This windmill is big. This windmill is big. As Bernard says, find the person in the first picture.
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Technology Investment Dot Info
Through valuation only is there value… (Nietzsche)
Bailout eye candy
I was reminded this morning that one of the much under-appreciated aspects of the credit crisis and resulting bailouts is the innovation in information display as people try and make sense of it. I am collecting these attempts as they appear, so might as well share them before they are out of date.
First up, the most recent; looking at the state of play in funneling taxpayer dollars (and IOU’s) to banks and other powerful interests.
Best thing since… the wheel?
I’m not sure how I missed this, but better late than never. Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
Tech Industry
Google is experimenting with ad-supported music in China, in a bid to catch up with local market leader Baidu.
The Google service allows Chinese consumers to search for music, link to the Web site of a Beijing company called Top100.cn and download licensed music from that Chinese site, which has signed contracts with the music industry… Top100.cn will sell advertising on its own site to pay for more than 1.1 million songs it plans to offer to Chinese consumers. And the struggling music industry gets a new revenue source, sharing income with Google… Google also said its new service would offer high-quality music downloads and protect consumers from viruses and poor-quality recordings, which the company says are a problem with illegal sites.
Skype is explicitly going after cellular revenues. A review says “awesome”.
As with Skype on the computer, users of Skype on mobile phones can make calls and send instant messages to other Skype users free, and they pay lower rates than the phone companies would charge when they use Skype to call landlines or other mobile phones… Apple will limit Skype’s use on the iPhone somewhat, allowing Skype calls to be made only when the device is connected to local Wi-Fi networks, and not allowing Skype calls over the data networks of its carrier partners like AT&T.
But Google is going after Skype with its own service; collateral damage being the death of telco’s.
Google Voice allows users to route all their calls through a single number that can ring their home, work and mobile phones simultaneously. It also gives users a single and easy-to-manage voice mail system for multiple phone lines. And it lets users make calls, routed via the Internet, free in the United States and for a small fee internationally. Skype… has 400 million registered users and is adding 350,000 users a day…
Tech Futures
Years ago I read an engineering white paper (recent version, see Appendix 2) on the feasibility of collecting solar energy in space and beaming it via microwaves to collectors where it was needed. The numbers worked out to a clean, perpetual power source for 9bn people at American per capita consumption levels for for $2 trillion. Seemed like a lot of money at the time. It is one of those things that is bound to happen as there is no other source that makes as much scientific, engineering and economic sense and has the scale. Space Energy Inc is a startup hoping to commercialise that vision.
Space Energy, Inc. has assembled an impressive team of scientists, engineers and business people, putting together what Sage calls “a rock-solid commercial platform” for their company… “This is an inevitable technology; it’s going to happen. If we can put solar panels in space where the sun shines 24 hours a day, if we have a safe way of transmitting the energy to Earth and broadcasting it anywhere, that is a serious game changer.” If everything falls into place for this company, they could be producing commercially available SBSP within a decade.
Terrafugia, the car/plane hybrid, made its first flights for the FAA, (gallery)
CeBIT 2009 Notes
I didn’t have the time to get over to CeBIT in Hannover this year, but it was well covered by a range of online sources. The show’s daily newspapers weren’t online yet, but coverage from Engadget, Gizmodo and CNET turned up the following interesting items:
ASUS was showing Eee desktop all-in-one slabs (iMac clones) with HDMI and Blu-ray, an EeePC built into a wireless keyboard, and a wireless LCD screen prototype, but the star to my mind is the dual panel touchscreen laptop. This concept was mooted about a year ago by the OLPC group as their second generation design and follows on from the Nintendo DS. One of the screens will act as a full-size keyboard when need be.
Tech sustainability
I used to think that peak-oil would pre-empt the development of global warming, but peak credit now seems to have pre-empted peak oil. I love this quote from the ‘collapsnik’ Dmitri Orlov.
An American’s two greatest enemies are his house and his car.
If you want to read more of Orlov, who likens the current situation in the USA to the collapse of the Soviet Union which he lived through and keenly observed, his salon is ‘Club Orlov‘ and one of the copies of his book “Thriving in the Age of Collapse” is on Google books. Perhaps the New Alchemy Institute was just 35 years ahead of its time.
Fast food or fast cars? 33% of the 2009/2010 US corn crop will go to make ethanol.
Medical News Today reported that using a carbon isotope to identify the type of feed eaten by the animals whose meat goes into hamburgers, and the oil used to cook fries, researchers were able to establish that nearly all fast food consumed in the US relies on corn agriculture. Researchers bought over 480 servings of hamburgers, chicken sandwiches and fries from some of the biggest chains in the US: McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s throughout the US. Out of the 480 samples, only 12 servings of beef did not show traces of the carbon isotope signature for corn.
Tech industry
Here’s a price (other than gold) that is actually going up. Citibank:
According to DRAMeXchange, 16Gb MLC NAND spot and contract prices are up 60% and 50% respectively from the Dec 08 bottom.
Gartner server data is not so positive (via Credit Suisse):
Annual server shipments declined 6.1% year over year… the first decline since the second quarter of 2002 and the sharpest drop of the decade… x86 servers may prove to be the most cyclical segment in hardware… Dell units fell 7.1% compared to an x86 server market decline of 5.9%… IBM server units fell 21.4% in the quarter, reflecting weakness reported in fourth quarter results. x86 units fell 22.5%, dragging down already weak hardware results. For Sun, overall units declined 6.1%, in-line with the market, while x86 units dropped a mere 0.5%.
Tech medical
A team at the University of Washington developed a malaria test on a disposable card small enough to fit into a wallet, with its chemical contents dehydrated so they last for months without refrigeration. The test is printed on a disposable Mylar card.
Tech futures
The inventor of a car slightly wider than a strand of DNA took out a top prize in nanotechnology.
James Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice University, won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for experimental nanotechnology for his nanocar, which is four nanometers across and includes a chassis with an engine, a pivoting suspension and rotating axles attached to rolling buckyball wheels, each made of 60 carbon atoms… It took Tour and his team eight years to build the car. One of the significant challenges was attaching the wheels because the buckyballs had the adverse affect of shutting down the binding property — the palladium reaction — used to form the rest of the vehicle.