Recent breakthroughs have paved the way for practical, commercially viable quantum computing – a new computing technology that stands to make early investors a windfall once it reaches market. Quantum computing is still nascent enough that most investors have yet to catch wind of it… And today, I’m going to tell you the name of the company that holds the keys to the kingdom.

This is often and accurately called the Information Age. Nations and enterprises succeed or fail because of the use, disuse or misuse of information. Indeed, the growth in the importance of information has been outstripped only by the sheer volume of information at our disposal.

A recent University of Southern California study, for example, revealed that the typical American now consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information every single day outside of the work environment.

Occupational information is even greater.

To contrast, a mere century ago, a typical corporation generally created no more than a few dozen megabytes of data, these being stored in dead tree format. In modern times, these data pools have grown into many terabytes and have become accessible to individuals within an organization almost instantly and without regard to physical location.

All these data have not come without their drawbacks, however…

Uninterpreted data are of little worth. They must be processed into meaningful information that can be utilized in decision-making. But how can a human being sift through the mountains of seemingly unrelated data available? It is a task apparently beyond normal human ability. An urgent need has arisen for technology that can change the vast amounts of data into useful information.

By far, the largest store of data is publicly hosted on the Internet. Search giant Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has built a vast financial empire extracting desired information from that data. However, conventional computing based on the von Neumann architecture, the basis of all modern computers, has definite limitations. So the world’s Googles are casting about looking for more powerful ways to extract useful information.

One solution exists in quantum computing.

As you know, quantum computing harnesses the basic properties of quantum particles to manipulate data. Quantum computers can theoretically solve large complex problems much faster than classical von Neumann architecture computers. They also possess the theoretical capacity to apply extremely advanced artificial intelligence techniques to harvest and classify data.

For example, a new computer algorithm, published in Physical Review Letters, demonstrates a potential for a revolutionary explosion in the ability to solve problems with millions or even trillions of variables. A quantum computer running this algorithm would be able to solve problems in a few hundred steps that would take a classical computer a hundred trillion steps to complete.

Like all new and revolutionary technologies, however, quantum computing has been met with a chorus of skepticism. This may finally be changing.

Recently, Google executives announced they have spent the past three years investigating the elusive properties of quantum computers to more efficiently perform search operations. To do so, they partnered with Canadian early-stage quantum computing company D-Wave Systems.

[Ed. Note: While D-Wave is privately held, Patrick’s Breakthrough Technology Alert readers have already been filled in on a backdoor way to pick up shares…]

To date, D-Wave has the only commercially available quantum-based computing platform. Google’s involvement, of course, serves as a major validation for D-Wave’s technology.

Among other things, Google has been utilizing D-Wave’s quantum computers to perform advanced pattern recognition. For example, at a recent Neural Information Processing Systems conference, Google was able to demonstrate a detector that can identify cars far better than any conventional system.

The detector was powered by D-Wave’s C4 Chimera quantum chip. The potential for this sort of advanced image-processing technology is staggering.

Google has recently deployed an Android mobile platform-based application called Goggles. This application allows the end-user to simply take a photo with their Android-based mobile device. Google pattern recognition then can often identify it and pull up information from the Google search engine.

Walk into an art museum, take a snapshot of a masterpiece, and there is a good chance that the Goggles application will be able to pull up relevant information regarding the work and the artist. Let me add that this application is being enabled using only traditional technology at this time. Quantum-based pattern recognition should make these kinds of information searches far more powerful.

And you can bet that they’ll be just as powerful for the fortunes of the early stage investors in these companies.

For transformational profits,
Patrick Cox

January 5, 2010

Patrick Cox

Patrick Cox has lived deep inside the world of transformative technologies for over 25 years. In the 1980s, he worked in computer software development and manufacturing. By the mid-1990s, he worked as a consultant for Netscape — the company that handled 90% of all Internet browsing traffic at the time. InfoWorld and USA Today have featured Patrick's research numerous times. He's also appeared on Crossfire and Nightline. Patrick has been quoted by The Wall Street Journal and Reason magazine. His expertise brought him to Agora Financial, where he now heads Breakthrough Technology Alert, the only place you'll find the truly transformational technologies that offer exponential gains.

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