Ever since the validity of patents covering Internet-enabled business methods was upheld by a 1998 court case known as "State Street," there's been a flurry of patenting as e-commerce entrepreneurs scramble to lay claim to new ways of doing business on the Internet.

Selling research software is a tough way to generate big returns: there are dozens of competitors, most markets are small, and technology changes fast. Some companies are trying to create one-stop shopping solutions for large clients, building consulting and training businesses onto software sales in order to leverage up per-client fees. Others are creating one-stop-shops of a more democratic kind by exploiting the Web. Instead of selling to bioinformaticians, they're aggregating often easy-to-use versions of bioinformatics software and selling affordable subscriptions. But their real revenue generation model may be context-sensitive e-procurement: pointing out to customers which reagents to buy and then taking a percentage of the selling price.

Genomics; Bioinformatics. Alphagene intends to use its abilities to speedily find full-length genes and determine that they are indeed novel and disease-related on behalf of Big Pharma clients. The company will use its original analytical software, itsmethod for building gene libraries, and its robotic system for determining which genes are turned off or on in normal and diseased tissue to work with drugmakers working in defined disease areas (rather than selling its set of tools to clients).