Innovations That Reinvent The Wheel

By Leslie Walker
Thursday, February 20, 2003; Page E01

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:

• ActiveWord Systems (www.activewords.com) aims to speed up computing by letting people create text shortcuts to automate tasks. You could choose "em," for example, to launch your e-mail manager and open a blank message, or "exp" to launch your Web browser and take you to Expedia.com. These "active words" are similar to keywords in America Online, only they are customizable and work across many different software applications. Pricing for the software starts at $10.

• Delean Vision showed a technique for creating a "visual skin print," using new software that generates unique patterns from the way light hits a person's skin. The company claims its visual skin prints can uniquely identify anyone from a simple digital photograph.

• 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.

• TerraDigital Systems (www.terraplayer.com) showed a wireless music player designed to store all the CDs in your music collection and put them literally at your fingertips. The rectangular box has a small touch screen displaying lists of artists and songs, sorted by genre or personally created playlists. You play music by touching an icon of the album or name of the song you want to hear, then dragging it to a "play" button. The TerraPlayer has two parts -- a wireless base station and a receiver -- and connects to your computer so it can pull down album information from the Internet. When TerraPlayers go on sale this spring, they will start at $800. The device is still in the prototype stage, though, and its creators are seeking partnerships to make and distribute them that could lower the cost.

• Digital Sun (www.digitalsun.com) was one of several companies showing wireless "meshed" networks in which sensors communicate with each other and a base station to accomplish a task more efficiently. For Digital Sun, the task is watering lawns. Skinny stakes are stuck in the ground with sensors to monitor the soil, detecting when water is needed and how much. That data is swapped wirelessly among sensors and eventually beamed back to a controller box, hooked up to a sprinkler system. Pricing starts at $150 for the controller and a single sensor.

• Liquid Machines (www.liquidmachines.com) showed a novel approach to securing a company's intellectual property. Harvard computer science professor Michael Smith devised new software that gives corporations dynamic control over the digital content their employees can access, copy and e-mail to other people. It's not cheap -- $50,000 is the starting price -- but several big companies are already testing the software. The idea is to give companies more flexibility in creating access controls -- and revoking them on the fly -- for material on their internal networks.

Leslie Walker will host a Live Online discussion with Demo producer Chris Shipley next Thursday at 1 p.m. at www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline. Her e-mail address is walkerl@washpost.com.