Technology

William P. Bishop, 50, of Holland, a pension consultant and actuary for many years, died Monday, Dec. 19, at his home of complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Before retiring in 2008 due to illness, Mr. Bishop served as president of the Savitz Organization, a Philadelphia employee-benefits consulting firm with offices at 1845 Walnut St. Mr. Bishop joined Savitz in December 1995 and became president in 1997. Under his leadership, the firm developed and gained a national reputation for creative, quality service, said Tom Finnegan, a principal in the company.

Jim Young , raised in Apple Computer's hometown of Cupertino, Calif., developed the notoriously successful face-and-body comparison-voting site HotOrNot.com back in pre- Facebook days, while he was warming up for his doctoral dissertation at Berkeley. Cheyenne Ehrlich , raised in a meditation center, developed ClickTheButton.com , a PayPal predecessor, while he was an undergraduate at Vassar, and went on to help build firms in Silicon Valley and East Asia, from his home on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

A tumble by technology stocks led the broad stock market indexes lower yesterday. The Nasdaq composite index, heavy with technology issues, lost 18.24 points.

Imagine a particle 1/10,000 of a cross-section of a human hair. That's the size of a protein, way smaller than a cell. Bernardo Cordovez, 29, and his partners have come up with something they call a NanoTweezer that allows them to pick up and move that kind of teeny-tiny particle using a laser beam of light. There's been a lot of talk about trying to bring high-tech, high-potential businesses to Philadelphia, and the story behind how Cordovez's very small company, Optofluidics Inc., landed here provides an object lesson.

Stocks fell as sour earnings prospects for 1998 overshadowed 1997 reports. Technology and small-cap issues held up better than blue chips.

Maybe someday, Alesia Brown joked, the futuristic Star Trek idea of instantaneously producing food items directly from an advanced computer system will come to Philadelphia's Central High School. If it does, said Brown, the teacher technology leader and computer support coordinator at Central, she would not be surprised. In the 30 years that Brown has been working with computers at Central, she has seen many changes in technology and its uses at the academic magnet high school.

About 50 area executives learned about just-in-time manufacturing at a four-day workshop taught by the J-I-T Institute of Technology of Denver. The manufacturing technology workshop wound up yesterday with the executives manning a model assembly line. The workshop was sponsored by the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce and the Delaware Valley Industrial Resource Center.

MAYOR NUTTER was expected to announce today that he has appointed New Jersey's chief innovation officer, Adel Ebeid, as the city's first chief innovation officer. Slated to start Aug. 22, Ebeid will be responsible for developing and managing strategy and daily operations of all technology and information services. The position was known as chief technology officer when the former head of the Division of Technology, Allan Frank, departed in February. He oversaw a consolidation of the city's information-technology operations.

SunGard Data Systems is a Fortune 500 company with 20,000 employees and $5 billion in annual revenue. But for a group from Teen Tech Camp visiting its Broad Street data center Tuesday, the number that really stuck may have been one that tour guide Wayne Martin revealed after asking the 10 campers to guess the facility's monthly electric bill. "Maybe $5,000?" one ventured. "How about $10,000?" another asked. Eyes widened at Martin's answer: $500,000, largely to keep the site's thousands of servers and network and storage devices running round the clock for clients that rely on SunGard for "mission-critical" aspects of corporate data management, including the disaster-recovery services the company pioneered three decades ago, when it was spun off by Sun Oil Co. "I'm impressed by how much power they use," said Zamir Brown, 15, a ninth grader at Philadelphia's World Communications Charter School who is plainly well-suited to the camp's T-shirt logo: "Techie in training.