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Wall Street Journal's Technology Innovation Awards

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the fun-places-to-work dept.

Carl Bialik writes "Gene-sequencing company 454 Life Sciences was selected as the Gold Winner in the Wall Street Journal's 2005 Technology Innovation Awards. 'Around 750 applications were screened by a Wall Street Journal editor, who narrowed the field to 104 semifinalists. Then a panel of expert judges from industry, research organizations and academia scored each entry and picked the winners.' (Listen to an MP3 clip on how the judges chose.) Other winners include a company that has developed a low-cost method for manufacturing RFID tags; Riverbed Technology's network appliances; Fujitsu's ID system that uses the veins in a person's palm instead of fingerprints; and the Agitator tool to debug code."

3 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Academic experts were involved in the process?? by LeonGeeste · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why? They generally have no clue about how useful their innovations are to ordinary people. (Remember my story about the professor who justified memory metal on the grounds that it could reveal fish had been defosted? Yeah.) They're going to be biased in favor of solvers of "difficult" problems which confer no benefit on anyone. Just a thought.

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  2. Re:Solar Power by fbg111 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Too bad that 50% roof coverage only generates 25% of the power they need.

    Why too bad? Depending on the durability of the solar cells, it sounds like getting 25% of your energy needs for a fixed cost and no recurring costs would be quite efficient. Further, cover 100% of the roof (if possible) and get 50% of annual needs from solar? Sounds great. Add a fuel cell storage system to the mix and you've mitigated the risk of business stoppage from blackouts. Sounds like there's a lot of potential there.

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  3. 454 will be around by Mab_Mass · · Score: 2, Interesting
    As someone who is working in biotech, I can tell you that 454 Life Sciences is definitely going to be around in 2 years. Not only is this a great technology, they have already built an instrument which is being distributed by Roche (ie, one of the bigger names in biotech). At this point in the game, they can deliver more sequence information faster than anybody else.

    Also, this company does not do "gene-sequencing" as the summary states, but it instead goes "genome sequencing". This is a huge difference. (For those unfamiliar with the terms - genes are the relatively small stretches of DNA that encode for a specific protein that span hundreds of nucleotides, whereas the genome is the total set of all DNA that goes into the organism and stretches for millions of nucleotides in bacteria to billions of nucleotides in humans.)

    454's technology is able to sequence almost all of a bacteria in a matter of days. (I say "almost all" because of very specific technical/biological considerations more complicated than I wish to explain.) To get to a comparable point with traditional sequencing, it would take months.