It Has Collected More Personal Data Than Any Other Organization in Human History

August 2012 | www.technologyreview.com p72 Why you will wear Google Goggles

p50 Will Germany’s clean-energy gamble sink Europe?

p80 Creating human organs on a microchip Published by MIT WHAT FACEBOOK KNOWS It has collected more personal data than any other organization in human history. What will it do with that information?

july12.cover.indd 1 6/6/12 9:47 AM Contents VOLUME 115, NUMBER 4

8 Feedback 56 12 From the Editor

NOTEBOOKS 10 Lesson Learned Fukushima should make nuclear energy safer than ever. By Jacopo Buongiorno 10 Data Dystopia With Facebook’s great power comes great responsibility. By Zeynep Tufekci 50 11 Safe Science Lessons from nanotech could be helpful for synthetic biology. By David Rejeski

UPFRONT 15–22 How A123 went wrong; looking for the next Instagram; the trouble with LED bulbs; P ayPal’s new leader 42 GRAPHITI 31 How Much Is a User Worth? FEATURES Putting the Facebook IPO hype in perspective. By Brian Bergstein 42 What Facebook Knows and Mike Orcutt The company’s social scientists are hunting for insights about Q&A

human behavior. What they ﬁnd could give Facebook new CO ways to cash in on our data—and remake our view of society. 32 Max Levchin VER: EM The PayPal cofounder thinks IL

By TOM SIMONITE Y startups should try for S HU

bigger things. R/ CO

By Conor Myhrvold RB

50 The Great German Energy Experiment IS Can a heavily industrialized country run on wind turbines and solar panels? We’re about to ﬁnd out. 22 By DAVID TALBOT

56 Biology’s Master Programmers Synthetic biologists promised to revolutionize how we make fuels and pharmaceuticals. But it turns out that programming new life forms isn’t so simple. By MICHAEL WALDHOLZ

2 technology review July/August 2012

July12 ToC.indd 2 6/6/12 3:42 PM Contents VOLUME 115, NUMBER 4

PHOTO ESSAY 72 You Will Want DEMO 34 Star Gazers Google Goggles 80 An Organ on a Chip Way out in a barren Chilean Go ahead and sneer. You’ll Microscale devices that mimic desert, the biggest telescope change your mind once you see human organs could speed the ever made is taking shape. the technology in action. discovery of new drugs. By Timothy Maher By Farhad Manjoo By Susan Young 75 Why Publishers BUSINESS REPORT Don’t Like Apps FROM THE LABS 63–68 The Value It turns out that apps aren’t 84 Materials the future of media after all. of Privacy 84 Energy Internet ads are a $70 billion The Web is. business built on data about By Jason Pontin 85 Information you. Has it gone too far? Technology 86 Biomedicine HACK

REVIEWS 79 Lithium-Ion Battery 70 The Facebook Fallacy We peel back the layers of 27 YEARS AGO IN TR Basically, Facebook is just a the power source for portable 88 Reshaping the website that sells ad space. Now electronics and electric cars. Human Species it needs an earthshaking idea. By Kevin Bullis Ethicist Peter Singer looked at By Michael Wolff new fertility aids and wondered where they would lead. By Timothy Maher

44 technology review July/August 2012

July12 ToC.indd 4 6/7/12 1:02 PM feedback

“10 Emerging Technologies,” May/June 2012 Belong “Of all the innovation going on in this country, Grow Timeline? Really? Shame on you.” Alec LaLonde, Salt Lake City, Utah Succeed

HigH SCHool college preparatory THE RAVAGES OF TIMELINE The May/ many other algorithms being speeded up by program for students June issue featured our annual list of this new shortcut. We are living in the age in grades 8–12 the year’s top technology breakthroughs of the algorithm—this is a big deal.” (“10 Emerging Technologies”), and as usual, readers took issue with some of LENDING AND MISSPENDING The U.S. our choices. The inclusion of Facebook’s Department of Energy’s loan program is “in Timeline seemed to be a particular point shambles,” wrote TR editor David Rotman of annoyance. Alec LaLonde of Salt Lake in “Can Energy Startups Be Saved?” Because City, Utah, wrote: “Please elaborate on of diminishing government help, Rotman how it will ‘have the greatest impact on concluded, the best bet for small energy the shape of innovation in years to come’? companies will be to partner with the large College Your entire supposition is based companies they might once transitional and associate on the collection of data for the have hoped to make obsolete. degree program for purpose of advertising—how “This sounds trite,” responded young adults does this at all help its users? dnwdfw, “but maybe compa- To them, Timeline is merely an nies need to grow organically, (often unwanted) restructur- without federal intervention. ing of a user’s homepage. And The vast majority of startups I suspect the lofty idea of a Web do fail, and that birthing pro- ‘permanent record’ is merely a cess actually weeds out the weak May/June 2012 side e!ect of maximizing data and marginal, allowing the ones collection, and not at all the primary goal. with the right DNA to thrive. It’s called the Facebook’s much-hyped IPO makes this market, and we need to let it work and stop Summer decision especially disconcerting. Of all the letting the feds pick the winners based on hands-on experiential innovation going on in this country, Time- politics and cronyism.” learning line? Really? Shame on you.” Sault, another online commenter, took Other choices drew much more praise, a di!erent tack: “DoE loans are problem- such as the faster Fourier transform—an atic nowadays because of gridlock in Con- e!ort by a quartet of MIT researchers to

create a new algorithm for processing data. JOIN THE DISCUSSION, OR CONTACT US “If I had to lay a bet as to which of these 10 E-mail [email protected] technologies will have the most e!ect over Write Technology Review, One Main Street, the next ﬁve years, I would put my money 13th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02142 Fax 617-475-8043 Serving Students with Nonverbal on this one,” wrote ptmmac in an online Learning Differences and Asperger’s Please include your address, telephone number, comment. “We are talking about sending and e-mail address. Letters and comments may more information with less bandwidth, and be edited for both clarity and length.

technology review July/August 2012

July12 Feedback.indd 8 6/4/12 9:09 AM gress concerning the budget and frivolous investigations conducted solely for political reasons. U.S. solar companies are hurting because China is dumping solar panels on the world market at unfairly While the world beneﬁ ts low prices due to currency manipulation, meager wages, unsafe working conditions from what’s new, IEEE can for employees, zero government oversight, and massive overt and hidden subsidies. focus you on what’s next. Let’s get rid of fossil-fuel subsidies and make those companies pay for the damage their products cause to people’s health and the environment.”

CHARM: OFFENSIVE? Is Siri, the new iPhone’s personal assistant, really breaking new ground in artificial intelligence? Or does it use wit and charm to cover up its shortcomings? TR’s online editor, Will Knight, tackled this question in “Social Intelligence” and found that AI has a long way to go—though he found Siri’s charm irresistible anyway. Alexanderm responded: “Does the charm of Siri’s personality provide lasting benefits, beyond the novelty e!ect? Anecdotally, several colleagues have said they’re a bit tired of smart-alecky replies.” “Back in the early ’80s,” wrote cvmichael, “I attended an AI conference and Nicholas Negroponte opened his talk by saying AI is 95 percent artificial and 5 percent intelli- Develop for tomorrow with gent. That said, Siri is fun to use and much better than Vlingo and Evi, at least for now.” today’s most-cited research.

BELIEVE THE HYPE Our photo essay Over 3 million full-text technical documents on Tesla’s manufacturing ﬂoor (“Building can power your R&D and speed time to market. Tesla”) got some readers debating whether t *&&&+PVSOBMTBOE$POGFSFODF1SPDFFEJOHT Elon Musk’s high-end electric vehicles were worth all the hype. To which flipd t *&&&4UBOEBSET responded: “I keep hearing that same tired t *&&&8JMFZF#PPLT-JCSBSZ argument from critics that if a car isn’t sell- t *&&&F-FBSOJOH-JCSBSZ ing 200,000 units, it’s a failure. The Cor- t 1MVTDPOUFOUGSPNTFMFDUQVCMJTIJOHQBSUOFST vette sold only 13,000 units in 2011. It’s an expensive sports car that not everyone can a!ord, but they keep making them, don’t IEEE Xplore® Digital Library they? People will pay a premium to have Discover a smarter research experience. something a normal car won’t do. In the case of the Corvette, it’s speed and handling. With the Volt, it’s the technology and the idea that for your average commute you will hardly ever have to ﬁll up with gas. The Tesla is a no-brainer, in my opinion. Less than a Corvette, more luxurious, almost as Request a Free Trial fast, and you don’t have to pay for gas.” www.ieee.org/tryieeexplore

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July12 Feedback.indd 9 6/4/12 9:10 AM notebooks

in the world, and seismic and tsunami risks SOCIAL NETWORKING in Germany are practically nonexistent. The decision seemed to be more the result of Data Dystopia politics and public fear than of logic. Zeynep Tufekci says Facebook’s Most countries using nuclear energy were more rational. The U.S., the U.K., power over our social lives comes France, China, and South Korea, among with great responsibility. others, studied the Fukushima accident closely so that they could reduce the like- ystopias in the 20th century came lihood of similar events at their own plants. mostly in two flavors: the impos- These countries restated their commit- Ding surveillance state, as depicted ment to the safe and secure development in Orwell’s 1984, and the stupefying pleasure of nuclear energy as a way to combat global dome, as in Huxley’s Brave New World. What warming and ensure energy independence. if these were not separate nightmares? The ENERGY A number of countries with young nuclear real threat could be surveillance in the ser- energy programs, such as the United Arab vice of seduction rather than punishment. Lesson Learned Emirates, Turkey, Vietnam, and Poland, Facebook is so successful because it helps The Fukushima disaster should did not significantly alter their plans after us fulfill the urge to remain connected to Fukushima. one another. That urge has led about a bil- make nuclear energy safer than The consensus now is that the tsunami lion of us to provide a single company with ever, says Jacopo Buongiorno. protection system at the Fukushima plant imprints of a sizable part of our social lives was “underdesigned.” When a nuclear plant (see “What Facebook Knows,” p. 42). n March 11, 2011, one of the stron- loses o!-site power, it needs on-site AC and As a social scientist, I’m terribly excited by gest earthquakes in recorded his- DC power sources to activate safety systems this data trove, because it’s a great resource Otory struck Japan’s northeast coast. and read instrumentation. At Fukushima, for studying the human animal. Emerging The earthquake and the tsunami that fol- those backup sources were in poorly pro- “big data” sources—Facebook is one of the lowed killed more than 20,000 people and tected rooms that were overwhelmed by best—have the potential to contribute to our caused over $200 billion in property dam- the large waves of water. understanding of society. But this informa- age. The tsunami also disabled critical safety Protecting on-site AC and DC power tion has uses that go beyond targeting ads. systems at the Fukushima-Daichii nuclear sources in waterproof, fireproof rooms is Though the prospect doesn’t seem to faze power plant, resulting in damage to its fuel the simplest way to defend nuclear plants Facebook users so far, it could be used to rods and a large release of radioactivity. against natural events such as floods, fires, target civic, political, and social messaging Scary though the accident looked and hurricanes, and tornadoes. U.S. plants are in ways that are unhealthy for democracy. sounded in the media, its radiological con- already well equipped thanks to measures Political campaigns, for example, now sequences are negligible. Nobody has died taken after September 11, 2001. Follow- encourage voters to connect with their from radiation exposure. The Japanese ing the disaster in Fukushima, the U.S. Facebook apps or pages, which can access government evacuated tens of thousands nuclear industry took voluntary action in-depth data about not just a person but people from the area surrounding the plant to strengthen protections against natu- his or her social networks and interactions. to avoid radiation doses that would have ral disasters. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory This creates opportunities for profiling at had no measurable e!ect on their health. Commission recently formalized require- unprecedented precision and scale. I am On the other side of the world, as the acci- ments for extended protection against such waiting for the first wave of vicious negative dent was still unfolding, Germany chose to events in current and future plants. Nuclear political campaigning on Facebook. (Most shut down its nuclear plants and replace energy will emerge even safer after Fuku- of us might not even notice it, since it could their output with energy from renewable shima, just as it has after previous accidents. be narrowly targeted to a receptive niche, sources (see “The Great German Energy It will continue to produce clean and reli- or even to individuals.) N

Experiment,” p. 50), a decision compara- able power for the beneﬁt of humanity. The way Facebook uses its collected data ICK

ble to giving up driving because a friend can inﬂuence our social interactions. Face- REDDYHOFF Jacopo Buongiorno, associate professor of nuclear crashed a car on a dangerous road. German science and engineering at MIT, works on thermal book’s news feed does not show all updates, nuclear plants are among the best-operated hydraulics and the safety of nuclear power plants. or even the most recent, but rather what

10 Notebooks technology review July/August 2012

july12.notebooks.indd 10 6/6/12 5:21 PM BIOLOGY can have lasting e!ects—witness European consumers’ rejection of genetically modi- Safe Science fied foods. We should learn from what Lessons from nanotechnology helped nanotechnology break free of the hysteria. can help synthetic biology As nanotechnology matured, federal mature, says David Rejeski. spending on research into its environmental, health, and safety risks increased—from ynthetic biology—the science of $38 million in 2006 to an estimated $103 engineering systems from biologi- million in 2012. In 2008, the National Sci- Scal organisms or parts—could have a ence Foundation and the Environmental significant impact on our lives. Numerous Protection Agency invested $38 million products based on this technology, including to establish two centers to address nano- bioplastics, pesticides, biofuels, and drugs technology’s environmental implications. to treat diabetes, cholera, and cancer (see A similar commitment should be made for Facebook thinks will make you click or com- “Biology’s Master Programmers,” p. 56), are synthetic biology. There are complex, legiti- ment. News-feed algorithms create spirals already on the market or close to it. mate questions about how synthetic organ- of reinforcement for certain behaviors. The That march from lab bench to market isms can be contained, whether they can details are secret, but reverse-engineering is under scrutiny from venture capitalists, survive in the environment, and whether shows that Facebook thinks photos gener- politicians touting the new bio-economy— their genes will transfer to other organ- ate more engagement than text; updates and the usual naysayers. This last group isms. These questions will not be answered with them are featured more prominently, warns of scientists “playing God” and fears quickly or cheaply, but answering them will leading to even more engagement. Even that terrorists could exploit the technology open doors to future markets. without explicit instruction, people will for cheap bioweapons. Friends of the Earth By shouldering some of the responsibil- undoubtedly pick up on these cues and and other organizations have called for a ity, the synthetic-biology industry can also start posting ever more photos. In other moratorium, insisting that capitalism yield help build public trust, as DuPont did in ways, too, Facebook may be guiding how to the precautionary principle. 2007 by working with the Environmental we socialize. Perhaps cheery posts get more This scenario is familiar to anybody Defense Fund to develop a risk manage- prominence. Perhaps we will one day learn with a memory going back 10 years. Nano- ment framework for nanotech. The press of a suicide following a brief, cryptic status technology was once discussed in similarly could also help by better communicating update that no one responded to because hyperbolic terms, with scientists talking the real issues rather than, for example, Facebook downgraded it on people’s news up its Earth-saving capacities and oppo- suggesting tenuous links between the small feed upon judging it not to be the kind of nents warning that self-replicating nano- amateur biotech scene and the H5N1 bird- post that generates clicks. bots could devour the planet. The fervor has flu virus. Finally, synthetic biology would I do not claim there are easy answers to since cooled, and the global nanotechnology benefit from a coherent, long-term national the questions Facebook raises. Any algo- market is expected to reach $30.4 billion by strategy and better international coördina- rithm for the news feed would have its 2015, according to Global Industry Analysts. tion. The Obama administration’s National downside. But the questions are important When the public is confronted with new Bioeconomy Blueprint, released in April, because Facebook occupies an important technologies, trust is volatile, and mistrust is only a start. civic niche. Decisions about how it uses its In his provocative 2000 essay “Why the hoard of data, what it makes public, and how Future Doesn’t Need Us,” computing pio- much access it gives political and corporate neer Bill Joy claimed that robotics, genetic campaigns will a!ect us all. We need to be engineering, and nanotech were making it talking not just about the potential of this possible to construct “technology that may awesome data store but about the power the replace our species.” We are still here, but company has and the ethics it upholds. we shouldn’t let our guard down.

Zeynep Tufekci is an assistant professor at the Uni- David Rejeski is the director of the Science & Tech- versity of North Carolina and a fellow at the Berkman nology Innovation Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. Center in Washington, D.C.

www.technologyreview.com Notebooks 11

july12.notebooks.indd 11 6/6/12 5:21 PM From the Editor

The Planetary Experiment What is Facebook doing with its unprecedentedly large network?

mid all the chatter about Facebook’s whose 12 researchers form “a kind of Bell Labs recent initial public o!ering of stock— for the social-networking age.” The feature’s A much of it determinedly superficial author, Tom Simonite, writes that the members (was the IPO bungled by its underwriters?); “apply math, programming skills, and social some of it substantive, at least for investors science to mine our data for insights that they (what was an appropriate valuation for the hope will advance Facebook’s business.” company?); and a quantum clarifying (see The group is led by Cameron Marlow, who Michael Wol!’s review “The Facebook Fallacy” is quick to minimize the impact of his work on on page 70, which argues that the company the larger world. “Marlow says his team wants lacks “the big idea”)—left unspoken was the to divine the rules of online social life to under- general assumption that the social network stand what’s going on inside Facebook, not to was monstrous. develop ways to manipulate it. ‘Our goal is not Facebook is disquieting for several reasons: to change the pattern of communication in soci- because it is the largest network ever to be con- ety,’ he says.” But Simonite is skeptical: “Some of trolled by a single company; because its cor- his team’s work and the attitudes of Facebook’s porate values (insofar as they can be guessed leaders show that the company is not above from its technologies and mission “to make using its platform to tweak users’ behavior. the world more open and connected”) sug- Unlike academic social scientists, Facebook’s gest a commitment to a “radical transparency” employees have a short path from an idea to an that is new to human a!airs; and because, as experiment on hundreds of millions of people.” we entrust more of our personal information Simonite provides some examples of the to its databases (“dumb fucks,” the company’s tweaks possible. They are blameless, if spooky. chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, once called But as a publicly traded company, Facebook is his early customers), we are learning that we now dedicated to returning value to its inves- are its principal assets. (To learn how Facebook tors. Its interests are not those of its users. hopes to use its 900 million users to market The frontispiece to the original, 1651 edition products and services, see “You Are the Ad,” of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan was an etching May/June 2011.) by Abraham Bosse showing a crowned giant The planetary scale of Facebook’s network, emerging from behind a hill: his torso and its ideology, and its store of data have sug- arms were composed of more than 300 figures, gested an irresistible idea to the company’s turned inward. It is an apt visual metaphor for technologists: that they should conduct experi- the emerging commonwealth of Facebook. ments upon humanity in real time. So far, Mark Zuckerberg has sometimes compared those experiments have been benign, but the Facebook to a nation. (If it were one, it would fact that they are being conducted at all has be the third most populous on the planet.) At the jarring, science-fictional strangeness of the the moment, we have no theory of how such a truly novel. virtual commonwealth should be governed, or This issue’s cover story, “What Facebook what obligations the crown has to its people. MAR K OSTOW Knows” (p. 42), reveals the group conduct- But write and tell me what you think at ing the experiments: the Data Science Team, jason [email protected].

12 From the Editor technology review July/August 2012

July12 Editor Letter.indd 12 6/6/12 12:59 PM COMPUTING ENERGY WEB BIOMEDICINE The Next Get Juice Out of PayPal’s New A Better Way to upfront Instagram an Electric Car Leader Restore Vision p. 18 p. 18 p. 20 p. 22

CEO David Vieau explains one application of A123’s technology to President George W. Bush at the White House in 2007. CHARLES DHARAPAK/AP CHARLES

ENERGY ing, and tax credits and grants from the government, it had raised about $1 billion. What Happened to Its stock price nearly doubled shortly after the IPO as investors clamored for a piece of a hot clean-tech company. hen A123 Systems went public Three years later, A123’s situation looks A123? in 2009, things could not have very di! erent. The company’s shares, once Wlooked better. worth more than $25, trade for less than Once the rising star of the A123 boasted advanced lithium-ion bat- $1. A123 loses money on every battery it clean-tech industry, the tery technology, developed at MIT, that sells, and after years of increasing losses, promised to popularize electric cars by it’s desperate for capital to stay aﬂ oat. What advanced battery maker making batteries more powerful, safer, and happened? faces an uncertain future. longer-lasting. The company had factories For one thing, A123 depended too heav- capable of producing millions of batteries ily on a single customer, the electric-car per year. Between the IPO, private fund- maker Fisker. When Fisker failed to bring

www.technologyreview.com Upfront 15

july12.upfront.indd 15 6/5/12 8:06 PM upfront

It allows you, as a parent, to monitor kids’ driving behavior Raz Dar, a manager at AT&T’s busi- in real time. And if your kid is SMS-ing while driving, you will ness incubator in Ra’anana, Israel, “ talking about a prototype cloud-based be able to log it—and even remotely disable the phone. ” system for monitoring teen drivers. its Karma sedan to market in time, it cut Mounting Losses and Falling Expectations back orders for batteries. A123 has never been proﬁtable, and its net losses have grown every year But A123’s problems also reflect the since 2005. That’s partly because it costs more to make its batteries than challenges facing many startups in highly A123 can sell them for. competitive energy markets. Not only is it $22.44 expensive to commercialize and manufac- 300 ture energy-related products—A123 has $257.8 20 250 spent well over $300 million on equip- 15 ment and other capital expenses over the 200 $152.9 $9.54 last three and a half years—but it is also 150 10

$86.6 price Stock risky. In A123’s case, the company appeared 100 $80.4

Net losses (millions) losses Net 5 $31 to scale up too quickly. As it rushed to ramp 50 $14.3 $15.8 $1.61 $1.02 up production for Fisker, it produced some 0 0 defective battery cells, leading to a costly 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2009 2010 2011 May 2012 recall and replacement program. Year-end prices except where noted A123 has contracts to supply batteries for several brands of vehicles over the next and chemistry at Dalhousie University, in years to fulfill warranty obligations, and few years, including GM’s upcoming Spark. Halifax, “A123 has a very impressive battery A123’s financial troubles could scare some The company says it can become profitable system. It can provide very high power, and of them o!. eventually—if it can raise enough money it works really well at low temperature. But EV sales have been sluggish because the to keep going until those supply contracts unfortunately, it doesn’t have all the ingre- cars cost up to twice as much as their gas- kick in over the next couple of years—and dients that a successful lithium-ion battery fueled equivalents. Batteries—which sell for that the contracts will allow it to achieve technology needs to have.” In particular, over $10,000—are one of the biggest rea- the volumes necessary for exploiting econo- Dahn says, A123’s battery lacks a low-cost sons, even though automakers are buying mies of scale. method of energy storage. them for less than it costs to make them. That path appears daunting. Andrea A123 is drumming up business in other A123 talks about lowering its costs as it pro- James, an analyst for the investment bank markets; for example, it’s selling batteries duces batteries in greater numbers, but this Dougherty & Company, estimates that A123 to help stabilize the electrical grid. But it may not do much to make electric vehicles needs to sell nearly 50,000 electric-vehicle surely will remain heavily reliant on electric cheaper; it would just help A123 by finally battery packs a year—more than a tenfold cars, whose sales overall have been disap- allowing it to make money on what it sells. increase over last year’s sales. pointing. To make matters worse, it’s not Those hoping for a revolutionary technol- She also says that the company must clear whether A123 will hold on to EV mak- ogy that will make electric vehicles a!ord- make technical advances to become prof- ers as customers. Automakers need to feel able may need to look elsewhere. itable. Says Je! Dahn, a professor of physics sure a company will be around for many —kevin bullis

TO MARKET encrypted connections requires Secret Connections the phone on each end to have a TrustChip installed in its mem- TrustChip No ordinary memory card, the ory slot. Apps can then route TrustChip can upgrade any calls and messages via the chip COMPANY KoolSpan CO phone to make super-secure and its 32-bit encryption pro- UR encrypted calls and data cessor. The product is aimed TESY OF KOOLSP PRICE Undisclosed transfers—which would usu- at organizations, like security AVAILABILITY Now ally require expensive special- services and banks, that worry ized mobile devices. Making about eavesdropping. AN

16 Upfront technology review July/August 2012

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There are two kinds of people: Some people who say, ‘I’m not going to Bernardo Huberman, an HP give you my data at all unless you give me a million bucks.’ And there are researcher who is creating a mar- “ ket to let people realize some of the a lot of people who say, ‘I don’t care, I’ll give it to you for little.’ ” value in their personal information.

COMPUTING WHAT’S THE NEXT INSTAGRAM? In the wake of Facebook’s billion-dollar purchase of the mobile photo service, video-sharing apps are jostling to become the next big thing.

Sharing photos from mobile users who are clamoring creative edge by adding devices has become hugely to make little flicks on their e!ects such as filters and popular, but many mobile- phones and send them to background music. app developers are already friends online. Even if you don’t create moving past still images to With this in mind, I a prize-winning film, you’ll video. Free video-sharing reviewed several of these have fun developing your apps like Viddy and Social- video apps. The best ones inner auteur. cam have quickly gained let you give your videos a —rachel metz

Socialcam Viddy AVAILABILITY: Android and iPhone AVAILABILITY: iPhone only TO MARKET SHARING: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, SHARING: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Posterous, Tumblr, Dropbox, e-mail, and SMS e-mail, and SMS Home Unlike most other apps, this Viddy is devoted to clips no one doesn’t limit video length. longer than 15 seconds. It’s full Power Before you shoot, you select one of features, such as a handy on- of Socialcam’s filters, such as the screen sound meter that lets you Supply flashback-inducing “Grunge” or the Tron- keep an eye on volume. When you’ve finished like “Electronica.” After you’ve shot, you can taking a video, you can change its look by add- Owners of the electric Nissan pick a soundtrack from a variety of cheesy ing a filter; each also has a soundtrack that Leaf in Japan can now use their prerecorded tunes. Socialcam is indeed very you can adjust or turn o!. I liked the ability to cars as backup power supplies social: the app has more ways to share videos adjust the strength of a filter, which is useful for their homes. Nissan’s Leaf than any other one I tried. So many choices if, say, you’re using the production pack Snoop to Home system converts DC can make the app’s interface feel too crowded, Dogg created for Viddy but want just a hint of power from the car’s battery though. the smoky haze layer it typically imposes. to AC power compatible with home appliances. Once con- Cinemagram Tout nected to a household electrical AVAILABILITY: iPhone only AVAILABILITY: Android and iPhone panel, it delivers power through SHARING: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and e-mail SHARING: Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, and SMS existing wiring to plugs through- This addictive app lets you cre- Tout also limits you to 15- second out the house. The Leaf stores ate hauntingly beautiful anima- videos. Its no-frills setup makes enough electricity to supply tions that combine video with it very simple to quickly share an average Japanese home for still imagery. After you take a clips with friends. Tout has no about two days. short video, Cinemagram will show you the filters to choose from, and you can’t use the first frame of the clip. You then use your fin- iPhone’s digital zoom. You just shoot your

Leaf to Home ger to shade in the portion of the screen you video while a little on-screen clock counts CO UR

want to animate; the rest of the image will down the seconds to zero. After record- TESY OF HP; COMPANY Nissan Motor remain static. If you shoot a video of friends ing a clip, you can add a note to describe it

PRICE ¥330,000 ($4,200) dancing and highlight only their shadows, and choose a social network to share it on or KY you’ll create a still shot of your friends with e-mail a link to your friends. You can easily ODO/A

AVAILABILITY Now, in Japan their shadows boogying over and over. watch other users’ creations. P

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I’m sure the iPhone 10 will have a“ DNA-sequencing module. Andreas Sundquist, CEO of DNANexus, a” startup offering an online genomic analysis service.

RANT The Problem of Path Dependence and LED Light Bulbs Why are we cramming 21st-century technology into a socket designed by Edison?

GE’s Energy ED lights, mass-produced as tiny pressure. And people were used Smart LED so too do our technology, eco- individual diodes, can be configured to gas lamps, whose fixtures (above) is made to nomics, and mind-set limit the Linto any shape you can imagine. In could be repurposed for electric last for 23 years. ways in which we can progress. the future, they could cover large surfaces, lights. Because of this, more Our world is full of light curved or flat, mimicking the light that than 100 years later, we have to cram sockets and electrical wiring that can’t comes through windows and skylights. LEDs into something that requires space- be reconfigured without punching holes They can be used to create di!use or con- age fins to keep it from overheating? in the wall, which is why we’re stuck centrated illumination, in a radiant or In economics and social science, this with LED light bulbs that exploit only beam configuration. Yet for all their flex- phenomenon is known as “path depen- a fraction of this technology’s potential. ibility, the way they’re most likely to show dence.” The simplistic definition of path Path dependence seems simultaneously up is as something that looks approxi- dependence is that “history matters,” but insane and unavoidable. Yet perhaps we mately like a light bulb and gets screwed there’s an even better way to think about can avoid it with new standards and new into a traditional light socket. it, and that’s as a sort of evolutionary con- notions of how and where to place lights That is ridiculous. Edison’s bulb had to straint. Just as evolution is forced to build that are infinitely more flexible than the be roughly spherical in order to contain a upon what came before, preserving and sort we’ve grown up with. vacuum while withstanding atmospheric reusing parts (like genes) along the way, —christopher mims

Many big retailers now Why is that beneﬁcial? How can P ayPal maintain 1let me use PayPal at the 2 That becomes a tool for the 3 an advantage while other register. All I do is provide my merchant to treat you [better]. If companies develop mobile cell-phone number and PIN. you go to Peet’s coffee in San payment systems? Will we soon stop carrying Francisco but now you want Innovation at scale in payments cash and credit cards? to go to Peet’s coffee in Palo is really hard. It’s really easy to Ultimately the consumers will Alto, you’re greeted by your get some initial buzz when you decide how they want to pay. name despite the fact that it’s launch a product. [But] to this THREE QUESTIONS FOR But the payment experience, your ﬁrst time in that store. They day, no one has succeeded

to me, is going to move out of know what your favorite drink in signing up consumers at a CO UR

DAVID the way. My favorite [example] is, and they’ll prepare it for you. meaningful scale for a digital TESY OF GE; CO MARCUS is location-based payments, We remove the friction from the wallet service—no one except where the merchant knows payment experience—nobody us. We need to continue inno-

The new head of UR

you’re in the store and the likes to pay, everybody likes to vating, [but] as long as we con- TESY OF P PayPal is pushing transaction happens with no shop—but we also enable you tinue doing that, because we

the service into friction, ﬂawlessly, without you to have the best possible shop- have the scale advantage, we’ll AYPAL physical stores. doing anything. ping experience. be ﬁne. —RACHEL METZ

20 Upfront technology review July/August 2012

july12.upfront.indd 20 6/5/12 8:06 PM upfront

The percentage of U.S. home solar-panel installations SolarCity’s percentage in 2011. That is more handled by SolarCity in 2010. The company deals with than double the share anyone else has, according 6 solar’s high cost by leasing panels to customers. 13 to GTM Research.

This photovoltaic retinal prosthesis is a ﬂexible TO MARKET sheet of silicon pixels that convert light into electrical signals, which can be picked up by neurons in the eye. A scanning-electron micrograph shows Light- the implant in a pig’s eye. Powered image data, or both to a chip inside the ret- iPad ina. The more hardware that’s installed in the body, the greater the risk to the patient. And Keyboard the complexities of the electronics have typically limited the pixel counts of these systems, This combination iPad case inhibiting image quality. and keyboard from Logitech The new design, described in the journal uses a photovoltaic technol- 100 µm Nature Photonics, gets around these problems ogy called dye-sensitized by using light as a power source. solar cells, which are highly BIOMEDICINE The device, designed by researchers at efﬁcient at producing elec- Stanford University, combines infrared video- tricity from indoor light. The A Smarter projection goggles with a small, wire-free chip photovoltaic cells recharge implanted inside the retina. A camera on the an onboard battery that Prosthetic for goggles transmits video to an image processor, provides power to the key- which sends a signal back to infrared projection board—which is part of the the Eye screens inside the goggles. The infrared image case that protects the iPad. is picked up by a compact array of photovoltaic These cells are made by A new type of implant requires less pixels implanted right where light-sensing cells G24 Innovations in Cardiff, hardware than existing devices and would be in a healthy eye. Each pixel contains Wales, based on technology could restore more vision. three infrared-sensitive diodes facing the inside originally invented in 1991 by NATURE Michael Grätzel at the Swiss of the eye. The diodes convert light into elec- PHOTO etinal implants powered by light could tricity that’s pulsed out to the nerve cells by Federal Institute of Technol- N reverse some vision loss with simple electrodes facing the back of the eye. ogy in Lausanne, Switzerland. ICS /STANFORD R surgery. Other researchers have tried to develop The new implant, which works like a com- photovoltaic retinal implants, but they failed Solar Keyboard Folio ; CO

bination digital imaging chip and photovoltaic because an implant couldn’t get adequate UR

COMPANY Logitech T array, requires much less bulky hardware than power from “the light that you get into the back ESY OF LOGITECH

previous designs. The devices have yet to be of the retina at the equator on a sunny day,” PRICE $130 tested in live animals or human patients, but says Stanford researcher James Loudin. That’s the implants are exciting researchers because why the Stanford system doesn’t rely on light AVAILABILITY Now they might restore more vision than other reti- that comes into the eye, using the projection nal prosthetics being worked on. system to intensify it instead. Infrared light is People su!ering from some forms of blind- used because that won’t damage eye tissues and ness, including macular degeneration (the most will not be picked up by any remaining light- common cause of blindness among older peo- sensitive cells in the eye, which would muddle ple), have lost the light-sensing cells in the ret- image perception, Loudin says. ina but still have the underlying nerve cells that The Stanford scientists are experimenting convey visual information to the brain. Reti- with various designs, including a ﬂexible sili- nal implants use electrodes to stimulate those con array that can bend to the curvature of the nerves. Typically, the prosthetics require bulky eye. The next step is a few years of safety testing electronics that sit on the eye to supply power, before clinical trials. —katherine bourzac

22 Upfront technology review July/August 2012

july12.upfront.indd 22 6/6/12 3:36 PM The Spanish health care system has consistently spent less as a percentage of GDP than other industrialized countries, while its PRODUCING citizens have enjoyed what the World Health Organization considers to be one of the very best health care systems. This has been ENERGY, RENEWABLY achieved to no small degree because of the efforts and successes of Last year, under the brilliant sun in the south of Spain, a concen- Spanish companies. trating solar power (CSP) plant called Gemasolar began operations. The Spanish government, and Spanish companies, also bet heavily The 19.9 megawatt plant is the world’s fi rst commercial-scale tower on renewable energy, and they are now enjoying the rewards. Not CSP system to incorporate a storage system, allowing it to operate only does Spain boast a record percentage of electricity generated when the sun is not shining. (CSP is also known as “solar thermal,” by renewable sources—wind, solar thermal power, and photovoltaic since it capitalizes on the sun’s heat.) panels—but the companies that made it possible have since taken The plant’s 2,650 heliostats, each with120 square meters of mir- the lead in some of the most signifi cant international renewable rors, direct the sun’s rays to the top of the 450-foot pillar, where energy projects. molten salts are heated to a temperature above 500°C. That heat In the article that follows, you’ll read about many accomplishments transforms water into steam, which turns turbines that generate elec- of Spanish companies, in sectors that span a wide range of technolo- tricity. Most important, the salts retain their daytime heat well into gies. Spain’s advances have led to success for industries not just in Spain, the evening hours. The plant can provide stored power for as long but around the world. as 15 hours so the tower can meet peak evening demand, around 8:00 PM in winter and 10:00 PM in summer. Torresol, a joint ven- Introduction by KATHLEEN D. KENNEDY ture of the Spanish engineering company Sener and Abu Dhabi’s President, MIT Enterprise Forum; Chief Strategy Offi cer, Technology Review renewable energy company Masdar, designed and built the tower. Gemasolar is the latest of Spain’s many successes in renewable energy, both at home and overseas. Spain’s government, concerned about the country’s dependency on oil and its relatively tenuous connection to the greater European power grid, created favorable conditions for renewable energy in Spain, particularly solar (both photovoltaic panels and solar thermal) and wind power. Spain leads Europe in wind-generated electricity, and its installed capacity ranks among the highest in the world. Spain leads the world in installed solar thermal capacity, boasting more than double that of the second-place United States. The U.S. provides a strong market for Spanish CSP companies. Abengoa is developing California’s Mojave Solar, a solar thermal plant that will come online in 2014 and, with 280 megawatts of capacity, provide power for 54,000 homes. Mojave Solar will be the 16th Abengoa-developed solar thermal plant, and its second in the U.S. (Another is currently under construction in Arizona.) Another company, Acciona, has built a solar thermal plant in Nevada. When it comes to solar thermal, says Luis Crespo, director of the Spanish solar thermal industry association Protermosolar, “most of the projects in the U.S. depend on Spanish technical assistance,” even for installations not headed by Spanish companies. Wind power continues to generate excitement as the relatively mature industry moves into new territories. Iberdrola, an interna-

tional leader in wind farm operations, has completed the construc- PHOTO tion of one of the world’s largest wind farms, with 304 megawatts of :

installed capacity, in Ohio. That farm also includes technology from © wind-turbine powerhouse Gamesa, which supplied 152 turbines. TORRESOL Gemasolar is a concentrating solar Both companies manufacture and operate technology for wind plant in southern Spain that can provide

farms across the U.S., and in fact across most of the world. Iber- ENERGY power when the sun is not shining. drola has installed more than 13,000 megawatts of capacity in 23 countries and is also moving into offshore wind. The Spanish

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Spain.Insert.June2012.indd 2 6/1/12 2:35 PM Spain’s high-speed rail network has garnered praise from around the world.

enterprise Acciona, which operates on four continents, is the leading wind power company in Mexico. FROM CITY TO CITY The recent growth of wind and solar in the U.S. has come about in The road between Madrid and Barcelona, Spain’s two largest cit- part because of the Obama administration’s interest in promoting the ies and the country’s economic centers, stretches nearly 400 miles, development of energy from multiple sources, including renewables. roughly the same distance as from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Speaking at a Spanish conference on “smart cities” in June, 2011, By automobile, this trip takes about six hours. But by high-speed Joseph Hurd, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s senior director for rail, which cruises smoothly at an average of 200 mph, the trip export promotion and trade policy, discussed the proposed American takes just over 2.5 hours. Power Act (which attempts to set standards for energy savings and The Madrid-Barcelona line opened in early 2008 and is one the emissions of harmful gasses) and the American Recovery and of the key achievements of the Spanish high-speed rail network, Reinvestment Act of 2009 (which supports renewable energy). Hurd which has garnered praise from around the world. Spain’s web of noted that Spain is the ninth-largest investor in renewable energy more than 1,800 miles of high-speed lines is centered on Madrid in the U.S., and second in terms of investment growth, employing and also links cities along its coasts; the country is second only to 70,000 Americans. China in high-speed track mileage. Spain was also the ﬁ rst country Spanish companies design critical parts and systems to support to equip its high-speed network with the most advanced signal- these massive renewable energy installations. Gamesa, which contin- ing system, which will eventually become the European standard. ues to innovate in blade and turbine design, has provided the technol- This domestic experience has given Spanish companies expertise ogy for more than 24,000 megawatts of wind power in 35 countries. in rail construction and management, train building, signaling, and And Siliken has been recognized internationally for the quality of its the accompanying telecommunications and control systems that PV modules; it has developed proprietary systems to purify solar- high-speed rail demands to compete on the international market. grade silicon. The company recently opened a new manufacturing “We have a model in Spain that has worked because citizens facility, Siliken’s fourth factory, in Ontario. (Siliken also operates in and politicians have supported railways,” says Pedro Fortea, direc- PHOTO

Spain, Romania, and Mexico.) Siliken has also begun production of tor of MAFEX, the Spanish railway association. “So people from : a signiﬁ cantly more efﬁ cient solar cell, which will lead to a reduction other countries come to see what we’ve done—how we have cities INDRA in both the size of a given installation and its cost. with trams, metros, and integrated public transport systems, with

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Spain.Insert.June2012.indd 3 6/1/12 2:35 PM high-speed connections with airports—and how institutions and private companies together have fi nanced these projects. These are PURIFYING WATER excellent references for Spanish companies.” In the 1960s, Spain’s government saw a potential problem brewing. Spanish companies have completed or are involved in rail proj- The rocky, sunlit Canary Islands, off the coast of northern Africa, ects in more than 90 countries on fi ve continents, including Tur- were attracting tourists in increasing numbers. But while there was key, Brazil, the U.S., India, and Ireland, and countries across North plenty of space to house those tourists, the supply of potable water Africa and Central Asia. One Spanish consortium—CAF is fur- could not increase to meet the demand. And so Spain turned a nishing the trains, the OHL group is in charge of engineering and challenge into an opportunity. The government invested in devel- construction, and Dimetronic is supplying signals—won the bid- oping brand-new technology that uses membranes to fi lter the salt ding for construction of a high-speed line between Ankara and out of salt water, and Spanish companies eventually developed the Istanbul. OHL also recently won a contract to extend the Miami- technologies to utilize those membranes in treatment plants. The Dade County Metrorail to the nearby airport. result: Europe’s fi rst desalination plants. India presents major opportunities for Spanish rail companies: Today, Spain produces more desalinated water than any other the Talgo train manufacturing company will soon be opening an country in Europe, and is one of the world’s top producers. Spain’s offi ce there, and CAF is already building a factory in New Delhi. more than 500 plants treat more than 200 billion gallons of water The engineering company Ineco won the feasibility study contract per year. for one of India’s planned high-speed lines. “In only a short period of time in Spain, we developed a great deal In the most signifi cant news for the Spanish rail industry, a of infrastructure,” says Angel Cajigas, director of ATTA, the Spanish consortium of a dozen Spanish companies and public authorities business association for water treatment. “And this has given us a lot was recently awarded a 12-year contract to construct, operate, and maintain a new high-speed line between Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia, in partnership with the Saudi Railway Organization. This rail consortium is the largest one created to date by Span- ish companies, and the project is the largest so far of its kind. Talgo, one of the country’s two top train manufacturers, will supply the trains. OHL, Copasa, and Imathia will develop the infrastructure, and Dimetronic will supply the signaling. The information company Indra will manage telecommunications and control, and Cobra, Inabensa, and OHL will install the electrical infrastructure. Three government-owned companies will also provide services to the Saudi project: Renfe, Spain’s national service provider, will manage operations, and its infrastructure administrator, Adif, will provide the critical expertise for the management of stations and traffi c control. Ineco, a government transportation consulting company, serves as the project’s lead contractor. “Even though we have a lot of experience developed in Spain, this is a huge opportunity to show our experience abroad,” says José Solorza, Ineco’s Asia and Africa area manager. Manuel Benegas, director of operations at Ineco, estimates that the on-track tests should begin by the end of 2014. The Spanish Minis- try of Development hopes to capitalize on this success to sell similar complete projects in the U.S., Russia, and Brazil, whose governments have stated their commitment to developing high-speed rail. Advances in transportation management extend beyond railways, onto highways and city roads as well. Spanish companies are world leaders in the management of toll roads, expert at developing and integrating sensors and barrier-free tolls to enhance traffi c fl ow The Alicante desalination plant is one of more than

ACCIONA and make ticketing easy. Other companies are pioneering park- : five hundred in Spain. ing guidance systems, which direct drivers to free spots in parking

PHOTO garages or along city streets.

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Spain.Insert.June2012.indd 4 6/1/12 2:35 PM of experience in design, construction, and operations. The technol- Australia, and Valoriza Agua is constructing one in Perth. And dis- ogy has developed as well,” making Spanish companies extremely cussions are underway for the first desalination plant in sub-Saharan competitive on the world market. In fact, Cajigas adds, of the top Africa, in Namibia. Other companies, including Befesa, Aqualia, 20 companies in the world active in desalination, seven are Spanish. and Cadagua, are also well-positioned internationally. In 2009, a new large-scale desalination facility was completed The U.S. is also home to three desalination plants built or oper- in the city of Barcelona. The Prat de Llobregat plant, which can ated by Spanish companies: two in Florida and one outside Bos- supply up to 20 percent of the city’s drinking water, won a 2010 ton. In Tampa, the Tampa Bay Desalination Plant had been beset Global Water Award for technical achievement from the industry with problems since its construction began in 1999. After Acciona magazine Global Water Intelligence. Agua took over the plant, in partnership with American Water, it The plant employs more than 5,200 solar panels and a wind tur- finally began operations in 2008. Today the plant purifies 25 mil- bine, along with energy efficiency technologies and energy recov- lion gallons a day and supplies 10 percent of the drinking water ery features. All together, these reduce the facility’s environmental for the region. impact and its operating costs. (A significant percentage of the cost Water treatment extends, of course, beyond desalination, into con- of running a desalination plant derives from its energy requirements.) ventional water purification for drinking water and beyond, and into “Companies are always innovating,” says Cajigas. He adds that industrial purification to deal with waste from industries like mining. companies are beginning to use filtration membranes to reutilize “Spanish companies are very competitive in water treatment,” wastewater. Companies are designing more compact plants, and says Cajigas. “This is one of our fundamental strengths.” ones that are powered by renewable energy. Some companies are also developing new methods to disinfect water, increasing the ability to treat extremely low levels of contami- nants. Information technology companies have developed systems to manage INDUSTRY TO and integrate the massive information stream water treatment plants require— SUPPORT INDUSTRY pressure and flow data, home meters Industries in sectors as varied as power generation, aerospace, auto- to measure consumption, information motive, rail, and domestic appliances depend on machine tools to about the available and consumed vol- create their products. And the Spanish companies that support umes of water, among other data—to their efforts—machine tool manufacturers as well as companies enable smarter water management. that produce accessories, component parts, and tools—provide Innovations such as these have made the necessary means. In 2011, exports from Spain reached 120 Spain’s desalination plants some of the countries and accounted for more than 80 percent of the country’s best in the world, and have enabled overall business in this sector. Spanish companies to compete world- Spain’s machine tool industry has been “supplying technology wide to design, construct, and oper- and production equipment to the main sectors of the economy ate water treatment and desalination for more than 65 years,” says José Ignacio Torrecilla, president of plants. Some Spanish companies are Advanced Manufacturing Technologies, the Spanish trade associa- involved in building and operating tion. This has helped Spanish companies “improve their competi- the plants, while others manufacture tiveness and that of the country,” he adds. products to serve the water treatment Today, Spain’s machine tool sector is the third largest in the Euro- market, such as valves, motors, pumps, pean Union, and includes some of the world’s leading companies. and filtration systems. “To make things in steel—machinery, foundry, mills, stamping, Spanish water purification compa- lathes—these are traditional skills of people here,” explains Félix nies are active today in more than 30 Remírez, commercial manager of the machine tool company Fagor countries, from Chile to Australia, in Arrasate, referring to the long metalworking tradition along the North Africa, the Middle East, India lush, green mountains in the north of Spain. and China. They’re developing more Machine tools can transform coils or sheets of metals into all the than 30 desalination plants, along shapes and components needed for the trappings of modern life. with dozens of other water purifica- They perform tasks such as rolling and stretching metal into flat tion plants. Acciona Agua is part of the sheets; stamping it into all manner of shapes; cutting, drilling, and partnership behind one of the world’s grinding to precise specifications. And their precision has increased largest desalination plants, in Adelaide, dramatically in recent years, as companies such as Nicolás Correa,

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Spain.Insert.June2012.indd 5 6/1/12 2:35 PM which makes milling machines, and Fagor Arrasate, which designs primarily in Spain, some also maintain overseas offi ces and plants. and builds machines such as stamps and presses, have taken advan- Danobat opened an offi ce in China in 2011, and Fagor has a man- tage of the latest motors and computer controls to enable faster, more ufacturing facility there. Spanish automotive companies, including exacting manufacturing. Cie Automotive, Gestamp, Trimplast, and Fagor, are expanding into For the automotive sector, Fagor, which tailors all its machines to a the rapidly growing South American market, particularly in Brazil. company’s needs, has completed a new line of completely automated Spanish machine tool companies have a tradition of pooling and and synchronized presses that operates nearly 50 percent faster than coordinating their resources to benefi t the industry as a whole, both previous models. They recently installed one such press for Volk- in jointly-fi nanced research centers and in national and international swagen in South Africa. They have also sent the latest development projects. Some of these projects have resulted in, to take a few exam- of a blanking line (which creates shapes in sheets of material), 50 ples, ultraprecise new milling machines; better “intelligent” features percent faster than previous ones, to a company in South Carolina to enable higher-precision machines that can be operated more easily; that manufactures parts for BMW. and improved sustainability and energy-saving features of machines In fact, many Spanish machine tool companies excel in the auto- and parts, minimizing the environmental impact. motive sector, combining the national expertise at machining with For the food production industry, Spanish companies export their a history of hosting manufacturing from automakers that include solutions around the world. Spanish food has exploded in popular- Ford, Volkswagen, Renault, Mercedes, and Nissan. ity over the past few decades, along with the popularity of Spain’s Last year Nicolás Correa provided milling solutions to British agricultural products, and Spain’s experience in irrigating, cultivat- Aerospace, which manufactures parts for military aircraft. And Dan- ing, cleaning, separating, processing, and packing its products has obat, another major manufacturer, supplies milling and turning grown as well. machines to companies that create parts for aerospace, wind tur- Innovations in technology led Metalquimia to develop machines bines, and railways. that dramatically shorten times to cure and dry meat such as salami Though many of these companies manufacture their machines and chorizo. NC Hyberbaric has created machines that take advantage of high levels of water pressure to kill microorganisms, endow- ing food with a longer shelf life without extensive processing or salt and additives. Other food sector companies market faster seeding machines, packing machinery that incorporates radio-frequency ID tags, and artifi cial vision to sort and classify products and produce more effi ciently.

HEALTHIER FOR LESS The Spanish health care system enjoys two remarkable accomplishments. It is among the least expensive per person among industrialized nations, in terms of the percentage of GDP it spends on health care. At the same time, it is ranked by the World Health Organization as among the best in the world, based on a number of parameters including effectiveness and ﬁ nancial fairness. Spain has achieved this because of successful partnerships between government authorities and private companies, producing innovations in patient treatment and technology solutions for managing the health care system. Spain gradually introduced electronic health records (EHRs) during the past decade. By 2010, more than 95 percent of primary health care providers in Spain had used them, and more than 250 million prescriptions were being submitted electronically to Spanish machine tool pharmacies. These statistics place Spain among the leading users companies export of this technology. A number of Spanish companies, including El to 120 countries. Corte Inglés, Everis, Indra, and Oesia, are international leaders in EHR technology.

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Spain.Insert.June2012.indd 6 6/1/12 2:35 PM samples by how many tumor cells the protocol has killed. Internationalization is a fundamental principle of all Spanish biotechnology and health care companies. Vivia Biotech has signed drug-development partnership agreements with U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies, and plans to enter the American market after it launches its personalized medicine test in Europe this year. Progenika, which is also well positioned in the U.S., has developed a DNA chip that analyzes blood for a number of blood type variants in addition to the typical A/B/O and Rh positive or negative types. The chip has already been adopted to test for rare anti- gens in blood banks throughout Europe: identifying these variants can help avoid reactions that a chronic patient might suffer from repeatedly receiving blood that doesn’t match perfectly. From its satellite offi ce near Boston, the company has received U.S. approval for its tests, and has signed distribution agreements with multina- tionals that include Pfi zer and Novartis. AB-Biotics has also created a DNA chip, one that analyzes the patient’s saliva for genetic variations that indicate responses to various drugs for psychiatric and neurological diseases. The company New approaches in personalized has already patented a number of its products in the U.S. medicine have the potential to Spain’s National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) partnered improve care and trim costs. with Stanford University and the Life Length company (a CNIO spinoff) in a study published in Cell in 2012 that focuses on what the human genome may eventually tell us about diseases. The The move to EHRs provides signifi cant cost and time savings, Spanish team helped to analyze the personal molecular and health facilitating coordination and use of resources and granting oppor- data of Michael Snyder, director of Stanford University’s Center tunities for improved treatment. Everis, whose health care solu- for Genomics and Personalized Medicine. tions cover more than 20 million users, is now building software Says CNIO Director Maria Blasco, “This study shows that dis- to improve chronic disease management. The new product helps eases are a product of an individual’s genetic profi le as well as determine the level of care required for a variety of chronic diseases interaction with the environment. So far we know little about and the types of technologies that can meet a patient’s needs at this correlation, while the use of human genome information to home. Everis began implementing its solutions in Spain in 2011; prevent and treat disease is still clearly in its infancy. But what we business director Santiago Martín says that so far the range of sav- can see—the tip of the iceberg—is fascinating.” ings for chronic patients is 20 to 40 percent over traditional care. The vast amount of information that electronic records can amass and process will help advance the fi eld of “personalized” medicine, where diagnoses or therapies for illnesses such as cancer will be individually tailored, assisted by data on a patient’s genetic THE INFORMATION AGE profi le and other relevant information. This has the potential both Information and communications technology, or ICT, now under- to improve patient treatment and trim health care costs, avoiding lies nearly all the world’s major commercial sectors. Spain has risen trials of expensive medicines that won’t work. The Indra informa- to the top in a number of these sectors, as Spain’s information com- tion company has initiated a “FutureClinic” project to research panies have provided international solutions for needs such as air new algorithms and genomic information processing systems to and road traffi c control, security in public spaces and digital ones, meet such needs. and mobile telecommunications. Spain was also the fi rst country In order to provide a personalized approach to cancer, many to employ a single broadcasting network for digital television. As a companies are developing approaches that tailor appropriate result, Spanish companies became experts in both low- and high- PHOTO medications to a patient’s individual genetic makeup. One, Vivia power transmitters and are active around the world in digital pro-

Biotech, created a platform that evaluates the most popular com- cessing and transmission. : PROGENIKA binations of drugs to treat blood cancers (leukemias, lymphomas, “The ICT sector in Spain boasts a large group of solid and com- and myelomas). The technology can analyze thousands of blood petitive companies that are favorably positioned internationally, and samples and medication combinations in 48 hours, then rank the are leading in their activity areas,” says Jesús Banegas, president

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Spain.Insert.June2012.indd 7 6/1/12 2:35 PM of AMETIC, Spain’s association of information technology and communications companies. A number of key factors in Spain have encouraged the fl ourish- ing of the ICT sector. Since autumn 2008, all national identity cards have been issued in an electronic format. Spain was one of the fi rst countries in the EU to adopt this technology and, with more than 25 million e-ID cards issued, Spain is an international leader in electronic signatures. Spain has also experienced rapid growth in the use of electronic health records. Both have led to advances in information processing, and in security systems that safeguard a user’s digital data and all transac- tions the citizen makes electronically. Companies have developed solutions to verify personal identifi cation and allow safe and secure card use both in person and online. The implementation of the electronic ID has prompted the development of additional technologies. Informática el Corte Inglés, working with Investrónica, created the fi rst digital TV decoder that is compatible with the electronic ID card. The device contains an ID reader and even allows users to access services via Spanish companies have developed the television, if they have no computer or are unfamiliar with top management systems for rail computer use. and air traffic control. Tourism, according to Juan José González, Indra’s director of development strategy, temporarily doubles Spain’s population every year. The country has built a modern network of internal fl ights and up rather than substituting for old ones. high-speed rail to accommodate their travel—and its companies The migration of digital services to the cloud has infl uenced the developed sophisticated technology to manage air traffi c and rail activities of Spain’s two largest ICT companies, Indra and Telefónica traffi c. Indra’s air traffi c control system, implemented around the (which is the world’s fi fth largest telecom company). Both Indra world, helps three out of every fi ve fl ights in the world land safely. and Telefónica, along with other major ICT companies, are mov- The high demands of tourism and travel have also led to new ing into digital services and cloud computing, and are integrating technologies to securely identify travelers. One such solution, which data from different services in order to create the smarter cities of the Ministry of the Interior has installed, is called the Automatic tomorrow. Their solutions might involve integrating traffi c control, Border Control System, or ABC System. The fi rst of its kind in police notifi cations, and hospitals and paramedics in order to deal Europe, the system pairs facial recognition with the signals from quickly with any emergency. electronic passports or electronic IDs, and links the information to Spanish digital skills extend to excellence in visualization as four large databases: passport inspection, electronic ID authoriza- well: its companies created graphics for the televised vote tally in tion, police data, and border control. And for the fi nancial security the U.S. 2008 presidential elections and the NASDAQ displays in of tourists and residents, in Spain and internationally, the company Times Square. A Spanish company designed a program to create GMV developed a system to ensure monitoring of all ATM opera- the realistic water images used in computer graphics in Hollywood. tions, and prevention of any unauthorized access. Yet another is playing a key role in the postproduction stereo 3-D Transportation and security systems come together in intel- processing for Peter Jackson’s two upcoming fi lm adaptations of ligent traffi c systems, which can manage and operate sections of The Hobbit. road, and also communicate data related to public transportation Connectivity remains crucial across all sectors, says AMETIC’s to riders. Spanish companies are implementing intelligent traffi c Banegas, pointing out that Spain heads European countries in control in a number of cities in China, and are also operating toll smartphone ownership and use of 3G networks, and Spanish com- roads in North America. panies lead in providing Internet and broadband access. He says The smart electrical grid provides another opportunity for ICT the sector will surge ahead “anywhere connectivity and mobility companies to manage huge amounts of data from electric compa- are a key factor.” nies together with usage information from consumers, in order to

INDRA conserve energy and save money. South and Central America may : Learn more at www.technologyreview.com/spain be important new markets for this technology, as their emerging or visit www.spaintechnology.com

PHOTO economies are deploying the new technologies from the bottom

S8 WWW.TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM/SPAIN

Spain.Insert.June2012.indd 8 6/1/12 2:35 PM Market Value per User Circle size reﬂ ects value per user—which is implied by graphiti a company’s market capitalization, its valuation in private investment rounds, or its highest acquisition price.

Sources: comScore, company ﬁ lings, news reports

$200 1,000 million Google $116 COMPANY Facebook VALUE (in $ billions) 500 $200 $104

MONTHLY USERS $5 to $12.5 $1 to $4 200 Under $1 $57 Twitter $8 Tumblr 100 Yelp $19 $431 Instagram 50 Lycos $149 Yandex $66 $25 Renren

Myspace $23 $52 $57 Pinterest $83 Zillow $35 20 $187 YouTube Geocities Foursquare

10 Excite $372

5 $145 $83 Quora Path

2 ’92 ’94 ’96 ’98 ’00 ’02 ’04 ’06 ’08 ’10 ’12 YEAR LAUNCHED

When Facebook went public in May, the com- will profit handsomely from their very large How pany was valued at $104 billion, an astonishing audiences. fi gure for an Internet company. Was the fi gure Another reason this metric is useful: it indi- Much Is preposterously high? That depends on how you cates that for all the hype around Facebook and look at it. Facebook’s value lies in its enormous its kin, the situation isn’t as hyperbolic as it was a User audience—901 million people every month who in the dot-com boom. Remember Excite, one of are potential viewers of advertisements and buy- the fi rst Web portals? It and its 18 million users Worth? ers of virtual goods. So you could think of Face- were worth as much as $6.7 billion—$372 per book this way: it was worth about $116 for every user—to the @Home Network in 1999. The next Estimates of the user it had. On that basis, the company’s valua- year, Lycos was valued at as much as $12.5 billion, historical value of a tion wasn’t as high as Google’s ($200 per user) or $431 per user. It might be of little solace that Web audience put or even the question-and-answer service Quora’s valuations aren’t as infl ated as they were a dozen Facebook’s IPO hype ($145). This metric also reveals that investors years ago, but at least now, unlike then, there is a appear much less optimistic that Twitter (worth sizable amount of Internet ad revenue to vie for. in perspective. INFOGRAPHICS.COM less than $60 per user) or Tumblr (about $8) —Brian Bergstein and Mike Orcutt

www.technologyreview.com Graphiti 31

july12.graphiti.indd 31 5/31/12 4:00 PM q&a

TR: What concerns you the most about it a little bit cheaper,” under the right the startup culture today? circumstances—under most circum- Levchin: I feel like we should be aim- stances—the potential backer says, ing higher. The founders of a number “That’s a terrible idea. I’m not giving a of startups I encounter have no real penny to this. Why don’t you go invent Max Levchin intent of getting anywhere huge. They something interesting?” The PayPal cofounder wants just want to build a company that is But the overabundance of capital likely to get acquired for a meaningful, that resulted from just enormous suc- to see more startups trying but not necessarily enormous, amount cesses in Silicon Valley over the last few for bigger things. of money. The acquisition price doesn’t years has actually made it possible for really matter, but it serves relatively such things to get funding, and they do. echnology startups, especially well to measure the consequence of the And so people are building things that startup and therefore indirectly mea- are, at times, trivial. those in Silicon Valley, love to sures the ambition of the founders at T talk about innovation. But how the outset. In many respects, Slide seems as trivial good are they at actually inventing and as these other companies you think commercializing important technolo- What’s wrong with building a company should be aiming higher. Do you wish gies? Not as good as they should be, says in hopes it will be acquired? you hadn’t spent those years creating I think it is less likely to result in truly virtual pets? Max Levchin, a computer scientist who revolutionary or groundbreaking com- Games and entertainment can aim cofounded PayPal (earning him TR’s panies being created. In Silicon Valley, pretty high. The world can occasion- “Innovator of the Year” award in 2002) the number of startups that could be ally be changed by an amazing piece of and is now an angel investor. Levchin, easily confused with a feature [of some art or music or writing. At Slide we did along with fellow PayPal founder Peter other service] is increasing relatively some great work, but the result did fall Thiel and former chess champion Garry rapidly. short of my ambitions. I think the lesson learned for me was that I’m not that Kasparov, is completing a book called The But what about big innovations in good at changing the world through art, Blueprint, which will outline how and recent years like the rise of smart and should stick to what I know: science. why startups should tackle much harder phones and social media? problems. Levchin, 36, says too many of There’s a fair amount of disruptive tech- Have you shaped your investments the country’s best programmers are work- nology going on. In general, the train of accordingly? Tell us about a startup innovation is rolling along. I’m not too you’ve backed that has a truly big idea. ing for companies that have little pros- worried about innovation at large. The I’m really excited about Kaggle. It’s pect of doing anything transformative. point I was trying to make is that there’s essentially a platform [that can tap Levchin’s own startup record is mixed. an awful lot of e!ort being expended the minds of the world’s top data ana- Although building PayPal’s online pay- that is just never going to result in lysts]. People are frequently employed ments technology into a trustworthy meaningful, truly disruptive innovation. in places where they make great impact system was a technically di"cult and And I think that’s a problem. A lot of on their employer’s data sets but are resources are getting soaked up by these unavailable to make great impact on risky project that ultimately prospered, lesser companies—most importantly, other data sets, so creating a platform he later founded Slide.com, which was talented engineers, talented builders of where these people can be literally best known for creating a somewhat silly things. rented out per problem is really fabu- series of Facebook applications such as lous. Because then you have people that W TIM A Superpoke! Pets. Google bought Slide Why is this happening? can still keep their jobs at NASA and GNER

Typically these things go through the solve radio telescopy data set prob- /ZU in 2010 for about $200 million but shut MA

sieve of scarce resources—e.g., capital. lems, and on occasion dig into things PRESS/CORBIS down most of its services last year. When you try to raise money and your like human genome projects and cancer Levchin discussed his ideas with Tech- pitch sounds like “I’m going to look at research. I think that’s a very powerful nology Review reporter Conor Myhrvold. that video game, clone it, and make concept.

32 Q&A technology review July/August 2012

July12.qa.indd 32 6/4/12 3:54 PM Cameron Marlow calls himself Facebook’s “in-house sociologist.” He and his team can analyze essentially all the information the site gathers.

www.technologyreview.com Feature Story 43

july12.facebook.indd 43 6/6/12 3:31 PM apply math, programming skills, and social on the site, and you have an incredibly rich science to mine our data for insights that record of their lives and interactions. they hope will advance Facebook’s business “This is the first time the world has seen and social science at large. Whereas other this scale and quality of data about human analysts at the company focus on informa- communication,” Marlow says with a charac- tion related to specific online activities, teristically serious gaze before breaking into Marlow’s team can swim in practically the a smile at the thought of what he can do with IF entire ocean of personal data that Facebook the data. For one thing, Marlow is confident facebook were a country, maintains. Of all the people at Facebook, that exploring this resource will revolutionize a conceit that founder Mark perhaps even including the company’s lead- the scientific understanding of why people Zuckerberg has entertained ers, these researchers have the best chance behave as they do. His team can also help of discovering what can really be learned Facebook influence our social behavior for in public, its 900 million when so much personal information is com- its own benefit and that of its advertisers. members would make it the piled in one place. This work may even help Facebook invent Facebook has all this information entirely new ways to make money. third largest in the world. because it has found ingenious ways to col- Contagious Information It would far outstrip any regime past or lect data as people socialize. Users fill out present in how intimately it records the profiles with their age, gender, and e-mail arlow eschews the collegiate pro- lives of its citizens. Private conversations, address; some people also give additional grammer style of Zuckerberg and family photos, and records of road trips, details, such as their relationship status and Mmany others at Facebook, wear- births, marriages, and deaths all stream mobile-phone number. A redesign last fall ing a dress shirt with his jeans rather than into the company’s servers and lodge there. introduced profile pages in the form of time a hoodie or T-shirt. Meeting me shortly Facebook has collected the most extensive lines that invite people to add historical before the company’s initial public o!ering data set ever assembled on human social information such as places they have lived in May, in a conference room adorned with behavior. Some of your personal informa- and worked. Messages and photos shared a six-foot caricature of his boss’s dog spray- tion is probably part of it. on the site are often tagged with a precise painted on its glass wall, he comes across And yet, even as Facebook has embed- location, and in the last two years Facebook more like a young professor than a student. ded itself into modern life, it hasn’t actually has begun to track activity elsewhere on He might have become one had he not real- done that much with what it knows about the Internet, using an addictive invention ized early in his career that Web companies us. Now that the company has gone pub- called the “Like” button. It appears on apps would yield the juiciest data about human lic, the pressure to develop new sources of and websites outside Facebook and allows interactions. profit (see “The Facebook Fallacy,” p. 70) is people to indicate with a click that they are In 2001, undertaking a PhD at MIT’s likely to force it to do more with its hoard interested in a brand, product, or piece of Media Lab, Marlow created a site called of information. That stash of data looms digital content. Since last fall, Facebook Blogdex that automatically listed the most like an oversize shadow over what today is a modest online advertising business, Even as Facebook has embedded itself into modern life, it hasn’t worrying privacy-conscious Web users and rivals such as Google. Everyone has a done that much with what it knows about us. Its stash of data feeling that this unprecedented resource looms like an oversize shadow. Everyone has a feeling that this will yield something big, but nobody knows resource will yield something big, but nobody knows quite what. quite what. Heading Facebook’s e!ort to figure out what can be learned from all our data is has also been able to collect data on users’ “contagious” information spreading on Cameron Marlow, a tall 35-year-old who online lives beyond its borders automati- weblogs. Although it was just a research until recently sat a few feet away from cally: in certain apps or websites, when project, it soon became so popular that Zuckerberg. The group Marlow runs has users listen to a song or read a news article, Marlow’s servers crashed. Launched just escaped the public attention that dogs Face- the information is passed along to Face- as blogs were exploding into the popular book’s founders and the more headline- book, even if no one clicks “Like.” Within consciousness and becoming so numerous grabbing features of its business. Known the feature’s first five months, Facebook cat- that Web users felt overwhelmed with infor- internally as the Data Science Team, it is a alogued more than five billion instances of mation, it prefigured later aggregator sites kind of Bell Labs for the social-networking people listening to songs online. Combine such as Digg and Reddit. But Marlow didn’t age. The group has 12 researchers—but is that kind of information with a map of the build it just to help Web users track what expected to double in size this year. They social connections Facebook’s users make was popular online. Blogdex was intended

44 Feature Story technology review July/August 2012

july12.facebook.indd 44 6/6/12 3:31 PM demic journals—much as Bell Labs researchers Eytan Bakshy advanced both AT&T’s experimented technologies and the with the way study of fundamental Facebook users shared links so physics. that his group It may seem strange could study that an eight-year-old whether the site functions like an company without a echo chamber. proven business model bothers to support a team with such an academic bent, but Marlow says it makes sense. “The biggest challenges Facebook has to solve are the same challenges that social science has,” he says. Those challenges include understanding why some ideas or fashions spread from a few individuals to become universal and others don’t, or to what extent a person’s future actions are a product of past communication with friends. Publishing results and collaborating with university researchers will lead to findings that help Facebook improve its products, he adds. For one example of how Facebook can serve as a proxy for examining society at large, consider a recent study of the notion that any person on the globe is just six degrees of separation from any other. The best-known real-world study, in 1967, involved a few hundred people trying to send postcards to a particular Boston stock- holder. Facebook’s version, conducted in as a scientific instrument to uncover the nize those you may want to designate mere collaboration with researchers from the social networks forming online and study “acquaintances” in order to make their University of Milan, involved the entire how they spread ideas. Marlow went on to updates less prominent. Yet the group is social network as of May 2011, which Yahoo’s research labs to study online social- an odd fit inside a company where soft- amounted to more than 10 percent of the izing for two years. In 2007 he joined Face- ware engineers are rock stars who live by world’s population. Analyzing the 69 billion book, which he considers the world’s most the mantra “Move fast and break things.” friend connections among those 721 mil- powerful instrument for studying human Lunch with the data team has the feel of a lion people showed that the world is smaller society. “For the first time,” Marlow says, grad-student gathering at a top school; the than we thought: four intermediary friends “we have a microscope that not only lets us typical member of the group joined fresh are usually enough to introduce anyone to examine social behavior at a very fine level from a PhD or junior academic position a random stranger. “When considering that we’ve never been able to see before but and prefers to talk about advancing social another person in the world, a friend of allows us to run experiments that millions science than about Facebook as a product your friend knows a friend of their friend, of users are exposed to.” or company. Several members of the team on average,” the technical paper pithily con- Marlow’s team works with manag- have training in sociology or social psychol- cluded. That result may not extend to every- ers across Facebook to find patterns that ogy, while others began in computer sci- one on the planet, but there’s good reason they might make use of. For instance, they ence and started using it to study human to believe that it and other findings from study how a new feature spreads among behavior. They are free to use some of their the Data Science Team are true to life out- the social network’s users. They have time, and Facebook’s data, to probe the side Facebook. Last year the Pew Research helped Facebook identify users you may basic patterns and motivations of human Center’s Internet & American Life Project know but haven’t “friended,” and recog- behavior and to publish the results in aca- found that 93 percent of Facebook friends

www.technologyreview.com Feature Story 45

july12.facebook.indd 45 6/6/12 3:31 PM had met in person. One of Marlow’s researchers has developed a way to Sameet Agarwal calculate a country’s figures out ways “gross national happi- for Facebook to manage its ness” from its Facebook enormous trove activity by logging the of data— giving occurrence of words the company a unique and and phrases that sig- valuable level of nal positive or negative expertise. emotion. Gross national happiness fluctuates in a way that suggests the measure is accurate: it jumps during holidays and dips when popular public figures die. After a major earthquake in Chile in February 2010, the country’s score plum- meted and took many months to return to normal. That event seemed to make the country as a whole more sympathetic when Japan su!ered its own big earthquake and subsequent tsunami in March 2011; while Chile’s gross national happiness dipped, the figure didn’t waver in any other countries tracked (Japan wasn’t among them). Adam Kramer, who created the index, says he intended it to show that Facebook’s data could provide cheap and accurate ways to track social trends—methods that could be useful to economists and other researchers. Other work published by the group has more obvious utility for Facebook’s basic strategy, which involves encouraging us to make the site central to our lives and then using what it learns to sell ads. An are those displayed alongside certain Web period, the 76 million links that those users early study looked at what types of updates searches, because the searchers are express- shared with each other were logged. Then, from friends encourage newcomers to the ing precisely what they want. This is one on 219 million randomly chosen occasions, network to add their own contributions. reason why Google’s revenue is 10 times Facebook prevented someone from seeing Right before Valentine’s Day this year a blog Facebook’s. But Facebook might eventually a link shared by a friend. Hiding links this post from the Data Science Team listed the be able to guess what people want or don’t way created a control group so that Bakshy songs most popular with people who had want even before they realize it. could assess how often people end up pro- recently signaled on Facebook that they had Recently the Data Science Team has moting the same links because they have entered or left a relationship. It was a hint begun to use its unique position to experi- similar information sources and interests. of the type of correlation that could help ment with the way Facebook works, tweak- He found that our close friends strongly Facebook make useful predictions about ing the site—the way scientists might prod sway which information we share, but over- users’ behavior—knowledge that could an ant’s nest—to see how users react. Eytan all their impact is dwarfed by the collective help it make better guesses about which Bakshy, who joined Facebook last year after influence of numerous more distant con- ads you might be more or less open to at collaborating with Marlow as a PhD student tacts—what sociologists call “weak ties.” It any given time. Perhaps people who have at the University of Michigan, wanted to is our diverse collection of weak ties that just left a relationship might be interested test whether our Facebook friends create most powerfully determines what informa- in an album of ballads, or perhaps no com- an “echo chamber” that amplifies news and tion we’re exposed to. pany should associate its brand with the opinions we have already heard about. So he That study provides strong evidence flood of emotion attending the death of a messed with how Facebook operated for a against an idea nagging many people: that friend. The most valuable online ads today quarter of a billion users. Over a seven-week social networking creates harmful “filter

46 Feature Story technology review July/August 2012

july12.facebook.indd 46 6/6/12 3:31 PM bubbles,” to use activist Eli Pariser’s term he says. “Our goal is to understand it so we Association wanted to encourage healthy for the e!ects of tuning the information we can adapt our platform to give people the eating, for example, it might be able to refer receive to match our expectations. But the experience that they want.” But some of his to a playbook of Facebook social engineer- study also reveals the power Facebook has. team’s work and the attitudes of Facebook’s ing. “We want to be a platform that others “If [Facebook’s] News Feed is the thing that leaders show that the company is not above can use to initiate change,” he says. everyone sees and it controls how informa- using its platform to tweak users’ behav- Advertisers, too, would be eager to know tion is disseminated, it’s controlling how ior. Unlike academic social scientists, Face- in greater detail what could make a cam- information is revealed to society, and it’s book’s employees have a short path from paign on Facebook a!ect people’s actions something we need to pay very close atten- an idea to an experiment on hundreds of in the outside world, even though they real- tion to,” Marlow says. He points out that millions of people. ize there are limits to how firmly human his team helps Facebook understand what In April, influenced in part by conversa- beings can be steered. “It’s not clear to me it is doing to society and publishes its find- tions over dinner with his med-student girl- that social science will ever be an engineer- ings to fulfill a public duty to transparency. friend (now his wife), Zuckerberg decided ing science in a way that building bridges Another recent study, which investigated that he should use social influence within is,” says Duncan Watts, who works on com- which types of Facebook activity cause peo- Facebook to increase organ donor registra- putational social science at Microsoft’s ple to feel a greater sense of support from tions. Users were given an opportunity to recently opened New York research lab their friends, falls into the same category. click a box on their Timeline pages to sig- and previously worked alongside Marlow But Marlow speaks as an employee of a nal that they were registered donors, which at Yahoo’s labs. “Nevertheless, if you have company that will prosper largely by cater- triggered a notification to their friends. The enough data, you can make predictions that ing to advertisers who want to control the new feature started a cascade of social pres- are better than simply random guessing, flow of information between its users. And sure, and organ donor enrollment increased and that’s really lucrative.” indeed, Bakshy is working with managers by a factor of 23 across 44 states. Doubling Data outside the Data Science Team to extract Marlow’s team is in the process of pub- advertising-related findings from the results lishing results from the last U.S. midterm ike other social-Web companies, of experiments on social influence. “Adver- election that show another striking example such as Twitter, Facebook has never tisers and brands are a part of this network of Facebook’s potential to direct its users’ Lattained the reputation for technical as well, so giving them some insight into influence on one another. Since 2008, innovation enjoyed by such Internet pio- how people are sharing the content they are the company has o!ered a way for users neers as Google. If Silicon Valley were a producing is a very core part of the business to signal that they have voted; Facebook high school, the search company would model,” says Marlow. Facebook told pro- promotes that to their friends with a note be the quiet math genius who didn’t excel spective investors before its IPO that people to say that they should be sure to vote, too. socially but invented something indis- are 50 percent more likely to remember ads Marlow says that in the 2010 election his pensable. Facebook would be the annoy- on the site if they’re visibly endorsed by a group matched voter registration logs with ing kid who started a club with such social friend. Figuring out how influence works the data to see which of the Facebook users momentum that people had to join whether they wanted to or not. In reality, Facebook Facebook is not above using its platform to tweak users’ behavior, employs hordes of talented software engineers (many poached from Google and as it did by nudging them to register as organ donors. Unlike other math-genius companies) to build and academic social scientists, Facebook’s employees have a short path maintain its irresistible club. The technol- from an idea to an experiment on hundreds of millions of people. ogy built to support the Data Science Team’s e!orts is particularly innovative. The scale at which Facebook operates has led it to could make ads even more memorable or who got nudges actually went to the polls. invent hardware and software that are the help Facebook find ways to induce more (He stresses that the researchers worked envy of other companies trying to adapt to people to share or click on its ads. with cryptographically “anonymized” data the world of “big data.” and could not match specific users with In a kind of passing of the technological Social Engineering their voting records.) baton, Facebook built its data storage system arlow says his team wants to This is just the beginning. By learning by expanding the power of open-source soft- divine the rules of online social more about how small changes on Face- ware called Hadoop, which was inspired by Mlife to understand what’s going on book can alter users’ behavior outside the work at Google and built at Yahoo. Hadoop inside Facebook, not to develop ways to site, the company eventually “could allow can tame seemingly impossible computa- manipulate it. “Our goal is not to change others to make use of Facebook in the same tional tasks—like working on all the data the pattern of communication in society,” way,” says Marlow. If the American Heart Facebook’s users have entrusted to it—by

www.technologyreview.com Feature Story 47

july12.facebook.indd 47 6/6/12 3:31 PM spreading them across many machines intense interest in Facebook’s data technol- it to fill in the gaps in their own data and inside a data center. But Hadoop wasn’t built ogy suggests that its ad business may be make smarter apps or services; for example, with data science in mind, and using it for just an o"shoot of something much more Facebook itself uses Factual for information that purpose requires specialized, unwieldy valuable. The tools and techniques the com- about business locations. Patil points out programming. Facebook’s engineers solved pany has developed to handle large volumes that Facebook could become a data source in that problem with the invention of Hive, of information could become a product in its own right, selling access to information open-source software that’s now indepen- their own right. compiled from the actions of its users. Such dent of Facebook and used by many other information, he says, could be the basis for Mining for Gold companies. Hive acts as a translation service, almost any kind of business, such as online making it possible to query vast Hadoop acebook needs new sources of income dating or charts of popular music. Assuming data stores using relatively simple code. To to meet investors’ expectations. Even Facebook can take this step without upset- cut down on computational demands, it can Fafter its disappointing IPO, it has a ting users and regulators, it could be lucra- request random samples of an entire data staggeringly high price-to-earnings ratio tive. An online store wishing to target its set, a feature that’s invaluable for companies that can’t be justified by the barrage of cheap promotions, for example, could pay to use swamped by data. Much of Facebook’s data ads the site now displays. Facebook’s new Facebook as a source of knowledge about resides in one Hadoop store more than 100 campus in Menlo Park, California, previ- which brands are most popular in which petabytes (a million gigabytes) in size, says ously inhabited by Sun Microsystems, makes places, or how the popularity of certain Sameet Agarwal, a director of engineering at that pressure tangible. The company’s 3,500 products changes through the year. Facebook who works on data infrastructure, employees rattle around in enough space Hammerbacher agrees that Facebook and the quantity is growing exponentially. for 6,600. I walked past expanses of empty could sell its data science and points to its “Over the last few years we have more than desks in one building; another, next door, currently free Insights service for advertis- doubled in size every year,” he says. That was completely uninhabited. A vacant lot ers and website owners, which shows how means his team must constantly build more waited nearby, presumably until someone their content is being shared on Facebook. e!cient systems. invents a use of our data that will justify the That could become much more useful to All this has given Facebook a unique expense of developing the space. businesses if Facebook added data obtained level of expertise, says Je" Hammerbacher, One potential use would be simply to when its “Like” button tracks activity all Marlow’s predecessor at Facebook, who ini- sell insights mined from the information. over the Web, or demographic data or infor- tiated the company’s e"ort to develop its DJ Patil, data scientist in residence with mation about what people read on the site. own data storage and analysis technology. the venture capital firm Greylock Partners There’s precedent for o"ering such analytics (He left Facebook in 2008 to found Clou- and previously leader of LinkedIn’s data for a fee: at the end of 2011 Google started dera, which develops Hadoop-based sys- science team, believes Facebook could take charging $150,000 annually for a premium tems to manage large collections of data.) inspiration from Gil Elbaz, the inventor of version of a service that analyzes a busi- Most large businesses have paid established Google’s AdSense ad business, which pro- ness’s Web tra!c. software companies such as Oracle a lot of vides over a quarter of Google’s revenue. He Back at Facebook, Marlow isn’t the one who makes decisions about what the com- One potential use of Facebook’s data storehouse would be to pany charges for, even if his work will shape them. Whatever happens, he says, the pri- sell insights mined from it. Such information could be the basis mary goal of his team is to support the well- for almost any kind of business. Assuming Facebook can do this being of the people who provide Facebook without upsetting users and regulators, it could be lucrative.. with their data, using it to make the service smarter. Along the way, he says, he and his colleagues will advance humanity’s under- money for data analysis and storage. But has moved on from advertising and now standing of itself. That echoes Zuckerberg’s now, big companies are trying to under- runs a fast-growing startup, Factual, that often doubted but seemingly genuine belief stand how Facebook handles its enormous charges businesses to access large, carefully that Facebook’s job is to improve how the information trove on open-source systems, curated collections of data ranging from res- world communicates. Just don’t ask yet says Hammerbacher. “I recently spent the taurant locations to celebrity body-mass exactly what that will entail. “It’s hard to pre- day at Fidelity helping them understand indexes, which the company collects from dict where we’ll go, because we’re at the very how the ‘data scientist’ role at Facebook was free public sources and by buying private early stages of this science,” says M arlow. conceived ... and I’ve had the same discus- data sets. Factual cleans up data and makes “The number of potential things that we sion at countless other firms,” he says. the result available over the Internet as an could ask of Facebook’s data is enormous.” As executives in every industry try to on-demand knowledge store to be tapped exploit the opportunities in “big data,” the by software, not humans. Customers use Tom Simonite is Technology Review’s senior IT editor.

48 Feature Story technology review July/August 2012

july12.facebook.indd 48 6/7/12 1:28 PM The Great

These wind turbines under construction in Görmin, Germany, are among more than 22,000 installed in that country.

50 Feature Story E xperiment july12.germany.indd 50 6/7/12 1:11 PM The Great

Germany has decided to pursue ambitious greenhouse- gas reductions—while closing down its nuclear plants. Can a heavily industrialized country power its economy with wind turbines and solar panels?

By David Talbot

Along a rural road in the western German German state of North Rhine–Westphalia lives a farmer named Norbert Leurs. An a!able 36-year-old with callused hands, he has two young children and until recently pursued an unremarkable line of work: raising potatoes and pigs. But his newest businesses point to an extraordinary shift in the energy policies of Europe’s largest economy. In 2003, a small wind company erected a 70-meter turbine, one of some 22,000 in hundreds of wind farms dot- ting the German countryside, on a piece of Leurs’s potato patch. Leurs gets a 6 percent cut of the electricity sales, which comes to about $9,500 a year. He’s considering adding two or three more turbines, each twice as tall as the first. The profits from those turbines are modest next to what he stands to make on solar Energy panels. In 2005 Leurs learned that the government was requiring the local utility to pay high prices for rooftop solar power. He took out loans, and in stages over the next seven years, he covered his piggery, barn, and house with solar panels—never mind that the skies are often gray and his roofs aren’t all optimally oriented. From the resulting 690-kilowatt installation he now collects $280,000 a year, and he expects over $2 million in profits after he pays o! his loans. Stories like Leurs’s help explain how Germany was able to produce 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources in E xperiment Feature Story 51

july12.germany.indd 51 6/7/12 1:11 PM 2011, up from 6 percent in 2000. Germany has guaranteed high prices for wind, solar, biomass, and hydroelectric power, tacking the costs onto electric bills. And players like Leurs and the small power company that built his turbine have installed o!-the-shelf technology and locked in profits. For them, it has been remarkably easy being green. What’s coming next won’t be so easy. In 2010, the German government declared that it would undertake what has popu- larly come to be called an Energiewende— an energy turn, or energy revolution. This switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy is the most ambitious ever attempted by a heavily industrialized country: it aims to cut greenhouse-gas emissions 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, and 80 percent by mid- century. The goal was challenging, but it was made somewhat easier by the fact that Germany already generated more than 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, which produces almost no greenhouse once. To help replace nuclear power, they At dockyards near the North Sea port of Ros- gases. Then last year, responding to pub- are racing to install huge wind farms far tock, Germany, Siemens is building a massive platform that will house equipment for managing lic concern over the post-tsunami nuclear off the German coast in the North Sea; power from wind farms far offshore. disaster in Fukushima, Japan, Chancellor new transmission infrastructure is being Angela Merkel ordered the eight oldest Ger- planned to get the power to Germany’s approximately 10 percent since the eight man nuclear plants shut down right away. industrial regions. At the same time, com- nuclear plants were shut. The German grid A few months later, the government final- panies such as Siemens, GE, and RWE, is strained as never before. And—ironically, ized a plan to shut the remaining nine by Germany’s biggest power producer, are given the Energiewende’s goal of reducing 2022. Now the Energiewende includes a looking for ways to keep factories humming greenhouse-gas emissions—the decision to turn away from Germany’s biggest source during lulls in wind and solar power. They close the nuclear plants has increased reli- of low- carbon electricity. are searching for cheap, large-scale forms ance on coal-fired power plants. Germany has set itself up for a grand of power storage and hoping that comput- Despite the costs, Germany could experiment that could have repercussions ers can intelligently coördinate what could greatly benefit from its grand experiment. for all of Europe, which depends heavily be millions of distributed power sources. In the past decade, the country has nur- on German economic strength. The coun- Estimates of what the transition will cost tured not only wind and solar power but try must build and use renewable energy vary widely, depending in part on how fast less- heralded energy technologies such technologies at unprecedented scales, at new technology can be introduced and its as management software and efficient enormous but uncertain cost, while reduc- price lowered. Various economic think industrial processes. Taken together, these ing energy use. And it must pull it all o! tanks predict that the country will spend “green” technologies have created an export COUR without undercutting industry, which relies somewhere between $125 billion and $250 industry that’s worth $12 billion—and is TESY

on reasonably priced, reliable power. “In billion on infrastructure expansion and poised for still more growth, according to O F SI

a sense, the Energiewende is a political subsidies in the next eight years—between Miranda Schreurs, director of the Environ- EMEN statement without a technical solution,” 3.5 and 7 percent of Germany’s 2011 GDP. mental Policy Research Center at the Berlin S; says Stephan Reimelt, CEO of GE Energy The long-term costs, including the expense Free University. Government policies could PREVIOU Germany. “Germany is forcing itself toward of decommissioning nuclear power plants, provide further incentives to develop and S SP

innovation. What this generates is a large will be far higher. deploy new technologies. “That is know- REA

industrial laboratory at a size which has Germany has already incurred signiﬁ- how that you can sell,” Schreurs says. “The D: SEA

never been done before. We will have to try cant costs. Each monthly electric bill car- way for Germany to compete in the long run N GALLU a lot of di!erent technologies to get there.” ries a renewable-energy surcharge of about is to become the most energy-e"cient and P/GE The major players in the German energy 15 percent (heavy industry is exempt). resource-e"cient market, and to expand on TT industry are pursuing several strategies at Wholesale electricity prices have jumped an export market in the process.” Y

52 Feature Story technology review July/August 2012

july12.germany.indd 52 6/7/12 1:11 PM If Germany succeeds in making the tran- verse Germany to reach the major indus- the transportation system, Germany’s econ- sition, it could provide a workable blueprint trial centers in the country’s south. Some omy—and that of Europe as a whole—could for other industrial nations, many of which 3,800 kilometers of new power lines are be in trouble. Already some German firms are also likely to face pressures to trans- needed, but only around 200 have been are building new manufacturing facilities form their energy consumption. “This Ener- built, with reluctant landowners and elsewhere; for example, last year the chem- giewende is being watched very closely. If it regional politicians stalling progress and ical producer Wacker C hemie decided to works in Germany, it will be a template for creating choke points. The delays and the build a polysilicon plant in Tennessee, partly other countries,” says Graham Weale, chief novel technologies make the German o!- because energy costs in Germany were so economist at RWE, which is grappling with shore wind program a huge high. Weale says, “The quality how to shut its nuclear power plants while gamble all by itself. “Nobody “This of the supply would only have keeping the lights on. “If it doesn’t, it will really knows what the Ener- Energiewende is to deteriorate a little bit and be very damaging to the German economy giewende will cost,” says Karen being watched it would be quite serious for and that of Europe.” Pittel, an energy economist very closely. this high-tech nology industry. at the University of Munich. If it works in We’ve already seen, even with- Choke Points “But especially those wind Germany, it will out the lights going out, that In the city of Erlangen, 20 kilometers farms—they are more or less be a template industry is getting nervous.” north of Nuremberg, tight security greets pilot projects.” for other To avoid catastrophe, visitors to the complex of industrial build- The uncertainties don’t countries. If it Germany will have to start ings that house the labs and factories of the stop there. Even with cur- doesn’t, it will be deploying storage technol- energy giant Siemens, one of several con- rent levels of wind power, on very damaging ogies and load-balancing tractors contributing to the Energiewende. windy days grid operators to the German strategies at far larger scales. One of these buildings literally hums with must shut turbines down economy.” The country today has 31 power—30 megawatts’ worth. Inside is a because there’s nowhere to pumped-storage power giant steel and copper machine that con- put the power. When a cloud plants, which force water into verts AC power to DC at a massive scale; it’s bank rolls over southern Germany on an uphill reservoirs at night and then use the destined for installation on o!shore plat- otherwise sunny day, the output of the downhill flow to spin turbines to generate forms that must withstand harsh North Sea region’s many photovoltaic panels can power. Altogether, they can store 38 giga- storms for decades. drop by hundreds of megawatts; the e!ect watt-hours’ worth of electricity. That might Germany needs this technology because is like hitting the o! switch on a moderate- sound like a lot, but it’s less than 90 minutes it’s looking for the steadiest source of wind size coal-fired power plant, increasing the of peak output from Germany’s wind farms. it can find, and that’s found far o!shore—so threat of blackouts. Batteries might help, but so far costs are far that the standard AC lines for transmit- Without enough cheap, reliable power to too high for them to play more than a niche ting power won’t work. To date, Germany support the high-technology industry and role. In another building in Erlangen, Sie- has installed only about 500 megawatts mens is building tractor-trailer-size bat- of offshore wind power, all within 90 teries based on three di!erent lithium-ion kilometers of land, in water less than 40 Germany’s Electricity technologies. Each could power 40 German meters deep. Now energy companies are Generation in 2010 houses for a day, but the batteries are too planning to install 10,000 megawatts of BeforeGermany’s nuclear Electricity plant Generation closings in 2010 expensive to use for backup power. Instead, wind power as far o!shore as 160 kilome- (before nuclear plant closing) high-tech manufacturers are likely to use ters, at depths of up to 70 meters. Several them to ride out brownouts with, say, a Other 10,000- to 20,000-ton o!shore substations 5% 15-minute, eight-megawatt jolt so that will convert gigawatts of AC output to DC, specialized equipment won’t need costly Natural gas Nuclear which can span such distances without 14% Production23% restart procedures. Prices would need to fall large energy losses. “There is nowhere in by at least half before lithium-ion batteries the world where this has been done—build- could provide an economical way to store Renewables ing o!shore grids and o!shore connections 17% hours of excess power from wind turbines. in this way and in this amount,” says Lex Lignite coal Other storage technologies are being Hartman, director of corporate develop- 23% developed but are still probably years from

ment at Tennet, the Dutch grid company Hard coal being practical, if they ever will be. One 18%

COM in charge of parts of Germany’s megascale new technology at Siemens, for example, S.

HIC North Sea e!ort. produces hydrogen by using surplus elec- Of course, all this just gets the power Sources: Federal Association of the Electricity and Water Industry tricity to split water molecules. But it is SOURCE: FEDERAL ASSOCIATION OF FOGRAP

IN to the beach. The electricity needs to tra- THE ELECTRICITY AND WATER INDUSTRY experimental and, at this stage, expensive.

www.technologyreview.com Feature Story 53

july12.germany.indd 53 6/6/12 7:01 PM Inevitably, some hot July week will come dreds of thousands of home units—and needed to balance the fl uctuating output when a high-pressure system stalls over larger ones powering apartment or o! ce and create a block of stable power. Europe, stilling turbines just when sun- buildings—to generate extra electricity for Early projects like this one are stepping- burned Germans reach for their air condi- the grid in a pinch. As much as 5 percent stones toward more sophisticated systems tioners. Until large-scale, cheap storage is of Germany’s electricity could be produced that include demand management: utilities available, gas power plants, which can start this way—about the amount utilities expect would compensate customers for agreeing up quickly and e! ciently, will be the most to draw from the new o" shore wind farms. to have their power consumption auto- practical way to cope with these situations. Reaching that point could take decades matically curtailed during times of peak But there’s little incentive to as homeowners and busi- demand. Someday the systems could also build such plants. Owners nesses gradually replace draw power from the batteries of parked of gas plants meant to meet The goal is to their existing boilers and the electric cars, or store excess power in them, peak power needs can no use software infrastructure is put in place to compensate for shifts in the wind. longer count on running for to transform to synchronize hundreds of GE and other companies are pursuing a certain number of hours, thousands of thousands of power sources. such concepts, too. “Today what we know since the need will no longer renewable But an hour east of Duis- is that the energy market will be decentral- fall on predictable workday energy sources, burg, in a 1960s-era office ized; it will be a fragmented market,” says afternoons but come and go each of which building on the edge of Dort- Reimelt, of GE. “Before, we had four utility with the sun and wind. Says alone is mund, engineers are test- companies. Today we have 350 companies Ottmar Edenhofer, chief econ- unreliable, into ing a more modest network generating power, going up to a thousand, omist at the Potsdam Institute a vast network as a starting point. A base- and going up to a million if you count every- for Climate Impact Research, that utilities can ment server room functions one with a solar panel on the roof. So one “The design of the electricity depend on. as a communications hub of the trends that we see is that there must market will change funda- for 120 small generating sta- be less emphasis on power generation and mentally. You have fl uctuating tions that together produce more on power management.” demand, and at the same time a fl uctuat- 160 megawatts of electricity from renew- ing supply. The linkage and the interplay in able sources—mostly wind but also biomass Baffl ed in Bavaria these two dimensions has become the sub- and solar. Software takes weather predic- The fl oor-to-ceiling windows behind the ject of intense research. There could be new tions into account and assembles a block of desk of Wolfgang Mayer, the burgermeister and emerging market failures.” renewable electricity from wind and solar, of the small Bavarian town of Gundrem- switching the biogas plants on and o" as mingen, provide a commanding view. A Virtual Power Duisburg is a gritty town just west of Essen, a major World War II munitions manufac- Germany’s Progress So Far Charting the Energy Turn turing center that was reduced to rubble by Goals for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and Percentage of the country’s electricity that Goals for greenhouse-gas emissions and Allied bombing. This is where RWE, one of renewable energy use comes from renewable sources renewable-energy use Germany’s four major utilities, is working 80% at the frontier of another crucial technol- Electricity generation ogy: virtual power plants, in which soft- Share of Renewable Energy Supply?? (RES) (% of total gross electricity consumption) from renewable ware intelligently controls vast numbers of sources 60% 60% small power sources (and, eventually, dis- 35% Path to tributed storage sites) to coördinate their 2020 goal Final energy output for sale on energy markets. The consumption goal is to transform thousands of renew- from renewable sources* able energy sources, each of which alone is 35% 20 unreliable, into a vast network that utilities can depend on. It’s a dazzling concept, but 20% one in its infancy. 18% Emissions relative to Inside a lab that sits in front of a Nazi- 1990 level built bomb shelter shaped like a pointed 3.1 witch’s hat, RWE researchers are testing ’90 ’95 ’00 ’05 ’10 ’15 ’20 2020 ’30 ’40 ’50 a dozen gas-fired boilers and fuel cells Sources: Federal Ministry for the Environment, *Include*Including electricity, electricity, transportation transportation fuels, and heat fuels, and heat designed to generate both heat and elec- Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety SOURCE: FEDERAL MINISTRY FOR THE ENVIRONMENT, Sources:SOURCE: FEDERALFederal Ministry MINISTRY FORfor the THE Environment ENVIRONMENT, tricity. In theory, utilities could call on hun- NATURE CONSERVATION, AND NUCLEAR SAFETY NatureNATURE ConservationCONSERVATION, and AND Nuclear NUCLEAR Safety SAFETY

54 Feature Story technology review July/August 2012

july12.germany.indd 54 6/7/12 1:11 PM most inexpensively, you would focus not so much on renewables but much more on e#ciency,” says Pittel, the energy economist from Munich. The current subsidies also don’t encourage innovation as much as they make existing technologies proﬁtable. There’s little incentive to, say, develop radically new photovoltaic technologies, even though these might ultimately be the only way to make unsubsidized solar power cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels. To some German economists, the country’s energy policy is simply wrong-headed. Hans-Werner Sinn, president of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research at the Uni- versity of Munich, is especially scathing. “The Energiewende is a turn into nowhere- land, because the green technologies are just not su#cient to provide a replacement for modern society’s energy needs,” he says. “It is wrong to shut down the atomic power Cooling towers at a nuclear power plant in ing, the coal plant is the largest of its kind plants, because this is a cheap source of Gundremmingen are visible behind homes in the world, and it’s going full blast these energy, and wind and solar power are by whose owners are taking advantage of solar- power subsidies. The plant is marked for closure. days to keep up with power demand. no means able to provide a replacement. “If you close eight nuclear plants, which They are much more expensive, and the mile away stand the twin cooling towers were carbon-free, overnight, you will energy that comes out is of inferior qual- of the Gundremmingen Nuclear Power Sta- increase carbon emissions,” Weale says. ity. Energy-intensive industries will move tion Units B and C, which together are the “One will have to be more reliant on coal out, and the competitiveness of the German largest source of nuclear power in Germany. than was previously expected. It may be manufacturing sector will be reduced or

Nicely situated halfway between the indus- hard to reduce CO2 emissions as quickly as wages will be depressed.” trial centers of Stuttgart and Munich, the one would like.” Decisions made now about German politicians, of course, are bet- plant has the capacity to produce 2.6 giga- what kinds of power plants to install will ting that Sinn is wrong. And plenty of watts of power. Mayer is confounded by the have repercussions for decades, he says: encouraging signs argue against his pessi- Energiewende, which threatens hundreds of “You can’t make sudden changes from one mism. The cost of solar panels has dropped jobs in town and could hurt tax revenues. asset to another.” sharply, which means that solar power may “They say 2017 to shut down Unit B, and A second problem is that even when become more competitive. Battery costs 2021 for Unit C,” he says, motioning toward it comes to alternative energy sources, may follow suit. If fossil fuels continue to the plant. “But they were the same time Germany doesn’t reward carbon dioxide become more expensive, renewable power starting up in 1989! A normal person can- reduction. Rather, its policy establishes sources will look more attractive. “Forty not understand. What is the logic?” well-defined subsidies for specific tech- years is a long time, and one is continu-

REVIEW Mayer is not alone in his ba!ement. nologies: a kilowatt-hour of solar power is ously being surprised by favorable techno- GY There is much about the current policy rewarded more than power from o"shore logical developments—for example, the way that arguably isn’t logical. In the short term wind, which in turn earns more than power in which the price of solar cells is coming ECHNOLO

T/T at least, the decision to close the nuclear from onshore wind. Even though solar sub- down,” Weale says. “From my point of view, BO L

TA plants means that the Energiewende will sidies have been reduced to rates far lower I want to emphasize how challenging the ID ID

AV actually push utilities to rely more heav- than the ones Leurs locked in, solar power Energiewende is. At the moment, it’s look- ily on coal. Last year, for example, RWE still pays the highest rates. If reducing ing di#cult. But with the right incentives, COM; D COM; S.

HIC ﬁred up two long-planned new boilers at emissions were the focus, however, more one can have good reason to believe that an existing facility near the Belgian border money would be directed toward reducing technological progress will be a lot faster FOGRAP that burns the dirtiest fossil fuel of them energy use. “If you could choose the opti- than we currently expect.” : IN: all: brown lignite coal. Though these boil- mal instruments, focusing on those areas OSITE David Talbot, Technology Review’s chief correspon- PP

O ers are cleaner than the ones they’re replac- first where you can achieve your goals dent, wrote about Kenya’s startup culture in March.

www.technologyreview.com Feature Story 55

july12.germany.indd 55 6/6/12 7:01 PM BIOLOGY’S MASTER PROGRAMMERS

For more than a decade, synthetic biologists have promised to revolutionize the way we produce fuels, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. It turns out, however, that programming new life forms is not so easy. Now some of these same scientists are turning back to nature for inspiration.

By MICHAEL WALDHOLZ Photographs by Mark Ostow

eorge Church is an imposing Church looms especially large these days figure—over six feet tall, with because of his role as one of the most influen- a large, rectangular face bor- tial figures in synthetic biology, an ambitious dered by a brown and silver and radical approach to genetic engineering nest of beard and topped by a that attempts to create novel biological enti- Gthick mop of hair. Since the mid-1980s Church ties—everything from enzymes to cells and has played a pioneering role in the develop- microbes—by combining the expertise of biol- ment of DNA sequencing, helping—among his ogy and engineering. He and his lab are credited other achievements—to organize the Human with many of the advances in harnessing and Genome Project. To reach his o!ce at Harvard synthesizing DNA that now help other research- Medical School, one enters a laboratory hum- ers modify microörganisms to create new fuels ming with many of the more than 50 graduate and medical treatments. When I ask Church to students and postdoctoral fellows over whom describe what tangible impact synthetic biology Church rules as director of the school’s Center will have on everyday life, he leans back in his for Computational Genetics. Passing through an chair, clasps his hands behind his head, and says, anteroom of assistants, I find Church at his desk, “It will change everything. People are going to his back to me, hunched over a notebook com- live healthier a lot longer because of synthetic puter that makes him look even larger than he is. biology. You can count on it.”

www.technologyreview.com Feature Story 57

July12 Feature SynthBio.indd 57 6/6/12 1:16 PM Such grandiosity is not uncommon among the practitioners of he has founded or taken an advisory role in more than 50 startup synthetic biology. Ever since Church and a few other researchers companies—and he stayed awake throughout our time together, began to combine biology and engineering a dozen years ago, they apparently excited to describe how his lab has found ways to have promised it would “change everything.” And no wonder. The take advantage of ultrafast sequencing and other tools to greatly very idea of synthetic biology is to purposefully engineer the DNA speed up synthetic biology. Among its many projects, Church’s of living things so that they can accomplish tasks they don’t carry lab has invented a technique for rapidly synthesizing multiple out in nature. Although genetic engineering has been going on novel strings of DNA and introducing them simultaneously into since the 1970s, a rapid drop in the cost of decoding and synthesiz- a bacterial genome. In one experiment, researchers created four ing DNA, combined with a vast increase in computer power and billion variants of E. coli in a single day. After three days, they an influx into biology labs of engineers and computer scientists, found variants of the bacteria in which production of a desired has led to a fundamental change in how thoroughly and swiftly chemical was increased fivefold. an organism’s genetics can be modified. Church says the technology will eventually lead to all manner of breakthroughs: we will be able to replace diseased tissues and organs by reprogramming cells to make new ones, create novel microbes that e!- ciently secrete fuels and other chemicals, and fashion DNA switches that turn on the right genes inside a patient’s cells to prevent arteries from getting clogged. Even though some of these applications are years from reality, Church has a way of tossing o" such predictions matter-of- factly. And it’s easy to see why he’s optimistic. The cost of both decoding DNA and synthesizing new DNA strands, he has cal- culated, is falling about five times as fast as computing power is increasing under Moore’s Law, which has accurately pre- dicted that chip performance will double roughly every two years. Those involved in synthetic biology, who often favor com- James Collins puter analogies, might say it’s becoming exponentially easier to read from, and write into, the source code of life. These underlying technology trends, says Church, are leading to an explo- The idea, Church explains, is to sort through the variations to sion in experimentation of a sort that would have been inconceiv- find “an occasional hopeful monster, just as evolution has done able only a few years ago. for millions of years.” By mimicking in lab experiments what takes Up to now, it’s proved stubbornly di!cult to turn synthetic biol- eons in nature, he says, he is radically improving the odds of find- ogy into a practical technology that can create products like cheap ing ways to make microbes not just do new things but do them biofuels. Scientists have found that the “code of life” is far more e!ciently. complex and di!cult to crack than anyone might have imagined a decade ago. What’s more, while rewriting the code is easier than A DNA Turn-On ever, getting it right isn’t. Researchers and entrepreneurs have In some ways, the di!culties researchers have faced making new, found ways to coax bacteria or yeast to make many useful com- more useful life forms shouldn’t come as a surprise. Indeed, a les- pounds, but it has been di!cult to optimize such processes so that son of genome research over the last few decades is that no matter the microbes produce significant quantities e!ciently enough to how elegantly compact the DNA code is, the biology it gives rise compete with existing commercial products. to is consistently more complex than anyone anticipated. When Church is characteristically undeterred. At 57, he has sur- I began reporting the early days of gene discovery 30 years ago, vived cancer and a heart attack, and he su"ers from both dys- biologists, as they often do, thought reductively. When they found lexia and narcolepsy; before I visited him, one of his colleagues a gene involved in disease, the discovery made headlines. Scientists warned that I shouldn’t be surprised if he fell asleep on me. But said they believed that potent new medicines could soon deactivate

58 Feature Story technology review July/August 2012

July12 Feature SynthBio.indd 58 6/6/12 1:16 PM malfunctioning versions of genes, or that gene therapy could be circuit out of biological parts helped launch the field of synthetic used to replace them with healthy versions in the body. biology,” says Collins. The results were published in January 2000. The early biotech companies also employed a one-gene-at-a- Soon Collins’s toggle was joined by an expanding list of DNA time approach. Companies would locate the gene that made a circuits, including biosensors, oscillators, bacterial calculators, particular protein, such as insulin; then, using gene-splicing tech- and similar molecular gadgetry. Researchers even established a nology first developed in the 1970s, they would snip open the DNA Registry of Standard Biological Parts: 7,100 di!erent DNA struc- of a bacterium and slide in the insulin-making gene. It’s a technol- tures are available to order. Scientists were excited by the idea that ogy that has led to today’s biotech industry. biology might be modular and predictable, like something made Yet some sco!ed at the idea that such techniques involved any with Lego blocks or computer code. Many scrambled to found real engineering. “To us, it was no more engineering than chang- companies that they hoped would commercialize the technology ing a red light bulb with a green light bulb,” says James Collins, a to produce fuels, drugs, or other products. While comparisons to computer programming inspired “Many of us thought that working at the single-gene level was just a many researchers, however, starting point, that we really needed to figure out how all these newly these tended to oversimplify biology, which has not proved identified genes arising from the Human Genome Project fit into entirely predictable. Further- networks, pathways, and circuits inside the cell.” —James Collins more, the claims that some synthetic- biology companies made now appear to have been Boston University bioengineer who is credited with helping create overly optimistic, Collins says. the field of synthetic biology in 2000. “Many of us thought that Indeed, Collins believes the rush to commercialize has been a working at the single-gene level was just a starting point, that we mistake. “The companies are sucking the oxygen out of the field,” he really needed to figure out how all these newly identified genes aris- says, noting that they have hired scores of geneticists from univer- ing from the Human Genome Project fit into networks, pathways, sity labs. They’re “scooping up our seed corn, the young research- and circuits inside the cell.” By comparison, says Collins, “synthetic ers who should be staying in academic labs working through new biology is genetic engineering on steroids.” ways to engineer biology.” He worries that the race to apply the I met Collins on a rainy winter day in his o"ce on the BU cam- new technology means “there’s going to be a number of biotech pus. He’s an enthusiastic storyteller, full of details, digressions, and carcasses on the side of the road in the near future.” gossip. And at 46, he has lived through the conception and birth of Not even George Church has been immune: Codon Devices, a synthetic biology. Collins told me how he and other engineers in company he cofounded in 2004, was forced to shut down. Codon, the late 1990s felt left out of what appeared to be the most impor- in Church’s words, was established to be the Intel of the bioen- tant science of the time, the sequencing of the human genome. It gineering industry, building ready-made synthetic-biological seemed that every other cover of the journal Science was hailing modules that researchers could use to redesign, say, a yeast. The some new gene breakthrough. But with a slew of unanalyzed DNA company “burned through its cash,” he laments. data piling up in computer databases, it was becoming clear that biologists didn’t know how genetic parts worked together. Collins Nature’s Code says, “We had felt like we were kids outside a candy store. So we Church hopes his latest enterprise avoids a similar fate. Called figured, ‘How can we get in?’” Warp Drive Bio, the company combines computer science, chem- Collins wanted to study cellular processes by constructing gene istry, and genetic engineering in ways that would not have been networks rather than taking them apart. As a first step, he built a possible until recently. It aims to use ultrafast DNA sequencing and biological toggle circuit. A toggle is a mechanism with two possible synthetic-biology techniques, some of which Church pioneered, to states—in the case of a light switch, on or o!. In the switch he and hunt for potential medicines by scouring the DNA of millions of his colleagues built from DNA, two genes next to each other in a environmental samples that drug companies have collected and bacterial genome both produced proteins when they were “on.” But stored over several decades. Warp Drive is, in e!ect, searching for Collins set things up so that each protein would block production genetic parts that nature has already programmed to make par- of the other—if gene 1 was on, it would keep gene 2 o!, and vice ticularly potent, useful chemicals. Church’s technology will be used versa. With the aid of chemicals or a thermal pulse, Collins could to generate copies of those parts, incorporate them into bacteria, flip between the two states. and optimize their performance. Then the bacteria can be used The DNA toggle switch was analogous to an electronic transis- to produce chemicals that, if all goes according to plan, have new tor, able to store a single bit of information. It was also an engi- and interesting therapeutic properties. neered example of the kind of feedback loop that often determines Warp Drive, which was launched in January, employs fewer than whether cells grow, divide, or die. “The idea that you could build a a dozen full-time sta!ers and occupies only about 1,000 square

www.technologyreview.com Feature Story 59

July12 Feature SynthBio.indd 59 6/6/12 1:16 PM feet of o!ce and lab space in Cambridge, Massachu- setts. But the startup, which has raised $125 million in investments, has already formed a strategic partnership with the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi. If Warp Drive Bio meets certain milestones, it has the option to demand that Sanofi purchase the company for $1 billion or more. The deal was struck after Warp Drive’s principal founder, Har- vard biochemist Gregory Verdine, was invited to Paris last May and gave a two-hour presentation that had Sanofi’s head of research, Elias Zerhouni, and several other sta"ers crowding around his laptop. Zerhouni, a former head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, immediately grasped the novelty and potential of Warp Drive’s idea for sifting through nature’s existing stockpile of DNA parts. “We’ve been plagued by a lack of creativity,” he says. “It made sense to give them the resources they need.” Verdine’s insight is that nature is particularly adept at creating chemicals that act safely and pre- Gregory Verdine cisely on a desired biological target. He says that

“It struck me that probably something useful in evolution of the natural drugs that have already helped tailor properties in these compounds that made them been identified have similar DNA signatures—clusters of genes that often occur better suited to work in complex cell systems like the human together in a microbe’s genome. The body.” —Gregory Verdine trick, he adds, is to scan the samples’ DNA to locate familiar-looking clusters that might be recipes for synthesizing half the small-molecule drugs developed over the last 30 to 35 a natural product—ideally, an important one that hasn’t been years have been natural products or derivatives of such products. found before. “It struck me that probably something useful in evolution helped Once identified, the DNA sequences will need to be engineered tailor properties in these compounds that made them better suited into a bacterium so that the company can produce the chemical to work in complex cell systems like the human body,” he says. and study the potential drugs. This is where the synthetic-biology “Nature seemed to have already engineered in complexities that techniques developed by Church will be crucial: in transforming drug chemists don’t understand.” the code into actual compounds. “We use genomics and informat- I interviewed Verdine in a spare room, no bigger than a walk-in ics to find a gene cluster. But that’s an information unit,” Verdine closet, just outside Warp Drive’s lab in a converted book factory in says. “We have to get the molecule. Synthetic biology involves coax- Cambridge. If Church and Collins are intent on creating new syn- ing the cluster into biosynthetic factories, which then produce the thetic parts and bioengineering techniques, Verdine is hoping to molecules. If we don’t have the molecule, the cluster is useless.” use many of the same techniques to unwrap the mysteries of how The idea of resorting to nature’s stockpile for parts, Church nature does it. Over the decades, he explained to me, pharmaceu- says, is “ironic and interesting” given synthetic biology’s interest in tical researchers have collected and stored tens of thousands, and producing entirely new DNA circuits and, ultimately, generating more likely millions, of environmental samples, including dirt entire organisms from scratch. Researchers today may alter, copy, and pond scum. The idea was to discover some potent chemical and paste DNA with increasing ease, but they still struggle when in these mixtures by dripping extracts onto cancer cells or into it comes to actually composing DNA that does anything useful. petri dishes of bacteria. But that process is laborious and subject They are still editing nature’s code and learning from it. It turns to chance. Most drug companies have scaled back such research. out that for now, nature is still the best programmer. The answer, Verdine decided, was to search for DNA instead. Given the plummeting cost of DNA sequencing, it’s now feasible Michael Waldholz is a former managing editor at Bloomberg News, where he over- saw the publication’s coverage of health and science. Previously, he was a reporter to simply decode all the genetic material present in, say, a drop and news editor at the Wall Street Journal. His books include Curing Cancer and of pond water teeming with microörganisms. Verdine says many Genome, which was published in 1990.

60 Feature Story technology review July/August 2012

July12 Feature SynthBio.indd 60 6/6/12 1:16 PM A Business Report on The Value of Privacy Internet ads are a $70 billion business that is built on data about you. Has it gone too far? TR examines the business models and technologies that are determining the value of privacy. Find the full report at technologyreview.com/business.

INCLUDING: High Stakes in The Curious Case Keeping Things Private A Dollar for Your Data Internet Tracking of Internet Privacy at Microsoft ORD F STUARTBRAD

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THE BIG QUESTION like Amazon’s that target you on the basis of your past Web surfing. High Stakes in Internet Tracking Such ads are a multibillion-dollar busi- Will “Do Not Track” kill off innovation along ness. All the same, Microsoft’s chief privacy o!cer says the forthcoming Internet with targeted advertising? Explorer 10 will be the first browser to have By ANTONIO REGALADO “Do Not Track” turned on by default. For Microsoft, trust is the greater competitive n Amazon ad for a book by science advantage. A fiction writer Cory Doctorow recently DATA MARKET Before you cheer, you might ask if there appeared on my computer screen. “What The growth of online advertising is raising is any real harm in commercial tracking. a coincidence!” I thought naïvely. I’d been privacy questions. Despite the hand-wringing, it’s not so easy What is your view about companies On a scale of 0 to 10, which reading Doctorow’s item on Internet privacy U.S. online ad spending ($ billions) tocollecting find people personal hurt information by collection online? of their companies do you trust with your (see opposite page) and had looked up his 40 personal data. Just ask the trial lawyers who personal information? past writing. That was all it took for a crowd have 9%been bringing a ballooning number of Apple ...... 35 4.6 of ads to start following me. privacy13% suits. At first,Invasion courts of rebu privacy"ed their Google ...... 3.8 Improves online The business story of our age is how the 30 class-action claims; experiencethey could not show LinkedIn...... 3.0 Internet connects us. Part of being con- “injury78 in% fact.” Other Facebook...... 2.7 25 nected by technology is having an identity. Recently, regulators have taken a more Twitter ...... 2.4 It used to be a phone number. On the net- expansive view. The Federal Trade Commis- 20 How concerned are you work, it’s an IP address or the browser cook- aboutsion now online says data privacy-related collection? harms needn’t ies that tell other computers who you are. 15 be7% economic or physical but can also include The problem now is that anyone can use practices1% that “unexpectedly reveal previ- 10 10% these tools to track you. Gary Kovacs, CEO ously private information”Very concerned like purchasing Somewhat concerned of Mozilla, recently demonstrated Collusion, 5 habits. That is openingNot the very legal concerned floodgates. 29% an add-on to the Firefox Web browser that Facebook53 faces% a classNot action at all concerned that alleges 0 Don’t know lets you see who those anyones are. Kovacs 20082007 20102009 2011 2012* it violated wiretap laws and asks for dam- says a who-knows-who of 150 entities were Source: eMarketer *estimate Source:ages of USC/ $15L.A.Times billion—about poll of 1,500 California what voters the company tracking his activity after one day. This raised in its IPO. The National Law Review crowd of hucksters and ad networks was calculates that Google could owe $800 bil- following his nine-year-old daughter, too. lion in fines to the government for circum- What is your view about companies On a scale of 0 to 10, which Some peopleU.S. onlinethink adtracking spending is ($ creepy. billions) collecting personal information online? companiesventing the do Safari you trust browser’s with your privacy settings. Kovacs is one40 of them. He says when we personalNow information?that lawyers are involved, you’d be 9% go on the Internet we are like Hansel and Appleright...... to wonder if something innovative 35 What is your view about companies On a scale of 0 to 10, which 4.6 13% Invasion of privacy Gretel leaving informationU.S. online ad breadcrumbs—spending ($ billions) collecting personal information online? companiesGooglewill end...... updo youin the trust crosshairs. with your For3.8 instance, Improves online 40 personal information? birthdays,30 financial histories, and rela- 9% experience LinkedIna 12-person...... Data Science Team 3.0at Facebook 78% Other Apple ...... 35 Facebook...... 4.62.7 tionship status—“everywhere25 as we travel 13% Invasion of privacy is sitting on the largest trove of data ever GoogleTwitter...... 3.82.4 through the digital woods.” Improves online collected on human behavior (see “What 30 experience LinkedIn...... 3.0 20 How concerned are you % Other It’s a scary story, but what are we really about 78online data collection? FacebookFacebook...... Knows,” p. 42). This2.7 could yield What25 is your view about companies On a scale of 0 to 10, which worried about?15 In our age of satellite Twittersomething...... big—even if no one2.4 yet knows U.S. online ad spending ($ billions) collecting personal information online? companies7% do you trust with your imagery and20 Street View and data mash- How 1concerned% are you what. It will definitely result in more tar- 40 personal information? 10 10% ups, knowledge9% is getting more and more about online data collection?Very concerned geted ads. But so what? The fact is, if you 15 Apple ...... Somewhat concerned 35 7% 4.6 granular. It’s13%5 becoming harderInvasion to be ofprivate, privacy Not very concerned phrase the question right, many consumers Google29%1%...... 3.8 53% Not at all concerned 10 Improves online 10% 30 to be “secluded” in the most literal experience sense of LinkedIn...... VeryDon’t concerned know 3.0 will admit they actually want targeted ads. 0 Somewhat concerned %20082007 20102009 Other 2011 2012* the word. There’s578 now a gathering move- Facebook...... Not very concerned2.7 Now that I think about it, I might just 25 Source: eMarketer *estimate Source:29% USC/L.A.Times poll of 1,500 California voters ment to give people a choice. Earlier this Twitter ...... 53% Not at all concerned2.4 buy that Doctorow book. Thanks for the 0 Don’t know 20 year PresidentHow concerned Barack20082007 Obama are you endorsed20102009 2011 “Do2012* connection, Amazon. about Source:online eMarketer data collection? *estimate Source: USC/L.A.Times poll of 1,500 California voters Not Track,” a browser technology meant to Antonio Regalado is Technology Review ’s senior editor 15 7% limit tracking1 and% potentially prevent ads for business. 10 10% Very concerned Somewhat concerned 5 64 Business Report Not very concerned technology review July/August 2012 29% 53% Not at all concerned 0 Don’t know 20082007 20102009 2011 2012* Source: eMarketer *estimate Source: USC/L.A.Times poll of 1,500 California voters

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this day forward, to sell the insights PRESERVATIONIST Cory Doctorow gleaned thereby, and to retain that working in the privacy information in perpetuity and sup- of his home ofﬁ ce ply it without limitation to any third in London. party.

Actually, the text above is not exactly analogous to the terms on which we bargain with every mouse click. To really polish the analogy, I’d have to ask this magazine to hide that text in the margin of one of the back pages. And I’d have to end it with This agreement is subject to change at any time. What we agree to participate in on the Internet isn’t a negotiated trade; it’s a smorgasbord, and intimate facts of your life (your location, your interests, your friends) are the bu! et. Why do we seem to value privacy so little? In part, it’s because we are told to. Facebook has more than once overriden its users’ privacy preferences, replacing them with new default settings. Facebook then responds to the inevitable public outcry by restoring something that’s like the old system, except slightly less private. And it adds a few more lines to an inexplicably complex privacy dashboard. Even if you read the fi ne print, human OPINION beings are awful at pricing out the net present value of a decision whose consequences The Curious Case are far in the future. No one would take up smoking if the tumors sprouted with the of Internet Privacy fi rst pu! . Most privacy disclosures don’t Free services in exchange for personal information. That’s the “privacy put us in immediate physical or emotional distress either. But given a large popula- bargain” we all strike on the Web. It could be the worst deal ever. tion making a large number of disclosures, By CORY DOCTOROW harm is inevitable. We’ve all heard the stories about people who’ve been fi red because ere’s a story you’ve heard about the But if it’s a bargain, it’s a curious, one- they set the wrong privacy fl ag on that post HInternet: we trade our privacy for ser- sided arrangement. To understand the kind where they blew o! on-the-job steam. vices. The idea is that your private informa- of deal you make with your privacy a hun- The risks increase as we disclose more, tion is less valuable to you than it is to the dred times a day, please read and agree with something that the design of our social fi rms that siphon it out of your browser as the following: media conditions us to do. When you start you navigate the Web. They know what to out your life in a new social network, you do with it to turn it into value—for them By reading this agreement, you give are rewarded with social reinforcement as and for you. This story has taken on mythic Technology Review and its partners your old friends pop up and congratulate proportions, and no wonder, since it has the unlimited right to intercept and you on arriving at the party. Subsequent

JONATHAN WORTH/CREATIVE COMMONS WORTH/CREATIVE JONATHAN billions of dollars riding on it. examine your reading choices from disclosures generate further rewards, but

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not always. Some disclosures seem like descend on IT giants’ data centers to ensure Cookie managers should come next. bombshells to you (“I’m getting a divorce”) they aren’t cheating. In the EU, they like the Imagine if your browser loaded only cook- but produce only virtual cricket chirps from idea that you own your data, which means ies that it thought were useful to you, rather your social network. And yet seemingly that you have a property interest in the than dozens from ad networks you never insignificant communications (“Does my facts of your life and the right to demand intended to interact with. Advertisers and butt look big in these jeans?”) can produce that this “property” not be misused. But media buyers will say the idea can’t work. a torrent of responses. Behavioral scientists this approach is flawed, too. If there’s one But the truth is that dialing down Internet have a name for this dynamic: “intermittent thing the last 15 years of Internet policy tracking won’t be the end of advertising. reinforcement.” It’s one of the most power- fights have taught us, it’s that nothing is Ultimately, it could be a welcome change ful behavioral training techniques we know ever solved by ascribing property-like rights for those in the analytics and advertising about. Give a lab rat a lever that produces a to easily copied information. business. Now it seems as if everyone gets to slurp data out of your computer, regardless of whether the service is superior. Once the The users and the analytics people are in a shoot- privacy bargain takes place without coer- ing war, but only the analytics people are armed. cion, good companies will be able to build There’s a business opportunity for a company that services that get more data from their users than bad companies. supplies arms to the rebels instead of the empire. For mobile devices, we’d need more sophisticated tools. Today, mobile-app food pellet on demand and he’ll only press There’s still room for improvement—and marketplaces present you with take-it-or- it when he’s hungry. Give him a lever that profit—in code. A great deal of Internet- leave-it o!ers. If you want to download that produces food pellets at random intervals, data harvesting is the result of permissive Connect the Dots app to entertain your kids and he’ll keep pressing it forever. defaults on how our browsers handle cook- on a long car ride, you must give the app How does society get better at preserving ies, those bits of code used to track us. Right access to your phone number and location. privacy online? As Lawrence Lessig pointed now, there are two ways to browse the Web: What if mobile OSes were designed to let out in his book Code and Other Laws of turn cookies o! altogether and live with the their users instruct them to lie to apps? Cyberspace, there are four possible mecha- fact that many sites won’t work; or turn on “Whenever the Connect the Dots app wants nisms: norms, law, code, and markets. all cookies and accept the wholesale extrac- to know where I am, make something up. So far, we’ve been pretty terrible on all tion of your Internet use habits. When it wants my phone number, give it counts. Take norms: our primary normative Browser vendors could take a stab at the a random one.” An experimental module mechanism for improving privacy decisions problem. For a precedent, recall what hap- for Cyanogenmod (a free/open version of is a kind of pious finger-wagging, especially pened to pop-up ads. When the Web was the Android OS) already does this. It works directed at kids. “You spend too much time young, pop-ups were everywhere. They’d moderately well but would be better if it on those Interwebs!” And yet schools and appear in tiny windows that re-spawned were o"cially supported by Google. libraries and parents use network spyware when you closed them. They ran away Far from destroying business, letting to trap every click, status update, and IM from your cursor and auto-played music. users control disclosure would create from kids, in the name of protecting them Because pop-ups were the only way to com- value. Design an app that I willingly give from other adults. In other words: your pri- mand a decent rate from advertisers, the my location to (as I do with the Hailo app vacy is infinitely valuable, unless we’re vio- conventional wisdom was that no browser for ordering black cabs in London) and lating it. (Oh, and if you do anything to get vendor could a!ord to block pop-ups by you’d be one of the few and proud firms around our network surveillance, you’re in default, even though users hated them. with my permission to access and sell that deep trouble.) The deadlock was broken by Mozilla, information. Right now, the users and the What about laws? In the United States, a nonprofit foundation that cared mostly analytics people are in a shooting war, but there’s a legal vogue for something called about serving users, not site owners or only the analytics people are armed. There’s “Do Not Track”: users can instruct their advertisers. When Mozilla’s Firefox turned a business opportunity for a company that browsers to transmit a tag that says, “Don’t on pop-up blocking by default, it began to wants to supply arms to the rebels instead collect information on my user.” But there’s be wildly successful. The other browser ven- of the empire.

no built-in compliance mechanism— dors had no choice but to follow suit. Today, Cory Doctorow is a science ﬁction author, activist, we can’t be sure it works unless auditors pop-ups are all but gone. journalist, and co-editor of Boing Boing.

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results. Do you handle social media any differently? People have to opt in to any experience where search results are shared. Also, Facebook requires users to be 13 or older to access its services, whereas Bing’s social search features will only surface results for users who are 18 or older.

What did Microsoft learn during the 1990s, when conspiracy theorists accused you of using Windows updates to spy on people? That really helped us understand the importance of trust. Windows updates keep society protected from online threats. So we wanted to ensure that we had strong privacy controls in Windows Update, so that people would trust it and use it. One of the things we did was to have indepen- dent auditors crawl all over what we were doing and then issue a report that assured everyone we were collecting only the data we said we were collecting.

LEADERS Does “privacy” mean something different to Microsoft than it did 15 years ago? Keeping Things Security as it relates to data is primarily about the protection of that data, but pri- Private at Microsoft vacy is something much broader: “what is The company and its rivals have important differences when it the correct use of the data?” There was a lot more focus on security in the early days at comes to protecting personal information, says its chief privacy ofﬁcer. Microsoft, but we’ve been investing deeply By LEE GOMES over the last 10 years to get us ready for this moment when privacy would become much arlier this year, Microsoft caused a stir don’t abuse your personal data. Journal- more important. The big privacy challenge Eby running big newspaper ads charg- ist Lee Gomes spoke with Brendon Lynch, of our time will be enabling society to beneﬁt ing that its archrival, Google, was trampling Microsoft’s chief privacy o"cer. from information-centric innovations while on personal privacy by gathering ever more ensuring that personal privacy is protected. information on users. Some saw the ads as TR: Why did Microsoft criticize Google? disingenuous: Microsoft uses some similar Lynch: It was recognizing that there is Do devices like the Kinect game control- practices in its own search engine, Bing. angst in the environment, that there is con- ler present new privacy challenges? But inside Microsoft, the claim that it is cern around privacy for a lot of consumers. There are some privacy sensitivities—it better at privacy is an article of faith. Micro- We feel proud about the way we build privacy can do voice recognition, it can do facial soft’s e!orts began in the 1990s, when it features and controls, and we wanted people recognition. Protecting privacy in this case battled security holes in its Windows oper- to know that there was a choice out there. involved making sure that none of this ating system. Back then, privacy meant not information leaves the Kinect device. It’s HORVATH

R having your computer infected with a hack- Bing recently began letting users sign not storing the information or sharing it ETE

P er’s malware. Today, it means companies in with Facebook and share search with anything else.

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CASE STUDIES when they simply give away their location and much more. It is a phenomenon Green A Dollar for Your Data considers a “fundamental instability” in the Information about you is free for the taking on marketplace. Economists, however, have found major the Web. A new crop of entrepreneurs wants problems with the idea of personal-data you to collect. By JESSICA LEBER marketplaces. Individuals struggle to put a value on their data. And within today’s market structure, the value can vary dramati- nless your name is Oprah Winfrey or mation of all sorts, trivial (pizza orders) or cally depending on how it’s measured, but UWarren Bu!ett, you’d be hard pressed sensitive (student loan records, medical often information is exchanged for mere to find anyone to pay $1,000 to hear about prescriptions). They place the data in a pennies, says Alessandro Acquisti, co-direc- your purchasing habits. Anyone who wants “vault” and can grant other people or Web tor of Carnegie Mellon University’s Center this information can glean much of it from programs access to relevant portions. You for Behavioral Decision Research. your behavior on the Internet anyway. Com- could enter your home alarm code and “I would like these services to succeed,” panies tracking and aggregating our clicks, share it only with houseguests, or grant Acquisti says. “At least they provide some taps, and swipes are the ones making for- a financial advisor access to details about more transparency. But I fear they may not.” tunes. Individuals are not. your retirement accounts. It’s unclear so far how many users Personal But a startup called Personal thinks it This year, the company plans to add a has; the company declined to say. As of now, can change this. Its starting point is an marketplace where people will be able to Green’s startup idea appears to have won idea that may seem strange to the Face- sell access to their personal information— more attention from analysts and privacy book generation: an online network where for instance, an intention to buy an SUV watchdogs than from consumers. users control what information advertisers in the next four weeks. Local car deal- In the end, people will have to see enough can access. ers, Green believes, would want to pay for benefit from such services to invest time in Personal, based in Washington, D.C., the chance to advertise or o!er incentives maintaining an account, which can involve is among a number of startups that want to such users because the strategy o!ers manually entering information such as the to help people “collect, curate, and derive higher odds of a payo! than, say, targeting numbers associated with bank accounts or value” from their own online data, according ads through Google. Green says an individ- warranties. But Green believes there are big to the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium, ual could earn $1,000 a year in this man- productivity benefits to storing one’s valu- a group formed in 2010 to encourage such ner; Personal would take a percentage of able information in a single location. Users e!orts; it lists 30 businesses as members. advertiser fees. will have access to a personal data search Personal cofounder Shane Green Green started Personal in 2009 and box, and a feature to be introduced soon believes that many Internet surfers are has raised $11 million from investors. He will let them safely complete online forms primed to share more detailed and reveal- previously founded an online company with a single click. ing information than they commonly do that helped owners of stadiums and other Green says the ultimate challenge for today—so long as they stay in control, and facilities create maps of buildings or private private data networks like his will be main- possibly earn money from it. events like the Super Bowl. His custom- taining security. As with a bank, if you lock Users of the network, launched last ers wouldn’t have allowed him to resell the a lot of value in a vault, robbers will try to November, are encouraged to upload infor- data, yet that is exactly what individuals do get in.

More on Ad Men Spot an Click Me! Does Siri Europe’s Privacy Privacy Enemy: W3C Behavioral Remember Rules Stiﬂe Read all the stories The coming battle Advertising on Everything Innovation in this report at between Madison the Open Web You Say? Strict data privacy rules technologyreview.com/ Avenue and the Web Here’s how to track Voice recognition are making things dif- RU

business Consortium. users even if you’re is the new privacy ﬁcult for startups in FA R/ V

not Facebook. battleground. Europe. EER

68 Business Report technology review July/August 2012

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IOI full page ad.indd 1 12/6/2010 2:10:25 PM reviews

with its 900 million users, its valuation of I don’t know anyone in the ad- The around $60 billion (as of early June), and supported Web business who isn’t engaged a business derived primarily from fairly in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit opera- Facebook traditional online advertising, is now at tion to realign costs with falling per-user the heart of the heart of this fallacy. revenues, or who isn’t manically inflating Fallacy The daily and stubborn reality for tra!c to compensate for ever-lower per- everybody building businesses on the user value. For all its valuation, the strength of Web advertising is that the Facebook has convinced large num- social network is just another value of digital ads decreases every quar- bers of otherwise intelligent people that the ad-supported site. It needs ter, a consequence of their simultaneous magic of the medium will reinvent adver- an earthshaking idea. ine"ectiveness and e!ciency. The nature tising in a heretofore unimaginably profit- of people’s behavior on the Web and of how able way, or that the company will create By MICHAEL WOLFF they interact with advertising, as well as the something new that isn’t advertising, which character of those ads themselves and their will produce even more wonderful profits. acebook not only is on course to go inability to command attention, has meant But because its stock has been trading at bust but will take the rest of the ad- a marked decline in advertising’s impact. about 40 times its expected earnings for the Fsupported Web with it. At the same time, network technol- next year, these innovations will have to be Given its vast cash reserves ogy allows advertisers to more something like alchemy to make the com- and the glacial pace of business precisely locate and assemble pany worth its sticker price. For compari- Facebook ads reckonings, this assertion will audiences outside of branded son, Google has been trading at a forward www.facebook.com/ sound exaggerated. But that advertising channels. Instead of having to P/E ratio of around 11. (To gauge how much doesn’t mean it isn’t true. go to CNN for your audience, faith investors have that Google, Facebook, At the heart of the Internet a generic CNN-like audience and other Web companies will extract value business is one of the great business falla- can be assembled outside CNN’s walls and from their users, see Graphiti, on page 31.)

cies of our time: that the Web, with all its without the CNN-brand markup. This has Facebook currently derives 82 percent BRIAN

targeting abilities, can be a more e!cient, resulted in the now famous and cruelly of its revenue from advertising. Most of that ST A and hence more profitable, advertising accurate formulation that $10 of o#ine is the desultory, ticky-tacky display adver- UF FE

medium than traditional media. Facebook, advertising becomes $1 online. tising that litters the right side of people’s R

70 Reviews technology review July/August 2012

july12.reviews.indd 70 6/7/12 2:48 PM Facebook profiles. Some is a kind of social billion people. (One of the problems with tator. It can eliminate the whole laborious, marketing: a user chooses to “like” a prod- the logic of constant growth at this scale numbing process of selling advertising uct, which is supposed to further social and speed is that eventually Facebook will space: if a marketer wants to place an ad relationships with companies. The social run out of humans with computers or smart (that is, if it is already convinced it must network sells its ads by valuing various phones.) And then it is social. Facebook has, advertise), the company calls Mr. Google. combinations of the cost of a thousand ad in some yet-to-be-defined way, redefined And that’s Facebook’s hope, too: it wants impressions (or CPM) and the cost of a click something. Relationships? Media? Com- to be a facilitator, the inevitable conduit at (CPC). Both forms of ads are more or less munications? Communities? Something the center of the world’s commerce. coarsely targeted to users on the basis of big, anyway. Facebook has the scale, the platform, information they’ve volunteered to provide The subtext—an overt subtext—of the and the brand to be the new Google. It lacks to Facebook and the sharing or “liking” of popular account of Facebook is that the net- only the big idea. Right now, it doesn’t actu- media within Facebook’s universe. Gen- work has a proprietary claim to and special ally know how to embed its usefulness into eral Motors recently announced it would insight into social behavior. For enterprises world commerce (or even, really, what its no longer buy any kind of Facebook ad. and advertising agencies, it is therefore the usefulness is). Facebook’s answer to its critics is: Pay bridge to new modes of human connection. But Google didn’t have the big idea no attention to the carping. Sure, grunt- at its founding, either. The search engine like advertising produces the overwhelming borrowed the concept of AdWords from portion of our $4 billion in revenues, and The sweeping, basic, Yahoo’s Overture network (a lawsuit for yes, on a per-user basis, these revenues are transformative, and simple patent infringement and a settlement fol- in decline. But this stu! is really not what way to connect buyer to lowed). Now Google has all the money in we have in mind. Just wait. seller and get out of the way the world to buy or license the ideas that It’s quite a juxtaposition of realities. On eludes Facebook. It has to could make its platform and brand pay o!. the one hand, Facebook is under the same sell its audience like every What might Facebook’s big idea look relentless downward pressure as other humper on Madison Avenue. like? Well, it does have all this data. The Web-based media. The company’s reve- company knows so much about so many nue amounts to a pitiful $5 per customer people that its executives are sure the per year, which puts it ahead of the Hu!- Expressed so baldly, this account is hardly knowledge must have value (see this ington Post but somewhat behind the New di!erent from what was claimed for the month’s cover story, “What Facebook York Times’ digital business. (Here’s the companies most aggressively boosted dur- Knows,” on page 42). heartbreaking truth about the difference ing the dot-com boom. But there is, in fact, If you’re inside the Facebook gal- between new media and old: even in the one company that created and harnessed a axy—a constellation that includes an New York Times’ declining traditional busi- transformation in behavior and business: ever- e xpanding cloud of associated ven- ness, a subscriber is still worth more than Google. Facebook could be, or in many peo- tures—there is endless chatter about a near- $1,000 a year.) Facebook’s business grows ple’s eyes should be, something similar. Lost utopian new medium for marketing. Round only on the unsustainable basis that it can in such analysis is the failure to describe the and round goes the conversation: “If we just add new customers at a faster rate than the application that will drive revenues. ... if only ... when we will ...” If, for instance, price of advertising declines. It is peddling Google is an incredibly efficient sys- frequent-flier programs and travel destina- as fast as it can. And the present scenario tem for placing ads. In a disintermediated tions actually knew when you were think- gets much worse as people increasingly advertising market, the company has turned ing about planning a trip ... If a marketer interact with the social service on mobile itself into the last and ultimate middleman. could identify the person who has the most devices, because on a small screen it is On its own site, it controls the space where influence on you ... If an advertiser could vastly harder to sell ads and monetize users. a buyer searches for a thing and where a introduce you to someone who would relay On the other hand, Facebook is, every- seller hawks that thing (AdWords, its key- the advertising message ... Get it? No ads, one has come to agree, profoundly di!er- words advertising network). Google is also just friends! My God! ent from the Web. First of all, it exerts a the cheapest, most e"cient way to place But so far the sweeping, basic, trans- new level of hegemonic control over users’ ads anywhere else on the Web (through the formative, and simple way to connect experiences. And it has its vast scale: 900 AdSense network). It’s not a media com- buyer to seller and get out of the way million, soon a billion, eventually two pany in any traditional sense; it’s a facili- eludes Facebook.

www.technologyreview.com Reviews 71

july12.reviews.indd 71 6/7/12 2:48 PM So the social network is left in the same position as all other media companies. Instead of being inevitable and unavoidable, it has to sell its audience like every humper on Madison Avenue. But that’s what Facebook is doing: selling individual ads. If you consider only its revenue, it’s an ad-sales business, not a technology company. To meet expectations—the expectations that took it public at $100 billion—it has to sell at near hyperspeed. The growth of its user base and its ever-swelling page views mean an almost inﬁnite inventory to sell. But the expanding supply, together with equiv- ocal demand, results in ever-lowering prices. The math is sickeningly inevitable. Absent that earthshaking idea, Facebook will look forward to slowing or declining growth in a tapped-out market, and ever-falling ad rates, both on the Web and (especially) in mobile applications. Facebook isn’t Google; it’s Yahoo or AOL. Oh, yes ... in its Herculean e!orts to maintain its overall growth, Facebook will force the rest of the ad-driven Web You Will Want Google Goggles to lower its prices, too. The low-level panic the owners of every mass-tra"c I thought that glasses with “augmented reality” would be hopelessly website feel about the ever-downward dorky and could never go mainstream—until I saw the technology movement of their CPM is turning in action. to dread. Last quarter, some big sites observed as much as a 25 percent By FARHAD MANJOO decrease, following Facebook’s own attempt to book more revenue. t ﬁrst glance, Thad Starner does Starner’s eye; he sees its display—pictures, You see where this is going. As Face- not look out of place at Google. A e-mails, anything—superimposed on top book gluts an already glutted market, pioneering researcher of the world, Terminator-style. C

A OR the fallacy of the Web as a proﬁtable in the ﬁeld of wearable comput- Starner’s heads-up display B ad medium will become hard to ignore. ing, Starner is a big, charm- Google’s is his own system, not a proto- ETT LEE/ Project Glass The crash will come. And Facebook— ing man with unruly hair. But type of Project Glass, Google’s https://plus.google FO that putative transformer of worlds, everyone who meets him does a recently announced e!ort to UN .com/1116261273 DATION which is, in reality, only an ad-driven double take, because mounted 67496192147/posts build augmented-reality gog- FI

site—will fall with everybody else. over the left lens of his eye- gles. In April, Google X, the GH T glasses is a small rectangle. It company’s special-projects IN G Michael Wolff, a contributing editor to Vanity looks like a car’s side-view mirror made lab, posted a video in which an imaginary BLIND Fair, writes a column on media for the Guardian, for a human face. The device is actually user meanders around New York City while ESS

founded Newser, and was, until October of last /AP year, the editor of Adweek. a minuscule computer monitor aimed at maps, text messages, and calendar remind-

72 Reviews technology review July/August 2012

july12.reviews.indd 72 6/7/12 2:48 PM Google cofounder Sergey Brin wore a Project Glass prototype at a charity GRAY MATTER MATTERS function in San Francisco in April.

ers pop up in front of his eye—a digital seen. This was a revelation. Here was a guy wonderland overlaid on the analog world. wearing a computer, but because he could #ELEBRATINGOURTH Anniversary, Google says the project is still in its early use it without becoming lost in it—as we all the Intellectual Property law firm of phases; Google employees have been test- do when we consult our many devices—he Allen, Dyer, Doppelt, Milbrath & ing the technology in public, but the com- appeared less in thrall to the digital world Gilchrist, P.A. has protected the pany has declined to show prototypes to than you and I are every day. “One of the intrinsic rights of new technologies most journalists, including myself. key points here,” Starner says, “is that we’re and original ideas through the Instead, Google let me speak to Starner, trying to make mobile systems that help the application of trademark, copyright a technical lead for the project, who is one user pay more attention to the real world as and patent law, licensing, trade of the world’s leading experts on what it’s opposed to retreating from it.” secrets & infringement protection like to live a cyborg’s life. He has been wear- By the end of my meeting with Starner, and unfair competition litigation. ing various kinds of augmented-reality gog- I decided that if Google manages to pull o! Protect your next brainstorm gles full time since the early 1990s, which anything like the machine he uses, wear- with the brain trust of an once meant he walked around with video able computers seem certain to conquer experienced I.P. law firm. displays that obscured much of his face and the world. It simply will be better to have required seven pounds of batteries. Even in a machine that’s hooked onto your body computer science circles, then, Starner has than one that responds to it relatively slowly long been an oddity. I went to Google head- and clumsily. quarters not only to ﬁnd out how he gets by I understand that this might not seem in the world but also to challenge him. Proj- plausible now. When Google unveiled Proj- ect Glass—and the whole idea of machines ect Glass, many people shared my early that directly augment your senses—seemed take, criticizing the plan as just too geeky to me to be a nerd’s fantasy, not a potential for the masses. But while it will take some mainstream technology. time to get used to interactive goggles as But as soon as Starner walked into the a mainstream necessity, we have already colorful Google conference room where we gotten used to wearable electronics such met, I began to question my skepticism. I’d as headphones, Bluetooth headsets, and come to the meeting laden with gadgets— health and sleep monitoring devices. And I’d compiled my questions on an iPad, I even though you don’t exactly wear your was recording audio using a digital smart smart phone, it derives its utility from its pen, and in my pocket my phone buzzed immediate proximity to your body. with updates. As we chatted, my attention In fact, wearable computers could end wandered from device to device in the dis- up being a fashion statement. They actually tracted dance of a tech-addled madman. ﬁt into a larger history of functional wear- Starner, meanwhile, was the picture of able objects—think of glasses, monocles, concentration. His tiny display is connected wristwatches, and whistles. “There’s a lot to a computer he carries in a messenger bag, of things we wear today that are just dec- a machine he controls with a small, one- orative, just jewelry,” says Travis Bogard, handed keyboard that he’s always gripping vice president of product management in his left hand. He owns an Android phone, and strategy at Jawbone, which makes a too, but he says he never uses it other than line of fashion-conscious Bluetooth head- Contact us today to learn more. for calls (though it would be possible to sets. “When we talk about this new stu!, /RLANDOs route calls through his eyeglass system). we think about it as ‘functional jewelry.’” *ACKSONVILLEs The spectacles take the place of his desk- The trick for makers of wearable machines, -IAMIs top computer, his mobile computer, and Bogard explains, is to add utility to jewelry -ELBOURNEs his all-knowing digital assistant. For all its without negatively a!ecting aesthetics. 4AMPAs utility, though, Starner’s machine is less dis- This wasn’t possible 20 years ago, when 7INTER3PRINGSs tracting than any other computer I’ve ever the technology behind Starner’s cyborg life www.addmg.com

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july12.reviews.indd 73 6/7/12 3:10 PM was ridiculously awkward. But Starner house—are all meant to be relevant to what the potential for deeper distraction— points out that since he first began wear- you’re doing at any given point and thus goofing o" by watching YouTube during ing his goggles, wearable computing has won’t seem like distracting interruptions. a meeting, say? But Starner counters that followed the same path as all digital tech- Much of what I think you’ll use goggles most of these problems exist today. Your nology—devices keep getter smaller and for will be the sort of quotidian stu" you cell phone can record video and audio of better, and as they do, they become ever do on your smart phone all the time—look everything around you, and your iPad is an more di!cult to resist. “Back in 1993, the up your next appointment on your calen- ever- present invitation to goof o". Starner question I would always get was, ‘Why dar, check to see whether that last text was says we’ll create social and design norms for would I want a mobile computer?’” he important, quickly fire up Shazam to learn digital goggles the way we have with all new says. “Then the Newton came out and the title of a song you heard on the radio. technologies. For instance, you’ll probably people were still like, ‘Why do I want a So why not just keep your smart phone? need to do something obvious—like put mobile computer?’ But then the Palm Pilot Because the goggles promise speed and your hand to your frames—to take a photo, came out, and then when MP3 players and invisibility. Imagine that one afternoon at and perhaps a light will come on to signal smart phones came out, people started say- work, you meet your boss in the hall and that you’re recording or that you’re watching, ‘Hey, there’s something really useful ing a video. It seems likely that once we get here.’” Today, Starner’s device is as small One criticism of Google’s over the initial shock, goggles could go far as a Bluetooth headset, and as researchers demo video of Project Glass is in mitigating many of the social annoyances figure out ways to miniaturize displays—or that it paints a picture of a guy that other gadgets have caused. even embed them into glasses and contact lost in his own digital cocoon. I know this because during my hour- lenses—they’ll get still less obtrusive. But Starner argues that a long conversation with Starner, he was At the moment, the biggest stumbling constantly pulling up notes and conduct- heads-up display will actually block may be the input device—Starner’s ing Web searches on his glasses, but I miniature keyboard requires a learning tether you more firmly to real- didn’t notice anything amiss. To an out- curve that many consumers would find life social interactions. side observer, he would have seemed far less daunting, and keeping a trackpad in your distracted than I was. “One of the coolest pocket might seem a little creepy. The best he asks you how your weekly sales num- things is that this makes me more socially input system eventually could be your bers are looking. The truth is, you haven’t graceful,” he says. voice, though it could take a few years to checked your sales numbers in a few days. I got to see this firsthand when Starner perfect that technology. Still, Starner says, You could easily look up the info on your let me try on his glasses. It took my eye a the wearable future is coming into focus. phone, but how obvious would that be? few seconds to adjust to the display, but “It’s only been recently that these on-body A socially aware heads-up display could after that, things began to look clearer. I devices have enough power, the networks someday solve this problem. At Starner’s could see the room around me, except now, are good enough, and the prices have gone computer science lab at the Georgia Insti- hovering o" to the side, was a computer down enough that it’s actually capturing tute of Technology, grad students built a screen. Suddenly I noticed something on people’s imagination,” Starner says. “This wearable display system that listens for the screen: Starner had left open some display I’m wearing costs $3,000—that’s “dual-purpose speech” in conversation— notes that a Google public-relations rep not reasonable for most people. But I think speech that seems natural to humans but had sent him. The notes were about me you’re going to see it happen real soon.” is actually meant as a cue to the machine. and what Starner should and should not say One criticism of Google’s demo video For instance, when your boss asks you during the interview, including “Try to steer of Project Glass is that it paints a picture about your sales numbers, you might the conversation away from the specifics of of a guy lost in his own digital cocoon. But repeat, “This week’s sales numbers?” Your Project Glass.” In other words, Starner was Starner argues that a heads-up display will goggles—with Siri-like prowess—would being coached, invisibly, right there in his actually tether you more firmly to real-life instantly look up the info and present it to glasses. And you know what? He’d totally social interactions. He says the video’s you in your display. won me over. augmented- reality visualizations—images You could argue that the glasses would that are tied to real-world sights, like direc- open up all kinds of problems: would Farhad Manjoo is the technology columnist at Slate and contributes regularly to Fast Company and the tion bubbles that pop up on the sidewalk, people be concerned that you were con- New York Times. He is the author of True Enough: showing you how to get to your friend’s stantly recording them? And what about Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.

74 Reviews technology review July/August 2012

july12.reviews.indd 74 6/7/12 2:48 PM Wonder and Inspiration digital replicas but suitably enhanced with Delivered — Since 1942 Why interactive features? They told themselves that the new digital replicas would be Publishers better than their Web-bound kin because they would run in “native” applications on Don’t Like mobile operating systems like Apple’s iOS, App and thus would possess the dazzling func- Controlled Robotic Ball Apps tions of true software. For traditional publishers, the scheme The future of media on mobile was alluring. Because they were once again devices isn’t with applications delivering a discrete product, analogous but with the Web. to a newspaper or magazine, they could charge readers for single-copy sales and By JASON PONTIN subscriptions, reëducating audiences that journalism was something valuable for y the time Apple released the iPad which they must pay. Software vendors like 2,500 RPM Desk Display in April of 2010, only four months Adobe promised that editorial created with Bafter Steve Jobs ﬁrst announced his their print-oriented copy-management sys- “magical and revolutionary” new machines, tems could be “seamlessly” transferred to traditional publishers were gripped by a the apps. And as for software development collective delusion. They had ... well, how hard was that? convinced themselves that Most publishers had Web- tablet computers and smart Technology development departments: let phones would allow them to Review iPad app the nerds build the apps. Patented Pheom of unwind their unhappy histo- version 2.0 Publishers also expected Geometric Design ries with the Internet. The Daily to revive the old print adver- For publishers whose busi- iPad-only newspaper tising economy. The Audit nesses had evolved during the Financial Times Bureau of Circulations (ABC), long day of print newspapers HTML5 website the industry organization that Electromagnetic and magazines, the expan- www.ft.com audits circulation and audience Desktop sion of the Internet was ter- information for magazines and Demonstration ribly disorienting. The Web newspapers in North America, taught readers that they might read stories said the replicas inside apps would whenever they liked without charge, and it count toward “rate base,” the measure o!ered companies more e"cient ways to of publications’ total circulation, which advertise; both parties spent less. includes subscription and newsstand sales. Smart phones and tablets seemed to Rate base had been the metric for setting promise a return to simpler days. It was advertising rates in publishing before the true that digital replicas of print newspa- emergence of online banner and keyword pers and magazines (most often read inside advertising, where electronic arcana like Web browsers) had never been very popu- click-throughs and ad impressions are the lar, but publishers reasoned that reading accepted currencies. Apps would return Mental Exercise replicas on desktop computers and lap- media to its proper, historical structure: Equipment tops was an unpleasant experience. The publishers could sell digital versions of the forms of the new smart devices were a lit- same ads that appeared in their print pub- tle like those of magazines or newspapers. lications (perhaps with a markup if the ad Couldn’t publishers delight readers by had interactive elements), valued with the delivering something similar to existing old measurement of rate base. 1.800.728.6999 SCIENTIFICSONLINE.COM

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july12.reviews.indd 75 6/7/12 3:10 PM People lost their heads. One symptom Apple demanded a 30 percent vigorish There were other di!culties. It turned of the industry’s euphoria was a brief-lived on all single-copy sales through its iTunes out that it wasn’t at all simple to adapt print literary genre, the announcement of the store. While publishers were accustomed publications to apps. A large part of the iPad edition. In late 2010, the New Yorker’s to handing over as much as 50 percent to problem was the ratio of the tablets: they editors gushed: “This latest technology ... newsstand distributors, the depth of the possessed both a “portrait” (vertical) and provides the most material at the most cut smarted because it was unexpected; “landscape” (horizontal) view, depending on advanced stage of digital speed and capac- many publishers responded by not selling how the user held the device. Then, too, the ity. It has everything that is in the print single copies in Apple’s store. Then, for a screens of smart phones were much smaller edition and more: extra cartoons, extra year after the launch of the iPad, than those of tablets. Absurdly, many pub- photographs, videos, audio of writers Apple couldn’t work out how lishers ended up producing six different and poets reading their work. This versions of an editorial product: a print week’s inaugural tablet issue fea- publication, a conventional digital replica tures an animated version of David for Web browsers and proprietary software, Hockney’s cover, which he drew on an iPad.” Giddiest of all was the The real problem with apps chief executive of News Corp., Rupert was that when people Murdoch: he lavished $30 million on the read on electronic media, launch of The Daily, an experimental iPad- they expect the stories to only newspaper with a $39.99 subscrip- possess the linky-ness of the tion price. Unpacked in this fashion, the delu- Web—but the stories in apps sion is clear enough, but I succumbed didn’t really link. myself—at least a little. I never believed that apps would unwind my industry’s dis- a digital replica for landscape viewing on ruption, but I felt that some readers would tablets, something that was not quite want a beautifully designed digital rep- a digital replica for portrait viewing on lica of Technology Review on their mobile to sell subscriptions in a way that satisfied tablets, a kind of hack for smart phones, and devices, and I bet that our developers could ABC, which requires publishers to record ordinary HTML pages for their websites. create a better mobile experience within “fulfillment” information about subscribers. Software development of apps was applications. I liked the idea of bundling When Apple finally solved the problem of much harder than publishers had antici- inside an app all the editorial we produced, transferring fulfillment data to publishers, pated, because they had hired Web devel- including the daily news and video we post it again claimed its 30 percent share. That opers who knew technologies like HTML, to TechnologyReview.com. So we created hurt more than the vig on single-issue CSS, and JavaScript. Publishers were aston- iOS and Google Android apps that were sales: publishers have always hated shar- ished to learn that iPad apps were in fact free to download: anyone could read our ing subscription revenues with third par- real, if small, applications, written mostly daily news or watch our videos without ties, a business they associate with shady in a language called Objective C, which no charge, but they had to pay to see digital resellers who tra!c in notoriously disloyal one in their Web-dev departments knew. replicas of the magazine. readers. Starting in June of last year, Apple Publishers responded by outsourcing app We launched the platforms in January did allow publishers to directly fulfill sub- development, which was expensive, time- of 2011. Complimenting myself on my con- scriptions through their own Web pages consuming, and unbudgeted. servatism, I budgeted less than $125,000 in (a handful of publishers, including Tech- But the real problem with apps was revenue in the first year. That meant fewer nology Review, had enjoyed the privilege more profound. When people read news than 5,000 subscriptions and a handful of earlier), but the mechanism couldn’t match and features on electronic media, they

single-issue sales. Easy, I thought. What iTunes for ease of use. Google was more expect the stories to possess the linky- TE CH

could go wrong? reasonable in its terms, but Android never ness of the Web—but stories in apps didn’t N OLOG Like almost all publishers, I was badly emerged as a signiﬁcant alternative to the really link. The apps were, in the jargon Y RE

disappointed. What went wrong? Every- iPad: today, most tablet computers are still of information technology, “walled gar- VIE

thing. Apple machines. dens,” and although sometimes beautiful, W

76 Reviews technology review July/August 2012

july12.reviews.indd 76 6/7/12 2:48 PM they were small and stifling. For readers, had paid for any of them. Apps are good none of the novelty or prettiness of apps for plenty of things: you can use them to overcame the weirdness and frustration of translate street signs in a foreign city, or reading digital media closed o! from other discover the cheapest bulk source of floor digital media. wax, or, if you’re carefree and so inclined, The Daily’s fortunes were not atypical: hook up with willing partners. But the paid, the publication has found only 100,000 expensively developed publisher’s app, with The subscribers, well short of the half-million its extravagantly produced digital replica, Rupert Murdoch said would be necessary is increasingly uncommon. to make it a viable business. The gloom was The recent history of the Finan- general. With few subscribers and single- cial Times is instructive. Last June, the Future copy buyers, there were no audiences to sell company pulled its iPad and iPhone app to advertisers, and therefore no revenues to from iTunes and launched a new version of o!set the incremental costs of app devel- its website written in HTML5, which can of opment. Most publishers soured on apps. optimize a site for any device and provide The most commonly cited exception features and functions that are app-like. For to the general bitterness is Condé Nast, a few months, the FT continued to support which saw its digital sales increase by 268 the iPad and iPhone app, but on May 1, the Money percent last year after Apple introduced an paper chose to kill it altogether. iPad app called Newsstand. Still, even 268 And Technology Review? We sold 353 NEW percent growth may not be saying much in subscriptions through the iPad. We never CONSUMER total numbers: digital is a small business discovered how to avoid the necessity of BEHAVIORS for Condé Nast. Wired magazine, among designing both landscape and portrait the most digital of Condé Nast’s titles, versions of the magazine for the app. We AND had 33,237 digital-only subscriptions last wasted $124,000 on outsourced software BUSINESS year, representing just 4.1 percent of a total development, a sum that does not begin to OPPORTUNITIES circulation of 812,434, and 7,004 digital capture our allocation of internal resources. single-copy sales, which is 0.8 percent of We fought among ourselves, and people left paid circulation, according to ABC. (Wired the company. There was untold expense of spins the numbers di!erently, claiming a spirit. I hated every moment of our experi- Purchase the report at: digital circulation of 108,622; but that sum ment with apps, because it tried to impose www. includes the 68,380 print subscribers who something closed, old, and print-like on technologyreview.com/ activated free digital access.) Similarly, the something open, new, and digital. business New Yorker, another Condé Nast publica- Last fall, in version 3.0 of our apps, tion, last year had only 26,880 digital-only we moved the editorial content, includ- subscribers among its million subscribers. ing the magazine, into simple RSS feeds Today, most owners of mobile devices in “rivers of news.” We dumped the digital read news and features on publishers’ web- replica altogether. Now we’re redesigning sites, which have often been coded to adapt TechnologyReview.com, which we have themselves to smaller screens. Or, if they do made free to use, and we’ll follow the use apps, the apps are glorified RSS read- Financial Times in using HTML5, so that ers, such as Google Reader, Flipboard, and our Web pages will look great on a laptop the apps of newspapers like the Guardian, or desktop, tablet, or smart phone. Then which grab editorial from the publisher’s we’ll kill our apps, too. Now we just need site. A recent Nielsen study reported that to discover how to make the Web pay. while 33 percent of tablet and smart-phone

users had downloaded news apps in the Jason Pontin is the editor in chief and publisher previous 30 days, just 19 percent of users of Technology Review.

www.technologyreview.com

july12.reviews.indd 77 6/7/12 2:48 PM

house.third.impact.indd 1 6/6/12 10:57 AM Wiring conveys power and data from the protection circuit to the device. hack

Positive terminal Protection circuit Negative terminal

Fuse

Cathode on aluminum Lithium-Ion

Separator Battery Anode on Inside the power source copper foil for portable electronics Separator and electric vehicles

Foil pouch By KEVIN BULLIS

ithium-ion batteries, because they’re lightweight and compact, L have enabled smart phones to get slimmer and electric vehicles more practical. Like all batteries, they work by means of chemical reactions that send electrons and ions from one electrode to another. Lithium-ion batteries, like the e-book battery shown here, require safety measures such as a fuse to prevent them from catching fi re. Battery confi gurations vary, but generally the electrodes must FOIL FOIL be thin enough to allow lithium ions to move readily in and out of them. Elec- trode materials are deposited on foil that Cathode Anode collects electrons and conveys them out of the battery. The electrodes don’t store Current fl ows as lithium much energy by area, so long strips of Metal oxide ions move between them are folded or rolled up to boost the or phosphate electrodes and electrons battery’s capacity. Lithium ion move through an external Graphite circuit. During charging, they reverse course. Illustration by John MacNeill Technical advisors: Jonathon Harding and Seung Woo Lee

A typical e-book battery (right) contains a copper foil coated with black graphite, the negative electrode material (middle). Peeling back more layers reveals the dark-gray positive electrode and the white electrolyte-soaked separator material (far right), which provides a path for lithium ions to travel between the electrodes

PHOTOS: TECHNOLOGY REVIEW TECHNOLOGY PHOTOS: but blocks electrons.

www.technologyreview.com Hack 79

july12.hack.indd 79 6/4/12 5:22 PM 01 demo

Building an Organ on a Chip Microscale devices that mimic human organs could provide a much more realistic environment for drug discovery.

By SUSAN YOUNG

he way pharmaceutical companies To achieve this, Ingber and his team test drugs is broken, and Donald are developing a menagerie of microscale T Ingber has an idea for how to ﬁx it. devices that replicate the structures and Scientists typically test potential phar- environments of actual human organs more maceuticals on animals, but more often closely than a simple culture dish. than not, “the predictions from animals The Wyss Institute’s ﬁrst organ was a fail when a compound is tested in humans,” breathing lung on a microchip. The trans- says Ingber, director of Harvard Univer- parent, thumb-size device is made of cell- OUSTER

sity’s Wyss Institute. Performing initial friendly materials and serves as a platform T A tests on people, of course, is too danger- for growing human lung cells. Tiny channels OSHU J J

ous. “Our proposed solution is to do stud- cut through the device. Air and liquid ﬂow OSHU BY PHS ies with human cells,” he says, “but not just through the central channels, where the A A T cells in a dish—cells that exhibit organlike lung cells are grown, and because the device OUSTER

structures and functions.” is ﬂexible, scientists can apply vacuum pres- PHOTOGR

80 Demo technology review July/August 2012

july12.demo.indd 80 6/4/12 10:19 PM 01 The “gut on a chip” shown here is the Wyss 02 03 Institute’s latest device for growing cells in an organlike environment. This chip contains two microﬂuidic channels separated by a porous membrane on which intestinal cells can grow.

02 A scientist seeds a new gut chip with cells. Tubing connects a syringe filled with cultured cells, which flow into the chip’s microfluidic channels and attach to the central membrane. There they form a layer similar to the intestinal lining.

03 The cells are then grown in an incubator while a pump (red box) supplies a constant ﬂow of ﬂuids to mimic conditions in the human gut. Researchers could expose the cells to drugs at this stage.

04 After a few days of growth, the cells are ready to be examined. A researcher moves the chip to a microscope and hooks up tubing that will keep nutrients ﬂowing across the cells.

05 While the chip is under the microscope, syringes driven by pumps (not shown) provide sufﬁcient force to move ﬂuids through it.

06 Wyss Institute postdoctoral fellow Hyun Jung Kim, who developed the gut chip, looks at the cells through the microscope. The cells are also displayed on the computer screen on the right.

www.technologyreview.com Demo 81

july12.demo.indd 81 6/4/12 10:19 PM demo

Wyss researchers have mimicked various organs and hope soon to connect them for more comprehensive drug testing.

sure to the side channels so that the cen- as villi that are important for absorption is working toward a grander vision in which tral channels expand and contract—much of nutrients and other compounds. These several of the chips are linked together. By like human lungs. The team has shown that structures do not form when cells are connecting the microfluidic versions of a such mechanical forces a!ect the behavior grown in a dish, suggesting that the cells heart, lung, gut, kidney, and more, Ingber of the cells. In the case of the lung cells, the feel more at home in the device. Scientists and his coworkers believe, they will be able mechanical breathing helps them absorb can also grow common intestinal bacteria to better study how the body processes and particles flowing in the air chamber. along with the gut cells in the channel. In a responds to various compounds. More recently, the institute has devel- culture dish, the bacteria usually overtake One project under way with Wyss fac- oped a human gut on a microchip. The cen- the human cells, says Ingber; “now we can ulty member Kevin Kit Parker is to test tral channel of the device, which is lined study much more complex interactions.” inhaled drugs for negative e!ects on the with human cells, can be subjected to wave- Individually, each organlike chip gives heart—a long-standing problem in drug like motions that mimic the movement of researchers a chance to study human cells in discovery. “Cardiac toxicity is actually the the intestines during digestion. In the chip, a more natural environment and to test how biggest cause of failure of drugs, regardless the cells form fingerlike structures known they respond to drugs and toxins. But Ingber of what they target,” says Ingber.

82 Demo technology review July/August 2012

july12.demo.indd 82 6/4/12 10:19 PM resilient, ultralight sponge that could soak NEXT STEPS: The researchers plan a from up more than 100 times its weight in oil controlled study to test how the sponge and repel water. compares with other products on the mar- the labs WHY IT MATTERS: Scientists have had ket in remediating oil spills. In addition, trouble bonding nanotubes together so that they intend to perform toxicity studies to they can form large structures, but the new determine the sponge’s usefulness for bio- technique provides a way to do that. The logical applications. ﬁrst application could be making sorbents for cleaning up oil spills. Initial measure- ments suggest that the sponge can absorb ENERGY MATERIALS more than three times as much oil or solvent as the best sorbents on the market but does Low-Carbon Oil Spill not take up water, unlike some used now. The sponge could be reused after Cement Sponge squeezing out the oil or burning it off. Among other potentially useful qualities, A new chemical process A unique nanotube material it has good conductivity, can easily be mag- eliminates carbon dioxide may beat the best sorbents netized, and is one of the lowest-density emissions from lime production on the market solids in existence. Its properties might make it useful for other applications, such SOURCE: “STEP CEMENT: SOLAR THERMAL ELECTROCHEMICAL PRODUCTION OF CAO SOURCE: “COVALENTLY BONDED THREE- as high-performance battery electrodes or DIMENSIONAL CARBON NANOTUBE SOLIDS WITHOUT CO2 EMISSION” sca!olding for growing bone tissue. VIA BORON INDUCED NANOJUNCTIONS” Stuart Licht et al. METHODS: Researchers formed nano- Pulickel M. Ajayan et al. tubes by creating a mist made of micro- Chemical Communications, published online April 5, 2012 Nature Scientiﬁc Reports, droplets of chemical ingredients and then published online April 13, 2012 heating it in a furnace. The presence of RESULTS: Researchers at George Wash- RESULTS: Adding a small amount of boron introduced kinks into the nanotubes ington University have invented a solar- boron to carbon nanotubes helped bond and helped form strong, covalent bonds powered process that makes lime from them together to form a strong, three- between them, which led them to form a limestone without emitting any carbon dimensional network. The result was a three-dimensional structure. dioxide and demonstrated it in a proof-of- JE FF F IT LO W/RICE UNIVE W/RICE

NANOTUBE SPONGE A three-dimensional R

network of nanostructures soaks up oil. SITY

84 From the Labs technology review July/August 2012

July12 From The Labs2.indd 84 5/29/12 10:57 AM concept device. The researchers estimate that the process could cost less than the conventional one. WHY IT MATTERS: The new process could eliminate a major global source of carbon dioxide emissions. Lime is used to make cement, purify iron, treat soil, and produce glass, paper, sugar, and other things. Cement production alone emits 5 to 6 percent of total man-made greenhouse gases, and most of that comes from producing lime. METHODS: Rather than simply heating up limestone until it releases carbon dioxide, as in the conventional method, the process uses a combination of heat and electrolysis, which produces lime, oxygen, and either carbon or carbon monoxide, depending on the temperatures used. The researchers built a device that includes three Fresnel lenses for concentrating sunlight. Two of those heat a mixture of lithium carbonate and limestone (calcium carbonate). The third focuses light on a high-e!ciency solar cell, which pro- BLINDING RAIN On the left, light reﬂects off fall- NEXT STEPS: For such a system to be vides the electricity needed to electrolyze ing drops of water. On the right, droplet-tracking practical, headlights would need to be software helps eliminate that glare. the carbonate mixture. High temperatures based on LEDs, as they already are in some reduce the amount of electricity needed and cars today. Arrays of LEDs would allow cause the lime to precipitate out of the mix- allowed a projector to shine light through ﬁne control of a headlight’s beam, mim- ture, making it easy to separate. simulated rain without illuminating the icking the e"ect of a projector. The system NEXT STEPS: The device works only water drops. The system used a camera also needs to be faster to be able to handle when it’s sunny, and intermittent opera- to predict the downward path of droplets raindrops approaching a car as it travels at tion isn’t ideal for an industrial process. as they entered the top of the projector’s high speeds. The researchers anticipate that The researchers propose using molten salt beam. Then software directed the projec- cameras, LED light sources, and a processor to store heat, a system used in some solar tor to selectively black out its beam to avoid could eventually be built on the same chip, thermal power plants. That would allow the droplets as they fell. In one test, the allowing such a system to sense and react the process to run day and night. system could avoid lighting up 84 percent to falling drops extremely quickly. of the droplets. WHY IT MATTERS: The experiment sug- INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY gests that future lighting systems for cars Sound-Based could reduce glare reflecting off falling Seeing in raindrops or snowflakes. Those reflec- Gesture tions often distract drivers and can lead the Rain to accidents. Control

SITY METHODS: The researchers paired a R Smart headlights could make high-speed monochrome camera and an Any computer can be controlled N UNIVEN O difﬁcult driving conditions safer o"-the-shelf projector. They used a mirror with the wave of a hand LL to allow the camera to view the scene in SOURCE: “FAST REACTIVE CONTROL FOR front of the projector from the perspective SOURCE: “SOUNDWAVE: USING THE DOPPLER NEGIE ME NEGIE ILLUMINATION THROUGH RAIN AND SNOW” EFFECT TO SENSE GESTURES” CAR

, of its lens. This makes it easier for the soft-

AB Raoul de Charette et al. Desney Tan et al.

G L G ware to predict what the projector needs

GIN IEEE International Conference on Computa- to do to avoid the water drops, since no ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in IMA tional Photography, Seattle, Washington, April Computing Systems, Austin, Texas, May 5–10,

ND correction is needed for perspective and A 27–29, 2012 2012

ION ION viewpoint. They also wrote tracking algo- AT

IN RESULTS: Researchers at Carnegie Mel- rithms that could speed up detection of the RESULTS: Software developed by research-

ILLUM lon University have written software that droplets. ers at Microsoft and the University of Wash-

www.technologyreview.com From the Labs 85

July12 From The Labs2.indd 85 5/29/12 10:57 AM ington uses a computer’s speakers and devices; preliminary tests show that the trical fields produced by subjects wearing microphone to sense arm gestures and other same approach should work. The accuracy the sensor. movements of a person’s body. The speak- of detection could potentially be improved NEXT STEPS: The researchers believe ers emit a high-pitched tone between 18 by making use of the multiple speakers and that better optics could make the sensor and 22 kilohertz, inaudible to most people, microphones on some devices to emit and as sensitive as the bulky standard devices. and the microphone picks up sound reflec- detect more complex tones and reflections. In addition to improving the optics, they tions so the software can analyze them. The plan to combine as many as 100 sensors researchers showed that a hand wave can into one device to help them pinpoint the be used to scroll through a document or BIOMEDICINE origin of magnetic fields. flip through a photo album. The computer can also sense when a user walks away and Compact switch into a low-power state. Dividing WHY IT MATTERS: Devices that use cam- Brain-Wave eras or accelerometers to sense movements, Cancer such as Microsoft’s Kinect and Nintendo’s Sensor Wii, demonstrate that gestures can be a Newly identified differences useful, powerful, and fun way to control a A mini-magnetometer could between breast tumors could computer. Gesture control could become inexpensively detect brain injury help doctors tailor treatments more widespread if it could be used without a special camera or hand-held sensor. SOURCE: “MAGNETOENCEPHALOGRAPHY WITH SOURCE: “THE GENOMIC AND TRANSCRIPTOMIC A CHIP-SCALE ATOMIC MAGNETOMETER” ARCHITECTURE OF 2,000 BREAST TUMOURS M ETHODS: The researchers pro- Svenja Knappe et al. REVEALS NOVEL SUBGROUPS” grammed the software to analyze reflected Samuel Aparicio et al. sound for several clues that help it recog- Biomedical Optics Express 3(5): 981–990 Nature, published online April 18, 2012 nize a person’s gestures. It makes use of the RESULTS: A prototype sensor the size of a Doppler e!ect to determine the direction of sugar cube can measure the magnetic fields RESULTS: Researchers identified 10 types movement. The researchers also designed produced by electrical activity in the brain, of breast cancer by measuring the genetic a set of hand gestures that could be read- report researchers at the National Institute di!erences between tumors. ily distinguished using those signals, and of Standards and Technology in Boulder, WHY IT MATTERS: Identifying types of the software was shown to work reliably on Colorado, and their colleagues. breast cancer could help doctors provide several desktops and laptops with di!erent WHY IT MATTERS: Commercial devices more accurate prognoses. It might also lead sound hardware. based on the new technology may prove to improved treatments. Drugs that aren’t NEXT STEPS: The researchers plan to useful for detecting changes in brain behav- e!ective for the general patient popula- develop more sophisticated mathemati- ior caused by brain injury. Such devices tion might prove e!ective for patients with cal techniques to allow recognition of a could be smaller, cheaper, and more por- certain types of breast cancer. By grouping wider range of gestures. They also hope to table than MRI or CT scan machines or the tumors into types, the researchers were make a version of the software for mobile conventional brain-wave detectors, which able to identify a new class of patients who require bulky cooling systems filled with might benefit from an existing treatment. MIND METER A rubidium-filled sensor detects potentially dangerous coolants such as liq- METHODS: The researchers studied the magnetic fields of brain waves. uid helium. The researchers say the new nearly 2,000 breast tumor samples. They devices, if mass-produced, could be a!ord- screened for abnormal parts of each tumor’s able even for high-school football teams, genome using a technique called DNA which could use them to check for brain hybridization, which enabled them to e"- injury after games. Eventually, the research- ciently examine the DNA and the molecular ers say, they might be used to detect signals products of genes in each sample. The team from the brain that could be used to control then used a type of mathematical analysis prosthetics. to group similar tumors according to these METHODS: Researchers filled a small genomic abnormalities. cube with gaseous rubidium, which absorbs NEXT STEPS: The international team, light di!erently depending on the strength which is based in part at the University of the magnetic field it’s exposed to. Opti- of Cambridge and the University of Brit- cal fibers attached to the cube shine lasers ish Columbia, is currently sequencing the KN

into the rubidium and detect the light genomes of some of the tumors to build A PPE

transmitted through it. In a magnetically a more complete picture of the genomic /N shielded room, the team measured the elec- changes in breast cancer. IST

86 From the Labs technology review July/August 2012

July12 From The Labs2.indd 86 5/29/12 10:57 AM professor at Princeton and the University women and gay couples.) Singer saw no 27 years ago of Melbourne, the dawning era of biotech- problem with a couple using an egg donor nology seemed full of unknown dangers. if the woman had a genetic defect. But who “Should we tinker with the human gene defi ned what a “defect” was? pool?” he asked. “If so, in what way?” The What if the defect is very minor? What if Reshaping new techniques, he wrote, “may even allow there is no defect at all, but the couple wants us to select for desirable traits as well as a donor egg or sperm from a male or female the Human against undesirable ones”: friend whose intelligence or beauty they con- This could be done by producing sev- sider superior to their own? A California Species eral embryos, identifying their genetic char- acteristics, and then implanting the most A bioethicist wondered whether desirable embryo. Eventually, it may even fertility technologies might be possible to modify the genetic properties lead to a new and “improved” of an embryo before implantation to elimi- Homo sapiens. nate defects and build in desirable qualities. As he was writing, doctors were pre- By TIMOTHY MAHER paring to use gene therapy to treat a brain disorder called Lesch-Nyhan syndrome (the revolution is under way in human attempt would be unsuccessful, it turned reproduction that is comparable out). The treatment involved removing “ A in many ways to the revolution in bone marrow cells from a! ected children, physics that produced the atomic bomb,” genetically altering the cells, and injecting wrote Peter Singer, the noted ethicist and them back into the patient. A logical next philosopher, in the pages of TR in February step, Singer wrote, would be to use the ther- 1985 (“Technology and Procreation: How apy to treat genetic defects in the womb. Far Should We Go?”). The revolution was And if major defects could be cured, why the new wave of fertility technology, which not minor ones? seven years before had resulted in the fi rst In time, we may even decide to build in human baby conceived outside the womb. positive modifi cations. After all, natural Singer felt that in vitro fertilization and selection has left ample room for improv- other advances, like gene therapy, might ing the human race. And the ethical line sperm bank is already offering selected “someday give us the power to reshape the between eliminating defects and making women the sperm of Nobel Prize–winning human species itself.” positive modifi cations is di! cult to draw. scientists. Taken in itself, IVF may seem nothing If we learn how to a" ect intelligence, should Singer noted that some people feared a more than a means of helping some infertile we stop short at eliminating mental defi - darker outcome. If we could make ourselves women become pregnant. But it opens the ciency? If we eliminate abnormally depres- smarter or more beautiful, they mused, a door to an avalanche of technologies that sive personalities, would it be wrong to try government might be just as capable of could be far more controversial: the freez- to produce people who tend to be a little more using genetic modifications to make us ing of human embryos for research use, the cheerful than most of us are now? If we elim- docile. Here, at least, he felt we had noth- donation of an embryo from one woman to inate tendencies toward criminal violence, ing to worry about. another, surrogate motherhood, sex selec- might we not build just a little more kind- If we have succeeded in keeping our tion, gene therapy for inherited diseases … ness into the human constitution? freedom in the age of television, snooping Not all of Singer’s predictions turned Singer thought we needed a new system devices, and computers, we should be able out to be accurate; genetic engineering of of ethics to deal with our new capabilities. to cling to it when we have the means to human traits, to name one potential tech- What future human beings might do with manipulate genetic traits as well. The technology he cited, isn’t close to happening. technology was anybody’s guess, but in his nical ability to suppress liberty has been But his essay is a reminder of the ethical mind it was better to think about all the with us for a long time. It is our determina- angst created by the fertility breakthroughs possibilities in advance. (Some countries tion to prevent our rulers from exercising of the time. To ethicists such as Singer, then have tried to limit those possibilities by law: this ability that has kept us free.

head of the Centre for Human Bioethics at Germany and Norway ban egg donation, REVIEW TECHNOLOGY

Australia’s Monash University and now a while France and Italy deny IVF to single TIMOTHY MAHER IS TR’S ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR.

Technology Review (ISSN 1099-274X), Reg. U.S. Patent Offi ce, is published bimonthly by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Entire contents ©2012. The editors seek diverse views, and authors’ opinions do not represent the offi cial policies of their institutions or those of MIT. Printed by Brown Printing Company, Waseca, MN. Periodicals postage paid at Boston, MA, and additional mailing offi ces. Postmaster: send address changes to Technology Review, Subscriber Services Dept., PO Box 16327, North Hollywood, CA 91615, or via the Internet at www.technologyreview.com/customerservice. Basic subscription rates: $39 per year within the United States; in all other countries, US$52. 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

88 27 Years Ago technology review July/August 2012

July12 Years Ago2.indd 88 5/30/12 9:12 AM