Further gains are inevitable, if one believes the obscure engineering dictum known as Haitz's Law, which states that the flux of light from LEDs will double every 24 to 30 months, as it has for the past 30 years.

Communications: Meshnetworks Inc.

Maitland, Fla.

MeshNetworks' "meshing" innovation handles high-bandwidth data transmission for mobile applications, a technical challenge in part because moving nodes tend to lose contact with their peers. By relaying data mainly through nearby devices in a process it calls Multi-Hopping, the company can save on infrastructure, speed up deployment, and resist both system overload and deliberate sabotage. For these reasons, the firm's initial markets are in the military and emergency-response services.

How it works: users of the company's products form networks with one another on the fly, with a little help from a bare-bones network of wireless routers. Scattered access points to the wired world complete the picture.

Ed McDonald

Wi-Fi In The Sky:: Data hops from point to point across a grid of access points, including both wireless and fixed nodes [shown here].

"The thing about meshing is that you regenerate at every hop, and though there is some lag, the tradeoff buys you increased throughput," says Peter Stanforth, MeshNetworks' CTO. He notes that although a 100 percent lag at a hopping point will halve the effective bit rate, it may still be well worth the loss if a transmitter can thereby exploit a data-hurling but short-range standard, such as IEEE 802.11, popularly known as Wi-Fi. "Every device makes the cost-benefit calculation for itself to determine the best route to take," he says.

The technology comes out of military research done by ITT Industries, White Plains, N.Y., funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. MeshNetworks has built upon that intellectual property by working out routing algorithms, battery lifetimes, and other engineering constraints for terminals, and ways for transmitters to fix their locations without reference to GPS, which may not work in urban canyons or inside burning buildings.

The police and utilities departments of Medford, Ore., are deploying a MeshNetworks system. Another potential market is the intelligent highway, which would allow moving vehicles to share data in some scenarios, such as increasing traffic flow. One step in that direction is the public-transport service of Portsmouth, England, which is providing 45 kiosks that allow pedestrians to track the progress of moving buses.

Cryptography: Magiq Technologies Inc.

New York City

Bryan Christie

Not long ago, you could sleep soundly knowing that public-key encryption was keeping your most sensitive data safe. But faster hardware and ever-sharper algorithms have since shown that the method sometimes has feet of clay, and interest has focused on a theoretically unbreakable alternative: quantum cryptography.