The role of information technology in healthcare reform is such a huge, sprawling topic that it’s hard to make any real progress in just an hour or two of discussions. Yet that’s just what transpired at a stellar event last night called “Healthcare-IT—Innovations That Will Transform Healthcare Now and in the Future.” It all took place at the Herban Feast in Sodo Park, South Seattle, and it was organized by the Washington Technology Industry Association.

Over some fancy appetizers, a distinguished panel of technologists, executives, and entrepreneurs debated everything from the technical and cultural issues of privacy and security in electronic medical records to who’s going to get a piece of the $19 billion in federal stimulus funding for digital healthcare; everything from whether consumers really want e-health enough to drive regulatory changes to—and this was particularly interesting to Xconomy—what the real opportunities are for startups in the space. The panel showcased some of the first-rate expertise we have here in the Seattle and Portland regions.

Moderator Joel French, the founder and managing director of Nephalios Group, a management consultancy, kicked things off by saying the whole healthcare debate boils down to four things: a cost problem, quality variability, access and coverage, and wellness. In each of these issues, IT plays an important role. “You can’t really share information if it’s not digital,” French said.

With that, it was open season on the panelists:

—Henry Albrecht, CEO of Bellevue, WA-based Limeade, an online health and productivity startup making software-as-a-service for employers (we reported Limeade raised money in July).

—Carla Corkern, CEO and chairman of Bellevue, WA-based Talyst, a company that makes software and systems to help pharmacies manage medications in hospitals and long-term care facilities (we reported on Talyst’s broader strategy and funding in June).

—Luis Machuca, CEO of Hillsboro, OR-based Kryptiq, a maker of collaborative software that lets healthcare providers share information with patients, labs, and physicians (we’ve reported on some of Kryptiq’s deals and customers, including NASA).

—Mohan Nair, executive vice president and chief marketing executive of Oregon-based Regence, the largest health insurer in the Northwest (he has a background in tech entrepreneurship).

—Michael Raymer, global market strategist and general manager for Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group (we’re reported on HealthVault, the company’s Web platform for medical records).

For the next hour, some tough questions flew out from the audience, and among the panelists. Here are my takeaways from the discussion:

1. “The magic pill is data liquidity.” That was from Luis Machuca, who argued that patients need to be able to own and access their own digital health information and use it to get better healthcare. “Universal health will fail, everything will fail, if we don’t have data liquidity and digitization,” Machuca said.

2. An open market, human behavior, and connectivity are important too. Nair argued that the present closed marketplace for healthcare services encourages entitlement instead of earned rewards. Albrecht noted that we should pay more attention to behavior, and less to technology. Raymer added, “Data liquidity needs to be coupled with tools to empower people to make changes, and connect people together.”

3. If you want better healthcare, go to jail. “We see the best compliance for …Next Page »

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Tadayoshi Kohno spends his career looking at life through the eyes of a criminal, and he’s teaching University of Washington students to do the same. The UW computer science and engineering assistant professor studies computer security and privacy, which to Kohno means anticipating the bad guy’s moves before he does. I chatted with him recently to find out more about the “security mindset,” how you teach it, and what this mysterious bad guy could do using ingenious technology hacks.

“We’re seeing computers in all aspects of our lives, in medical devices, exercise equipment, cars, airplanes, utility systems, power lines, everywhere,” Kohno said. “One of my main concerns is that while we’ve thought a lot about security for our desktop computers, computing is much broader than that, and we need to address security for all of it.”

Kohno’s interest in security goes back to his teenage years, when as a 10th grader he won the Colorado History Day competition with an essay about the history of cryptography. During his doctoral work, Kohno revealed security flaws in the software of electronic voting machines. The machines, which were rising in popularity following the 2000 presidential election, could easily be hacked to manipulate votes or reveal people’s voting choices, Kohno said.

Since then, he and his graduate students at the UW have pointed out security holes in technologies such as implantable cardiac defibrillators, pacemakers, radio frequency identification tags (which are used, among other places, on many credit cards and Washington state’s new enhanced driver licenses), and the Nike + iPod sport kit (the workout tracker that fits inside running shoes). His group has also recently developed software that causes messages or data to self-destruct after a set period of time. The program, Vanish, is one step towards a security answer to the problem of putting all your information into the “cloud” of sites such as Facebook or Google, Kohno said, where it might be backed up and never fully deleted.

I found his group’s revelations about implantable medical devices especially chilling. Right now, devices such as cardiac defibrillators signal wirelessly only over short distances, to allow doctors to adjust them without surgery. But in the future, Kohno said, he can see technology advancing to the point where those wireless signals have a longer range, and that’s where the real danger to the patient comes in. Beyond just gleaning a patient’s medical and other personal information, a defibrillator hacker could send signals to shut off the device or send electric shocks to the patient’s heart. In 2008, Kohno’s group managed to perform these potentially fatal hacks on a real defibrillator (not in a person).

“This is a wake-up call for the industry and the FDA that these are serious issues, or could become serious in the future,” Kohno said. “I believe that providing the first concrete evidence is the first step toward having a broader impact.”

To figure out which piece of technology he’s going to hack into next, Kohno asks what the next big thing in technology is going to be over the next five to 10 years, that people might not have examined for security gaps. Then he tries to think of every damaging thing a devious person could do with that technology, if they hacked into it. “I think I have always liked to play the game of looking for holes in the system,” Kohno said, when I asked him how he first got interested in security.

Kohno, who is kicking off the Technology’s Alliance’s Science and Technology Discovery Series with a lecture this morning, also teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on computer security at UW, and is planning a security lecture or event for middle school and high school students sometime in the next year. Even though most of his students won’t go on to become security professionals, Kohno sees his courses on the “security mindset,” or how to think one step ahead of the hackers, as valuable for the computer industry, so that those working on new technologies will know when to call in the experts. “I want students have the habit of saying ‘what if’ when they see a new system,” he said. “The gritty details are much less important than having the mentality of asking, ‘What if something bad happens?’”

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Seattle-based WhitePages, the Web and mobile online directory, announced today it has redesigned its website for $2.5 million. The site is meant to help customers across the U.S. connect with each other by phone, text, e-mail, or snail mail. It includes new privacy controls and a user interface intended to improve services for customers and advertisers. WhitePages was founded in 1997 and is led by CEO Alex Algard.

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The private e-mail addresses of several hundred customers of Waltham, MA-based Pixily were accidentally shared with other customers Saturday in the aftermath of an Internet routing snafu that left many users unable to reach the document-scanning service for several hours.

The breach, in which names intended for the “bcc” line of a customer service e-mail explaining the routing problem were put into the “cc” line instead, was the result of “human error,” according to Pixily co-founder and chief product officer Anand Rajaram.

The shared data included e-mail addresses only, and involved only a small fraction of Pixily’s customer list—not the entire list, as Fidelity Ventures’ Larry Cheng posted on Twitter today.

“We view customer security and privacy extremely seriously, and we have a level of trust with the people who use us,” Rajaram told Xconomy. “Our customers have been pretty supportive [about the problems] so far.”

In his own tweet this afternoon, Pixily CEO Prasad Thammineni said the e-mail system used to send out the customer service alerts was not the same one used to communicate with customers about their confidential scanned documents. “[The] entire management is in the office to address this issue and to make sure it does not happen again,” Thammineni wrote to Xconomy.

Update 10:45 pm 7/11/09: Pixily has posted an entry on its company blog (and a comment on this story, see below) apologizing for the e-mail error. The post says that the company will automate customer service communications in the future to eliminate the possibility of human error, and it is offering affected users one envelope’s worth of free document scanning.

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Steven Gal, who founded San Diego-based ProQuo to help consumers control their personal information and reduce their junk mail, bid a fond farewell in an e-mail blast this afternoon.

“I can’t say I saw this economic nuclear winter coming last year when I decided to take a sabbatical from tech startups and return to teaching after 13 years away,” Gal wrote. “It has been a roller coaster transition, but I am pleased that ProQuo’s new leader, Bob Nascenzi (former COO of TargusInfo) is now well on board. Today is my last day as CEO of ProQuo, and I will be remaining on the Board of Directors.”

Gal says he’ll be teaching entrepreneurship at Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management in Ithaca, NY. But he plans to return to San Diego in a year.

Before he started ProQuo in 2007, Gal was a co-founder of San Diego’s ID Analytics, which analyzes consumer transactions for telltale signs of fraud. He worked there in various executive capacities.

ProQuo’s free online service enables consumers to review various mass-market mailing lists (for coupons, credit cards, catalogs, etc.) and decide with a click of the mouse what junk mail they really want to receive. In effect, it gives consumers a way to selectively customize their mailing list so they only get the catalogs they want, which also happens to make each list a more targeted—and valuable—marketing tool. ProQuo, which makes money by selling the customized lists, says consumers can reduce their unwanted junk mail by 50 to 90 percent within a few months. The startup has received a total of $15 million in venture capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetson of Menlo Park, CA, San Diego’s Mission Ventures, and Western Technology Investment, a venture lender in San Jose, CA.

Gal says he’s excited about the change of scenery, and so is his family.

“My family and I are excited about our upcoming adventure,” Gal writes. “It is a privilege on so many levels—to return to my undergrad alma mater to teach, to get the opportunity to think, work and study with students and faculty again during the very interesting times in which we live—and to introduce my kids who don’t own long pants to a real winter.”

What he doesn’t say is whether he’s told his shorts-only kids that snowfall in Ithaca averages 120 inches a year.

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The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation (OCABR) has taken pity on recession-dazed business owners in the state, putting off the deadline for meeting new data encryption regulations from January 1, 2009, to May 1, 2009, and then postponing enforcement again until January 1, 2010. Sooner or later, though, all Massachusetts businesses small and large will have to comply with the new rules, which are designed to combat breaches of private data like those that have struck Framingham, MA-based TJX and Scarborough, ME-based Hannaford Bros.

As I observed back in December, one business’s headache is another’s bounty. Massachusetts has a thriving cluster of companies in the computer security, risk management, and compliance business, and some of them are greeting the new regulations as an opportunity to sell data protection technologies and services down-market to companies much smaller than those they’re used to dealing with.

Liquid Machines, a Harvard University spinoff in Waltham, MA, is one of those companies. It sells data-loss-prevention software that gets inside office software such as word-processing programs and e-mail clients, automatically encrypts all of a business’s digital documents, and controls who gets to view them. The software is targeted at Fortune500-scale companies with thousands of employees, and Liquid Machines normally wouldn’t bother trying to market it to small- and medium-sized businesses. But through a recently announced partnership with Mansfield, MA-based HR Knowledge, a payroll processing company, Liquid Machines now offers a cloud-based subscription version of its rights management software.

I got the lowdown on so-called “Information Protection for Compliance Solution” last week from HR Knowledge president and CEO Jeff Garr and Liquid Machines vice president of corporate development Ed Gaudet. Until recently, Gaudet says, most state regulations around data privacy have been non-prescriptive—they merely required companies to notify customers in the event of a data breach. “But now you’ve got Massachusetts and Nevada and other states saying, ‘Thou shalt encrypt,’ and that opens up opportunities for companies that offer some type of encryption, which Liquid Machines does and has since the beginning,” Gaudet says.

Specifically, the new Massachusetts regulations—known by the melodious name 201 CMR 17.00—require that all businesses operating in the state encrypt all personal information stored on computer hard drives or transmitted electronically. The rules, which apply to both employee data and customer data, define “personal information” as a person’s last name and first name or first initial in combination with confidential data such as a social security number, a driver’s license number, a bank account number, or a credit or debit card number.

While most of the large organizations that are Liquid Machines’ typical clients already encrypt their data and will be able to meet the new requirements without a struggle, that’s not the case for the thousands of smaller companies in the state—hence the opportunity. Yet Liquid Machines isn’t set up to cater to small companies; its rights-management approach to document software requires some training and handholding up front, a process that gets even more demanding if a company isn’t large enough to have its own IT department. “We made some early forays into this and we learned that it really requires knowledge of small businesses and an understanding of what they know and don’t know,” says Gaudet.

Which is where HR Knowledge comes in. “When we first found out [about 201 CMR 17.00] it concerned me greatly, because I hadn’t heard about it and I feared my clients hadn’t either,” says Jeff Garr. “And it’s just as I thought If I go out and talk to 10 small businesses, three or four won’t know anything about the law, and five or six will have heard of it but won’t know much about it, and none of them will have any clue about what they need to go to get compliant.”

But as it happens, Liquid Machines outsources much of its HR and payroll operation to HR Knowledge. “When we learned that one of our clients is in this space, one thing led to another, and we realized there might be an opportunity to partner up and provide a service to assist companies with compliance,” says Gaudet.

The Information Protection for Compliance Solution, rolled out on March 16, is a slimmed-down version of Liquid Machines’ rights-management software that …Next Page »

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In Finland I am a reporter for Ilta-Sanomat, Helsinki’s second-largest newspaper. I write about Finland’s Nokia a lot, so I may have a different perspective on Qualcomm, the San Diego-based chipset maker.

For us Finns, Nokia is a larger-than-life, close-to-home success story. We speak the same strange language and it’s our only global giant. In the United States, which is the leading market for mobile phones, Nokia lost its No. 1 ranking in cell phone sales when the clamshell design and thinner cell-phones became popular. Then came the iPhones. Nokia wants to change this situation and resume its leadership position in the U.S. market.

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) got new hope to fulfill its ambitions last month, when Qualcomm and Nokia announced a joint “Plan to Develop Advanced Mobile Devices.” A statement issued by the two companies on Feb. 17th didn’t provide many details about this collaboration. Qualcomm’s Steve Mollenkopf says in the statement, “This new level of cooperation would bring exceptional leaps in mobile performance to people around the world.”

Only last year Nokia and Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) settled a nasty patent fight. In Finland, Qualcomm was viewed by many as being very aggressive in its licensing demands. But this new collaboration benefits both organizations: Qualcomm gets its first deal with Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones; Nokia gets a fresh opportunity to reclaim its leadership in the U.S. market. Their mutual goal is to research and make the next-generation phones, which means iPhone killers.

One place where this collaboration may be playing out …Next Page »

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Rather than sending President Obama’s weekly Web video address to YouTube for hosting, as it has in past weeks, the White House published last Saturday’s video on its own website, Whitehouse.gov, which is hosted by Akamai. But an Akamai official says the company can’t comment on whether the widely discussed decision signals a permanent turn away from YouTube, which has been criticized for its use of cookies to track viewing patterns.

Cambridge, MA-based Akamai owns one of the world’s largest Web content distribution networks, and specializes in delivering broadband content such as video. As ReadWriteWeb and other blogs have noted, a simple “whois” search shows that it’s the host for the Whitehouse.gov domain.

The president’s webcasts had come to be known informally as the “the weekly YouTube address.” But YouTube uses persistent cookies, small files stored on users’ hard drives, to track who’s watching its videos, and federal policy forbids such persistent cookies on government sites. To the dismay of privacy advocates, the administration carved out an exemption to the rules for YouTube shortly after the inauguration, and observers such as Chris Soghoian, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, interpreted Saturday’s change as a response to the privacy concerns.

But according to a White House statement quoted last night in the New York Times Bits Blog, the administration hasn’t changed its policy on YouTube videos. Saturday’s switch was merely an experiment, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said. Google itself weighed in later on its public policy blog, saying that the reports that the White House had ditched YouTube were wrong. The company added that it has now created an embeddable video player that handles cookies in a way that’s more consistent with federal privacy policies.

Curious about Akamai’s role in all this, I wrote today to Jeff Young, the company’s director of corporate communications. I asked him whether Akamai had worked directly with the White House to embed Saturday’s address, whether Akamai’s video player technology sidesteps the concern over cookies, and whether the company has any insight into the White House’s Web video plans. Young was unable to provide any answers. “I can’t comment on any of this, at this time,” he said in an e-mail reply.

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If not for a reprieve granted in mid-November by the Massachusetts Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation (OCABR), most businesses in the Bay State would be spending these last two weeks before the New Year rushing to meet state mandates requiring the encryption of personal data about Massachusetts residents stored on laptops or transmitted across public networks. But while businesses now have until May 1—rather than the original January 1 deadline—to comply with the new regulations, which are designed to combat a recent epidemic of corporate data breaches and identity theft in the state, the burden on companies to protect personal data hasn’t gotten any lighter. Local companies, including Web-based businesses that collect information about their users, need to start thinking now about how they’ll comply with the new standards, or face increased liability later, say local security industry leaders.

“The Massachusetts regulation is extremely broad in scope and potentially covers every business of every size, even mom-and-pop joints that do credit-card transactions or just write someone’s name and account number in their ledgers,” says Nagraj Seshadri, head of product marketing at Utimaco Software, a security subsidiary of Burlington, MA-based antivirus company Sophos. “It’s also got a lot of implementation-related specifications. Many of the earlier regulations simply said ‘protect the data,’ but this gets into the details about encrypting data on your laptops, ensuring your wireless networks are encrypted, and verifying that your operating system patches and antivirus signatures are up to date. It is something that can potentially be quite far-reaching.”

Published in September, the Massachusetts regulation defines “personal information” as a resident’s last name and first name or first initial whenever it’s stored in combination with a social security number, a driver’s license number, a bank account number, or a credit or debit card number. The new rules make Massachusetts one of only two states that require all businesses to encrypt such data whenever it’s stored on a laptop hard drive or transmitted electronically. (The other is Nevada.) And as Seshadri notes, the rules affect pretty much every business in the state—even those that don’t collect consumer financial data—since they apply to employee data, such as tax withholding data and automatic deposit information, as well as consumer data.

In at least two ways, however, the new regulations could become a boon for the local economy. After massive and well-publicized incidents of data loss at area companies, including the 2006 theft of some 45 million credit card numbers from Framingham, MA-based TJX (NYSE: TJX) and the revelation last spring that intruders had place credit- and debit-card-scooping malware on hundreds of servers owned by the Scarborough, ME-based Hannaford Bros. supermarket chain, the new measures may help to restore consumers’ confidence that companies can protect their personal information.

Moreover, because only 20 to 30 percent of business already own the software needed to protect data on laptop hard drives and wireless networks, according to a study by Forrester Research, the new regulations could also mean a bonanza for security software companies, which happen to be one bulwark of the Massachusetts technology economy. OCABR has estimated that the average small business with 10 employees will need to spend about $3,000 up front on the required software and up to $500 a month for ongoing administration, while bigger organizations could end up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Local security companies are already stepping up to offer their services. Utimaco, for example, sells a system called SafeGuard that’s used by administrators to enforce encryption policies and manage encryption keys across a company’s entire collection of PCs, laptops, PDAs, and e-mail systems. “The thing about this regulation is that it doesn’t simply say ‘encrypt it and forget it,’” says Seshadri. “It says you need to …Next Page »

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BlueKai, an online-marketing startup in Bellevue, WA, has nailed down one of the bigger tech venture deals of the past few months. The company is announcing today it has closed a $10.5 million Series B investment led by Battery Ventures, based in Waltham, MA, and Menlo Park, CA. The round also includes returning investor Redpoint Ventures.

The company’s name with the Hawaiian suffix (”kai” means ocean) is inspired in part by the bestselling business book Blue Ocean Strategy, which urges businesspeople to create a new market or “blue ocean” rather than fight it out with competitors in established markets. BlueKai seems to be applying this idea to online advertising, creating a completely new way for businesses to reach customers.

I spoke with BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol to get the story behind today’s deal. Tawakol, an MIT and Stanford University alum, is a veteran of Seattle-based Medio Systems and Bellevue-based Revenue Science. He started BlueKai in December 2007 with the idea of creating a huge database of online users’ preferences and intentions. The company provides data on users’ Web-browsing behavior to marketers, advertising networks, and publishers, and it collects a percentage of each ensuing transaction.

What makes BlueKai different from other related companies is its notion of “data exchange,” and the fact that it separates user data from everything else. A travel site, for instance, may sign up with BlueKai to provide anonymous user data. Publishers, airline marketers, and ad networks can then bid for the right to its “cookies”—snippets of code that tell where a user has been and what their preferences are—so as to more effectively target ads. “We’ve aggregated very high-value data at massive scale,” says Tawakol. “People pay for the data, instead of revenue sharing. That encourages big sellers, it gives them a revenue option that’s safe.”

Back in March, BlueKai closed a $3.2 million Series A round led by Redpoint. As Tawakol explains, the original plan was to focus on one “vertical” space—but the company got up and running in the travel, retail, and automotive sectors, ahead of schedule. “Our goal was to validate the concept in one vertical,” he says. “As it approached October, we had three verticals up with huge sellers, and a growing buyer base. So we thought, this is the right time to go for Series B…Our strategy was to keep our relationships with VCs, and we kept our contacts open.”

It seems to have paid off. Besides the infusion of capital, BlueKai gains the online-media expertise of Battery Ventures. Satya Patel, a Battery principal based in Silicon Valley, is joining the BlueKai board. Patel has previous experience as a product manager at Google and DoubleClick.

Tawakol isn’t naming names, but so far, BlueKai has signed up more than 20 large retailers, half of the top 20 ad networks, and several top travel search engines. He says the new funds will be used for “more investment in the product” and sales teams—to do things like add new categories and get more visibility. There will be modest growth in the staff, he says, which currently numbers 13.

I asked Tawakol whether consumers have to buy into the whole concept in order for BlueKai to take off. He emphasized that BlueKai is a business-to-business operation, and that its revenues are growing independent of any consumer push. But he acknowledged the privacy issue, pointing out that the company lets consumers opt out of having their data traded online, as well as letting you “see exactly what data is known about you by marketers” through its BlueKai Registry program.

As Tawakol points out, “If we don’t raise the bar and be more open with consumers, there could be FTC [Federal Trade Commission] backlash.” He adds that it’s important to be completely transparent about what is being done with user information.

All that said, Tawakol envisions a day, perhaps five to seven years from now, when Internet users will receive the equivalent of mileage points for their own data, and be able to trade them for goods and services. People could then manage their product preferences and other information, he says. “We’re creating an economy for data.”

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It was almost exactly a year ago that Microsoft launched its HealthVault service, a secure online database for users to store and manage their medical records. And in recent months, we’ve reported on the software giant’s increasing efforts in health care, including its new partnerships with prescription drug provider CVS Caremark and Boston, MA-based health startup American Well. Now, Microsoft is teaming up with San Diego-based Scripps Health to study the long-term effects of personal genome testing on health and lifestyle.

The study, which is co-sponsored by the Bay Area firms Affymetrix and Navigenics, seeks to do genetic scans on as many as 10,000 people affiliated with the non-profit Scripps Health system. The scans and analysis will tell participants about their genetic risk for health conditions like diabetes, obesity, heart attack, and certain types of cancer. But the point of the study is to follow what happens after that: will participants change their lifestyle to combat their newfound health risks, and if so, how? The plan is to track their behaviors over 20 years using detailed questionnaires and periodic health surveys. To protect the privacy of users, the identifying information on their saliva samples and questionnaires will be “encrypted and kept in a secure database,” according to Scripps.

What’s in it for Microsoft? Participants will be able to store their clinical and lifestyle information in a Microsoft HealthVault account, and access it or share it with health care providers. “This collaboration is a significant step forward in empowering people to proactively address their specific individual health needs, as well as give clinical researchers access to a broader pool of genetic data to develop new disease treatments,” said Peter Neupert, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s health solutions group, in a statement.

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Want wireless power? Better network privacy? Automated elder care? You’ve come to the right place.

That place is the 2008 Intel Research Seattle open house, which I had the opportunity to attend yesterday afternoon. I had gotten a sneak preview the day before from lab director David Wetherall, and just before hitting the demos, I also sat down with Intel’s vice president and director of research, Andrew Chien, for an overview. For the open house, Wetherall noted that Abel Weinrib, Intel’s vice president and director of the corporate technology group, was in attendance, along with representatives from Intel’s business units, and many Seattle-area researchers and industry types.

Then it was time for the fun stuff. Wandering around the sixth floor of Intel’s building near the University of Washington campus, I got a technology-packed tour from the lab’s associate director and principal engineer, Anthony LaMarca. I’ll give just a few of the highlights here. (All photos courtesy of Cheryl Miller at Intel.)

—First, I took in the latest progress in home-monitoring systems for elder care. These include sensors like radio-frequency identification tags on kitchen utensils, which then communicate with a computer to infer when a person is eating, drinking, taking proper medications, and so forth. I covered this area several years ago, and wondered just how far the tech implementation has come. “It’s gone from a vision to something much closer to reality,” said Wetherall. “We’re doing real trials, and sorting out the business value proposition too. We find many parties stand to gain if you do it the right way…Families like it, organizations like it, insurance companies like it. It helps with auditing, as well as providing appropriate care.”

The lab is working with the Veterans Administration on home tests. Home monitoring is related to a broader theme within Intel Research—what it calls “richly communicative” everyday sensing and perception. “Our insight was it was practically impossible to get the deployment right,” says Chien. “And to translate it to a business model was not going to fly.” Chien says the researchers set a “90-90″ goal: it should work for 90 percent of activities, for 90 percent of your day. “It’s a coverage goal, and it is really central to achieving large-scale commercialization of the technology,” Chien adds. “This is a second generation of sensing and perception…It’s one of our largest efforts.”

—James Landay, a professor of computer science and engineering at the UW and the previous director of Intel Research Seattle, showed me another example: a monitoring device to help you keep track of your exercise and activity levels, and even what kind of transportation you’re using on a daily basis (walking, biking, driving). An accelerometer and other sensors in the device connect to a processor, which uses your cell phone as a display. Landay says his team is in the process of porting the technology over to the iPhone (which has an onboard accelerometer), and possibly to phones that will run Google’s Android system, because the latter might be a more open platform.

—Intel research scientist Ben Greenstein showed me the “trustworthy wireless” project, which is about improving privacy for users of wireless devices. On a monitor was a map of Seattle showing all the locations his laptop had been broadcasting signals that anyone could use to figure out his identity and where he lives (with software available on the Internet). Another monitor showed exactly what information is sent out when his laptop tries to find a wireless network, or when he opens an e-mail while connected to a network. Greenstein pointed out one nefarious use I hadn’t thought of: a corporate spy might be able to figure out connections between companies and anticipate certain deals just by hanging out in their vicinity. “They might work out if something’s going down,” he says. To defend against this, Greenstein’s software goes in and limits the information being sent out by a device, by working at different levels of the wireless device and network.

—Who knew that Intel works this much on robots? Principal engineer Josh Smith, who did his Ph.D. at MIT with Neil Gershenfeld, showed me a few “personal robotics” projects, including a robotic arm and hand with springy actuators to make it softer, safer, and more adaptive to manipulating objects in its environment (see top photo). Electric-field sensors and a video camera allow it to recognize objects and tell when it is gripping a cup or an apple, say. “Manipulation is the big, hard problem for robotics now,” Smith says. If home helper robots ever take off, I’m thinking Intel wants to be the one to supply their brains.

—Lastly, the most visually striking (and technically speculative) demo was one on “wireless power.” This is the idea that you could potentially charge your phone or laptop without plugging it into a wall socket. Wouldn’t that be something? I didn’t believe it when I first heard about the research at MIT last summer, which was published in the journal Science. (Doing power transfer via electromagnetic radiation has efficiency and safety issues.) But the new idea, which is based on magnetic fields, has held up so far. Alanson Sample, a graduate student in electrical engineering at the UW, showed a demo of a light bulb being turned on by 60 watts of power transferred from one magnetic coil to another, about two feet away (see photo, left). It works by setting up a resonance between the powering coil and the remote coil connected to the light bulb, which gives you an energy efficiency of about 75 percent. Alanson said he’s working on setting up magnetic loops to fit on a laptop. A visitor from laptop-maker Lenovo seemed very interested.

All in all, Intel seems convinced it is getting its money’s worth from its UW research collaborators. “We are the eyes and ears in the community,” says Intel’s LaMarca, who adds that if there’s an interesting idea in the innovation community, the lab makes sure Intel hears about it. On the UW side, the partnership seems to be going well, too. “We’re very excited about the lab being here, and having our faculty members run it,” says Hank Levy, chairman of the department of computer science and engineering at UW. “The lab changes focus every couple of years, but it also keeps some continuity.”

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On a clear day, David Wetherall can see Mount Rainier from his desk. On a clearer day, he can see the future of Intel. OK, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But Wetherall, the director of Intel Research Seattle, has certainly been charged with leading an exploratory research effort for the chip-making giant—blue-sky, “off-roadmap” stuff that won’t be in Intel’s products anytime soon, but is nonetheless vital to the company because it could help create the broader future of computing.

Intel Research Seattle, located three blocks from the University of Washington campus, is one of three Intel labs tied closely to universities around the country—the others are at UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The Seattle lab, which opened in 2001, has 20 full-time researchers, with about an equal number of students, interns, and visiting researchers at any given time.

I sat down with Wetherall yesterday as he was doing last-minute preparations for today’s annual lab open house. Wetherall has been director of the Seattle lab since mid-2006. He is also an associate professor of computer science and engineering at UW, and his own research has focused on wireless networks and distributed systems. It’s an unusual model, in that Intel hires its research lab directors for three-year terms, after which they typically go back to academia full-time. (Wetherall is the third director of the Seattle lab.) “The lab has a charter, to bring in new people from the university,” says Wetherall. This helps “invigorate things” and keeps the lab’s research on the “cutting edge.”

As Wetherall explains, it’s a pretty open and forward-looking effort. “We have a lot of joint research, projects where university people work here, and we also fund research at the university. It’s a big way we get things done. There is a joint, open collaborative agreement between Intel and UW. People don’t have to sign an NDA,” says Wetherall. “We’re not focused on an immediate product, we’re focused around opening markets…We’re chartered with doing disruptive research that’s not on the product map. Intel is interested in new computing technologies. We’re trying to invent them, and stay ahead of the game. We’re a small scout organization looking for game-changing technologies.”

The Seattle lab’s research theme is “focused on future computer systems woven into the fabric of everyday life,” says Wetherall. It’s the next step in the evolution of computers as they migrate from desktops to mobile devices to embedded devices. “We try to figure out what technologies and usage models work, how to power them, how to provide privacy, how to do sensing,” he adds. Researchers at the lab have expertise in hardware, robotics, machine learning, wireless networks, and human-computer interfaces, among other disciplines. “We believe in prototyping, from hardware through software systems, and we have a user-centered viewpoint,” says Wetherall. “We are finding out what users want.”

It sounds a lot like the “connected computing” (or ubiquitous computing) trend that the founders of Voyager Capital were telling me about last week, from an investor’s perspective—the confluence of software, wireless, and digital media. I asked Wetherall what connections the Intel lab has with the local innovation community in these areas. …Next Page »

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Best Energy May Be Under Our Feet

Everybody talks about wind and sun as among the most promising new sources of energy the world can tap. But speaking at the National Energy Summit in Las Vegas this week, Dan Reicher, director of climate and energy initiatives at Google, said the “killer app” of energy may be enhanced geothermal systems, which use artificial means to get heat from under the Earth’s crust. The New York Times science section offers a video interview with Reicher on its site

Google Says It’s Committed to Health-Data Privacy

Google has its thumb in a lot of pies these days, including the medical world with its Google Health application, which consolidates users’ medical data. Eric Sachs of Google spoke this week at the Harvard Privacy Symposium, and assured listeners that Google is committed to keeping users in control of their health records. He reiterates that point at Google’s Public Policy blog.

Packet Scanning Raises Privacy Concerns

Web surfers concerned about their privacy have a new worry with the recent rise in deep packet scanning, which service providers use to track their customers’ habits so they can better target sales pitches. The Washington Post says deep packet scanning only recently became practical, thanks to increases in processor power, and that lawmakers are starting to question the use of the technology

Full Disclosure Important to Security, Expert Argues

The recent case in which a judge (temporarily) quashed a presentation by MIT students on vulnerabilities in Boston’s public transportation system has raised the hackles of both computer security experts and First Amendment supporters, who argue that the injunction was unconstitutional prior restraint. Writing in Wired, the chief technology security officer of BT Global Services argues that secrecy is a fragile safeguard against hacking attacks, and that responsible disclosure is in everyone’s best interests

Wind Fights Coal on Mountain Top

Global warming experts will say wind is a superior energy source to coal because it doesn’t release the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now a grassroots group in West Virginia is also arguing wind beats coal–at least on Coal River Mountain, where a planned coal mine would tear up the mountain top. The group hired a wind energy consultant, which argues it would be more economical to install 220 2-megawatt wind turbines on the mountain top, Earth2Tech writes. Not answered: Would you be proud to be a wind farmer’s daughter?

Economist Holds Online Energy Debate

Do you think the world’s energy problems can be solved with existing technologies, or must there be breakthrough innovations to move us beyond our dependence on coal and oil? You can read the pros and cons on that question and then voice your own opinion in an online energy debate at The Economist’s website. Votes may be cast until August 29.

Comcast Will Throttle Some Internet Users

The Federal Communications Commission ruled earlier this month that Comcast violated the law when it slowed down data speeds for peer-to-peer file transfers. Comcast has responded by saying it won’t throttle down Internet access for specific applications. Instead, CNET News reports, it will target heavy bandwidth users, throttling their speeds for up to 20 minutes at a time

States Ditch Computer Voting

Break out the butterfly ballots. After a number of states spent $2 billion to replace old-fashioned voting systems with touchscreens, several of those states are reversing course and getting rid of the electronic voting machines ahead of the November presidential election. Ars Technica reports that states including Alaska, California, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Tennessee, and New Mexico will get rid of their voting machines in favor of old-fashioned paper ballots

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Web Surfers Give Away Secrets Online

Most Internet users—84 percent—say they don’t give out personal data online, but actually 89 percent of them do, according to a study done by AOL. ComputerWorld reports that the study found that, while people seem to be aware of the dangers of giving away data, they don’t actually take steps to protect themselves. The study also found that 34 percent of users expect to be a victim of credit card fraud, even though it’s only happened to 11 percent.

Telemedicine Boosts Healthcare, Study Finds

Two-way video conferencing between medical specialists and patients can lead to better outcomes than simply consulting over the telephone, according to a study in Lancet Neurology. Ars Technica says the study found that stroke victims in rural or remote areas were correctly diagnosed more often through telemedicine than by phone, 98 percent versus 82 percent.

Systems Takes the Hum Out of Turbines

One common barrier to using wind turbines to produce electricity is that their neighbors complain about the noise caused by the spinning blades and cogwheels. Now a German researcher has come up with an active noise damping system to counteract the problem. The Chemical Engineer Today reports that the system measures changing vibration frequencies and produces vibrations designed to cancel them out.

Bright Insects Identify Medicinal Plants

Drug discovery specialists have a new tool to lead them to plants that may have undiscovered medicinal benefits; they just have to follow the bugs. According to New Scientist, researchers have found that brightly colored insects like to sit on medicinally active plants. The plant produces substances the insects can use, and the bugs display bright colors to warn predators that they’re toxic.

Spyware Declines, But the Net Isn’t Safe

Some major online risks, such as spyware, are dropping in prevalence, but that doesn’t mean the Internet is free of danger. The PolicyBeta blog reports that a study by Consumer Reports found a 56 percent decline in the rate of serious spyware problems. Still, spyware cost the country $3.6 billion over the last six months, the report says.

Cotton-Backed Solar Cells on the Way

A company says it has developed a backing for solar cells made from cotton and castor oil, Greentech Media reports. BioSolar, of Santa Clarita, CA, says the bio-based backing is more environmentally friendly and will be about 25 percent cheaper than the petroleum-based film backing most solar cells use today.

States See Revenue Potential Online

Digital downloads—of games, music, and TV episodes—are soaring in popularity, and many states are thinking they ought to get a piece of the action. Daily Tech reports that 17 states and the District of Columbia now tax digital downloads. While lobbyists in California and Wisconsin have fought off the revenuers, other states are considering adding new taxes.

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Electric Bikes Look More Appealing

A new generation of electric bicycles hasn’t quite caught on yet, but if gas prices continue to rise, they just might, one dealer tells the Chicago Sun Times. This isn’t your father’s moped; the new bikes have smaller motors and batteries that can propel riders for 20 miles before recharging, with top speeds near 20 mph.

Cell Phone Locations Should be Private, Groups Argue

It should take a warrant for the government to get a person’s cell phone location data, four groups are arguing in a court brief. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the ACLU of Pennsylvania filed the brief challenging a government attempt to obtain location data from cell phone companies, Ars Technica reports. The groups say the records reveal people’s location even when they’re in private spaces, and should be subject to Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search and seizure.

Group Opposes Broadband Throttling or Metering

Network congestion is only sporadic, not widespread, and should not lead to either blocking of peer-to-peer file exchange or tiered pricing plans, the media reform group Free Press argues. GigaOm says the group has released a new report casting doubt on what Internet service providers are saying about the level of congestion. GigaOm’s writer wonders if such plans are just an attempt by ISPs to make more money.

New Stem Cell Lines Allow Study of Diseases

Harvard scientists say they have used people’s skin cells and bone marrow to create lines of stem cells bearing the mutations that cause 10 genetic disorders, the Discovery Channel reports. The new lines will allow researchers to study such diseases as Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and Down syndrome.

Defense Department Marches US Toward Green Living

The Department of Defense, which accounts for 1.5 percent of U.S. energy consumption, wants to get greener, and hopes its efforts will translate into benefits for civilian society as well, Reuters says. The military wants 25 percent of its energy to come from renewable sources by 2025. Among their goals are the development of portable solar and wind power stations.

Social Networks Vulnerable to Scams, Researchers Warn

Facebook, MySpace, and their ilk are becoming increasing popular for identity thieves and purveyors of malicious software, several speakers at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas said this week. The Washington Post’s Security Fix blog says the raft of user-created applications on these sites are prime candidates for spreading malware. On the other hand, one speaker warned that staying off such sites gives scammers the opportunity to create a fake profile for you and use it against your friends.

Three Ways for Next President to Improve Cybersecurity

Both presidential candidates have mentioned the need for security in cyberspace but have tackled few details. Now a columnist at Wired is offering some broad advice on what the next president can do. His suggestions: Use government buying power to require secure machines and software, legislate the results and not the methods to achieve security, and invest broadly in research.

Dell Claims Carbon Neutrality

PC Maker Dell says it is officially carbon neutral, five months ahead of its own deadline. Dell says it improved energy efficiency at its facilities and invested in 645 million kilowatt hours of electricity generated by wind power in the U.S., China, and India, CNET News reports. At least one analyst, though, questions whether it’s possible for a company to be truly carbon neutral.

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How Much Does Your ISP Know About You?

One perhaps overlooked aspect of the Federal Communications Commission’s warning to Comcast to stop slowing down file-sharing traffic is the way Comcast went about its throttling. In order to figure out who was using peer-to-peer services to share files, Comcast had to study the data packets machines were trading. GigaOm, which warns that this may be a privacy intrusion that’s not getting enough attention, lists three ways in which Internet service providers monitor user data.

Medical Blogs Spread Knowledge, Raise Privacy Issues

Doctors are increasingly blogging about their work lives, discussing both their successes and frustrations online for anyone to see. The Los Angeles Times reports that medical blogs are making medical practice more transparent to patients and helping doctors share insights. But at the same time, they raise concerns about the risk of violation patient confidentiality.

Get Ready For Web 3.0

If Web 2.0 was all about user-generated content, from blogs with feedback sections to YouTube videos, Web 3.0 is about user-generated software, says Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, in an essay on TechCrunch. He argues that code is being written using the shared resources of cloud computing, allowing programs to be developing more quickly and without regard to the expense of computing infrastructure. This development, he argues, is going to severely disrupt the traditional software industry.

Web Makes Criminal Records Easily Accessible

A newly created free search service will dig up police records of anyone you want to find out about in all 50 states, including traffic violations. An essay in the New York Times wonders if such services will upset a social balance where the privacy of minor infractions was protected by the difficulty of obtaining such records.

Bioterrorism Focus Leads to Modest Gains

The US has spent more than $57 billion on bioterrorism defense in the last seven years, from stockpiling drugs to setting up networks of bioweapon-sensors around major cities. The result of all that effort, says the Washington Post, is only a modest gain in preparedness. Experts say the country needs to develop a general-use anthrax vaccine and a new generation of sensors, as well as take other steps.

Do Biodefense Labs Help or Hurt?

One step the U.S. government has taken to contain the threat of bioterrorism is to build new biodefense labs to study potentially deadly biological agents. Wired’s Danger Room blog argues that such labs, rather than making us safer, are diverting money from research into real health threats, such as tuberculosis, while creating new risks from either the accidental release of deadly organisms or the work of a malicious insider.

Building Should Be All Green By 2030, Architect Says

Buildings account for almost half of annual greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. and consume more than three quarters of the electricity produced in American power plants, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. BusinessWeek tells us that New Mexico architect Edward Mazria is on a crusade to make people aware of those facts and do something about them. He wants the building industry to reach carbon neutrality by 2030, using only energy from renewable sources.

New Material Could Lead to Fuel-Cell Power Plants

Next-generation power plants that rely on fuel cells rather than turbines might become practical, thanks to a new electrolyte created by researchers in Spain. Technology Review reports that the electrolyte for solid-oxide fuel cells operates at temperatures hundreds of degrees lower than conventional electrolytes, which regulate the flow of electrical current in the fuel cells. The new material would work at just above room temperature, rather than the 700 degrees Celsius needed by conventional materials, thus reducing the need to use energy to generate that heat.

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Charter Communications, the St. Louis, MO-based cable and Internet service provider (of which Paul Allen is the chairman and largest stockholder), announced that it is indefinitely halting its plan to monitor users’ surfing habits. The idea was to partner with advertising companies to deliver targeted ads, but it has drawn privacy concerns from customers and Congress.

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