Radar Roundup

• Antivia, a Business Intelligence 2.0 Solution. Despite the title, it's an interesting premise—add social networking and collective intelligence (people who liked also liked) to enterprise reports.
• EDGE have a Drew Endy interview. Drew's the Synthetic Biology pioneer from Foo Camp and OSCON.
• Grand Challenges of Engineering from the National Academy of Engineering. Many of their challenges are also on our radar and will be explored ETech: Make Solar Energy Affordable, Advance Health Informatics, Engineer Better Medicines (including personal genomics), Reverse-Engineer the Brain (shades of Mind Hacks here, and I can't wait to see what the Mind Hacks site editor Vaughn has to say about it), Secure Cyberspace (if you need to be convinced, go to a security talk by Foo and author Rasmus Lerdorf—he lays down exactly how difficult this is to get right), Enhance Virtual Reality (I'd argue that virtual and physical are blurring, rather than Virtual is Getting Better; things like multitouch, gestural interfaces, and physical computing are all making this come true. I loved William Gibson's line from his Rolling Stone interview: "One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable."); and on a personal note I'm a huge fan of Advance Personalized Learning and systems like New Zealand's AsTTle for getting there. (via sci Foo Deepak)
• Synthetic Biology used to make biofuels and malaria drugs.
• Surprise Modeling. This is the work of Microsoft researcher Eric Horvitz, who attempts to mix machine learning with cognitive insights to help people avoid surprises. His current application (being commercialized) is in traffic.
• Matt Webb's birthday was the 18th. I love how he first describes the significance of his age: "my lightcone is two weeks away from Gamma Pavonis and some weeks ago enveloped its 45th star, Kappa-1 Ceti." Matt's one of that crop of absolutely brilliant thinkers that the BBC had
• Credentica gives security and privacy, they claim. "By protecting privacy, you can actually enhance security," [founder] Brands says. "My goal is to get the best of both worlds.". Talk of a free SDK to get adoption, the way RSA did.
• Bryan O'Sullivan looks at popular Perl packages. Databases, Unicode, and HTML parsing are the most popular.
• The Economist on Chinese Internet use. 210M users, up 50% from previous year, now 3x India's Internet-using population. 70% under 30. Will overtake America in a few months. Ecommerce stifled by government. Mobile content the big moneymaker. Multiplayer games so popular the government's worrying about their impact on productivity. Well worth reading.
• Telex lives on, as a legally valid document transfer system. Love the chart showing the precipitous decline in Telex brought on by teh intarwebs.
• Twitter in the Economist, about Ana Marie Cox (whom we old-timers remember and worship for her time at Suck.com) covering the campaign trail in her tweets.
• The Economist on leapfrogging technology (and again), reporting on a World Bank Global Economic Prospects 2008 report on Technology Diffusion in the Developing World. Takeaway: leapfrogging is rare because many technologies require other tech in place, and this dependence tree acts against adoption.