John Lamb's Week (4/12/00): Who wants to help an e-millionaire?

The talking shop for telecoms, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), is holding its regional bash - ITU Telecom Asia 2000 - in Hong Kong between December 4 and December 9. This huge deal-making fest features presentations from such industry luminaries as Craig Barrett, Intel president, and Tadashi Sekizawa, chairman of Fujitsu.

But the hottest ticket at the show will undoubtedly be to hear Keiji Tachikawa, president of NTT DoCoMo. Last week the Japanese mobile phone company signed a deal with AT&T of the US that will see DoCoMo's i-mode high speed wireless system enter the US market.

The two companies plan to develop third generation (3G) wireless data services using the i-mode platform. The deal, which involves DoCoMo taking a 16 per cent stake in AT&T for $10bn, is a huge shot in the arm for i-mode, generally seen as superior to WAP systems for mobile internet access. You can find out more at www.itu.int/ASIA2000/index.html.

Talking about money, Sun is the latest company to jump on board the craze for distributed resource computing. That is the idea that big processing tasks can be carried out by farms of computers working part time on the project.

The model for this style of collaborative computing is the Seti@home effort to find signs of extraterrestrial life, which involves over a million home computers. However, there are commercial opportunities here too.

Sun will be holding a round table discussion on December 7 to explore the implications of a joint venture with network firm Level 3 and Science Applications International Corporation, a service company, to make excess computing power available for those engaged in life sciences research.

Biotech companies spend some $2bn per year on IT services and are likely to have to dig deeper into their pockets to cover the cost of processing work on the human genome and for the development of new, more sophisticated drugs.

This week also sees work begin on recruiting people for one of those dot-coms that everyone would like to succeed. New CEO Stephen Harpin gets his feet under the desk at youreable.com, an internet business pitched at disabled people.

Backed by the likes of Andersen Consulting, Bright Station, BM Investments, Oxygen and Skillcapital.com, youreable is the brainchild of Leeds charity worker Joe Rajko who was joint winner of the Emillionaire Show on Channel 4 in July.

Wheelchair bound Rajko won a package of investment and business help from the sponsors worth £1m for his concept of a site providing information, community activities and shopping for disabled people. With estimates that there could be as many as eight million disabled people in the UK with total spending power of £40bn, youreable is pitching at a potentially huge market.

One of Harpin's first tasks is to winkle out a group of cyber squatters currently sitting on various 'yourable' URLs, which are close enough to 'youreable' to pick-up significant miskeyed traffic. "We don't want to go to the mattresses over this," Godfather aficionado Rajko tells me.

In the meantime Harpin is looking for applications and HTML programmers, disability experts and journalists to help him get the venture off the ground by next April. The address for CVs is stephen.harpin@youreable.com.

John Lamb

John Lamb is the latest industry expert to join silicon.com's growing list of high-profile columnists. He has covered the computer industry as a writer and editor for many years, working both freelance and in-house. Currently he edits the British Computer Society publication IT Strategy, acts as consultant for Richmond Events' IT Directors' Forum and contributes regularly to FT IT Review. He has edited a number of weekly publications including Informationweek UK, Computer Weekly and ComputerAge, a supplement to Sunday Business.

He has also been a regular contributor to InformationWeek (US), New Scientist and Computing. Recent assignments include reports for the Computing Services and Software Association and NMTV. John also writes case studies and conducts media training sessions - current clients include Cable & Wireless and the mmd public relations agency. John lives in Norfolk and sails dinghies.