Technologies Of The Year -- Notable Innovations

aPriori Cost Management Platform
(aPriori Technologies Inc., Concord, Mass.) targets the need for real-time, predictive cost assessments throughout product development. Use the resulting knowledge to test the validity of outsourcing decisions, the company says.

Arena PLM
(Arena Solutions, Menlo Park, Calif.) is available as a service, has zero upfront costs, no costly IT requirements and features easy-to-use implementations. The service features automatic upgrades -- 44 since the company's founding in 2000.

AtmoPlas process
(Dana Corp., Toledo, Ohio) enables heat treating without the need for vacuum equipment. The enablers: combining microwave energy with the ability to generate and sustain a plasma at atmospheric pressure. The benefits: big savings in capital equipment and operating costs.

Blue Gene supercomputing technology
(IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, N.Y.) is powering a new collaboration between IBM and the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory. The goal: accelerate and broaden research in fields including life sciences, hydrodynamics, materials sciences, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics and business applications.

BPX Technology
(Broin and Associates, Sioux Falls, S. D.) harnesses a new enzyme commercialized with Novozymes to bring new process competitiveness to ethanol plants. Benefits: reduced energy consumption, improved ethanol yields and increased value of co-products.

Brightidea.com
(Brightidea Inc., New York) is an on-demand innovation process management service designed to accelerate product development, process improvement, cost cutting, intellectual property management, technology adoption, marketing strategy and business model innovation.

Cognos 8
(Cognos, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) is a business intelligence product that enables business enterprises to leverage all corporate data and deliver all BI capabilities to all users across the organization on one Web-based architecture, regardless of infrastructure complexity.

MARVEL
(IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, N.Y.) searches, indexes and categorizes large volumes of multimedia data such as video, images and audio. Machine learning techniques automatically label content.

The Medhesive family of adhesives
(Nerites Corp., Brooklyn, Wis.) draws unique inspiration from the superglues of mussels. Claims include high strength without forming a chemical bond to the surface. Bonds are said to self-heal and bind without surface preparation in a wide variety of industrial and medical applications, even in the presence of water or blood.

Meshscape wireless sensor networks
(Millennial Net, Burlington, Mass.) enable remote monitoring and management in both building and industrial automation. The design focus is on scaling systems to hundreds of nodes with extremely low power consumption.

MetaCarta GTS
(MetaCarta Inc., Cambridge, Mass.) provides map-driven geographic search, geographic referencing and data visualization capabilities. The system makes it possible for users to discover, visualize and act on geographic-based information.

QualysGuard
(Qualys Inc., Redwood Shores, Calif.) offers Web-enabled enterprise security. Think of it as an automated way to identify network vulnerabilities, prioritize remediation and ensure regulatory compliance -- with no infrastructure to deploy or manage.

Rapid Injection Molding
(The Protomold Co. Inc., Maple Plain, Minn.) integrates an online customer interface with an automated manufacturing system. Marketing target: filling the gap between rapid prototyping and conventional molding. Parts can be shipped in as little as three days.

RuleStream
(RuleStream Corp., Wakefield, Mass.) aggregates and manages intellectual property assets to automate complex decisions for all product-centric business operations. The software ensures that business decisions incorporate the most up-to-date product-based intellectual property.

Sovereign Information Integration
(IBM's Almaden Research Center, San Jose, Calif.) is designed to allow two or more entities to share data without compromising the privacy or security of either data set. The enabler: a unique double encryption technique.

SupplyWEB
(Infor, Alpharetta, Ga.) is a supply-chain solution accommodating 14 languages that Web connects customers and suppliers in real-time. Advantages: reductions in inventory, stock-outs, quality issues and EDI communication costs.

XCoupler Enterprise Transaction Modules
(Online Development Inc., Knoxville, Tenn.) translates data between factory floor devices and enterprise system applications. Typically mounted in a PLC, the programmable module supports enterprise systems such as IBM WebSphere MQ and DB2, Oracle and Microsoft SQL.