Digital, P.I.

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While Imagen zeroes in on one market, Alien and Nanomix have learned a few hard lessons about focusing. Although Alien once concentrated on flexible computer screens, it is now putting all its efforts behind radio-frequency-identification (RFID) tags. The key to both flexible screens and RFID tags is Alien's patented manufacturing process, which allows chips to be generously sprinkled onto thin plastic sheets that can be easily attached to almost any type of product. Once fastened to a pack of razor blades, for example, a RFID chip emits a radio signal that allows the manufacturer or retailer to track if and when the product has been sold. Alien is the market leader in these chips and expects to make between 50 million and 100 million tags next year.

In Emeryville, Nanomix is determined to find its way to market with its own version of digital detective technology. The question is: Which market? Nanomix makes sensors that can be trained in a bewildering array of applications such as leak detection, medical-and environmental-hazard monitoring and industrial-process control. No wonder that five years after Marvin Cohen and fellow University of California, Berkeley professor Alex Zettl co-founded the company, they still don't expect to have product until 2006.

Their first target will be to replace current chemical sensors used to detect pollutants with cheaper and more efficient Nanomix versions. The U.S. market for sensors like these is a modest $100 million, says Nanomix co-chairman and venture backer Alex Wong. But you have to start somewhere: a $100 million real market beats a billion-dollar imagination. That's not to say Cohen and Zettl aren't still dreaming. They have not abandoned hope that their nano material could one day form the foundation for flat-panel displays, hydrogen-storage systems and even the quantum computer, which performs complex calculations at blistering speeds by using the principles of quantum physics. For Wong, it all boils down to a truism: "The proof is in getting useful products out," he says. Usefulness is, indeed, the key. The next big thing doesn't have to be a universal cure-all. Just a better floor wax will do.