Identity check
Business finalists emphasize uniqueness of people and products
Global Entrepolis@Singapore finalists
These six companies were chosen based on their technology as well as on their business performance and potential to become global market leaders
·GNI
Japan
INNOVATION: Use of technology to identify gene networks
·Singular ID
Singapore
INNOVATION: Tags used in tracking clothing and other items
·Titanium Group
Hong Kong
INNOVATION: Biometric technologies, such as face recognition
·SiBiono GeneTech
China
INNOVATION: Gene therapy drug Gendicine for treatment of a wide range of cancers
·tenCube
Singapore
INNOVATION: System for locking a mobile phone, making it useless to anyone who steals or finds it
·YeePay
China
INNOVATION: Provides e-payment solutions in China, both online and offline
IF you had to sum up this year's six finalists for the Global Entrepolis@Singapore Award in a word it might be: identity. The finalists for the award, presented by The Wall Street Journal Asia in association with the Economic Development Board of Singapore, are from very different fields-from gene therapy to cell phone security-but they all share a common strand: recognizing and working with the uniqueness of identity.
Sometimes it's simply a question of figuring out how one person can do business with another. In China that's not as easy as it sounds. When Beijing University alumnus Chen Yu returned in 2003 after working in the U.S. he found others heading in the opposite direction, terrified by the outbreak of SARS. Those who remained stayed indoors. Amid the grimness, however, he and his friends saw an opportunity. "They were all locked in their homes," he recalls, "but still wanted to buy stuff." The problem, they realized, was that China remained a largely cash economy. Even with dramatic growth, an impressive fixed and mobile telephone network and the world's largest bankcard infrastructure, most Chinese buy and sell stuff in the same way their grandmothers did: via cash on delivery. The technological trick: To find a way to hook up the phone, merchants and the banking system in a way that was secure enough so Chinese didn't have to conduct physical transactions.
The solution: an e-payments system-YeePay-where consumers could use their debit cards to make payments by dialing into their bank and following the voice menus. While there's plenty of technology involved, especially in reducing fraud, says Mr.
Yu, the solution needed to be an enhancement rather than pure innovation. "In the future people will directly buy over the Internet," says Mr. Yu, a co-founder of YeePay. For now, "we have a solution that will fuse the gap."
On China's southern border with Hong Kong another technology is tackling a similar problem: handling large numbers of transactions where the identity of the individual needs to be established. Lo Wu Immigration Control Point, which handles the vast bulk of crossings between mainland China and Hong Kong, has for the past year been testing a system from Hong Kong-based Titanium Group Ltd. that uses facial recognition to handle over 350,000 registered users. The user inserts a smartcard, places a thumb on a scanner and looks at a camera while the system scans the face and fingerprint and compares them with a database. The success rate is more than 96% and the average time taken to process an individual is about eight seconds.
Reading the contours and features of an individual's face and thumb so finely you can tell twins apart may seem like a big step forward, but how about reading our genes-the strands of material that go into making who we are? As scientists understand more about genes and the DNA that composes them, so they're finding ways to better treat illness. This is the area explored by SiBiono GeneTech Co., based not far from the Lo Wu checkpoint in China's bustling city of Shenzhen. Si-Biono has created a gene-therapy drug to treat a number of different cancers, using genetic material to repair a malfunctioning gene. This is more effective than other forms of therapy such as radio therapy, which can kill both good and bad cells, and chemotherapy, which merely blocks the growth of tumor cells.
Gene therapy works like this: Some genes are regulators, killing off bad genes and controlling the growth of new ones. The absence or failure of genes like these, such as p53, is closely related to the growth of cancer in the body since there is no regulator to stop cancer cells growing without interruption.
Gendicine gets around this by firing off two salvoes: one is a copy of the p53 gene, the payload, and an adenoviral vector, the transportation. The vector delivers the p53 gene specifically to the tumor cells; once inside, the new p53 gene takes over responsibility for controlling the growth (and death) of existing cells. This is all taking place higher up the chain than other therapies. "It's a kind of upstream therapy," says Chiu Fu, an assistant to Zhaohui Peng, the president of SiBiono and inventor of the drug.
SiBiono's gene therapy builds on the achievements of earlier scientific efforts to untangle our genes as a way to understand and identify the role each of them plays in combating disease. Another tack on this scientific identity parade has been taken by Japan-based GNI Ltd. Its innovation: To look at the way the tens of thousands of genes in the human body build networks within the body and work as a way of better understanding existing and proposed drugs. By not merely focusing on individual genes but on the way they cooperate with others, GNI can establish not only the identity (and function) of individual genes but where they fit in the body's hierarchy-a sort of organizational chart of the individual's gene structure.
This lets the company paint a much clearer picture of how, and why, drugs work or don't work without extensive trials. "Now," says Christopher Savoie, president of GNI, "we can figure out how the drug is working, where it's working and its side effects."
Identity, then, need not be just about individuals. It can also be about things we make. How can you be sure that the medicine, the wine or the spare parts for your car are the real thing? This scale is greater than you might think: international police organization Interpol reckons 5% to 7% of world trade is in counterfeit products. The problem: You can't stop people from copying things. But you should be able to stop them from copying the tag that authenticates the product. But how to do this so it's not prohibitively expensive? What you need is a way to create a unique identity for each item that can be read easily enough by those wanting to authenticate the item, but can't easily be replicated by the bad guys.
This was what two young Singapore-based scientists, Adrian Burden and Peter Moran of Singular ID Pte. Ltd., found they had when they were experimenting with microscopic bar magnets.
While others were trying to pull them into some kind of order to improve, for example, the capacity of computer hard drives, they realized that nature was pulling the magnets in the other direction: entropy, or disorder. "It's a bit like taking a handful of magnets and throwing them down on the table," is how Mr. Burden explains the process.
The result is a unique pattern that cannot be repeated. Mr. Burden and his co-inventor realized that they had something, but they just weren't sure what. "We could read the patterns easily but we couldn't control how they came out," he says. "The question was: what could we use these things for?"
Product counterfeiting was a natural fit. If each product could be assigned a unique tag-containing a splice of these micro-magnet spills-then the manufacturer would know a) that each of his widgets had a tag that was different from all those on all the other widgets and b) a counterfeiter is going to have a tough job copying the tag.
These tags are now in commercial production, incorporated into labels on air-conditioning units. But they could be small enough to be on more or less anything-even built invisibly into the product or widget itself, whether it's a car hood or a bottle of shampoo, protecting the intellectual property behind the original creation by giving it a unique, uncopyable identity.
Sometimes identity is something you want to conceal. Singapore-based tenCube Pte. Ltd. came up with its idea when one of its founders, Varun Chatterji, lost his Nokia 6600. He started to mess around with the Symbian software that operates the phone and found a way to allow the user to either remotely lock the phone or, even better, to delete sensitive data on it without actually having physical access to the phone.
The company's WaveSecure product is now being tested on thousands of phones operated by the Singapore Police Force, says Asia Pacific head Royyuru Avinash. If a user believes her phone is lost and may have fallen into the wrong hands, she simply goes to a Web site and issues instructions to the phone. The Web site will try to communicate with the phone using the Internet first, and, if that's not successful, via Short Messaging Service.
Two useful features: as part of the service the user can back up her data regularly, so should she have to wipe the phone her data is safe elsewhere. The second is that the user will receive an acknowledgment that the phone has been wiped.
Sometimes identity is something we don't want to share.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2006
