PICMET '05, "Technology Management: A Unifying Discipline for Melting the Boundaries," will be held July 31-August 4, 2005, at the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower in Portland, Oregon, USA.


Technology continues to be the central force affecting all aspects of life. It dominates the way we design strategies, develop tactics and implement operational decisions in every subsystem of society, including industrial, economic, educational, financial, medical, political, and other sectors. As this dominance continues, we are observing the growth of technology's impact in more and more areas that are not intuitively obvious. These impacts are resulting in complex relationships and interactions among a multitude of disciplines, specialties and subspecialties. Discontinuous innovations and disruptive technologies are changing the world and opening doors for exciting new opportunities. The potential of stem cell research to find cures for "non-curable" diseases, the promise of fuel cells to provide nearly unlimited energy, and the vision of a world with nano-level bio-mechanical devices collecting and disseminating information for continuous improements in people's health are no longer science fiction. They are within reach. [More]
 

The first PICMET-Japan meeting, held at the University of Tokyo in November 2004
Based on the strategy for PICMET international activities established at PICMET ‘04 in Seoul, Korea, PICMET-Japan was formed as a representative organization for PICMET. The first PICMET-Japan meeting was held at the University of Tokyo on November 20, 2004. Forty-five very active people in technology management areas attended the meeting: 20 from universities, 17 from companies, and 8 from government and elsewhere. Since just 30 percent of them had participated in previous PICMET conferences, the PICMET-Japan meeting provided a good opportunity to disseminate PICMET information to key people in Japan. Participants enjoyed four stimulating presentations, which are summarized below, and productive discussions and communications. They all agreed that PICMET-Japan meetings should be held two or three times a year. [More]
 

International Workshop on Accelerated Radical Innovation
Information Enhanced Technology Cluster Development Challenges
IWARI2005

March 10-12, 2005, Toledo, Ohio, USA

The Council on Competitiveness, the National Academy of Engineering, and several other organizations recently published assessment reports alerting business, academia, and government that a dramatically accelerated radical innovation process has become critically important for 21st Century competitiveness. [More]
 

Source: Liberty Times

After ten months of work and the joint efforts of over 700 volunteers from around the world, an open source, open courseware prototype system (OOPS) project from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been formally posted in Chinese at www.twocw.net. The site also includes a simplified Chinese version. Currently, nearly 100 courses are to be presented on the Internet. Non-commercial use of the courses is free to the public for both enjoyment and enrichment. The project marks a new page in the history of sharing knowledge. [More]
 

by Michael Aneiro

Dec. 14, 2004-In the face of an increasingly global economy, the United States has actually widened its advantage over most European nations when it comes to innovation, according to a recent study out of Europe.

The 2004 European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS), released in November by the European Commission, found that the U.S. and Japan remain "far ahead" of E.U. nations in the area of innovation. The report said that the level of E.U. innovation has remained relatively constant since 1996, while innovation performance in the U.S. and Japan has continued to improve, widening what it called the "innovation gap" between the U.S. and the E.U. The report traced this gap primarily to significant differences between the U.S. and E.U. in a handful of key areas, including patents, the education level of the working population, business expenditures on research and development, high-tech manufacturing, and early-stage venture capital. [More]
 

Researchers at SEMATECH North have reached a significant milestone in reducing deposition tool-generated defects in mask blanks used for extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL), bringing that technology a step closer to commercial feasibility.

Technologists from SEMATECH, Veeco Instruments Inc. (NASDAQ: VECO), and Asahi Glass achieved an extremely low level of added defects in recent work with Veeco's NEXUS system, an ion beam deposition (IBD) low defect density (LDD) tool for deposition of critical films. Following a two-year effort to improve tool hardware, process parameters and handling protocols, the technologists deposited EUV multilayers with as few as one defect per mask at 80 nm resolution, which translates into 0.005 defects per square centimeter. A state-of-the-art laser-based defect detection system was used to identify the defects. [More]
 

Source: Korea Times

A team of Korean scientists was successful in developing a revolutionary technology to mass produce nontoxic uniform nanoparticles, a must in various futuristic applications.

It is the first time ever a technology for mass production of nontoxic uniform particles was developed, although small-scale production technology has been tried outside Korea. [More]
 

Source: University of California, Davis, December 29, 2004

The location of the Dec. 26 earthquake that unleashed a devastating tsunami across the Indian Ocean was identified in a 10-year forecast of likely earthquake sites worldwide made recently by researchers at the University of California, Davis, Center for Computational Science and Engineering. [More]
 

Source: Project Management Institute

The Project Management Institute (PMI), the world's leading not-for-profit advocacy association for the project management profession, was recently named as one of the Best Places to Work in PA (Pennsylvania). The award program, created in 2000, is the first of its kind offered by a state in the United States. The program is a public/private partnership of the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, Team Pennsylvania Foundation, Kuntz Lesher LLP, Central Penn Business Journal, the Great Place to Work(R) Institute, and the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry. [More]
 

Source: Inland Northwest Health Services


SPOKANE, Wash, Dec. 20/PRNewswire -- Inland Northwest Health Services has been awarded first prize for most innovative use of technology to improve patient safety by judges at the Emerging Technologies and Healthcare Innovations Congress (TETHIC) that concluded December 1, 2004, in Washington, D.C. The TETHIC innovation prize recognizes the leadership role INHS has taken in building the technology framework for a TelePharmacy system that provides 24-hour pharmacy services at a reasonable cost to multiple rural hospitals and health care facilities. [More]
 

If adopted the framework Programme for Competitiveness and Innovation (CIP) would be an instrument to support competitiveness and innovation in the single market.

It would bring together a number of existing community programmes in the very fields that have been identified as most critical to boosting European productivity growth. These programmes are: [More]
 

Source: SciDev.Net

[RIO DE JANEIRO] The Brazilian president Luiz Inácio 'Lula' da Silva took steps earlier this month to remove some of the barriers that make it difficult for public sector researchers and private companies to collaborate.

Legislation to this effect, signed by the president on 2 December, is seen as an attempt to stimulate research innovation. [More]
 

The latest European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) confirms that Europe is maintaining its innovation levels – with the Nordic countries holding on to their mantle as world leaders. However, the EU continues to lose ground in the innovation stakes against some of its major competitors.

Finland and Sweden have reaffirmed their status as Europe’s most innovative countries, outperforming the USA and Japan on several important indicators, the annual EIS reveals. Germany and Denmark also scored well above the European average. The Netherlands, Ireland and France continue to move ahead but their growth is slowing down. [More]
 

NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate today announced completion of a year- long external review of the agency's technology transfer activities.

The review was conducted by the National Academy for Public Administration (NAPA) at NASA's request to assist in focusing technology transfer activities. The study provided eight major recommendations, which are under review by senior agency managers. [More]
 

The company announced plans to buy privately held Protego Networks, which makes software that aggregates and correlates information about security threats, for $65 million in cash. The deal is expected to close by Jan. 29, the end of Cisco's fiscal 2005 second quarter.

Cisco has focused on adding security capabilities to its product line for more than a year now. Last year, the company unveiled its Network Admission Control (NAC) program, a security architecture that combines virus scanning with network policing to keep attacks from entering the network in the first place. From the beginning, Cisco has relied on acquisitions to assemble the pieces necessary to make the architecture a reality. In fact, the critical "trust agent" software in the NAC architecture that sits on users' PCs and communicates with the Cisco policy server came from its acquisition in 2003 of Okena. [More]
 

Source: CNET News.com, January 2, 2005

As the death toll of the disastrous tsunami continues to mount, technology companies, technology workers and Web surfers are rallying together to raise millions for the relief effort.

The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation announced a $3 million donation on Friday, saying that it hopes the donation will encourage others to give to the relief efforts. [More]
 

Source: China S&T Newsletter, No. 387

On December 10, 2004, China and Sweden jointly inked an agreement on the cooperation in the field of science and technology between the two nations. At the signing ceremony, both XU Guanhua, Chinese Minister of Science and Technology, and his counterpart, Leif Pagrotsky, Swedish Minister for Education and Culture, underwrote the agreement. [More]
 

Source: Intel Newsletter. Technology Innovations and Trends

Overview: Widespread, Affordable Connectivity
Connectivity is vital to Indian business and society. Globalization and the Internet have created rapid growth in information technology-related businesses in India. Although only half a percent of the Indian population has residential Internet access (4.7 million out of 1 billion people), India's more than 9,000 Internet cafes can be seen bustling with people everywhere in the Indian cities. [More]
 

Source: Technology Review by Charles H. Ferguson, January 2005

For Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, 2004 was a very good year. His firm led the search industry, the fastest-growing major sector in technology; it went public, raising $1.67 billion; its stock price soared; and its revenues more than doubled, to $3 billion. But as the search market ripens into something worthy of Microsoft’s attention, those familiar with the software business have been wondering whether Google, apparently triumphant, is in fact headed off the cliff. [More]
 

Source: IBM News

IBM says it has demonstrated a technique that triples the performance of a standard transistor used in semiconductors. The new process is compatible with current CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology, requiring no radical changes in chip manufacturing.

The technique involves the creation of a layer of the element germanium in the "channel," the part of the transistor through which electrical current flows. Boosting transistors' current flow has already led to increased circuit performance. In fact, several companies are already using strained silicon to do just that. Strained germanium, however, offers significantly better transport properties than silicon or strained silicon. Until now, conventional circuit manufacturing techniques have not been able to add strained germanium. The IBM demonstration placed strained germanium on the selected areas of a chip using a CMOS-compatible process already widely used in the industry. [More]
 

Source: IBM News

Fifteen technology companies have banded together to form Power.org, an open standards community around chips and systems which use Power Architecture technology. Power microprocessors are found in products ranging from video gaming systems and telematics to supercomputers. Coming together to form the Power.org community are AMCC, Bull, Cadence Design Systems, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Culturecom, IBM, Jabil Circuit, Novell, Red Hat, Sony Corporation, Shanghai Belling, Synopsys, Thales, Tundra Semiconductor and Wistron. More companies are expected to join. [More]
 

Source: TechWorld, Dec 13, 2004

It's over. After 18 months of the most heated boardroom battles in recent memory, Oracle has finally got its hands on rival PeopleSoft for a staggering $10.3 billion.


The deal, announced at 11.30am today, has the approval of both boards and is expected to close in January - subject of course to the offical approval of shareholders. Since the fact that a majority of PeopleSoft shareholders publicly stated they were willing to sell their shares to Oracle was what put the final thumbscrew on PeopleSoft's directors, it seems somewhat unlikely that the deal won't go ahead as planned. [More]
 

Source: TechWorld, Dec. 29, 2004

David Duffield has resigned as PeopleSoft's CEO and chairman. He lasted less than three months after taking over again as CEO at the company he founded and which is in the process of being acquired by rival Oracle.

According to a filing made by PeopleSoft with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Duffield resigned on 21 December, only eight days after Oracle announced it had reached an agreement to buy PeopleSoft for about US$10.3 billion [b], ending a nasty takeover battle that lasted for about 18 months. [More]
 

Source: ARMONK, N.Y. and BEIJING -- Dec. 7, 2004

Lenovo Group Limited, the leading Personal Computer brand in China and across Asia, and IBM today announced a definitive agreement under which Lenovo will acquire IBM's Personal Computing Division to form the world's third-largest PC business, bringing IBM's leading enterprise-class PC technologies to the consumer market and giving Lenovo global market reach beyond China and Asia. [More]
 

by Halime Inceler Sarihan

Wells Fargo & Co. has been named by Forbes magazine as one of America's best-managed companies and topped 17 industry peers as the best-managed company in the banking category. The rankings appear in Forbes' Jan. 10, 2005, edition, which features its annual Platinum 400 listing.

In an interview with Colin Walsh, Executive Vice President, Customer Fulfillment and Servicing, Wells Fargo Consumer Credit Group, he said, "We provide our customers with multiple products across a variety of channels, including the Internet and telephone as well as traditional banking stores. We believe these choices enhance the value of our relationship with customers. The technology we use across our channels must be aligned, as well as state-of-the-art. Wells Fargo has taken an 'anytime, anywhere' approach to channel distribution in satisfying customers’ needs." [More]
 

Colin Walsh

Q1: How does the Consumer Credit Group use technology to leverage its industry leadership, organizational capabilities and customer services?

We provide our customers with multiple products across a variety of channels, including the Internet and telephone as well as traditional banking stores. We believe these choices enhance the value of our relationship with customers. The technology we use across our channels must be aligned, as well as state-of-the-art. [More]
 

Book Review: The Keystone Advantage: What the New Dynamics of Business Ecosystems Mean for Strategy, Innovation, and Sustainability



Authors: Marco Iansiti and Roy Levien
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press
Date Published: 2004
ISBN: 1591393078


by Halime Inceler Sarihan

The book’s central theme is business ecosystems, which consist of clusters of networked companies and differentiated industries. At the center of each ecosystem is a so-called keystone business. Marco Iansiti and Roy Levien use biological metaphor to explain how modern business ecosystems work and how companies have used different strategies to achieve success in the modern business ecosystem. [More]
 

Gartner Business Intelligence Summit
January 31-February 1, 2005
London, England
More information at http://www3.gartner.com/2_events/conferences/bie6i.jsp

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Converging Technologies - A Vision for Europe
January 20, 2005 [More]