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Citywide Wi-Fi: The rise and rise of Pulling the plug will it work? flash memory on standby power page 21 page 26 page 34 TechnologyQuarterly March 1 1th 2 0 0 6

Scents and sensibility The bizarre world of smell technology

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C B M R Y G K W C B M R Y G K W The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006 Monitor 1

Contents

On the cover While technologists have perfected the reproduction and manipulation of sight and sound, smell has been left behind. But sometimes smell can provide information that other senses cannot, which opens the door to a range of new technologies, from digital noses to Turning wind power smellyvision: pages 14-15 Monitor on its side 1 Vertical-axis wind turbines, hacking household devices, in-store advertising, online trendspotting, growing new organs, search-engine politics, Energy technology: Wind turbines that rotate about a vertical axis, rather software for fairer divorce than the usual horizontal one, could have a number of benets settlements, dancing with Google, and hybrid planes IND turbines are springing up in all gearboxes of conventional turbines can- Wsorts of places around the world, not cope with the strain, and they have to Rational consumer from China to California, but most of be shut down. TMA says its vertical-axis 9 Television’s next big shift them have the same basic design: the design can still work even at wind speeds Timeshifting v placeshifting blades rotate about a horizontal axis, as as high as 110kph, however. The ability to in an old-fashioned windmill. Such tur- harvest high-speed winds is particularly Reports bines can generate electricity at a cost not valuable, since each doubling of wind 10 Scents and sensibility much higher than non-renewable, fossil- speed results in an eightfold increase in Digital noses and other bizarre fuel sourcesprovided the wind is blow- available energy. TMA also claims that its smell technologies explained ing, that is. But if proponents of a rival de- design is quieter and less visually obtru- 12 Wi-Pie in the sky? sign are to be believed, electricity can be sive than conventional turbines. The dream of citywide Wi-Fi may generated from wind even more cheaply, A British consortium, Eurowind be too good to be true using turbines that rotate about a vertical Developments, which includes VT axis, like a playground roundabout. Group, a shipbuilding and engineering Case history TMA, a company based in Cheyenne, company, and Mott Macdonald, a consul- 15 Not just a ash in the pan Wyoming, announced in November that tancy, believes VAWTs could be the best Why ash memory is sweeping its rst vertical-axis wind turbine design for giant oshore turbines. Such a other storage technologies aside (VAWT) would soon be ready for com- turbine, with a capacity of ten mega- mercial production. The TMA system has watts, would be able to power around Reports two sets of vertical blades. The two inner 10,000 homes. Today’s largest horizontal- 18 Reinventing the internet blades, each shaped like a half-cylinder, axis turbines produce around ve mega- Enough tweaking, say experts catch the wind and rotate about a central watts, and are proving dicult to scale the time has now come for a axis, while the three outer blades, shaped up. Each blade has to be more than 60 clean-slate overhaul like aircraft wings, are xed. The interac- metres long, and the bigger the blade, the 20 Standby for action tion between the two sets of blades greater the stress it experiences as it turns: Idle electrical devices waste lots causes a drop in pressure in front of the the blade’s own weight compresses it at of energy. What can be done? rotating blades’ leading edges, which fur- the top of the cycle and stretches it at the ther increases the rate of rotation. TMA bottom. As a result, blades must be made Brain scan claims that its system harvests 43-45% of and transported in one piece, which is ex- 22 Power to the people the wind’s available energy; conven- pensive. Reinforcing the blade to enable Iqbal Quadir’s initiatives use tional propeller-style turbines, in con- it to withstand these forces further in- technology to promote trast, have eciencies of 25-40%. creases cost and reduces eciency. bottom-up development In winds of more than 80kph The blades of a VAWT, in contrast, do (50mph), furthermore, the blades and not have to undergo this repeated stretch- 1 2 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006

2 ing and compression. Nor does their short, a hackthat is, in turn, used to hack cross-section vary from top to bottom, the car’s engine. which makes them cheaper to manufac- Hybrid and electric vehicles have also ture than windmill blades, the shape of Hackers go home attracted the attentions of hackers. After which must be painstakingly engineered. General Motors introduced the short-lived VAWT blades can also be made in pieces EV1 electric car in 1996, intrepid owners and joined together on site. So vertical- soon worked out how to connect hand- axis designs should enable wind tur- held computers to its built-in diagnostic bines to be scaled up more easily, result- Consumer technology: Technological systems and observe what was going on ing in cheaper electricity, even for VAWT tinkering, or hacking, is not limited with their vehicles. Armed with this designs of similar eciency to conven- to computers. Cars, cameras and knowledge, they could then change their tional turbines. If we can build a ten vacuum-cleaners can be hacked too driving behaviour to improve the car’s megawatt turbine for only slightly more range on a single charge. Today, attention than other companies build ve mega- HE word hacker is widely misused. is focused on the Toyota Prius, a hybrid- watt turbines, then the eciency ques- TAmong hackers themselves, it refers electric vehicle that uses battery power at tion goes out of the window, says to someone who enjoys tinkering with low speeds (in stop-start trac, for exam- Steven Peace of Eurowind. technology, exploring its boundaries and ple) and a petrol engine at high speeds or Neither TMA nor Eurowind has yet getting it to do unexpected or unintended on long journeys. proved the technology in commercial de- tricks, though in general use the word re- The problem, from the point of view of ployments, however, and the main- fers to individuals who break into com- some drivers, is that the control system of stream wind industry remains sceptical puters for nefarious ends (for whom the Prius, and the limited capacity of its about the benets of VAWTs, in large hackers prefer the terms malicious nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries, part because the idea is not new. Simple hacker or cracker). But a hacker is not prevent it from being used as an all-elec- VAWTs, with a couple of sails pushed necessarily bad and is not necessarily just tric vehicle, even on quite short journeys. around by the wind, have been around someone who messes around with com- So a number of Prius owners have hacked for centuries, and were being used in puters. Thomas Edison was arguably a their vehicles, tting them with larger lith- Persia thousands of years ago. In 1922 a hacker, back in the 19th century. Today’s ium-ion battery packs that can be re- Finnish engineer, S. J. Savonius, im- technological tinkerers, however, have a charged from the mains and tweaking the proved on this primitive design, and de- far wider range of household gizmos to battery-control system to extend the car’s vised a turbine based on two half- play with and modify, from cars to cam- electric-only range. EDrive, a rm based in cylinder blades, as TMA uses. In 1931 a eras. Getting them to do new things, and Monrovia, California, is about to launch Frenchman, Georges Darrieus, patented a not merely what the manufac- just such an upgrade package wind turbine that operates on an entirely turer had in mind, is an for Prius owners, at a cost dierent principle with two thin, curved increasingly popular of around $12,000. blades xed to a central axis, in a design pastime. It even has its Closer to home, the often compared to an egg-beater. own magazine, MAKE, ever more complex in- Turbines based on the Savonius de- which is lled with nards of consumer- sign are already used for small-scale gen- projects for the techno- electronics devices eration in remote locations. Even logically intrepid. mean they are also ripe large-scale VAWTs have been tried be- Car enthusiasts have a for modication by hackers. fore. In the early 1990s the British govern- long tradition of modifying Now open for hacking The advent of the TiVo per- ment funded a trial in Carmarthen Bay in their vehicles to improve on sonal video recorder was sig- Wales, which culminated in the construc- the manufacturer’s original specications. nicant in many ways: not only did it tion of a 500 kilowatt, 35-metre turbine. As cars become as dependent on electron- precipitate a dramatic shift in viewing But it failed after six months because of a ics as they are upon mechanics, the busi- habits, it was also one of the rst con- manufacturing fault, and the trial was ness of tweaking their performance has sumer-electronics devices to be based wound up shortly afterwards. The pro- become ever more elaborate. Upgrades for upon Linux, the open-source operating ject’s nal report concluded that VAWTs various fuel-injection and ignition com- system. Most users, of course, were hap- had no applications on land, but they puters have been available for well over a pily unaware of this fact. But for the more should be reconsidered if oshore wind decade, providing additional powerof- technically minded, it made possible a energy becomes more attractive. ten at the expense of warranty cover and wide variety of modications, letting That day has now come, so it might be fuel eciencyjust by replacing a micro- users make their TiVos work just the way time to give the technology another look. chip or two in the engine compartment. they wanted. Nigel Crowe, director of the British Wind But such modications are now passé. Simple changesdierent colours for Energy Association, says the use of hori- The latest twist comes from TurboXS of the on-screen interface, installing a larger zontal-axis turbines has as much to do Gaithersburg, Maryland. Its DTEC boost hard disk to increase recording capacity with historical factors as technological controller uses a standard Nintendo Game quickly evolved into new software de- merit. Why do we use horizontal axis Boy Advance SP handheld games console velopment that, for example, allowed the turbines? Why do we use VHS, not Beta- as its display and input device. The soft- TiVo to be remotely controlled over the in- max? he asks. They are the ones that ware comes on a standard game cartridge, ternet, enabling users to add a show to the got accepted rst, and got established in and provides a variety of read-outs and di- device’s recording schedule from work. the marketplace. The industry now is go- agnostic options. Wire up a few hardware This extensibility quickly gained the TiVo ing through some major changes. Maybe sensors, and the games console becomes a a passionate following, but also raised le- the goalposts have moved a bit and tuning tool, allowing changes via the gal concerns. Not content to add features maybe it is the right time to look again. boost-controller hardware to the running to the device, TiVo users soon worked out With plans afoot to build wind farms o engine conguration. And all of this was how to download programmes to watch the coast of Britain and elsewhere, the done without any help from Nintendo, them on their laptops, or transfer them to fortunes of the VAWT may be about to notes Nathan Kofahl of TurboXS. It is a DVD. While TiVo made eorts to prevent take a turn for the better. 7 new, unintended use of the consolein this sort of thing, the ingenuity of its users 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006 Monitor 3

2 prevailed and instructions have prolifer- Point of Purchase Advertising Interna- ated online. tional, an independent trade association, Even when an electronic device is not more than 70% of purchasing decisions based on Linux, it is usually not long be- Signs of the are made in shops. Most people, after all, fore hackers get Linux running on it, write beer or shampoo on their shop- which then makes tweaking much easier. times ping lists, rather than specifying particu- The unocial installation of Linux on lar brands. And so, helped along by the Apple’s iPod music-player, for instance, falling prices of fast internet links and led to the discovery of some hardware se- Advertising technology: Huge video large at-screen displays, digital signage crets within it. Some iPods, it turned out, screens that bombard people with is being adopted by retailers and their actually had the internal circuitry reads while they shop oer an suppliers around the world. quired to record high-quality audio, attractive new outlet for advertisers In America Wal-Mart, the world’s big- though this feature is usually unavail- gest retailer, has constructed a Wal-Mart able. Other hacks include the ability to HEN asked why he robbed banks, TV network that is connected to more run games and display pictures, even on WWillie Sutton, a notorious thief, than 2,500 stores. The network carries a older iPods. Phillip Torrone of MAKE says famously replied Because that’s where sophisticated multi-channel oering: this type of modication simply unlocks the money is. A similar logic is now be- screens positioned in the best points the piece of hardware that you paid for. ing applied by advertisers. With the ad- around the store show advertising picked But in some cases, such hacks can un- vent of hundreds of television channels, to suit individual departments, while dermine the manufacturer’s business the internet, and that particular scourge other screens provide entertainment model. Consider games consoles, for ex- of the advertiser, the personal video re- interspersed with even more advertis- ample, which operate on a razor and corder, consumers are harder to reach ingto customers standing in line at the blades principle. Consoles are often sold than ever. So where is the hottest place to tills. According to Premier Retail Net- at a loss, but console-makers receive a li- put advertisements? In supermarkets works (PRN), a rm based in San Fran- cence fee of a few dollars for each game because that’s where the shoppers are. cisco that operates Wal-Mart TV, the soldso provided each customer buys Hence the enthusiasm for digital network has over 50m viewers a month, enough games, the console-maker eventu- signage, which is just a fancy name for which exceeds the viewership of popular ally makes money. When Microsoft at-panel displays that show a constantly television shows such as CSI, Lost launched its Xbox console in 2001, hack- rotating series of advertisements, mixed and The Apprentice. ers raced to install Linux on it, which trans- with news and entertainment. The In common with other digital-signage formed it into a low-cost, high screens are placed in high trac (in installations, Wal-Mart TV displays cus- performance media-playback system. other words, busy) parts of shops, and tomised content that is often derived While this was a minority sport, anyone the advertisements they show can be up- from standard television advertisements. who did this without buying any games dated at will via satellite or internet links. Charlie Nooney, PRN’s chief executive, was, in eect, receiving a subsidy from This makes it possible to vary the ad- says it makes sense for consumer-goods Microsoft. Little wonder, then, that the vertisements shown depending on the rms and retailers to recycle their costly new Xbox 360 console features signi- time of day, season, or local factors such television advertisements to reach a cap- cantly beefed-up security measures. as demographics or weather. tive audience of shoppers who are, by de- A second example is the low-cost dis- This ability to reach consumers just as nition, in the mood to buy things. If I’m posable digital cameras sold by CVS, an they are deliberating about which item to an advertiser and I can capture that per- American pharmacy chain. These cam- pick from the shelveswhat the market- son in store with a dynamic message eras are designed to be used once and then ers at Procter & Gamble, a big consumer- about my product and the benets of my returned to the shop, where, for a process- goods rm, call the rst moment of product, it’s a great win, he says. It is cer- ing fee, the stored pictures or movies are truthhas huge potential. According to tainly a great win for PRN and Wal-Mart, 1 returned to you on CD or DVD. The cameras are then reset and resold. Inevitably, however, hackers have gured out how to access and reuse the cameras themselves. (One even ended up being installed in the nose of a small rocket.) If enough people do this, the business model breaks down. Clever hacking by a few, in other words, could lead to higher prices for the many. But some companies, at least, have cho- sen to embrace hackers. iRobot, the company behind the Roomba robot vacuum-cleaner, includes an external data connector in the device and has even doc- umented how to use it. While most customers appreciate their Roombas for their autonomous cleaning skills, there is also a small minority of users who want to re- program them. iRobot is one of the few rms to acknowledge and appreciate customers who like to tinker. After all, there are few manifestations of feedback as heartfelt as someone who is willing to spend their own time and eort to improve a product. 7 Supermarketing 4 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006

2 which charge advertisers on the network tem, called Usenet, dates back to 1979 and between $60,000 and $293,000 to show can now be easily reached via Google, an advertisement for four weeks. Other which also maintains archived discus- retailers that have installed or tested digi- sions going back 25 years. More recently, tal-signage networks include Albertson’s, web-based discussion boards, and the Target and Kroger in America, and Tesco, comments that can be appended to blogs, Asda and Sainsbury’s in Britain. In China, have become the most popular forums Carrefour has signed an installation deal for online debate. Most of these discus- with CGEN, a digital-signage company. sions are of little interest except to their While advertisers warm to the idea, participants. But the direct, unltered, however, digital signage still has hurdles brutally honest nature of much online to overcomeso traditional television ad- discussion is gold dust to big companies vertising is not obsolete just yet. For a that want to spot trends, or nd out what start, the cost of installing and running a customers really think of them. As a re- network means that retailersa notori- sult, many rms now monitor online ously parsimonious bunchmust be con- chatter as an adjunct to more traditional vinced of the business case before going forms of market research. ahead with a chain-wide roll-out. An- For example, ConAgra, an American other problem, says Nikki Baird of Forres- food giant known for its Butterball tur- ter, a consultancy, is the store-multiplier keys and Healthy Choice ready meals, eect. Implementing any kind of new tracks discussion groups to keep abreast technology across thousands of stores in of new diet trends, such as Atkins and or- a retail chain quickly becomes very ex- ganic food. These discussion groups are pensive. The expense of creating and very useful to determine whether a trend managing fresh and eective content also is really a trend, or just a fad, says Nick poses a barrier to entry, she notes. Mysore, ConAgra’s director of strategy. impact of a campaign, in contrast, might But for some advertisers, at least, digi- They also help you get a read on the mar- take weeks or even months. tal signage is already taking its place in ketplace quickly and cost eectively, and The results can often be surprising. the media mix. Its ability to reach cus- provide you with the ‘baseline hypothe- Wavemetrix, for example, carried out a tomers as they shop gives it an edge over sis’ that you can test further, using con- study for a European mobile operator traditional forms of advertising, such as ventional market-research techniques. that was aware that its network was less television, radio and billboards. Ms Baird This sort of thing has been going on, in reliable than those of its rivals. Online re- predicts further pilot schemes and the dean informal way at least, for several search, however, showed that the general velopment of industry standards this years. Sometimes public-relations teams public believed the opposite to be true. year; 2007, she says, will be the year are asked to keep an eye on online discus- Other surprising ndings arise because when digital signage really takes o. sions, and switched-on company execu- participants in discussion groups can say Those in the retail and advertising indus- tives visit forums to stay in touch with the anything they like, whereas people an- tries will be watching the new technol- public mood. But companies are now swering a survey answer only the ques- ogy closely. They will be hoping that looking to do it in a more systematic way. tions that researchers think to ask. shoppers will do the same. 7 Initially, this involved throwing lots of What of privacy? Max Kaleho of computing power at the problem. Accen- BuzzMetrics insists that openness and ture and IBM have each built computer transparency are the most important systems that trawl the web in search of things in our industry. Even so, many trends and insights. But the extensive use companies are reluctant to discuss their Listening to the of jargon, abbreviations and obscure activities in this area. Although rms slang can make it hard for computers to track only public forums, they do not ob- internet gure out what people are saying. tain the participants’ formal consent, and So smaller specialist rms, such as many users may be disconcerted to learn Wavemetrix in Britain and Nielsen Buzz- that their conversations are being lis- Internet trends: Companies are Metrics in America, are now using a com- tened to. That said, people who post their eavesdropping on online discussion bination of computers and human thoughts online generally want them to forums to nd out what their researchers. They track general discus- be read. While the ethics of monitoring customers really think about them sions and try to spot trends early, by iden- public discussion boards are a matter of tifying the members of online debate, there is general agreement that NE of the things that makes the in- communities who are most likely to inu- the active abuse of forumsin particular, Oternet so appealing is that for any ence other participants. BuzzMetrics does posting poorly disguised product subject, no matter how obscure, there is this kind of work on behalf of 100 of the plugsis unacceptable. almost guaranteed to be at least one web- world’s biggest rms, including General Occasionally, the monitoring of dis- site, blog or discussion forum where peo- Motors, Ford and Microsoft. cussion groups itself becomes a topic of ple congregate to talk about it. Online Such research has a number of weak- conversation. In one car forum, a discus- discussion forums cover a huge range of nesses, not least the fact that it excludes sion of BuzzMetrics’ research for General topics: it is not just stereotypical geeky non-internet users, so it is not about to re- Motors produced no objectionsjust dis- bickering about Macs versus PCs, or place telephone surveys and focus belief that the carmaker could listen to Windows versus Linux. Worried mothers groups any time soon. But it also has their conversations and still produce such compare the fat content of dierent many advantages, notably its high speed unappealing products. Consumers often brands of potato crisps; car enthusiasts and low cost. Opinions appear on the moan that companies do not listen to discuss the merits of forthcoming mod- web within minutes of an event. Con- them. Might the monitoring of discus- els; fans of obscure bands swap trivia. vening a focus group or performing tradi- sion groups provide an answer to that The internet’s oldest discussion sys- tional market research to gauge the problem? Discuss. 7 The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006 Monitor 5

generative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, are trying to do just that. Dr Atala, a pioneer in the eld, is now Organs to order working with Tengion, a biotech rm Attack of the based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. It is one of several rms pursuing the idea Eurogoogle of making organs to order, but seems to have made the most progress. Already, a Biotechnology: Could the creation of handful of patients in America have been Search technology: Can an ambitious replacement organs, grown to order quietly tted with new bladders made new European search engine, backed for particular patients, be just using Dr Atala’s technology. by the governments of France and around the corner? The approach is simple, but it has Germany, challenge Google? taken decades to rene. Healthy progeni- ODAY there are around 90,000 pa- tor cells (the precursors to particular cell E MUST take the oensive and Ttients in America registered and wait- types) are extracted from the patient, iso- Wmuster a massive eort, said ing for organ transplants. Macabre as it lated and multiplied in culture. They are Jacques Chirac, the president of France, sounds, they are, in eect, waiting for a then placed into a scaolding structure, who went on to warn of the dangers of genetically suitable, organ-donating made of collagen, which is sculpted to re- losing the battle for the power of tomor- somebody within a few hundred miles to semble the required organ. This in turn is row in a speech made last April. Stand- die, and provide a replacement for a ter- then placed into a soup of nutrients in an ing beside him was Gerhard Schröder, minally damaged heart, kidney, liver, incubator, resembling an aquarium, that then chancellor of Germany. In response pancreas or other organ. But even those simulates the conditions found inside the to the formidable challenges posed by patients lucky enough to receive a donor human body. Four to six weeks later, America, Japan and the emerging powers organ in time, and survive the transplant you have a ‘neo-bladder’ that can then be of China, India and Brazil, the two men surgery, face more misery still. Some will placed into the patient, says Dr Atala. announced that they had decided to step reject the new organ, and will be put back The immune system senses nothing un- up their co-operation in a technological on the waiting list; those who do not will toward, allowing the body to stimulate programme of vital strategic importance. spend the rest of their lives on drugs that the remaining growth necessary for full A new ghter jet, perhaps, or a satellite are prone to cause side-eects and will functionality. The collagen scaolding is surveillance system? No, the two heads suppress their immune systems, prevent- gradually reabsorbed into the body. of state were endorsing a plan to build a ing rejection but leaving them susceptible The idea of building body parts on a Franco-German internet-search engine, to infections and other maladies. scaold made of collagen by using a pa- to be called Quaero (Latin for I seek). Most patients, however, never get tient’s own cells is not new. Genzyme, a The project would, said Mr Chirac, be even that far. Although most Americans biotech rm based in Boston, makes a undertaken with the help of government support organ donation, very few go product called Carticel, for example, funds in the image of the magnicent through the complicated process of for- which allows cartilage to be cultured in success of Airbus. In a series of further mally consenting to it. Of those that do, the laboratory from a patient’s own cells speeches over the past few months, he not all are able to donate, either because and then implanted into the patient’s has warmed to his theme: We must take their organs are unsuitable or their fam- knee to repair cartilage defects. Since its up the global challenge of the American ilies decide to overrule their wishes introduction in 1997, it has been used to giants Yahoo! and Google; Culture is which is allowed under American law. treat more than 10,000 patients. not merchandise and cannot be left to So the idea of being able to create re- But Tengion, which plans to put its blind market forces; We must staunchly placement organs from scratch, using a neo-bladder into clinical trials later this defend the world’s cultural diversity patient’s own tissuesand hence pre- year, has loftier ambitions. Furthermore, against the looming threat of unifor- venting rejectionhas considerable al- it has the funds to pursue them, having mity; Our power is at stake. lure. Researchers including Robert raised $40m in initial funding late last In July Mr Chirac noted that while Langer, of the Massachusetts Institute of year. While there is a lot of research in the French research has traditionally been Technology, and Anthony Atala, of the elddating back to a series of animal good, it now needs encouraging. The Wake Forest University Institute of Re- studies, co-written by Dr Atala, which following month the French government, appeared in the journal Nature Biotech- the main nancier and developer of nology in 1999no other commercial Quaero, duly created the Agency for In- venture has yet got as far as developing a dustrial Innovation (AII), based in Paris, neo-bladder, let alone other, more largely to oversee the project. The AII re- complex organs. ceived an initial endowment of 1.7 bil- The eld is now moving fast. Ten lion ($2 billion). Michel Lemonier, a years ago, they said organs couldn’t be senior administrator at the AII, refuses to built. Now the challenge is unravelling discuss how much of the budget is being solid organs like the liver, pancreas, heart, allocated to Quaero because, he jokes, and lungs, writes Christopher Thomas the leaders of other AII-funded pro- Scott, a bioethicist at Stanford University, grammes would be very jealous. in his recent book, Stem Cells Now (Pi Quaero is expected to be nished before Press, 2005). While the prospects for or- any of the other planned AII projects, gans to order seem promising, however, and may be online before the year is out. there is no guarantee that what works in The magic of Quaero, say its suppor- animals will also work in humans. ters, will be in the ambitious capabilities Patients, doctors and investors should of its tentacles. Today, internet searches not get their hopes up until trials of Ten- are performed using keywords. Of gion’s neo-bladder demonstrate that the course, search engines can retrieve image, new technology really can hold water. 7 audio and video les, in addition to text 1 6 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006

2 documents. But this is done by matching classic example of European state-funded the user’s keywords to a text description industrial policy, while Google is the of the image, audio or video content. very embodiment of American free-mar- Quaero users will be able to search the in- ket techno-capitalism. The use of govern- ternet with keywords in the usual way; ment funds to back Quaero has raised but in addition, researchers at Quaero’s eyebrows, even among its supporters, public-private consortium, led by Thom- who worry that it might fall foul of rules son and France Telecom in France and that prevent governments from using Siemens and Deutsche Telekom in Ger- state aid to give favoured rms an unfair many, are developing technology that competitive advantage. will allow users to perform searches us- But so far no formal complaints ing pictures and sounds as query terms. against Quaero have materialised. The It’s beyond Google, says Marie-Vin- project is a public-private partnership, cente Pasdeloup of Thomson. and the private rms involved are also Quaero will allow users to search us- committing considerable sums to it. The ing a query image, not just a group of government funds, meanwhile, are being keywords. In a process known as image carefully distributed via a complex sys- mining, software that recognises shapes tem of favourable loans, interest-free and colours will then retrieve still images cash advances, forgivable loans and and video clips that contain images simi- grants for pre-competitive research, all of lar to the query image. (The software is which are allowed under international being supplied by LTU Technologies, a trade rules. The project is further pro- rm based in Paris, which already sup- tected by the fact that big public-research plies the technology to law-enforcement organisations, including France’s Na- agencies for use in sifting through surveil- tional Centre for Scientic Research and lance footage.) When Quaero nds an im- Germany’s RWTH-Aachen University, age without a description that matches a are also involved. properly labelled image, it will append When Angela Merkel took over as March of the the description from the labelled image German chancellor in November, there to the unlabelled one. This technique, were rumblings that she might not match called keyword propagation, will en- Mr Schröder’s commitment to the pro- robolawyers rich the web linguistically: image descrip- ject. In fact, her dedication to Quaero is tions in French, for example, will spread even greater, says Jean-Philippe Touut, as they are tacked on to similar images, so the secretary-general of the Cournot Cen- Software: A new program uses game that those images can also be retrieved by tre for Economic Studies in Paris, who co- theory to produce fairer outcomes users who type in French keywords. ordinates collaboration between the pro- when dividing the property of Meanwhile, in Germany, researchers ject’s French and German participants. divorcing couples at the University of Karlsruhe are de- How will Google respond? Brad veloping Quaero’s voice-recognition and Fallon of SEO Research, a search-engine HEN it comes to the dicult pro- translation technology, with funding consultancy based in Atlanta, says Wblem of deciding who gets to keep from the European Commission. The Google has put the development of the holiday home, the dog and the Barry idea is that this software will nd audio multimedia search technology into its Manilow albums, divorcing couples now lessuch as political speeches or radio as-soon-as-possible category, since it have somewhere new to turn. Research- broadcastsand then automatically tran- now oers only text-based searches. At ers in Australia have developed a com- scribe and translate them into a number the moment, however, Quaero appears puter program that relies on a branch of of European languages. The original au- to have the edge, he says. But when Goo- mathematics known as game theory to dio les can then be found using key- gle and the other big American search en- produce a fairer outcome when dividing word searches. In addition, gines unveil their multimedia search property. Instead of the traditional ap- speaker-identication software will al- features, they are likely to provide inter- proach of dividing a couple’s property in low users (via computer microphones) to faces in foreign languages, just as they do half, the system, called Family Winner, search the internet for audio clips re- today with text-based searches. So guides the couple through a series of corded in their own voices, or those of simply by existing, Quaero will make the trade-os and compensation strategies. other speakers. cut-throat search-engine business even According to John Zeleznikow, a com- These are stunningly ambitious goals, more competitive. puter scientist at Victoria University in and some of the audio features may not Google, of course, makes its money Melbourne, who developed the software be ready by the time Quaero is launched. from advertising, and Quaero’s backers with his colleague Emilia Bellucci, the re- Yet they show that Quaero is intended to hope that it too will produce substantial sults are fairer because both parties end be far more than just another would-be advertising revenues. But Quaero’s chief up with what they value most. Google, but a leap forward in search-en- aims are cultural and political, rather The software was tested last year on gine technology. Google is so hege- than commercial. Alexander Waibel, a 50 divorcing couples, with the outcomes monic that no one even wonders about research leader at the University of evaluated by Victoria Legal Aid. Each other interfaces, says François Bourdon- Karlsruhe who sits on Quaero’s steering party is given a limited number of points, cle, the chief executive of Exalead, a committee, oers an emotional justica- which they are asked to allocate to the French search engine that has taken on tion too. Europe wants to secure access items of property they wish to keep. the task of integrating these various tech- that does not have to be channelled Through a multi-step process of modica- nologies under the Quaero umbrella. through American technology, he says. tion, the parties are encouraged to give Even so, the most striking dierence And an ocial close to Mr Chirac adds priority to the items they most value. The between Quaero and Google is not tech- that the goal surpasses by far the researchers found that, using the soft- nological, but ideological. Quaero is a industrial stakes. 7 ware, each party ended up with 70-80% 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006 Monitor 7

2 of what they originally wanted, rather industry has sprung up devoted to the than the usual 50-50 split. pursuit of website visibility. In 2005 Applying game theory in this way is a worldwide spending on such search-en- welcome development in an area of law Dancing with gine optimisation (SEO), grew 125%, to where parties are normally encouraged $1.25 billion, according to SEMPO, a Bos- to be combative when going through the Google’s spiders ton-based trade association. It predicts courts, says Richard Susskind, a law pro- spending will grow by 150% this year. fessor who is technology adviser to Eng- The Google Dance can rattle compa- land’s Lord Chief Justice. In the eyes of Search engines: Google is engaged in nies, since precipitousbut often tempo- the law, this approach to conict resolu- an elaborate dance with rms raryfalls down the pecking order are tion would appear to be superior, he determined to keep their websites common. But Paul Aelen of Checkit, a SEO says, because it produces a more equita- high up in its rankings large rm based in the Netherlands, ble outcome than the courts. But, he admits that algorithm updates are very notes, it can be employed only if both HE industrious spider bots that exciting for SEO experts, who can then parties consent to its use, which is un- Tcrawl around the web on behalf of test an array of tricks to gure out what likely in the most acrimonious cases. Google, the world’s biggest search en- works, and what doesn’t. The ones that perhaps need it the most gine, evoke both fear and reverence. Late SEO rms boost their clients’ online may be the ones most resistant to using last year the bots swept through the rankings by tinkering with their websites it, he warns. world’s web servers to scrutinise some 8 to enhance the characteristics that search Dr Zeleznikow admits that despite the billion web pages and determine their engines consider positive. This involves system’s merits, divorcing couples do not new rankings in Google’s search results. techniques such as simplifying compli- necessarily always want what is fair. But, As Google tweaks its mighty ranking al- cated page addresses, rewriting copy to he says, the system is intended for use by gorithms, and applies them to the con- produce single-theme pages with accu- couples seeking out-of-court mediation stantly changing pages of the web, rate titles, adding extra keywords to the as they separate, rather than those al- dierent sites shue up and down invisible page descriptions (or meta- ready involved in legal battles. The soft- wildly in its search rankings, repeatedly tags) read by indexing software, and ware will be aimed at mediation services gaining and losing ground. This opera- putting product information stored in da- when it goes on sale later this year. tion, which takes place two or three times tabases directly on to xed pages, so that This is not Dr Zeleznikow’s rst ven- a year, is known as a Google Dance. search engines’ bots can read it. ture into the eld of robolawyer soft- Like hurricanes, Google Dances are The quest to understand how search ware. Indeed, for those determined to given names, such as Bourbon, Gilligan engines rank websites has become an ob- take their former spouses for everything and Florida, often by commentators at a session for some. Web forums devoted to they’ve got, he has already developed a website called webmasterworld.com. the topic hum with debate, and many dierent program, called SplitUp, which Jagger, the two-week dance that began SEO experts comb through patent appli- can encourage them to reconsider media- late last October, moved through servers cations to nd out what new algorithms tion. It uses techniques from the eld of in three waves, eliciting chatter in in- are in the pipeline. That ruse, however, is articial intelligence to draw inferences ternet forums. Been kicked o the face of becoming less eective. Matt Cutts, a se- based on past rulings in the Family Court the index by jagger1, reads a typical en- nior engineer at Google who is assailed of Australia. This allows parties to play try. Will try not to panic til after jagger3. with algorithm questions at industry out risky or aggressive courtroom strate- All search engines test and implement conferences, says his rm, like its compet- gies to see just how successful they might new algorithms constantly, though not in itors, carefully controls access to its se- actually be, but without any of the risks. such a dramatic fashion. Because achiev- crets. A lot of our best ideas don’t get By going for the jugular, disputants gen- ing a high search ranking is crucial to suc- led as patents because patents eventu- erally diminish their prospects of getting cess for many online businesses, a huge ally become public, he says. what they want, says Dr Zeleznikow. The best SEO rms can do wonders for SplitUp can help people realise this, and a site’s ranking. Lee Odden, the president thus encourage them to give mediation of TopRank Online Marketing, a rm another look. based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, says Game theory can be applied to many one of his clients stopped paying out other elds besides family law, notes Dr $50,000 a month on pay-per-click ad- Zeleznikow. The availability of a purely vertising; instead, Pacic Security Capital, rational approach to dividing property an investment bank based in Beaverton, means that the same approach could be Oregon, now spends a tenth of that gure particularly suitable for resolving indus- on SEO and claims the top spot for some trial disputes, he suggests. By forcing the 50 keywords on several search engines. parties to focus on what matters most to The most powerful determinant of a them, it could bypass the emotional and web page’s importance is the number of political elements of a dispute that so of- incoming referral links, which is regarded ten inhibit progress. as a gauge of the site’s popularity. Site op- Resolving disputes more eciently timisers solicit links from directory sites, through software is a laudable aim. But is swap links with prominent sites, and sh there not a risk that it might trigger a legal for links from bloggers by sending them arms race? After all, says Dr Susskind, if a press releases. But the inuence of links system can be developed to inject fair- begets abuse. Unethical methods, known ness and rationality into divorce, then as black-hat SEO, include renting links someone else could just as easily design a from popular or long-established sites system that suggests more aggressive or (their links carry more weight). Some un- Machiavellian strategiesto help clients scrupulous SEO outts even exploit loop- take their exes to the cleaners. 7 holes in website-management tools to 1 8 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006

2 place hidden links on prestigious sites, At the moment, electricity on board neering, in England. But now, he says, such as those maintained by universities. aircraft is provided by an auxiliary power fuel cells are steadily becoming lighter, The link farm technique involves unit (APU)a small gas-turbine engine more powerful and less costly, which spamming the web with automatically that handles lighting, air-conditioning makes them more suitable for use in avia- generated bogus blogs, known as splogs, and pressurisation of the cabin, and even tion with every passing year. that link to a website to give it a boost. helps to start the main engine. (The APU The real challenge turns out to be inte- David Sifry, founder of Technorati, a blog accounts for the constant whirring noise grating fuel cells into aircraft. It’s the sys- search-engine based in San Francisco, that airliners make when sitting on the tem, stupid, says Ted Wierzbanowski of estimates that 10,000 link-bearing splogs tarmac, even when their main engines AeroVironment. The diculty of integra- sporting content copied (or scraped) are switched o.) The current designs for tion is the main reason that Boeing’s sin- from legitimate sites are put online every hybrid aircraft involve replacing the APU gle-seater fuel-cell aircraft, in which the day to fool the spider bots. Cloaking in- with a far more ecient system based on electrical systems are retrotted into a volves presenting content to indexing a fuel cella device that combines a fuel conventional airframe, has taken so long bots that is dierent from that which web with oxygen to produce electricity. This to get o the ground, says Mr Glover. This surfers who visit the site will actually see. approach has strong advantages over is not a problem unique to aviation. As Keyword stung involves hiding pop- combustion: fuel cells are quiet, ecient, the appetite for fuel cells spreadsthey ular search terms on a pageusing, say, and produce far fewer emissions. Boeing are being incorporated into everything white text on a white backgroundto estimates that the eciency of the APU in from laptops to locomotiveseach indus- attract visitors. converting energy from fuel into electric- try must gure out how to build the new Mahesh Murthy, the founder of Pin- ity could go from 15% today to as much as power source into their existing products. storm, a company based in Mumbai that 70% with fuel cells. So although hybrid aircraft will take o is one of India’s biggest SEO rms, says This is a dierent approach to that of eventually, at the moment they still have that the Google Dance and other similar the hybrid car, of course, where electrical a long runway in front of them. 7 algorithm updates are constantly getting power (currently from a battery, but po- better at detecting and shutting out tentially from a fuel cell in future) is used cheaters. This can mean relegation to the for propulsion at low speeds, and to pro- bottom of the rankings, or even removal vide occasional bursts of acceleration. It altogether. Last month Google accused is true that AeroVironment, a rm based Bright sparks BMW, a carmaker, of using cloaking, and in Monrovia, California, successfully briey removed its website from its in- ew a fuel-cell-powered aircraft called dex. But the nancial stakes are so high Global Observer last year. But it was an Innovation Awards: We invite that SEO rms will continue to look for unmanned, lightweight design built for nominations for our annual new ways to boost their client’s rankings. surveillance work; nobody expects elec- prizes recognising innovators This is one dance, it seems, that will not trically propelled airliners to take to the be going out of fashion any time soon. 7 skies in the near future. HE Economist’s fth annual Inno- For years, Boeing has been trying to Tvation Summit will take place in build a small, single-seater plane, driven London on November 10th. Speakers by an electric motor and a fuel cell. Work- from industry and academia will ex- ing with Intelligent Energy, a British rm, amine the latest trends in the manage- Flight of fancy? its researchers in Madrid now hope that ment of innovation, from the lab- such an aircraft will make its maiden oratory to the marketplace. At an ight later this year. It’s been a good awards ceremony on November 9th, learning experience for us, says Mr we will also honour successful inno- Glover. But this pure-electric approach vators in a range of elds. does not scale up to larger aircraft, which Accordingly, readers are invited to Energy technology: Following the suggests that, as with cars, the hybrid nominate outstanding innovators in success of hybrid cars, which run on model has more promise, at least for the seven categories: bioscience; energy both electricity and fossil fuels, time being. Hence Boeing’s interest in and the environment; computing and attention is turning to hybrid planes fuel-cell APUs. telecoms; no boundaries (which in- Don’t rush out to buy a ticket for a hy- cludes materials science, nanotech- YBRID carspowered by a mixture brid airliner just yet, however. The com- nology and other emerging elds); Hof novel electrical and conventional pany is still only at the stage of doing consumer products; business pro- fossil-fuel technologiesare ourishing. laboratory tests and preliminary design cesses; and social and economic de- So what about hybrid aircraft? The idea is work. Mr Glover reckons that it will be velopment, a category that recognises not as far-fetched as it might sound. As probably in the neighbourhood of 15-20 individuals who have pioneered with cars, the high cost of aviation fuel, years before you see it in your local air- novel technologies and business not to mention concerns about aircraft port. For its part, Boeing’s main rival, models that improve everyday lives. noise and emissions, has created a clam- Airbus, says it is looking at fuel cells in a Please e-mail nominations to our for greater energy eciency. At the fairly intensive way, but expects the [email protected], giving same time, aircraft are becoming ever technology to take hold in cars rst, be- the nominee’s name, current ali- more demanding of electrical power, and fore spreading into planes. ation and contact information, and a not just for avionics and entertainment So what are the remaining hurdles? 100-word summary explaining why systems. Boeing’s new Dreamliner, due For many years, the problem was one of the nominee deserves to win the to enter service in 2008, will use electrical weight. Early fuel cells were simply too award in a category. The submissions components in place of some pneumatic heavy for aircraft, since they were de- will be judged by a panel of technol- and hydraulic systems. This will improve veloped for trucks and buses, where ogy and business experts, including performance and durability, and may weight is not such a constraint, notes several previous winners. The dead- also reduce weight, says Bill Glover, an John Fielding, an aircraft-design expert at line for nominations is April 24th. environmental guru at Boeing. Craneld University’s School of Engi- The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006 Rational consumer 9

Television’s next big shift

lets you watch your own television from their main residences; some have plugged anywhere in the world via the internet. in security cameras, so that they can keep Consumer electronics: Will Shaped like a giant, silver chocolate bar, an eye on their homes (as well as watch- placeshifting, which lets you the Slingbox sits on top of your television, ing TV) while travelling. Even broadcast- takes in video feeds from cable or satellite ers are using Slingboxes to monitor the watch your TV from anywhere, be set-top boxes, DVD players and PVRs, and performance of their networks. as disruptive as timeshifting? then retransmits a video stream via a As with the TiVo, Slingbox users be- broadband internet connection to wher- come advocates for the technology to T ALL started with the video recorder. Its ever you happen to be. The remote device their friends. Another similarity between Iappearance in the 1970s enabled people can be a PC, a laptop or even a handheld the two devices is that they are dicult to to watch programmes when they wanted computer or mobile phone, provided it explain without a demonstration. But the to, rather than when broadcasters de- has a fast internet connection. You can Slingbox has the advantage that its users cided to show them. But programming then watch television (or DVDs, or pro- can demonstrate it wherever they are, video recorders can be ddly. So time- grammes recorded on your PVR) from rather than just in their homes. Indeed, shifting, as the process of liberating anywhere. Sling Media’s founders, Blake Slingbox users who start watching televi- viewers from broadcast schedules is Krikorian and his brother Jason, had the sion in oces and airport lounges have sometimes called, only really came into idea for the Slingbox in 2002, when they been known to attract small crowds. its own with the advent of personal video were unable to watch their local baseball Placeshifting might become a standard recorders (PVRs) such as the TiVo. Such team, the San Francisco Giants, while function on set-top boxes in future, just as boxes can be set up to record your favour- travelling. Veterans of the tech industry, PVR functionality is fast becoming stan- ite programmes whenever they come on, they built the prototype out of sheer con- dard today. Mr Krikorian says he would and their large storage capacity allows sumer frustration, says Blake Krikorian. like his rm to become the Dolby of dozens of shows to be stored for playing The Slingbox went on sale last July for placeshifting by licensing its technology back later. Such easy-to-use timeshifting $249. While it took 21 months for the TiVo to makers of set-top boxes, just as Dolby technology completely changes the way to sell 125,000 units, says Mr Krikorian, licenses its audio-processing technology that its users watch television. Not every- the Slingbox sold that many in six to electronics rms. (In January, two big one approves, however: the same tech- months. Products that do similar things media rms, Liberty Media and EchoStar, nology also makes it easy to skip over have been developed by other rms: invested in the company.) But even if it advertisements. And broadcasters are Sony sells a product called LocationFree, does not become widespread, placeshift- starting to impose restrictions on how Orb Networks oers software that lets a ing could have dramatic consequences long programmes or lms can be stored. PC retransmit TV across the internet, and for the TV and lm industries. While the timeshifting revolution is Microsoft is working on something simi- For while placeshifting oers benets still playing out, another big change is un- lar. But the Slingbox has a head start. to those industriesit vastly increases the der way with the emergence of placeshift- number of television screens, by turning ing. Just as timeshifting lets viewers Putting it in its place any PC or handset with a broadband con- choose when to watch something, Will placeshifting have as signicant and nection into a potential televisionit also placeshifting lets them decide where. Of disruptive an impact as timeshifting? On poses challenges. Placeshifting makes it course, people have long been able to the face of it, placeshifting’s appeal is harder to charge consumers for new carry recorded shows (on videotapes or much narrower: travelling executives streaming video and mobile-TV services, DVDs) around with them. But in the past who want to watch their home teams for example; why pay extra for a limited few months, the placeshifting of live from their hotel rooms across the globe selection of programmes when you can broadcasts, as well as recorded shows, hardly constitute a mass market. But the stream TV from home right to your com- has become possible. What we’re mov- buzz around the Slingbox suggests that puter or handset? More signicantly, the ing towards is having any content, any- placeshifting could have broad appeal. Its technology circumvents national censor- where, anytime, on whatever device is buyers are ordinary consumers, not just ship and regulatory rules and makes a available to you, says Van Baker of geeks, insists Mr Krikorian. This is a mockery of national rights to television Gartner, a consultancy. This is, he says, mainstream product already, he says. shows and sporting events, or regional part of a far broader trend: the personali- Placeshifting enables oce workers to release windows for lms. sation of media consumption, from mo- watch sport at their desks on weekends or Placeshifting may turn out to be some- bile-phone ringtones to music playlists. when working late, and allows people to thing that suits only a small minority of The company at the forefront of use a Wi-Fi enabled laptop as a portable viewers. But by eroding many of the geo- placeshifting is Sling Media, a start-up television within the home or in the gar- graphic rules that exist in the media in- based in San Mateo, California. Last year den. People are using Slingboxes to pipe dustry, it should hasten the arrival of it launched the Slingbox, which in eect television to their holiday homes from when I want, where I want television.7 10 Reports The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006

array of a dozen or so polymer lms, each of a slightly dierent type. The electrical conductivity of these lms varies in the presence of dierent chemicals, so that when the array of lms is exposed to a particular odour, the dierent lms respond in a characteristic way. Dr Subramanian’s electronic nose, however, takes a dierent approach. In- stead of polymer lms, it uses an array of transistors made out of various organic semiconductor materials. Transistors are ideal for sensing, he says, because they are highly sensitive to very slight changes in charge structure and bond structure, both of which can be induced by bringing them into contact with other compounds. Transistors made of dierent materials respond dierently to dierent chemicals, so that the array produces a distinctive signal when exposed to an odour. A sensor based on an array of ve types of organic transistor is capable of distinguishing be- What the nose knows tween unspoiled and oxidised wine. Dr Subramanian’s new nose is unusual not only in how it works, but also in how it is made. Organic semiconductors electronic nose that can, among other can be printed using special inkjet print- things, tell when wine has gone stale. The ers, which greatly reduces their cost. This Smell technology: Technology advantage of an electronic nose is that it is could slash the price of electronic noses can manipulate and reproduce far more ecient and versatile than tradi- from hundreds to just a few dollars. In- tional chemical sensors. Developing a deed, Dr Subramanian believes that elec- sight and sound with amazing sensor to detect a single chemical sub- tronic noses will eventually be so cheap delity. But what about smell? stance is expensive, says Dr Subrama- that they will be built into food containers nian, and such sensors then cannot be and pharmaceutical packaging, to indi- HEN it comes to reproducing sights used to detect anything else. It is as if you cate when a product is past its best. For Wand sounds, technology has made had invented a camera that can take pic- this to happen, however, the price will great strides in the past century. It is now tures only of red objects, or a microphone have to fall below $1, which is unlikely for possible to buy a high-denition televi- that picks up words only if they are spo- at least ve years, he says. sion that produces an image almost indis- ken in French. But a general-purpose elec- Even when cheap sensors do become tinguishable from an aquarium or the tronic nose can be used for all sorts of available, detecting compounds is only view through a picture window; the best things, from sning food for quality con- half the problem. As with a natural olfac- surround-sound systems can reproduce a trol to detecting explosives at airports. tory system, electronic noses must be able concert performance so that it sounds just The inspiration for such general-pur- to learn and later recognise new smells. as it did in real life. While technologists pose devices is the human nose itself. Ritaban Dutta at Warwick University in have concentrated on sight and sound, Rather than recognising individual chem- Britain has developed software that can however, smell has been left behind. Per- icals, each of its 300-400 dierent types of recognise the smell of bacteria, including haps that is not surprising, since smell is, receptor responds to a wide range of vola- the deadly superbug MRSA (methicillin- for most people, of lesser importance. But tile compounds. Across the tens of mil- resistant Staphylococcus aureus). The pro- sometimes smell can provide informa- lions of cells that make up the human ject began when his collaborator, David tion that other senses cannot. And that olfactory system, recognition of a smell Morgan, who is a surgeon at the Heart of potentially opens the door to a range of appears to emerge from the combination England Hospital in Birmingham, noticed new technologies. of many such responses, much as the rec- the distinctly dierent smells given o by For decades, scientists have been inter- ognition of a face depends on identica- abscesses during surgery. He wondered if ested in imitating the way in which the tion of many dierent characteristics. a machine could be trained to tell these nose detects compounds. Devices that do This distributed approach enables the ol- dierent smells apart. so are usually called articial or electronic factory system to detect tens of thousands Armed with a traditional polymer- noses, says Vivek Subramanian, an engi- of smells without having to have tens of based electronic nose of the kind used by neer at the University of California in thousands of dierent types of receptor. the food industry to detect rotten ingredi- Berkeley. He has developed a new type of Today’s electronic noses consist of an ents, Dr Dutta trained his software to re-1 The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006 Reports 11

2 cognise MRSA by exposing it to samples The idea is gradually to reintroduce the other words, of a blindfold or earplugs. of the bacteria. This was more dicult patient to the environment that caused Overcoming horrendous smells can be than it sounds, since the relative con- the stress and trauma in the rst place, one of the biggest obstacles in clean-up centrations of the various compounds steadily increasing the realism of the ex- operations such as those that followed that correspond to a particular odour can perience until it no longer causes them the Asian tsunami of 2004 and Hurricane vary from one sample to another. But suering, he says. Katrina in New Orleans last year. The when it was tested on 150 known sam- To make the treatment even more re- stench of decaying esh from bodies ples, the resulting system was able to alistic, Dr Rizzo has taken to using a box of oating in the water or hidden inside identify MRSA correctly 96% of the time. tricks that squirts out a range of odours, buildings, combined with the reek of Dr Dutta is now seeking backing to extend including the smells of cordite, diesel, overowing sewers, is enough to turn his system so that it can also detect other body odour, gunpowder and even rub- even the strongest stomach. dangerous bacteria, such as those that bish, intended to make soldiers feel as Besides making the conditions for re- cause Legionnaire’s disease. It might ulti- though they are back in Iraq. It is an old lief workers unimaginably dicult, it can mately be possible to install sensors in but eective trick: real-estate agents often also leave them with memories that hospital ventilation systems, he says, to recommend making coee before poten- haunt them for years. Such an experience prevent the spread of infections. tial buyers visit a home, because the smell can be so unpleasant and powerful that Michael Phillips of Menssana Re- makes them feel relaxed and at ease. Simi- the smell seems to etch itself into the ol- search in Fort Lee, New Jersey, has gone larly, shopping centres often have cookie factory senses, in what is sometimes one step further by developing a breatha- shops, which pump out warm chocolatey called the barbecue eectso named lyser that can detect lung cancer. We can smells. The olfactory system is linked to because the smell of burning meat can pick it up very early, says Dr Phillips. His the limbic system, which controls mem- trigger horric memories of burned bo- invention, called the Breath Collection ory, says Dr Rizzo, and that explains why dies in re-ghters or soldiers years later. Apparatus, has already been approved by such tricks are so eective. Yet when clearing up in the aftermath America’s medical regulator, the Food of Katrina, many of the relief workers and Drug Administration, for detecting Towards smellyvision avoided this possibility by smearing a the early signs of heart-transplant rejec- These smell boxes are remarkably simple, novel gel under their noses. Called Odor- tion, and he believes it can also be used to but might eventually lead to the ultimate Screen, the gel looks and smells decep- detect breast cancer and tuberculosis. in olfactory output technology: smelly- tively simple, but is quite unlike other The trick is to get a big sample of vision. According to Doron Lancet, a sci- odour-neutralising agents. While the breath, says Dr Phillips. The patient entist at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, mentholated petroleum jelly that pathol- breathes into the device for two minutes just about any kind of smell can be bot- ogists and crime-scene workers some- and an absorbent trap captures volatile tled, from burnt tyres to candy-oss. But times use is designed to overpower organic compounds (VOCs), which are he believes it will be possible to make de- unpleasant smells, OdorScreen interferes found in the bloodstream and pass into vices that can produce just about any kind with the sense of smell itself. Odor- the breath in minute quantities. The levels of smell without having to have samples Screen is a completely dierent concept, of VOCs are then measured using gas of each and every one. We have math- says Dr Lancet, who acts as a consultant chromatography, and compared with ematical algorithms that could streamline for Patus, the Israeli company that those in a sample of ambient air taken at the process of mixing the odours, he developed the gel. the same time. The system can detect very says. These formulae could be used to mix OdorScreen works by releasing into minute concentrations of VOCsas low compounds from a palette of smells to the nose harmless compounds that inter- as a few parts per trillion. A pilot study produce a range of dierent odours. In fere with receptor proteins involved in found that the presence of a combination conjunction with an electronic nose, it controlling the perception of the intensity of 22 VOCs was an accurate indication of would then be possible to sample a smell of malodours. These mechanisms serve a lung cancer, and a larger study is now un- in one place, and synthesise it at another. similar purpose to the iris, which controls der way. In the rst stages of lung cancer, This was the dream of DigiScent, an how much light enters the eye. Without patients have an 80% chance of surviving American company that Dr Lancet joined such mechanisms, our senses would be for another ve years, compared with a in 2000. DigiScent had the ambitious goal overwhelmed, says Dr Lancet. The eect 5% chance when at stage four, says Dr Phil- of odourising the internet with digital lasts for about two hours, after which lips. We can detect lung cancer at stage scents in this way. We were trying to fresh gel can be applied without fear of an one, he says. make odour generators which could be overdose. And unlike a nose clip, the gel So much for devices that detect smells; controlled electrically, he says. But even does not interfere with breathing. what about systems that emit them? though their prototype machines could Since it seems to be capable of conceal- These turn out to have therapeutic uses, indeed produce a few dozen smells, ing all kinds of malodours, the gel could such as in the treatment of war veterans smellyvision was sadly not to be. People have a wide range of uses beyond disas- suering from post-traumatic stress disor- told us this was a technology ahead of its ter-recovery, says Dr Lancet. It could be der (PTSD). Skip Rizzo, a psychologist at time, says Dr Lancet. used in operating theatres, for example, the Institute of Creative Technology at the A third type of smell technology does and might even nd its way into house- University of Southern California in Los not detect or reproduce smells, but pre- hold products such as nappies. A trivial Angeles, has been using virtual reality, in vents the sense of smell from working application, perhapsbut one that is not the form of video games, to treat PTSD. providing the olfactory equivalent, in to be snied at. 7 12 Reports The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006

Philadelphia’s ambitious scheme prompted many other cities, including Wi-Pie in the sky? San Francisco, Portland and Minneapolis, to follow. So far, nearly 200 municipalities have announced plans for citywide wireless networks, issued bid requests, or built networks, according to Esme Vos, the founder of Muniwireless.com, a website Communications: Cities across America plan to build municipal that tracks the subject. Over the next three Wi-Fi networks to widen access to broadband. Will they work? years nearly $700m will be spent building such networks in America, she esti- E WILL not stop until every San vide subsidised or free access to tens of mates. Some networks will be supported WFranciscan has access to free thousands of unconnected residents, by advertising; many will charge fees of wireless-internet service. It was a typi- sometimes even supplying computers. $15-25 per month. Most will oer some cally bold statement from Gavin New- Only 45% of Philadelphia residents had form of free access at certain times of day som, the charismatic young mayor of San internet access at home, the city found, or to poorer users. Francisco, as he announced plans in Octo- which compared poorly with the na- Free (or at least cheap) broadband for ber 2004 for a Wi-Fi network that would tional gure of 73%. Last October the body every citizenwho could argue with that? blanket the city with wireless-internet established by the city to oversee the pro- Plenty of people, it turns out. Critics coverage. Mr Newsom thus joined a na- ject, Wireless Philadelphia, picked Earth- worry that cities are underestimating the tionwide movement of cities across Link, a national internet service provider, cost and complexity of building and run- America that are planning to provide to build and operate the network, which ning their own networks. Incumbent tele- wireless-broadband access for govern- is expected to cost around $10m. coms and cable operators are predictably ment workers, residents and businesses. opposed to subsidised schemes that will These municipalities, ranging in scale compete with their own broadband oer- from communities of a few thousand resi- ings. Then there are the technical objec- dents to huge cities including Philadel- tions: no Wi-Fi network as large, dense phia and San Francisco, are concerned and complex as Philadelphia’s proposed that the lack of availability of broadband system has ever been built; citywide access, compared with other parts of the Wi-Fi networks could interfere with exist- developed world, is holding back econ- ing Wi-Fi systems; and the networks will omic growth and perpetuating a digital be built using proprietary technologies, divide between internet haves and have- so that municipalities will become de- nots. A further motivation is that by set- pendent on their equipment-makers. ting up their own wireless networks, These criticisms have some merit. Last municipalities hope to be able to cut com- October Mr Newsom back-pedalled on munications costs, improve the eciency his free Wi-Fi for all pledge, in favour of of their sta, and make possible new ser- providing aordable wireless access vices such as allowing parking meters to throughout San Francisco. And when accept debit and credit cards. putting networks out to tender, the pre- Small municipal wireless networks, ferred model is now for the construction typically built for local-government use, and operating costs of the network to be have been up and running in some parts carried by the winning bidder, to ensure of America for some time. The far bolder that cities’ own liabilities are limited. But idea of building citywide networks avail- much uncertainty still remains over able to all took ight in August 2004, whether large-scale municipal Wi-Fi net- when plans for such a network were an- works can be made to work at all. Even if nounced by John Street, the mayor of they can, nobody knows how much they Philadelphia. Stringing transmitters will cost. And it is hardly reassuring that 1 across the entire city would create the world’s largest Wi-Fi hotspot, providing access both indoors and out. This would extend low-cost broadband access to existing users frustrated by the slow speed and high cost of dial-up internet connections. A survey conducted by the city found that 72% of internet-connected households used dial-up connections, compared with 47% nationally. We wanted broadband at dial-up rates, says Dianah Ne, the city’s chief information ocer. In addition, the city would pro- The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006 Reports 13

Using Wi-Fi at high power levels for citywide coverage could drown out existing networks.

2 rival manufacturers, each promoting dif- Mesh networking allows large areas to networks to connect up a at, sprawling, ferent and incompatible technologies, be blanketed with wireless coverage relatively sparsely populated suburb is claim not just that their equipment is the quickly and inexpensively. As its name one thing. But many unknowns remain, best, but that their rivals’ will not work at suggests, a mesh network consists of an given the scale and nature of the net- all. When challenged, vendors point to array of wireless access points, only a few works about to be installed in Philadel- the many smaller networks that are al- of which are actually connected back to phia, San Francisco and several other ready running. So who is right? the internet via high-speed links (known large American citiesall of which will as backhaul connections). The trick is push Wi-Fi technology to its limits. We’re The view from Tempe that all of the access points double as re- taking this technology and, through some To see municipal wireless networking in lays, passing packets of data to and from enhancements, we’re trying to apply it for action, a good place to start is the city of their neighbours. This connects up the an application it wasn’t really designed Tempe, Arizona, a suburb on the outskirts mesh, so that users can access the internet for, says Peter Rysavy, an independent of Phoenix with 160,000 residents spread at high speed at any of the access points. If wireless consultant. Consequently, we over 40 square miles. The at, desert ter- the nearest access point does not have a just do not know how well it’s going to rain is an ideal environment in which to backhaul connection, the packets of data workbut we’re going to nd out. use wireless networking to boost the that users send and receive simply make availability of broadband. Several years one or more hops across the mesh. Not so fast ago the city installed wireless-broadband As well as being cheap and fast to set Some mesh network devices, notably equipment on two buttes at the opposite uppartly because many of the access those made by Tropos Networks, the mar- ends of town. Rather than paying to lease points can be attached to utility poles ket leader, use the same Wi-Fi frequencies high-speed digital lines from Qwest, each mesh networks have several other merits. both for communication between neigh- of which would cost hundreds of dollars They can provide coverage in areas, such bouring access points, and to connect us- per month, police stations and other as sprawling suburbs, where fast copper ers to the mesh. Wireless experts fear that municipal buildings are linked via the or bre-optic connections are hard to the use of Wi-Fi at the very high power city’s own wireless network. Telecoms come by. When you get out in the resi- levels required for municipal-scale net- costs have fallen from $1.7m a year a de- dential areas, there’s no bre, says Chuck works, particularly in cluttered cities, cade ago to $0.5m today. We’re probably Haas of MetroFi, whose company has in- could drown out existing outdoor Wi-Fi not Qwest’s favourite customer, says stalled mesh Wi-Fi networks in three of networks, public and private, and slow or Dave Heck, Tempe’s deputy manager of the San Francisco Bay Area’s largest sub- disable indoor networks. An estimated information technology. urbs. Mesh networks are reliable, since 10m American homes contain Wi-Fi net- As a result, when the city began con- the failure of one or more access points works; many more are installed in oces, sidering ways to extend broadband ac- does not bring down the whole network, schools, coee shops and parks. It is ab- cess to more residentsincluding nearly and they can also route data around ob- solutely guaranteed that you’re going to 60,000 students, sta and faculty mem- stacles, such as large buildings, which end up interfering with anybody else that bers at the main Arizona State University might otherwise block coverage. is using any channels within your cover- campus in the centre of townwireless By January NeoReach had installed age area, says Mr Rysavy. made a lot of sense, says Mr Heck. We over 400 access points in Tempe, provid- To make matters worse, Wi-Fi operates don’t have a lot of competition for broad- ing Wi-Fi to subscribers in much of the in unlicensed frequency bands, which band in Tempe, he says. There’s just not city, and in outdoor areas in downtown are supposed to be available for anyone to a lot there. A local provider, NeoReach, Tempe and on the university campus. use. By interfering with existing Wi-Fi net- won the contract to build a Wi-Fi mesh With the network’s completion this works, a municipal network is, in eect, network to provide broadband through- month, NeoReach claims to have built the appropriating a shared public asset. out Tempe, using equipment made by rst example of a citywide Wi-Fi network There are going to be 3,000 or 10,000 or Strix Systems. NeoReach is paying for the in America. Proof, surely, that Wi-Fi mesh whatever access points in the city of San network’s construction, and will collect networks are an excellent way to extend Francisco, says Tim Pozar, a wireless con- access fees from subscribers; the city’s ad- broadband coverage across entire cities? sultant. Even though this is unlicensed ministration, police, re and emergency In fact, it is too soon to say. Wi-Fi was frequency, guess who owns the spec- services will also pay to use the network, designed for use in small hotspots, not in trum? The vendor. which will cost $2.3m to build. citywide mesh networks. Using mesh Ron Sege, the boss of Tropos, insists1 14 Reports The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006 If city governments cannot even ll potholes, how will they be able to manage running a network?

2 that his rm’s technology does not cause undue interference. After all, he notes, there are millions of access points in use already, with more being added all the time. Tropos nodes installed in a city are no dierent, he says, from a home user buying an access point and plugging it in. The problem, however, is that o-the- shelf access points operate at just 3-20% of the power output of the mesh nodes made by Tropos and its rivals. Reducing the signal strength of the mesh nodes zon, AT&T and Comcast, have criticised large Wi-Fi network is harder than it would reduce interference with existing municipal networks as risky wastes of looks, says Mr Haas, who has rst-hand networks, but the density of nodes would taxpayers’ money that will provide unfair experience, not least because, once de- then have to go up, increasing costs. competition to private companies. Simi- ployed in the eld, mesh Wi-Fi equipment Interference is not the only potential larly, there have been complaints that if does not always perform as promised. diculty with municipal Wi-Fi networks. city governments cannot even ll pot- The radios we put up in 2002 and 2003 Another problem, notes Mr Rysavy, is holes in roads, how will they be able to and the rst half of 2004hundreds of that there is no common standard for manage the far more complex task of run- themare either back at the vendors or Wi-Fi meshing, and thus no compatibility ning a network? Proponents of municipal sitting in the warehouse, he says. Only in between the ve leading vendors’ equip- networks respond that broadband access the past 18 months has his rm hit upon ment. So if a city builds a network and the is just another utility, and that utilities the right combination of equipment and vendor goes bustas recently happened have been state-run in the past. That is network design. to Vivato, a pioneer of long-range Wi-Fi true, but public ownership of electrical gearkeeping the network running could utilities was, in fact, as controversial a cen- One step at a time be dicult. Although a standard for Wi-Fi tury ago as municipal Wi-Fi is today. Reassuringly, Philadelphia and other big meshing, called 802.11s, is under develop- Philadelphia’s plans were almost de- cities are taking a staged approach to the ment, it is not very far alongand cities railed when, after much lobbying, legisla- deployment, which will allow the con- want to start building now. Until there’s tion was proposed in Pennsylvania that icting claims made by equipment manu- some standardisation in the mesh proto- would have given Verizon, the local in- facturers to be resolved, one way or cols, any deployment today is pretty cumbent, right of rst refusal in any another. In Philadelphia, EarthLink will risky, says Mr Rysavy. municipal telecoms scheme. A bitter ar- start by building a 15-square-mile test net- That raises another criticism: that gument ensued, and the bill was signed work covering dierent terrain, demo- wireless technology is developing very into law only after Verizon agreed to issue graphics and building densities. Building quickly, yet most municipal networks a waiver exempting the city of Philadel- such a test network is very expensive to will be based on a Wi-Fi standard that is phia from the provision. Similar bills pre- do, but it’s never been done, says Greg already three years old. Why not wait for venting municipalities from going into Richardson of Civitium, a consultancy the next-generation standard, 802.11n, competition with telecoms incumbents that was involved in the bidding in Phila- which is much faster, or for Wi-Fi’s long- have been passed in over a dozen states. delphia and San Francisco. If EarthLink range big brother, a much-hyped technol- One exception is Texas, where a grass- cannot meet the specications set by the ogy called WiMax? Waiting a year or two roots movement succeeded in scuttling a city and assessed by independent audi- might make it possible to build faster net- vote on such a bill, which had been spon- tors, the network will not be built. It gives works over greater areas at lower cost. sored by the local incumbent, SBC (since us a chance to see if what we ask for is re- In fact, 802.11n is designed to perform renamed AT&T). Michael Dell, the foun- alistic, or if we need to change some of the best indoors, while WiMax has already der of the world’s biggest PC-maker, parameters, says Ms Ne. And if existing been factored into most municipal wire- based in Round Rock, Texas, helped to un- Wi-Fi networks are disrupted, citizens in less planswhere it will be used to pro- dermine the bill when he pointed out to the test area will know whom to blame. vide backhaul connections to the mesh. state legislators that more broadband Mayor Newsom’s utopian vision of EarthLink, for example, will use Canopy, might sell more computers, and thus free wireless for all quickly ran up against Motorola’s WiMax-like technology, for bring more jobs and tax revenues to the the snag that all such giveaways require: this purpose in Philadelphia and in four state. To avoid such political wrangling, there’s a price to pay at the end of the day. other cities. And dedicated Canopy links many cities are now taking the approach Even with the decision to charge some us- will also, says Ms Ne, be used to connect of awarding contracts to rms that build ers for access, not all cities will nd that several hundred large buildings, which the networks at their own expense, pay their plans for citywide Wi-Fi networks will not therefore rely on the Wi-Fi mesh. taxes or franchise fees, and operate auton- turn out as expected. The real measure of Metro Wi-Fi is going to create the base omously, in return for special rights to municipal wireless networks will not be and the excuse for WiMax, says Tom Hul- city-owned facilities such as utility poles, in places such as Tempe, where they are sebosch of Motorola’s Canopy division. towers, building tops and electricity. expected to work, but in bigger cities, Municipal Wi-Fi must also contend All of this means that Philadelphia, where success is far from certain. Whether with political interference. A number of San Francisco, Minneapolis, Portland, service providers will be able to meet the reports nanced directly or indirectly by Chicago and many other cities are partici- required technical standards and still incumbent telecoms rms such as Veri- pants in a great experiment. Building a make a prot will soon become clear. 7 The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006 Case history 15 Not just a ash in the pan

Storage technology: Flash-memory chips are encroaching on markets previously dominated by hard disks, recordable DVDs and magnetic tape. Will ash displace all other storage technologies?

HEN Apple launched the iPod advent of the rst camcorders able to gen- Wnano, the slimmest incarnation to erate recordable DVDs. Every storage date of its prized music player, last Sep- technology, it seems, is threatened with tember, it attracted plenty of attention. replacement by ash. While consumers swooned over its sleek Admittedly, the Sanyo camera records design, analysts were more likely to hail it only about 20 minutes of high-denition as a turning point for the storage indus- video on to a one gigabyte ash card. But try. Whereas the original iPod used a rela- as such cards shoot up in capacity and tively bulky, power-hungry hard-disk tumble in price, the gap with other stor- drive to store music, the iPod nano in- age media will narrow. And, as the iPod stead relies on small, silent and sturdy nano demonstrates, capacity is not control gate.) Initially, the oating gate ash memory chips, which retain data everything: an iPod nano with four giga- does not interfere with the working of even when the power is switched o. It is bytes of ash storage sells for around the transistor. But applying a suitable vol- a vivid illustration of the way in which $250, just $50 less than a traditional tage across the oxide layer causes elec- ash memory is marching into markets iPod based around a 30-gigabyte hard trons to tunnel through it and become previously dominated by other storage disk. Flash-based products may have less trapped on the oating gate, where they technologies: not just hard disks in music storage capacity at a given price point, but are stuck even if the power is discon- players, but photographic lm in cameras they are smaller, sleeker, more robust and nected. If there are enough electrons on and magnetic tape in camcorders. require less battery power than devices the oating gate, it starts to interfere with Flash is everywhere. Digital cameras based on mechanical storage technol- the working of the transistor, so that a use plug-in ash cards to store photos. ogies, which boosts their appeal. voltage applied to the control gate no lon- Flash-based memory sticks, or keychain ger controls the ow of current through drives, have dethroned oppy disks as Flashback the transistor. Whether current ows the easiest way to carry data around. Mo- The origins of ash memory go back to through the transistor or not can be de- bile phones and handheld computers use 1967, when Simon Sze and Dawon tected using external circuitry. ash memory to store software, docu- Kahng, two researchers working at Bell The modied transistor can thus serve ments, music tracks and photographs. Labs in New Jersey, devised a new type as a memory cell. When no electrons are Then there is all the ash you don’t see, of semiconductor memory device in on the oating gate, and the transistor quietly storing settings and conguration which information could be stored and works normally, it represents a one; and data in cars, games consoles, printers, updated, and which was non-volatile when electrons are trapped on the oat- modems, satellite-positioning systems, which means it retained its contents even ing gate, so that the transistor stops work- and so on. when the power is switched o. This was ing, the cell is deemed to represent a zero. In 2005 global sales of ash chips ex- a novelty, since most semiconductor Crucially, the process can also be re- ceeded $19 billion, says Alan Niebel, a memory was either random-access mem- versed: a suitable voltage across the oxide semiconductor analyst at Web-Feet Re- ory (RAM), the contents of which can be layer applied in the opposite direction search. That is enough to buy roughly 40 changedbut which forgets everything causes the electrons to tunnel back o megabytes of ash for each person on the moment the power goes; or read-only the oating gate, restoring the transistor earth. Such is the demand in consumer memory (ROM), which never forgets, but to its original state and resetting the products that in November Intel and Mi- cannot be reprogrammed. stored value to a one. The cell is therefore cron Technology, two big chipmaking The beauty of the researchers’ design both programmable and non-volatile. rms that are normally competitors, es- lay in its simplicity. It required just a mi- Dr Sze, who now works at the Na- tablished a $5 billion joint-venture, called nor modication to a eld-eect transis- tional Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, IM Flash Technologies. tor, the basic building block of most recalls the initial reaction to this break- Meanwhile, ash continues to expand microchips. Transistors use a small vol- through. My boss said ‘Simon, tell me, its inuence. Japanese camcorder-makers tage, applied to the gate of the transis- what use can you think of for this de- have been oering ash support (which tor, to control the ow of a large current. vice?’ I could not think of anything. As a allows video to be recorded directly to The zeroes and ones of digital informa- result, he was told to bury the result in an ash cards) for several years and, at the tion that whizz around inside a computer obscure journal, lest this useless inven- Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas correspond to whether individual tran- tion draw the ridicule of his peers. Float- in January, Sanyo previewed what it sistors are switched on or o. ing-gate memory did eventually nd its claims is the rst camcorder able to record The researchers’ innovation was to way into production, but since it was ex- high-denition video to a ash-memory add a second gate to the middle of the pensive, it tended to be used in niche card. It goes on sale this month, just two transistor, called a oating gate because applications such as military equipment years after the rst hard-disk-based cam- it is insulated by a thin oxide layer. (The and the very earliest mobile phones, corder appeared and four years after the transistor’s original gate is known as the which were hardly mass-market items. 1 16 Case history The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006 Flash will increasingly compete with hard disks to become the preferred storage technology in laptops. Expect a showdown in the next few years.

2 Then in 1980, Fujio Masuoka, a re- rious degrees. Two binary digits (bits) of tall. As in the real world, when property searcher at Toshiba, led a patent for a information can then be stored in a single gets expensive, engineers build upwards. novel variation on oating-gate memory. cell, for example, depending on whether As such tricks improve the storage His new invention was dubbed ash it is not working (0,0), 33% working (0,1), density and reduce the cost of ash mem- memory, because it allowed entire sec- 66% working (1,0) or fully working (1,1). ory, it will increasingly compete with tions of memory to be erased quickly and Another feat of ash engineering has hard disks to become the preferred stor- easily, by applying a voltage to a single been to reduce the density of ash storage technology in laptop computers; a wire connected to a group of cells. Dr Ma- age by stacking several chips on top of showdown seems likely in the next few suoka’s design was a compromise be- each other. This involves etching away years. Laptops are portable devices, so tween exibility and cost. Being able to the underside of the chips until they are any technology that can reduce volume erase each memory cell individually almost as thin and as exible as paper, and weight and increase battery life has made ordinary oating-gate memory bonding them together and then con- obvious appeal. At the same time, how- complex, power-hungry and expensive. necting them up via electrodes that pro- ever, as fully edged computers running Dr Masuoka’s design was less exible, ject slightly out of the edge of the complex operating systems, laptops re- since it required entire groups of cells to resulting sandwich (see picture on next quire tens of gigabytes of storage. be erased together, but it was far cheaper. page). This trick is particularly favoured As with oating-gate memory, Dr Ma- by makers of NOR ash, the kind used in Battling for the laptop suoka’s idea was not initially appreciated mobile phones, where space is at a pre- That is why hard disks are the dominant by his superiors. My daily work was to mium. Most stacked-chip ash products form of storage in laptops. But last May, develop a one-megabit RAM, he says. involve just two chips, though some pro- Samsung, a South Korean electronics At home, after working hours, I worked ducers make stacks up to ve or six chips giant, demonstrated a 16 gigabyte NAND to develop ash memory. In retrospect, ash drive. (Samsung is by far the largest however, his invention was a classic case producer of NAND ash, with more than of a well-prepared mind seeing an oppor- Memories are made of this 50% of the market.) The prototype drive tunity where others had not even real- How flash memory works contained 16 one-gigabyte ash chips ised there was a problem. Dr Masuoka GATE packed into a standard hard-disk casing, happened to have a good understanding which can slot into any computer. Being of the separate elds of computer mem- based on ash, however, it weighs half as ory and magnetic-storage systems. His in- SOURCE DRAIN much as an equivalent hard disk and uses vention oered a useful compromise: a much less power. Samsung has since an- new means of storing and accessing data nounced a two-gigabyte ash chip, les that was faster and more resilient A: Transistors exploit the properties of which will go into mass production later than a hard disk, even if it could not com- semiconducting materials so that a small voltage, this year. applied to the gate, can be used to control the flow pete with traditional memory (RAM) on of a large current between the source and drain. The main drawback with such ash speed or programming exibility. This is what an ordinary transistor looks like. drives, when they reach the market, will By 1986 Toshiba was producing the be their high cost. The price per gigabyte rst batches of test chips, and two years CONTROL GATE of ash storage is roughly 100 times that later Intel licensed the technology and FLOATING GATE of hard-disk storage. The cost of a given began its own production. In 1987 Dr Ma- amount of ash storage is falling all the suoka invented another type of ash 1 time, of course, but the same is true of memory that could be produced more hard disks. Jim Handy, an analyst at Sem- cheaply and in denser arrays. That va- B: In a flash-memory cell, a second gate—called a ico Research, a consultancy, estimates riety is now called NAND ash, to distin- floating gate, because it is insulated by a thin oxide that it would cost around $4,000 to buy layer—is added to the middle of the transistor. guish it from the earlier type, known as Initially, the floating gate does not interfere with enough ash memory to replace an aver- NOR ash. (NOR and NAND are the the working of the transistor. In this state, the cell age laptop hard diska gure that has re- names of simple circuits that perform is deemed to represent a “one”. mained roughly constant for the past ve logical operations on binary information; years as laptops’ storage requirements in the context of ash memory, they de- ++++ have grown. In other words, because Electrons scribe the particular way in which the trapped on both technologies continue to evolve, the memory cells are interconnected. ) floating gate – – – – price-performance gap between ash In the two decades since the rst ash and hard disks is narrowing slowly, if at chips appeared, thousands of engineers 0 all (see chart on next page). have applied themselves to making the However, says Mr Handy, the price technology smaller, cheaper and better. C: Applying a large voltage across the oxide layer per gigabyte does not give the complete Some of their advances are minor mir- causes electrons to tunnel through it and become picture. Hard disks have a xed cost, inde- trapped on the floating gate, where they remain acles of ingenuity, such as the develop- even if the power is disconnected. This interferes pendent of capacity, of around $100 for ment of multi-level ash-memory cells. with the working of the transistor. In this state, the their internal mechanical parts. Flash has These work by varying the quantity of cell is deemed to represent a “zero”. The state of no such xed cost. So at any given point the cell can be read using external circuitry to test electrons trapped on the oating gate, so whether the transistor is working or not. Applying a there exists a range of storage capacities that rather than preventing the transistor large voltage in the opposite direction removes the where ash, despite being much more ex- from working altogether, they disable its electrons from the floating gate. pensive per gigabyte, can compete with ability to control the ow of current to va- Sources: Intel; The Economist hard disks on price. Today, ash is com- 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006 Case history 17 Universal memory, the holy grail of storage, would combine the speed of RAM with the non-volatility of ash and the low cost of hard disks.

Although ash seems unlikely to re- cessor chips every 18 months. Sooner or The chips are down place hard disks just yet, it could soon later, this sort of exponential trend, Price per gigabyte, $ start to inltrate laptops in a more gradual which depends on shrinking each gen- Flash memory 2.5 inch HDD way. Last year Microsoft and Intel dem- eration of transistors, is going to run into 1.0 inch HDD* 3.5 inch HDD onstrated dierent ways to combine ash fundamental manufacturing limits. What 1.8 inch HDD memory with hard-disk drives. In both new storage technology will step in then? 1,000 cases the ash serves as a temporary stor- The eld is wide open. Mr Niebel of log age for frequently used data, reducing the Web-Feet Research says he keeps track of FORECAST scale 100 need to access the disk. This speeds up more than 40 pretenders to the ash the rate at which data can be retrieved, throne. Many of them have yet to pro- enables laptops to wake up more quickly gress beyond laboratory prototypes. But 10 from sleep and extends battery life. one or two have made the leap to fabrica- Not everyone is convinced, though. tion. Magnetic RAM (MRAM) and Ferro- 1 Mr Handy points out that neat demos electric RAM (FRAM) are, as their names usually take a couple of years at least to indicate, variations of the RAM used in 0.1 turn into real products. And in that time, today’s computers. These technologies 2003 04 05 06 07 08 hard disks will have improved further as combine the speed and programming Source: Web-Feet Research *Hard-disk drive well. Indeed, ash has traditionally done exibility of RAM with the low power best against storage media that have consumption and non-volatility of ash. 2 petitive for capacities of four gigabytes or more or less reached their technological But to store data, they rely on special ma- lesshence its appearance in the iPod limits, such as photographic lm, oppy terials that respond to magnetic or elec- nano, which comes in two-gigabyte and disks and CDs. Hard-disk rms, however, tric elds, which makes their production four-gigabyte versions. Above about 20 continue to innovate at great speed, and trickier. As a result, prototype chips with gigabytes, hard disks win hands down. are by some measures managing to push more than a megabyte of capacity have In between is a battle zone where the down the cost per gigabyte of storage begun to appear only in the past couple two technologies compete. And as the even faster than ash. Indeed, hard disks of years, and will be relegated to special- price per gigabyte of both technologies have lately been ghting back: both Sam- ist markets until they can compete on cost falls, the ght shifts to ever higher capaci- sung and Nokia have launched mobile and capacity with other technologies. ties. In theory, it is just a matter of time phones that contain tiny hard disks to A radically dierent approach to stor- before ash drives become competitive store music, for example. And the ex- ing data is the Ovonic Unied Memory in the 50-100 gigabyte range of today’s pected leap in demand for storage capac- (OUM), pioneered by Stan Ovshinsky, a laptop hard-disk capacities. Yet each new ity, as phones double as TVs and video highly successful and eclectic serial in- operating system requires more storage cameras, plays to hard disks’ strengths. ventor. OUM is based on so-called chal- capacity than the last. In January Micro- cogenide materials, the atomic structure soft signalled that laptops would need The quest for the universal memory of which can be changed reversibly from around 80 gigabytes of disk storage to run This is all a healthy reminder that no stor- a well ordered crystalline state to a disor- the next version of its Windows operat- age technology can aord to rest on its dered, amorphous state by applying a ing system, called Vista. laurels. Indeed, the greatest threat to ash burst of electrical current. These two To further complicate matters, ash may come from its own success. Flash states can then be used to represent has the disadvantage that its memory chips are, by most estimates, doubling in zeroes and ones. The technology is faster cells eventually wear outthough the capacity roughly every year, outdoing than ash, has a lifetime of trillions of cy- cells in modern ash chips can typically even Moore’s law, which predicts a dou- cles, and its performance increases as the be reprogrammed around 1m times be- bling of the number of transistors on pro- size of the memory cells is reduced (since fore this happens. This is not a problem in less energy is required to change the state a devices that stores largely static les of a smaller cell). Mr Ovshinsky’s rm, that are read but seldom modied (such Ovonyx, has already made prototype as music tracks on an iPod). But using chips in conjunction with STMicroelec- ash memory in place of a hard disk to tronics, a big chipmaking rm, and the re- store running software, such as an operat- sults are said to be very promising. ing system, is a dierent matter, since in- OUM is just one of the candidates in formation is constantly being modied the race to create a universal memory, and updated. To get around this draw- the holy grail of the storage industry, back, ash-memory controllers keep which would combine the speed of RAM track of how often particular groups of with the non-volatility of ash and the cells have been modied, and move data low cost and high storage-density of hard to dierent parts of the chip to maximise disks. Ed Doller, chief technology ocer its lifespan. And if a fault is detected in a at Intel’s ash-memory division, says the group of cells, that group can be tagged so company is following the progress of that it is no longer used. It is worth OUM technology closely. Although it is remembering, however, that hard disks, not in a position to threaten ash in the particularly those in laptops, also have next couple of years, he says, beyond limited lifespans. These chips are stacked in your favour 2010, it has legs. 7 18 Reports The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006

Reinventing the internet

proposals from the engineering research community, which are due this month. Networking: New initiatives aim The aim of these schemes is to prompt to overhaul the internet. But academic engineers to think afresh for the longer term. The challenging question is: how can a clean slate redesign can we conceive a vision for what a global ever be implemented? communications network will look like in ten or 15 years? To do that, you have to F A planet-wide data network, akin to free yourself from what the world looks Ithe internet, were built on Mars, what like now, says David Clark of the Massa- would it look like? That might sound like a chusetts Institute of Technology, who silly question, but it raises an important helped to design the internet, and now is point. The design of computer networks trying to x it.The internet is so obvious is constrained by the need to be compat- that it is hard to contemplate what a non- ible with the internet and other systems internet would look like, he says. that have grown up over the past four decades. What if network designers could Visions of the future start again with a clean slate, unencum- That said, it seems reasonable to assume bered by today’s messy reality? that the number of devices on the net- Ever since the internet’s inception in work will continue to multiply in new 1969 engineers have tweaked it in a piece- and unforeseen ways. So researchers are meal fashion. That the system has scaled starting from the assumption that com- up well enough to handle almost 1 billion munications chips and sensors will even- users and blazingly fast bre-optic links is tually be embedded in almost everything, for example) might be shunted aside for nothing short of amazing. But as the in- from furniture to cereal boxeshundreds screening, just as security guards in oce ternet has grown, so too have problems of billions of such devices, suggested buildings wave through sta but look such as spam, viruses and denial of ser- one group of engineers in a working pa- more closely at visitors. Particularly du- vice attacks that can cripple large web- per last year. And while today’s internet bious packets might then be blocked, thus sitesnot to mention the challenge of trac is generally initiated by hu- making various kinds of online wrong- accommodating all kinds of new devices, mansas they send e-mails, click on web doing more dicult. The whole system from cars to mobile phones to wireless links, or download music tracksin fu- would be based on a web of trust, in sensors. We’ve pretty much exhausted ture, the vast majority of trac may be which trac ows freely between devices the tweaks we can do, says Tom Ander- machine to machine communications: that trust each other, but is closely scruti- son of the University of Washington. things irting with other things. To further nised between those that do not. The ba- As a result, a handful of the internet’s complicate matters, these things will sic, fundamental change is that packet- original pioneers, along with a gaggle of probably be connected wirelessly, and forwarding decisions are based on levels young Turks, are now putting their heads will move around. of trust between sender and receiver, as together to consider how to x the net- Given all these demands, what sort of well as traditional things like optimal work’s shortcomingsnot by ddling new ideas have the engineers come up path, says John Wroclawski of the USC with a few things here or there, but by with? It is still early days, of course, and a Information Sciences Institute, one of the starting again from scratch. To this end, number of veteran internet engineers are proposal’s developers. America’s National Science Foundation holding back their own proposals in order Another idea is a new approach to ad- (NSF) has launched two initiatives. The to encourage the emergence of a younger dressing, called internet indirection in- rst, Global Environment for Networking generation, who might otherwise feel frastructure, proposed by Ion Stoica of Innovations (GENI), is a project to build that the initiative was being dominated the University of California, in Berkeley. It an advanced test-bed network for piloting by the old boys’ network, as it were. Still, a would overlay an additional addressing new protocols and applications. In Janu- few proposals have already emerged. system on top of the internet-protocol ary the project’s leaders produced their One is trust-modulated transpa- numbers now used to identify devices on conceptual design plan, and they must rency. The idea is to enable the network’s the internet. This would make it easier to now lobby for the money to implement it. trac-routing infrastructure to judge the support mobile devices, and would also The second project, Future Internet De- trustworthiness of packets of data as they allow for multicasting of data to many sign (FIND), will examine how best to pass by. Packets deemed trustworthy devices at once, enabling the ecient dis- equip the internet for the needs of the fu- would be delivered normally, but du- tribution of audio, video and software. ture. In December, the NSF asked for FIND bious packets (from unfamiliar senders, But how could a new addressing sys-1 The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006 Reports 19

boxes that direct internet trac, would be replaced with more exible devices, able to learn new communications protocols when needed. Devices at the edge of the network could then dynamically repro- gram all the routers along the network path between them to use whatever new protocol they wanted. The routers would be able to partition themselves internally, so that other users of the network would not be aected. This approach has the advantage that new protocols would then emerge, tailored to applications such as video streaming, le sharing, and new things that have yet to be imagined. The drawback, however, is that routers are able to handle trac quickly because they are single-minded. Adding complexity to the internet’s core infrastructure might end up increasing versatility at the expense of performancea trade-o not all users would be prepared to make.

Soul of a new network The idea of metanets also provides an answer to the question of how to deploy a new clean-slate internet. Metanets would, in eect, allow multiple internets to run in parallel. There could then be competition between dierent protocols; and if one of the metanet protocols 2 tem be tested? Dr Anderson and others sion. Back in the 1970s, rather than pre- turned out to be much more secure, for in- have set up PlanetLab, a worldwide ex- judging the kinds of uses to which the stance, then security-sensitive users perimental overlay network that sits on internet might be put and favouring some would have a reason to adopt it. Perhaps top of the internet and acts as a testbed for at the expense of others, its designers the clean-slate approach is not quite as es- new networking software. Using Planet- opted to make it as simple as possible. oteric and academic as it seems. Lab, researchers can quickly establish a This open approach is what has made the Before a Darwinian internet of com- global network of machines in order to internet such a vibrant platform for inno- peting metanets can emerge, however, test a new approach to packet routing, say, vation. New applications, such as the engineers must dream up new ideas and or content distribution. PlanetLab allows web, peer-to-peer le sharing and in- devise new protocols, which will take many such prototype networks to operate ternet telephony, were later able to time. And as well as confronting technical at once, without interfering with each emerge even though they were undreamt hurdles, the engineers vying to redesign other. One of these virtualised net- of back in the 1970s. None of these are ex- the internet will undoubtedly nd them- works is in fact a recreation of the internet plicitly provided for by the internet’s un- selves caught up in social, political and itself, which can be used to test modica- derlying design, but neither does it economic arguments. That is because tions to the internet protocol. preclude them. while the internet’s existing architecture Yet another proposed feature of a The internet itself stays resolutely fosters innovation and promotes free clean-slate internet comes from Dr Clark, dumb, and blindly passes packets of data speech, for example, it also allows spam who suggests adding diagnostic systems between devices on the edges of the net- and illegal music downloads to ourish. so that users can work out what has gone work, which can then be upgraded to do In reconsidering the technological under- wrong when the internet fails to perform new things. This non-discriminatory ap- pinnings of the network, the engineers as expected. Then, when a videoconfe- proach is known as the end-to-end prin- will inherently be making choices with rence call failed to connect smoothly, for ciple, and it is one of the most cherished far wider implications. example, it would be possible to deter- aspects of the internet’s design. The end- When ever you design an architec- mine whether the fault lay with the in- to-end principle has promoted innova- ture like this, you’re not just designing a ternet service provider or with poorly tion at the edges of the network, but it has technical solution, but also designing an congured equipment. But the network it- necessarily prevented innovation at its industry structure, says Dr Clark. It may self would have to collect and share per- core. One possible remedy, which would well transpire that the greatest impedi- formance measures, something today’s allow diversity and innovation to ourish ment to upgrading the internet will turn dumb network cannot do. within the core of the internet, is the con- out to be political disagreements over Today’s network is dumb for a reason, cept of active networks or metanets. how it should work, rather than the tech- however: it was a deliberate design deci- The idea is that today’s routers, the nical diculty of bringing it about. 7 20 Reports The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006

Pulling the plug on standby power

number of household appliances that are some cases. That same year, a similar never fully switched o, but spend most study in France found that standby power Energy: Billions of devices of the time in a standby mode, ready to accounted for 7% of total residential con- sitting idle in standby mode spring into action when needed. The consumption. Further studies have since venience of being able to switch on your come to similar conclusions in other de- waste vast amounts of energy. television from the sofa using a remote veloped countries, including the Nether- What can be done about it? control, in short, has a cost, since some cir- lands, Australia and Japan. Some cuits in the television must remain active, estimates put the proportion of consump- TRANGE though it seems, a typical watching for signals from the remote con- tion due to standby power as high as 13%. S microwave oven consumes more elec- trol. Added up on a nationwide or global J.P. Ross, who took part in the 2000 tricity powering its digital clock than it scale, Dr Meier realised, the wasted en- study while a graduate student at the Uni- does heating food. For while heating food ergy must be staggering. We’re moving versity of California in Berkeley, was par- requires more than 100 times as much from an electromechanical world that’s ticularly surprised by the variation in power as running the clock, most micro- on and o to an electronic world that’s standby-power consumption between wave ovens stand idlein standby never o, he says. similar devices (see chart). One televi- modemore than 99% of the time. And He and his colleagues at LbnLset out to sion that I looked at had a minuscule they are not alone: many other devices, quantify the scale of the problem. In 1998 amount, and one had a high standby such as televisions, DVD players, stereos they released an initial study which esti- load, he says. This shows, he says, that and computers also spend much of their mated that standby power accounted for you can still have the functionality with- lives in standby mode, collectively con- approximately 5% of total residential elec- out the electricity loss. The problem, as suming a huge amount of energy. Moves tricity consumption in America, adding Dr Meier noted way back in 1998, is that are being made around the world to re- up to more than $3 billion in annual en- there is very little incentive for manufac- duce this unnecessary power consump- ergy costs. According to America’s turers to make devices with low standby- tion, called standby power. Department of Energy, national residen- power consumption. And even when As in many other areas of environ- tial electricity consumption in 2004 was they do, there is no easy way for consum- mental policy, the state of California is 1.29 billion megawatt hours (MWh)5% ers to distinguish between power-hungry leading the way. On January 1st the Cali- of which is 64m MWh. The wasted en- devices and more abstemious ones. fornia Energy Commission introduced ergy, in other words, is equivalent to the Dr Meier and other researchers argue mandatory standby requirements for va- output of 18 typical power stations. that there is no technical reason why all rious electronic devicesthe rst such This gure, however, was based on es- electronic devices cannot use the more ef- obligatory regulations in the world. This timates. So Dr Meier and his team went cient electrical designs with lower is due in no small part to the eorts of on to measure standby-power consump- standby-power lossesand thus allow Alan Meier, a sta scientist at the Law- tion directly, in an empirical study. Their consumers to minimise consumption rence Berkeley National Laboratory results, published in 2000, revealed that while maintaining convenience. The (LBNL) in Berkeley, California. In the standby power accounted for as much as worst oenders consume more than 20 1990s he noticed a proliferation in the 10% of household power-consumption in watts in standby mode. But nearly all1 The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006 Reports 21

It is now illegal in California to sell a television that consumes over three watts in standby mode.

2 standby functions, Dr Meier insists, can surprise to those in the industry. be performed with a power consumption Stand by me In late 2004 the California Energy on standby of one watt or less. Using the Standby-power use ranges of home appliances Commission went even further by impos- most ecient designs could reduce aver- 1999, watts ing limits on standby power-consump- age household standby-power consump- Minimum Average Maximum tion for various consumer-electronic tion by 72%, he calculates. Applying this devices, including DVD players, external reduction across the developed nations of 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 power adapters and stereos. This legisla- the OECD would reduce carbon-dioxide Satellite decoder tion took eect in January, so that it is now emissions by nearly 0.5%equivalent to Cable set-top box illegal in California to sell a television or removing more than 18m cars from Euro- Compact audio DVD player that consumes more than pean roads, he notes. system three watts in standby mode. Power Video recorder adapters will be limited to a standby con- Sticks and carrots Television sumption of 0.75W from next year, falling So what can be done about the electronic Inkjet printer to 0.5W from January 2008. And new lim- vampires that are needlessly consuming its will apply to stereos and set-top boxes. DVD player so much power? Alas, there is little scope Not everyone approves. The Con- for reducing the ineciency of existing Microwave oven sumer Electronics Association (CEA), an Rechargeable household appliances, such as micro- power tool American industry body, argues that the wave ovensother than switching them Video-game console voluntary Energy Star scheme was work- o at the mains or unplugging them ing well enough already. Douglas John- Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory when not in use, of course. Modifying son, the CEA’s senior policy director, says them to reduce their power consumption Alan Meier’s one-watt standard is more is, in most cases, impractical. programme, the European Union’s codes of a sound bite than a reasonable policy A growing proportion of new house- of conduct agreed with electronics manu- when it comes to the electronics indus- hold devices, however, contain newer, facturers, and the standards laid down by try. Imposing mandatory regulation will more ecient power supplies. Unlike old- the Australian Greenhouse Oce. Of stie innovation and limit consumer fashioned, chunky power supplies, these, by far the best known is the Energy choice, he warns. Industry-led standards which contain iron cores surrounded by Star scheme, which began in America in are a much better approach for focusing windings of copper wire, these new 1992 and has since expanded to many on energy-related eciency than stan- power supplies use switch mode tech- other countries. Devices that meet par- dards set by government, he says. Last nology to convert mains electricity to the ticular standards for energy eciency are month the CEA succeeded in having low voltages used to power small devices. allowed to display a special logo. In 2005 some of the new rules slightly delayed. As well as being far more ecient, this the scheme was extended to external But if California’s new mandatory can, with the addition of extra circuitry, power adapters, which can earn Energy rules are a success, they could prompt reduce consumption to a fraction of a Star approval if they consume less than other regulators to follow suit. In Austra- watt in both standby mode and no load 0.75W in no load mode. lia, for example, regulators have always mode (when a power supply is plugged In 1999 the International Energy left open the option of applying manda- in, but nothing is attached to it). Agency, based in Paris, adopted Dr tory standards to devices that consume Power Integrations, based in San Jose, Meier’s proposed one-watt standard as excessive amounts of standby power. California, provides components for a target for standby consumption. In 2000 Reducing unnecessary power con- switch-mode power supplies to equip- Australia became the only country to sumption is not just a matter for device- ment-makers including Apple, Dell, adopt this standard nationally, in the makers and regulators, however. Con- Motorola, Samsung and Sony. Its presi- form of a voluntary scheme that began in sumers can do their bit too, by unplugging dent, Balu Balakrishnan, says his rm’s 2002. The aim is for most new products to infrequently used devices or switching components can be found in more than 1 meet the one-watt standard by 2012. them o at the mains; looking for energy- billion devices worldwide. But, he says, In addition to these various voluntary eciency logos and modern, ecient switch-mode devices made by his rm schemes, there have been some manda- power supplies when buying new equip- and its rivals account for only 20% of the tory measures. Perhaps surprisingly, one ment; and unplugging chargers and estimated 4 billion power supplies sold of them was introduced by President power supplies when they are not in use. worldwide each year. The vast majority George Bush, as a result of the California Even these simple measures are better are still of the old, inecient kind, which energy crisis of 2001. That year, Mr Bush than just standing idly by. 7 are cheaper. Equipment-makers do not issued Executive Order 13221, which have any incentive to use more ecient states that every government agency, components, after all, since the cost (in when it purchases commercially avail- higher power consumption) is borne by able, o-the-shelf products that use exter- their customers. nal standby power devices, or that That is why regulators around the contain an internal standby power func- world have started to introduce rules de- tion, shall purchase products that use no signed to encourage manufacturers to more than one watt in their standby make their products less power-hungry. power consuming mode. Given that Mr Most of these rules are voluntary: exam- Bush is not renowned for his environ- ples include the international Energy Star mental credentials, this came as quite a 22 Brain scan The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006 Power to the people

subscribers are telephone ladies who provide access to telephony in more than Iqbal Quadir pioneered wider 50,000 rural villages, with a total popula- access to mobile phones in tion of 80m people. Despite accounting Bangladesh. Can he do the same for a small proportion of the mobile for electricity and clean water? phones in circulation, these village phones account for one-third of the traf- S A young boy in rural Bangladesh in c on the network, since they are shared A1971, Iqbal Quadir walked ten miles between a large number of users. By to collect some medicine for a sibling making telephony widely available, says who was unwell. But when he arrived at Mr Quadir, GrameenPhone has in- his destination, the medicine man was creased the country’s GDP by a far greater not there, so he had to walk home empty- amount than repeated infusions of for- handed, having wasted an entire day. eign aid. Mobile phones promote econ- Many years later, having moved to Amer- omic activity, prevent wasted journeys, ica and become an investment banker, make it easier to look for work, and Mr Quadir was reminded of this episode widen access to markets. GrameenPhone when the network at his New York oce is not a charity, but a protable venture: it stopped working. Without communica- made net prots of $101m in 2004. Its ap- tions, he realised, people are far less pro- proach is now being replicated in other ductive, whether in a modern oce or a countries in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, rural village; a simple telephone call including Uganda and Rwanda. could have prevented him from making GrameenPhone’s success is a striking that unnecessary round trip all those endorsement of Mr Quadir’s unusual ap- years earlier. As he waited for the e-mail proach to promoting economic develop- to start owing again, Mr Quadir was ment. The problem with the traditional seized by the idea that a telephone is a top-down approach of supplying devel- weapon against poverty. He decided to opmental aid to governments, he com- dedicate himself to making telephones plains, is that it widens the gap between more widely available to the poor in his politicians and the people, by increasing homeland. I didn’t know anything the power of central authorities. The key about telecoms, he says. But maybe to economic progress in Bangladesh does that was helpful. not lie in foreign aid, but in the hands and It was only after having many fruitless brains of its masses, he says. We need meetings with rms and policymakers to nd technologies that can activate that Mr Quadir nally hit upon the right those hands and brains for productive approach. He was inspired by Grameen purposes. Using technology to em- Bank, a Bangladeshi organisation well power citizens from below, as mobile known for supplying microcredit, or phones do, is a far better way to promote small loans, mainly to the rural poor. In a development, says Mr Quadir: Top- typical example, a woman borrows down approaches do not work. The enough money to buy a cow, and then re- bottleneck is at the top of the bottle. pays the loan using the prots that result from selling its milk. The loan is repaid, Between the geek and the meek the woman earns an income from the There are historical precedents for this cow, and her neighbours can buy milk. bottom-up approach, notes Mr Quadir, Mr Quadir looked at this model and real- who lectured in technology and econ- ised that a cell phone could be a cow. omic development at Harvard Univer- He formed a consortium with Grameen sity’s Kennedy School of Government for Bank and Telenor, a Norwegian mobile four years from 2001 and has recently operator that provided the required tele- moved to the Massachusetts Institute of coms expertise. He was then able to se- Technology, where he is establishing a cure loans from development banks and new programme in development entre- aid agencies, and won a licence from the preneurship. In medieval Europe, innova- Bangladeshi government. Grameen- tions such as spectacles, water wheels, Phone launched its service in March 1997, clocks and printing had the eect of em- and today has more than 6m subscribers, powering people from below and stimu- making it the country’s largest telecoms lating economic development, often in operator. Bangladesh now has six mobile the face of opposition from church and operators and more than 9m subscribers state. Similarly, the industrial revolution in what has become a booming market. was the result of entrepreneurial, bot- Around 200,000 of GrameenPhone’s tom-up activity, not government plan- 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly March 11th 2006 Brain scan 23 The aim of his new venture is to establish small, neighbourhood power plants in Bangladesh.

2 ning. Having proven the eectiveness of The next step is to mass produce the the eect of making price information his approach with GrameenPhone, Mr generators so that the scheme can be more transparent and widely available. Quadir is now working to apply the same launched commercially. Mr Quadir says The system is designed to be as simple as combination of technology and bot- he hopes to convince a manufacturing possible: it will not handle transactions, tom-up entrepreneurship in other areas, company to license Mr Kamen’s design but will simply put buyers and sellers in starting with the supply of electricity. I and set up a factory in Bangladesh to contact with each other via mobile see myself as an entrepreneur between build the generators. This would have phone. It will be possible to access the the geek and the meek, he says. several advantages over simply import- system using just text messages. Elec- The aim of his new venture, Emer- ing the technology (as happened with the tronic commerce could prove to have gence Energy, is to establish small, neigh- mobile phones): it would create jobs, even greater appeal in developing coun- bourhood power plants in Bangladesh avoid import taris that would otherwise tries, where the transport infrastructure is that can provide electricity to a handful make the generators less aordable, and often poor, than in developed ones. of homes, shops and businesses. This the resulting transfer of technology and Trying to change things from the time he has teamed up with Dean skills would ensure that the machines ground up is more eective than lobby- Kamen, an American inventor best could be xed by locals, rather than having authorities, insists Mr Quadir. With- known for creating the Segway electric ing to rely on foreign technicians. out necessarily introducing scooter. During 2005 they conducted a To nance the purchase of the genera- enlightenment or new arguments, tech- six-month trial in two rural villages in tors by entrepreneurs, Mr Quadir is work- nology can quietly initiate novel ways of Bangladesh of prototype generators, ing with BRAC, another microcredit making things or trading them, poten- created by Mr Kamen, based on a design lender. The generators will cost several tially redistributing economic and politi- called a Stirling engine. thousand dollars, far more than a mobile cal clout, he says. Just as economists The generators can be powered by phone. But microloans are already being invoke the invisible hand of the mar- biogas extracted from cow manure. The used to nance larger purchases, such as ket, he likes to speak of a technology as idea is that one entrepreneur, funded by a houses, says Mr Quadir, so he is con- an invisible leg that can move an econ- microcredit loan, sets up a business to dent that the microcredit model can be omy from one state to another. turn manure into methane gas and fertil- applied to the new venture. The result, as And even when a government adopts iser; another entrepreneur, also funded entrepreneurs start to install generators in a sensible policy, there is no guarantee it by microcredit, buys the methane to villages, will be to produce electricity, will be implemented. Before the estab- power the generator, and sells the result- fertiliser and jobs. lishment of GrameenPhone, for example, ing electricity. This will, Mr Quadir the Bangladeshi government’s stated pol- hopes, unleash all kinds of economic ac- Bubbling up icy was to promote universal access to tivity. Energy gives you the power to At the same time, Mr Quadir is pursuing telecommunications; but in practice not empower, he says. two other bottom-up initiatives. The rst, much happened. The clear success of The trial was intended as a test, to nd CleanWater, is dedicated to supplying GrameenPhone, however, prompted the out what people would use electricity safe drinking water to Bangladeshi vil- government to issue more mobile for, and whether there was an economi- lages, where arsenic contamination is a licences, which led to today’s thriving cally viable business model. The results grave problem. Rather than relying on aid market. Technology, in short, makes it were promising: the scheme proved to be agencies or governments to install equip- possible to change the facts on the ground technically feasible, there was strong de- ment, Mr Quadir hopes to license a rst, so that government policy can then mand for electrical power, and consum- chemical preparation that can remove ar- follow, says Mr Quadir. Power to the ers were willing to pay for a regular senic from water and make it safe to people, indeed. 7 supply. The main use of electricity was drink. The chemical would then be dis- for lighting, says Mr Quadir; using low- tributed and sold, like salt, via a network Oer to readers power bulbs, each generator, which proof local entrepreneurs; Mr Quadir esti- Reprints of this survey are available at a price of duces one kilowatt of power, was able to mates that buyers would have to spend £2.50 plus postage and packing. light up 20 households or shops. around $3 per person per year on the A minimum order of ve copies is required. This allowed shops to stay open later, chemical to ensure a safe water supply, enabled students to study for longer which is well within reach of most villag- Corporate oer hours, and let people enjoy television ers. Again, this initiative would create Customisation options on corporate orders of and other forms of entertainment. Sur- jobs, provide a wider societal benet, 500 or more are available. Please contact us to discuss your requirements. prisingly, Mr Quadir found that some and give people the means to solve a seri- households already had televisions, ous problem themselves. Send all orders to: powered using car batteries. Such batter- The second initiative, developed by The Rights and Syndication department ies are also used to recharge mobile Mr Quadir’s brother Kamal, is called Cell- 26 Red Lion Square phones. This suggests that the potential Bazaar. The idea is to create an electronic London WC1R 4HQ chicken and egg problem that there marketplace that can be accessed via mo- Tel +44 (0)20 7576 8000 would be no demand for electricity, since bile phonesa phone-based equivalent Fax +44 (0)20 7576 8492 nobody owns any electrical appliances, of newspaper classied advertisements. e-mail: [email protected] will not arise. Access to a regular supply If somebody wants to sell a bicycle, for of electricity should, however, promote example, they can list it in CellBazaar, the wider adoption of electrical devices where it will be visible to potential buy- of all kinds. ers, says Mr Quadir. This will also have