Identity Check Business Finalists Emphasize Uniqueness of People and Products
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 cellphone 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 bank-card 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. SiBiono 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.
入围企业看重身份
有时候，这就好比是一个人怎么和另一个人做生意一样，是个非常简单的问题。但在中国，情况却并非如此。当毕业于北京大学的余晨在美国工作多年后于2003年回到中国时，他发现很多人因非典型肺炎(SARS)的爆发而选择了和他相反的路，而那些留下来的人也大多整天足不出户。余晨和他的朋友们却正是从这种严酷的现实中发现了商机。他回忆说：“大家整天闭门不出，可他们总得买东西啊。”问题是，中国仍是一个大量使用现金的国家。尽管经济飞速发展，国内有着庞大的固定及移动电话网络，而且银行卡基础设施规模也是全球首屈一指，但是现在大多数中国人购买及出售东西的方式与几十年前相差无几：一手交钱一手交货。
相关报导
? 表彰那些改善我们生活的创新者
? 奇思妙想 不开技术进步
他们面临的技术问题是：要找到一种足够安全的方式将电话、商家及银行系统结合起来，以使人们不再需要进行现金交易。解决方案：一个电子支付系统──易宝支付(YeePay)。借助这个系统，消费者可以通过拨打电话银行，按照语音提示从他们的借记卡中进行支付。作为易宝共同创始人的余晨说，虽说其中牵涉诸多技术问题，尤其是防止欺诈的技术，但是我们所需要的解决方案更大程度上应是一种改进升级，而非纯粹的创新。“大家未来都会直接从互联网上购物，”余晨说。“我们这个解决方案缩短了通向未来的路。”
在中国大陆南部与香港交界的地方，另一项技术解决了一个类似的问题：由于要处理大量往来业务，需要建立个人身份识别系统。在罗湖入境管制站(Lo Wu Immigration Control Point)每天有大量旅客往来于中国大陆与香港之间，去年它一直在对香港钛极科技集团(Titanium Group Ltd.)的一个系统进行测试。这个系统使用面部识别技术对超过35万名注册用户进行识别。用户插入智能卡后，将拇指放在扫描仪上，同时注视摄像头，这时系统会对用户的面部及指纹进行扫描，并与数据库中的备案进行比对。识别成功率在96%以上，而且人均处理时间尽为约8秒钟。
十分精确地识别每个人脸部及拇指的轮廓及特征，甚至能将双胞胎区分开来，这在技术上似乎已经前进了一大步。那么如果能够识别基因──决定我们是谁的那些物质──又会怎样呢？随着科学家对基因及其组成成分DNA的了解不断增加，他们也发现了更多治愈疾病的办法。这也正是赛百诺基因技术有限公司(SiBiono GeneTech Co.)所探索的领域。这家总部设在深圳的公司已经制造出一种用来治疗多种癌症的基因药物。这种药物利用基因物质修复机能失常的基因，它比其他治疗方法更有效，因为通常的放射疗法会同时杀死所有细胞，而化疗只能抑制肿瘤的生长。
基因疗法的工作原理是这样的：人体内有些基因就象是管理者，如p53,它们能够消除坏的基因并且控制新基因的生长。此类管理基因的缺乏或者机能失常与人体内癌细胞的生长有着密切的关系，因为人体内没有“管理者”来干预、阻止癌细胞的生长了。
重组人p53腺病毒注射液(今又生, Gendicine)通过双箭齐发来实践这个原理：一个是有效负荷，即对p53的复制；另一个是运输，即腺病毒载体。后者将把p53送到肿瘤细胞内，一旦进入癌细胞后，p53基因会迅速履行控制现有细胞生长（及死亡）的职责。与其他疗法相比，基因疗法在治疗链条的高端进行。Chiu Fu是赛百诺总裁、“今又生”药物发明人彭朝晖的助手，他表示：“这是一种标本兼治的治疗方法。”
赛百诺的基因疗法是在早先基因研究的科学成果上发展而来的。之前，很多科学家作出巨大努力揭开基因之迷就是为了更好的理解及认识基因在对抗疾病方面发挥的各种作用。总部设在日本的GNI Ltd.也是朝这个技术方向进发的公司之一。它的创新之处在于：研究人体内数十万个基因相互建立网络的方式，并且利用这些知识更好的了解现有以及即将被推出的药物。GNI不仅仅集中于单个基因的研究，它还研究基因相互合作的方式。因此它不光能够确定单个基因的身份（及功能），还能够确定它们属于人体的哪个层次－－就象是能够勾勒出人体基因构造的结构图。
这就使该公司能在不进行广泛试验的情况下更加清楚地了解某种基因药物发挥疗效或不发挥疗效的原理及原因。“现在，”GNI的总裁克里斯多夫?萨瓦(Christopher Savoie)说，“我们能够找出药物作用的原理、它在人体的什么位置发挥作用以及它的副作用。”
当然，不光是每个人有身份。我们制造出来的产品可能也有身份。你如何才能够确定所购买的药物、酒或者汽车的配件是真货？仿冒品的规模似乎要比你想像的大很多：国际刑警组织(Interpol)估算全球贸易中有5%-7%是仿冒产品。问题是：你不可能阻止其他人复制他人的产品。但是你可以防止他们复制验证产品真伪的标签。但是如何能够使这种措施的成本不至于太昂贵呢？你需要做的是为每件商品创造一个身份，这个身份应该容易被那些要验证真伪的人们识别，但是又不能让那些坏人轻松地复制。
这正是身处新加坡Singular ID Pte. Ltd.的两名科学家安德利安?波登(Adrian Burden)及彼得?莫兰(Peter Moran)在对微小磁棒进行实验时发现的新技术。
尽管其他人努力将微小磁棒有序排列来改善某些功能，比如电脑硬盘的容量，但是波登和莫兰意识到自然特性却在把磁物质向相反方向引导：混乱。“有点像这样：抓起一把磁棒，然后把他们洒在桌子上，”波登这样解释这个过程。这样做的结果是这些磁物质会形成一种独特的、不能被复制的模式。“我们能轻松地识别这种模式但无法控制它们怎么形成，”他说。“问题是：我们能够在哪些方面运用这种特性呢。”
产品防伪和这种技术是天生的一对。如果能够给每个产品配一个独特的标签－－包含一些微型磁棒－－那么生产商就会知道：1）他们所有产品都会有一个标签，这个标签与其他商品上的标签完全不同；2）仿冒者要想复制这种标签将十分困难。此类标签现在已用到商业产品中，如已被嵌入空调产品的标签中。它们已经小到足以用到任何大小的产品标签中－－甚至能够嵌入产品或者新开发的产品中，肉眼根本无法识别。不论这些产品是汽车引擎盖还是一瓶洗发水，在它拥有了这样一个独特、不可复制的身份后，就能够很好地保护其创新团队的知识产权了。
不过有时候，身份恰恰是你想隐藏的东西。总部设在新加坡的tenCube Pte. Ltd在其共同创始人瓦伦?查特吉(Varun Chatterji)丢了诺基亚(Nokia) 6600手机后想出了一个好点子。他开始在手机运行程序Symbian软件上花费大量的时间进行研究，期望找到一种方法使用户能够远程锁住电话，或者不对手机进行实体接触就可以删除其中的敏感数据，后面的方法似乎更好。
亚太区负责人罗玉鲁?阿维纳斯(Royyuru Avinash)表示，公司的WaveSecure产品现正在新加坡警察部队(Singapore Police Force)控制的数千部手机上进行测试。如果一位用户认为她的手机丢了，而且可能已落入坏人的手中，她只要登录一个网站，对手机发布命令就可以了。这个网站会先尽力通过互联网与手机取得联络，如果不成功的话，它会再通过短信息的方式向手机传递命令。
这个产品有两个比较有用的特点：它提供手机数据定期备份服务。这样的话，如果用户不得不删除手机内的数据，这些数据在其他地方仍有安全的备份。另外，用户还会收到手机数据被删除的确认。
有时候，身份并不是我们愿意与他人分享的东西。
Jeremy Wagstaff
