Can a web search engine be designed to predict the future? At least, the part of it that nobody can predict? Or maybe the parts that a few people already know, but aren't divulging, like plans to release a new consumer product such as an updated iPhone?

Boston-based Recorded Future is making some intriguing claims on its website, www.recordedfuture.com

You can check out the link and see some YouTube demos of how it works, and even sign up for a free newsletter

A number of trade publications and a couple of mainstream media outlets have written about the company in recent months. The most interesting bit of news may be that the CIA has provided some funding.

Here's the story I just filed to my Innovation page.

A Boston-based web startup says its new search engine can predict the future - or at least scraps of it.

Recorded Future says "the world's first Temporal Analytics Engine"

Disclaimer: Until very recently I was at best only faintly aware of the existence of the most successful British Columbia-based retail clothing chain that is not Lululemon. Trendsetting women's fashion store Aritzia was just another blur in Coquitlam Mall, like Whatchamacallits, that I missed on my way to my preferred shop for comfortable and practical (ie spouse-derision-attracting) garments.

(I blame the fact that I have no daughters.)

Thus my confusion when my editor passed along an opportunity to interview one of Aritzia's senior executives.

'A software company, right?' I bluffed.

As it turned out, the story was about software, sort of. My interview was with Aritzia's Jennifer Wong, who worked her way up from a part time sales associate job in 1987 to chief operating officer.

It's an interesting time in the company's history to be talking with Ms. Wong. They're in the midst of an expansion in

 This morning I interviewed Alejandro Toledo, former president of Peru and a leading candidate to return to that office in next April's national election. The first indigenous Peruvian to be elected President in 500 years, he's in Vancouver today to court the international mining community as part of a campaign platform emphasizing responsible economic growth.

A leading candidate for president in Peru's upcoming national election took his campaign this week to Vancouver.

Alejandro Toledo, who is seeking a return the top office after serving as president from 2001 to 2006, believes that mineral resource development can be a central pillar of economic expansion for the South American nation.

But not at any cost.

Vancouver, as an international centre for mineral exploration investment and mine engineering, was a logical destination for Toledo who is shoring up his campaign platform after announcing his candidacy on November 10

Sierra Club Canada is claiming partial victory in a 'greenwashing' dispute that saw an oil industry lobby group using advertisements that favorably compared oil sands tailings to yogurt.

Sierra filed its complaint earlier this year after an industry executive in a television advertisement by the Canadian Association for Petroleum Producers asserted that the tailings are "essentially like yogurt."

CAPP withdrew the ad in response to the complaint, according to a Sierra news release on Tuesday. However, the Advertising Standards Canada (ASC) Council ruled this week that CAPP had not violated the watchdog agency's standards.

Sierra argumed that likening oil sands tailings to yogurt "misleads the public by downplaying the toxicity of tailings ponds that contain numerous chemicals like arsenic, mercury, and poly aromatic hydrocarbons" - and was thus a violation of the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards.

"The

Forget about fire and the wheel - the mobile device is becoming humanity's primary tool. A statistical analysis for MIT Technology Review by Evan Schwartz indicates that ther ratio of mobile phones accounts to human beings is approaching one to one. Schwartz saidmobile service "is amont the fastest-spreading technologies in history. The number of mobile-phone acounts worldwide has doubled, to about 5.5 billion, over the past five years while world population has nearly reached 6.7 billion." Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific region will account for almost 60 per cent of global mobile data traffic by 2014 - although emerging markets including Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa are growing the fastest, Schwartz said. Email is the most common Internet application and the rise of smart phones seems to be boosting email traffic at the expense of text messaging.

I've got to think this will stir up a lot of office discussion. Or maybe just resentment. Or schadenfreude (delight at the misfortune of others).

New research from Israel's Ben-Gurion University suggests that attractive men get more employer callbacks on job applications when they imbed a piture of themselves in the top corner of a CV (curriculum vitae, or vital information).  Plain looking men are only half as likely to get a callback. By contrast there is no beauty premium for women, according to a work-in-progress from researchers Bradley Ruffle and Ze'ev Shtudiner.
Their findings are based on 5,312 job applications sent in pairs, in response to postings in Europe and Israel.
"In each pair, one CV was without a picture while the second, otherwise almost identical CV contained a picture of either an attractive male/female or a plain-looking male/female," according to an abstract on the research.
"Employer callbacks to attractive

Environmental groups are hailing a new report from federal fisheries that recommends establishment of a commercial-scale pilot project to test closed-containment salmon aquaculture.
The report does some economic analysis comparing closed containment to the standard industry practice of open net pen salmon farming. It has some very interesting numbers to suggest that conventional open net pen ocean fish farms can make their owners a lot of money.
For example the report estimates that it costs $5 million to establish a conventional net pen farm compared to $22 million for a closed containment operation.
It calculates a four per cent return on equity for a closed operation with recirculating water technology after three years - and a 52 per cent return on equity for an open pen operation after three years

  I just posted this to my Innovation page.

The British Columbia Innovation Council has a new boss.

Danny Robinson, co-founder of Bootup Labs and a 15-year veteran of the high tech community, was introduced this week as chief executive officer of the Crown agency.

BCIC provides programs and services for budding entrepreneurs and science and technology startups.

In a news release, BCIC noted that Bootup, an 'internet seed developer' invested in and mentored eight new internet companies in the last two years.

Robinson and his wife Maura Rodgers are co-founders of Bootup Entrepreneurial Society, a non-profit organization set up to help internet startups make the transition from concept to commercialization, the release said.

"Danny brings over 15 years of experience to BCIC and has a proven track record of successfully working with early-stage technology companies," said Greg Aasen, BCIC chair, in the release. "Danny

For overnight I'm writing about a joint announcement from Illinois-based Tellabs and Vancouver's Zeugma Systems. Both companies are in the wireless technology space, supporting mobile service companies. The deal will see Tellabs convert Zeugma's Vancouver operations into a research and development facility.

If you're familiar with either company and want to comment, please don't hesitate. I'm interested in your thoughts about this deal and about Zeugma's legacy here in Vancouver.

Here's my online story so far:

Vancouver's Zeugma Systems has been purchased by a U.S. wireless network systems service provider.

Illinois-based Tellabs plans to transform Zeugma into a research and development centre according to a joint news release Monday from the two companies.

The release says that wireless networks are "struggling" to keep up with mobile data traffic growth, and the acquisition brings Tellabs "key

  A group of Stanford University students, concerned about e-waste, have designed a notebook computer you can disassemble into recyclable parts in just 30 seconds, MIT Technology Review is reporting.

John Pavlus cheekily notes in this week's MIT TechSpecs that the Bloom notebook is pretty much the opposite of an Apple - something designed in a way that you'll never have to take them apart.

(Personal aside - I disassembled an old eMac a few years ago so I could remove the hard drive before taking the remaining bits to the local recycling station. It was way tougher than taking the hard drive out of a PC)

"Consumer electronics contain plenty of recyclable materials, but their tightly integrated manufacturing makes the various bits of glass, metal, plastic, and silicon near-impossible to separate by the average consumer," Pavlus writes.

Taking an intact computer to a recycler just means somebody else has to disassemble it in order to

   University of British Columbia civil engineering professor Don Mavinic has been honored again - this time with a $200,000 prize - for developing a technology that uses municipal sewage to produce a valuable fertilizer.

UBC announced this week that the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, NSERC, has awarded Mavinic a 2010 Synergy Award for Innovation for his role in developing the technology.

I wrote about Mavinic and the product, known generically as struvite, in this story last September after he was announced as the winner of a $25,000 prize for innovation from Alberta's Manning Foundation.

Struvite is a phosphorus-rich deposit that accumulates in the pipes and bio-reactors at municipal waste treatment plants and has generally been regarded as a nuisance

  Canadian venture capital market activity expanded in fiscal third quarter 2010, with $261 million invested compared to $217 million in the same period a year earlier.

Notable trends including higher relative dollar flows to Ontario and British Columbia, and to companies in the information technology and life sciences sectors.

Canada's Venture Capital and Private Equity Association, CVCA, reported in a study released this morning that venture capital investment continues to track ahead of 2009 - totaling $905 million compared to $709 million through three quarters of the previous year. That's an increase of 28 per cent.

The number of firms receiving funding was unchanged at 107.

Amounts invested per Canadian firm averaged $2.4 million compared to $2.0 million last year.

Dollars invested in B.C. totaled $53 million from July to September, 37 per cent higher than the previous year.

Software firms accounted for $50 million of

Chief information officers must set aside their concern over privacy and security issues in favor of adopting innovative social media - even if their organizations aren't, the associate dean of Ryerson University's management school, warns.

James Norrie of Ryerson's Ted Rogers School of Management said at a recent conference that "everything in business has risk - get over it," according to a report by Howard Solomon in IT World Canada.

"Stop talking to me about privacy and security. We live, unfortunately, in a post-privacy world. Grow up. That's the way it's going to be," Norrie is quoted as saying in IT's report on a recent CIO conference in Toronto.

Norrie reportedly told the conference that chief information officers shouldn't hide behind the possible problems social media such as Twitter may raise for their companies.

The day-long conference focused on how CIOs can lead innovation in their organizations

Electricity utilities may be their own worst enemies when it comes to encouraging consumers to adopt energy-saving technology according to a U.S. national survey released this week.
The survey found that 77 per cent of respondents have gotten the message about home lighting alternatives and have replaced incandescent bulbs with more efficient compact fluorescent lights and LED bulbs. (More on LEDs at the bottom of this - I'm definitely not convinced that particular technology is consumer-ready).
Half of survey respondents said they've taken one or more energy conservation measures as well, including replacing windows with more energy efficient models, replacing home heating and air conditioning systems and adding insulation. Fifty-nine per cent have replaced appliances with more energy efficient models.
In spite of all those measures, 64 per cent reported that their utility bills have gone up - with the pollsters suggesting consumers aren't exactly feeling

 There was some good news/bad news today for British Columbia, and for global efforts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions.

A global glut of natural gas will keep prices of the fossil fuel depressed for at least a decade, threatening efforts to boost investment in renewable energy, the International Energy Agency says in a report released Tuesday in London.

The IEA's World Energy Outlook for 2010 – an annual forcast of energy supply, demand and consumption authored by the world's developed nations including Canada and the United States – anticipates a global oversupply of gas on the order of 200 billion cubic meters beginning next year according to a Reuters story.

That's more than three times