He’s a scholarly technophile in the Bill Gates mould – without Billy G’s elephantine bank balance.

Mild, bespectacled, and kind of anonymous. Just another attentive face in a grad school lecture theatre.

However, appearances to the contrary, Brian Moore packs the intellectual muscle it takes to chart the destiny of an emerging fibre-optics mover, known as BigBangwidth, on two fronts.

In the lab, Moore is an ace.BigBangwidth’s president and chief technological officer, his name appears as inventor, or co-inventor, on four patents. He’s also in pursuit of a doctorate in electrical engineering at the University of Alberta, and has been a technological adviser to the National Research Council.

Al Popil, for Business Edge
Brian Moore's Edmonton company uses nanotechnology to handle data traffic.

There’s more, though. Moore wrote the Edmonton company’s business plan. He also commands the savoir-faire you need to sweet-talk $3 million in start-up cash out of TechnoCap, an American-style venture capital company from Montreal.

In short, Moore’s a new-age Renaissance man – a do-it-all explorer in the Wonderful World of Small.

“As the company grows, I may take more of a technical role than a business role. That’s where I’m strongest,” Moore conceded, sitting in a roomy suite of new offices just off Whyte Avenue, near 103rd Street.

That’s his story, anyway. We’ll probe the technical details of Moore’s BigBangwidth Grid (according to the buzz, it’s a “massively parallel netOptical (TM) device” for fibre-optic telecommunication networks) in a sec.

First, consider how Moore piqued TechnoCap’s interest in his hardware product last February, and how emphatically the money guys responded.

“I looked at the portfolio of companies they had invested in (including Edmonton’s YottaYotta Inc., co-founded by Wayne Karpoff, a one-time colleague of Moore’s) and there was a theme there,” Moore explained.

“Internet growth, data storage. An application of my technology fit in with the theme, but they hadn’t yet made an investment in the hardware end.”

He was carefully sussed out by TechnoCap’s network of specialists.

Then an offer was made, “amazingly fast,” Moore whistled appreciatively. The whole deal shook down in less than two months.

But TechnoCap did more than sign a fat cheque and bid Moore godspeed.

His investors also pointed him towards a substantial batch of key U.S. techno-trade shows – ideal trolling territory for gathering intelligence.

Then they sent him into the action.

“You talk to potential investors, corporate partners, customers – it’s a chance to check out the competition,” he said of the VC-financed kick-start.

On TechnoCap’s dime, Moore and his lieutenants were able to spend the past several months travelling to Dallas, Boston and California, steadily adding to their knowledge banks.

Despite the current telecom sluggishness, response from potential BigBangwidth customers – phone companies, data carriers and equipment suppliers – has been enthusiastic. Moore is confident BigBangwidth will nail its first sale before the close of next year’s second quarter.

TechnoCap’s confidence is, of course, one of Moore’s selling points.

Meanwhile, BigBangwidth has received moral support from the political sector.

Provincial cabinet ministers dropped by for the official opening of company offices. And Booster Bill Smith, the three-term mayor, termed the occasion “a recognition of the quality of (Edmonton’s) technology infrastructure.”

So . . . why the hoopla?

It’s all about data traffic. As we speak, the volume of data traffic has overtaken voice traffic volume throughout the globe’s telecommunication highways.

“To carry that data is what we’re about. We make equipment that carries the data over fibre-optic networks,” Moore spelled it out for a slow-witted interviewer.

“People are sending Power Points, AVI movie clips, huge MP3 files over the Internet. It all leads to the need for wider highways along the information backbone.”

BigBangwidth’s patent-protected nanotechnology (Nano = 1,000 times smaller than micro) allows users to eliminate the expensive procedure of converting optical signals back into electronics at the receiving end.

That now-unnecessary process of conversion is the reason video images tend to “hiccup,” even on high-powered computer screens.

But by using all-optical technology, “the data comes in and goes out at the speed of light. So no jitters,” he smiles.

Moore realizes more venture capital may be hard to rustle up for a while. He’d like to find investors willing to cough up another $10 million, but is content to stick to his knitting for now.

But sooner or later, the double-threat president expects BigBangwidth to make a sizeable splash in the Wonderful World of Small.