Backblog January 2007

The Roslin Biocentre of Edinburgh, Scotland (of Dolly The Sheep fame) recently announced that it has created genetically modified chickens that produce very high levels of cancer-fighting proteins naturally within their egg whites.

Frankly, I find this incredibly exciting. Want to read the technical details? Your best bet is probably to go here and have a look for yourself. You'll get to read an assortment of details on miR24 monoclonal antibodies, human interferon b-1a, and a veritable slew of other biologyspeak that I can't make any sense of whatsoever. But that's beside the point—we have cancer-fighting chickens, people.

This is great news, and it enhances the status and profile of the biotech industry. This is what biotech is all about—using modern science to make our food and lives better and safer. Unfortunately, the mainstream media has been relatively mute on this subject, which leaves me wondering: if cancer-fighting chickens can't get some play on the 6 o'clock news then what does it take?

Do these chickens have to start firing iPhones out of their bodies for anybody to start paying attention?
We get wall-to-wall coverage of Donald Trump vs. Rosie O'Donnell, but nobody mentions the cancer-fighting chickens. We may have a living, breathing tool in the fight against cancer, that can be maintained with run of the mill chicken feed.

Could disease-fighting animals be the start of an entirely new industry? There has been much public distrust of genetically modified food (especially in Europe) and this could be one of the ways to get nay-sayers on board. What if genetically modifying food wasn't about increasing yields and product uniformity, but about improving the health and safety of everybody involved? Can we take a cow, and make its milk fight heart disease? Can we take a goat and make it produce antibodies that fight malaria?

Can you think of a better way to get people to buy your product than to make it combat deadly diseases? Sounds like added value to me.

I guess this is a microcosm for the entire world of commerce. Business today is a lot like a bunch of people picking up every chicken in every coop and looking for that one golden egg that makes everybody rich. Somebody, somewhere, is financing the research on these cancer-fighting chickens and that person is going to be very, very wealthy if this all pans out. Cancer-fighting proteins growing naturally in chickens...

Sounds like a golden egg to me.

Andrew Rideout

One of the greatest things about the technology industry is that it can generate an absolutely obscene amount of money for the right person with the right idea at the right time. We all remember the heady days of the original tech bubble in the late 1990s (some of us painfully so), but only now are we really able to see some of the end results.

My case in point on this one is the handful of people who got rich off the '90s tech boom. I mean really rich, like the "I make your annual salary while I'm sitting on the can for a minute and a half" type of rich. I think one of the greatest by-products from the old tech bubble has been the massive injection of money and free time it has given to a few people. The best example out there? If you ask me, it's Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and his newest project -- taking you to outer space and back.

Project Blue Origin is the code name for Bezos' entry into one of the most ambitious and incredible projects undertaken by modern science -- the commercialization of space flight. You may have already seen the Spaceship I concept that actually won the $10 million prize for the first commercial space vehicle to actually work, but Bezos' concept is so creative and so distinctly out of this world that it definitely warranted a blog post this afternoon.

As Bezos puts it "Our first objective is developing New Shepard, a vertical take-off, vertical-landing vehicle designed to take a small number of astronauts on a sub-orbital journey into space." How great does that sound? And wait until you see the actual New Shepard space vehicle! It looks straight out of a 1950s Ed Wood movie, except that there is no visible string dangling from the top of the screen -- this baby works!

Skip on over to their Web site and have a look at some of the pictures and streaming videos that Bezos himself was kind enough to post. Watching that thing take off, hover, and then set down like it's nothing sends chills down my spine. We're close, people. We are very very close to what seemed like science fiction only years ago. Since governments have taken their foot off the gas in the space race, it is now up to the private sector to step up and turn fantasy into a reality.

I guess that is part and parcel of the technology world. We take stuff out of people's dreams and fantasies and make it a reality. I remember as a kid thinking that video phones were the definition of the future and I was only born in 1982. Now we're not only talking on video cell phones, we're downloading "My Humps" by the Black Eyed Peas and using it as a ringtone to irritate the living hell out of the general populace. That isn't even useful, but people will pay for it, and if people are going to pay for it, somebody's going to provide it. Is a 20 minute trip to outer space useful? Not really. But people will pay for it. Whether it's a trip to space or a 99 cent ringtone of a terrible song, the tech industry will keep pushing things forward because it simply doesn't know how to stop.

The tech industry is kind of like a great white shark. When it comes close to the people, everybody takes notice, It's got plenty of suckers clinging onto the bottom and if the shark stops moving, it dies. Just like the tech industry will die if it stops moving forward. If the commercial space race is the next niche industry where money will be made, simple market economics will make sure that it happens. That's what it all boils down to -- market economics. Just ask the Black Eyed Peas.

Or Jeff Bezos, for that matter.

Andrew Rideout 

The biggest tech story of Jan. 10 is undoubtedly the unveiling of Apple's iPhone (universal reaction: “I want one!”) but the award for strangest story goes to the discovery that American contractors have been carrying Canadian spy coins.

According to reports in daily newspapers, three American defence contractors who had visited Canada between October 2005 and January 2006 were surprised to discover that some of the coins they carried had radio frequency transmitters hidden inside them.

And no, this is not a joke.

The story is weird for a couple reasons. First, the only known type of transmitter small enough to fit into a coin would be an RFID tag, devices typically used to track merchandise in warehouses and stores. But these little guys have very short range, so they could not be used to track a target's movements around a city unless, of course, thousands of RFID receivers have been clandestinely embedded in lamp posts and doorways. Of course, if you wanted to know if and when a target walked through one or two specific monitored doorways, a loaded Loonie could tell you that.

The second problem with this form of spying, as noted by security consultant Chris Mathers in The Toronto Star, is that coins are meant to be spent; anytime the target uses a handful of coins to buy a latte, the entire covert surveillance program gets stalled at the local Second Cup.

What is not weird about this story is that someone might want to track the activities of U.S. defence contractors. Call it jonesing for a James Bond life, but I suspect that type of spying goes on all the time, and bleeding-edge technology surely plays a leading role.

Peter Wolchak

Welcome to Backbone's new blog, a place of ideas, news and opinions. We hope you'll check back often and comment on what you read here. This section of our site is a great place for us and you to discuss the articles in Backbone and also to chew over the events of the day in the tech and business communities.

Case in point: if you will check your Globe and Mail today you will find our January/February issue with a focus on predictions for 2007. It is also online right on this very website.

We examine seven trends that we think will shape the coming year and impact your business. Read the article, and then let us know what you think by clicking the “comment” link below. Did we miss an important trend, or over-hype one you think is going nowhere? We want to hear about it.

Then read further into the issue, and let us know if your company uses too much paper or loses too many laptops to theft. And, what can we do about the unsavoury aspects of the Internet?

This is your space. Discuss, debate and make your voice heard.

Peter Wolchak

Cellphones are hugely popular, with about 50 per cent of Canadians owning one. The problem with cells is that minutes are costly. Skype is hugely popular, with more than 136 million registered users. The problem with Skype is you have to be sitting near a computer to use it.

So what we need is one mobile phone that can automatically link to either the Internet over Wi-Fi or to a cellular network. If you're in range of an available Wi-Fi signal, your call goes out over the Internet and is either free or very cheap. If there's no ’net connection, the call is made on the cellular network.

Industry watchers and enthusiastic users have been waiting a couple of years for this. Nokia came a step closer with the announcement at CES of its new N800 Internet Tablet. (Details at http://www.nokiausa.com/N800.) The N800 is an update of the Nokia 770, an earlier device that failed to take the market by storm.

With a Skype client available for download soon, N800 users will be able to make IP calls using this relatively small device. That's good news, especially as it comes from the world's largest cellphone company. But we're still waiting for Nokia to take the next step: add Skype to a cellphone and have the unit automatically switch from Wi-Fi to cell as needed. HP has also come close to this: the iPaq 6900 series is both a cellphone and a Wi-Fi device and you can use it for Skype, but at present the user has to choose either Skype or cellular for a call, and the time it takes to do this means most people will just opt for the convenience of always burning cell minutes.

Of course, Rogers, Bell and Telus are quite happy with the status quo; the lack of easy mobile Skype connectivity keeps customers burning cell minutes. But if cellphone companies want to keep their customers happy, it's time to deliver an integrated and seamless Skype experience.

Peter Wolchak

2006 was the first year since 1999 that file-sharing jumped into the media spotlight in a big way. But gone are those days of Shawn Fanning’s Napster and its Metallica-induced malaise. If you paid attention to CNN, Time and the recording industry in 1999 you would think that after seven years of file-sharing record stores would be a thing of the past and all of the Internet’s bandwidth would be wasted downloading Britney Spears songs—scary stuff, indeed.

Flash forward to 2006 and you have youtube. You have Myspace. You have iTunes. You have podcasting. You have Flickr. You have del.cio.us. You have RSS feeds. You have user-generated content that gives people exactly what they want, right when they want it.

How can we expect TV to compete with that?

Something different happened this time. It wasn’t music, it was video. It was blogs. It was pictures. It was profiles. It wasn’t about you downloading a Rolling Stones song. It was your co-workers videotaping you singing “Sympathy for the devil” at the office party you wish you could forget.

User-generated content gave us some incredible images over the past year. But more importantly, it has changed the dynamics of media so that CNN now counts on an army of unpaid people with cellphone cameras for the latest breaking news. When something eventful happens, bet money that faster than you can say “Macaca” the video is online.

Andrew Rideout