TROTTING swiftly through the forest, a truffle hunter is travelling light.
His faithful pig—the truffle-sniffer of old—is still in its sty. In
its stead, our high-tech hunter is waving a pen-shaped contraption at the leaf
litter. The gadget’s electronic nose is sniffing for a telltale pungency, and
when at last it recognises pong de truffle, an alarm alerts him to a
valuable find.
This is just one of the many ideas that stream from the mind of the Swedish
entrepreneur and former neurophysiologist Christer FÃ¥hraeus. These days
FÃ¥hraeus’s forte is looking at the things people do, and dreaming up new ways to
do them—preferably with profitable new technologies.
If you could take a look inside the pen-shaped gizmo, there wouldn’t be a
wire in sight, says FÃ¥hraeus. Just a sensor and a chip not much bigger than an
aspirin tablet. The chip is a short-range radio transceiver that beams signals
to a cellphone in the hunter’s pocket. In turn, this is hooked up via the
Internet to a computer that continually compares the signal with that expected
of truffle.
The future’s blue
If you think this set-up sounds like the ravings of a man who’s one herring
short of a smorgasbord, you’d be wrong. FÃ¥hraeus is founder of a string of
wireless technology companies, including C-Technologies of Lund, and Anoto of
Stockholm. His truffle-hunting scenario is intended to show just how far out the
applications of this little chip will become. Its heart is a device called a
Bluetooth chip, and pundits are tipping it as The Next Big Thing.
FÃ¥hraeus’s singular vision…
