HP Labs India

HP Labs India Wins Runner-up in Wall Street Journal's Technology Innovation Awards 2006

The Wall Street Journal
11 Sept 2006

The Wall Street Journal's 2006 Technology Innovation Awards: And the Winners Are...

COMPUTER systems are notoriously finicky. They'll hum along just fine and then unaccountably slow down, freeze up or stop working altogether. Finding the cause of some unexplained problem is difficult and time-consuming, especially with complicated systems in real-life settings.

Bryan Cantrill and a team of engineers at Sun Microsystems Inc. have devised a way to diagnose misbehaving software quickly and while it's still doing its work. While traditional trouble-shooting programs can take several days of testing to locate a problem, the new technology, called DTrace, is able to track down problems quickly and relatively easily, even if the cause is buried deep in a complex computer system.

The DTrace trouble-shooting system from Sun was chosen as the Gold winner in The Wall Street Journal's 2006 Technology Innovation Awards contest, the second time in three years that a Sun entry has won the top award. The panel of judges, representing industry as well as research and academic institutions, selected Gold, Silver and Bronze award winners and cited one technology for an Honorable Mention. (The Wall Street Journal Asia has a separate Asian Innovation Awards program. The finalists will be profiled on Oct. 25 and the winners on Nov. 1.)

For the Technology Innovation Awards, now in their sixth year, judges considered novel technologies from around the world in several categories: medicine and medical devices, wireless, security, consumer electronics, semiconductors and others.

The Wall Street Journal screened more than 600 applications. The judges then considered 121 of the entries, selecting 12 category winners and 38 runners-up. Among the runners-up this year are some from India and Japan. Among the category winners are the top three award winners.

In selecting winners, judges considered whether the technology truly represents a breakthrough from conventional methods, rather than just an incremental improvement. (One of the judges, Robert Drost, won the Gold award for Sun Microsystems in 2004; he recused himself from voting on Sun's DTrace software.)

The Silver award went to HelioVolt Corp., of Austin, Texas, which has come up with a way to make lightweight solar-energy panels that are powered by an alternative to the more common silicon solar panel material and that can be applied to glass or other building materials.

HelioVolt President and Chief Executive B.J. Stanbery developed the method for manufacturing thin-film solar material based on a compound called CIGS, for copper indium gallium selenide, which is more efficient at producing energy than silicon-based solar cells.

Dr. Stanbery's advance uses the same kind of printing process used in making integrated circuits to apply a power-producing coating to just about any building material. With $8 million in venture funding, he is developing prototype equipment to begin CGIS film and hopes to have products available for testing by the end of next year.

Pfizer Inc. of New York and Nektar Therapeutics, of San Carlos, California, won the Bronze award for their development of a powdered, inhalable insulin treatment designed to replace shots for the treatment of diabetes.

Almost 200 million people world-wide suffer from diabetes, Pfizer says. But because using insulin to control blood-sugar levels has required daily shots, many sufferers don't get the treatment they need, leading to serious complications. Efforts to develop and manufacture a powdered insulin have been stymied by the technical challenges, which included coming up with a powder that can be absorbed into the bloodstream through the lungs and an inhaler that can be used to deliver an accurate dose.

The powdered insulin, along with a specialized inhaler that can disperse the powder effectively inside the lungs, was developed in the early 1990s by Nektar, a biotechnology company. The product, known as Exubera, was approved in January by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and by the European Commission, and is available in Germany, Ireland and the U.K. The company plans to make it available in the U.S. this month.

An Honorable Mention award went to Sonos Inc., Santa Barbara, California, for a system for broadcasting music around a home over a wireless network. With the system, music lovers can transmit tunes stored on a computer to speakers in several rooms.

Sonos's pleasing design and easy-to-use remote control have been praised by gadget reviewers and users, including at least one of the Innovation Awards judges. "I'm listening to it right now, and our entire family uses and enjoys it," said Diane Greene, president of VMware Inc., of Palo Alto, California.

Here are the winners in the 12 industry categories:

BIOTECH-MEDICAL

Pfizer's and Nektar's Exubera powdered insulin won in the biotech-medical category. Researchers for years have been looking for a substitute for insulin shots to control diabetes, and several leading pharmaceutical companies are in the process of developing their own inhalable alternative.

But Exubera is the first to market, and the leading competitors are still in clinical trials. (One rival, Novo Nordisk AS of Denmark, has sued Pfizer, claiming Exubera infringes on several Novo patents for inhalable insulin; a hearing on Novo's request for an injunction has been set for December. A Pfizer spokeswoman says the company is considering its defense but "is confident in the innovation behind the development of this important new medicine.")

While some judges questioned whether Exubera offers an improvement over injected insulin in treating diabetes, others said the drug could encourage diabetes sufferers to get treatment earlier and more often.

"This has such a tremendous advantage for a huge number of people world-wide," said Pedro Nueno, professor of entrepreneurship at the IESE Business School of the University of Navarra, in Barcelona, Spain, and excecutive president of the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai. "It is a real breakthrough."

CONSUMER ELECTRONICS

The Sonos digital-music networking system was the winner in this category. While other companies offer products that wirelessly broadcast music around a home, Sonos's use of mesh networks -- basically an efficient way to route data among multiple devices -- enables it to stream music between distant rooms without lost signals. Sonos also got extra points from judges for its user-friendly design.

Asian Runner-Up: HP Labs, India, for a gesture keyboard. It is a square tablet on which a pen-like stylus is used to enter characters in Devanagari and Kannada, two of India's national languages. Some judges said the device had the potential to reach areas of the Indian population neglected by the computer boom.

ENERGY AND POWER

HelioVolt won in this category for its process of making ultrathin solar-power materials. Mr. Stanbery founded HelioVolt in 2001 to devise a procedure to manufacture CIGS film cheaply and efficiently. The technology is still in its early stages; the company is using its funding to build prototypes of the equipment necessary for commercial-scale manufacturing. Still, judges liked the promise of delivering solar power at dramatically reduced cost. "Solar power at one-tenth the cost will be a revolution," said Sun's Mr. Drost.

ENVIRONMENT

ETwater Systems LLC, of Corte Madera, California, won for a landscape-irrigation system that promises to reduce water use by gauging the precise watering needs of a home or business based on the location's plants, soil types and rainfall. Unlike other electronically controlled watering systems, the technology uses Web-based controls for users to enter details about their irrigation needs -- landscape features, local watering restrictions, and soil and plant types. It also relies on a central computer to analyze weather conditions and determine each location's watering schedules; the centralized controls make is easier to update the software that performs that analysis. The four-year-old company has about 100 customers, mainly large commercial sites and residential developments.

MATERIALS

Eikos Inc., of Franklin, Massachusetts, won in this category for a transparent, electrically conductive coating that can be used, among other things, to make solar cells, flexible displays and touch-screen monitors that are less prone to dead spots. The company uses carbon nanotubes -- microscopic structures that can conduct electricity -- which it purifies and spreads as a clear coating. It has received contracts from the U.S. Air Force to develop a coating for aircraft canopies that can dissipate electrostatic charges, and from the U.S. Department of Energy to research the use of the coating in solar cells.

MEDICAL DEVICES

Incisive Surgical Inc., of Plymouth, Minnesota, won for a new mechanical skin stapler, which uses absorbable skin staples to close wounds after surgery. Traditionally, surgeons could choose mechanically applied metal staples, which are fast but require additional visits to have the staples removed, cause unsightly scarring and have a higher risk of infections. Or they could use absorbable sutures, which leave less scarring but take much longer to sew into place. Incisive's Insorb stapler, says John L. Shannon Jr. , the company's president and chief executive, can save up to two hours of suturing time for some surgeries. Since the company introduced the product in late 2004, more than 50,000 of the disposable staplers have been used.

IT SECURITY AND PRIVACY

AuthenTec Inc., of Melbourne, Florida, won for its fingerprint-reading technology, used to authenticate users of personal computers, cellphones and other devices. The TruePrint sensor uses radio-frequency waves to get more-accurate fingerprint readings by detecting the patterns under the surface of the skin.

The more accurate readings mean the sensors can be smaller and cheaper, reducing the cost of embedding fingerprint readers. About 10 million of the sensors have been sold and are used in laptops from Hewlett-Packard Co. and Lenovo Group, and cellphones offered by Japan's NTT DoCoMo Inc.

"This seems to have massively changed the commercial proposition and allowed them to sell very large numbers of sensors," said William Webb, an Innovation Awards judge and head of research and development at the U.K. Office of Communications.

SECURITY (FACILITIES)

AxonX LLC, of Sparks, Maryland, won for a security-camera system that uses artificial-intelligence software to detect and identify smoke and fire in large commercial buildings. While typical fire-detection systems either respond when smoke reaches a sensor or when a fire's heat triggers a sprinkler system, the axonX system analyzes video images picked up by security cameras to spot smoke or flames before fire advances.

SEMICONDUCTORS

Semprius Inc., a start-up based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, won for a process for making large-scale, high-performance electronic circuits that can be applied to any surface. The technology, developed by John Rogers, the company's president and co-founder, along with researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, does this by using a two-step process: In the first, electronic devices are formed on a semiconductor wafer using conventional techniques. Then -- and this is the tricky part -- an extremely thin layer that contains the complete transistor is lifted from the wafer and printed onto the desired material, which can include thin plastic sheets, fabric or rubber.

Among other things, the process can be used to make large flexible displays, or rubber gloves with built-in sensors that could be used by surgeons. Semprius (originally named pSi-Tech) recently developed a prototype automated printing system for cellphone displays.

Asian Runners-Up: Fujitsu Labs, QD Laser Inc. and the University of Tokyo, for their work on quantum-dot lasers. Quantum dots are semiconductor particles that are a single nanometer (one billionth of a meter) in size. Lasers using this technology are expected to play an important role in optical communication networks.

SOFTWARE

Sun Microsystems won for its DTrace trouble-shooting software.

Mr. Cantrill came up with the general idea for DTrace in 1996, while he was a computer-science student at Brown University, but didn't get to start work on it until late 2001. It took nearly three years for him and his team -- Michael Shapiro, a Sun distinguished engineer, and Adam Leventhal, a staff engineer -- to make it work; a final version shipped early last year as part of Sun's Solaris 10 operating system.

Where most debugging takes place as software is being developed, DTrace analyzes problems with systems that are in production -- running a company's database, say, or executing stock trades. It does this with a process called "dynamic tracing," which enables a developer or systems administrator to run diagnostic tests on a system without causing it to crash.

Before DTrace, such tests often took days or weeks to reproduce the problem and identify the cause. With DTrace, performance problems can be tracked to their underlying causes in hours, even minutes.

TECHNOLOGY DESIGN

Seagate Technology LLC, of Scott's Valley, California, won for a hard-disk recording technology that dramatically increases the amount of information that can be stored on a single disk. Seagate's "perpendicular" recording method stores data bits on end, which allows information to be more tightly packed than traditional methods, which store data bits parallel to the disk surface.

Seagate began shipping disk drives using the technology earlier this year, and expects that by the end of the year all of its disk-drive products will use the technology.

WIRELESS

Zensys Inc., of Fremont, California, won for wireless technology for controlling home lighting, entertainment and security systems. Like Sonos, Zensys uses a mesh network to transmit signals around a home -- in this case, radio waves convey on-off commands to any electrical device connected to the system.

By using a mesh network, instead of simple radio controls, the Zensys system can detect when a new device is added to or removed from the network and can route commands without interruption anywhere in a home. More than 125 home-electronics companies sell products that can work with the technology.