TOKYO: Takeo Ogura walks through the crowded railway station in central Tokyo ignoring the people waiting at the ticket machines and heads straight for the ticket barrier, where he whips out his mobile phone and waves it over a card reader, which beeps as he passes through.

Mobile Suica, as it is known, is part of a growing e-money revolution in Japan that is making life easier for consumers by allowing them to conduct an array of transactions rapidly with their mobile phones, instead of fumbling for bills or small change at the cash register. For small retailers, Mobile Suica offers information that can improve their marketing.

“Its really convenient,” said Ogura, who works in accounting. “I dont need small coins, dont have to look at the fares, and best of all I dont have to line up.”

Mobile Suica was introduced in January 2006 by NTT DoCoMo and East Japan Railway. It is a mobile phone based smartcard that can be used for buying rail tickets or for access to buildings.

Smart cards have been in circulation for some time, but with many it is necessary to bring the card into direct contact with the reader. Contactless interfaces allow the user to pass close by a reader without touching it, which means the card or phone can be left in a pocket or bag.

The system is based on the RFID - or radio frequency identification - Integrated Circuit chip card developed by Sony, which was first used in the Octopus card system for virtually all public transport in Hong Kong in 1997.

Other programs that make money obsolete are in place in Europe. In France, Sociйtй Gйnйrale, in partnership with Visa Europe and Gemalto, piloted a project from July 2007, using a Visa Premier “contactless” bank card to make small purchases; the whole transaction takes less than one second. In London, The Evening Standard newspaper is sold at specially equipped kiosks that require contract between a card and a scanner.

The Bank of Japan, which issues nationwide money supply figures each month, does not release a figure for e-money, but some analysts say e-money makes up about 20 percent of the 300 trillion, or $2.8 trillion, in Japanese consumer spending. The approximately 60 trillion is more than twice the estimate of 28 trillion made by a team of analysts at Nomura Securities in 2003.

“Mobile phone based e-money is becoming more widely accepted in Japan,” said Tetsuhiro Nanbu, research director with the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living, which is affiliated with one of the largest advertising in Japan. “More people will use this form of payment as they become more comfortable with it.”

The Telecommunications Carriers Association says that the number of mobile phones in Japan topped the 100 million mark in January 2007, and stood at 100.9 million as of January 2008, suggesting that more than 80 percent of the 127 million people in the country own a mobile phone.

The leading Japanese mobile phone provider, NTT DoCoMo, started its own e-money service, “Osaifu Keitai” - literally “wallet mobile” - in July 2004, and by Jan. 31, 2008, it had signed up approximately 27 million users.

Philip Sugai, associate professor of marketing at the International University of Japan, said it was the contactless technology which was pushing the spread of e-money.

“With contactless Mobile Suica on your mobile phone, you can check your balance, and upload more money into your account at any time, and from anywhere,” he said.

It is now possible to check in for flights with All Nippon Airlines using a mobile phone, and some people pre-program songs at their local karaoke pub.

There are causes for concern, most specifically security. “If I lose my phone then it would be like losing my money,” said Kenji Kato, who works with computers.

To address these concerns, several mobile phone providers have introduced biometric security measures including finger print, facial and voice recognition, which are needed to activate the phone.

Among those most likely to benefit from the spread of e-money are small retail and convenience stores, said Nahoko Mitsuyama, a principal research analyst at Gartner Japan.

“Catering for e-money will allow smaller stores to record transactions on their readers, opening the way to micro-marketing,” she said.

The benefit to larger stores is limited. They issue their own credit cards, or have loyalty clubs, which double as sources of information on purchasing history and market research.

Wider acceptance of the technology should lead to increased use by consumers.

“With multiple functions on a single mobile phone - your Suica train card, your ANA membership card, and your karaoke card - then life is going to be really interesting,” Sugai said, referring to All Nippon Airways.

NEW YORK:

If innovation has a heart, it is probably a semiconductor, beating to the pace of Moores Law. Under this principle, named for Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, the chip industry in the last four decades has doubled the number of transistors it crams onto a chip about every 18 months.

That is a big reason that chips are now in our offices, homes, cars and toys - and often implanted in our pets and occasionally in our own bodies. Chips are almost ubiquitous, and where they are not, they probably will be soon.

But keeping the heart of innovation beating is becoming ever harder and more expensive. Making chips is an improbable blend of farming, photography and baking: Think of your standard 300-millimeter silicon wafer as a field where mostly metallic substances are “grown” according to patterns put in place by photolithography, and then “baked” at extremely high temperatures.

This agri-photo-baking requires big money: It costs $3 billion to $5 billion to build a single semiconductor fabrication plant, or “fab.” In the near future, that figure is likely to rise to $12 billion, according to VLSI Research. In the boom-and-bust cycle of the chip industry, it has become increasingly difficult to get a return on fab investments.

The remarkable progression of Moores Law, meanwhile, involves continually shrinking almost everything to do with the chips. Today, the transistors in a high-end chip are no wider than the nucleus of an individual cell - that is far smaller than the smallest light wave.

Until now, as chips became smaller, they also became faster in about the same proportion. It is still true for transistors, but it is no longer true for the wires that are used to connect transistors, which limit performance gains. Daniel Edelstein, a program manager and fellow at IBM Research, said, “Were running out of steam.”

Edelstein is leading a team of researchers from inside and outside IBM in developing a new way to solve the problem: using “self-assembling” nanotechnology to make better insulators, and raise performance. In this case, self-assembly involves creating so-called air gaps - vacuums a few nanometers wide that keep the billions of tiny copper wires in a chip from touching one another, instead of putting down a layer of insulating material and trying to align it effectively. It is more efficient, and it means that IBM will not need to spend $50 million on photolithographic equipment.

A few weeks ago, Edelstein took me on a tour of the fab in East Fishkill, New York, that will be the first to use the self-assembly technique. While the technique is not quite done being tested, John Kelly 3rd, IBMs senior vice president for research, said that “there is no question in our minds this is going to work,” and that IBM would move to it by 2009, first for an existing high-end processor or a next-generation chip, then for all its fabs.

With the self-assembling nanotechnology, he also had to go beyond IBMs walls, in part because IBM in the 1990s decided for a number of reasons - including costs and the desire to help create a Ph.D. feeder program - to work with a public-private consortium to develop a modern research fab run by the College of Nanoscience and Electronics at the State University of New York at Albany. This fab features one-of-a-kind equipment, and it is where Edelsteins team developed its techniques before moving it to IBMs fab in East Fishkill.

Kelly said IBM was developing other ways to use self-assembly in other parts of the chip-making process.

Other companies are also racing to adopt the techniques. Steve Jurvetson, a co-founder of the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, said self-assembling technology held huge promise for all types of semiconductors. He said two start-ups that his firm had backed, ZettaCore, which is developing memory chips, and Konarka Technologies, which makes solar-power technology, were close to reaching commercial production of their products, thanks in part to nanoscale self-assembly.

Richard Doherty, director of the engineering consultant group Envisioneering, said self-assembly techniques should also greatly reduce the number of defective chips, leading to better returns for fabs.

The techniques could lead to much more dramatic advances. Alain Kaloyeros, professor of nanoelectronics at SUNY-Albany, said self-assembling nanotechnology would make it possible to etch a computer onto a pair of glasses, or to create “nanobots” that can float in our bloodstream, searching for cancerous cells that the bots will then eliminate.

Martin Winn’s cholesterol level was inching up. Cycling up hills, he felt chest pain that might have been angina. So he and his doctor decided he should be on a cholesterol-lowering medication called a statin. He was in good company. Such drugs are the best-selling medicines in history, used by more than 13 million Americans and an additional 12 million patients around the world, producing $27.8 billion in sales in 2006. Half of that went to Pfizer («www.businessweek.com») for its leading statin, Lipitor. Statins certainly performed as they should for Winn, dropping his cholesterol level by 20%. “I assumed I’d get a longer life,” says the retired machinist in Vancouver, B.C., now 71. But here the story takes a twist. Winn’s doctor, James M. Wright, is no ordinary family physician. A professor at the University of British Columbia, he is also director of the government-funded Therapeutics Initiative, whose purpose is to pore over the data on particular drugs and figure out how well they work. Just as Winn started on his treatment, Wright’s team was analyzing evidence from years of trials with statins and not liking what it found.

Yes, Wright saw, the drugs can be life-saving in patients who already have suffered heart attacks, somewhat reducing the chances of a recurrence that could lead to an early death. But Wright had a surprise when he looked at the data for the majority of patients, like Winn, who don’t have heart disease. He found no benefit in people over the age of 65, no matter how much their cholesterol declines, and no benefit in women of any age. He did see a small reduction in the number of heart attacks for middle-aged men taking statins in clinical trials. But even for these men, there was no overall reduction in total deaths or illnesses requiring hospitalization—despite big reductions in “bad” cholesterol. “Most people are taking something with no chance of benefit and a risk of harm,” says Wright. Based on the evidence, and the fact that Winn didn’t actually have angina, Wright changed his mind about treating him with statins—and Winn, too, was persuaded. “Because there’s no apparent benefit,” he says, “I don’t take them anymore.”

Wait a minute. Americans are bombarded with the message from doctors, companies, and the media that high levels of bad cholesterol are the ticket to an early grave and must be brought down. Statins, the message continues, are the most potent weapons in that struggle. The drugs are thought to be so essential that, according to the official government guidelines from the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP), 40 million Americans should be taking them. Some researchers have even suggested—half-jokingly—that the medications should be put in the water supply, like fluoride for teeth. Statins are sold by Merck («www.businessweek.com») (Mevacor and Zocor), AstraZeneca («www.businessweek.com») (Crestor), and Bristol-Myers Squibb («www.businessweek.com») (Pravachol) in addition to Pfizer. And it’s almost impossible to avoid reminders from the industry that the drugs are vital. A current TV and newspaper campaign by Pfizer, for instance, stars artificial heart inventor and Lipitor user Dr. Robert Jarvik. The printed ad proclaims that “Lipitor reduces the risk of heart attack by 36%…in patients with multiple risk factors for heart disease.”

So how can anyone question the benefits of such a drug?

For one thing, many researchers harbor doubts about the need to drive down cholesterol levels in the first place. Those doubts were strengthened on Jan. 14, when Merck and Schering-Plough («www.businessweek.com») revealed results of a trial in which one popular cholesterol-lowering drug, a statin, was fortified by another, Zetia, which operates by a different mechanism. The combination did succeed in forcing down patients’ cholesterol further than with just the statin alone.