A startup pays people around the world to log prices in their local stores each day, offering a real-time way to track how economies are doing.

In early September, news outlets reported that the price of onions in India had suddenly spiked nearly 300 percent over prices a year before. Analysts warned that the jump in price for this food staple could signal an impending economic crisis, and the Research Bank of India quickly raised interest rates.

A startup company called Premise might’ve helped make the response to India’s onion crisis timelier. As part of a novel approach to tracking the global economy from the bottom up, the company has a daily feed of onion prices from stores around India. More than 700 people in cities around the globe use a mobile app to log the prices of key products in local stores each day.

Premise’s cofounder David Soloff says it’s a valuable way to take the pulse of economies around the world, especially since stores frequently update their prices in response to economic pressures such as wholesale costs and consumer confidence. “All this information is hiding in plain sight on store shelves,” he says, “but there’s no way of capturing and aggregating it in any meaningful way.”

That information could provide a quick way to track and even predict inflation measures such as the U.S. Consumer Price Index. Inflation figures influence the financial industry and are used to set governments’ monetary and fiscal policy, but they are typically updated only once a month. Soloff says Premise’s analyses have shown that for some economies, the data the company collects can reliably predict monthly inflation figures four to six weeks in advance. “You don’t look at the weather forecast once a month,” he says.

Premise uses a mixture of in-store logging and online prices to measure U.S. inflation. The company has continued to publish new figures each day even as the federal shutdown triggered by Congress has halted the U.S. government’s indexing program.

The people who check store shelves for Premise are located mostly in cities in Latin America and Asia, including the largest emerging economies: China, India, and Brazil. Soloff says that custom price indexes for food or specific crucial commodities will be of interest to many financial and consumer product companies. “In these developing, huge economies this isn’t an alternative—it’s primary,” he says. “We’re building a map for the first time.”

Each day, Premise’s workers receive a kind of to-do list on their smartphones via a mobile app for Android devices. They’re asked to go to particular stores and log the prices of certain products, and to snap a picture of that product on the shelf. Workers receive between 5 and 15 cents for each price logged and may be asked to record as many as 250 in a day, a workload that would take a couple of hours. The tasks, done with the permission of store managers, are designed to be something workers can fit in around another job or university studies.

Premise can also collect customized data for clients by sending specific questions to its crowd of workers. Consumer goods companies might be interested in paying for information on how its own and competing products are being priced in certain markets, Soloff says.

Soloff says Premise is already working with some consumer goods companies and has begun to feed data to financial companies including Bloomberg, which has since August offered access to certain Premise data feeds on inflation indexes. The company is backed by venture capital firms Harrison Metal, Andreessen Horowitz, and Google Ventures. Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, is an advisor.

Premise’s data could be a useful new way to monitor prices and unearth new information about how they are changing within economies, says Alberto Cavallo, an assistant professor of economics at MIT and a cofounder ofPriceStats, a company that calculates inflation and price indexes by monitoring online prices for goods in over 70 countries.

However, Cavallo says that Premise will have to constantly check that its workers are recording the price of the exact same items each time they log prices in a store. Research projects that looked into using mobile apps to track prices in stores have sometimes produced unreliable data because people sometimes record the price of a different version or packet size of a product by mistake, says Cavallo.

“That’s potentially the greatest challenge of crowdsourcing,” says Cavallo. “If they can control for that and make sure it is always the same items, it could be a very useful approach.”

Soloff says he is confident his company can do that, because it offers multiple layers of quality control. The company’s workers are carefully trained to be reliable, he says, and Premise can check the location fix and other metadata gathered by its app each time a price is recorded.

The company is also investigating whether image processing software could be used to automatically check the images uploaded with each price check. That could ensure that the correct item was logged and might even allow more sophisticated measures to be added—recording, for example, what condition fresh food is in, or whether shelves are running low on stock.

Premise’s data may have other uses outside the financial industry. As part of a United Nations program called Global Pulse, Cavallo and PriceStats, which was founded after financial professionals began relying on data from an ongoing academic price-indexing effort called the Billion Prices Project, devised bread price indexes for several Latin American countries. Such indexes typically predict street prices and help governments and NGOs spot emerging food crises. Premise’s data could be used in the same way. The information could also be used to monitor areas of the world, such as Africa, where tracking online prices is unreliable, he says.

A wearable depth-sensing camera may soon give sightless people a better way to master their environment.

WHY IT MATTERS

Economist Simon Johnson says governments will feel the urge to suppress the crypto-currency Bitcoin.

Governments and established financial institutions are likely to launch a campaign to quash the decentralized digital currency Bitcoin, according to a leading economist and academic. Simon Johnson, a professor of entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, expects Bitcoin to face political pressure and aggressive lobbying from big banks because of its disruptive nature.

“There is going to be a big political backlash,” Johnson said on stage at MIT Technology Review’sEmTech conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last Thursday. “And the question is whether the people behind those currencies are ready for that and have their own political strategy.”

The system of cryptographic software behind Bitcoin represents a significant technical advance, and the currency has inspired many cyber-libertarians (see “What Bitcoin Is and Why It Matters”). Mathematical and computer networking principles are used to underpin a system through which financial transactions can be made digitally, without the need for any central authority or financial institution.

The code that supports and regulates the Bitcoin network is built into the software needed to use the currency. It works in a distributed network across the Internet to confirm transactions and prevent counterfeiting. Adding to the mystique, the technical expert or experts who developed the Bitcoin protocol are still unknown.

After several years as a nerdy curiosity, the currency has recently gained momentum as a legitimate means of payment. Many Bitcoin-based businesses are springing up, some backed by major Silicon Valley venture capitalists (see “Bitcoin Hits the Big Time, to the Regret of Some Early Boosters”).

However, Johnson says that Bitcoin’s success will draw increased attention from governments and regulators, who are used to having tight control over currencies. He believes they will be egged on by established financial institutions, which will likely seek to quash the currency. Bitcoin enables very rapid, cheap transfers and payments that could compete with existing fee-based ways of moving money around. “Any bankers watching this should be very afraid,” said Johnson.

Bitcoin opponents could get ammunition for their campaign from the recent case of Silk Road, an online marketplace where bitcoins were traded for illicit drugs. The FBI arrested a man on suspicion of running the site and seized the servers that ran Silk Road. The site was hidden from the open Internet using the anonymous networking technology Tor.

Johnson suggested that this kind of controversial association could certainly put pressure on Bitcoin. “People care a lot about how monies are used,” he said. “They care about the various behaviors associated with monies.”

Indeed, it appears that Bitcoin is coming under increased scrutiny from lawmakers and politicians. Stephen Pair, cofounder and CTO of the Bitcoin payments company Bitpay, says his company has been contacted by state and national officials who have subpoenaed information about its activities.

Pair rejects any suggestion that the currency has any special association with illegal activities. “Just because you use Bitcoin and Tor doesn’t mean you can get away with breaking the law,” he says. “I would not advise people to see Bitcoin as a means of subverting the legal system.”

Johnson, who served as chief economist for the International Monetary Fund in 2007 and 2008, said he thinks supporters of the “crypto-currency” could head off opponents by persuading politicians and legislators that it represents an opportunity for international innovation. “They shouldn’t sit back and wait for other people to define them in terms of Silk Road or anything else,” he said in an interview after the conference. “They should be proactive and explain why this would be a great industry for the U.S. to develop, and why they should have appropriate regulation around that.”

He also said that some governments outside the U.S. may feel threatened by Bitcoin because it allows citizens and companies to sidestep restrictions on the movement of funds across their borders.

Biotech startup Greenlight Biosciences has a cell-free approach to microbial chemical production.

Biotechnologists have genetically engineered bacteria and other microbes to produce biofuels and chemicals from renewable resources. But complex metabolic pathways in these living organisms can be difficult to control, and the desired products can be poisonous to the microbes. What if you could eliminate the living cell altogether?

Greenlight Biosciences, a Boston-area startup, engineers microbes to make various enzymes that can produce chemicals and then breaks open the bugs to harvest those enzymes. The scientists don’t have to go to the trouble of isolating the enzymes from the other cellular material; instead, they add chemicals to inhibit unwanted biochemical reactions. By mixing slurries based on different microbes with sugars and other carbon-based feedstocks, the company can generate complex reactions to produce a variety of chemicals. Greenlight say its technology enables the company to make cheaper versions of existing chemicals and has already produced a food additive, drug products, and pesticides and herbicides.

The biggest motivation in starting the company was to figure out how to produce such compounds in a more environmentally friendly way, says CEOAndrey Zarur. But Greenlight’s products also have to be cheaper than those produced by chemical- or cell-based manufacturing, he says, or industries will be reluctant to use them.

Greenlight’s strategy is a departure from classic fermentation processes that depend on vats of living microbes. It is also unlike a different approach to genetic engineering, often called synthetic biology, that tweaks the pathways in microbes so that they are optimized to fabricate desirable compounds. Several companies are engineering bacteria and yeast to produce specialty chemicals, but for the most part, these groups keep the bugs alive. Amyris, for example, can make biofuels, medicines, and chemicals used in cosmetics and lubricants by engineering microbes with new sets of enzymes that can modify sugars and other starting materials (see “Amyris Announces Commercial Production of Biochemicals” and “Microbes Can Mass-Produce Malaria Drug”). Metabolix has engineered bacteria to produce biodegradable plastic (see “A Bioplastic Goes Commercial”).

A problem with that strategy is that when bacteria and other microbes are turned into living chemical factories, they still have to put some resources into growing instead of chemical production, says Mark Styczynski, a metabolic engineer and systems biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Furthermore, even in a seemingly simply bacterium, metabolism is complicated. “Metabolic pathways have complex regulation within them and across them,” he says. Changing one metabolic pathway to improve chemical production can have broad and sometimes negative consequences for the rest of the cell.

Thus, separating the production pathway from the needs of the cell could be a huge advantage, he says. Greenlight doesn’t completely avoid microbes. In the company’s sunny lab space north of Boston, researchers use bubbling bioreactors to grow bacteria in liquid culture, maintaining different species and strains that can produce a variety of enzymes. Once the bugs have reached a certain density, the researchers send them through a high-pressure extruder to break them into pieces. Then they add drugs to the resulting gray slurry to turn off most of the cells’ metabolic enzymes; the useful enzymes are unaffected because they have been engineered to resist the drugs.

The technology that keeps the exposed metabolic pathways working was developed by James Swartz, a biochemical engineer at Stanford University who left his position as a protein engineer at the biotechnology company Genentech to develop cell-free methods for producing pharmacological proteins (insulin is an example of a druglike protein that can be produced by biotechnology). Seeking more control over the biological machinery that produces proteins, Swartz figured out how to give that machinery the biochemical environment it needed even outside its normal home in a cell. Not only did his methods enable him to make more complex proteins, but it turned out they could also be used to control biological machinery to make small molecules and chemicals. “We’ve found that by reproducing the chemical conditions that occur inside the cell, we activate a lot of metabolic processes, even ones people thought were too complicated,” he says.

Greenlight can troubleshoot and tweak the metabolic production of chemicals in ways more akin to chemical engineering than anything found in typical microbial engineering. The cell-free slurries are active for 96 hours before the enzymes begin to break down. At that point, a new batch of microbes must be grown.

“One of the beauties of the cell is it is self-replicating,” says David Berry, a principle at Flagship Ventures, who cofounded the biofuels companies LS9 andJoule Unlimited. (Berry is a 2007 MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35.) But even though a cell-free system misses out on that advantage, there are other benefits, such as superior flexibility. “There is the potential to work with more inputs and to work around situations where certain pathways currently don’t work because of the needs of the cell,” Berry says.

Zarur says Greenlight could have its first product on the market at the beginning of next year. It will be a food supplement with health benefits, he says.

The company has also received a $4.5 million grant from ARPA-E to develop a system for converting methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, to liquid fuel. The agency says such technology could “enable mobile fermenters to access remote sources of natural gas for low-cost conversion of natural gas to liquid fuel.”

A new database tool dramatically improves processing speeds using technology that’s already in your computer.

New software can use the graphics processors found on everyday computers to process torrents of data more quickly than is normally possible, opening up new ways to visually explore everything from Twitter posts to political donations.

Known as MapD, or massively parallel database, the new technology achieves big speed gains by storing the data in the onboard memory of graphics processing units (GPUs) instead of in central processing units (CPUs), as is conventional. Using a single high-performance GPU card can make data processing up to 70 times faster.

Right now the prototype technology is being demonstrated on tweets; it can show how a meme is propagating in real time on regional or world maps (watch “Visualizing Big Data in Milliseconds on Cheap Computers”). Many large-scale Twitter visualizations—including animated maps and charts—take several seconds or longer to process data before it can be displayed. With MapD, a user can adjust search terms and other parameters—like time frame or geographical region—and see a new visualization instantly, without having to wait for each new map and animation to compute and load.

This public interface can be used to visualize 50 million geocoded tweets posted between September 28 and October 6. The tool allows users to explore different search terms, examine broad geographical trends, and zoom in on each tweet. For each of the 30 frames per second it generates when animating Twitter, Map-D scans all the tweets that have been loaded on the GPUs, constructing visualizations such as maps of how word usage—which could include mentions of a product name or news item—is propagating across a region or around the world in real time.

“The [existing Twitter visualizations] we know of are ‘canned’—based on some previous computation of a map or picture, rather than being truly interactive,” says Samuel Madden, a computer science professor at MIT. “We have built a new kind of database system. It will answer and also map every request by scanning through every tweet in the database, which can be done in just a few milliseconds.” The system can keep up the pace even if the database has hundreds of millions of tweets.

The technology was dreamed up last year by Todd Mostak, then a Harvard graduate student in Middle Eastern studies, who was frustrated by the sluggish processing he encountered as he tried to crunch social-media data sets from Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. “By building a tool to explore data sets like this in a truly interactive fashion, with latencies measured in milliseconds rather than seconds or minutes, we hope to remove a computational bottleneck from the process of hypothesis formulation, testing, and refinement,” Mostak says.

The technology could make it easier to glean insights from Twitter’s huge corpus of information. Combining census data with tweets, for example, could show how mention of the word “McDonald’s” in geotagged tweets relates to variables like income or unemployment levels.

An early adopter will be the Sunlight Foundation, which promotes openness in campaign financing. That organization is feeding 22 years of U.S. state and federal campaign donation data to MapD, which will provide ways to rapidly vary visualizations that break down more than 20 million donations according to donor, region, elected official, and other parameters. Each new type of query will generate a new visualization in just milliseconds.

Using existing methods, it can take seconds for a visualization to load, because it takes that long to query the information in a database. Faster access enables  researchers to test hypotheses and refine visualizations more quickly. That could make big data sets more useful. “Many laptops even contain fairly powerful GPUs—fast enough to dramatically accelerate the interactive exploration of moderate-sized data sets of, say, 20 million tweets,” Mostak says.

“MapD’s technology promises to make new kinds of real-time queries possible,” says Bob Lannon, a developer at Sunlight Labs, which develops data analysis tools for the Sunlight Foundation. “Soon you will be able to quickly explore large amounts of data and pivot, filter, and summarize it in ways not previously available. We’re excited to see what it could mean for our users.”

Nvidia, one of the leading manufacturers of GPUs, plans to demonstrate MapD on more than one billion tweets using eight GPUs at an upcoming conference. The researchers are also planning to do a joint demo with Gnip, the leading reseller of social-media data from sources like Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook. Elaine Ellis, a spokeswoman for Gnip, said the company was not ready to talk about the collaboration.

Twitter reported recently that it has 215 million monthly active users broadcasting more than 400 million tweets per day. Of these, about seven million tweets contain GPS geolocation tags, typically from mobile devices. Being able to visualize massive streams of geographically identifiable social-media and mobile-phone data in real time could have powerful implications for epidemiology and disaster response (see “Big Data from Cheap Phones”).

Beyond using graphics chips, Madden and Mostak are working with researchers from Intel to allow MapD to take advantage of the company’s new massively parallel processors as well as the ordinary X86 processors that power most computers.

(Reuters) – Japan’s SoftBank Corp said on Friday it agreed to pay $1.26 billion for a 57 percent stake in privately held cellphone distributor Brightstar Corp as it looks to boost its bargaining power with handset makers.

SoftBank, which owns 80 percent of No. 3 U.S. mobile operator Sprint Corp, said under the agreement its ownership of Brightstar would increase to 70 percent over the next five years, or upon certain unspecified events.

SoftBank had announced earlier this week it was in talks with Brightstar. SoftBank’s billionaire founder, Masayoshi Son, has said one of the key benefits of the Sprint deal would be to bolster the group’s position with handset makers, an industry dominated globally by Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Apple Inc.

Earlier this week, SoftBank said it spent $1.5 billion for a 51 percent stake in Finnish mobile games maker Supercell, valuing the small maker of hit games “Clash of Clans” and “Hay Day” at $3 billion.

The Brightstar transaction, which has been approved by SoftBank’s board, will be subject to regulatory approval, according to the companies. They expect to close the deal by the end of 2013.

SoftBank said it is financing the deal with $1.26 billion in cash on hand and intends to guarantee Brightstar’s outstanding $350 million senior unsecured notes due 2016 and $250 million senior unsecured notes due 2018.

Under the agreement, Brightstar will become the exclusive provider of handsets to certain SoftBank affiliates.

Brightstar has a presence in over 50 countries, and generated earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of about $260 million on revenues of more than $7 billion for the 12 months ended June 2013, the companies said.

Brightstar acts as a wholesaler between manufacturers of phones, tablets and accessories and wireless operators and retailers.

Goldman, Sachs was financial adviser to Brightstar, and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP and K&L Gates LLP served as legal counsel. The Raine Group LLC advised SoftBank and Morrison & Foerster LLP acted as lead counsel to SoftBank.

(Reuters) – Data storage company Nimble Storage Inc filed with U.S. regulators to raise up to $150 million in an initial public offering of its common stock.

The company, which makes storage devices that combine hard disks and flash drives, competes with larger companies such as NetApp Inc and EMC Corp.

Nimble’s investors include Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company, founded in 2008, had raised $40 million in September 2012.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the major underwriters, the company told the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in a preliminary prospectus.

Reuters reported in August that Nimble was planning an IPO later this year.

The filing did not reveal how many shares the company planned to sell or their expected price.

San Jose, California-based Nimble intends to list its common stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “NMBL.”

Net proceeds from the offering would be used for working capital and other general corporate purposes, the company said.

The company’s net loss widened to $27.9 million for the year ended January 31, from $16.8 million a year earlier. Revenue rose to $53.8 million from $14 million during the period.

The amount of money a company says it plans to raise in its first IPO filings is used to calculate registration fees. The final size of the IPO could be different.

By Soham Chatterjee and Alexei Oreskovic

(Reuters) – Google Inc shares jumped past $1,000 on Friday as investors bet on the Internet company’s continued dominance of the mobile and video advertising businesses despite aggressive competition from Facebook Inc and Yahoo Inc.

Shares of the world’s No. 1 search company rose more than 13 percent to hit an all-time high of $1,008.18, swelling the company’s market value by almost $40 billion. That vaulted Google past Microsoft Corp and Berkshire Hathaway Inc in capitalization and brought it to No. 3 among U.S. companies, behind only Apple Inc and Exxon Mobil Corp.

Google, which is also known for its Google Maps service, Chrome browser and Nexus line of smartphones and tablets, on Thursday reported a 23 percent jump in net revenue from its Internet business. Advertising volume soared 26 percent – the highest rate of growth in the past year – and more than made up for an 8 percent slide in ad prices.

But given concerns about how U.S. companies can increase revenue in an uncertain global economy, those numbers suggested Google was firing on all cylinders except for its perennially money-losing Motorola unit, analysts said.

“Google’s ownership of the Android ecosystem makes Google like the house, in Vegas terms,” said Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan. “The success of Android, which becomes more and more popular every day, is starting to really add up, and Google is collecting small tolls along the way.”

Rohan said accelerating revenue growth outside the United States and the UK was impressive, particularly in South Korea and Japan. “That could go on a while,” he said.

At least 16 brokerages raised their price targets on the stock to between $880 and $1,220. The shares traded at $1,006.44 on Nasdaq at midday.

“We view solid paid clicks growth to be a good indicator of demand, driven by the continued shift to mobile,” JPMorgan analysts said. They had expected 21.5 percent growth in ad volumes.

A STUDY IN CONTRASTS

Google’s Friday rally also stemmed from investors’ focus on Facebook and its own increasingly successful efforts to sell advertising on mobile devices. Google stock had gained just 26 percent this year, while Facebook’s has almost doubled.

“The worst is behind Google from a sentiment perspective,” Deutsche Bank analysts said.

Google and Facebook, which is expected to report its third-quarter results on October 30, also stand head-and-shoulders above the likes of Yahoo. The once-dominant Internet portal this week reported a tepid quarter, losing market share in display and search advertising.

Facebook rose 3.6 percent to $54.08 on Friday, while Yahoo was up 2 percent at $33.40. Baidu Inc, often called China’s Google, gained 7.1 percent to $164.78.

Google’s rally has already rewarded investors such as Fidelity Investments’ $101 billion Contrafund.

Contrafund added to its stake in Google in the third quarter and got a big lift from the surging performance of Facebook and Tesla Motors Inc as well. The fund returned 8.94 percent in the third quarter, easily beating the 5.24 percent advance of the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index.

Some say Google still has room for improvement. JPMorgan analysts said continued efforts to counter declines in ad rates might yield a major opportunity in the upcoming holiday season.

Google earlier this year rolled out a service to help advertisers promote their products on a mix of smartphones, tablets and desktops. The move is also expected to bolster Google’s overall advertising rates by mitigating the impact of mobile ads, which command lower rates.

Others say YouTube, the world’s most popular video website, is still not fully tapped. Ads on the site increased more than 75 percent in the quarter from a year earlier, with 40 percent of traffic now coming from mobile devices.

“We estimate that Google’s key YouTube asset generated approximately $4 billion in revenue in 2012, positioning Google extremely well for the strong growth in video advertising,” RBC Capital Markets analysts wrote in a note.

Analysts at Jefferies said Google was among the companies best positioned to benefit in mobile, given the 1 billion mobile devices running its Android software. The Mountain View, California-based company sells applications and content through its Google Play Store.

Despite promising results in controlling neuronal activity, leaders in brain research still wrestle over turning their work into treatments.

Recent achievements in neurotechnology are nothing short of stunning—blind people can see parts of their world again, and a woman who has been paralyzed for a decade can feed herself using a robotic arm. Leaders in the field presented these and other advances at the Aspen Brain Forum last week, while at the same time debating how quickly these technologies will lead to treatments for neurological disease and injury.

At the Aspen meeting, which was cosponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, Robert Greenberg, CEO of Second Sight, described how his medical-device company developed a prosthetic-sight system (see “Bionic Eye Implant Approved for U.S. Patients”). In its current form, the system transmits image data from a camera to a 60-pixel implant in the retina. However, the company is talking about a future version of the system that bypasses the eye altogether and instead sends the image information directly into the visual cortex.

But despite such progress, Greenberg and many other presenters made clear that much of how the brain works—and what happens when things go wrong—remains a mystery. The U.S. government announced this spring a $100 million initiative to develop new technology to map neuron- and circuit-level activity in the brain (see “Why Obama’s Brain-Mapping Project Matters”), and the European Union is funding a $1.3 billion project to understand the brain through computer simulations.

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“It’s so difficult to get anything to work in the human brain at all,” says Ed Boyden, an MIT neuroscientist who discussed his work using light to control neural activity, which could be developed into a treatment for blindness. “It’s enormously complex, and the risk for patients is high,” he says.

But medical treatments rarely wait on a complete understanding of how the body works. And there are successes even when there aren’t complete answers.Andy Schwartz, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, discussed his group’s research on brain-computer interfaces, which have been used by quadriplegic patients to drive a robotic arm to move objects and even feed themselves (see “Patient Shows New Dexterity with Mind-Controlled Robot Arm”).

“We are starting to see a little bit of maturation and get a better understanding of what we can and can’t do,” says Schwartz. As his work has moved from monkeys to humans, his team has uncovered details of the neural code, but there is still plenty to learn.

Helen Mayberg of Emory University presented some of her still-experimental work treating otherwise intractable cases of depression with deep-brain stimulators. Such stimulators have been implanted in more than 100,000 people around the world. In most of these cases, the technology is used to treat mobility problems in Parkinson’s patients, but researchers have also found that they can treat a variety of neurological and psychiatric diseases (see “Brain Implants Can Rest Misfiring Circuits”).

But deep-brain stimulators are a rare example of new options for brain treatment, and Mayberg expressed frustration in the dearth of tools for human use. “We want what the animal people have to understand the choreography of the whole system,” she said, “to look at all the cross-talk between neurons and [eliminate] symptoms of psychiatric disease.”

One of the world’s largest chip makers is helping to instigate a boom in wireless health devices.

Asthmapolis has a GPS sensor for inhalers that uses a Bluetooth radio so people with asthma can track where and when they needed help breathing. CleverCap attaches to pill bottles, flashes and beeps when it’s time to take medication, and then, using Wi-Fi and cellular networks, reports to the Internet whether the pills were taken. The Garmin heart-rate monitor straps across the chest and digitally communicates beeps and blips with yet another wireless protocol, called ANT-plus.

That’s just a fraction of the wireless health devices reaching the “mobile health” market, gadgets that could one day be as ubiquitous as mobile phones. But this is no seamless ecosystem: these three devices alone use three different communication protocols. The potential flood of data pouring out of the machines might as well just disappear into the ether if it’s not stored, organized, and made accessible to the right people in real time.

Qualcomm Life, launched two years ago as a division of the San Diego–based telecommunications giant Qualcomm, is building software and protocols that could bring some order to the chaos of health data. Its first product, called the 2Net Platform, is a system for getting wireless data off those devices and onto the Internet servers of clients, like health device makers or hospitals.

About half of American adults have some kind of chronic condition, including obesity, arthritis, or diabetes, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Wireless devices could let more of their health care happen at home. To proponents of mobile health, like Don Jones, Qualcomm Life’s head of global marketing and strategy, this means that unnecessary visits to clinics and emergency rooms will plummet, people will refine their use of medicine, and doctors and nurses will have more time to focus on their neediest patients. A PricewaterhouseCoopers report this year estimated that mobile health technology could help save developed countries $400 billion by 2017.

Sitting in his office in decidedly mundane Sorrento Mesa—no stunning San Diego ocean views in sight—Jones pulls out the division’s first gadget, the 2Net hub, a plain-looking white box that’s about the size of a night light and plugs into a wall socket. The box solves a particular problem: people often don’t take advantage of the wireless capabilities of their health devices. For example, a bathroom scale might be equipped with Bluetooth, but it never transmits any data if the owner doesn’t complete the setup process, called pairing. “If you’ve ever paired anything, it’s not a complex process, but there’s a very high failure rate,” says Jones.

The box supports four different radio protocols, including Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and a USB port. Device manufacturers buy it from distributors for less than $100 so consumers can have a plug-and-play experience with their tracking devices, even if they don’t have an Internet connection. Devices that currently work with the 2Net hub include a thermometer, a blood-pressure cuff, a pulse oximeter, and a blood-glucose monitor.

By 2020 there will be 25 billion wireless devices transmitting data, estimates the Broadband Commission for Digital Development. To accelerate things in health care, a separate Qualcomm Life Fund has invested widely in startups such as Noom, publisher of an app for people trying to lose weight, and Telcare, which makes a system that diabetics can use to monitor their glucose levels.

This year Qualcomm Life paid an undisclosed amount to acquire Healthy Circles, a “software-as-a-service” platform that uses social-networking ideas to coördinate health care. Essentially, patients send their self-gathered data to a Web portal that also stores their medical records, information on their current medications, and up-to-the-minute lab reports. This allows nurses, doctors, and pharmacists to literally stay on the same page as the patients themselves, while obeying federal rules on data privacy.

Logical, efficient and slick as wireless, always-on health care may sound, Jones agrees that it’s still far from reality. “At the end of the day, one of your health-care providers has to make it available to you and build it in to a solution,” he says. “We’re selling that platform.”