Innovations That Reinvent "The Whee"
THE WASHINGTON POST
Innovations That Reinvent "The Whee"
(Excerpt on Pixim)
February 20, 2003
By: Leslie Walker
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- Today's
inventors are still trying to make yesterday's inventions work, which
means innovation is more about tweaking old breakthroughs than seeking
new ones, Leslie Vadasz, president of Intel Capital, said at a
high-tech forum here this week.
"The next big thing is all the little things that make the big things
work," Vadasz told the 525 executives attending the 13th annual Demo, a
showcase of futuristic products held Monday and Tuesday. "That's the
situation we are in; we are trying to make the Internet work."
As if to bear him out, 61 companies trotted out prototypes that
featured incrementally new ways of doing familiar things, such as
e-mail, instant messaging, digital music and software security. Two
areas that drew the most ideas were methods for helping people manage
e-mail overload and ways to let portable devices and electronic sensors
communicate wirelessly with the Internet.
The geeky audience chuckled at a new wireless network for smart lawn
watering called S.Sense, which relies on sensors stuck in the soil that
chatter among themselves in the grass. They watched intently as a New
York inventor showed a "skin print" software program for electronically
identifying people through ordinary photographs of their skin. And they
oohed and ahhed over the latest Internet music player, a box with a
touch-screen menu that lets you play digital music by rubbing your
finger over thumbnail images of album covers.
Most of the exhibitors were start-ups, and they brought more business
productivity tools than consumer gadgets. Many let attendees use their
products during the event, even though most of the new stuff won't go
on sale for months.
A California start-up called Vivato hung a few of its new antenna
devices (costing nearly $9,000 apiece) outside the hotel to create a
super-high-powered wireless network that attendees used to surf the
Internet and do their e-mail. Another start-up, Introplus.com, let
conference-goers meet fellow attendees via e-mail by filling out a form
and submitting it to an electronic matchmaker.
More interesting was the bake-off between spam-fighting tools. In tests
conducted on thousands of messages by a consultant for Network World
magazine, MailFrontier's new corporate tool for blocking junk e-mail
bested a similar product from Cloudmark. MailFrontier's software
blocked 85 percent of junk e-mail and falsely identified about 1
percent of legitimate messages as spam, the consultant reported.
Cloudmark, by contrast, blocked 43 percent of junk e-mail while
erroneously blocking fewer messages than MailFrontier.
Another promising e-mail tool named "Ella" aims to act like a smart
electronic assistant. It tries to help people organize e-mail by
studying how they deal with messages. It watches what you read, delete
and move into folders and suggests ways to automatically process
messages faster. Its creator, Open Field Software, plans to release a
$30 consumer product soon and a fuller version later this year.
While there were no breakthroughs on the scale of the Internet itself,
there were plenty of intriguing ideas. Among the more promising:
· Pixim ( www.pixim.com )
claims its technology produces better digital images by converting
light into digital signals sooner during the photo-taking process. The
system allows cameras to do a better job of capturing dark and light
elements in the same scene, the company said. It showed a Pixim
surveillance camera detecting someone cheating at blackjack by
revealing a hidden $5 chip on the table. Five surveillance-camera
makers recently licensed its imaging system, but the company aims to
embed its technology in many other types of video and still cameras as
well.
