to find economical ways to build LEDs into offices and homes. path of the stylus. Instead, its
The effort is now taking shape in a demonstration lab sponsored by alliance mem- software recognizes a character by
bers and being built at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY. There, re- the sequence of corners hit; it can
C O U R T E SY O F L I G H T I N G R E S E A R C H C E N T E R ( L I G H T ) ; CA R N E G I E M E L LO N U N I V E R S I T Y ( W R I T E )
searchers intend to create a uniform set even be adapted for use with
of snap-together wall, ceiling, and LED- joysticks, touch pads, or trackballs.
based lighting panels that are all EdgeWrite co-inventor Jacob
prewired with safe, low-voltage electri- Wobbrock, a PhD candidate in
cal connections. The idea is that the pan- Carnegie’s Human-Computer
els would replace both plasterboard and Interaction Institute, is currently
conventional wiring and lighting fix- providing the software and home-
tures. This, says Nadarajah Narendran, made plastic templates for free via
director of research at RPI’s Lighting his website; he hopes to find a
Research Center, would cut construc- commercial partner to bring the
tion costs enough to balance out the technology to a wider market.
higher costs of LEDs; it would also make
it easy and inexpensive to reconfigure
living spaces. RPI is scheduled to open Spoken-Word Search
Snap-together the demonstration lab this summer and How do you find one specific song
panels could
light up homes begin holding the first focus groups on an MP3 player that holds
and other with construction experts and building- thousands? You might try scrolling
buildings.
materials manufacturers. David Talbot through menus or using a tiny

Forward
TE LECOM
Web Dynasty
Ben Tsiang leads China’s dot-com surge
N THE FRENZY of the Shanghai morning Tsiang, in his mid-30s, is the face of a in the West, which seems to have shaped
I rush hour, Ben Tsiang is calm and

composed. The executive vice presi-
dent of product development for Chi-
na’s largest Web portal, Sina, is a
seasoned veteran of the Internet boom
and navigates startups as deftly as he does
the traffic around his company’s financial
new generation of developers in the
world’s fastest-growing Internet commu-
nity. Historically, sources of news and in-
formation for Chinese citizens have been
limited to state-run TV and radio. Tsiang
and his peers have made their names cre-
ating homegrown Web browsers, por-
his attitudes about information and busi-
ness. From a prominent family—his
grandfather was secretary general for Tai-
wanese leader Ching-kuo Chiang—Tsiang
was born in California but grew up and
went to college in Taiwan. As a graduate
student at Stanford University in 1995, he
headquarters. “Ten years ago, people here tals, and search engines that offer more cofounded Sinanet, an online news ser-
didn’t know what the Internet could do for in-depth content and services than can vice directed at Chinese-language read-
them,” says Tsiang. Now, Internet compa- usually be found on Chinese versions of ers outside of China. Three years later,
nies are helping Chinese users “leapfrog American websites. Sinanet merged with Beijing Stone Rich
to the leading edge of technology and be- Like the rest of Sina’s top brass, which Sight Information Technology, a leading
TO N Y L AW
come even more advanced than the top of includes executives Yan Wang, Charles Chinese software and Internet company.
the pyramid in the U.S.” Chao, and Hurst Lin, Tsiang was trained The result was Sina, an all-things-Chi-

entertainment. In fact, the mobile mar-
ket now accounts for 60 percent of Sina’s Prototype continued from p. 27
revenues, through partnerships with cel-
lular service providers such as Unicom keyboard to type in search terms—
and China Mobile. And last February, but researchers at Mitsubishi
Shanda Interactive Entertainment, Chi- Electric Research Laboratories
na’s largest Internet gaming company (MERL) in Cambridge, MA, have a
and a top-rated IPO in better idea: use your voice instead.
Balancing 2004, bought a 19.5 A Mitsubishi team led by Peter Wolf
market percent stake in Sina— has developed a voice recognition
demand for perhaps signaling a fu- algorithm called SpokenQuery that
Internet ture merger. lets a user find music simply by
media, But hurdles abound. saying the name of a song, band, or
entertain- Says Tsiang: “The In- album—or any combination of the
ment, and ternet is a wide battle- three. Unlike many existing voice-
gaming with field.” Up to this point, recognition programs, which have
government he says, China’s Web set menus and require users to stick
policy is very battles have played out to a predefined syntax, Spoken-
delicate much like in the West, Query allows the user to put the
work, in Ben but with the action words in any order and even use
Tsiang’s view. compressed into two partial names. The technology could
or three years. As Sina make it possible to search for not
expands, it will need to only MP3s but also, for instance,
fend off competition from more-special- television shows or driving direc-
ized firms such as Beijing-based search tions simply by saying a few words,
startup Baidu. Another challenge: Sina says Wolf. The researchers are
and other companies must adhere to fa- working to pare down the algo-
mously strict government regulations. rithm’s memory requirements so it
Balancing market demand for Internet can run on many different devices.
media, entertainment, and online gam-
ing with state policy is “very delicate
work,” says Tsiang. Intergalactic
On the business side, Tsiang warns, Black Box
“Never make bold assumptions accord- A data recorder recovered by NASA
ing to old perceptions. Always come back investigators after the disintegration
to the market data.” That’s particularly of the space shuttle Columbia in
good advice in a country of 1.3 billion February 2003 helped them
Ben Tsiang thinks
Web companies people whose tastes have sometimes been reconstruct the causes of the
need to pay
attention to perceived as uniform—or at least predict- disaster. But luck played a big part:
culture, not just able. Sina originally believed, for in- the device had not been designed to
technology.
stance, that the largest mobile Internet survive breakup or impact. Now
market would be in huge, affluent cities engineers at the Aerospace
nese portal with an emphasis on news like Shanghai. But demand turned out to Corporation in El Segundo, CA, are
and entertainment. be stronger in Henan, a rural inland prov-
It’s been a success by any measure. ince; Tsiang says Sina’s market studies Black box for spacecraft
Since its initial public offering on the Nas- hinted that the reason might be that con-
Antennas Transmitter
daq in 2000, Beijing-based Sina has grown sumers in Henan had more leisure time.
into a $200 million company with 2,000 Tsiang’s experience also holds broader
staff worldwide and has welcomed a total lessons for Web companies across the
C O U R T E SY O F A E R O S PAC E C O R P O R AT I O N
of 100 million registered users on its site. globe. He says it’s not enough to get the
In China—which already leads the world technology and business model right—you
in mobile-device users and is expected to also have to understand local pockets of
surpass the U.S. in Internet users by 2007— culture. Those companies that capitalize
Sina’s potential for growth is staggering. on this knowledge stand to do well in Data
recorder
Command
and control
For now, says Tsiang, Sina is fortifying China and beyond. Says Tsiang, “This is board
its position as a news leader and is ex- where the major action will be.”
panding into search, e-mail, and mobile Gregory T. Huang Batteries

Forward
N A N OT E C H
Can
Small Be
Big Again?
When serial entrepreneur Larry Bock’s
Palo Alto startup, Nanosys, pulled its
IPO a year ago this month, it helped to
deflate financial interest in nanotech.
But Bock, Nanosys’s chairman, says
his confidence in nanotech’s future
has not diminished.
Skeptics call nanotech a great

collection of small markets with
no killer app.
That’s probably true in the short term,
but even three years out, some of the
things we’ll see will be monumentally
world changing.
“Nanotechnology
Is the federal National Nanotechnology
is a thousand
Initiative (NNI) helping things along? different things.”
One of the industry’s ongoing problems is
the gap between basic and applied
research. People call it “the valley of
death”—too big or long-range for the VCs
to handle, too applied for academics. NNI
should be a helpful bridge.
Environmentalists have nanotechnol-

ogy on their watch list. Are you worried
about a repeat of what happened with
genetic engineering?
It has people in the industry concerned,
sure. The big difference is that unlike
genetic engineering, nanotechnology is a
thousand different things. There’s an
obvious distinction between using metric
tons of carbon nanotubes to fill tires versus
someone making a single nanowire sensor.
That’s why you need to open a dialogue with
critics and start doing an individual risk-
benefit analysis for every application.
More evidence that the blanket term Larry Bock thinks

“nanotech” is pretty useless? it’s important to
consider each new
There’d be a lot less hype and confusion nanotechnology
if everyone used the NNI definition— on its own merits.
exploiting novel properties and functions of
materials in the sub-100-nanometer size
range. I don’t think golf balls loaded with
nanomaterials should necessarily be labeled
CR E DIT
nanotechnology. Spencer Reiss

TE LECOM
Prototype continued from p. 29
Software-Defined Radio
testing a device that can record
Any one of today’s radio-based devices, such as cell phones, GPS receivers, and
factors such as temperature,
wireless modems, is likely hardwired to use a single communication protocol and
frequency—one reason that many cell phones don’t work when you travel abroad. acceleration, and mechanical
Imagine instead devices that could switch easily between different protocols, stresses on a space vehicle as it
frequencies, or even functions. That’s the goal of software-defined radio tech- begins to break up, then detach and
nology, which allows the radio chip in a wireless device to change its reception and carry the data safely through the
output frequency and protocol via a change in software. Military customers have plasma blaze of reëntry. The
been early adopters. Market researcher Venture Development predicts that further recorder is about 25 centimeters
adoption by militaries, followed by the cellular and public-safety industries, will drive across and resembles a blunt-tipped
market revenues in North America and Europe to more than $5 billion in 2007. rocket cone. Its shield of insulating
foam is extremely light, says William
Predicted revenues from Military expenditures on Ailor, the Aerospace engineer
software-defined radio in North software-defined radio leading the development of the
1%
America and Europe Canada device. Once it drops into the upper
1% atmosphere, the recorder simply falls
Military Handsets Public safety
Commercial wireless infrastructure U.S.
23% to the earth, transmitting its data to
$6 32% U.K. satellites before it’s destroyed on
Revenue (in billions)
55%
12% 63% 13% impact. Ailor says the company has
$4
successfully dropped prototypes of
$2 Other the device from balloons and will
European
nations have a model ready to fly on
0
expendable rockets next year.
2003* 2004 2005 2006 2007 2003: $1.1 billion 2007: $2.8 billion
(actual) (forecast)
*ACTUAL F I G U R E
S O U R C E: VE NTU R E D EVE LO P M E NT
Gauntlet Gab
Using hand gestures to communi-
cate instructions to troops on the
years ago in Technology Review battlefield may seem as antiquated
25 From “The Case for as arm signaling on the highway,

but it’s reliable and convenient and
therefore remains an integral part
Fuel-Cell-Powered Vehicles” of troop interaction. RallyPoint in
Cambridge, MA, has given the
(August/September 1980, p. 60)
practice a high-tech update in the
form of a computerized glove that
reads a soldier’s hand signals and
relays them wirelessly to troops and
commanding officers who may be
out of the line of sight. The glove
incorporates various sensors that
measure how fingers bend and
touch and detect the direction and
speed of hand movements.
A microprocessor translates the
sensor readings into commands—
“fall back,” for instance—which
can then be sent to other soldiers
over radio equipment and conveyed
as symbols on helmet-mounted
view screens or as verbal com-
J O N AT H A N S P R AG U E
mands via an earpiece. RallyPoint is

Fuel-cell-powered golf cart developed at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.
waiting to hear if it will receive its
Air and tanks of hydrogen currently feed the fuel cell, which is enclosed by insulation.
The addition of a reformer would permit the use of methanol-water fuel mixture. next round of funding for the project
(Photo: Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) from the army.

Data Mine
Online Recreation
he web largely remains a place to have fun and enjoy But these market figures exclude two significant sources of
T personal pursuits. The Pew Internet and American Life

Project estimates that 70 million U.S. adults are online on
a given day. Activities formerly done offline, such as checking the
online revenue: pornography and gambling sites. While the na-
ture of the sites’ content makes accurate estimates of their traffic
and revenues difficult, Nielsen/NetRatings monitored site visits
news and weather, are now done online by nearly twice as many among a panel of surfers and found that during April alone, 24
people as in 2000. The market for paid content continues to ex- percent visited porn sites and 18 percent visited gambling sites.
pand, with sites collecting $1.8 billion in revenue in 2004. Dating It’s no wonder, then, that there are an estimated two million
sites account for more revenue than any other type of site. Enter- pornographic sites on the Web today and that the online gam-
tainment sites, such as music- and movie-downloading destina- bling market is expected to hit $24 billion by 2010.
tions, rank second despite 90 percent revenue growth in 2004. Maryann Jones Thompson
Daily life on the Net Online-content spending

Significantly more Americans accessed news, weather, political, The overall market for paid content (excluding pornography and
travel, and religious information online in 2004 than did in 2000. gambling) has grown from $664 million in 2001 to $1.8 billion in 2004.
2000 2004 2003: $1.6 billion 2004: $1.8 billion
Go online Personals, dating

Use e-mail Entertainment, lifestyles
Get news Business, investment

Research
Check the weather
Personal growth
Do work-related research
Games
Look for political information
General news
Research a product before buying it
Community-made directories
Send instant message
Sports
Get travel information Greeting cards
Get health or medical information Credit help
Post to a blog 0 $100 $200 $300 $400 $500
NA
Spending (in millions)
Share files on peer-to-peer networks NA
Buy a product
0 25 50
U.S. adults performing activity on a
75 Traffic to entertainment sites*
typical day (millions) Nearly a fourth of monitored Web users visited pornographic sites in April.
Music 43%
Growth in pornographic content online Games 34%
The number of pornographic websites has increased nearly Videos, movies 30%
30-fold in the past seven years. Pornographic content 24%
Gambling or sweepstakes 18%
2.0 400 0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50%
1.5 300 Online-gambling forecast

Web-based gambling revenue will double in the next five years.
1.0 200
Websites (millions)
$25
Pages (millions)
$20
0.5 100 $15
$10
$5
0 0 0
1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
* P E R C E N TAG E O F ACT I V E U . S . I N T E R N E T U S E R S W H O V I S I T E D E AC H T Y P E O F S I T E AT L E AST O N C E D U R I N G A P R I L 2005. S O U R C E S : P E W I N T E R N E T A N D A M E R I CA N L I F E P R OJ E CT,

O N L I N E P U B L I S H E R S AS S O C I AT I O N / C O M S C O R E N E T WO R KS , S E C U R E C O M P U T I N G , C H R I ST I A N S E N CA P I TA L A DV I S O R S , N I E LS E N / N E T R AT I N G S
32 DATA MINE T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

Dealflow
Funding of Innovative Startups

Company Founded CEO Recent funding Key investors Technology Prospects
Caspian Networks 1999 Brad Wurtz $55 million Oak Investment Partners, Routers that help service This startup’s core
San Jose, U.S. Venture Partners, providers control, technology is promising
CA Morgenthaler Ventures, manipulate, and monitor and timely. Initial
New Enterprise Internet protocol–based infrastructure products
Associates, Alloy Ventures, traffic have already been
and ABN-AMRO introduced in the
commercial marketplace
for service providers.
Phenomix 2001 Laura $40 million JPMorgan Partners, Delphi Drugs for immune disease Treatments for type 2
San Diego, Shawver Ventures, Baker Brothers and metabolic syndromes diabetes and rheumatoid
CA Investments, Alta Partners, arthritis are scheduled
Sofinnova Ventures, Bay to begin clinical trials
City Capital, CMEA this year.
Ventures, GBS Venture
Partners, and Novartis
BioVenture Fund
Avidia 2003 Peter Van $28.5 million Morgenthaler Ventures, Biotherapeutic proteins that Avidia says its approach
Mountain Vlasselaer TPG Ventures, Amgen bind to multiple targets at is faster and cheaper
View, CA Ventures, MedImmune once and that could be than current methods of
Ventures, Alloy Ventures, used to treat a range of producing protein drugs.
Maxygen, and Willem disorders, including Boehringer Ingelheim
Stemmer and other autoimmune disease, Austria recently signed
individuals inflammation, and cancer on as the manufacturing
partner.
Quorum Systems 2002 Bernard $15 million Greylock Partners; Kleiner, Chip that supports both With products ready for
San Diego, Xavier Perkins, Caufield, and cellular and Wi-Fi the market, Quorum is
CA Byers; and Enterprise connections hoping it is at the leading
Partners Venture Capital edge of a convergence of
wireless technologies.
Codon Devices 2004 Samir Kaul $13 million Flagship Ventures, Alloy Rapid, low-cost synthesis of If successful, the
Cambridge, Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, DNA to produce genetic startup’s technology
MA and Vinod Khosla parts needed for the could enable the develop-
emerging field of synthetic ment of new biosensors,
biology engineered cells that
produce novel drugs,
and better vaccines.
Will take time to reach market Strong competitive position High-benefit, high-risk technology
Company Spotlight increasingly important to service provid- will unify these networks, allowing both
Caspian Networks When it comes to ers as IP-based traffic, which now includes the Wi-Fi and cellular functions to oper-
corporate pedigree, you can’t get much video, gaming, music downloads, HDTV, ate in the same handset.
better than Caspian Networks. The com- and voice over IP (VoIP), gets heavier. While a number of other chip makers
pany was started in 1999 by Lawrence Caspian recently announced an agree- are working to make dual-mode chips,
Roberts, one of the founding fathers of the ment with ETRI, a research center sup- Quorum claims an advantage in its low-
Internet. In the mid-1960s, Roberts was ported by the South Korean government, cost design; the company argues that dual-
chief scientist for the U.S. Department of to develop a network reaching 20 million use handsets will not take off unless they
Defense’s Advanced Research Projects broadband users in that country, and the are attractively priced. As for the pitch to
Agency, whose computer packet network company also signed a codevelopment network operators, it’s simple: your cus-
ARPAnet evolved into the modern Inter- pact with Northrop Grumman, the aero- tomers will be happier because they’re
net. Roberts later founded Telenet, the space and defense systems company, to getting better, more reliable coverage and
first packet data communications carrier. work on a project for the U.S. Air Force. the advantages of both Wi-Fi—including
Now Roberts is hoping to transform VoIP—and cellular service.
today’s Internet. In its latest announce- Quorum Systems Wi-Fi is quickly be- Some market researchers believe sales
ment, Caspian says it has gained another coming pervasive, and yet there is a gap of dual-mode phones could reach 100
$55 million in funding from its existing between wireless data networks like the million units by the end of this decade.
investors. Caspian is touting routing tech- one you connect to at Starbucks and the The challenges for Quorum will be to
nology that lets communications service wireless cellular networks that connect help the market mature and to make cer-
providers efficiently manage Internet pro- our mobile phones. Enter San Diego– tain that its chip resides in some signifi-
tocol (IP) traffic across their networks. based semiconductor company Quorum cant portion of those phones.
This type of control and optimization is Systems, which is marketing a chip that Andrew P. Madden
T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 DEALFLOW 33

Financial Indices
Up, up, and...which way? East.
Technology stocks look expensive—except in Asian countries other than Japan
i t was a strong four weeks for The TR Large-Cap 100 and Small-Cap 50 indices
the majority of companies in live online, where they are updated daily.
the Technology Review indi- Visit www.technologyreview.com/trindex.
ces, with only four of twenty industry groups showing negative returns. In terms of
market capitalization, the stocks of small-cap companies continued to outpace those
TR stock index comparison
130
120
110
of their larger peers, and the TR Small-Cap 50 is up a remarkable 24.7 percent for 100
the year ending June 10. But we live in nervous times, and such a performance is
90
therefore as much a cause of concern as it is of celebration. So, at least, says one of
Index
the smartest observers of all things tech-stock related. 80
Pip Coburn, the global tech strategist for investment bank UBS, points out that J F M AM J J A SON D J F M AM J
’04 ’05
on a price-earnings basis, technology stocks are trading at a lofty premium of 33
percent relative to the broader market, despite projected earnings growth in 2005 of % change One-year
5/13–6/10 % change
just 9 percent for both groups. His prognosis: a narrowing of that valuation gap over
TR Large-Cap 100 2.5% 5.1%
the next 12 to 18 months, as technology stock prices fall “in a slow but steady bleed.”
TR Small-Cap 50 4.3% 24.7%
That’s the bad news. The good news is that he still sees some stocks worth paying a S&P 500 3.2% 4.8%
premium for, including TR Large-Cap 100 member Apple. He also points out that
non-Japanese Asian technology stocks are the only ones trading at a discount rela-
tive to nontech—an 18 percent haircut—while European and Japanese tech stocks
trade at nearly absurd premiums of 55 percent and 39 percent, respectively. If it’s In depth:
bargains you’re looking for, go east, young tech investor, go east. Duff McDonald Nextel Communications
TR Large- Nextel
Cap 100 Communications
110
TR Large-Cap 100 TR Small-Cap 50
100
% change Total market % change Total market
5/13–6/10 cap (millions) 5/13–6/10 cap (millions)
90
Energy 7.1% $1,257,303 Media 15.5% $13,449
Index
Semiconductors and Computers 10.9% $17,590 80

5.1% $407,126
equipment Consumer 6.3% $2,759 Jan. Feb. March April May June
Aerospace and Software and services 6.0% $16,769
4.4% $241,435
defense Nextel Communications is the fifth-place
Health care 4.8% $10,092
Consumer 3.3% $184,253 also-ran in a five-company sprint to the
Aerospace and wireless finish line. Because of its laggard
Computers 3.3% $725,106 2.8% $6,061
defense status, Nextel has agreed to be acquired
Software and services 1.9% $483,120 Semiconductors and
2.1% $8,272 by Sprint later this year, and integration
Health care 0.5% $207,593 equipment plans are ongoing. Suddenly, it seems, in-
Telecommunication Biotechnology and vestors are finding Nextel stock interest-
0.2% $747,690 1.2% $11,897
services pharmaceuticals ing again. But don’t expect a bidding war
Media -0.8% $454,695 Energy -0.8% $9,362 along the lines of the Verizon-Qwest battle
Biotechnology and Telecommunication for MCI. Nextel looks to be spoken for.
-0.8% $1,195,464 -2.6% $3,319
pharmaceuticals services
TR Large-Cap 100, top gainers % change

5/13–6/10
One-year
% change
TR Small-Cap 50, top gainers % change
5/13–6/10
One-year
% change
Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) 17.7% 10.2% CMC Magnetics (Taiwan: 2323) 21.9% -18.8%
Nextel Communications (Nasdaq: NXTL) 14.5% 30.8% Grant Prideco (NYSE: GRP) 17.3% 59.9%
Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) 14.0% 8.0% Western Digital (NYSE: WDC) 14.6% 71.8%
TR Large-Cap 100, top losers % change One-year TR Small-Cap 50, top losers % change One-year
5/13–6/10 % change 5/13–6/10 % change
Merck (NYSE: MRK) -6.2% -34.3% First Calgary Petroleum (Toronto: FCP) -34.3% -20.5%
Nintendo (Tokyo: 7974) -5.8% -8.6% Valeant Pharmaceuticals (NYSE: VRX) -10.7% 5.9%
Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) -5.6% -31.4% Havas (Nasdaq: HAVS) -7.5% 8.4%
N OT E : I N T H E T R S M A L L- CA P 5 0, P L A I N S E X P LO R AT I O N A N D P R O D U CT I O N H AS R E P L AC E D PAT I N A O I L A N D G AS I N T H E E N E R GY I N D U ST RY. S O U R C E S : STA N DA R D A N D P O O R ’ S C U STO M

I N D E X S E R V I C E S , T E C H N O LO GY R E V I E W , YA H O O F I N A N C E
T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 FINANCIAL INDICES 35

Briefcase
they were already earning revenues. But
The Business it remains to be seen whether the busi-

ness model will deliver profits.
of Blogging New Medium, Old Partners

This is not the first time Calacanis and
THE CASE: Blogs are the soapboxes of the Internet era— Alvey have collaborated. They attended
independent platforms for everything from personal the same Brooklyn high school and started
their first venture, a magazine about on-
diatribes to political discourse to tech-gadget reviews. line services called Cyber Surfer, in 1994.
But with their growing popularity, could blogs also Two years later they launched Silicon Al-
become media platforms capable of making money? ley Reporter, a magazine that covered In-
Two entrepreneurs are trying to find out. ternet startups and served as an East Coast
foil to the better-known California-based
tech tomes of the late 1990s, such as Red
epending on whom you Herring and the Industry Standard.
D talk to, Web logs, or blogs,

inspire excitement, alarm,
or a yawn. They are the
personal diaries that now
litter the Web, composing a newish on-
line medium that is simplicity itself.
Most blogs consist of musings posted
Silicon Alley Reporter prospered in the
days of profligate advertising budgets,
and it launched additional businesses,
such as an events-planning division, e-
mail newsletters, a website, and a radio
show. Calacanis established himself as a
familiar pundit of the East Coast tech
to idiosyncratic and amateurish websites. Brian Alvey Jason McCabe boom. He served as CEO of the company,
Calacanis
But while blogging is a favored mode of while Alvey, who built TV Guide’s web-
expression for blowhards of every stripe, site in 1995 and was a member of the team
it is also the basis for a new crop of edito- Weblogs Inc. that built the first BusinessWeek site later
rial products with high-quality content Headquarters: New York, NY that year, was chief technology officer.
and loyal readerships. Over the past sev- Bloggers under Weblogs’ umbrella: 80 When the market crashed in 2000, and
eral years, blogs have become platforms Total monthly page views generated by other Internet-focused media companies
Weblogs bloggers: 60 million
for political discourse, Hollywood gossip, went out of business, Calacanis retooled
and insider information on subjects rang- Silicon Alley Reporter to focus on venture
ing from the latest Apple operating system capital. In 2001, he changed the name to
to presidential-election results. other sort of editorial platform, with regu- Venture Reporter, ditched the advertising-
Several factors have contributed to the lar publishing schedules and clear edi- based business model, and increased the
emergence of blogs. First, they can be torial missions. These bloggers tend to price of the magazine, turning it into a
started with very little, and very inexpen- use more-sophisticated software than do high-end business-information offering.
sive, editorial content yet are capable of more-casual bloggers. One such tool is Venture Reporter charged up to $1,000 for
exerting extraordinary influence. Blogging Movable Type, made by San Francisco– research reports and from $1,000 to
software is inexpensive—or often free—and based Six Apart. Movable Type is custom- $5,000 for access to a proprietary database
easy to use. Low bandwidth requirements izable and can help make a blogger’s of information about venture capital in-
and Web-hosting fees keep the ongoing in- postings look professional. vestment and mergers-and-acquisitions
frastructure costs of maintaining a blog All these trends are leading a num- activity. The makeover narrowly rescued
very low. And new, easy-to-use advertising ber of media entrepreneurs to wonder the company from oblivion. After Venture
services such as Google AdSense, which whether blogs can generate meaningful Reporter was acquired, first by Wicks
frees content creators from having to deal revenues or, for that matter, offer a legiti- Business Media and then by Dow Jones,
with actual advertisers, have breathed fresh mate alternative to the business models of Alvey, and eventually Calacanis (who stuck
life into online media. existing media companies. around until 2004), decided to move on.
The accessibility and ease of use of Two of those entrepreneurs are Brian In early 2003, Calacanis and Alvey be-
blogs have had a dual effect, a simultane- Alvey and Jason McCabe Calacanis. They gan to discuss new business ideas in the
ous erosion and improvement of quality. are the cofounders—Alvey is president media sector. They’d followed the blog-
E VA N K A F K A ( CA L ACA N I S )
At the low end, blog-platform sites like and Calacanis is chairman and CEO—of ging exploits of two former Silicon Alley
LiveJournal and Xanga provide an outlet Weblogs Inc., a network of 80 blogs. The Reporter employees: Xeni Jardin, who is a
for hobbyists and diarists. More-serious pair bootstrapped Weblogs with their contributor to the popular collaborative
bloggers, however, have increasingly ap- own funds, and barely 18 months after blog Boing Boing, and Rafat Ali, who
proached their sites as they would any the network’s January 1, 2004, launch, publishes PaidContent.org, a blog about
36 BRIEFCASE T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

emerging new-media business Engadget, a Weblogs site
models. Calacanis saw the va- Blog Growth that covers technology devices,
lidity of one of those models as Technorati, a popular blog search engine, estimates that 30,000 to 40,000 was an exception. It is now the
blogs are created and 500,000 posts made each day.
he observed the immediacy of most popular blog in the net-
Jardin’s and Ali’s postings, the work and ranks among the
value of their information, and 8 most popular on the Web. Its
the loyalty of their readerships. author, Peter Rojas, had previ-
6
Technorati (millions)
“It wasn’t hard to see that there ously written a similar blog
Blogs tracked by
was this new model emerging 4 called Gizmodo for a rival net-
where writers are unfiltered work, Gawker Media. [Disclo-
2
and readers actually like it as sure: Rojas worked for Jason
much as, or perhaps even more 0 Pontin, Technology Review’s
than, they like magazines,” he March January January editor in chief, when Pontin
says. “And they certainly appre- 2003 2004 2005 was editor of Red Herring.] Ac-
ciate that the content is avail- cording to Gawker founder
S O U R C E: TE C H N O RATI
able on a more regular basis.” Nick Denton, Rojas sought an
equity stake in the business,
Alvey built the publishing platform from but Denton was unwilling to offer one.
The Network Effect the ground up; he believed that commer- Calacanis poached Rojas from Gawker, by
But as Calacanis and Alvey began to study cially available blogging programs such offering him a new platform and an un-
the economics of blogging, they encoun- as Movable Type couldn’t handle such a disclosed equity stake in Weblogs. But
tered a question that few bloggers have large number of blogs and didn’t offer the Rojas’s contract is an exception for the
been able to answer: how to expand. “We kinds of reporting tools that Weblogs company, says Calacanis: “Nineteen out of
looked at individual blogs and couldn’t wanted to build into its system. 20 people we talked to rejected the idea of
figure out when or how you add employee In early 2004, Calacanis and Alvey be- equity. Most just want that paycheck.”
number two. Maybe never?” explains gan to recruit writers into the network. As a result, almost all Weblogs blog-
Alvey. “We wanted to put together a blog- “When we started, there weren’t that gers are freelance contractors who are
ging franchise that could actually grow.” many blogs out there that had reached any paid on a monthly basis. They make any-
It was clear that growth couldn’t hap- where from $100 to $3,000 a month, with
pen at the level of the blog. A stand-alone the average falling between $500 and
blog tends to have a single author, a nar- “We looked at $600, says Calacanis. Contract negotia-
row focus, and a small audience. It is thus
unlikely to benefit from Google AdSense,
individual blogs tions are based on a number of factors, in-
cluding how often the blogger updates his
an automated contextual-advertising pro- and couldn’t or her site. The Weblogs network cur-
gram that becomes lucrative for site own- figure out when rently includes 80 bloggers and generates
ers only when traffic increases to hundreds or how you 60 million page views per month. Web-
of thousands of page views per month. In logs is the exclusive copyright holder on
a best-case scenario, a blogger with low
add employee all the content it publishes.
traffic might be able to make money by number two,” The company is generating a steady
finding a sponsor willing to pay a pre- recalls Weblogs stream of revenue from network ads,
mium to reach a targeted audience. Inc. cofounder which are automatically served by compa-
Calacanis and Alvey’s solution was to nies such as Google and Tribal Fusion,
assemble a large network of bloggers who
Brian Alvey. and from direct ads, which are the result
together would generate a river of traffic. “Maybe never?” of traditional contracts with such advertis-
Stand-alone bloggers face great pressure ers as Volvo, Equifax, Pacific Poker, Palm,
to keep their sites fresh for audiences who level of significance,” says Calacanis. “For and Subaru. According to Calacanis, the
expect frequent updates. With a network, any of the ones that had, we went and majority of the company’s revenues come
if fresh content is not available at one blog, talked to them and tried to see if there was from direct ads, which currently com-
it most likely will be at a sister blog with a deal we could do. We made offers to buy mand a CPM rate (cost per 1,000 impres-
overlapping coverage—and authors can or partner with them.” sions) of between $4 and $12, whereas
contribute to one another’s sites. But bloggers are independent spirits. network ads generate between $1 and $4
The final business plan for Weblogs Few established bloggers wanted to part- CPM. The most popular blogs tend to fea-
called for a network of more than 300 ner with the company or sell controlling ture a greater number of ads purchased di-
blogs targeting niche markets in techn- interest in their content, Calacanis found. rectly by advertisers. More than half of
ology, media, entertainment, and con- Nor did the bloggers, many of whom had Weblogs’ advertisers end up buying space
sumer goods. With his experience in been stung by the dot-com crash, have on more than one of the network’s blogs,
creating content management systems, much interest in Weblogs equity. says Calacanis, but to pique a direct adver-
T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 BRIEFCASE 37

Briefcase
tiser’s interest, a blog’s traffic businesses using other emerg-
must exceed one million page Creation and Reading of Blogs ing models. John Battelle, who
views per month. Nine percent of Internet users have created blogs, and 25 percent have founded Industry Standard and
read blogs, representing, respectively, 6 percent and 16 percent of
The company openly ex- U.S. adults overall.
writes SearchBlog, a blog about
periments with homegrown the intersection of media, tech-
ad formats, including Focus nology, and the Internet, has
Percentage of Internet users

Have created blogs Have read blogs
Ads, which invites users to 30% launched a venture tentatively
comment on ads, and “ad- called FM Publishing that will
verposts,” which are ads writ- 20% provide independent blogs with
ten in a blog format (though such services as ad sales, but will
they are clearly labeled as 10% not own their content.
ads). Weblogs Inc. has also With this approach, Battelle
begun to embed ads in its RSS 0 may be able to attract high-end
June February November March
feeds. RSS (“really simple 2003 2004 2004 2005 bloggers who want to maintain
syndication”) allows content ownership of their editorial con-
providers to disseminate the S O U R C E: P EW I NTE R N ET AN D AM E R I CAN LI F E P R OJ E CT
tent but don’t have the time and
information on their sites, in- resources to figure out how to
cluding links, headlines, and summaries AdSense alone and has recently surged as monetize their blogs. And by bringing
of stories, to an RSS reader—a software high as $2,000. Maintaining that average prominent blogs together, FM Publishing
program that aggregates the updated con- would translate to $730,000 in revenue in could begin to enjoy some of the same net-
tent from a person’s favorite sites, elimi- a year, “which is nice,” Calacanis observed work benefits that Weblogs does.
nating the need to visit them individually. on his blog, “but much, much, less than A similar venture, called BlackInc
An advertisement within an RSS feed ap- we write in checks to our team every Media, is being launched later this year by
pears as a text link, much like a Google month (think 75+ bloggers and 10 full- former CNET Networks employees. The
“sponsored link” on a Web page. With time staff).” In May 2004, Mark Cuban, company will help blog publishers with ad
this new advertising format, the ads ac- sales and business development. “Our goal
company the content wherever it goes. is to allow bloggers to focus on the thing
One potential pitfall of the reliance on A potential pitfall that made them valuable in the first place—
automated ad programs is the temptation of the reliance good editorial content,” says Matt Comyns,
to game the system by creating search- one of BlackInc Media’s founders.
friendly editorial content referring to
on automated Another, less tangible challenge facing
highly trafficked search subjects, like ad programs is Weblogs is the fickle nature of Internet
Paris Hilton. Calacanis maintains, how- the temptation trends. The influence that bloggers
ever, that the practice of gaming search
engines is quickly punished by readers.
bloggers may wielded in the national debate during last
year’s presidential election suggests that
“People come to blogs not to be duped— feel to game the the medium’s cultural importance is un-
to get genuine coverage,” he says. And system by creating likely to fade anytime soon. But that
while he admits that blog publishers have search-friendly doesn’t guarantee that advertisers will ulti-
fostered a spirit of collaboration with ad- mately find sufficient value in blogs. To
vertisers, he says the so-called Chinese
editorial content. date, most advertising has been conducted
wall between editorial and advertising is on an experimental basis.
essential to establishing the credibility of who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo at the Calacanis believes that blogs need not
commercial blogs, just as it is for tradi- height of the bubble for an astonishing revolutionize media in order to be success-
tional forms of media. For this reason, $5.7 billion, made an investment in the ful. “The problem is that lots of people
Weblogs rejects the idea of tying compen- company. His own personal blog, Blog want to make this a zero-sum game,” he
sation for a specific blog to its ad per- Maverick, is part of the Weblogs network. says. “I don’t see blogs cannibalizing what
formance; the company wants its content Calacanis says he has no immediate plans Google News does or what the New York
to be as genuine as possible. “If our blog- to raise more money. Times does. I see it as something unique. I
gers are just chasing traffic by writing think blogs will eventually represent 20
about Lindsay Lohan, readers won’t tol- percent of a person’s media diet.”
erate it,” Calacanis says. No Barriers to Entry If he’s right, then blog networks—and
Though Calacanis and Alvey will not Calacanis openly refers to his latest ven- even some stand-alone blogs—may be able
disclose revenues, Calacanis—in the col- ture as a “blog experiment,” and to be to carve out a comfortable existence. But
laborative spirit of blogging—has shared sure, it is an unproven model. In addition in the end, a blogging company’s greatest
certain details on his own blog (calacanis. to competing with other networks, like weakness may be the very thing that makes
weblogsinc.com). Weblogs generates Gawker Media, which currently publishes the new medium so powerful: anybody
more than $1,000 per day from Google 13 blogs, Weblogs must compete with can publish a blog. Andrew P. Madden

Briefcase
player represents what we call a ‘theoreti-
The Digital cal win,’” says Garrow. “You would call

that a loss.” That is what makes comping
so important: it is the method by which ca-
Pit Boss sinos try to soften the edges of the hard re-
ality of loss. And how comping is done
matters greatly: the trick is to lavish the
THE CASE: Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun casino is preparing to biggest gifts on the people who are most
go “all in” on a sensor-riddled blackjack table that will give the likely to not only place big bets but also
make decisions that worsen their odds.
house perfect knowledge of how its customers play. Casinos know that technology can help
It found that a relatively low-tech system of cameras is them identify those people. Garrow ex-
more sensible than RFID—and that customers will tolerate plored—but has rejected for now—proto-
electronic surveillance if they believe it offers them benefits. type systems that use radio frequency
identification (RFID) tags embedded in
gaming chips. This technology gives each
or a casino, the expenses chip a unique identifying code; as a player
F and profits at blackjack ta-

bles are difficult to precisely
pin down. What’s clear is that
the aggregate numbers are
staggeringly high: a typical blackjack
table in Reno, NV, can see more than
$6 million wagered monthly, with about
buys chips (after first showing a player ID
card to become eligible for comps), the
chips are electronically associated with
that player. At blackjack or other tables, a
tag “reader” identifies each movement of
each chip, registering how much has been
bet, won, and lost. As a side benefit, such
1 percent of that sum staying behind as chips are nearly impossible for employees
the casino’s winnings. But gauging the to steal or players to counterfeit.
performances of individual players has While a few casinos are testing proto-
long been an inexact science. Clay gam- type RFID-chip systems, none has yet
ing chips slide back and forth between implemented them, says John Kendall,
human hands. Paper playing cards are president of one RFID–gaming chip
dealt, collected, and shuffled. Players The Mohegan maker, Chipco International of Raymond,
signal their desire for additional cards by Sun casino has ME. When Garrow investigated RFID
about 6,200 slot
tapping their fingers on the table and re- machines and 300 chips, he concluded they were too costly,
gaming tables.
fuse hits by waving their hands. Some ex- though he acknowledges that prices have
pend all their chips; others walk away since come down. (The newest versions
with more than they brought. Mohegan Sun add about 50 cents to the 80-cent price of a
Casinos hunger for a better under- FY 2004 revenues: $1.13 billion traditional casino chip, Kendall says.)
standing of players. In particular, they Employees: 9,700 Moreover, while RFID technology pro-
want information that will help them re- Average daily visitors: 30,000 vides detailed information about players’
fine how often, and to whom, they dole betting patterns, it reveals nothing about
out “comps”—a sort of casino currency re- the cards they base their bets on, and there-
deemable for treats like free hotel rooms, technology can help it track blackjack fore nothing about their skill at blackjack.
dinners, and drinks. This calculation re- players. “We have long been looking for a While searching for alternatives, Gar-
quires two primary pieces of information: technology that would help us provide auto- row courted lone inventors proposing tech-
how much a given player is wagering, mated ratings of players at gaming tables,” nology for blackjack tables. At one point he
and—for blackjack and some other card says Dan Garrow, the chief information and his staff found themselves in the 13th-
games—how skilled that player is. officer at Mohegan Sun. “If you spend floor Manhattan apartment of an inventor
Knowing how much players are wager- $10,000, we will do something for you to who had rigged a blackjack table with com-
ing requires watching their chips closely, keep coming back. It’s no different than puters and sensors to track all aspects of
and judging their skill levels accurately re- any other business—how do you keep your play. While the technology showed prom-
quires observing each decision they make. customers coming back?” ise, the vendor was essentially looking for
C O U R T E SY O F M O H E G A N S U N
Right now, the onus for keeping track of But of course, gambling is different Mohegan Sun to provide his venture capi-
these things falls to a manager known as a from any other business. While a casino tal and expand his business—something
pit boss, who is, famously, backed up by does, as Garrow says, care about customer Garrow was unwilling to do.
surveillance staff eyeballing video moni- retention as much as any company, its rela- Then came MindPlay. Garrow was
tors in a back room. Like other casinos, tionship with its customers is adversarial: aware that a couple of casinos in Nevada
Mohegan Sun, in Uncasville, CT, thinks a casino wants its customers to lose. “Each had been trying out a system from Mind-

Play, a small, Bellevue, WA–based com- power on low-stakes tables and thus don’t
Casino-Revenue Snapshot
pany that has since been bought by Bally issue comps to the players who frequent
Blackjack brought in $1.2 billion to Nevada
Gaming and Systems. MindPlay builds casinos in 2004, but the game’s portion of them. So the MindPlay tables give El Do-
blackjack tables with small cameras overall revenue has declined since 1994. rado a marketing edge. “We want to be
tucked into a slightly raised dealer plat- able to comp $5 players, $10 players, that
Blackjack Other table Other
form facing the players. The accompany- other properties don’t ever track,”
Percentage of casino revenue

games revenue
ing gaming chips bear simple line patterns $12 20% Mouchou says.
on their edges; these are read by the sys- These advantages were not lost on
$9 15%
tem’s pattern-recognition software. Spe- Mohegan Sun’s Garrow. But he faced one

cial playing cards also bear line patterns $6 10% final hurdle: the gamblers themselves,
that identify them; the patterns are on the who—just like anyone else—can be suspi-
faces of the cards and are read by a camera $3 5% cious of electronic surveillance. Richard
pointing up through the table at the mouth 0 0
LeBaron, a product manager at MindPlay,
of the “shoe”—the box containing cards. says the company’s technology offers ad-
1994 2000 2004
Players swipe their casino cards at the S O U R C E: AM E R I CAN GAM I N G AS S O C IATI O N, N EVADA
vantages to players, too. “Like any new
start of play—so they can earn comps—and GAM I N G C O NTR O L B OAR D technology, it takes time to be accepted
thereafter, every detail of their play is with open arms,” he says. “It’s all in train-
tracked. The system knows which cards president of operations, made a few ing dealers in handling questions that
they receive, what decisions they make, mouse clicks during a phone interview come from patrons. Patrons have felt their
and the amount of each bet they make. and reported that in a recent 30-day pe- comps are never tracked properly. The pa-
A back-end system continually evaluates riod, 5,795 skilled players who swiped in trons of a casino now have a better under-
and reëvaluates their skill, hand by hand, using player ID cards wagered $16.6 mil- standing that with the system, they are
hit by hit. (The theoretical best player, lion at the 16 MindPlay tables. going to get comped accurately and fairly.”
who plays strategically perfect blackjack, A few mouse clicks later, he saw the Today, Mohegan Sun just has two
will have a mathematical disadvantage payoff to the casino on these players. Be- MindPlay tables, which it keeps in its
of .45 percent; each mistake he or she fore MindPlay, Mouchou comped players dealer-training facility—a steel warehouse
makes drives that number upward.) The at a flat 25 percent of their estimated a short drive from the casino itself. But it
software’s skill assessments are fed into losses—a figure the house fixed at 1 per- will install 10 of the new tables in the
the casino’s management software. In a cent of the amount they were estimated to casino next month. And Garrow is plan-
final, tangible touch, the playing surface have wagered. But this was always very ning to cash in all of Mohegan Sun’s
of the MindPlay blackjack table has the much a ballpark figure, he says. Now he chips—literally—in favor of a new batch
feel of a mouse pad. comps at 25 percent of the amount their that works with the MindPlay tables. The
Paving the way for Mohegan Sun was skill evaluations suggest they will lose, on new chips won’t be as expensive as RFID
the El Dorado casino in Lake Tahoe, NV, average, multiplied by the exact amount chips, but they will be made of extruded
which did its beta testing four years ago. they wagered. The 5,795 players cited by nylon, not clay. The nylon gives more
Now the casino has implemented 16 Mouchou were particularly skilled, so sharply defined edge patterns, allowing
MindPlay tables. And what kind of data is their projected average loss was just .63 the camera’s pattern-recognition software
it getting? Rob Mouchou, El Dorado’s vice percent. Previously, Mouchou would have to correctly identify them.
comped them $41,500—one- Mohegan Sun hasn’t given up on RFID
quarter of 1 percent of $16.6 entirely. It’s considering giving its custom-
million. Instead, he comped ers special RFID tags they can put on their
$26,145, one-quarter of .63 cars and installing tag readers on the road
percent of $16.6 million. Thus to the casino. When the high rollers with
he saved nearly $15,000 in bad blackjack skills hit town, Mohegan
comps. Since this was spread Sun will know it before they even reach
out among 5,795 players, each the valet parking. “We could have services
player’s comp reduction was available, credit-limit changes, or set up a
tolerable: less than $3. (And as gaming table in a particular area, or have a
G E O R G E STA M O S / B A L LY G A M I N G A N D SYST E M S
a side benefit, he can track his favorite drink or food ready,” Garrow says.
dealers and see which ones “We might be able to make your experi-
keep the momentum going, ence here at Mohegan Sun that much
and which ones are sluggish.) more special.” As Mohegan Sun and other
Now Mouchou is planning casinos—and indeed other businesses—
a marketing campaign based identify cost-saving surveillance technolo-
MindPlay’s blackjack
table includes a platform on El Dorado’s new tech- gies that both work on a practical level and
with embedded cameras nology. Most casinos won’t are accepted by consumers, you can bet
that track every chip.
expend their pit-boss man- they’ll be installing them. David Talbot
T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 BRIEFCASE 41

Briefcase One Decision
But the market for game consoles is
Why Microsoft about much more than games. Microsoft

continues to develop its Media Center op-
erating system, which allows a computer to
Paused Halo 2 be a TV, DVD player, photo editor, and digi-

tal jukebox—and the upcoming release of
the Xbox 360 will make connecting to a
THE DECISION: Microsoft released Halo 2, the sequel to Media Center PC even easier. As Bill Gates
its highly successful video game Halo, a year later than recently told CNET, “We didn’t do Xbox
just to do a video game; we did it to be part
customers expected. Though the delay disappointed of our vision of the digital lifestyle.”
gamers in the short term, it ensured a better product. Of course, Microsoft delayed Halo 2
It also bolstered the hold of the Xbox game console— not just because it felt it had to, but also be-
part of Microsoft’s bid for a place in our living rooms. cause it could. Microsoft doesn’t face the
same financial pressures that most other
game companies do, and its strength al-
alo, the revolu- will try to sell a high number of lows it to base narrow decisions, such as
H tionary video game

pitting the “Master
Chief” against a coa-
lition of evil aliens,
helped spark sales of Microsoft’s
Xbox game console when both
products debuted in 2001. When
games across different plat-
forms, Microsoft uses proprie-
tary games to drive demand for
the Xbox. As Kim explains,
“The console with the best
games will win.”
Jay Horwitz, a senior ana-
release dates, on broad strategic goals.
“Winning the console market is a mara-
thon for them. It’s not measured on a
quarterly basis,” says Jupiter’s Horwitz.
That said, Microsoft did see a short-
term benefit from delaying Halo 2. When
the game shipped, it was an instant suc-
the company announced in August lyst with Jupiter Research, says cess—in terms of both its own sales and
2002 it was creating Halo 2, the game was his company’s data lend support to Micro- those of the Xbox. According to the NPD
expected to be on the market by the 2003 soft’s approach. “When we ask customers Group, Halo and Halo 2 were both among
holiday season. Instead, it would not be the three most important considerations the 10 top-selling video games of 2004,
released until the 2004 holidays. in the purchase of their next game con- even though Halo 2 was released in No-
Programmers at Bungie Studios, one sole,” he says, “availability of the best ex- vember (Halo 2 brought in $125 million
of Microsoft’s in-house game studios, in- clusive games consistently ranks highly.” the first 24 hours it was released). The
sisted they needed more time to make the At the time of Halo 2’s release, Sony was new game won dozens of industry awards
game they envisioned. Halo is a “first- dominating the game-console market and helped drive two million people to
person shooter,” the kind of game that with its PlayStation 2, and Microsoft was Microsoft’s online game site. All that
runs the risk of becoming repetitive. Halo eager to capitalize on the success of Halo to helped Microsoft’s Home and Entertain-
avoided that pitfall thanks to a gripping increase its console market share. A much ment (read: Xbox) Division close out the
storyline, excellent graphics and sound, improved Halo 2 would help in that effort. year with its first quarterly profit, of $84
and innovative game play. By early 2004, million on $1.41 billion in revenue. In the
customers were clamoring for Halo 2, Will it play on the big first quarter of this year, however, the di-
screen? Microsoft is
and their expectations ran high. “The talking to Hollywood vision lost $154 million on $593 million
successor to Halo really had to be amaz- about Halo. in revenue. Things could get back on track
ing,” says Shane Kim, general manager of later this year, with the Xbox 360 sched-
Microsoft Game Studios. “If we had uled to be released for the holidays.
rushed the game out, we would have had It’s tricky to draw lessons from Micro-
fewer single-player missions, fewer mul- soft, which operates in a strategic universe
tiplayer maps, and a lot less polish in the all its own. But the Halo 2 story underlines
graphics and game play.” a big question for any company deciding
That argument alone may not have whether to ship an acceptable product on
been enough to justify the delayed release. time or a better product late: is a delay jus-
But Microsoft needed Halo 2 to be wildly tified by an imperative greater than the
successful for reasons beyond the reve- short-term sales of the product itself? That
nues it might generate. That’s because the Microsoft question gave Microsoft pause. Julie Bick
C O U R T E SY O F E D E L M A N
video game market drives the game- FY 2004 revenues: $36.8 billion
console market, whose major players are Employees: 60,000 Bick, now a freelance writer, worked in
Sony’s PlayStation, Nintendo’s Game- Hours gamers had spent playing Halo 2 product management for Microsoft from
online as of mid-June: 250 million
Cube, and Xbox. And whereas a third- 1990 to 1995; her husband works for the
party game maker such as Electronic Arts company now.

By Invitation Craig Newmark
Socialized
Computing
The founder of craigslist is obsessed
with customer service.
y title at craigslist is value is to help other people if you can. I
M “customer service rep

and founder,” and my
customer service role is
at least a full-time gig.
A CEO runs the actual organization now.
I’ve always had difficulty articulating why
I have this obsession. I work anywhere
feel that customer service, even when you
get paid for it, is an expression of that
value, an everyday form of compassion.
Also, I’ve learned from the open-source
movement that people want to contribute
to endeavors of mutual benefit. So at craigs-
list, we’ve turned over a lot of control over
from two to ten hours a day, seven days a the site to the people who use it. We seri- Craig Newmark is a Web-oriented software
week, doing stuff like deleting “bait and ously listen to suggestions and actually engineer, with around 25 years’ experience
switch” posts from New York apartment change the site in response to them. of coding. In 1995, he started craigslist, a
brokers, moderating discussion boards, Anyone who feels a posting on our site community bulletin board with classifieds and
and sharing community suggestions with is wrong, for whatever reason, can flag it discussion forums. Today, tens of millions of
the team. If you e-mail me about the site, for removal; if enough people agree, the people use the site for free. In high school, he
I’ll probably write back—quickly, too. ad’s removed automatically. A similar phi- really did wear a plastic pocket protector and
Craigslist was originally a very simple losophy is embodied in the Wiki move- thick black glasses, taped together.
e-mail list for my friends, focusing on arts ment, particularly in Wikipedia (an online
and technology events in San Francisco. encyclopedia whose roughly two million
People suggested doing more, like job and entries are created and corrected by the This seems to be part of the general dys-
apartment listings, so I did that; then I got site’s users). We plan to turn over even function of large organizations. As a com-
more feedback—so I did even more stuff. more control of our site to the people who pany accumulates power and money, the
Today, craigslist helps people in more use it. Mainly, we need suggestions about people who are skilled at corporate poli-
than 100 cities in 24 countries with every- what to do next. tics take control of it. Customer service
day needs, like finding a place to live or Currently, we’re trying to figure out never seems to be highly prized by people
getting a job or selling furniture. With how to charge the New York rental agents with those skills. Maybe it’s because they
nine million unique visitors a month, it’s a for apartment listings (they’ve suggested lack empathy.
big site, though a simple one. We have a this as a way to improve site quality) while I speak with a lot of workers at many
pretty good culture of trust and goodwill. giving a break to the smaller agents. companies, and for the most part, they
really want to provide good customer ser-
vice. But they tell me they’re often pre-
A lot of my motivation derives from the vented from doing so because service is
name of our site; I take things personally. seen as a cost and not something that con-
tributes to profits.
I plan to be doing customer service forever. Me, maybe a lot of my motivation de-
rives from the name of our site; I take
I figure that reasonably good customer I feel that all this is a deep expression things personally. Maybe sometime this
service is part of the social contract be- of democratic values. From a business year I can go part time as a customer ser-
tween producer and consumer. In general, point of view, of course, it makes good vice rep, and I could use a day off, maybe a
if you’re going to do something, you should sense, too: it lowers our costs and im- Sunday. But I plan to be doing customer
follow through and not screw around. As a proves the quality of what’s on our site. service forever.
nerd, I have the tendency to take things Finally, it helps keep management in No matter how hard I try, sometimes
pretty seriously, so if I commit to some- touch with what’s real—or at least that’s we screw up. Then we apologize and fix
thing, I try really hard to stay committed. what we hope. it. My lingering concern is that I’m miss-
ST E P H A N E M A N E L
This isn’t altruism or social activism; Unfortunately, in contemporary cor- ing something big, and that I need to hear
it’s just giving people a break. Pretty much porate culture, customer service is often about it from my team and the commu-
all world religions tell us that one moral an afterthought, given lip service only. nity. What am I missing? ■
T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 BY I N V I T A T I O N 43
Continuous computing:
the proliferation of cheap mobile gadgets,
wireless Internet access for everyone,
a new Web built for sharing and self-expression...
suddenly, computing means connecting.
Social
Machines MY BOSS, JASON PONTIN, CAUSED A MINOR RUCKUS IN MAY
while attending D3, the Wall Street Journal’s third annual “All
Things Digital” conference outside San Diego. The editor in
chief of Technology Review, like many executives, entrepre-
neurs, engineers, and students these days, doesn’t go anywhere
without his wireless gear—meaning, at a minimum, a Wi-Fi–en-
abled laptop and a cell phone. At D3, Jason was using his laptop
to file blog (or Web log) posts “live” from the conference floor,
summarizing talks by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sun Microsystems
CEO Scott McNealy, and other computer-industry celebrities.
But on the third day, he couldn’t find a signal. The Wi-Fi net-
work he’d been accessing was on by mistake, a conference staffer
Editor’s note: In this article, additional comments and references appear in the margins. Most were
written by the author. However, several were contributed by visitors to the article’s companion blog,
www.continuousblog.net, where a draft of the article was published in May. This experiment in online
By Wade Roush participatory journalism seemed appropriate in light of the article’s subject: social computing. The
Illustration by Peter Stemmler blog will be maintained indefinitely as a forum for discussion of this theme.
T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 FEATURE STORY 45

told him. She explained that the hosts of the conference—Walt Mossberg and Kara
Swisher, two of the Journal’s technology writers—had decided that no one should have
Internet access from the main ballroom.
Blog post: See pontin.trblogs.com/ Jason, naturally, wrote a new blog post about the incident (from the hallway this
archives/2005/05/d3_suppressing.html. time). Forbidding live blogging at a technology conference, he remarked, “seems a
very retrograde move.” Mossberg responded hours later. “It is untrue that Kara and I
banned live blogging at D3, from the ballroom or anywhere else,” he explained. “We
merely declined to provide Wi-Fi, to avoid the common phenomenon that has ruined
too many tech conferences—near universal checking of e-mail and surfing of the Web
during the program.”
Other bloggers: Including me. Other bloggers soon pounced on the minicontroversy. Some commended Mossberg’s
See www.continuousblog.net/2005/05/ decision and warned against the perils of “continuous partial attention,” the state of men-
disconnected_at.html.
tal blurriness thought to be induced when information is constantly pouring in from
multiple sources. Others extolled the social benefits of “always on” connectivity. “Dur-
ing conferences the back channel can and does enhance the fore channel, especially if I’m
Continuous partial attention: A phrase able to look up information that would be too tedious, basic, or digressive to ask about
coined by Linda Stone, a former Microsoft during a Q&A,” wrote Gardner Campbell, an assistant vice president for teaching and
vice president and a widely respected
authority on human-computer interfaces. learning technologies at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA. “I
can also share the experience, and be newly energized, by being in touch with staff and
friends and family who are not able to attend with me.”
Both sides had a point. But the most telling thing about the debate was that it hap-
pened at all. Without much hoopla, many conference centers and university and corpo-
rate campuses—even entire metropolises, in the case of Philadelphia and a few other
cities—are being turned into giant Wi-Fi hot spots. Trains, planes, airports, and libraries
are also installing wireless networks to serve customers carrying wireless gadgets. As a
result, many businesspeople, students, and Starbucks addicts now expect cheap, easy
access to the Internet as a matter of course. Losing it can feel like being stranded.
Constant connectivity has changed what it means to participate in a conference or
Wikis: Web pages that allow users to add any other gathering. Using chat rooms, blogs, wikis, photo-sharing sites, and other
content or edit existing content. technologies, people at real-world meetings can now tap into an electronic swirl of
commentary and interpretation by other participants—the “back channel” mentioned
by Campbell. There are trade-offs: this new information stream can indeed draw atten-
tion away from the here and now. But many people seem willing to make them, pleased
by the productivity they gain in circumstances where they’d otherwise be cut off from
their offices or homes. There is meaning in all of this. After a decade of hype about “mo-
Podcasts: Amateur radio shows without bility,” personal computing has finally and irreversibly cut its bonds to the desktop and
the radio. Podcasters produce MP3 has moved into devices we can carry everywhere. We’re using this newly portable com-
recordings on whatever subjects interest
them and publish the files on the Internet, puting power to connect with others in ways no one predicted—and we won’t be easily
where listeners can subscribe to shows, parted from our new tools.
download files to their computers, and
then transfer them to their portable music
players, such as the Apple iPod.
Continuous Computing
To grasp how rapidly things are changing, consider all the things you can do today that
would have been difficult or impossible just a few years ago: you can query Google via
Flickr: The photo-sharing site of choice text message from your phone, keep an online diary of the Web pages you visit, down-
for many digital photographers. One of its
trademark features is the ability to add load podcasts to your iPod, label your photos or bookmarks with appropriate tags at
descriptive words, or “tags,” to photo- Flickr or Delicious , store gigabytes of personal e-mail online, listen to the music on your
graphs, so that the photographer or
others can find them more easily later. home PC from any other computer connected to the Net, or find your house on an aerial
See www.flickr.com. photograph at Google Maps. Most of these applications are free—and the ones coming
close behind them will be even more powerful. With more and more phones carrying
Global Positioning System (GPS) chips, for example, it’s likely that companies will offer
a cornucopia of new location-based information services; you’ll soon be able to find an
Delicious: A “social bookmarking” site online review instantly as you drive past a restaurant, or visit a landmark and download
created by freelance software developer
Joshua Schachter. Users can store URLs, photos and comments left by others.
personal comments, and descriptive tags This explosion of new capabilities shouldn’t be mistaken for “feature creep,” the ac-
that will help them identify Web pages they
want to find later. See del.icio.us. cretion of special functions that has made common programs such as Microsoft Word so
mystifyingly complex. There is something different about the latest tools. They are both
46 FEATURE STORY T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

digital, rooted in the world of electrons and bits, and fundamentally social, built to enable
Computing: Blog reader Hannu Leinonen
new kinds of interactions among people. Blogging, text messaging, photo sharing, and comments: “I feel uneasy about the word
Web surfing from a smart phone are just the earliest examples. Almost below our mental ‘computing.’ It sounds like counting. In
Spanish the word for computer is
radar, these technologies are ushering us into a world of what could be called continuous ‘ordinador’ and in Finnish it’s ‘tietokone.’
computing—continuous in the usual sense of “uninterrupted,” but also in the sense that Tietokone translates to ‘knowledge
it’s continuous with our lives, in all their messy, social, biographical richness. machine.’ We are not there yet, but have
we passed computing?”
The arrival of continuous computing means that people who live in populated areas
of developed countries (and increasingly, developing ones such as China and India) can
spend entire days inside a kind of invisible, portable “information field.” This field is
created by constant, largely automated coöperation between People: Blog reader Gene Becker
comments: “In your definition of continuous
1) the digital devices people carry, such as laptops, media players, computing, you might consider adding ‘4)
and the devices they encounter along the
and camera phones way, such as situated displays, networked
2) the wireline and wireless networks that serve people’s locations as entertainment systems, printers, and
connected vehicles.’ We are just around
they travel about, and the corner from these situated networked
3) the Internet and its growing collection of Web-based tools devices’ becoming active participants in
our digital experience. I wonder if you also
for finding information and communicating and collaborating want to pull in physical-tagging notions
with other people. (RFID, bar codes, semacodes, visual tags,
etc.) as the ‘physical hyperlinks’ that bring
everyday objects into the digital mix. In the
This information field enables people to both pull information about virtually any- same spirit, GPS and other location
technologies are starting to make physical
thing from anywhere, at any time, and push their own ideas and personalities back onto place a first-class element of the digital
the Internet—without ever having to sit down at a desktop computer. Armed with noth- experience. Oh, and can we all please work
on a better term, one that doesn’t use
ing more than a smart phone, a modern urbanite can get the answer to almost any ques- ‘computing’? It’s so not about that.”
tion; locate nearby colleagues, friends, and services; join virtual communities that form
and disband rapidly around shared work and shared interests; and self-publish blog en-
tries, photographs, audio recordings, and videos for an unlimited audience.
The ingredients of continuous computing have emerged piecemeal. Japanese com-
panies, for example, have long been testing new social and personal uses for cell phones.
Model smart homes that demonstrate how intelligent appliances will converse with Smart homes: A leading example in the
United States is the Georgia Tech
each other are a perennial favorite in both Japan and the United States. But the final Broadband Institute Residential Labora-
pieces fell into place only recently. These include the spread of Wi-Fi and other types of tory, a three-story home outfitted with
people-tracking sensors, gesture-sensitive
wireless access to millions of offices, homes, airports, and cafés; the enormous popu- remote controls, and other widgets. Part of
larity of camera phones and mobile audio players; free or inexpensive voice-over- the Aware Home Research Initiative
Internet phone calling; the rise of blogs as a means of both personal and political funded by Hewlett-Packard, Intel,
Motorola, and the National Science
communication; personal and professional social-networking sites; tagging and social Foundation, the Residential Laboratory is a
bookmarking; collaboration tools such as wikis and Microsoft’s Groove Virtual Office; classic instance of computing research
that starts with a perceived need—
new tools for gathering chunks of media “microcontent” into something resembling a assisting the elderly with complex,
personalized electronic newspaper; location-based services and other applications tied information-intensive tasks, for example—
and invents gadgets and software that
to specific geographic coördinates; and new computer languages and standards that supposedly address the need. But as we’ll
make it easy to offer powerful, personalized software services over the Web. What see, continuous computing is an emergent
phenomenon—a complex pattern of social
makes all these tools different from the computing styles of the past is that they fit more behaviors that arises from the use of a
naturally into our real lives—meaning, for example, that they adapt more readily to our variety of simpler digital tools. It advances
in unexpected directions as people find
locations, our preferences, and our schedules. innovative ways to put these commercial
One analyst who writes about these issues is Alex Pang, a historian of science and and open-source technologies to use in
their social lives.
former managing editor of the Encylopædia Britannica who now works as a research
director at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, CA, think tank. Software engineers,
he says, have discovered that computer science’s decades-long effort to make computers
smart enough to understand humans is simply irrel-
evant; they can make computing truly personal and
social using simple Web-based programming tools.
After all, we don’t really want to talk with comput-
ers—we want to talk through them. “The brilliance of
C O U R T E SY O F A L E X PA N G
social-software applications like Flickr, Delicious,

Technorati: A search engine built by
and Technorati,” Pang says, “is that they recognize software developer David Sifry that scans
that computers are really good at doing certain millions of blogs and displays the most
recent posts relating to any given keyword
things, like working with gigantic quantities of data, or tag.
Alex Pang
and really bad at, for example, understanding the

different meanings of certain words, like ‘depression.’ They devote computing re-
sources in ways that basically enhance communication, collaboration, and thinking
rather than trying to substitute for them.”
The Computer That Wouldn’t Disappear

While continuous computing is now a practical reality, it has been a long time coming.
The first serious work on it began 17 years ago at Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research
Center (PARC). That’s where computer scientist Mark Weiser set out to study the no-
Ubiquitous computing: Weiser’s tion of ubiquitous computing, which he defined as “activating the world”—creating net-
original Web pages on the subject are works of small, wireless computing devices that permeated the physical structures
preserved at www.ubiq.com/hypertext/
weiser/UbiHome.html. around us, where they would supposedly anticipate our needs and act without requiring
our attention. Weiser’s earliest experiments, funded by the U.S. Department of De-
fense, involved a network of infrared sensors scattered around PARC. The sensors com-
municated with prototype “tabs”—small, wireless displays that functioned as labels or
sticky notes—and with tablet-sized handheld computers and large display boards.
Weiser envisioned hundreds of these devices installed in rooms, homes, and office
Invisible: Blog reader Gardner Campbell complexes, where they would eventually become “invisible to common awareness,” as
comments: “These are compelling essays
and concepts, but a small worry persists: he predicted in a 1991 article for Scientific American. “People will simply use them un-
will the grail of invisible, continuous, consciously to accomplish everyday tasks,” he wrote.
ubiquitous computing turn out to be a
cognitive deadener, too? Some things work Tragically, Weiser died of cancer in 1999, at age 46. But by then, others had taken up
best when they’re visible and a little his call, including the famed product-design consultant Donald Norman, who squeezed
recalcitrant: writing, for example, or
thinking, for another example. If we use an entire thesis into the title of his 1998 book, The Invisible Computer: Why Good Prod-
symbols effortlessly, there’s a risk we’ll ucts Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are
settle for the path of least resistance
automatically rather than go for the more the Solution. People might be more efficient if their spaces, work
ambitious and difficult goals, the computer flows, and communications were fully digitized, but this
equivalent of a set of grunts and gestures
instead of a language, which involves a fair wouldn’t happen until improved technology relieved them of
amount of work to acquire and use well but the sense that they were interacting with “computers” at all,
has rich payoffs in terms of semantic Norman argued. He called for a new generation of “informa-
density.”
tion appliances” that would facilitate specific activities—such as
Author’s response: I agree. That’s why I teleconferencing, shopping, photography, or exercise—without
point out in this section and elsewhere that
continuous computing is not about making calling attention to themselves. Echoing Weiser, Norman wrote
computers invisible. that these appliances would “become such an intrinsic part of
the task that it will not be obvious that they are there. They will Donald Norman
be invisible like the embedded processors in the automobile or microwave oven.”
Researchers got busy building these appliances at places like MIT’s Laboratory for
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (since folded into one large
lab). In 2000, the lab launched a five-year, industry-funded initiative called Project
Project Oxygen: See oxygen.lcs.mit.edu/ Oxygen, so named because the founding scientists believed that computation would
Overview.html. eventually be “freely available everywhere, like batteries and power sockets, or oxygen
in the air we breathe.” Like Weiser, the Oxygen researchers have focused on a combina-
tion of handheld devices and networks of sensing and communications equipment em-
bedded in the environment—cameras, microphones, displays, wireless transmitters and
receivers, and the like. Their most famous prototype is the Intelligent Room, a confer-
ence room rigged with sensors and displays that responds to voice commands, saves au-
dio records of users’ discussions, and calls up presentations or recordings of prior
Cell phones: They’re now constant
companions for 1.7 billion people meetings. The idea, according to the MIT researchers, is to automate as many aspects of
worldwide. According to market research human collaboration as possible.
firm IDC, more than 690 million phones
were shipped in 2004 alone. In the first Ubiquitous-computing research continues at PARC, where researchers are working
quarter of 2005, vendors shipped 8.4 on technologies such as embedded sensors trained to zero in on specific conversations
million “converged mobile devices,” in busy rooms so that people watching by videoconference can join in. And in Europe, a
meaning phones that also function as
C O U R T E SY O F I A N U S K E L L E R
PDAs and can run many types of software three-year, $28 million “Disappearing Computer” initiative from 2001 to 2003 resulted
applications—an increase of 134 percent in several ongoing projects on “ambient computing,” the idea of augmenting everyday
over the first quarter of 2004. More than
182 million people in the United States objects with small, wirelessly networked sensors.
subscribe to cellular services, and in 2004 But here’s the surprise: the tools that are actually bringing us continuous computing
they spent more than a trillion minutes
using their phones. aren’t invisible. In fact, they are the very technologies Weiser and his successors were
trying to sideline: off-the-shelf computing devices such as laptops and cell phones, both

of which allow users to tap into Web-based social-software systems built in a largely un-
planned way by people using common programming languages and shared, open com-
Too heavily engineered: Blog reader
munications protocols and development tools. These systems don’t have to be designed Gene Becker comments: “I agree with your
as unified, integrated systems, like Project Oxygen’s Intelligent Room, in order to be assessment and would add that in many
cases, they are technology solutions in
useful tools for social computing; they can just as well emerge from the bottom up, the search of a problem. What is the question
way peer-to-peer networks and the Web itself did. (Indeed, one reason that projects at to which ‘ubicomp’ is the best answer?”
PARC, Project Oxygen, and other labs have never really blossomed into commercial
systems may be that they are too heavily engineered for preconceived uses.) And we
don’t really need computers to disappear into the woodwork, or to have elaborate spo-
ken-word interfaces. In fact, today’s social-software boom rests on common devices
such as mobile phones, computers, digital cameras, and portable music players.
“One of the things that really blew my mind was a trip last year at Christmastime to a
mall in the DC suburbs,” says Thomas Vander Wal, an Internet-application designer Thomas Vander Wal: Best known for
popularizing two concepts, the “infocloud”
whose writings are widely followed by developers of social-software applications. (the aggregate of one’s personal digital
“Which is, as places go, a little bit more technically advanced than the more rural areas data, which increasingly resides on
networks rather than on desktop PCs or
at the center of the U.S., but it’s still not the Bay Area or New York. But I was seeing permanent media) and “folksonomies” (the
people 50 and older waiting in line to get their packages wrapped and staring at their knowledge structures that emerge in place
of hierarchical taxonomies when groups of
mobile devices. I don’t know if they were text-messaging their kids or browsing the people tag digital data using an
Web or what, but their mobile devices were being used for more than just calling some- unconstrained vocabulary).
body. It was at that point that I thought, ‘We’re almost there’—wherever ‘there’ is.”
The Enabling Technologies

Three broad technology trends are making computing continuous. The first, as noted
earlier, is easy, inexpensive Internet access. The second is the spread of inexpensive,
wireless computing devices. Above all, this means wireless laptops. Only a computer ca-
pable of running a full-blown Web browser allows access to the full range of Web-based
software applications, which are, as we’ll see in a moment, the third major source of
technologies making computing more social. But laptops can’t be carried everywhere,
and smaller devices such as digital cameras, video recorders, voice recorders, portable
CD and DVD players, MP3 players, PDAs, pagers, GPS receivers, and wearable gear like
Microsoft’s wireless SPOT (for “Smart Personal Object Technology”) watches have the
important function of maintaining the information field when there isn’t a computer at Separate devices: PalmOne’s Treo 650,
hand. Then, of course, there’s the smart phone—in essence, a miniature computer jug- for example, is styled like a phone but also
gling tasks that formerly required half a dozen separate devices. The smart phone is “an acts as a still and video camera, an e-mail
and instant-messaging platform, an MP3
ideal system for pervasive, supportive social computing,” writes Russell Beale, director of player, a game player, a personal organizer,
the Advanced Interaction Group in the computer science department at the University of a Web-browsing device, an e-book reader,
and a short-range communicator (using
Birmingham, England. It’s “a two-way device, creating and consuming information, is the Bluetooth wireless standard).
highly personal, and is almost always available... .”
The third trend nudging us into a new era of computing is probably the most impor-
tant and the least expected. It is the emergence of the Web as a platform for personal pub-
lishing and social software. The examples are as diverse as informational sites such as Wikipedia: An online encyclopedia built
blogs, craigslist, and Wikipedia and services such as Gmail, LinkedIn, Flickr, and using wiki software, meaning that anyone
may add entries or edit existing ones.
Delicious. All of these are examples of what software developers and Internet pundits With1.8 million articles written by 51,000
have begun to call “Web 2.0”: the transformation of the original Web of static documents contributors in 109 languages, it is the
world’s most comprehensive (though
into a collection of pages that still look like documents but are actually interfaces to full- perhaps not its most reliable) reference
fledged computing platforms. These Web-based services are proliferating so fast be- work. It may, in fact, be the largest
collaborative literary work in history.
cause they can be built using shared, standardized programming tools and languages (See “Larry Sanger’s Knowledge Free-
developed, for the most part, by the open-source-software community. for-All,” January 2005.)
The list of popular social-software applications is almost overwhelming. The oldest
examples include text messaging on phones and pagers, instant messaging between
computers, and good old e-mail. But while these technologies may be familiar, they are
being radically upgraded to work with the Web. Classic circuit-switched landline and Static documents: Web 1.0 consisted
largely of text files jazzed up with browser-
cellular telephony, for example, faces growing competition from packet-switched sys- readable HTML instructions on how to
tems, including Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) networks such as Vonage and display the text and where to find related
files. Web 2.0 is more like a collection of
Skype. Calls placed within Skype’s peer-to-peer network are free, which has made the programs that talk to one another.
service a favorite among startup companies with employees in far-flung locations. Adam

Curry, a former television-show host on MTV who coinvented the idea of podcasting,
gushes frequently about Skype in his own podcasts, saying it’s the main way he conducts
business at Podshow.com, a podcasting network he is launching soon. “Skype is going
to be the phone company,” Curry intones.
Wi-Fi cell phones that let people use Skype even if they’re away from their computers
may soon hit the market, and new techniques for handing active calls from a cellular
network to a Wi-Fi network will allow people with dual-band phones to switch to the
lowest-cost service available at any given location. Meanwhile, the Short Messaging
System (SMS) for text messaging is giving way to the Multimedia Messaging System
(MMS), which can handle pictures, sound, and video in addition to text. Then there’s
Google’s Gmail service, which offers a practically unlimited amount of storage online
and an extremely efficient search mechanism for rummaging through it. Some users
consider Gmail to be at least as powerful as client-side e-mail programs such as Outlook
and Eudora (which store e-mail locally on a desktop machine), with the added advan-
tage that it is accessible from any computer with a browser.
Tools that turn private individuals into Internet broadcasters are another booming
application. When blogs were first emerging, publishing one was a tedious and forbid-
ding process that involved rewriting HTML code and manually uploading files to a Web-
hosting service. But with the advent of Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, WordPress,
and other services, the task of blog publishing has been reduced to writing something co-
gent and clicking on a couple of buttons. As a result, blogs have become the personal
Podcasting: Podcasters don’t agree on launching pads for millions of Web users’ social activities online—the place where they
much about their craft—both Adam Curry
and software guru Dave Winer claim to be gather their own thoughts and artistic creations, invite others to react, and share links to
the technology’s godfathers, for example— and commentary about content they find elsewhere on the Web. Lately, it’s become
but they do seem to agree that the term
“podcasting” was coined by Ben cheap and easy to publish audio and video blog entries. And new tools for transferring
Hammersley, a writer for British newspaper audio blog posts to portable digital-music players like the Apple iPod have created a plat-
the Guardian, in an article published
February 12, 2004. form for podcasting, an entirely new form of personal publishing. In 2004 there were
only a handful of regular podcasts; now there are several thousand, ranging from the sex-
ually graphic “Dawn and Drew Show” to “The Catholic Insider,” in which Father
Roderick Vonhögen, a priest of the Archdiocese of Utrecht, the Netherlands, ruminates
RSS: There is some contention over who on the new pope, run-ins with airport security guards in Rome, and Revenge of the Sith.
invented RSS and what the name actually But bloggers and podcasters wouldn’t have much to publish without a constant
stands for. In 1999, as part of the World
Wide Web Consortium’s effort to build a stream of incoming information, and another set of Web technologies is helping Inter-
Resource Description Framework (RDF) to net users to personalize that stream. Even before the Web, futurists predicted the advent
support Tim Berners-Lee’s concept of the
Semantic Web, engineers at Netscape of the personalized newspaper. Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of the MIT
created a document-mining tool called Media Lab, called it “The Daily Me,” a collection of items plucked from a variety of me-
“Rich Site Summary,” but they abandoned
it in 2001. Meanwhile, programmer Dave dia outlets by your home’s main computer, which would supposedly learn your prefer-
Winer wrote a script for publishing chunks ences by watching what you read and what you ignore. But Negroponte’s future has
of one site’s content on another, and called arrived: one of the most earthshaking developments in information management in the
it “Really Simple Syndication.” This is now
the most commonly accepted meaning of past half-decade is a straightforward Web-programming hack called RSS. It’s a way of
RSS, but the Netscape definition still has packaging Web items such as blog entries in a stripped-down, XML-based format so
its proponents, and still others say RSS
stands for “RDF Site Summary.” that they can be imported into other Web pages. Most blog-hosting services automati-
cally create RSS versions of blog posts. That means bloggers can “syndicate” their con-
tent across the entire Web, while readers can subscribe to RSS feeds from all of their
favorite blogs or news sites, and view them in a single place using an “aggregator” ser-
Feeds: An RSS feed can be created for vice such as NetNewsWire, NewsGator, or Bloglines. These services make it easier
just about anything. RSS is a key
technology behind podcasting, which is than ever for people to monitor developments in their areas of interest. (On the down-
essentially a method of delivering audio side, perhaps, aggregators also allow people to filter out news and ideas that don’t ac-
files via RSS subscriptions. And social- cord with their views.)
bookmarking services such as Delicious
and Rojo let users subscribe via RSS to The most radical ideas in Web-based software, however, are flourishing in an area
the links their friends save and annotate as that might be called “social knowledge management,” represented in part by sites like
they voyage around the Web.
Friendster, LinkedIn, and Ryze. Such social-networking sites generated a wave of ven-
ture investment and new users in 2004. At their best, they are like human search en-
gines: they exploit the “six degrees of separation” concept to help people make
Social-networking sites: connections with friends of friends of friends who may share similar interests or busi-
See “Internetworking,” April 2004. ness goals. Now a twist is on the way: a Boston startup called Proxpro is testing a cell-
phone–based service whereby a traveling businessperson can register a change in

location with an SMS message; if a potential contact who matches the traveler’s pre-
specified areas of interest (say, Oracle databases) is nearby, both parties are notified, and
they can use SMS to arrange a meeting.
The social-networking sites, in fact, were only a preview of what Web 2.0 technolo-
gies will make possible. Using a few basic building blocks such as XML, open-source
database software, simplified programming languages and environments like Ruby on
Rails, and protocols, like SOAP and REST, for exchanging data between Web applica-
tions, Web developers can build elaborate yet practical “social services” that collect and
redistribute the knowledge of large communities of people. (See the box on page 52 for
a tour of some of the most interesting new services.)
The more people who use the new services, the more powerful those services be- More powerful: This is one manifestation
of Metcalfe’s Law, the observation by
come. That’s because they’re all about coöperation: people are usually happy to share Ethernet inventor (and Technology Review
their knowledge, experiences, creations, schedules, and loca- board member) Bob Metcalfe that the
value of a network increases as the square
tions if it means that they can learn what the people who are of the number of nodes in the network.
important to them are thinking and doing. The most success-
ful services are always about shared interests; Jyri Engeström,
a PhD student in the Department of Organisation, Work, and
Technology at the Lancaster University Management School
in Britain, calls this the rule of “object-centered sociality.”
“The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of
Jyri Engeström
people,” Engeström wrote in a much-cited entry on his blog,
Zengestrom.com, in April. “They’re not; social networks consist of people who are
connected by a shared object,” such as the photographs they upload to Flickr, the URLs
they bookmark at Rojo or Delicious, or the articles they write for Wikipedia. Of course,
social software can also be put to less community-minded uses: the same Internet-
based services that keep businesses and families connected can be used to arrange
casual sexual encounters, distribute pornography, or run terrorist networks. But in a Terrorist networks:
way, the fact that the technology can support the full spectrum of human enterprises— See “Terror’s Server,” February 2005.
whether socially productive or not—only underscores its power.
Computing Is Real Life Money: It must be said that in many parts

of the globe, low incomes and political
It’s clear that new technologies are making computing continuous—meaning both “al- restrictions mean that citizens are very far
ways on” and “smoothly shading into our real lives.” But what’s actually new about the from achieving a state of continuous
computing. At the same time, however,
experience of continuous computing? How is life changing for those with the money to cellular networks cover an increasing
buy a few mobile devices and the time to sign up for Web-based social services? portion of the planet, efforts such as
Nicholas Negroponte’s Hundred-Dollar
At bottom, the shift is bringing computing far closer to our everyday experience. We’ve Laptop project may bring cheap comput-
just seen how social software can give us new ways to tap into the collective wisdom of the ing to many markets currently underserved
by major manufacturers, and countries
people in our social groups. But that’s only one consequence of continuous computing. without an entrenched infrastructure of
On a more personal level, for example, the portable devices that sustain the information landline telephones are often leapfrogging
to broadband wireless networks.
field are more respectful of our bodies and our perambulatory nature. No longer do we
have to slouch over desktop computers all day to stay connected to the Net: computing de-
vices have become so small, light, and ergonomic that we can take them almost every-
where. Visit any airport, beach, or city park and you’ll see people carrying laptops, cell
Almost everywhere: There is, however,
phones, and dedicated devices such as cameras and music players as naturally as if they one limitation still tethering us to the grid:
were part of their clothing. For people who must take their cell phones absolutely every- battery power. Even today’s best nickel-
metal-hydride, lithium-ion, and lithium-ion-
where, there are even “ruggedized” devices like Motorola’s new i355 handset, which polymer batteries will keep a laptop
meets U.S. military specifications for resistance to dust and blowing rain. running for only eight to 10 hours, and a
cell phone for about five hours (assuming
Mobility, in turn, has created a demand for software that’s sensitive to our ever continuous talk). Compact fuel cells could
changing locations. Already, many cell phones sold in the United States contain sys- quintuple these times, but they aren’t
tems such as GPS receivers that report users’ whereabouts during 911 calls. So far, few expected to be widely available until 2010.
C O U R T E SY O F J Y R I E N G E ST R Ö M
carriers have created ways for third-party software developers to put this location in-
formation to other uses, but in time, navigation tools and automatic-access location-
specific shopping or dining information will become standard fare for cellular
subscribers. In this area, Japanese and South Korean companies are, as usual, showing
the way. Tokyo-based cellular provider KDDI, for example, sells phones that use GPS
and onscreen maps to guide urban pedestrians to their destinations.

Your Life, Online
Eurekster (www.eurekster.com):
A social-search engine. Everyone who
uses the Eurekster search box at a
Surveying social software on the Web particular site becomes a member of a

local “search party”; feedback from party
members about the relevance of each
Backpack (www.backpackit.com): Dodgeball (www.dodgeball.com): search result is used to give the best
An information organizer accessible from A friend-finder service mediated by text results higher rankings in future searches.
Web browsers and smart phones that lets messages. Members in 22 U.S. cities use
users make lists, create reminders, store SMS to alert the Dodgeball network to EVDB (www.evdb.org): The Events
files and photos, and share any or all of their locations; the network broadcasts a and Venues Database. A free, searchable
this content with selected associates or member’s location to the phones of nearby repository for notices of events taking
family members. Created by 37signals, a friends, friends of friends, and “crushes.” place around the world. Anyone can
Chicago-based software consultancy. Google acquired Dodgeball in May. register an event.
The new technologies also allow people to create more-detailed, true-to-life online
Little sense: Blog reader Erik Karl Sorgatz identities. A decade ago, it was common for consumers opening online accounts to dis-
comments: “I disagree to the extent that
there is an old maxim about the system: ‘If guise themselves behind fanciful usernames like “Sk8rdude.” But today it makes little
you build it...they will hack it!’ Disguise, sense for a blogger or a member of a photo-sharing or social-networking community to
deception, and outright identity theft are also
amplified by the very same tools that can stay anonymous; after all, taking personal credit for the viewpoints we express or the
bring us together in our creative phases. In creations we share is often a way of gaining clout and attracting new acquaintances.
some ways, this dependence upon a
technology-based infrastructure makes us The best continuous-computing applications also mesh with our lives by understand-
both stronger and weaker. It might be better ing our preferences. Think of Amazon.com’s recommendation engine, which suggests
to blend this all with a little self-reliance, products based on the purchase histories of other customers with similar tastes. Newer
some non-computer-based learning, a little
apprenticeship involving real mechanical Web tools apply the same idea to other types of content; for example, Bloglines, owned
skills—they don’t even teach the kids shop by search company Ask Jeeves, analyzes a user’s RSS subscriptions to come up with a
classes anymore.”
daily list of new feeds that might be of interest. The creators of Backpack, meanwhile,
built in many ways for users to adjust the site’s behavior to their needs. For example, us-
ers can publish files and to-do lists from their cell phones if they aren’t at a computer,
Patterns: Blog reader Ian Wells asks, make their pages public or restrict them to specified associates, and program the system
“How do we teach ourselves and our
children to develop a rhythm of communica- to send SMS reminders to their phones at general times like “next Tuesday” or at specific
tion that is helpful to our relationships and moments like “30 minutes from now.”
our human pace of life? What patterns of
communication will drive us crazy? What Which leads to a final feature of continuous-computing technologies: they adapt to
helps our families? What helps our the chronology of our lives. Shared calendars like EVDB and Upcoming make it easy to
relationships? Why do so many people
spend so much time watching TV instead of synchronize our activities with those of our friends and colleagues. Soon, our mobile
doing something active with real people? devices may even track our activities, extract patterns, and predict what information or
We had part of the same issue with cheap
phone calls, with continuous TV, with services we need at specific times of day. That’s an area being explored by Nathan Eagle,
broadband Internet. Now we go up a level a postdoctoral student at the MIT Media Lab. “There are patterns in when you go to
of choice. Because we can communicate
continuously, should we? What do Starbucks, when you go out to the bar, and when you call your mom, to the point that you
conscientious parents teach their children can start predicting what the person is going to do next,” Eagle says. A phone sensitive to
about healthy continuous computing? Are your schedule and your location might realize, for example, that the office is always your
there healthy limits?”
next stop after the coffee shop and would start gathering your e-mail and voice-mail
messages from the Internet as you take your first sip of latte.
Of course, you don’t need futuristic gadgets like this to create a personal informa-
Futuristic gadgets: Blog reader Jim tion field. Just look at Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, a company that sells Web-
Haye comments: “Very interesting, but I’m
surprised at the lack of coverage of the based collaboration software based on wikis. The 34-year-old serial entrepreneur lives
devices we interact with each day that in Palo Alto with his wife and two children. Until Socialtext obtained venture-capital
have the most computing power of all—
automobiles. The typical car today has funding this spring, Mayfield’s office was entirely virtual. But even though the com-
numerous microprocessors operating over pany now has a real headquarters, Mayfield still carries a small armory of digital
several networks and runs incredibly
complex software in a highly risky devices around with him, including a Treo 600 smart phone, a 17-inch Macintosh
environment. Sure, you don’t carry them in PowerBook G4 laptop (“It sounds like it wouldn’t be portable, but it is,” he says), an
your pocket, and they’re transparent to
most users, but automotive information Olympus 5060 digital camera, an Apple iPod with an iTalk attachment for recording
systems are a big computing application.” voice memos, a Jabra wireless headset, a Wi-Fi network detector, an Apple Airport
Extreme Wi-Fi base station, a USB memory key, and, of course, the obligatory tangle of
power cords and chargers.

43 Things (www.43things.com): Upcoming (www.upcoming.org): bookmarking service. When a member
A collaborative goal-setting network. Another collaborative calendar. Members finds an item of interest, she can store it
Members list up to 43 life goals, then can enter the events they plan to attend, and share it within her circle of friends
consult others with the same goals for comment on events entered by others, and colleagues.
encouragement and commentary. One and syndicate event listings to their blogs.
common goal: “Stop procrastinating.” Wikicities (www.wikicities.com): A
Phling (www.phling.com): A peer-to- free tool for creating community wikis on
Ourmedia (www.ourmedia.org): A free peer system that lets owners of Nokia any subject. One Wikicity, for example,
repository for digital media such as video, smart phones send multimedia “post- contains information on lucid dreaming,
music, photos, text, and audio clips. cards” to their buddies, their blogs, and while another focuses on economic
Ourmedia’s backers, including the Internet their home computers. development in St. Petersburg, FL.
Archive, have promised to store users’ Operated by Wikia, a startup founded in
files forever and provide unlimited Rojo (www.rojo.com): A hybrid news 2004 by Jimmy Wales, cocreator of
bandwidth for downloads. aggregator, social network, and social- Wikipedia.
Together, these devices ensure that Mayfield is never out of touch with his col-
leagues or his family. For one-to-one communications, Mayfield says, he uses the Treo, Always-on: Blog reader Daniel Barkowitz
writes, “This ‘hands-on’ participatory back
Skype’s free VoIP service, and the e-mail system built into Socialtext’s own software. channel even now pertains to the world of
To conduct company meetings and client calls, he uses the conference-calling services college admissions. At MIT, we are
conducting our own social experiment with
at FreeConference.com. When he’s at a convention, a hotel, or a rented meeting room, blogging about the college admissions and
he connects the Airport to the local network, which financial-aid process with our incoming MIT
freshman class. The experiment has been a
creates his own Wi-Fi zone and gives him access to the tremendous success, providing students a
Web, Skype, instant-messenger software, and his com- much more interactive way to get their
questions answered and their issues
pany’s always-on IRC channel. He also advertises his addressed. As the director of financial aid at
whereabouts by registering his temporary Wi-Fi zone MIT, I walk around with my AIM channel
always open on my cell phone and
with a service called Plazes and by describing on EVDB constantly am monitoring the blog for
the events he’s attending. He uses Movable Type and feedback. Not only does the technology exist
Ross Mayfield to allow this, but the next generation of
TypePad to maintain multiple blogs, including one for customers is expecting it.”
his employees, one for the public, and several restricted to his customers. He book-
marks interesting Web pages on Delicious and sends them out on his personal link
feed, titled “Linkorama.” He reads the news and follows his favorite blogs using the
NetNewsWire and NewsGator RSS aggregators, which also supply him with regular
podcasts. Almost daily, he uploads photos from the Treo and the camera to Flickr, Plazes: A Web service based in Cologne,
where anyone can view his photo stream. He even has a dedicated wiki for his family. Germany, that allows users to set up new
“plazes”—representations of local
Though Mayfield is a self-confessed early adopter, he isn’t using all these social- networks complete with pictures, maps,
computing technologies just for the sake of being wired. They’re “rewarding in all kinds comments, and lists of the people online
—wherever they go.
of ways,” he says. He uses Skype to save money on long-distance calls; he announces his
location to increase the chances of meeting useful business contacts; he posts photos on
Flickr because he wants his family and his friends to know what he’s been up to; and he
blogs because it’s an efficient way to keep his employees up to date, care for his custom- Being wired: Blog reader Pete Sulick
ers, and get his message out to the larger world. comments: “Are we taking the first steps
toward digitizing our lives, or is this just an
And this, in the end, is what’s truly new about continuous computing. As advanced as inevitably more efficient way to share
our PCs and our other information gadgets have grown, we never really learned to love information, like e-mail, TV, the telephone,
radio, the pony express?”
them. We’ve used them all these years only because they have made us more produc-
tive. But now that’s changing. When computing devices are always with us, helping us
to be the social beings we are, time spent “on the computer” no longer feels like time
taken away from real life. And it isn’t: cell phones, laptops, and the Web are rapidly be-
coming the best tools we have for staying connected to the people and ideas and activi-
ties that are important to us. The underlying hardware and software will never become
C O U R T E SY O F R O S S M AY F I E L D
invisible, but they will become less obtrusive, allowing us to focus our attention on the
actual information being conveyed. Eventually, living in a world of continuous comput-
ing will be like wearing eyeglasses: the rims are always visible, but the wearer forgets
she has them on—even though they’re the only things making the world clear. Q
Wade Roush is a Technology Review senior editor based in San Francisco.

Your
Genomic
Diet Your genetic
profile could be the
key to knowing
what to eat—
and staying healthy.
IMAGINE A DIET PLAN THAT SAW THROUGH TO THE CORE OF
your being and beyond, that took into account not just the foibles
and little secrets no one else knows about (it’s awfully easy to dis-
pose of incriminating Wendy’s bags and 3 Musketeers wrappers)
but even the secrets that you don’t know—secrets that can help
keep you alive longer and in better health.
This is the promise—and the threat—of the latest scheme for
dramatic health improvement to fall out from the big bang of the
Human Genome Project. Nutritional genomics—or nutritional
genetics, or nutrigenomics—examines your diet and your genes
to determine how they interact. Proponents argue that nutrients
in food alter gene expression or structure, acting differently on
different people according to their genetic makeup. Once these
interactions are understood, the story goes, people can make up
for inherited weaknesses or genetic flaws by eating differently
and, when necessary, taking dietary supplements. Understand-
ing the links between genes, specific nutrients, and a range of
diseases—from diabetes and heart disease to less obvious dis-
By Corby Kummer eases like some cancers and neurodegenerative syndromes—will
Photograph by Eric Tucker result in a diet plan tailored to your very own gene profile.

CR E DIT
S O U R C E: C E NTE R O F E XC E LLE N C E FO R N UTR ITI O NAL G E N O M I C S

If genes are destiny, science has been doing its best to alter that grant applicant, he tried to imagine the next big use for the infor-
destiny, and of course venture capitalists, burned and jaded by mation it yielded. Its first large and obvious commercial and sci-
high tech, are looking for ways to turn the science into profit. The entific application was in pharmacogenomics—matching drugs
new field of nutritional genomics is taking off in both the United to populations with certain genetic characteristics. Many re-
States and Europe, with geneticists, nutritionists, and informat- searchers, Rodriguez among them, realized that they could apply
ics specialists collaborating to analyze data from long-term health a similar approach to nutrition, matching the effects of nutrients
studies using powerful new genomic techniques. The deliberate to genetic variants. Many drugs, Rodriguez says, are metabolites
pace of careful scientific research isn’t fast enough, though, for engineered to work on specific sites in the body to achieve spe-
baby boomers willing to spend whatever it takes to stave off if not cific goals. So is food, although food incorporates dozens or
vanquish the depredations of age. So companies are springing hundreds of metabolites, and they are usually very imprecisely
up, vying to take a swab from your cheek, test your DNA for a few engineered by nature. The action of specific nutrients on the body
genetic variants, and tell you that if you don’t follow their guide- could be correlated with individual genetic profiles to similar
lines you’re headed for trouble. Given the state of current re- useful effect—maybe even to similar profitable effect.
search, nutritional genomics hasn’t progressed very far beyond “You bring two things to the table,” says Rodriguez, an affable
standard, sensible dietary advice. But if you’re paying a lot for the man of medium height and luxuriant gray hair. “Your appetite
advice, it probably means you’ll take it seriously. and your genotype.” He believes that the public, however buf-
I recently filled out a diet survey devised by one of the most feted by changing health messages, is ready to alter its diet ac-
ambitious of the new companies and got my score from the direc- cording to gene type. There has been a “paradigm shift,” he
tor of diet and nutrition. The biggest surprise was that what I eat claims, in the public understanding of food, from the conception
is not more alarming. Perhaps because I write about food and am of it as a means of survival in a hostile environment, to the 20th-
a restaurant critic, I eat a very peculiar and imbalanced diet (or century demand for tasty and wholesome food, to the recent fear
perhaps I am simply peculiar and imbalanced, which is common of food-borne microbes and a search for food free of them. Now
in the food-writer game). people can intuitively grasp that food affects the way genes be-
I skipped the company’s genetic workup, which I didn’t have have, for good and for ill. “When you consume a food, your genes
time to take. Or so I said. The reality is that the number of diet- are like a Christmas tree, red and green lights that flip on and off
gene interactions that are sufficiently well understood to lead to and flicker back and forth,” says Rodriguez. “My Christmas lights
specific and helpful advice is very small, and the number of rele- differ from yours and flicker at a different rate. Over time, de-
vant genetic variants for which it is practical or feasible to screen pending on your types of genes and how frequently they’re turned
is even smaller; whereas a condition like obesity can involve hun- on and off, you’ll either be healthy or in a disease state.”
dreds of genes interacting in complex ways. In addition to these In 2001, Rodriguez asked Wasyl Malyj, a colleague at Davis
limitations, there are the uncertainty and risk of obtaining any with a background in molecular biology and informatics, if he
genetic information about yourself. Companies, of course, prom- would be interested in working on nutrition. Malyj began look-
ise complete confidentiality, but you never know. And the results ing for tools but knew there was no such thing as a molecular
of genetic screening are almost invariably ambiguous, with few video camera that can provide continuously refreshed data on
straight paths from individual variant to effective intervention. I how an entire genome responds to diet and environment. Malyj
found it telling that the academic researchers I asked hadn’t had and his colleagues would have to content themselves with the ex-
themselves screened (or bothered to try the experiment I had in pensive and partial snapshots provided by existing technologies.
mind, of submitting the same swab with two or three completely (One of these is the GeneChip from Santa Clara, CA–based Af-
different diet surveys). fymetrix, which can register the presence of particular biomole-
My discussions with several researchers and one dietician did cules.) And Malyj recognized that algorithms developed at
make me think that the field of nutritional genomics has real Stanford University in the 1990s could yield information about
promise. And I might even start eating more fatty fish—though I diet-gene interactions by helping to identify underlying patterns
fear that like many people told to eat fatty fish, I’m likelier to line in hundreds of data sets involving thousands of different genes.
the pockets of the dubious dietary-supplement industry. That in- “Most investigators,” Rodriguez says, “are under the false im-
dustry, like all the big food processors, is looking hungrily at ev- pression that one lab can do it all, or collaborate with a few others
ery development in nutritional genomics. and computational scientists and crack the code. We wanted to
A leading research center in the new field is the Center of Ex- network metabolic databases, genetic databases, and medical
cellence for Nutritional Genomics at the University of California, records.” Malyj, a bearish man with great enthusiasm for his
Davis. It owes its prominence to a five-year, multimillion-dollar subject, adds, “We realized early that this would have to be mul-
grant from the National Institutes of Health, and to the efforts tidisciplinary, and that not many people were doing it.”
and vision of its director, Raymond L. Rodriguez, a cellular and
molecular biologist. Rodriguez had been working to reëngineer
common food plants like rice, enriching them with important Genetic Cookbook
nutrients, and became increasingly curious about how human The groundwork for nutritional genomics was laid by re-
genetic variants enable or hinder metabolism of nutrients. searchers like Jose Ordovas, now the director of the Nutrition
Like all geneticists, Rodriguez was excited by every step of the and Genomics Laboratory at the Jean Mayer U.S. Department of
decade-long Human Genome Project, and like every shrewd Agriculture Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts

University. Ordovas has spent decades studying the correlation are relatively well defined and easily studied, and of course for
between the metabolism of dietary fats and the risk of cardio- men and women, whose needs for and reactions to nutrients can
vascular disease. Perhaps the best-studied diet-gene interaction differ greatly. Despite the number of genetic-screening compa-
involves low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol and high- nies contending to charge hundreds of dollars to devise individual
density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol. One of the most interest- “DNA diets,” the narrowest focus Rodriguez foresees in his life-
ing findings of recent years concerns HDL and LDL cholesterol time, he says, is at the level of “a middle-aged man of Hispanic
and a gene variant, or allele, that regulates their metabolism. descent” like himself. And that, he says, is “close enough.”
Some people who eat a diet high in saturated fat will never see an
increase in their “bad” LDL cholesterol, whereas others will see
a spike and won’t even benefit from following the universal ad- Soy Solutions
vice to eat a low-fat diet. It turns out that the differing effects of a It is these subpopulations that NIH expects Davis to study. The
high-fat diet depend in part on an allele of a gene involved in the Davis center’s grant comes from NIH’s National Center for Mi-
metabolism of “good” HDL cholesterol called the hepatic-lipase nority Health and Health Disparities. Already researchers have
gene. Ordovas explains that the remedy for these frustrated diet- found that African-American and Mexican women exhibit dif-
ers is to continue eating a normal amount of fat, but to make a ferences in folate metabolism, which can affect cancer risk and
very high percentage of it polyunsaturated. has been implicated in neural-tube defects in newborns. Green
This kind of targeted advice, which can be dispensed to any- leafy vegetables are rich in folates. But if a diet recommendation
one at the return of a genetic screening, is the great promise of is to be realistic or helpful, it must take into account what people
nutritional genomics, and cholesterol is the teasing example that can afford and whether they can find it. And that’s to say nothing
drives businesses and researchers forward. But it is only one of whether they like eating, say, broccoli (the cure-all, along with
needle in a very high haystack. Ordovas was able to identify the its cruciferous cousins cauliflower and cabbage) and soy, which
curious effect of the hepatic-lipase allele because he had access to many non-Asians view with dread.
data from the Framingham Offspring Study, part of the huge, Rodriguez is excited about preliminary results involving soy
very well funded, decades-long Framingham Heart Study con- and prostate cancer, to which African-American men are dispro-
ducted by NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. portionately susceptible. In 1997, a researcher at the University
Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at of California, Berkeley, Alfredo Galvez, studied the benefits of
the Harvard School of Public Health, conducted a review of the lunasin, a bioactive isoflavone in soy apparently associated with
Davis center in his capacity as chairman of its external advisory reduced levels of heart disease and several cancers, including
committee. He told the Davis researchers that new prostate. Lunasin seems to in-
observational studies would be prohibitively expen- crease the expression of genes
sive to mount, and that the center should devise Optimists say that that monitor DNA damage and
questionnaires to be incorporated into established in ten years the suppress tumor cell proliferation.
long-term health trials and seek to obtain serum or number of genes These results—like so many
blood samples from subjects to screen for genotype. that the public and the food in-
Already the center has begun several collaborations,
that can be reliably dustry seize on—are based on cell
one with a long-term asthma trial under way at the and cheaply tested cultures, not human studies. So
University of California, San Francisco, where the for will be closer to Kevin Dawson, senior informat-
researchers will look for connections between diet, 1,000 than 20, and ics scientist at the Davis center,
genotype, and the disease, and others with studies initiated a collaboration with the
of prostate cancer and restricted-calorie diets. that patients will Prostate Cancer Education Coun-
The study of diet-gene interactions in heart dis- arrive at health cil in Colorado, where rates of
ease progressed so quickly, not only because that’s providers’ offices prostate cancer are high and
where the money was, but because the biomarkers where data collection is both
for heart disease, like HDL and LDL cholesterol,
carrying gene chips. broad and detailed. The results
are well understood and easy to measure. But the seem so promising that they
Davis researchers are hoping that the accumulation of genetic should encourage everyone to eat soy protein once a day (unap-
information about many populations, combined with the tech- petizing as that might sound). But Dawson cautions that the pic-
niques of systems biology and the algorithms Malyj and his ture of prostate cancer he is trying to draw involves many more
colleagues are using, will be able to disclose more-obscure diet- nutrients, and that the effects of soy in different populations—
gene interactions. especially in populations that have not traditionally included soy
They have their work cut out for them. Cancer, despite a huge in their diets—must be studied over the long term.
scientific literature and investment in research, illustrates the dif- For now, even Rodriguez is disposed to generalize his diet rec-
ficult proposition for nutritional genomics. Markers vary for each ommendations. For example, he recently told a man who has
kind of cancer, and environmental stimuli might play important sought alternative treatments for his late-stage prostate cancer to
roles in the disease’s progress. For cancer, and for cardiovascular eat tomatoes and sauces with tomato paste for their lycopene,
and other diseases, the field’s first results are likely to be general- which is strongly associated with lowered incidence of prostate
ized recommendations for large ethnic groups whose genotypes cancer, and to try to eat soy, too, in soy milk or edamame.

Anxious yuppies want more sooner, of course, not to mention correlating the results with the swab report, was far too sensible
eternal, aging-free life. Companies offering “DNA diets” prom- and nice to be shocked. She calmly assessed my diet, which is
ise customized, expensive diets that fit right in with the current usually low in meats except when I taste through an entire menu,
idea of personal service as status symbol. It hardly matters, per- as I do a few times a month as a restaurant critic, and exceedingly
haps, that the number of genes such companies are able to test for high in sugar, owing to an insatiable sweet tooth.
is minuscule, and that the advice they can give will almost cer- Sciona tests only 19 genes whose variation can result in spe-
tainly not be a matter of life and death. Their selection of genes is cific dietary recommendations, Joffe assured me, so its report is
based on published papers, their nutritional guidance usually the not a general assessment of a customer’s health. Its main areas of
latest from the American Heart Association. What matters is that concern are heart health, bone health, inflammation, detoxifica-
the idea is catching on, in a very small and very health-conscious tion, and oxidative stress. She took me through each area, ex-
segment of the population—and that the commonsense advice plaining the advice she would give me based on my answers and
the companies are likely to give, with the smallest soupçon of how it might change if I had a specific genetic variant. Unsurpris-
genetic-based rationale, is unlikely to do any harm. ingly, the advice accorded strongly with common sense. And as
Rodriguez does see home testing in the future: “The trend is someone who holds buying from farmer’s markets to be a God-
faster better cheaper, for private, in-home, disposable tests. Pee given mandate, I was heartened to hear her say in every area that
on a stick and see if I’m at risk for many diseases.” And optimists the first recommendation would be to increase (or decrease)
say that in ten years the number of genes that can be reliably and consumption of a certain real food and only in the event of certain
cheaply tested for will be closer to 1,000 than 20, and that pa- genetic variants to take supplements.
tients will arrive at health providers’ offices carrying their own Such advice, of course, is far from a personalized diet based
gene chips, which can be fed into computers. on nutritional genomics. In the same way that personalized
If the American Dietetic Association has its way, those health medicine has been slow to emerge from pharmacogenomics, it’s
providers will be dieticians. Last April, the journal of the 65,000- likely to be a while before our genetic profiles will tell us exactly
member group published a review of nutritional genomics that what to eat. For starters, nutritional geneticists will need far
concluded that the “limited number of certified genetic counsel- cheaper and faster genetic-screening tools.
ors” left the field clear for “dietetics professionals...to play a pri- Still, the makers of omega-3 and folic-acid supplements, and
mary role.” Dieticians as counselors is fine by Rodriguez, who of calcium supplements for women, will be very pleased if mes-
says that doctors want the kind of yes/no, disease/not disease sages like Sciona’s filter down to the public. My own biggest
binary conclusions that nutritional genomics can’t yet provide, shock: that because I don’t drink soda, my extreme consump-
and that dieticians know something about preparing food, tion of sugar doesn’t throw my entire diet out of whack. I’m a bit
whereas nutritionists concentrate on research. That dieticians light on whole grains and the dread omega-3s—which, how-
know much about preparing food is a debatable point, at least ever, I was pleased to learn can be obtained not only through
for food writers, but they often mackerel and sardines but
do take a concerned interest in Milk Mutation also through the delightful-
your welfare. sounding flaxseed hot cereal.
One example of a genome-diet interaction that varies
I’m ready to make Pascal’s wa-
across populations involves adults’ ability to digest fresh
ger, as Ray Rodriguez calls the
milk. A single mutation in the genomes of northern
Diet Advice proposition of following die-
Europeans enabled them to tolerate lactose.
I filled out a diet survey from tary advice. (Blaise Pascal, the
Sciona, a company whose web- 17th-century French scientist
Intolerant Tolerant
site promises “professional ge- and philosopher, argued that
Southeast Asians 98%
netic screening” that allows if erroneously disbelieving in
Asian Americans 90%
people to base “their most im- God consigns you to hell, but
portant health decisions” “not Alaskan Eskimos 80% erroneously believing in God
on fashion but on their own African-American adults 79% has no consequences, it’s only
personal ‘inside’ story.” For Mexicans from rural communities 74% rational to believe in God.) If
several hundred dollars, a cus- North American Jews 69% flaxseed on the stove in the
tomer receives a report based Greek Cypriots
morning and sardines from
66%
on a detailed nutritional ques- the can at lunch are what will
Cretans 56%
tionnaire and the results of a help me live healthier and lon-
Mexican-American males 55%
cheek swab that tests for 19 ger, I’ll learn to like them. But
genes. I knew that I didn’t have Indian adults 50% I won’t give up sweets. Q
the time for a genetic screen- African-American children 45%
ing, but I did look forward to Indian children 20% Corby Kummer is a senior edi-
shocking a dietician. Caucasians of north-European 5% tor at the Atlantic and the au-
Yael Joffe, however, the die- and Scandinavian descent thor of such books as The Joy
0 25% 50% 75% 100%
tician in charge of designing of Coffee and The Pleasures of
S O U R C E: U C DAVI S C E NTE R O F E XC E LLE N C E FO R N UTR ITI O NAL G E N O M I C S
Sciona’s questionnaires and Slow Food.

Healthy, Wealthy,
CR E DIT

BY THE END of this year, King Jigme Singye
Wangchuck, whose family has ruled over
Bhutan for almost a hundred years, will of-
and Wise?
ficially hand over power to the people. No-
body wants to see him go, but the king
himself has decided that he must take a less
active role in government. By his own ac-
count, he does not want to see the throne
stand in the way of the remarkable mod-
The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan wants to ernization under way in Bhutan.
Under the current king’s rule, this tiny
show that modernization can be enlightened. Himalayan kingdom (whose population is
By Stephen Herrera Photography by Friendly Planet still unknown, but which is estimated to
CR E DIT

range from 700,000 to about two million people) has become a May, Bhutan’s first nationwide census set about trying to find out
rare innovator among developing nations. Rejecting the models of whether people are happier than they were 10 years ago. Conclu-
urbanization and unregulated market development usually pro- sions will be published next year.
moted by the U.S. government, the king has crafted the frame- It’s easy to find GNH quaint. Nevertheless, when I was in
work for a political economy based on a theoretically harmonious Bhutan earlier this year, everyone I spoke to—from intellectuals to
mix of representative government, south-Asian-style capitalism, entrepreneurs to young students in the countryside—said GNH
traditional religious values, environmentalism, hydropower, tour- was a good way of keeping government honest.
ism, mandated preventative medicine, and universal health care. In his modest office in Thimphu, over a cup of ginger tea with
Now comes the real test: can Bhutan and the king’s enlight- milk, Prime Minister Lyonpo Yeshey Zimba told me, “Bhutan’s
ened framework withstand the messy business of democracy and most valuable assets are its culture, religion, language, environ-
development, and the problems that tend to follow? “With China, ment, and people. In a sense, we’re like any small company with
India, and Nepal sitting on its borders,” says Stephen Cohen, a se- a niche. We must modernize to survive. But we must do it in a
nior fellow at the Washington, DC, policy think tank the Brook- way that ensures that we are not destroying, in the process, what
ings Institution who specializes in south-Asia security matters, makes us unique. GNH was the king’s effort to make sure that
“and donor nations in the West constantly pushing new models we don’t lose ourselves in modernization.”
upon the developing nations they fund, anything can happen.”
But if Bhutan can prove that democracy, social equality,
sustainable development, environmental protection, and limited Deep Impact?
technology are compatible with Buddhism and 21st-century What about more-conventional measurements? There’s plenty
modernization, it will be an interesting example for other poor to measure in Bhutan: some of it good, some of it less so.
nations who want modern technology and economies—but who First, the bad. By some estimates, as much as 90 percent of the
want them on their own terms. population lives at subsistence level. The country has a $598 mil-
Or as the king explained at a conference in his country last lion debt. Nearly two-thirds of Bhutan is still without electricity,
year, “There must be some convergence among nations on the while a quarter are without clean drinking water.
idea of what the end objective of development and progress This last fact may be one reason why Bhutan is not a very
should be.” healthy place to live. The average life expectancy is 63 years—
much lower than is common in richer countries. There are only a
handful of ambulances. Those lucky enough to make it to a hos-
The Happy Factor pital in one of the larger towns, like Thimphu or Phuentsholing,
If Bhutan’s experiment succeeds or fails, many will credit or will find large, modern-looking facilities. Trouble is, most of the
blame the country’s very Buddhist (or very eccentric, depending staff aren’t trained in basics like surgery or outpatient care. Diag-
on whom you ask) notion of “gross national happiness.” In the nostics and acute and chronic care are virtually nonexistent.
late 1980s, Bhutan’s University of Oxford–educated king fa- But then, Bhutan only began modernizing in the 1950s. Previ-
mously asserted that gross national happiness (GNH) was more ously, there were no paved roads, most homes were built from
important than gross national product (GNP). Among the core mud and grass, literacy was low, and the death rate was high.
principles of GNH, he said, are good governance and sustainable That Bhutan has progressed so far is thus remarkable. The cur-
economic development, cultural and religious preservation, rent king, who came to the throne in 1974, invested the country’s
eradication of poverty, and environmental protection. More re- meager finances in an airport, an east-west road, bridges, na-
cently, health care and education have been added to the concept. tional education, health care, and select energy-producing tech-
Even those who like the idea of GNH would admit that it is nologies like hydropower, which provides almost all the country’s
half-baked. The Centre for Bhutan Studies, the agency in the capi- electricity. And it has worked, after a fashion.
tal city of Thimphu According to the Asian Development Bank, Bhutan’s GNP in
China
responsible for the 1985 barely topped $45 million. By 2002, it was more than $590
promotion of GNH million. From 1999 to 2003, Bhutan’s average GDP grew by 6.72
Mount nationwide, con- percent every year. Save for China, none of Bhutan’s regional
Everest
cedes that GNH neighbors—including India—saw more GDP growth during the
can’t be measured same period.
Nepal Bhutan
yet—but promises If Bhutan is still not a very healthy place to live, it’s certainly
h m a putra it will be someday. better than it was. The number of health facilities in the country
Bra
India The center is al- rose from 65 in 1985 to more than 200 today. Infant mortality
ready trying to cre- rates in 2000 were half of what they were in 1985, while average
Ganges Bangladesh
ate a baseline. In life expectancy rose from 48 years to 63 during the same period.

The country has seen a remarkable growth in general educa- George Martin suspects that Bhutan’s king and his GNH
tion. The literacy rate is almost 50 percent, whereas in the early framework will be studied for years to come. Recently retired
1990s it ranked the lowest among the least-developed countries. from a career at the National Institutes of Health, Martin traveled
More than 90 percent of Bhutanese children now reach at least the to Bhutan last year as part of a delegation to assess the country’s
fifth grade. The country’s first university opened its doors in 2003. progress in public health. “Health care is still a struggle because
Technology use has increased, too: according to World Bank of things like geography, finances, training, and sanitation,” he
figures, from 1999 to 2003 the number of fixed-line told me recently. “But they get
and mobile-phone subscribers jumped from 18 to 45 that the name of the game is
per 1,000 people; personal-computer ownership “The whole kingdom preventative medicine.”
nearly tripled from 5 to 14 per 1,000 people. In 1999,
the country introduced its first commercial Internet
has made a
service provider, DrukNet, and its first television sustained effort Shangri-la
broadcasts, through the Bhutan Broadcasting Ser- to hold on to what Can a poor nation like Bhutan
vice (BBS). For roughly $60 a year, a Bhutanese
home can have both. This is, of course, a lot of money
is precious in its achieve limited moderniza-
tion, adopting only the media,
in Bhutan. According to DrukNet, neither it nor the past while trying the particular technologies,
BBS has a large subscriber base, as yet, because two- to bring its people and the developmental poli-
thirds of the households in Bhutan don’t have elec- into the future.” cies that fit into its odd concept
tricity. But DrukNet claims there are already a of GNH? Will Bhutan keep its
combined 120,000 subscribers. forests off-limits to loggers?
Bhutan has gone from being off-limits to tourists to being the Will it continue to put a cap on the number of tourists who visit
most coveted destination for well-heeled adventurers—in part be- the country? Can it afford to invest more than a third of its bud-
cause travel visas are rationed, giving travelers the sense they are get in health and education?
seeing something very special. They are, especially if they are for- So long as Bhutan declines foreign investment that goes
tunate enough to stay at the five-star Como Uma Paro or the against its environmental policies or infringes upon its sover-
Amankora, or the soon-to-open Yangphel Hotel. eignty, it can do all of these things. Whether it should is some-
But even as it modernizes, Bhutan has also strengthened or thing the Bhutanese themselves must decide.
enacted laws designed to control pollution, mining, and logging. One can easily imagine an economic liberal arguing that once
Almost 70 percent of the country’s forests are protected. New they are no longer ruled by the king’s whims, the Bhutanese may
laws ban smoking, gambling, and prostitution; anticorruption prefer a more conventional kind of development to their pictur-
and construction codes have also been enacted. esque poverty. The Bhutanese might want more affluence and
economic choice for themselves and their families. The eco-
nomic liberal would insist that it is Westerners who are most be-
The Challenge Ahead witched by the idea of Bhutan as an untouched paradise.
In its efforts to promote its citizens’ happiness, the Bhutan gov- The country tends to evoke strong sentiments in visitors. It
ernment remains preoccupied with health care. Health care in bewitched me. And I am not alone. Long-time Time essayist and
Bhutan is free; but health-care costs are rising, says Gado Tsher- travel writer Pico Iyer has seen more of the world than most. He
ing, director of Bhutan’s health department. Tshering wants to calls Bhutan the last Shangri-la. In a picture book about Bhutan
invest in a magnetic-resonance imaging station that would let commissioned by the Amankora hotel, Iyer writes, “We aspire,
doctors diagnose disease earlier and with greater confidence. many of us, to step out of the accelerated rush of our wired planet,
“Capturing disease faster would save us a lot of money,” he and into somewhere pristine; and we find more and more, that
says. When a patient’s illness exceeds Bhutan’s medical capabili- it’s nearly impossible....In Bhutan...the King has outlined a no-
ties—which happens often, since most of the country’s health-care tion of gross national happiness to stand for a different kind of
facilities are focused on treating pain, broken limbs, and gastroin- wealth and shelter.”
testinal-tract illnesses—the government pays to have the patient Maybe the Bhutanese think that Shangri-la is worth preserv-
sent to Calcutta or Bangkok. This is expensive and unsustainable. ing. During my visit to Bhutan, I felt that most Bhutanese share
“Eventually, probably sooner than later, we will need a lot the king’s aspirations. Iyer saw what I did: “The whole kingdom
more money, because the nature of disease in Bhutan is chang- has made a sustained and conscious effort to hold on to what is
ing,” Tshering says. “We’re seeing more obesity, pain, depres- precious in its past while trying to bring its people into the com-
sion, and hypertension.” These are expensive diseases to treat, fort and safety of the future.” ■
especially when not caught until late stages. Left unchecked,
health-care expenses will impinge on development plans. Stephan Herrera is a contributing editor to Technology Review.

Demo
64 DEMO
Demo
Machine in Motion
They don’t make robots like they used to. Instead of
plodding through a limited repertory of programmed
moves, Toddler learns to walk with a loose, easy gait.
Built by Russ Tedrake of MIT’s Computer Science
and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the robot combines
ideas from biomechanics, control theory, and machine
learning to push the limits of today’s robotic technology.
By Gregory T. Huang Photographs by Chris Mueller
DEMO 65
Tedrake’s team, which
included then undergraduate
Teresa Zhang, designed ARM
Toddler in the lab of MIT Lithium-polymer
computational neuroscientist battery packs
H. Sebastian Seung. The provide power and
robot’s control system, says counterbalance
Tedrake, uses “the natural the opposing leg
dynamics of the body.” as it swings
forward.
HEAD
Wireless Ethernet
allows a remote
operator to start
and stop Toddler.
COMPUTER
An onboard
Pentium chip learns
to control Toddler’s
gait on the fly, using
sensor information
about the body’s
orientation to adjust
control signals to
the ankles.
HIPS
Passive hinge
joints allow
the legs to
swing freely
without power.
66 DEMO
ANKLE
Electric motors
power each step,
taking signals from the
onboard processor to
help stabilize the
robot’s gait.
FOOT
Wooden feet are
coated with latex
paint for traction.
Tapered soles allow
Toddler to rock from
side to side as it
moves forward,
allowing better
foot clearance.
DEMO 67
Tedrake hopes that
designing Toddler to
learn to walk will provide
insights into human
learning, rehabilitation,
and prosthetics.
His approach could
also help make robotic
companions and helpers
better able to function
in human environments.
68 DEMO
Demo
Toddler learns to walk in

minutes without any prior
instruction. Top: The robot’s
mechanical design lets it
walk down a ramp with its
computer turned off.
Bottom: With this “passive”
walking as the target
behavior, ankle motors keep
Toddler moving on level
ground, and the onboard
processor adjusts the gait
from step to step to keep it
stable. The next-generation
robot has knees and will
navigate tougher terrain.
DEMO 69
Reviews
Our reviews use any artifact—a book, a product, a government report,
a movie, a research paper—as the occasion for a contemplative essay
on some technological controversy.
76 Bill Joy on the Birth of the PC

80 The “Father of Ecstasy” on Psychedelic Drugs
Summer
StuffAs vacation rolls around,
TR empties its beach bag
of timely gadgets, gizmos,
and other entertainments.
Illustrations by Peter Stemmler
Podcasting
Made Painless
PERSONAL BROADCASTING// startup launched by Blogger cocreator Evan
It wasn’t so long ago that publishing a Web log Williams and his former neighbor, Noah Glass.
(blog) required some Web programming skills. Podcasting, for the uninitiated, is the hot
Then along came Blogger, software that made independent-media trend of 2005; amateur
blogging easy enough for the masses. Blogger broadcasters record their own news shows,
became so popular that Google bought it in commentary, or interviews on whatever subjects
2003. Substitute “podcast” for “blog” in the they choose and put the audio files on the Web.
preceding sentences, and you’ll understand the Anyone with an Apple iPod or other digital music
vision behind the new Web-based podcasting player can subscribe to the shows and download
tools developed by Odeo, a San Francisco and listen to them. Unfortunately, being a
podcaster has, until lately, also meant being an
expert in digital recording and mixing. converts a PC into a rudimentary recording studio.
In May, I visited Williams’s office around the I used it to produce my own podcast, which you
corner from San Francisco’s South Park to try out can find on my blog, wade.trblogs.com, at www.
Odeo’s service. Just as Blogger did for blogging, technologyreview.com, and at Odeo.com. Making
Odeo turns the process of making a podcast (a a podcast was as simple as clicking “Record,”
basic one, anyway) into something any semi- talking into the PC’s built-in microphone (you can
competent PC user can handle. It also takes all also use an external headset), then clicking “Stop.”
the pain out of finding and downloading Clicking “Publish” placed the podcast in my own
podcasts (Apple has promised that the next “channel,” to which others can subscribe. What
release of iTunes, its music organizer, will do this, was a tedious process is now quick and mildly fun.
too; but it won’t produce podcasts). And it will be Odeo will no doubt cement Williams’s
at least partly free. The audiences of millions that reputation as one of the founding fathers of the
podcasters have been craving may arrive soon. personal-publishing revolution. And it may not be
The neatest part of the program is Odeo long before Google comes knocking again in
Studio, which runs inside a Web browser and South Park. Wade Roush
70
Hacking the
PlayStation Portable
GAMING// loopholes to install a Hackers have widely Sony has developed Nintendo’s new Game
Hoping to topple variety of unauthorized distributed detailed security patches that Boy Micro and
Nintendo from its applications on their online instructions that are included in its new improved DS come
decade-long PSPs, from Web show how to crack the game software and out later this year, but
leadership in the browsers to TiVo PSP’s encryption by install themselves their sales may suffer,
handheld gaming viewers, making the punching in codes automatically when a since they don’t offer
market, Sony this device more versatile using the PSP’s user loads a game. But the multimedia options
spring released the than Nintendo’s buttons. The this is only encourag- and innate hackability
PlayStation game-oriented DS. instructions are easy ing hackers to find of the PSP, making
Portable (PSP). Out of the box, the to follow and complete new holes. them attractive only to
Ironically, it may give PSP is already more with how-to visuals. The PSP’s security gamers. After
Nintendo stiff com- than a game player. It Using the PSP’s weaknesses may have dominating living
petition, not because has MP3, movie wireless connection, contributed to its rooms for more than a
of its wide-ranging playback, and photo- users can then phenomenal success. decade, Sony is
built-in applications, viewing capabilities. download software for It sold 500,000 units poised to take over
but because of its But even these RSS feed reading, within the first two backpacks as well as
many security flaws. features aren’t enough PSPcasting, and many days of its March briefcases. The PSP is
Hackers have for a subculture of other applications. To release and twice that available for $249.
exploited these frenzied gadgeteers. close these loopholes, in its first six weeks. Aleks Krotoski
T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 71
Reviews
Playing with
the Force
FILM//
This spring, Technology Review staffers
gathered to watch a new Star Wars film, directed
not by George Lucas but by Shane Felux, a 33-
year-old graphic designer and Star Wars fan. The
$20,000, 40-minute saga Star Wars:
Revelations begins after the end of Star Wars
Means
Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and chronicles
the Empire’s attempt to eradicate the Jedi.
Thanks to Lucas, Felux made a very Star Wars–
for lots
like movie, with storm troopers, light-saber fights,
and even Darth Vader. Yet Felux never saw a dime two rules: don’t make any money from the project,
from the project. Lucas allowed him to make his and don’t harm the franchise (which can be a
film only if he promised to show it for free. Still, difficult rule to adhere to, since it’s not clear what
Lucas thinks will harm the franchise).
once.
Felux got something out of the experience: a
chance to hone his craft and get recognition for it. While Lucas has ultimate control over his
Felux is hardly alone. Lucas has opened up Star Wars intellectual property, he is giving
part of his Star Wars universe for fans who want up-and-coming directors the ability to test their
to make films. For the last four years, Lucas has chops in front of a large audience. (There were
endorsed a film competition hosted by Atom- more than one million downloads of Revelations
Films, an online storehouse of movies, trailers, in the first week of its release.) And if more film
and shorts. This year’s competition drew more properties are offered up for creative reuse, it’s
than 100 entries and has gotten so popular that likely that this network of filmmakers will grow
the Cannes Film Festival recently screened 12 until it is vibrant and sophisticated enough to
past finalists or winners. But Lucas is not produce not just more fan films, but originals like
condoning a free-for-all. All filmmakers, whether Clerks, which helped launch the career of the
part of the competition or not, must follow at least now well-known director Kevin Smith. Brad King
Thumbless Text Messaging

DICTA– messages instead of time, it only got one
CELL PHONE// keying them in. word wrong, replacing
Billed as the first Unfortunately, this little “meet” with “let.” Still,
speech-to-text mobile clamshell has a tough the slow pace of
phone in the United time translating even dictation and the high
States, the Samsung the simplest phrases number of errors made
P207, released earlier correctly. the feature cumber-
this year, allows users I spent three some. The phone was,
to dictate text minutes training the however, terrific at
software, developed recognizing phone
by Woburn, MA– numbers and names,
based startup making autodialing
VoiceSignal, to more convenient. Like
recognize my voice by speech-to-text
saying 122 words into software for PCs,
the phone. To com- which still hasn’t lived
pose a text message, I up to the promise it
had to speak slowly, showed in the 1990s,
with distinct pauses software for cell
between words. When phones will need a few
I tried to dictate the more generations
sentence “Meet me for before enough of the
lunch,” the phone kinks are worked out
interpreted it as to make it truly useful.
“Means for lots once.” The Samsung phone
I gave the phone a is available through
Meet me second chance, Cingular for $99.99
for lunch. repeating the voice with a two-year
recognition training in contract.
a quieter room. This Anita Chabria
72 REVIEWS T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

ONLINE TICKET SCALPING//
I always thought the Internet might curtail
conventional ticket-scalping—the for-profit
reselling that is restricted or prohibited in 27
states. Efficient online sales would widen
the retail bottlenecks that arguably worked
to the scalpers’ advantage. Then, honest
resellers would meet buyers online. This
may be happening, but if a recent experi-
ence with StubHub.com, a ticket resale site,
is any guide, the Internet is also making
Who Wants
scalping efficient and anonymous.
A friend of mine—we’ll call him “Jim”—
who lives in Boston used StubHub to clear
a $169.40 profit on a pair of extra tickets to a
Green Day concert. First, he went online to
Ticketmaster and bought eight $36 tickets
to the Grammy-winning band’s April 30
Tickets?
show in Amherst, MA, paying $68 in service
charges. Then he registered on StubHub for
free and priced one pair at $310. A few days
later, a fan from a Boston suburb bought
them for $304. (Jim had agreed to let
StubHub lower the price over time.) After the
buyer paid for the tickets, StubHub e-mailed
Jim a FedEx shipping label with the buyer’s
address and StubHub’s San Francisco
address as the return address. Using this
label, Jim sent the tickets anonymously to
the buyer. When the buyer told StubHub
he’d received his tickets, StubHub
pocketed 15 percent ($45.60) of the sales
price and released the rest to Jim via PayPal,
the online payment service. According to its
website, StubHub collects an additional 10
percent of the sales price and the shipping
fees from the buyer.
The buyer had technical difficulty with
the website, and the sale was completed
over the phone with a StubHub agent. But
no one asked Jim if he had the ticket broker’s
license required by the state of Massachu-
setts or noticed that his price far exceeded
the state-mandated cap of $2 above face
value, plus a reasonable broker’s service
charge. When told of Jim’s transaction,
StubHub’s CEO Jeff Fluhr said, “We have a
very clear and very strict user agreement
that clearly states that you need to obey
state and federal laws.” (Jim says that he did
not read the user agreement.) StubHub
uses a California return address for
administrative reasons and hides sellers’
identities to prevent loss of business to side
transactions, Fluhr said.
New research suggests that online ticket
reselling is common. Dan Elfenbein, a
University of California, Berkeley, economist,
has looked at online football ticket scalping
and found that 1.6 percent of all NFL tickets
are resold through Ticketsnow.com alone.
Not only has law enforcement been absent
online, he says, but prices have been higher
in states with antiscalping laws, while the
number of transactions has been lower.
Fluhr, though condemning the illicit use of
his site, conceded that the laws are “great
for our business.” What his customers don’t
realize, though, is that sometimes it’s better
to deal with the hawkers on the street. Jim
observed that on the night of the Green Day
show, street-corner sellers barely recouped
face value. David Talbot
REVIEWS 73
Reviews
UV SENSORS//
I’ve long relied on the
three-beer rule for
limiting my sun
exposure during the
Sunburn summer, but a skin

patch called
SunSignals, which
Alert changes color when

exposed to sunlight,
showed that I could fry
my epidermis faster
than I could drink a
single brew.
The thumb-sized,
yellow adhesive
patches are designed
to turn dark orange
when they have
absorbed a certain
amount of UVB light
(the type of ultraviolet
radiation that causes
sunburn), telling
wearers to get out of
the sun, put on more
clothing, or slather on
more sunscreen. (The
sensors are not meant
to replace sunscreen.)
With more than one
million new cases of
skin cancer diagnosed
each year in the United
States, the patches are
a sensible reminder of
our fragility.
Unfortunately, my
patch changed color
after only 17 minutes in
the Los Angeles sun,
barely enough time to
finish a drink. My
companions fared a
little better, lasting 23
and 27 minutes before
the sun-fear factor
kicked in. While the
kids in our group got a
fun science lesson
from the stickers,
SunSignals seem
more of a novelty than
a technological
breakthrough. It’s still
up to sunbathers to
decide whether they
trust the sensors and
want to keep
reapplying sunscreen
every 20 minutes.
SunSignals are
available in selected
drug stores and
supermarkets; a
package of 18 can
be bought online
for $4.99.
Anita Chabria
74 REVIEWS
The Shape of that everyone is able to interact with,
modify, and rerelease applications
Things to Come within the network. If governments

and corporations are made
BOOK // responsible for designing future
Bruce Sterling has enlightened networks, technological develop-
emerging-technology watchers for ment will slow drastically, and the
almost 30 years, first as a science few, rather than the many, will control
fiction author and later as a access to information.
journalist. His latest nonfiction book, Despite Sterling’s insistence,
Shaping Things, is a rambling, near the conclusion, that he isn’t
rambunctious exploration of the arguing for a utopia, the book reads
future of humanity and its relation- like a religious primer, one meant to
ship with technology. Sterling appeal to the emotional ideals of
describes two scenarios: one where hackers and help them redouble their
technology helps establish social open-source and free-software
justice and create a cleaner, safer, development efforts. Sterling’s
richer world, and another where we arguments are quite different from
lose control over how technology is the legal framework Lawrence
Lessig presents in Code and Other
used. Which scenario we end up
with depends on how we, as a
society, design future information
Laws of Cyberspace, Richard
Stallman’s advocacy of free soft-
ware, and Nicholas Negroponte’s
Shooting
networks and the devices con-
nected to them.
In much of the book, Sterling
describes how we are approaching
technology-for-all stance. While all of
these utopian visions tend to be
idealistic, Sterling’s is the most
Blanks
the new age of “Spimes,” which he practical. He doesn’t completely rule MALE CONTRACEPTION//
defines as free-flowing data that can out governmental and corporate For better or worse, modern science has left
be easily plucked and processed by control of information technology; he women responsible for all but two methods of
“Wranglers” (what we call end users just calls on citizens to exert greater birth control. Women, I’m sure, would love to
today) wherever and whenever they influence over its design, which, if offload some of that responsibility on men. The
are needed. The networks and done correctly, should free us from problem is that many men dislike condoms, for
machines that store and carry the the drudgery of maintaining networks obvious reasons, but consider vasectomy a
data will be so intelligent that and machines and give us time to little too permanent. So far, their gender hasn’t
interacting with them will be work toward the common good. The had any alternatives.
automatic. Maintaining this constant, book will be released in October and But soon it might, in the form of a male
free flow of information will require sells for $21.95. Brad King variation of the birth control pill. The first
medicinal male contraceptive will likely be a
subdermal, hormone-releasing implant, and it
could be available in five years. The hormone is
progestin, which is also found in the current
women’s pill. In men, it blocks chemical signals
from the pituitary gland that tell the testes to
secrete testosterone and produce sperm. Of
course, low testosterone can mean mood
swings, dwindling sex drive, and the ego-
sagging possibility of shrunken testicles. So
supplementary testosterone will be necessary.
The most advanced clinical trial—which
began early last year with 350 European men
and is run by the drug companies Schering
and Organon—is testing matchstick-sized
implants in the upper arm. Testosterone is
injected in the buttocks every 10 to 12 weeks.
In the trial, a doctor gives the shots. However,
a prescribed product will allow women to,
literally, stick it to a husband or boyfriend.
Earlier trials showed that progestin stops
sperm production in most men, but only after
two months of treatment. Sperm-making is
back to normal within three months of the treat-
ment’s end. In these trials, the treatment was
about 98 percent effective in preventing preg-
nancy, a rate comparable to the female pill’s.
It’s questionable to what degree men will
want a drug that interferes with the production
of their beloved testosterone. Even if men
agree to the drug in principle, they may not go
for the implants and needles. Those men who
prefer their own pill will have to wait at least 10
years before it becomes available. Stu Hutson
T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 REVIEWS 75

Reviews
The Dream of one that guided him and his work for the next two decades.
Markoff writes that Engelbart
a Lifetime “saw himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of

different symbols....He would create a workstation for organiz-
ing all of the information and communications needed for any
Doug Engelbart and given project....he saw streams of characters moving on the dis-
augmenting human intellect play. Although nothing of the sort existed, it seemed the engi-
neering should be easy to do and that the machine could be
harnessed with levers, knobs or switches. It was nothing less
BY B I L L J OY than Vannevar Bush’s Memex, translated into the world of elec-
tronic computing.”
Engelbart earned a PhD in electrical engineering from the
ou’ve likely heard stories about the birth of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1955, and was soon working
Y PC: of Xerox PARC as the Mecca of computing; of

its creation of the Alto, Ethernet, and the laser
printer; of the Homebrew Computer Club, the
MITS Altair, Bill Gates and the theft of his Micro-
soft Basic; of Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, the founding of
Apple, and the Jobs visit to PARC that inspired the Macintosh.
But what you may not know about is the really early history.
at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). There, he came across a
paper called “Shrinking the Giant Brains for the Space Age,”
which had been presented at a conference in June 1959. Its author
was Jack Staller of the aerospace firm American Bosch ARMA,
Great Time
who had written, prophetically,
“The problem is to com-
press a room full of digital com-
The stories of Doug Engelbart and John McCarthy, of the Aug- What the Dormouse Said...: putation equipment into the
mentation Research Center, and of the early days of the Stanford How the 60s Counterculture size of a suitcase, then a shoe
Shaped the Personal
University AI Lab (SAIL) are not well known. Yes, you may have Computer Industry box, and finally small enough
By John Markoff
heard that Engelbart invented the mouse, and that SAIL and Viking, 2005, $25.95
to hold in the palm of the
Stanford led to companies like Sun and Cisco. But there are bet- hand....Forming on the hori-
ter stories, great and old ones from the early days of computing, zon are solid state circuits or
about the events that led to personal computing as we know it. the growing of the whole circuit on a single small solid-state wa-
In his wonderful new book, What the Dormouse Said..., John fer and molecular film techniques where films millionths of an
Markoff tells these stories. Markoff was born in Oakland, CA, inch thick and equally narrow conductors are built up layer over
and has been covering Silicon Valley for the New York Times for layer to form whole sections or perhaps complete computers in
more than a decade. From a distinctly West Coast perspective, fractions of cubic inches.”
Dormouse chronicles the origins of the personal computer and its Then, as Markoff relates, in February 1960, five years before
place in the Bay Area culture of the 1960s. Having lived, intensely, Gordon Moore published an article in Electronics magazine
the later part of this story, I am fascinated by the great back stories whose assertions would become known as “Moore’s Law,” Doug
of people I came to know and, often, work with. Many of these Engelbart came to the same conclusion that Moore would: that a
stories were only vaguely familiar; many more, I’d never heard. relentless and inevitable increase in computing capacity would
result from the continuous shrinking of the transistor. And he
saw that with this increase in capacity, computers would soon be
Engelbart’s Dream powerful enough to augment the human intellect. This dream—
The central figure in Dormouse is Doug Engelbart, whose long- Engelbart’s dream—has led to computing as we know it.
time passion was to build a working version of Vannevar Bush’s Engelbart found funding from visionary program managers
“Memex” machine. In the 1940s, while working in Washing- in the federal government, people such as the U.S. Defense Ad-
ton, DC, as director of the Pentagon’s Office of Scientific Re- vanced Research Project Agency’s J. C. R. Licklider, who envi-
search and Development, Vannevar Bush had imagined a sioned computers as a communications tool, and NASA’s Bob
“machine that could track and retrieve vast volumes of informa- Taylor, who later assembled and led the great group of computer
tion,” and he wrote about his idea in the July 1945 issue of the scientists who headed Xerox PARC. With their support, Engel-
Atlantic Monthly: bart, from 1960 to 1968, led a team at SRI that implemented a
“Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of prototype system demonstrating his ideas.
mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin The high point of Dormouse is Markoff’s recounting of
one at random, ‘memex’ will do. A memex is a device in which Engelbart’s first public presentation, in December 1968, of his
an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, “oNLine System” (NLS). Markoff writes,
and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with ex- “In one stunning ninety-minute session, [Engelbart] showed
ceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supple- how it was possible to edit text on a display screen, to make hy-
ment to his memory.” pertext links from one electronic document to another, and to
DAV I D C OW L E S
Engelbart encountered the idea of the Memex while serving mix text and graphics, and even video and graphics. He also
as a radar technician in the U.S. Navy during World War II. It sketched out a vision of an experimental computer network to be
took root in his imagination and, in 1950, he had an epiphany, called ARPAnet and suggested that within a year he would be

CR E DIT

Reviews
able to give the same demonstration remotely to locations across support large applications. These and many other key technical
the country. In short, every significant aspect of today’s comput- capabilities originated not in the counterculture of the West Coast,
ing world was revealed in a magnificent hour and a half. but in the great universities and research labs on the East Coast, in
“There were two things that particularly dazzled the audi- England, and even in the upper Midwest, where I grew up.
ence:...First, computing had made the leap from number crunch- Around the time of Engelbart’s NLS presentation, a practical
ing to become a communications and information-retrieval tool. implementation of a different set of groundbreaking computing
Second, the machine was being used interactively with all its re- concepts, far beyond a mere demonstration, appeared in the form
sources appearing to be devoted to a single individual! It was the of the Michigan Terminal System (MTS) operating system.
first time that truly personal computing had been seen.” MTS was written for a mainframe—the IBM 360/67—that was
one of the first computers to have virtual memory. IBM had 300
programmers writing a new operating system for this computer,
The 1960s: Drugs and Protest but they were far behind schedule. So the staff at Michigan wrote
Dormouse describes how political, social, and cultural forces MTS, which featured time-sharing, support for virtual memory,
came together to shape the early personal-computer industry on file sharing with protection, and many other functions in new
the West Coast: Engelbart and his colleagues were part of a com- combinations that were eventually to become key parts of the PC.
munity that included early experimenters with LSD and leaders By 1967, MTS was up and running on the newly arrived
of the antiwar movement. 360/67, supporting 30 to 40 simultaneous users. Fully a year be-
Despite today’s conservative backlash against much of what fore MTS was finished, in 1966, Michigan began a related proj-
the 1960s’ countercultural movement stood for, the Internet and ect, the Merit network, which would provide a way to network
the personal computer have been accepted, and they give us great multiple systems. Like the early ARPAnet, Merit used minicom-
tools to spread awareness. Though these tools can also be used to puters—Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP-11s—to connect
amplify propagandizing, there is reason to believe that they will larger machines to each other.
ultimately give advantage to the truth. In this, the spirit of the By the time I arrived as an undergraduate at the University of
1960s’ struggle lives on. Michigan in 1971, MTS and Merit were successful and stable
Some who read Markoff’s book may feel nostalgic for the drug systems. By that point, a multiprocessor system running MTS
culture that developed alongside the personal computer, but I do could support a hundred simultaneous interactive users, as well
not. For me, the stories about drug experimentation are sad sto- as remote graphics applications on computers such as the DEC
ries of a quest gone awry. The promise was that LSD and other 8/338 and 9/339—pioneering minicomputers with interactive
drugs would expand our creativity. But like other abused sub- vector graphics displays. MTS served as a campuswide network
stances, including alcohol and, now, in America, even food, they for these machines, and Merit soon connected the computers of
have largely brought us personal tragedy. In the end, drugs such the University of Michigan with those at other universities.
as LSD and marijuana give most users, not new creativity, but Similarly powerful systems were built on Digital Equipment
merely the personal and temporary presumption of the new, and PDP-10s at MIT, Stanford (SAIL), and Carnegie Mellon Univer-
at great personal cost. sity, often, like Engelbart’s NLS, with support from federal re-
The personal-computing and Internet revolutions have pro- search funds. Markoff recounts in passing what I had forgotten (if
duced much of what the drug experimenters were seeking. They I ever knew it)—that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were hanging
have given people long-sought enhancements of the ability to out at SAIL long before the famous Jobs visit to PARC. SAIL, and
communicate and to learn. And now, with so much accessible to similar systems, had much greater importance in the birth of the
so many people through the Internet, we see hope for the expan- PC than is generally acknowledged. In my view, these systems un-
sion of creativity itself, and for the raising of collective conscious- derpin, as much as Engelbart’s work does, personal computing.
ness. The Internet promotes creativity not through solitary,
short-lived experiences, but through the use of a real, perma-
nent, and shareable medium. It offers new awareness through True Augmentation
access to the firsthand truth about what is going on in the world— Engelbart’s dream came true because Moore’s Law held. Those
if its users take the time to separate the truth from the flood of who believed in the law often succeeded. They saw, as Engelbart
mass media and junk that the Internet also brings. did, that computing was destined to become cheap and therefore
widely available. It was these people who gave rise to a new wave
in computing: the PC industry. Those people who did not fore-
Other Dreamers see the impact of the relentless miniaturization fared less well;
Dormouse tells the important story of what the Bay Area did for thus nearly all of the companies in the previous wave—the mini-
computing. But as I read the book, I found myself thinking about computer industry—failed or were acquired.
other early history, stories not centered on the West Coast. While Most of today’s best thinkers on the subject agree that Moore’s
the PC was born in California, its conception required important Law has 10 or more years yet to run. If they’re right, transistor
contributions from other parts of the country. density will in 10 years be about 100 times what it is now. In think-
Today, PCs are highly networked, run multiple applications at ing about the future of computing, in hoping for further augmen-
the same time (much as the time-sharing computers of the 1960s tation of the human intellect, do we understand what another
and 1970s supported multiple users), and have virtual memory to 100-fold increase in computing power will mean? It should en-

able big new dreams. Let me suggest some, which might fuel the Does this mean that desktop PCs as we know them will disap-
next part of the story of personal computing. pear? I’m not suggesting that. Rather, I think, we will find that
Engelbart imagined a figure called an “augmented architect”: these larger computers with keyboards become less personal, be-
“Let us consider an ‘augmented’ architect at work. He sits at a come shared devices. In my household, many of us have accounts
working station that has a visual display screen some three feet on several different computers, which share our personal infor-
on a side; this is his working surface and is controlled by a com- mation among them. None of these is “my” computer, yet all are,
puter (his ‘clerk’) with which he can communicate by means of a when they need to be. The individual machines are becoming ac-
small keyboard and other devices....Every person who cess points to my presence on the network.
does his thinking with symbolized concepts...should be Are we taking Your smart phone will benefit greatly from
able to benefit significantly.” full advantage the next 100-fold improvement bestowed by
Are we taking full advantage of the power of computers of the power of Moore’s Law. It can acquire more sensors, be-
to augment our intellects? I don’t think so. Computers are computers to coming a personal medical scanner, tricorder,
currently unaware of their environments—of the people augment our translator, recorder, and interpreter. There are
and objects around them. The computer does not have intellects? many worthy dreams for such devices!
cameras to see what we see, to know what books and pa- I don’t think so.
pers are in the room. We don’t interact with the computer Computers
in natural ways—for instance, by drawing on paper (while are currently Note to Government: Think Big
the computer watches with its camera) or on electronic pa- unaware of their Engelbart’s research found strong support
per (on which the computer could draw too). We don’t talk, environments. from the government. But that was a long time
listen, or gesture to computers the way we do to each other. ago. Federal funding for speculative research
And we’re no better at entering into the computer’s environ- has now, largely, dried up; agencies looking for short-term pay-
ment than it is at understanding ours. The best commonly avail- backs now typically sponsor work on specific problems rather
able immersive technology we have today is the video game, not than the kinds of pure research, of unfettered thinking, that leads
the architectural design package. We, sadly, spend much more of to the birth of whole new industries, as Engelbart’s did.
our collective energy and focus on virtual reality for entertain- During the Clinton administration, I served as cochair of the
ment than for education and augmentation. President’s Commission on Information Technology (PITAC).
Worst of all, computer software doesn’t really interact with us. Fellow members of the committee and I recommended that the
It executes what we request but doesn’t initiate actions on its own. government think big and recognize that computers will be key to
Our computers do not understand the goals of the projects we’re all economic growth in the future, not just the growth of the com-
working on. They don’t think ahead and work, unprompted, in puter industry itself. We argued that there were industries where,
concert with us toward those goals. In reality, we work alone. without new computer applications, the United States would be-
We have, or will soon have, sufficient computing power to come substantially less competitive.
build interactive, immersive, and aware software, so that the Historically, the most cutting-edge research in computing was
rooms in which we work, as architects or engineers, scientists or sponsored for national defense, with a very long-term view. We
students, can routinely become immersive and interactive envi- recommended that the government fund, in a similar way, a
ronments. We need to sponsor the hard research needed to make number of large computing projects. Each of these projects would
this dream a reality—to find and to fund the dreamers. cut across disciplines and make different assumptions (call them
guesses) about what the future would be like. Each would create
an imagined environment and determine what it would be like to
Your (Pocket) Personal Computer live in it. The projects would result, we hoped, in inspirational
Nearly 50 years ago, J. C. R. Licklider imagined computers as a prototypes, NLS-like demonstrations of how the great advances
communications device. When we look at today’s smart mobile in computing and communication, the next 100-fold improve-
devices, the BlackBerries and the Treos and the Nokia Commu- ment, could be put to use by the next generation of Engelbarts.
nicators, we underestimate their importance. Their capabilities The committee’s recommendations were not followed.
are relatively limited. Compared to phones, they’re big and bulky, Though a President Gore would have been supportive of them,
but compared to notebook computers, they have frustratingly the current administration has not been, and the long-term trend
small screens and keyboards. Few people have them. They don’t toward a short-term focus in government-sponsored research
really feel like our most personal computers. continues. The young Doug Engelbarts of today will be hard
But I think they are. The power of such devices will grow rap- pressed to find support for their dreams.
idly, as did the power of the PC. And they will become intensely What a shame. It’s possible now, more than ever, to augment
personal, because they will be able to do more for you than any- human intellect. We should boldly set our sights on Engelbart’s
thing that is as portable. They will thus naturally become the goal. John Markoff has done us all a great service by writing a
focus of improvements in connectivity and communication. book that reminds us of the great value of thinking big. Q
Much as the Google query you make from your home runs on
machines located elsewhere, software run on behalf of your Bill Joy was the architect of Berkeley Unix and a cofounder of Sun
pocket PC could reside in remote server farms, on computers you Microsystems. He is now a partner at venture-capital firm Kleiner,
time-share with others—but that you don’t have to maintain. Perkins, Caufield, and Byers.

Reviews
Abused Substances The very first psychedelic I experienced (this was 45 years
ago) was the peyote-cactus alkaloid, mescaline. It was an awe-
some experience in several ways. But its most dramatic result
The “stepfather of ecstasy,” now 80, was my realization that there was no way the forgotten memories
believes pyschedelics are unfairly of my childhood that had just resurfaced, and the display of col-
anathematized. Tripping, he says, ors of which I had previously been unaware, could be contained
in a few hundred milligrams of a white crystalline powder. To me
has medical and spiritual uses. it was inescapable that all the richness of that day had been inside
my mind all along, and the drug was just the catalyst that gave me
BY A L E X A N D E R T. S H U L G I N access to it. Since I am a chemist, I can easily synthesize chemi-
cals with subtle structural differences—like a slightly longer car-
bon chain here or a sulfur in place of an oxygen there—to find the
sychoactivity is a broad term for the action of the dosages where they become active.
P many chemicals that affect the function of the brain.

There are many classes of these substances, such as
stimulants, anesthetics, sedatives, narcotics, de-
pressants, antidepressants—and also psychedelics.
The mechanism of action of such drugs always involves psycho-
neurological systems. Medically valuable psychoactive drugs are
most often discovered in animal behavior experiments, and find-
Two or three examples. When I moved one of the methoxy
groups of mescaline to an adjacent position, and replaced an-
other one with an ethyl group, I got a beautiful white solid that I
named 2C-E. It was fully active in me at 20 milligrams taken
orally. The visual activity and color enhancement it effected were
very much like those of LSD, but 2C-E had a strange and (for me)
novel property. On occasion, during a psychedelic experience, I
ing out how the drugs work frequently calls upon sophisticated would ask myself an important,
research using appropriately radio-labeled synthetic samples. private question to see what an-
But for the past four decades, I have studied psychoactive Compound Interests swer might bubble up. If the
drugs at the far end of the spectrum: those that affect the mind. 2,5-dimethoxy-4- question turned out to be too
These substances are usually discovered by people experiment- ethylphenethylamine (2C-E) complex, or touched on un-
ing on humans. Rats have brains, and we can remove them, cut N,N-dipropyltryptamine (DPT) pleasant subjects, I would drop
them into slices, and see where experimental drugs have gone— it and ask another. But 2C-E
Alpha,O-dimethyl
but I am not sure rats have what most people think of as minds. serotonin (O-DMS) wouldn’t let me do that. I had
It should be stated outright that the uses of these drugs are not to stay with each question until
merely recreational (although of course they are used that way all I worked through to an answer.
the time, and for other, more meditative reasons). Recently, sev- Another example, this one from the other family of psychedel-
eral researchers successfully navigated the bureaucratic paper- ics, the tryptamines. N,N-dipropyltryptamine (DPT) was first
work necessary to get approval of and permission for clinical synthesized and found to be active in humans by Steven Szara
studies of psychedelics. A study by Francisco Moreno at the Uni- back in 1962. But it exhibits an unusual property if the three-
versity of Arizona using psilocybin in the treatment of obsessive- carbon propyl groups are attached to the nitrogen atom by the
compulsive disorder has been completed. And two other studies of middle carbon rather than by the end carbon atom. This turns
psychedelics are under way: one, at the Harbor-UCLA Medical them into isopropyl groups. So I made the compound and called
Center, is exploring psilocybin as a treatment for anxiety in pa- it DIPT. It both lowers and distorts the pitch of sound.
tients with advanced-stage cancer; the other, being conducted in Another example of a subtle modification of a tryptamine
South Carolina, studies the treatment of post-traumatic stress dis- molecule involves the well-known neurotransmitter serotonin.
order patients with MDMA—the drug more commonly known as Although it plays a major role in enabling neurons to communi-
ecstasy. Additional studies should soon be up and running, includ- cate, it cannot enter the brain from the body. There is an effective
ing one at Harvard’s McLean Hospital that will investigate the po- obstacle called the blood-brain barrier that blocks the passage of
tential value of MDMA in treating cancer patients’ anxieties. most highly polar molecules, although some—certain amino
I choose to call these psychoactive compounds psychedelics, acids and sugars—can get across it because they have specific
but many names have been used for them. Originally they were transport allies. The serotonin-precursor amino acid is one of
called psychotomimetics, which meant, literally, drugs that pro- these exceptions, and once it has gotten into the brain, serotonin
duced a state that imitated psychosis. This was soon superseded can be made from it. Since serotonin is implicated in the effects
by “hallucinogens,” which is a more acceptable term but equally of most psychedelics, I changed it a little bit. On the right-hand
inaccurate. The actions of the psychedelics can involve visual phe- side of the molecule is a primary amino group. Upon the oxida-
nomena (color enhancement, shape distortion, unexpected inter- tive loss of this amine, the molecule metabolizes rapidly to a car-
pretations), but these are recallable from memory—there is none boxylate group, which is very polar. So I added an alpha-methyl
of the amnesia that often accompanies a true hallucination. Other group to block that deamination. On the left-hand side of the
terms have been used, such as entactogens (touching within), molecule is a polar phenolic hydroxy group. By converting it to a
empathogens (creating empathy), and entheogens (discovering methyl ether, I neutralized its polarity. I called the compound
God within), but I still prefer “psychedelics.” It may be offensive alpha,O-dimethyl serotonin, or O-DMS (it was also called 5-
to some people, but at least they know what I am talking about. MeO-AMT for 5-methoxy-alpha-methyltryptamine). Surprise!

It turned out to be orally active in the low-milligram range. In my that is where the physician should look for the tumor in the brain
research group, each person took a sample weighing somewhere of the person who hears from God.
between 2.5 and 4.5 milligrams, and all had trips that lasted One of the major impediments to the expansion of research
more than 12 hours. Almost all, once they were finally able to get in this fascinating area is the war on drugs. The categorization of
to sleep, had nightmares. psychedelics as evil and dangerous keeps them in the Schedule I
I have little insight as to how these remarkable compounds do category, where they are said to have no medical value. Discov-
what they do. The human mind is a mysterious and complex eries are not being published, because researchers feel that if
thing. There have never been dependable ways to get into it, take new and potentially useful compounds are openly discussed in
it apart, and see how it works. My hope is that psychedelic com- the medical literature, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency will
pounds may be the tools, or may lead to the discovery of tools, add them to the illegal list. With the series of clinical trials using
that can throw some light on elusive questions about how the psychedelics, I hope the wind is shifting. ■
mind works. Say a person is called “mentally ill” because he
hears God speaking to him. Maybe you can put a positron emitter Alexander “Sasha” T. Shulgin is a pharmacologist and biochemist
JOH N H E R SEY
on a chemical that gives you distortion in sound recognition, who popularized ecstasy in the 1970s. He was the first to synthe-
inject it into a normal subject who is in a PET scanner, and size hundreds of psychedelic compounds, including the 2C family
observe that it goes to a most unusual place in the brain. Maybe of phenethylamines, most of which have never been made illegal.

Megascope Ed Tenner
sold as Provigil, lets military pilots re-
Hypermotivational main alert during prolonged missions

without the perilous feelings of omnipo-
tence or the addiction risk sometimes
Syndrome linked to the older amphetamines.

Why is there so much passion for en-
hancing memory and decision-making
and so little for firing the imagination?
Many young people are using drugs Until the American Medical Association
not to drop out but to get ahead. declared its opposition to LSD research
in 1963, leading to U.S. Senate hearings
in 1966 that resulted in a virtual ban,
ecently, the Partnership breaking labors. In the Southern textile prominent medical researchers and artists
R for a Drug-Free America industry, traveling “dope wagons” brought embraced it as a possible means of thera-
recently gave its imprima- milder stimulants like caffeinated, sugary peutic insight and expanded creativity.
tur to a new buzzword: soft drinks and snuff to mill hands. The
report on what Americans think of con- help servicemen cope with

trolled substances showed that for the first the combat stress of World
time, more teenagers are abusing pre- War II. Amphetamine use by
LSD was marketed to psychiatrists by
Generation Rx. Its annual U.S. armed forces distributed cigarettes to the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Sandoz.
At first the drug was
Non-ADHD students widely acclaimed as a
often try to persuade promising therapeutic
scription painkillers than are using a vari- military flyers began at the family doctors to tool. In Saskatchewan,
ety of common illicit drugs. same time and persisted even prescribe Ritalin a psychiatrist, Humphry
What are these prescription drugs be- during later antidrug cam- and other drugs off Osmond, and an archi-
ing used for? Some of them mimic the ef- paigns, though at lower dos- label. Failing that, tect, Kyio Izumi, ingested
fects of street drugs. For instance, the pain ages, with stricter controls. some students buy LSD in an attempt to
reliever Oxycontin, when stripped of its Returning veterans stayed pills on a growing empathize with schizo-
coating, can produce a heroinlike high. with tobacco; their grand- black market. phrenia patients while
The consequences of this kind of abuse children are looking else- co-designing a new men-
are familiar. Antidrug advocates have where for a mental boost. For students tal hospital. Aldous Huxley and Allen
warned for decades that drugs impair not with full-blown attention deficit/hyperac- Ginsberg praised LSD as a source of
only users’ health but also their work. tivity disorder (ADHD), Ritalin can be a knowledge. John Markoff’s What the
Drug-induced torpor even earned its miracle. In 2000, People magazine Dormouse Said... reports that, in the early
own name: amotivational syndrome. profiled a Rhodes scholar who 1960s, Myron Stolaroff, a former Ampex
Timothy Leary’s flameout on the had overcome ADHD as well as employee, founded an institute that re-
Harvard fast track probably fright- dysgraphia—the inability to or- cruited volunteers, including some of the
ened more middle-class parents than ganize, spell, or write legibly— electronics industry’s brightest research-
the warnings of J. Edgar Hoover. partly by taking Ritalin. ers, to explore LSD’s potential to stimu-
But there is an aspect of prescrip- It is thus not surprising that late creativity. Many became believers.
tion drug abuse mentioned only briefly non-ADHD students often (Bill Joy reviews Dormouse on p. 76.) A
in the report: ingesting to excel, try to persuade family founding programmer of Microsoft told
not rebel. There’s now a hy- doctors to prescribe the Washington Post in 1996, “I consider
per motivational syndrome, off label. Failing the insights from LSD to be very useful,
use of prescription drugs that, some stu- both professionally and personally.” The
not to escape the com- dents buy pills on circle of distinguished people taking LSD
manding heights of edu- a growing black constituted a veritable hallucinogentry.
cation and the economy market. A junior The moment didn’t last. The dangers
but to attain them. at Yale University of LSD-induced psychosis and even death
The powers that be claimed that, fortified were real. Imagination-enhancing sub-
have long blessed chemi- with Adderall, he read stances were outlawed by the late 1960s.
cal performance en- Crime and Punishment And proscribed they have remained. Yet
hancement. Employers and completed a 15- the newer drugs also have their risks, es-
once encouraged stimu- page paper on it in about pecially psychological dependency. They
lants: a hundred years 30 hours. The drug is compete with proven nonpharmaceutical
ago, African-American “more efficient” than techniques like meditation. Taken indis-
dock workers in the caffeine, he told an ABC criminately, they may not provoke users to
A N DY P OT TS
South were given co- News correspondent. leap out of windows, but they could lead
caine to fuel their back- And Modafinil, also them to shut some doors. ■
82 MEGASCOPE T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

From the Lab
A good place to look for the important technologies of tomorrow
is in the scientific discoveries of today. Based on recommendations
from academia and industry, Technology Review has chosen these
peer-reviewed papers as ones that may one day inspire the
development of those technologies.
bright LED light sources. As the actor

performed, different lights flashed on
and off thousands of times per second, ei-
ther singly or in groups. A camera filmed
the actor at a frame rate equal to the rate
at which the lighting changed, so that
each frame was lit in a different way, for a
maximum of 180 different illumination
conditions. The researchers filmed the
actor’s head and shoulders, recording up
to eight seconds of action; downloaded
the information to computers; and used
algorithms to select and superimpose dif-
ferent frames to create desired illumina-
tion effects.
But there was a problem. Although the
actor was filmed at a high frame rate, and
Filming an
actor inside the lights flashed just as quickly, the actor
this apparatus still moved appreciably while each of the
enables lighting
after the fact. 180 lighting conditions was being cap-
tured. This meant that the position of the
actor differed slightly in each frame, so
I N F O R M AT I O N T E C H N O L O GY
superimposing the frames resulted in
smeared images. To solve this problem,
Digital Illumination the researchers used computer vision al-

gorithms to track and analyze the actor’s
facial movements. Based on estimates of
Graphics technique allows how the actor was moving in a given set of
movie-scene lighting after filming frames, they digitally warped the image
data to make it look as if each of the 180
frames was taken at the same instant. They
results: Researchers led by Paul Debevec fects, but for the most part, they can’t tin- repeated this process to produce a set of
at the University of Southern California’s ker with lighting. That means they have to frames showing the 180 individual light-
Institute for Creative Technologies have get the lighting just right during filming— ing conditions for each 24th of a second of
developed computer graphics tools that let a time-consuming and expensive process. the actor’s performance, which they then
filmmakers simulate the live-action light- The ability to change or re-create lighting assembled to produce the final film clip
ing conditions of settings that their actors after a performance can give filmmakers with the computer-generated lighting.
were never in, or add new lighting effects more flexibility in making the movies they
C O U R T E SY O F PAU L D E B E V E C
to film they’ve already shot. The research- want, while potentially saving time and next step: The researchers would like to
ers previously showed that they could money on the set. build a larger spherical structure with a
change lighting effects in still images. greater number of brighter lights that
methods: The researchers placed an ac- could capture images of an actor’s whole
why it matters: Movie directors use tor inside a spherical structure two me- body or of more than one actor at a time.
computers to adjust and create visual ef- ters in diameter that was lined with 156 They are also working on finding the best
T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 F ROM TH E L AB 83

From the Lab
pattern in which to flash the lights on and methods: In a large search, collecting a users compared thumbnails made with
off so as to obtain the optimum image representative sample is not easy. Most the Microsoft software with snippets of
quality while minimizing the appearance search engines assemble results not all at the songs beginning 30 seconds in, and
of flickering. Corie Lok once, but a handful at a time as needed. rated the Microsoft thumbnails more
They first generate a list of matching pages likely to contain the titles, choruses, or
Source: Wenger, A., et al. 2005. Performance for each keyword in a query. Those lists other distinctive features of the songs.
relighting and reflectance transformation with
time-multiplexed illumination. ACM Transactions
are merged, about a hundred results at a
on Graphics 24:756–64. time, using logical operators extracted why it matters: Today’s digital-audio li-
from the query—words such as “and” and braries are growing in size, and users
“or.” The IBM algorithm, on the other must manually sort through them to find
hand, simultaneously sifts through these and remove duplicate files. Microsoft’s
multiple lists, picking Web pages at ran- method of spotting duplicates could
Smarter dom and, if they meet all the conditions of
the search, adding them to the sample
make for easier and faster consolidation
of large song collections. Many online
Search
Streamlining retrieval
pool. The algorithm takes measures to
ensure that each Web page in a list has an
music purveyors also offer their custom-
ers previews of songs. Currently, those
on the Web equal probability of being chosen. A search previews are created either manually—
engine could use the sample pool to deter- someone listens to the song to find a rec-
results: Some Web-search sites like mine sorting themes. ognizable chorus, then makes the song
Clusty and Teoma sort results into catego- snippet—or via software that samples
ries to help users narrow their searches. next step: Devising custom sampling only a predetermined segment of each
Researchers at IBM have devised an algo- techniques to handle the most common song, which may not contain readily rec-
rithm that allows search programs to dis- types of queries could yield speedier ognizable material. The new software
play a wider selection of categories by search results. Anagnostopoulos is also can automatically find the defining part
analyzing the content of a sample of results interested in investigating whether, when of a song when extracting a thumbnail,
rather than that of every page. The re- devising sorting categories, giving less making the thumbnail a better indicator
searchers performed searches of 1.8 mil- popular pages even more weight leads to of the song’s identity.
lion Web pages, analyzing both the entire better results. Dan Cho
body of results and the sample populations methods: The duplicate detector extracts
selected by the algorithm. They found that Source: Anagnostopoulos, A., et al. 2005. Sampling a fingerprint for each file and puts it into a
search-engine results. Paper presented at the 14th
even when samples constituted only 1 per- International World Wide Web Conference. May 10–
database. To compare two songs, it con-
cent of the total results, the algorithm 14. Chiba, Japan. siders the location from which the first
could still capture most of the popular cate- song’s fingerprint was extracted and looks
gories extracted from all the results. for a matching fingerprint in the same vi-
cinity in the second song. If it finds a
why it matters: Looking for information match, it identifies the two as duplicates.
online can be frustrating when search
terms have multiple meanings and con-
Sampling After analyzing all the songs in the data-
base, the detector presents the user with a
texts. Sorting results into “clusters” of re-
lated topics can help cut search times, but
Songs list of duplicate songs.
The thumbnail generator compares
Digital fingerprints make
most search engines that use this tech- for easier searching fingerprints within a file. If it finds similar
nique examine only the most relevant few fingerprints at different points, it identi-
hundred results to extract common results: Microsoft researchers have de- fies them as the song’s chorus or some
themes. So even topics with plenty of veloped software that can automatically other characteristic feature. If fingerprint
pages devoted to them can be ignored in identify audio files—including streaming analysis doesn’t find a clear repeating fea-
favor of trendier subjects associated with audio—by extracting and encoding short ture, the software can analyze other as-
the same keywords: a search for “macin- sections of them to form “fingerprints.” pects of the song, such as patterns of sound
tosh” will identify themes prominent on Christopher Burges and colleagues have frequencies, to pick out a characteristic
millions of computer-gossip pages but en- developed two new applications for this section. The software then extracts the 15
tirely miss those few thousand pages about audio-recognition technology: identify- seconds of audio surrounding that section
Charles Macintosh, father of the rubber- ing duplicate files in a large collection of as the thumbnail.
ized raincoat. The sampling methods de- audio files and creating “thumbnails,” 15-
vised by Aris Anagnostopoulos, now at second-long, recognizable snippets of next step: The researchers are working
Brown University, and Andrei Broder and each file. The software found duplicates with Microsoft’s product teams to com-
David Carmel at IBM could allow users to in a database of more than 40,000 audio mercialize this technology. Potential ap-
quickly find the pages they want, even files with a 1.2 percent error rate. In an- plications might include software that
when their search terms are ambiguous. other test involving 68 songs, a panel of cleans up music collections on home com-
84 F ROM TH E L AB T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

puters, freeing up disk space. Online mu-
sic vendors could also use the thumbnail
generator to create previews of the songs
offered on their websites. Jean Thilmany
Source: Burges, C., et al. 2005. Using audio

fingerprinting for duplicate detection and thumbnail
generation. Paper presented at the IEEE Conference
on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. March
18–23. Philadelphia, PA.
B I OT E C H N O L O GY
Bacterial Genetically engineered bacteria reveal colored patterns under a fluorescence microscope.
Cells in the center (blue) secrete a signaling molecule sensed by the surrounding bacteria.
Sensors
Engineered E. coli bacteria
Left: one E. coli strain shines green at high concentrations of the molecule, while a second
shines red at medium concentrations. Right: a third strain shines green at low concentrations.
signal environmental changes the responses of different strains of E. coli Medical School–affiliated Children’s Hos-
to distinct ranges of signaling-molecule pital Boston have coaxed adult mamma-
results: Princeton University and Caltech concentrations. The researchers then syn- lian heart muscle cells into dividing by
researchers have genetically engineered E. thesized the strains likely to be most use- adding two types of chemicals. One blocks
coli bacteria to give off red or green fluo- ful by inserting into the E. coli genome an enzyme called p38 MAP kinase, impor-
rescent light in response to different con- desired genes, such as those that code for tant in the early development of many
centrations of a cell-signaling molecule fluorescent proteins. They then spread a types of cells; the others are protein growth
secreted by a third type of E. coli. Incubat- mixture of these strains in petri dishes factors. Adding these chemicals to rat
ing the three types of E. coli in petri dishes containing growth media and incubated heart cells in a lab dish induced 7 percent
resulted in controllable patterns. In one them overnight. Using a fluorescence mi- of them to begin dividing. To show that the
experiment, the researchers produced croscope, they took pictures of the plates p38 gene can inhibit heart cell division, the
concentric circles of different colors, with to reveal the different colored patterns. researchers engineered live mice who
the signaling cells in the center. Surround- lacked the gene and found that the dupli-
ing them were two types of fluorescing next step: To turn microörganisms into cation and separation of chromosomes in
cells: one that emitted green light when sensors, the researchers must couple their their heart cells—a key step in cell divi-
sensing a high concentration of the signal- gene networks to receptors that specifi- sion—increased by more than 90 percent.
ing molecule, and another that gave off red cally bind to target chemicals. They will
light at medium concentrations. also need to design the sensors so that the why it matters: During a heart attack,
cells remain alive and stable even out- oxygen-starved cells die, leaving behind
why it matters: Researchers had previ- doors. And they will likely need to devise damaged tissue. Researchers have long
ously programmed cells to communicate some kind of control switch to reset or thought that the heart can’t repair itself be-
individually or in small groups. Here the turn off the sensors. Corie Lok cause its cells can’t divide. This paper sug-
Princeton and Caltech team engineered gests that tissue regeneration might be
larger populations of bacteria to work to- Source: Basu, S., et al. 2005. A synthetic multicellular possible. Doctors could potentially admin-
system for programmed pattern formation. Nature
gether to form visible patterns that could 434:1130–34.
ister a drug that triggers heart muscle re-
be used, for example, to signal the pres- growth in recovering heart attack patients.
ence of a toxic chemical. Because the bac- Researchers have previously shown
teria produce different signals in response that heart cells can divide, but only in
to concentrations of a target chemical, strains of lab animals with genetic modifi-
they could flag areas of high concentration
as likely sources of wider contamination.
Repairing cations. Here, the Harvard researchers
have shown that they can turn on the cells’
In theory, bacteria-based sensors could be
more sensitive to a broader range of chemi-
the Heart
Dividing cells could mend
ability to divide using a more therapeuti-
cally practical strategy: adding chemicals.
C O U R T E SY O F R O N W E I S S
cals than conventional sensors are. tissue after heart attacks

methods: The researchers studied the ef-
methods: The researchers, led by Ron results: In a study that could have ramifi- fects of p38 inhibition on the major stages
Weiss and Frances Arnold, used mathe- cations for heart attack patients, research- of cell division—DNA synthesis, division
matical models of gene activity to predict ers led by Mark Keating at the Harvard of the cell’s nucleus, and division of the cell
T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 F ROM TH E L AB 85

From the Lab
itself—in rat cell cultures and living mice.
In one experiment, they stimulated heart
muscle cells from 12-week-old rats with
Nanoprinting
Ink-jet manufacturing for faster
growth factors in the presence or absence plastic electronics
of a p38 inhibitor. They looked for signs of
key molecular events associated with the results: Using conventional ink-jet print-
various stages of cell division. ing equipment, Henning Sirringhaus of
the University of Cambridge in England
next step: While the researchers dem- and colleagues built organic-polymer cir-
onstrated cell division in a lab dish, they cuits with switching speeds more than 100
did not demonstrate it in live animals. times greater than those of existing poly-
They are now injecting the inhibitor and mer circuits. They printed circuit features
growth factors into rats with damaged that they estimated to be smaller than 100
hearts and looking for signs of regrowth. nanometers, less than one–one-hundredth
The researchers will also have to ensure Nanoimaging using a superlens. Top: ion beam
the size of the smallest features previously
that they can control the cell growth and image of letters etched in chromium. Middle: produced through ink-jet printing.
superlens image of letters on light-sensitive
avoid causing cancer. Corie Lok material. Bottom: optical image without
superlens. Scale bar: two micrometers. why it matters: Thin, flexible, and cheap
Source: Engel, F. B., et al. 2005. P38 MAP kinase plastic electronics could have many appli-
inhibition enables proliferation of adult mammalian
cardiomyocytes. Genes and Development 19:1175–87.
waves allow researchers to get around this cations, from solar cells to radio frequency
limitation. The technique could eventually identification labels in product packaging.
allow researchers to watch, in real time, Ink-jet printing is an attractive manufac-
biological processes such as protein inter- turing option because it deposits materi-
actions in samples of living tissue—events als quickly and cheaply over large areas.
N A N OT E C H N O L O GY that can now be studied only indirectly. But so far, it has yielded features no
Previous research has used evanescent smaller than 20 micrometers, while the
waves to construct images in piecemeal features of typical integrated circuits mea-
Superlens fashion. The Berkeley team, led by Xiang
Zhang, has shown that it’s possible to take
sure tens of nanometers. The Cambridge
team seems to have broken the resolution
Crafters
Lens allows optical microscopy
a clear and complete picture in one shot. barrier, making ink-jet printing viable.
down to 60 nanometers methods: The researchers made a lens methods: The researchers produced their
out of a 35-nanometer-thick film of silver. ultrasmall features using a homebuilt ink-
results: A team from the University of They chose a light source whose frequency jet printer. They deposited a conducting
California, Berkeley, has devised a silver matched the resonant frequency of the polymer “ink” as droplets on glass. They
“superlens” that could increase the reso- lens’s surface electrons. The light shone then chemically modified the droplets’
lution of light microscopy by about a factor through the word “NANO,” inscribed in surfaces so they would repel additional
of six. The lens doesn’t diffract light like letters with a 40-nanometer line width on droplets. A second set of droplets was ap-
conventional glass lenses. Instead, it uses a piece of chromium through ion beam li- plied; these flowed off of the first set, land-
evanescent waves, which are produced thography. When the light hit the lens, the ing a tiny distance away. That distance
when light hits a lens at such an angle that silver electrons resonated with the evanes- represents the smallest feature size this
it bounces off instead of passing through. cent waves, boosting their energy. The technique can achieve. The researchers
Evanescent waves emerge on the other superlens directed the waves onto light- laid out transistors: the closely spaced
side of the lens and add optical informa- sensitive material to capture the image. droplets formed electrodes, and an or-
tion to normal “propagating” light waves, ganic semiconductor filled the gap be-
but they decay very quickly over short dis- next step: The superlens didn’t spread out tween them. The researchers estimated
tances. By capturing and amplifying these the evanescent waves enough that the hu- the width of this gap based on the perfor-
weak waves, the researchers obtained im- man eye could see the image directly; it had mance of the transistors.
ages with 60-nanometer resolution. to be observed with an atomic force micro-
C O U R T E SY O F N I C H O L AS X UA N L A I FA N G
scope. Future research will curve the lens next step: The researchers are now using
why it matters: High-resolution imaging so that it can further spread the waves and better-performing organic semiconduct-
methods such as electron microscopy can’t pass them into, say, a fiber-optic cable. Su- ing materials. They are also producing
image living tissue. Light microscopy can. perlenses might then be integrated into circuits that involve hundreds of intercon-
Its resolution, however, is limited by the light microscopes. Stu Hutson nected transistors. Corie Lok
wavelength of the light used. And 400
Source: Fang, N., et al. 2005. Sub-diffraction-limited Source: Sele, C. W., et al. 2005. Lithography-free, self-
nanometers is the shortest wavelength optical imaging with a silver superlens. Science aligned inkjet printing with sub-hundred-nanometer
that doesn’t damage tissue. Evanescent 308:534–7. resolution. Advanced Materials 17:997–1001.
86 F ROM TH E L AB T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

Geek Activity Page
you to concentrate on what’s fun—for example, writing a pro-
Web Libs gram that inverts a website’s stated intent.
That’s what we did with Doubletake, a wacky script that sub-
Build a content filter that rewrites verts a page’s original HTML with a list of specified substitu-
the Web—your way, Mad Libs style! tions. It’s like Mad Libs for the Web: Web Libs.
If you download Firefox, install Greasemonkey, and activate
BY S I M S O N G A R F I N K E L A N D P E T E R WAY N E R Doubletake, every Web page you view will be carefully rewrit-
ten using words of your own choosing. If a particular politician
seems a bit mentally challenged, you can replace his name with
If you are one of the many who feel that “Village Idiot.” Or whatever.
Doubletake is engineered to take advantage of built-in Java-
the media are unforgivably biased, Script functions such as the replace method, which can act upon
the Web now has a solution for you. the document object containing the HTML for a Web page. Re-
peatedly calling the replace function for each word will rewrite
Greasemonkey, an add-on for the open- the document. This approach is sluggish. The time required is
source Firefox browser, can act as a pro- proportional to the size of the document multiplied by the length
grammable content filter, sanitizing or of the list of words to be replaced.
To create a snappier version, we used JavaScript’s built-in hash
scandalizing the news before you see it. tables to store the list of words to be replaced. We preprocessed
For fun, we wrote a simple script (de- this list and built a table called matchTable, then broke the docu-
tailed below) that lets Greasemonkey ment apart and replaced every word appearing in the table.
rewrite the news ungrammatically, or if (typeof matchTable[word]!=“undefined”){

render it politically incorrect or even ans=ans+matchTable[word];
offensive. No matter where you stand on } else {
ans=ans+word;
the political spectrum, you’ll see that }
Greasemonkey and related technologies
However long the list of words to be replaced, the matchTable
are destroying one of the last one-way function finds each match in a constant amount of time, so the
streets in the media world. While the time required is proportional only to the size of the document.
Internet may be interactive, many of the The technologies at work here have more-practical applica-
tions as well. For example, Greasemonkey scripts can modify the
most trusted and reputable websites still style sheets that control how Web pages are displayed, so your
treat readers as passive recipients of browser could, say, display all text as black type on a white back-
content. Pages are rendered on the com- ground in 14-point font size—just the thing for the 20 million
Americans who have significant vision problems.
puter screen more or less the way the Firefox and Greasemonkey show the inherently democratiz-
publishers intended, and your job is to ing power of open-source software. Giving everyone the ability
consume, not to participate. to rewrite source code is upsetting the balance of power between
But of course, Web pages are nothing more than large collec- programmers and users, and between publishers and readers.
tions of bits, and bits are easy to flip, cut, and splice. Nothing can Of course, website authors who don’t want their artistic integrity
stop the data that the New York Times or MSNBC sends to your eroded can fight back: one of the most common techniques for
computer from being modified before it is displayed. sabotaging end-user control is to put text inside graphics or mul-
It used to be hard to write programs that hacked Web pages timedia Flash presentations. But these tricks make websites in-
in real time. Mozilla Firefox changed that with a plug-in archi- accessible for the blind (who rely on text readers) and impossible
tecture and a series of extensions. One of the best-known Firefox to navigate using cell phones. The battle for the future of mass
extensions is Adblock, which lets you suppress any website ad- communication is just beginning.
vertisement you choose. Code and instructions at doubletake.ex.com. Q
More interesting for the programmer is Greasemonkey, a
nifty extension by Aaron Boodman and Jeremy Dunck that lets Simson Garfinkel is a programmer and researcher in the field of
you write JavaScript programs that can rip apart Web pages on computer security and the author of Database Nation: The Death
the fly. Greasemonkey hooks JavaScript into the innards of the of Privacy in the 21st Century. Peter Wayner is a programmer and
browser, making it much easier to hack a Web page. This frees the author of Translucent Databases.
Technology Review (ISSN 1099-274X), Reg. U.S. Patent Office, is published monthly, except in January, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Entire contents ©2005. The editors seek diverse views, and authors’ opinions do
not represent the official policies of their institutions or those of MIT. Printed by Brown Printing Company, Waseca, MN. Periodicals postage paid at Boston, MA, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes to
Technology Review, Subscription Services Dept., PO Box 420005, Palm Coast, FL 32142, or via the Internet at www.technologyreview.com/customerservice/. Basic subscription rates: $34 per year, Canadian residents add $10, other
foreign countries add $33. Publication Mail Agreement Number 40621028. Send undeliverable Canadian copies to PO Box 1051 Fort Erie, ON L2A 6C7. Printed in U.S.A. ABC audited
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10 People and Organizations Index

24 Global Wind Power FI NANCIAL I N DICES

26 Cosmic Competition 35 Up, up, and...which way? East. 44 C OV E R S TO RY

32 Online Recreation 42 One Decision

4 CONTENTS T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

6 CONTENTS T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

Craig Newmark is the founder of craigslist, a community bulletin board featuring

The “stepfather of ecstasy,” Alexander Shulgin , believes that psychedelic com-

8 CONTRIBUTORS T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

PU B LI S H E R AN D CEO COR P ORATE ADVE RTISI NG SALES

E D ITOR IAL ASS I STANT

I side San Diego (an event attended by technology princes

16 LETTERS T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

Putting the Fun

T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 README 17

18 README T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

Home Smart Home

“If our bloggers

T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 FORWARD 23

Global Wind Power World electricity generation from

Estimated wind India 3,000 6%

24 FORWARD T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

MIT Media Laboratory

T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 FORWARD 25

And the tether challenge?

Is building something like that really

Your biggest prizes are $250,000 each.

Cosmic Competition you’ll see some bigger prizes.

What would it take to win a big one?

students, hobbyists, and hackers say, soft-land 10 kilograms on the Moon.

Actually get it there?

26 FORWARD T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

Projected market for advanced displays Prototype continued from p. 25

Market size (in billions)

Sterling, VA–based market $4

T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 FORWARD 27

I rush hour, Ben Tsiang is calm and

28 FORWARD T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 FORWARD 29

Skeptics call nanotech a great

Environmentalists have nanotechnol-

More evidence that the blanket term Larry Bock thinks

nanotechnology. Spencer Reiss

30 FORWARD T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

25 From “The Case for as arm signaling on the highway,

mands via an earpiece. RallyPoint is

T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 FORWARD 31

T personal pursuits. The Pew Internet and American Life

Daily life on the Net Online-content spending

2000 2004 2003: $1.6 billion 2004: $1.8 billion

Go online Personals, dating

Get news Business, investment

1.5 300 Online-gambling forecast

* P E R C E N TAG E O F ACT I V E U . S . I N T E R N E T U S E R S W H O V I S I T E D E AC H T Y P E O F S I T E AT L E AST O N C E D U R I N G A P R I L 2005. S O U R C E S : P E W I N T E R N E T A N D A M E R I CA N L I F E P R OJ E CT,

32 DATA MINE T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005

Funding of Innovative Startups

T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 DEALFLOW 33

Semiconductors and Computers 10.9% $17,590 80

TR Large-Cap 100, top gainers % change

N OT E : I N T H E T R S M A L L- CA P 5 0, P L A I N S E X P LO R AT I O N A N D P R O D U CT I O N H AS R E P L AC E D PAT I N A O I L A N D G AS I N T H E E N E R GY I N D U ST RY. S O U R C E S : STA N DA R D A N D P O O R ’ S C U STO M

T E CH N O L O G Y R E V I E W august 2005 FINANCIAL INDICES 35

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