may the force be with you

TIME:What other innovations are coming from your research group?

Gates: Videoconferencing is another good example. There’s more of it going on today than in the past. But it’s still not really mainstream. Even with cameras being very cheap, one thing that researchers noticed was that you look really bad in a videoconference image, because the lighting is bad and you get shadows and things. So they’re showing this software that makes you look good, that understands about shadows and bags under your eyes and highlighting the twinkle in your eye and it’s very realistic. It’s what a great makeup artist would do, but the software is doing that with this face recognition and transformation. And so it’s things like that that will take something like videoconferencing and you’ll start to use it more and you’ll start to think of it and you won’t really realize that a fairly key element was a little bit of magic software.

TIME:What's your strategy for developing the next great innovation that will make people go wow!, in a world where new technologies and devices come along frequently and as a culture we're technologically spoiled and harder to impress?

I wouldn’t say that. People know very well that these machines could be easier to use, they could do more for them, and they have a pretty clear filter about whether it has helped them get done the things they like to get done. And if it helps them share memories of the kids growing up with the grandparents then they’ll use it. And some technology things seem very cool and then there isn’t lasting use that takes place with them. Some things are a long time in the works. This high-definition video game, Xbox360, we’ve been working on that 3 1/2 years before we came out with it. And the way that works is that platform will stay the same for over four years and then there will be a big leapfrog.

TIME:Yet, all the early speculation and prognostications about Origami—a new product of yours that hasn’t even been introduced yet—would seem to be an illustration of the challenges of impressing people with technological innovation these days. Already one analyst is quoted saying Microsoft might not earn “cool points” for its Origami because the device—part Ipod, Part PSP and part Blackberry—tries to be all things to all people.

Gates:I don’t think that’s somebody who has seen what that device is. It’s not a device for everybody, and it’s not even in any one of those categories. Innovation has always been a challenge and it always should be. The bar should be set high. The notion that some analyst will be confused all the time and all analysts will be confused some of the time, I think that’s been true forever. Hopefully a few analysts aren’t confused a few times so that the message gets through. Basically products succeed by word of mouth. You do a little bit of advertising to prime the pump, but then people say these things like Microsoft Office is just the way I do my presentations. It’s the way I look at my business data. So it means your product has to be awfully good to get people to switch or to pay money, but there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s the rules we live by and we love it.

TIME:What demos were you most excited about at TechFest today and why?

Gates:There’s this incredible theme of making photos and video easier to work with. I saw over a dozen things that relate to that. Taking a set of photos and creating a 3D environment. Taking and recognizing things in photos or making a transcript automatically from a TV show. People are going to be surprised at how natural we can make these things and the places we can help them out. They’re not used to getting help organizing their photos. Or finding the new show about a particular topic that they would never run into. [One of the Microsoft Researchers] Curtis Wong was showing me this program on AIDS that PBS is doing, and how if you view that with software, you can interact with the information and find other related things and see the progression over time. So that you get the best of both worlds: watching the video, which you can do passively, but then at any point you want something explained or you want more info, it gives you a way of doing that. The future of TV is to have more of that interactivity. And so even some of the things we’ve learned out of what is really the gaming interactive realm is now coming to the educational and business realm. And that’s why we love the idea that anything that’s hard to do in software, we work on. No matter what kind of device it runs on or what type of media or where in the world it gets used, we tackle the hard software problems with an eye to what kind of empowerment it can generate for users.

TIME:What is this next big innovation in search technology that Microsoft has developed that you keep hinting at?

Gates:Well, obviously in search you can just sit down and type in input and see if you like the results. A lot of it has to do with understanding which words and which things get you what you want, whether it's local information or national information. There’s a lot that goes into it and over the next year we’ll be talking about the milestones and rolling those things out. I just use it as an example. There are categories where we are all by ourselves, such as interactive TV, the tablet PC. Then there’s categories like teaching the phone to recognize your speech. There are other people doing phone things but we’re probably the most ambitious about the software. And then there are areas like search where at least today, people think of others before they think of the work that we’re doing. Which is fine. We love surprising them as we get it done and they can just sit there and go wow it’s very easy to switch to a better search.

source:http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1172105,00.html

TIME: How do you think about innovation? What are your cues? Is there a way you look at the world and derive a vision of the future? People wonder how Bill Gates comes up with the next big idea.

Gates:There are tons of great people here at Microsoft who are always coming up with ideas. I go off for a week every six months and read hundreds of papers from people who are telling me about big advances, and their ideas about things they think we should do. Take a simple concept. You're a parent and your kid is growing up. How do you collect all the photos, email, video, calendars— all those things—and make it so that sharing it with relatives or going back 10 years later and finding some neat moments are very easy to do? Obviously today's software lets you do that better than you could 10 years ago, but it's still very hard, very manual and nothing like what it will be. Microsoft Research has a thing called the Sense Cam that, as you walk around, it's taking photos all the time. And the software will filter and find the ones that are interesting without having to think, "Let's get out the camera and get that shot." You just have that and software helps you pick what you want.

Actually the first place they used this is with people who have medical problems where their memory is not working. So they'll meet their son, which is a big event for them, but they won't be able to remember what was said. If you use this camera and play back the images for them, it reinforces those memories. That's not the mainstream application of it, but it's this amazing thing that who would have thought the right kind of software could take that memory impairment and really just change the life of someone like that and let him or her have those memories in a very simple, fun way.

It's really great to have the research people constantly talking to the product group people — "hey, we've made this breakthrough and why can't you apply it?" The product people are so much in the real world they'll say, well, it's too hard to set up or someone will have a privacy concern that if you have all those photos how are they going to be used.

TIME: Back in 2002 in a Fortune cover story, you discussed the questions that were guiding your conception of the computing future, and you had already anticipated the needs of a multitasking, on-demand and highly mobile consumer population. As you cogitate on what's next technologically, and the role the PC will play, what do you see now as you look ahead—what will we need, what will we want and how will Microsoft products deliver it?

Gates:We think about software running on the Windows PC but also on phone, in TV, in your car, across all these devices helping you get things done in a user-centric way. And you have to think about it from both ends: What would people like to have done for them? And you have to think about what can technology do. Inside our organization we have people who are particularly strong at one or the other. We find ways to bring those together. The best thinkers actually understand both sides of that. Some things that people would like to do are pretty obvious. When you watch the news there are things you are more interested in and less interested in and you wish it told you more about the things you cared more about and less about the ones you don't. Advertisers only like to pay to run their ads for people who might be interested in that product. And so those are things that we can make happen. I noticed I was taking a lot of notes and then going back to my office and trying to type up the email, but the next meeting would start and I thought, "geez I've got to have that right with me," and so started the dream of making a screen—a tablet PC that's better than note taking on paper or reading on paper so you can annotate things, share it with people, go back and see the history of what you've read. That's one of the quests we have as a company, and it really excites people to think that kids won't need textbooks, the teacher can customize the material, and the material can be interactive. So we take those big dreams about computing and then we see what's practical.

One of our researchers said that eventually software should make it so that you don't ever have fatal car wrecks. But that's way in the future. The quality of software and the cameras and other things it would take, that's hard to do. Whereas some things, like revolutionizing TV or getting the right hardware and software so this tablet idea becomes mainstream, those are things we think we can do in the next several years. So we're constantly playing around with those ideas and it helps a lot to have a research group that doesn't have any particular product they are working on. They don't have any time frame. But they are people who aren't just picked for their brains; they're also picked for their energy to want to come up with innovations that change the world. So this TechFest event where we bring our product people and our researchers together is probably the event that people look forward to the most because researchers love showing their new things and the product development people come in and not only get specific ideas, but they are reminded about the magic of software, which is what Microsoft has been about from the beginning—that software can unlock much better ways of being creative and communicating and keeping the memories of your kids, of being entertained. As the years go by, how people will be empowered by software will just get better and better.

TIME:Some people say that innovation is ideally suited to the young, cool, hip and nimble companies. Microsoft is certainly older and bigger than it used to be, but you haven't really slowed down. How much harder is it to innovate as a massive established company?

Gates:There are a lot of really incredible things we can only do now because the number of great people we have. One of the things weíre doing is taking all the photographs of the world from satellites, planes, cell phones and people driving around and stitching those all together to create what we call Virtual Earth so that you can see what it's like if you want to drive some place, see what a place looks like. That's a huge project. With all sorts of scales and costing a lot and representing a huge bet that we can only do because we're a large company. The Tablet PC with this handwriting recognition and helping to get new hardware to get it done. So being able to take on ambitious things, speech recognition, language translation, vision capability, those come because we're taking the success we've had and reinvesting very heavily. We're the most R&D focused company in the world as a percentage of sales of any large company, based on our overall R&D budget. That means we set a very high bar for the work that we do.

TIME:What's been your biggest misstep in terms of innovation and what did you learn from it that guides you now?

Gates:There are a lot of breakthroughs that once we make them we think, "ah geez we should have come up with that five years earlier, that maybe the pieces were there." Sometimes we start too early on things. With the Tablet PC we started 10 years ago. Someone could say, "geez you could have waited to start that." This revolution in internet TV is very personal and interactive. We started on that over a decade ago, and it has taken a long time for the costs of all the pieces to come down. Now, in the U.S. we have AT&T and Verizon and others actually rolling out this new generation of TV using our software to do it. So it has finally happened. The people who've been working on it for 10 years feel great that it came true. With Tablet PC we have a lot of people who love it, but it's not mainstream yet, so we still have years of work to do to make it that much better, cheaper, thinner, more accurate. We all have this conviction that it will be mainstream.

There are things that other people get to before us. We avoid that a lot by working well with the universities. We have way bigger university outreach program than any company and thatís worldwide, universities in Europe, India, China. The U.S. universities are where we get the most out of that, but we want to make sure we're doing it everywhere. There are famous cases. Google's done a super good job on search; Apple's done a great job on the Ipod. We're a company that's brave enough to say that we will keep those categories very competitive and see what we can do to come up with something that's even better in the years ahead. Certainly video games are a great example, where Sony's done a great job, but now we've got the breakthrough product in the market and we'll see what they come up with next. Ours is the Xbox360. And theirs will be called Playstation3. It's not out yet and people don't know much about it. It's a very healthy thing. Even search is nowhere near where it should be. You're still clicking around, you're looking at a lot of ads but you don't get paid to look at those ads; and that's not fair. A lot of things could be done.

source:http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1171641,00.html

The gaming giant is ditching tired tie-ins for more daring, interactive video game ideas

Video game giant Electronic Arts Inc. (ERTS ) had a very simple formula for success: base a product on a popular sports or movie franchise, spend a fortune marketing it, and then push out a new version of that game year after year. The strategy netted big bucks with games based on the Harry Potter, James Bond, and Lord of the Rings movies, as well as with EA'S Madden NFL series. It also delighted investors with a reliable stream of revenue in the notoriously hit-or-miss video game business. In 2005, the company landed the No. 34 spot on the BusinessWeek 50 list of top corporate performers.

But now EA is stumbling, and a big part of its time-tested strategy is about to change. The company hopes that its next mega-franchise will revolve not around a football star, a boy wizard, or a dashing British spy, but...a microbe. The game is called Spore. Developed by Will Wright, the creator of SimCity and The Sims, it lets players design an invertebrate in its primordial stages and then guide its evolution until the creature's offspring develop into a thriving civilization with cities, religion, and spaceships. EA's ambitious goal is to create more such innovative, internally developed games while lessening the company's dependence on professional sports and Hollywood movie franchises.

SLUGGISH SALES
The plan is nothing if not challenging. It's forcing EA's president of Worldwide Studios, Paul Lee, to rethink the way the company creates games and to figure out a way to transform a risk-averse organization known for its operational efficiency into a hotbed of creativity. Lee has little choice. Movie studios and sports leagues are driving the costs of licenses higher, while video game sales have stayed sluggish. Making matters worse, EA flubbed its debut on Microsoft's new Xbox 360 console, failing to grab its usual No. 1 market share and losing out to smaller competitor Activision (ATVI ) Inc. Although the company's revenues, an estimated $3.3 billion to $3.4 billion for the fiscal year ending on Mar. 31, remain more than twice the size of its next-largest U.S. competitor, it has either lowered or missed its earnings guidance for the past six quarters. The reasons include delayed games, higher-than-expected development costs, and disappointing sales of key titles.

To reverse the slide, Lee needs the EA home team to hit a few home runs. He wants to push the number of games based on internally created concepts above 50% of EA's total portfolio in the next 12 to 18 months, from about 30% today, and create at least one new franchise a year. The company is aggressively snapping up marquee talent ranging from award-winning game designer Doug Church to movie director Steven Spielberg, who will consult on the story lines of three original games. It is also building a brand-new development studio in Montreal that will focus entirely on cooking up new, original titles. With some $3 billion in cash and zero debt, EA is also eager to acquire independent studios.

At the heart of the Redwood City (Calif.) company's mission is figuring out how to inject creativity into its 6,100-employee operation without losing control. Most development houses typically rely on tightly knit groups of 40 or so programmers, artists, and designers, who focus on one game from start to finish for 12 to 18 months. Many such studios are wholly owned by large game publishers but have tremendous autonomy. And these little outfits have created some of the most imaginative and best-selling games today, from the Grand Theft Auto series, which came out of Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. (TTWO ) subsidiary Rockstar North (TTWO ), to Halo, which was created by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT )-owned studio Bungie. Studios in this model "create an environment where creative control goes without question, and the voices around the table are all supporting the same vision," says John Riccitiello, a former president and chief operating officer of EA. "That doesn't happen everywhere in the game world." Riccitiello left EA in 2004 to join Elevation Partners, a private equity firm that has acquired two independent game studios (and boasts U2's Bono as a lead investor).

CROSS-POLLINATION
EA's model, with a few exceptions like Wright's Spore group, traditionally has been very different. It employs hundreds of developers at its main studios in Vancouver, Los Angeles, and Redwood City, and assigns them to projects as needed, sometimes rotating them through a number of different ones to meet a tough deadline. This lets the company release many more titles a year and gives it an unparalleled ability to release titles on time. And the millions that EA spends on market research to decide what games it should sell lessens the chance of a big bomb.

For much of EA's past, that setup made it a model of reliability. But it's hardly a recipe that stokes creativity. So Neil Young, general manager of EA's Los Angeles studio, has been working on a way to encourage innovation while boosting the staff's morale and competitive spirit. For the upcoming World War II game Medal of Honor: Airborne, for example, Young has broken the development staff into small six-to-eight person "cells" and assigned each cell a small mission for the game, from programming the way enemies fire weapons or flee to making the human faces of the characters look as realistic as possible.

The idea is to embed technological advances in every detail of the game. "What I'm trying to build is a studio of gamemakers," says Young. "I don't want people focused on building the 90th tree or the 70th truck" in a game. Every week, the teams with the most remarkable breakthroughs have their work featured on the flat-panel TV screens that are placed throughout the studio. "It creates the feeling that you are swimming in a sea of small inventions," says Young, and helps spur cross-pollination between different cells. The more tedious line production tasks, such as coloring in trees or trucks, are outsourced. The cell system is now at work in several of the company's smaller studios, including the new Montreal location.

Another change is that homegrown projects will be given more flexible deadlines. Since these projects won't have hard release dates like sports or movie titles, Lee believes it makes more sense to develop them until the team feels its idea is fully realized. "In the past we have committed to ship dates with large development teams before we had a game design," says Lee. "That is changing....We're going to have the best games and release them when they are ready."

That could mean a higher level of quality for the company's new game titles, but it could also translate into headaches for investors as EA's product pipeline and revenue stream become less of a sure thing. That is probably not music to Wall Street's ears. But it may just be the price EA pays to achieve greater creativity.

source:http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_12/b3976086.htm

Nerve growth (shown in green) occurred after the injections

Nanotechnology has restored the sight of blind rodents, a new study shows.

Scientists mimicked the effect of a traumatic brain injury by severing the optical nerve tract in hamsters, causing the animals to lose vision.

After injecting the hamsters with a solution containing nanoparticles, the nerves re-grew and sight returned.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team hopes this technique could be used in future reconstructive brain surgery.

Ultimate challenge

Repairing nerve damage in the central nervous system after injury is seen as the ultimate challenge for neuroscientists, but so far success in this field has been limited.

Nerve regeneration is set back by a number of factors, including scar tissue and gaps in brain tissue caused by the damage. And this can make treatment by medical and surgical methods very difficult.

We found that we had got functional return of vision and orientating behaviour Dr Rutledge Ellis-Behnke

To find a novel way around these problems, the team based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, and Hong Kong University looked towards nanotechnology - a branch of science involving the manipulation of atoms and molecules.

The researchers injected the blind hamsters at the site of their injury with a solution containing synthetically made peptides - miniscule molecules measuring just five nanometres long.

Once inside the hamster's brain, the peptides spontaneously arranged into a scaffold-like criss-cross of nanofibres, which bridged the gap between the severed nerves.

The scientists discovered that brain tissue in the hamsters knitted together across the molecular scaffold, while also preventing scar tissue from forming.

Importantly, the newly formed brain tissue enabled the brain nerves to re-grow, restoring vision in the injured hamsters.

"We made a cut, put the material in, and then we looked at the brain over different time points," explained Dr Rutledge Ellis-Behnke, a neuroscientist at MIT and lead author on the paper.

"The first thing we saw was that the brain had started to heal itself in the first 24 hours. We had never seen that before - so that was very surprising."

Stroke repair

The scientists looked at young hamsters with actively growing nerve cells, and also at adults hamsters whose nerves had stopped growing.

Dr Ellis-Behnke said the team was surprised to find that the nerves in the adult hamsters had re-grown after the injection.

"We found that we had got functional return of vision and orientating behaviour, which was very surprising to us because we thought we would have to promote cell growth, through the growth factors."

The researchers found the peptides were later broken down by the body into a harmless substance and excreted in the animals' urine three to four week after first injected.

The scientists believe that they have overcome some of the barriers to nerve regeneration, and hope to be able to apply their work to medical applications at a later stage.

"We are looking at this as a step process. If this can be used while operating on humans to mitigate damage during neurosurgery, that would be the first step," Dr Ellis-Behnke told the BBC News website.

"Eventually what we would look at is trying to reconnect disconnected parts of the brain during stroke and trauma."

Dr Ellis-Behnke said that stroke and traumatic brain injury could have a major impact on an individual.

"In order to try to restore quality of life to those individuals you can try to reconnect some disconnected parts to try to give some functionality in the brain for communication and other things like that. And that's where we think that this might be very useful," he added.

source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4801728.stm

Last month, the Motion Picture Association of America announced one of its boldest sorties yet against online piracy: a barrage of seven federal lawsuits against some of the highest-profile BitTorrent sites, Usenet hosts and peer-to-peer services. Among the targets: isoHunt, TorrentSpy and eDonkey.

But, as always, one prominent site is missing from the movie industry's announcement (.pdf), and it happens to be the simplest and best-known source of traded movies -- along with pirated video games, music, software, audio books, television broadcasts and nearly any other form of media imaginable. The site is called The Pirate Bay, and it's operated by a crew of intrepid Swedes who revel in tormenting the content industries.

"All of us who run the TPB are against the copyright laws and want them to change," said "Brokep," a Pirate Bay operator. "We see it as our duty to spread culture and media. Technology is just a means to doing that."

A quick look at The Pirate Bay's lineup suggests which side is winning the piracy wars. Among the site's most popular downloads are recent Oscar nominees and winners like Closer and Brokeback Mountain, Steven Spielberg's Munich, the latest Harry Potter film and even stinkers like Underworld: Evolution and The Pink Panther. Downloading doesn't require users to register or install spyware -- if one has a BitTorrent client installed, anything listed is just a click away.

To international observers, The Pirate Bay's defiant immunity from copyright lawyers is somewhat baffling. But in Sweden, the site is more than just an electronic speak-easy: It's the flagship of a national file-sharing movement that's generating an intense national debate, and has even spawned a pro-piracy political party making a credible bid for seats in the Swedish parliament.

Founded in 2003 by a loosely knit crew of file-sharing advocates called Piratbyrån, or Pirate Bureau, The Pirate Bay began life as a Swedish-language site occupying a second tier among popular torrent trackers. Then the MPAA's groundbreaking 2004 crackdown on torrent hubs changed everything. As famous sites like SuprNova and LokiTorrent went under, their users crowded onto the surviving hubs like pelicans on a reef. When the storm passed, The Pirate Bay remained.

According to "Anakata," one of the site's operators, subsequent MPAA lawsuits have continued to drive more users to The Pirate Bay, which today boasts 1 million unique visitors a day. The Pirate Bay's legal adviser, law student Mikael Viborg, said the site receives 1,000 to 2,000 HTTP requests per second on each of its four servers.

That's bad news for the content industries, which have fired off letter after menacing letter to the site, only to see their threats posted on The Pirate Bay, together with mocking replies. Viborg said that no one has successfully indicted The Pirate Bay or sued its operators in Swedish courts. Attorneys for DreamWorks and Warner Bros., two companies among those that have issued take-down demands to the site, did not return calls for comment.

Viborg credits The Pirate Bay's seeming immunity to the basic structure of the BitTorrent protocol. The site's Stockholm-based servers provide only torrent files, which by themselves contain no copyright data -- merely pointers to sources of the content. That makes The Pirate Bay's activities perfectly legal under Swedish statutory and case law, Viborg claims. "Until the law is changed so that it is clear that the trackers are illegal, or until the Swedish Supreme Court rules that current Swedish copyright law actually outlaws trackers, we'll continue our activities. Relentlessly," wrote Viborg in an e-mail.

MPAA spokeswoman Kori Bernards insists The Pirate Bay violates copyright laws around the world. "Copyright laws are being enforced and upheld in countries all over the world and when you facilitate the illegal file swapping of millions of people around the world, you are subject to those laws," said Bernards. "The torrent and torrent tracker is something that points people to various files that make up a copyright that is protected under the law."

That legal claim is untested in the United States, according to Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In Sweden, the legality of the trackers is a topic of considered debate.

Magnus Martensson, a legal adviser for the Swedish branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, insists that The Pirate Bay does infringe on Sweden's copyright law, or at least qualifies as contributory infringement. "Pirate Bay has been on our radar screen for a couple of years and it is a great concern for our member record companies that we take some action," said Martensson. "The activity carried out by The Pirate Bay is damaging the record labels' business."

But that argument isn't finding the most fertile ground among Sweden's wired citizenry. According to Martensson, polls indicate that more than 10 percent of Sweden's 9 million people participated in file sharing in the last quarter of 2005. He said file sharing is widespread in Sweden because almost every household owns a computer and can get a cheap 100-Mbps broadband fiber connection from their ISP for 70 euros a month. "My guess is that Sweden is one of the worst places in the world when it comes to illegal sharing," said Martensson.

Until recently, downloading copyright material for personal use wasn't even illegal in the country. Bowing to international pressure, the Swedish government finally changed that last July, implementing the EU Copyright Directive, which outlaws the copying, distribution, uploading and downloading of copyright material without the copyright holder's permission.

A month before the law went into effect, The Pirate Bay -- now officially independent of Piratbyrån -- registered its opinion of the measure by launching an improved version of the site. Among other enhancements, the website now supports 25 languages, and offers a breakdown of the top 100 torrents, selectable by content category.

"The relaunch of the site was at first needed for withstanding the huge amount of traffic, but we decided to launch it when we did to make a political statement as well," said Brokep.

While The Pirate Bay is raising the Jolly Roger, the group that founded it is embracing grass-roots activism and political legitimacy. Piratbyrån today has 57,000 registered members committed to its belief that file trading is a means of sharing culture and making new art.

So influential is Piratbyrån that Sweden's leading anti-piracy organization defines itself by its opposition to the group. The MPAA-funded Svenska Antipiratbyrån uses its own software to keep logs and track IP address of suspected file sharers. Together with other copyright organizations, it has sent more than 400,000 letters to Swedish ISPs protesting their users' alleged file-sharing activities.

"We don't want to stop the exchange of culture, we are just saying that the creators have to be paid," said Henrik Pontén, an attorney for Antipiratbyrån. "It is the copyright laws that pay for new games and movies."

Last spring, Antipiratbyrån's tactics inspired some 4,000 Swedes to complain through e-mail to the Swedish Data Inspection Board that the group's IP tracking violated data-privacy laws. The board granted Antipiratbyrån a temporary exemption to continue the practice. Pontén said a final decision about whether an IP address is private data is still pending.

Antipiratbyrån said it helped provide evidence against two Swedes who were recently fined $2,000 for trading copyright files, in a case that made national news in Sweden. According to Viborg, the only proof in the case was screen dumps submitted by Antipiratbyrån, which he said could be easily manipulated. Pontén said the courts looked at the evidence in the case and found that the screen dumps hadn't been tampered with, adding that Antipiratbyrån had no motivation to do so.

Piratbyrån protested the screen-dump convictions by creating The Evidence Machine -- software that lets users produce fake evidence of file sharing against anyone by inserting an IP address and file name.

source:http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70358-0.html?tw=wn_technology_1

New biosensors could provide an inexpensive and portable way to detect everything from drugs to signs of cancer.

At-home pregnancy tests are the model of diagnostic simplicity: a tester just pees on a stick and within minutes knows if she has to buy a crib. Imagine if one could just as easily detect HIV infection or a drug overdose. Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) say they are close to developing devices that can do just that.

Biochemist Kevin Plaxco and colleagues at UCSB create sensors using specific DNA sequences combined with off-the-shelf components. They previously made devices that could detect proteins and bits of DNA linked to viral infections or other pathogens. In their latest feat, published last month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, they created a sensor that can detect cocaine in the blood.

Scientists have been searching for ways to make cheap and easy detection kits -- with limited success. DNA sensors to detect other segments of DNA are fairly easy to design. "But DNA sensors that can indicate the presence of proteins is more challenging," says Paula Hammond, a chemical engineer at MIT. Simple assays for small molecules are also difficult, since they usually require reactions with other reagents, says Hammond.

"[This work] opens the doors for a new generation of engineered biosensors for the rapid and selective detection of a plethora of proteins, viruses, nucleic acid, and even traditionally difficult targets, such as...small molecules like cocaine," says Ciara O'Sullivan, a research professor at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain.

The USCB researchers say their design has some major benefits over devices already on the market. Their device does not require any additional reagents, making it very easy to use. Other sensors use similar detection molecules, but require extra chemicals or bulky optical readers to detect the target. "We can really make a palmtop device," says Plaxco. The device can also be easily modified to sense a wide variety of substances, by swapping in different pieces of detecting DNA.

The sensor consists of a gold electrode covered in specific strands of DNA. When the target molecule, in this case cocaine, binds to the DNA, it changes conformation. That change increases current flow through the electrode, creating a measurable electronic signal that can be read by the device. The magnitude of the change in current indicates the concentration of the substance -- the fraction of DNA molecules that change conformation is proportional to the number of cocaine molecules in the sample.

The sensors also have the ability to work in contaminated samples, a goal that has been difficult to achieve in the biosensor field. Most detection systems in use today require a pure sample. But if such tests are to move from sterile lab settings to the doctor's office or patient's home, they must be able to work in the real world. In soon-to-be-published research, Plaxco's team showed that a sensor for DNA could detect the DNA target sequence in straight blood serum -- and even in mud. "Our sensor is immune to contaminants," says Plaxco. "We can scrape some dirt off the ground and add DNA and the sensor still works."

Jon Faiz Kayyem, cofounder of Clinical Micro Sensors, a biotech company that was bought by Motorola, says Plaxco's design has strong potential for broad use because it's cheap to make and easy to use. "For years, scientists have been reporting fantastic results, such as detecting a single particle of anthrax in a lung full of air. But you don't find those out there in real use. Most devices don't give attention to the person running the test, paying for the test, or making the test," he says.

The versatility of the design is also important. "There are lots of one-off individual tests for proteins and small molecules that rely on molecular weight or binding tests," says Kayyem. "But there is no good way to do small molecule and protein testing that allows you to take a single sensor and test for lots of different things. It would be a leap forward in efficiency to have a single machine to test for almost any small molecule using the folding DNA approach," he says.

One of the primary uses that Plaxco envisions for the device is to detect the levels of different drugs in a patient's blood. This kind of information could help doctors if they suspect a drug overdose. It could also be used to monitor the levels of prescription drugs that must be kept at a specific concentration in the body.

Scientists still have a few problems to work out before the tests can be used in the clinic. "This work is a clear step forward...However, the reported sensing technique must be further refined to enable clinically useful detection limits," says Aimee Rose, a specialist in organic-based chemical sensors at Nomadics, a security technology company with offices in Cambridge, MA. The device can currently detect cocaine in blood or saliva to a few micromolars. For routine drug testing, though, it would need to be able to detect picomolar concentrations, or a million times more dilute.

Rose speculates it will be challenging to make the device three orders of magnitude more sensitive. However, Kayyem says "there are lots of tricks in the yard for improving sensitivity, so I don't see that being a permanent barrier."

The sensitivity issue will play a role in other applications as well. The team has created DNA sensors to detect viral DNA present in the blood stream. The device has a lower detection limit of approximately 60 million DNA molecules per milliliter, which is about four orders of magnitude poorer than that needed for clinically relevant HIV detection, says Plaxco.

The team is now working on a sensor to detect a protein that appears to be diagnostic for several forms of cancer. Plaxco says proteins may be a better target for diagnostic purposes, because they tend to be detectable at clinically relevant concentrations in the blood.

source:http://www.technologyreview.com/BioTech/wtr_16580,306,p2.html

LONDON (AFP) - The newspaper industry needs to embrace the technological revolution of the Internet, MP3 players, laptops and mobile phones or face extinction, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch said.

"Societies or companies that expect a glorious past to shield them from the forces of change driven by advancing technology will fail and fall," he said in a speech to the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers.

"That applies as much to my own, the media industry, as to every other business on the planet. Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry -- the editors, the chief executives and, let's face it, the proprietors.

"A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it."

Murdoch, whose News Corporation empire ranges from newspapers and magazines to television and film interests across the globe, described the 21st century as "the second great age of discovery".

The greatest challenge for the traditional media now is to engage with more demanding, questioning and better educated consumers, adapting their products for new technology, the Australian-born media mogul said.

"There is only one way. That is by using our skills to create and distribute dynamic, exciting content," he said.

"But -- and this is a very big but -- newspapers will have to adapt as their readers demand news and sport on a variety of platforms: websites, iPods, mobile phones or laptops.

"I believe traditional newspapers have many years of life but, equally, I think in the future that newsprint and ink will be just one of many channels to our readers."

Murdoch sparked one of Britain's most bitter industrial disputes over the introduction of new computer technology for journalists and printers.

In January 1986, he moved his British newspapers The Times, The Sun and The News of the World overnight from their historic home on Fleet Street, central London, to a purpose-built facility in Wapping, in the east of the capital.

It was credited by some with not only breaking the stranglehold of print unions on a hitherto unprofitable industry crippled by strikes but paving the way for developments such as colour printing, supplements and websites.

source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060313/wl_uk_afp/britainmediatechnology_060313192945

This crop of fresh faces is poised to shake up the tech world. Here's their advice to wannabe entrepreneurs.

Want to know what's hot in technology? Follow the money. That's what we did to find a fresh crop of tech's best young entrepreneurs. We surveyed dozens of VC firms, from Sequoia Capital in Silicon Valley to Austin Ventures in Texas to Battery Ventures in Boston, to find out who's generating buzz and getting funded -- if not bought.

We then combed through the nominees to find the dozen or so people who in our view are poised to make the biggest impact on technology, be it through innovative ideas, successful business plans, outstanding products, or all of the above.

You may be familiar with some finalists. We felt we couldn't overlook Skype's Janus Friis, who last year sold his brainchild to eBay for a handsome $2.6 billion. Others may be new to you. Take Guido Lanza, who founded Pharmix to reshape the way drugs are developed, or Mark Spencer, whose startup Digium uses open-source software to build low-cost, multifunction phone systems. All, we hope you'll agree, have the potential to shake up tech. Their profiles -- and advice for would-be entrepreneurs -- follow.

Special Report: Young Entrepreneurs of Tech

source:http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/03/tech_entrepreneurs/index_01.htm?campaign_id=ds1

By the end of the decade a revolutionary new micro-satellite will orbit around the world at an altitude of 700km sending precise information on agriculture and marine changes in unprecedented precision and detail. The Israeli-French project will allow farmers to better treat their crops, fisherman to locate large quantities of fish in mid-sea and will also vastly increase the ability of the scientific community to study and monitor the flora and fauna in many areas around the globe. Equipped with an advanced plasma engine, VENUS will be able to operate for at least 4-5 years in its planed orbit.