Sunday, Mar. 02, 2003

A View To A Profit

Look at the gravestones for websites peddling financial news: Thestreet.co.uk (falco, geekspeak for "belly-up"), FTMarketWatch.com (quietly falcoed into the Financial Times' main site). But surprise: Breakingviews — a three-year-old, London-based site offering financial commentary, claims to be actually making money. Editor Hugo Dixon, a veteran journalist who wrote the FT's Lex column for many years, says the company made a profit in the fourth quarter of last year and expects one this quarter. "We're doing on-the-day financial commentary, focusing on a professional audience," boasts Dixon. "All of those elements are key to allowing us to survive." How did they do it? By defying nearly every convention of Web publishing. Their site has few interactive gewgaws. Netheads were horrified when, in January 2001, the site began charging several hundred pounds a year to subscribe. Worst of all, it had the audacity to sell its content to that antediluvian medium, the daily newspaper: eight papers across Europe now run Breakingviews content. The result: a lean staff of 10 journalists who churn out a few finely crafted nuggets of financial insight a day. And a few hundred companies willing to pay as much as €73,453 a year for their employees to read them. What's next? Dixon says he'd love to expand to the U.S., but "we're not in any hurry." And with most of his European competition slain, why should he be? — By Jim Ledbetter

Christo Would Be Proud
Blue denim, the favorite of everyone from construction workers to Donatella Versace, is about to get a new fan base: architects and designers. They'll be able to take new flexible solar panels — which resemble denim — and drape them just about everywhere. Rigid solar panels have traditionally resisted wavy walls and curvy roofs, which designers love; now they'll be able to hold the energy-producing material. The flexible solar cells, developed by Spheral Solar of Cambridge, Ontario, work by embedding silicon beads in an aluminum and plastic mesh. Each bead works like a tiny solar cell, turning light into electricity. And the material not only produces energy cleanly, but the silicon used is itself a waste product of the microchip industry. The flexible solar cells come into production next year. "The new material is far more robust than normal glass-based solar cells," says Dan Davies, an engineer at Solar Century, a London-based renewable energy company, "and it could also lead to a new flexibility in building design or be incorporated into consumer electronics." The University of Waterloo in Canada is anxious to use Spheral solar cells in its new School of Architecture building. "The beauty of this material is that we can use it on curved surfaces, but we can also swag it like a textile to provide shading and cut out glare on windows," says Rick Haldenby, director of the school. So theoretically the curves of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Sydney Opera House could be covered, as could lap-tops and cell phones, to generate their own power. The future, it seems, will be jeanetically modified. — By Robin Banerji

Talking Heads
'Gentle Will' isn't so gentle at all, as he shouts obscenities at a rather introspective-looking Saddam Hussein. Part of a multimedia show by Charlie Skelton that begins March 16 at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, their conversation is brought to life by a new technology called FaceWave. The exhibit also features a discussion between Gwyneth Paltrow, Shakespeare, Wagner and Elvis about life after death. And the technology hopes to have life after the exhibit; developed by Britain's Anthropics Technology, FaceWave allows you to use your photo phone — on either 3G or regular networks — to snap a picture of yourself, a Barbie, or a Stalin statue, plug in a message and send it as a surprisingly lifelike animation. FaceWave uses a statistical model of human faces to create video-quality messages with a fraction of the bandwidth and memory required by streaming video. In classic tech-visionary style, CEO Andrew Berend claims it will "break the link between celebrity and the people behind it." Tech Watch wouldn't go that far, but FaceWave does promise to make mobile communication less abstract, and certainly more in-your-face. — By Blaine Greteman