NanoBeam was featured in the Cambridge News, in a centre page report.

With the jobless total approaching 2.5m across the UK, at its highest since 1996, firms in Cambridge are experiencing the opposite problem, and nowhere more so than at NanoBeam on Coldham's Lane.

They don't mince their words, they are "desperate" to find 15 engineers to clinch their route to world domination.

Actually, it's pretty much theirs already, but the size of the domination could be a lot bigger.

The company, founded in 2002, makes the machines anyone involved in nanotechnology needs to progress their research and business.

Now, if you pause to think about this, given that everything electronic is getting smaller and smaller, nano is getting more and more important; nano is the future, and right now little NanoBeam in Cambridge is holding the aces in the pack.

The genius behind the company is Dr Tao Zhang, although the lineage goes back to Darwin and his son Sir Horace, founder of Cambridge Instrument Company in 1885.

Tao, now 57, was a boy-wonder in his native China, with all the neighbours asking him to mend anything that broke down. He loved it and went to university to study engineering, specialising in electron optics, a field in which Cambridge has the world lead.

What else could Tao do, but come here. He spent many years with the university before moving more into the commercial sector, including working with Leica, which had taken over Darwin's old firm.

His wife, Mei, who, like him has lectured in electronics, joined the firm, and over the past eight years they and eight others have built eight lithography machines, now deployed in various parts of the world.

This may not sound like much of an output, but these machines cost more than $1m a throw, and here is the crux, this is three or four times less than other machines, which also have the disadvantage of being much bigger, like the size of a room compared with the size of a photocopier.

Size is what matters in this nano world. Tao is drawing pictures on his white board, but it is not until he says:

"Your hair, it is thin (thanks), on a strand of your hair I could write a book."

This brings home the scale of things in nanoland, and those who inhabit it need the NanoBeam tools to see my hair on this mammoth scale.

To give it another human touch, the company's production manager, Alan Curtis, is Royston's bellringer-inchief, which is entirely by-the-by, except that I live in Royston and often enjoy hearing a peal.

But the human element that's most urgently needed at NanoBeam is more of us, and as soon as possible.

"The company is poised to take off," Tao explains, he is currently working a 17-hour day seven days a week himself. The machine has been perfected and the orders are coming in, but that's no good if Tao can't get the people he needs to make it - and it is entirely built in Cambridge.

The global market is quite small at the moment, only about 20 machines a year, but Tao says he can treble this because his machines are so much cheaper and smaller than anyone else's, and a lot of people who could use them can't afford them at the moment. This includes Cambridge University, which does have a machine, but would like two or three more.

And they should be getting them.

The knowledge economy is centred on Cambridge in the UK and everyone now recognises that this is the future driver of the country's economy.

Small is beautiful.

If you are interested in finding out more about the jobs at NanoBeam, contact the personnel manager in Coldham's Lane, but be warned, you will be expected to travel the world installing the machines you have helped to build. Dear me, what a bore.

See the original article at: http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/cn_business/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=444763