Digital, P.I.

December 15, 2003 | Source: TIME

The new “digital detective” firms are developing technologies that can monitor everything from deciphering buying trends in retail outlets to identifying dangerous chemicals.

The companies include Imagen, which makes software that recognizes patterns and identifies faces or scans circuit boards for flaws; Alien, which makes RFID chips that can be embedded in thin plastic sheets that can be attached to almost any type of product to track it on its journey from manufacturer to consumer; and Nanomix, which is developing low-cost nanotech-based sensors to detect pollutants.