Hybrid Highway

According to Fortune magazine, Toyota is on track to sell 400,000 hybrids next year. Toyota's success in the hybrid market has caused other automakers to change their tune. GM, DaimlerChrysler, and BMW recently announced that they are forming an alliance to develop new hybrid engines. Volkswagen and Porsche also unveiled plans to manufacture hybrid autos.

Toyota's strategy is simple: produce hybrid cars today and hydrogen-powered vehicles tomorrow.

I love it.

Food for Thought

"You don't have technology because you are rich. You are rich because you have technology."

-- Dean Kamen
(quote from talk at MIT Emerging Tech Conference, 9/28/05)

The Joy of Technology

Bill Joy of Kleiner Perkins discusses his interest for nano material and life science investment opportunities at the MIT Emerging Technology conference today 

My Consilient Capital partner, Mark Lester, and I were feeling right at home listening to Bill Joy speak today. Thanks to our good friend Vince Caprio for inviting us to the conference. You put on another great show, Vince. Well done!

Hydrogen Breakthrough

I continue to be long hydrogen and short fossil fuels. Researchers at the University of Denmark are making me feel better about my long term trade today.

University of Denmark Scientists Develop Hydrogen Tablet

Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark have invented a technology which may be an important step towards the hydrogen economy: a hydrogen tablet that effectively stores hydrogen in an inexpensive and safe material.

With the new hydrogen tablet, it becomes much simpler to use the environmentally-friendly energy of hydrogen. Hydrogen is a non-polluting fuel, but since it is a light gas it occupies too much volume, and it is flammable. Consequently, effective and safe storage of hydrogen has challenged researchers world-wide for almost three decades. At the Technical University of Denmark, DTU, an interdisciplinary team has developed a hydrogen tablet which enables storage and transport of hydrogen in solid form.

“Should you drive a car 600 km using gaseous hydrogen at normal pressure, it would require a fuel tank with a size of nine cars. With our technology, the same amount of hydrogen can be stored in a normal gasoline tank”, says Professor Claus Hviid Christensen, Department of Chemistry at DTU.

The hydrogen tablet is safe and inexpensive. In this respect it is different from most other hydrogen storage technologies. You can literally carry the material in your pocket without any kind of safety precaution. The reason is that the tablet consists solely of ammonia absorbed efficiently in sea-salt. Ammonia is produced by a combination of hydrogen with nitrogen from the surrounding air, and the DTU-tablet therefore contains large amounts of hydrogen. Within the tablet, hydrogen is stored as long as desired, and when hydrogen is needed, ammonia is released through a catalyst that decomposes it back to free hydrogen. When the tablet is empty, you merely give it a “shot” of ammonia and it is ready for use again.

“The technology is a step towards making the society independent of fossil fuels” says Professor Jens Nørskov, director of the Nanotechnology Center at DTU. He, Claus Hviid Christensen, Tue Johannessen, Ulrich Quaade and Rasmus Zink Sørensen are the five researchers behind the invention. The advantages of using hydrogen are numerous. It is CO2-free, and it can be produced by renewable energy sources, e.g. wind power.

“We have a new solution to one of the major obstacles to the use of hydrogen as a fuel. And we need new energy technologies – oil and gas will not last, and without energy, there is no modern society”, says Jens Nørskov.

Together with DTU and SeeD Capital Denmark, the researchers have founded the company Amminex A/S, which will focus on the further development and commercialization of the technology.

Broadband - Quantum Style

It doesn't get much more quantum than this, folks!

Rice researchers look to exploit light-electron interface

Sep. 22, 2005 - Researchers in Houston say they've found a way to enable light waves to be coupled efficiently to nanoscale structures and devices.

"We've discovered a universal relationship between the behavior of light and electrons," said study co-author Peter Nordlander, Rice University professor of physics, astronomy and electrical and computer engineering.

"We believe the relationship can be exploited to create nanoscale antennae that convert light into broadband electrical signals capable of carrying approximately 1 million times more data than existing interconnects."

The researchers said they discovered and demonstrated a simple geometry wherein light behaves exactly as electrons do.

The research is available online from the journal Nano Letters and will appear in an upcoming print edition.

Smile!

Put this in your nano pipe and smoke it!

Bell Labs president projects long-term nanotech
From JoongAng Daily in Korea:

In the next five to 10 years, mobile phone users will be able to detect changes in the facial expressions and even in the smell of the person they are talking to, according to Jeong Kim, president of Bell Labs, the research arm of the U.S. firm Lucent Technololgies.

As part of a five-day business trip here, Mr. Kim met with reporters in southern Seoul yesterday to introduce cutting-edge future technologies and offer predictions on the world’s information-technology industry.

Elaborating on the new cell phone technology developed by the laboratory, Mr. Kim said that smell-transmitting sensors, lenses that follow the movement of eyeballs and microphones as narrow as a human hair already exist, and would be on sale within a decade.

Mr. Kim said nanotechnology — techniques used to create structures as small as one-millionth of a millimeter — had played a key role in the development of the new technologies.

Mr. Kim predicted that nanotechnology could bring huge changes to the way humans live, citing the example of a new computer that will enable simultaneous translation of telephone conversations.

‘If nanotechnology maintains its current pace of development, it will give birth to a computer that has the information processing capacity equivalent to every human brain combined by 2060,’ he said.

Mr. Kim said that while communication technologies have so far mostly focused on speed, future developments will look to improve their convenience. Eventually, he added, phones will no longer need to be touched or even spoken to, but will instead respond to mental commands.

Quantum Japan

Japan is likely to be a hotbed of quantum-based technological invention and innovation in the years ahead. In the past several years, nanotech conferences in Japan have attracted far larger crowds than they have here in the U.S., and there are dozens of companies directing relatively large sums of yen into quantum and nano-related R&D activity. What's more, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out yesterday, given Prime Minister Koizumi's stunning victory in snap elections held last weekend, the ruling party in Japan has an overwhelming majority for the first time in 15 years and could use that majority to return Japan as one of the engines of global prosperity.

If you are a prospective quantum investor, my advice is to keep a close eye on developments in Japan.

Nano is the New Turbo

Diego Rodriguez at MetaCool has an interesting and astute observation on the use of the word "Nano" in the marketing world. I'm thankful my book publisher let me title my book "Quantum Investing" instead of "Nano Investing." :)


Nano is the new Turbo

The whole "nano-as-the-ultimate-modifier" marketing thing tipped last week with the release of the iPod nano. While I don't (yet) own one of these iPods, I do own several shirts which supposedly feature a nanotechnology fabric treatment. I believe we're now going to see "nano" applied to everything from cigars to Civics. Which is fine, except that in few cases will the product actually contain, or be about, nanotechnology.

Such is the case with the iPod nano, and that is why I believe that nano is the new turbo, another technical term appropriated by marketing people and applied in so many ways as to make it meaningless.

Nothing wrong with this, of course, for the truth is all marketers are liars. But it really rankles the engineer in me. And delights the marketer in me.

Beyond the Skype

eBay's purchase of Skype is a win-win in my view. I'm a big fan of both companies. Putting the two together makes great strategic business sense to me. In this case, one plus one equals a value far beyond two. As a longtime eBay user, I've been frustrated with using email. I've had several transactions fail due to spam-related issues or emails not getting through or misinterpreted (particularly, international deals). Talking with customers directly is much better.

Looking ahead, it won't be long before you'll be streaming video on Skype. eBay users will be able to show items to potential customers and demonstrate them on request. Skype has great instant messaging and the ability to do conference calls. One could easily envision real time auctions with small groups of people using Skype. Real time voice and video communications via Skype also has the potential to reduce fradulent transactions, which has been a thorn in eBay's side in the past.

What's more, it's not inconceivable that at some point down the road, eBay could spin out Skype in a separate IPO for tens of millions of more dollars than they paid for the company.

I'm excited about the future of eBay and Skype. Well done, Meg!

iPodNano isn't Nano, but it is a cool machine!

The new iPodNano from Apple isn't nanotechnology -- that is, it doesn't conform to the conventional definition of nanotechnology which I have discussed in a earlier blog post. That said, it's a great marketing slogan and a very cool device. Nice going, Steve!