Commuting in the future will be efficient, eco-friendly and easy to use2015 Hybrid cars will account for 30 per cent of the new car market 2020Sea travel will involve the use of hydrogen-powered yachts and ships. The ships of the future will look vastly different. Giant cruise ‘mother ships' will be able to launch fleets of smaller vessels.2030Intelligent cars will auto-drive. Exclusive automated highway networks will allow such cars to self-pilot across cities and even continents. The networks will interact with the onboard computer, sensors and actuator systems in the car.Space tourism will be common. (There are plans to build multi-purpose, commercial space stations that will include hotels, research facilities and venues for zero-gravity sports)Automated flying drones will transport humans. Developing a well-functioning delivery drone network will pave the way for confidence in it. Unmanned aerial vehicles will be safer than those prone to human error (such as 2D vision)2040Production of cars run by water will startFirst manned trip to MarsThe predictions are compiled from the writings of futurists Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock and The ThirdWave; Ian Pearson, a futurologist with Futurizon who is credited to have an "85 per cent accuracy at the 10 yearhorizon"; Patrick Dixon, business consultant and head of trends forecasting company Global Change; RayKurzweil, author and inventor with interests in optical character recognition and speech recognition; and ThomasFrey, executive director and senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute; among others(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 12-12-2011)
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Whoever told you that microprocessors no longer needed to go faster and faster? Needless to say, chips in today's gadgets are adequate for most of our computing needs. Over the years, with the advent of the netbook and now the tablet, we need more battery life rather than faster processing. Yet, there are so many things that computers cannot do well enough as processors are not good enough. Intel and AMD seem bent on addressing these problems.For example, try streaming a high-definition (HD) video while working on something else (probably in the background) on your computer. This may be difficult in India due to bandwidth constraints, but your processor won't be able to handle it even if you had fat pipes running to your home. Or try using a HD camcorder with your hands and zoom while recording; your hands won't keep still enough for you to record a flawless HD video. Or, better still, try converting — quickly — an HD video format into one that can be played on a mobile device. In many such situations, current processors are not good enough.Last week, just before the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Intel launched a new processor architecture that will solve some of these problems immediately, and some others slowly over a period. The Sandy Bridge architecture is Intel's answer to the online video age. It is a generation ahead of the previous architecture, Nehalem, that is used in its current frontline processors like i3, i5 and i7. From now onwards, these processors, whose names will not change, will start using the Sandy Bridge architecture.There are several improvements in the Sandy Bridge over its predecessor, but the most important one is the integration of the graphics processor to the main processor. Nehalem architecture had a separate chip outside the CPU, called north bridge, which consisted of the graphics unit, the memory controller, etc. In Sandy Bridge, north bridge is inside the main CPU. It would speed up video processing straightaway, to such an extent that you could multitask video watching with other work easily. It also offers better gaming experience through improved 3D image processing.Sandy Bridge chips are otherwise energy efficient, will run cool and have next-generation turboboost technology. And Intel has added an interesting feature in these chips for the first time. Called Intel Insider, this feature is aimed at stopping video copying from inside the PC and authenticates content automatically, without using additional software. This would obviously annoy many consumers, but encourage Hollywood studios and other television networks to sell their creations online. It would let viewers buy video content once and stream it to other devices. It would encourage movie companies to make available movies online simultaneously with DVD releases. In fact, it is even possible to let viewers download the video in advance, but let them watch only at the time of release.Improved video processing would help the progress of HD video. You could process video at higher and higher frame rates. Face detection would be easier. Real time algorithms could compensate for blurring by combining images. Faster processing can create very exciting possibilities for video. You could see some of them this year.(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 24-01-2011)
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About a month ago, researchers at Belgian firm Imec presented a new kind of micro-processor at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) at San Jose in California. Although it was a primitive product by modern standards, it generated some excitement in electronics engineers. The reason: it was made of plastic instead of silicon.For several decades, the world of electronics was driven by continuous improvements in silicon chips. These improvements will continue for some time, but silicon is simply not good enough for many applications because it is expensive and rigid. There is a minimum cost, about $1-2, below which you cannot produce a silicon chip. And you cannot bend silicon to fit the geometry of many products. Plastic electronics can solve both problems, thus opening up worlds we have only imagined so far.The Imec processor was the first to be made of plastic. The institution had been working on the device for a while, and had frequently announced milestones earlier. The current one, announced at ISSCC, consists of 4,000 plastic transistors pieced together and put on top of a flexible plastic foil. Together, the transistors take up an area of 4 sq. cm. It can handle only simple programs: those that run at 8 bits. The processor runs at about 6 hertz.The computer industry passed this phase decades ago. The first PC chip that Intel launched in 1972 had 3,500 transistors, was eight bit and could run at half a million hertz (500 khz). Even your phone processor runs at 1 ghz now and PC chips can process data at a maximum of 128 bits at a time. So the plastic chip is a snail, but even snails have their uses in many ways. The processor is part of an ongoing revolution in organic electronics. Although organic compounds that could carry current were discovered in the 19th century, the overwhelming success of silicon slowed down the development of organic electronics. It was only in the 1990s that scientists began to develop techniques for making plastic electronics substrates. The first set of commercial products will hit markets soon.The Imec processor is some way from commercial development. Plastic processors cannot be built with the precision of silicon processors: silicon has a perfect crystalline arrangement whereas organic molecules form a jumble. Yet, you can develop algorithms that could eliminate this imprecision to an acceptable level. The Imec team gives two examples: a processor that could give you warning of gas leaks or another one that could tell you the amount of calories you consumed from a packet of cookies.Organic processors would be used in situations where they need to be cheap or flexible. Organic electronics, however, has a much wider scope than computing. Plastic RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags are now coming into the market. Organic electronics is the basis for the emerging technology that uses electrochromism, a property of materials that change colour and opacity when a charge is applied (this is leading the development of smart glass for buildings and automobiles).Plastic Logic, one of the most high-profile startups in organic electronics, is developing a plastic e-reader. Its first generation product, called Que, was shelved a year ago due to change in market conditions, as a series of e-readers were launched. Coming up is its second generation plastic e-reader. In the near future, plastic paper could let you roll up your e-readers the way you do a newspaper. That will be quite a revolution.(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 18-04-2011)
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The first step in treating cancer is to catch the disease early. Unfortunately, it is also the most difficult step. The standard method is to take a tissue sample and put it under a microscope, but this method works only if we have a suspect in the first place and needs skilled pathologists. You could also take the patient's blood and screen it for many known markers, but they may give false alarms and so are not definitive tests. Now, there is hope for cancer patients: many new-generation tests based on nanotechnology are about to make their way into the market. Here are two examples. Scientists from the Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have developed a handheld device that can detect gastric cancers in one hour with 96 per cent accuracy. This is not unlike the tissue sampling method, but the difference is the increased accuracy due to automation involved. At the University of California in Los Angeles, scientists are using nanotechnology to identify and collect circulating tumour cells that play a major role in the metastasis — spreading of the disease in the body — of cancer. Both results were published early this week. The Harvard group developed a microchip that contains a solution with magnetic nanoparticles. These nanoparticles are designed to bind to 11 proteins commonly found in gastric cancers. The microchip is connected to a smartphone that has the software to analyse results of the binding quickly. The more the kind of proteins that bind, the higher the accuracy of the system, but just four bound proteins are enough to give an accuracy of 96 per cent. This is better than human examination of the tissue as it eliminates human errors. In the future, cancer diagnostics will be based on identifying proteins in the tissue or blood, but the technology is still in the development stage. It is important to automate these methods to enable ease of use and to eliminate human error. The device also needs to be portable because proteins start degrading after one hour of the removal of the tissue from the body. The Harvard method is a good idea in this sense because the test can be done by the patient's bedside. The technology is useful in detecting proteins involved in other diseases as well, and the scientists are already developing it for TB and ovarian cancer. Circulating tumour cells (CTC) have been known for at least 100 years, but they pose more questions than answers. For example, we do not know at what stage of cancer they start circulating in the blood. But we do know that they are involved in some way in the spread of cancer to other parts of the body. They are also considered to be good indicators of the progress of treatment. But identifying CTCs is a major problem because they are so few in number. There is only one approved commercially available method, manufactured by Veridex, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. This technology uses antibodies to gather CTCs. Nanotechnology-based tests are a generation ahead of the current approved test. Scientists from the University of California used a micro-chip with a nanotechnology-based ‘Velcro' that can identify and gather CTCs. However, this team is only one of the many in the world developing such technology. Two other teams are in Louisiana State University and MGH. Nanotech-based cancer diagnostics is becoming a hot area attracting the attention of investors. The MGH team recently got $30 million from Johnson & Johnson. Watch out for more. (This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 21-03-2011)
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When you start talking about Microsoft, it is often tempting to compare the IT giant with its closest rivals. In the 1990s, most comparisons were with its old foe Apple. There were countless arguments then about the benefits and drawbacks of Windows versus the Mac OS. Then, for a brief while, comparisons were between Linux and Windows, a line of argument that has not died down completely or probably never will. Now, in the cloud age, Microsoft products are compared with that of Google. Specifically, its Office products are weighed against Google Apps for Business, although the two sets of productivity software are very different in some ways. Now, there is a reason to continue these comparisons.A few days ago, Microsoft released the beta version of Office 365, its cloud-based offering for the Office Suite. Before we look at this more closely, it is worth looking at what it is not. It is quite different from the Google Apps for Business. It is not a pure Web version of Office 2010 either. Yet, it is a response to Google Apps for Business and the increasing tendency to use cloud-based versions of software. Microsoft offers these services in its own unique way, which could be exhilarating or frustrating, depending on your techno-political affiliation. If you leave these affiliations behind, Office 365 is like any other cloud-inspired software product: some good features, some not so good ones, and many others you are not sure about.Office 365 is a product aimed at small businesses and is the next version of Microsoft's business productivity online services (BPOS). It consists of Office Web Applications and online versions of SharePoint, Exchange and Lync. Like with Google Apps for Business, Office 365 also has a market place that helps users find partners and other applications. Office Web Apps is the online version of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. SharePoint Online is a set of collaboration tools. Exchange Online is a hosted service of email, calendar and contacts. Lync Online is an instant messaging and communications service. So, Office 365 has an extremely broad set of features. It has unified communications, business intelligence, content management, collaboration tools, enterprise search and other features. It also offers the option of purchasing Office as a subscription.Microsoft, thus, has three sets of offerings related to the Office Suite. One is the outright purchase of a version of Office in the conventional way. The second option, particularly for a consumer, is to use Windows Live. It has a large set of products including limited word processing, mail and Outlook Connecter for free, but with some ads. The third is Office 365, where you get the full Office Suite and other products for a subscription. It is here that Office 365 differs from the Google Apps for Business, which has no downloadable productivity suite. If you are on Google Apps but offline, there isn't anything that you can do. But with Office 365, you can continue to use the Office products as long as you have paid the subscription fee. But Office 365 makes commercial sense only for a company with at least 25 employees.Office 365 integrates your PC with mobile platforms such as a Windows 7 phone or iPhone. It works with Mac as well. For $6 per user, you also get 25 GB of storage free. A subscription also obviates the need for frequent upgrades. The launch of Office 365 is, thus, a significant move for Microsoft. We have to wait and see how Google and others react.(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 02-05-2011)
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Regenerative medicine crossed another milestone this week when scientists at the University of Lund in Sweden demonstrated the direct conversion of skin tissue cells into nerve cells. So far, the standard technique in this field has been to convert adult cells (usually from the skin) into stem cells, and then converting stem cells into tissues or organs that have to be transplanted. This method has several risks and has not worked well in humans so far, although a few recent breakthroughs seem promising. The new method skirts the stem-cell route, and so avoids most of the risks associated with it.Regenerative medicine is in some ways the Holy Grail of modern medicine. Damaged organs such as kidney, liver or the retina can seldom be repaired through drugs. The only way out is to transplant a new organ. This works for some time, but brings with it other risks such as rejection. The average life expectancy of a patient with a transplanted kidney, for example, is 10-15 years. Regene-rative medicine can one day provide these people with their own organs, but so far it has not worked to the extent required for field use.Regenerative medicine is useful not just in transplanting organs. Bone marrow transplants are being used to treat leukaemia patients. Many neural diseases can in theory be treated with regenerated cells. For example, Parkinson's disease, caused by degeneration of brain cells that produce a chemical called dopamine (an important neurotransmitter involved in many brain functions) can, in theory, be treated by transplanted brain cells. However, this method has not worked in practice so far.The use of stem cells in regenerative medicine has been dogged by several controversies. The use of embryonic stem cells has been criticised as unethical and has been banned at various times in several countries. Scientists have learned to convert adult cells — particularly of the skin — into a type of stem cell called pluripotent cells (which are capable of differentiating into most organs in the body), but the use of pluripotent stem cells in therapy is dangerous because they sometimes lead to tumours. The current method in Lund avoids this step, and converts cells of one type directly into cells of another type.The Lund scientists have achieved this by reprogramming the skin cell, of a type called fibroblasts. Cells differentiate into different types because different kinds of genes become active in different kinds of tissues. You can use this process to change cells of one type into another. For example, if you shut down the liver genes in the liver cells and activate the retina genes, the liver cells will be converted into retinal cells. Lund scientists, led by Malin Parmar at the department of developmental neurology, found that this technique was much easier than people thought.Parmar and her team activated three nerve cell genes in the fibroblasts, and another two genes involved in dopamine synthesis. This led to the conversion of the fibroblasts into dopamine-producing nerve cells, thereby demonstrating a possible therapy method for Parkinson's disease. This was a major breakthrough because it opened a new avenue of research with immense potential. For scientists to actually use it in a clinical trial, they need to see how the new neurons grow in the brain. They need to optimise their methods with the right kind of starting cell, see how well the new neurons grow in the brain, whether they survive in the long term, and also how well they produce dopamine. Of course, they would also need to see whether the patients get better with the treatment. (This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 27-06-2011)
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Hardly a week passes these days without some sort of announcement from Google. Last week it was in the realm of mobile payments, and Google took one more step in its attempt to be the dominant force in tomorrow's world. It announced its Mobile Wallet, a payment service that it is developing in the US with service provider Sprint. In simple terms, it lets you make a payment at a participating merchant store using your mobile phone. Others methods of doing this exist already, but Google has a completely different way that would provide an important alternative to operator-controlled methods widely in use in many countries.Here is how it works. Your phone stores all your credit card information. When you check out at a participating store, you can make a payment by simply tapping your phone once on a device at the counter. Google had teamed up with Citibank, MasterCard, Sprint and First Data to test and develop the technology. It hopes to roll out the service later this summer in the US, and expand to other countries — including India — in the near future. Currently, Citibank is the sole participating bank and Sprint the only participating telecom operator. But it has an impressive list of participating merchants: Subway, Bloomingdales, RadioShack, Walgreens and many other stores that are household names in America.To those who follow the mobile payments space, this service has some interesting aspects. First, Google combines the Wallet with Google Offers, a set of electronic coupons also stored on your phone. Availing these offers is easy and near-automatic, thereby increasing the attraction of the service to customers. Google is planning other features such as membership suggestions and digital receipts. But the standout feature, which Google is trying to sell, lies in its security. At least to outsiders, including its potential customers, the feature looks more secure than competing offerings.To begin with, you do not display your cards like you do in a wallet. Your bank verifies your authenticity and details when you first put them on your phone, and you can de-activate them when you lose your device. It uses a technology called near-field communications (NFC), and it ensures that your data do not go out far. In competing technologies, the data goes out into the cloud. The NFC chip in the phone has several security features embedded and it is difficult for hackers to break into it.On the flipside, it can be used now only on the Nexus 4G phones from Sprint, but it is supposed to expand to other Android phones and operators as it goes international. Yet, it would remain as an Android feature, although Google has said that it could be extended to devices such as BlackBerry and iPhone. It would be difficult, but not impossible, to use it on a phone without an NFC chip. But the real significance of the Google service, and its strength and weakness, lies in one fact: the service is controlled from the device rather than by the operator in another location. This has not been the preferred approach so far. In the UK, which is rapidly becoming the centre of mobile payments, telcos are controlling and driving the service.Google Wallet is currently the easiest way to use mobile payments at retail merchants, where a substantial portion of credit card transactions take place. Other methods exist, but they are tied to one or other companies, whereas Wallet will work with all companies. The advent of Google Wallet would be a significant event in India.(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 13-06-2011)
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New Jersey-based Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD), the century-old medical device giant, is not new to India. Its first office in the country was set up in 1995. BD's India revenues, which topped $100 million in the past year, come from selling syringes, diagnostic kits, lab equipment and related gear used in healthcare. As growth prospects get bleaker at home, the company is looking for new growth avenues in emerging markets, and India, with its Rs 5,750- crore medical technology market, looks attractive. Now the $7.1-billion giant wants to ramp up its development and manufacturing operations in India — it is shifting production from Sweden to India. Company chairman and CEO Edward J. Ludwig speaks to BW's Noemie Bisserbe about the company's strategy and plans for India.The medical technology market in India is growing fast. But its needs are very different from that of the West. How are you addressing these needs?Let me go back. We have been in India since 1995, and our first efforts, frankly, were not that successful. I don't think we had a good sense of what the market needed. The need for safe injection, safe blood collection and evidence-based therapy are universal. But the way these are delivered here — through a combination of external forces such as NGOs, a federal policy level and a state policy level —is unique.We initially had one basic product — a two-piece syringe that was successful in southern parts of Europe. We moved manufacturing from Spain to India and started selling it here. But it turned out that the market here wasn't really a two-piece market, but rather a three-piece market. The two-piece doesn't have the rubber stopper and many markets prefer that for whatever reasons; but not this market.So, first we had the wrong product. Secondly, we exported a lot of expensive equipment that we paid duties on. So, it was not cost competitive. We can look back now and say we should have known better, but sometimes you just have to move in and learn from experience. FAST FACTS Established1897CEOEdward J. LudwigHeadquartersNew JerseyRevenues$7.1 billionEmployees29,100BusinessThree divisions: BDMedical, BD Diagnostics and BDBiosciencesKey ProductsNeedles, syringes, other medical devices and diagnostic systems, and reagents We are now developing products that are lower priced. Though they are still of very high quality, they may have a few features less and are easier to use. We are going to take a couple of years to fill in the pipeline of products here. We do not do any research and development yet in India. This situation will change in the next five years, and we will be doing more development in India. We will also expand our plant. It has some spare capacity, so we are moving some manufac-turing lines from Sweden to India. We will then export the products back to Europe.Is there a larger plan to make India a manufacturing hub?Not immediately. But over time, we will continue to expand. So, maybe over a period of 10 years, we will call India a hub for certain products.What is your pricing strategy for India?The simple thing is that we do not determine our prices. This is a very competitive place, and the market determines prices. We just have to make sure that our cost structure and value proposition is appropriate, so that we can get acceptable returns.Indian companies have now started developing indigenous devices at an affordable cost. How do you look at this new competition?There is a lot that we can learn in India. If you look in this building, you will find that most people who work here are generalists. When we start thinking about developing products here, we will have to start getting people with a medical background who understand technology. They will scan the market and look for such companies. Most innovations come from smaller companies. So we can partner with them or at some point, think about making acquisitions.Clearly, this is a threat. But I like to think of it as more of an opportunity too. We have always been very big on partnering with small entrepreneurs and licensing. What we have to offer is a global standard. Very often a small company has a great idea, but it does not have the resources to scale manufacturing or hire 200 sales executives. That is where synergies come in. We could acquire these companies or may partner with them for production and sales.What role can mobile and rapid diagnostic tools play to improve quality of care in India?Rapid diagnostic has been applied successfully in a number of settings, so I do not see why it could not be applied here as well. Probably, the only rapid test in India today is for pregnancy, although there are some tests for flu. We don't yet have adequate tests for diseases such as TB. Technology is struggling to keep up with the need.How important a market is India for you?The absolute size is not great. We are under $100 million revenues, but going forward, emerging markets will gain more importance, mainly India and China. Until two or three years ago, India was part of what we called Asia Pacific. Today, it reports directly to the head of international operations. We think of India as a region all by itself. India has the same status in our company as Europe. Our Indian business is growing at 20 per cent a year. In many parts of the world, including the US, we are holding our expenses flat because of economic realities. But in India, we are adding 100 people a year. We have a team of 450 people in India — twice the number of people we had three years ago. We are putting resources where we think the greatest opportunities are.(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 12-04-2010)
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