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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."

14 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. WTF? by east+coast · · Score: 4, Funny

    Half-Life 2 didn't win for software? What a bunch of n00bz.

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  2. Other Awards by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Insightful
    • Yahoo & Google for developing technology to assist PRC in filtering news and tracking radicals
    • Music companies for unmitigated greed in trying to muscle Apple into increasing prices
    • Sony and Blu-Ray coalition on develping new standards which drive a stake through the heart of, and bury Fair Use

    Kinda have to keep in mind what Wall Street is really interested in.
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  3. Riverbed's stuff rocks! by wedding · · Score: 3, Informative

    Great to see this company getting some attention. We're using their devices, and it borders on black magic how much data reduction they're able to do over our WAN. I highly recommend them for anyone setting up a branch office!

  4. Fujitsu's ID system is Big Brother scary! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Fujitsu's ID system that uses the veins in a person's palm instead of fingerprints

    Fujitsu's system can not only identify you, but alert authorities to the last time you masturbated.

  5. Its nice to see by mymaxx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    that someone recognized an innovation (see MIT's water purification solution) that isn't going to make a lot of money, but works to solve a serious problem.

  6. Doesn't Matter... by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Insightful
    How many of these companies will actually be around in 2 years? Great products don't always translate into success.

    Their IP will live on forever and be accumulated by some little holding company with a PO Box in rural Wisconsin. A year after any company produces a product anything like what their portfolio includes and they'll up-end the Bucket o' Laywers and it's Game On!

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    1. Re:Doesn't Matter... by BarryJacobsen · · Score: 2, Funny

      Their IP will live on forever and be accumulated... in rural Wisconsin.

      As someone who has lived in rural Wisconsin, I assure you there is nothing remotely close to "Intellectual" there.

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  7. Solar Power by saskboy · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Solar Integrated Technologies Inc., Los Angeles, won for its solar roof system designed for large commercial and industrial buildings. The company combines a lightweight, flexible solar-energy system with a single-ply roofing membrane, enabling buildings to generate solar power from their flat rooftops. It has installed SmartRoof panels on a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Los Angeles and a Frito-Lay distribution warehouse in Torrance, Calif.; the Frito-Lay building's 70,000-square-foot roof is less than half covered with solar panels, but the system generates more than a quarter of the building's annual energy needs."

    Too bad that 50% roof coverage only generates 25% of the power they need. Perhaps they could get the rest from geothermal energy, although at some plants that would certainly be out of the question.

    It pains me to see new buildings going up without any form of solar panels, or light tubes put into them, when it wouldn't cost much to do so, and saves energy in the long run.

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    1. 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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  8. Found the related MIT Webpage by mymaxx · · Score: 3, Informative

    Since the WSJ didn't link to it, here is MIT's web page for their filtration system: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/nepalwater.html

  9. mp3 clip by minus_273 · · Score: 2, Funny

    this is slashdot! it's not and MP3 clip it's a PODCAST!

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  10. 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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  11. Flamebait by slashing1 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Parent is an unfair characterization of the WSJ article. Obviously we are talking about companies with a profit motive here, but even nonprofit international aid and development organizations talk about the profit motive-- in the form of "sustainable development." The article specifically cites inventions that are not financially rewarding, for example

    "Clean water is not sexy, and $20 a year won't make anyone rich," says Robert Drost, a scientist at Sun Microsystems Inc.

    from the overall Honorable mention award. The overall Silver went to a company that is reducing toxic pollutants and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions through energy reduction.

  12. 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.