Salon.com > Mark Compton

Camera on a chip

Mon, 22 May 2000 20:56:00 +0000

In the early '90s, a crack team of researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) set out to dramatically advance the state of image-capture technology. Their goal: smaller, cheaper, faster image sensors that could work using less power than the CCD (charge-coupled device) chipsets that had been carried aboard all previous space missions.

It just so happens that that team, led by Eric Fossum, managed to hit a major home run -- exploiting standard CMOS technology to invent new "active pixel" image sensors capable of making a big difference not just for the fly boys but also for industry at large. Image sensors that came in smaller packages and drew less power enabled a host of new image-gathering possibilities for the space program -- and now appear to be driving a whole new generation of consumer electronics, medical imaging and machine devices to market.

Lean, green gene-counting machine

Mon, 24 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

Whatever visions of fame and fortune British-born Roy Whitfield had in mind when he first headed west to mine California's rich veins of venture capital, he has far exceeded them by now. Fortune came first to the CEO of Incyte Genomics, who helped co-found the company in 1991. Today, Incyte supplies 18 of the world's 20 largest pharmaceutical companies with the genomic information that has come to play a vital role in drug discovery.

And, increasingly, Whitfield now also finds himself in the public eye. Distressingly so, in fact. Incyte Genomics has become one of the most visible players in a pitched debate between academics and entrepreneurs over how to share the knowledge that's rapidly being gained into the workings of the human genome. Now, as a rough draft of the complete Human Genome Project appears likely to be released in just a matter of weeks, the voices of dissent have become shriller than ever. Even heads of state have felt moved to make their views known.

And at much of this, Whitfield can only shake his head in wonder.

Cybersleuth

Mon, 27 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

It's good Dashiell Hammett didn't live to see it: A wave of denial-of-service attacks sweeps the country, briefly bringing down highflying e-commerce darlings like Yahoo, Amazon.com, eBay, CNN.com, ZDNet, E-Trade and Excite. The attacks immediately become a press spectacle. The Senate hurriedly musters a select committee to consider cybersecurity. The White House openly begins to mull the possibility of appointing a cybersecurity czar. And for help in tracking down the miscreants, the FBI turns to one of its most trusted Internet security allies.

But instead of cutting at this point to the seedy Hell's Kitchen walk-up of some aging, tough-as-nails gumshoe, we find ourselves in the bright, cheery offices of AntiOnline.com, an Internet security consultancy that tracks hackers and monitors their activities from smack-dab in the middle of Beaver, Pa. And the P.I. the feds are pinning their hopes on? Why he's no more than some fresh-faced kid in his early 20s named John Vranesevich, a guy who looks like he could just as easily be working the counter at Baskin-Robbins.

Where in the world?

Mon, 28 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Internet time indeed. Less than three years ago, Digital Island was busily carving out a nice little niche for itself by helping a select number of corporate clients accelerate intranet traffic across a high-capacity private network. Not a bad business, really, but very small beer in comparison to what's been brewing more recently at Digital Island, where months of wheeling and dealing have helped to put a nice little head on things. Digital Island is now working feverishly to extend e-business delivery capabilities to every nook and cranny of the globe.

The conglomeration process picked up a whole lot of steam in December with the finalization of the company's merger with Sandpiper Networks, which served to fuse Sandpiper's content-delivery capabilities with Digital Island's data delivery and hosting services -- as well as its global string of data centers. That was enough to encourage Sun Microsystems and Inktomi to jump on board not just as technology partners but also as significant investors, no doubt with an eye to building the world's dominant infrastructure for interactive e-business. Real Networks had already announced it would work with Digital Island and Inktomi to enable advanced media streaming across the network and, in January, Digital Island managed to expand on this by acquiring Live On Line, a leading supplier of live multicast and on-demand streaming media services.

It's about relationships

Tue, 22 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

It's not always easy to hold someone's hand from across a network, but Radha Basu and her company, Support.com (formerly Tioga Systems), have hit upon a way to help the help desk, by allowing tech-support staff to diagnose troubles remotely. Support.com is a pioneer in the newly dubbed e-support business -- and Basu, the president and CEO, is a pioneer in her own right.

As a young girl in India, Basu rebelled against the wishes of her parents and secretly enrolled in the engineering program at the University of Madras when she was 15. After graduating with honors, she foiled her mother's best-laid marriage plans by jetting off to the United States for graduate school. In her mid-20s, Basu joined Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, and became the first woman ever to lead an R&D project there.

Twenty years later, Basu was heading up HP's 1,400-person e-business software department when she called it quits to join a new start-up. Basu plans to shake up the way companies think about their customer support. And it's a field where she thinks women have an edge.

The number of senior women executives certainly has increased significantly in recent years, along with the growth of e-commerce. Do you see a relationship?

M is for mobile

Mon, 31 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Sporting a screen about the size of a Post-It, low-powered by any measure and limited to operating within today's narrowband airwaves, the wireless phone wouldn't necessarily be your first choice as a Web-access device. Not unless you were Alain Rossmann, that is. Given his history of founding start-ups -- like digital video firm Radius, video compression pioneer C-Cube Microsystems -- and his chief's seat at early PDA company EO, Rossmann's credentials as a visionary thinker were already well-established by the time he started tinkering with the idea of building a "microbrowser" for phones in early 1995. Thinking out of the box was one thing, but conventional wisdom suggested that using a phone to browse the Web was, well, a little wacky. Still, the guy had just sold EO to AT&T for a tidy little sum. So let him play.

Wired science

Tue, 18 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

"Accelerating Science" is the tag line Chemdex liberally sprinkles on its marketing materials. It's definitely got the accelerating part right.

Barely into its third year of operations, Chemdex has already established itself as the business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce leader for life sciences research. And that description doesn't even begin to cover it. The fact of the matter is that it's hard to even talk about business-to-business e-commerce without making some sort of reference to Chemdex. It was the Chemdex online exchange, after all, that arguably offered the first compelling evidence of how Internet-based solutions might be used to unify and streamline otherwise fragmented markets.

The idea of using a virtual trading floor to bring together enterprises, researchers and suppliers may have occurred to others. But it was Dave Perry who took that next step and actually made it happen.

High-speed Net access that's out of this world

Mon, 13 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Even though Tachyon.net's satellite-based Internet access service won't formally launch until the New Year, it's already creating some buzz -- the sort of buzz that download rates of 45 Mbps can inspire. For those of us who are a little slow at math, that comes out to something around, oh, 30 times faster than T-1 access.

That alone is pretty spiffy -- but what may be even more interesting is that
Tachyon claims to have figured out how to deliver this, along with a superfast 256 Kbps upload path, via high-flying geosynchronous satellites. Stationed some 22,300 miles above the equator, these so-called "high-flying birds" have historically been considered a poor match for TCP/IP-based Internet traffic because of the considerable time required for signals to travel all that way. (That partly explains why investors like Bill Gates are backing Teledesic -- a $9 billion network of 288 low-orbit satellites, scheduled to launch in 2004.)