Powered by Nanotechnology

Here's a quote for all those folks out there worried about global warming and energy shortages:

"None of the global warming discussions mention the world 'nanotechnology.' Yet nanotechnology will eliminate the need for fossil fuels within 20 years."

Ray Kurzweil
(quoted in a recent Washington Post online discussion)

HP develops grain-size wireless chip

EE Times reporter Spencer Chin on the latest technology breakthrough from researchers at Hewlett-Packard Co - a wireless data chip with a built in antenna the size of a grain of rice.

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MANHASSET, N.Y. — Hewlett-Packard Co. has developed a miniature wireless data chip the company said could broaden access to digital content in the physical world.

Measuring 2 to 4 millimeters—the size of a grain of rice—and could be attached or embedded in almost any object to make available information and content now found mostly on Web devices.

The chip, developed by the Memory Spot research team at HP Labs, is a CMOS memory device with a built-in antenna. According to the company, the chip could be embedded in a sheet of paper or attached to surfaces. It could eventually be available in a booklet as self-adhesive dots.

Potential applications include storing medical records on a hospital patient's wristband, providing audio-visual supplements to postcards and photos, preventing counterfeiting in the pharmaceutical industry, adding security to identity cards and passports and supplying additional information for printed documents.

"The Memory Spot chip frees digital content from the electronic world of the PC and the Internet and arranges it all around us in our physical world," Ed McDonnell, Memory Spot project manager, HP Labs, said in a statement.

The chip has a 10 megabits-per-second data transfer rate—10 times faster than Bluetooth wireless technology and comparable to Wi-Fi speeds— with a storage capacity ranging from 256 kilobits to 4 megabits in working prototypes. It could store a very short video clip, several images or dozens of pages of text. Future versions could have larger capacities.

The chip incorporates a built-in antenna and is self-contained, with no need for a battery or external electronics. It receives power through inductive coupling from a special read-write device, which can then extract content from the memory on the chip. Inductive coupling is the transfer of energy from one circuit component to another through a shared electromagnetic field. A change in current flow through one device induces current flow in the other device.

HP researchers envision the read-write device being incorporated into a cell phone, PDA, camera, printer or other implement. To access information, the read-write device is positioned closely over the chip, which is then powered so that the stored data is transferred instantly to the display of the phone, camera or PDA or printed out by the printer.

"We are actively exploring a range of exciting new applications for Memory Spot chips and believe the technology could have a significant impact on our consumer businesses, from printing to imaging, as well as providing solutions in a number of vertical markets," Howard Taub, HP vice president and associate director, HP Labs, said in a statement.

The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger

Here's a nice little piece by Eric Savitz on one of my investing heroes, Charlie Munger. Notice what CM has to say about corporate executive compensation, the accounting profession and hedge funds. Ouch!

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The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger
Posted by Eric Savitz

Between blog posts this morning, I ran over to Stanford to listen to Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA) Vice Chairman Charlie Munger speak at Stanford Law School’s Directors’ College, an annual event designed to educate corporate directors. Still sharp as a tack at age 82, Munger held court under a large tent just outside the Law School, seated in a large over-stuffed chair on a raised platform. With notes in hand, he proceeded to dispense wisdom on what’s wrong with corporate governance today - CEO’s are overpaid, accountants have failed us, and the hogs are overeating the hogwash. Here are a few tidbits from his talk, which would have made a fine addition to Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger.

Munger started by saying he would speak in the spirit of one of his law professors, who said “Let me know what your problem is, and I will try to make it more difficult for you.” He framed his talk as a series of questions and answers – he supplied both. For starters, he asked how the influence of directors at large public companies has changed since the 1950s and 1960s. To illustrate how things have changed, he told a story of a man who was asked to be a director of the telephone company, who related that after agreeing to take the seat, “it was the last thing they ever asked me.”

Despite the joke, Munger made the case that the old corporate director system, with “WASP-y white males in a club like atmosphere” actually worked better than what he have now. “The old culture had come out of poverty, out of English customs,” he said. “People did not have the vast sense of entitlement, that they were entitled to be rich. People were damned glad to have a decent job where they might advance.” And he says, it was a time when there was “practically no trading of publicly owned securities, when trading “rarely got to a million shares a day.”

What has happened since? “The system has deteriorated, and the reputation of the system has deteriorated even more than the system,” he said, noting that “a lot of people are mad at corporate governance,” including the kind of white-bread Republicans who should be the system’s biggest supporters. “When even they are mad at Corporate America,” Munger said, “Corporate America has a serious problem.”

Munger blames the excesses of corporate behavior and compensation on several factors, including the human tendency to be self-serving. But he also notes that “old restraints lessened, and new temptations presented.” So no one should really be surprised that excesses emerged. Or as Munger put it: “Expect hogs to eat a lot more in the presence of a lot of hog wash.”

Munger noted that enormous prosperity brought with it a lot of opportunity for “wretched excess.” He blames many of the problems on the failures of the accounting profession. “They really failed the surrounding civilization,” he said. “People started looking at accounting the way they look at the Internal Revenue Service, as a system to be gamed. This was a major failure, a combination of the failure of accounting, the stupidity of regulators and the natural incentives for greed.” And the level of outrage has risen, he said, to the point where it has finally reached “the porch where the country club Republicans sit.”

Munger made a plea to the directors to change the way CEOs are compensated. “CEOs have a duty…to dampen envy and resentment by behaving way more nobly than other people, and way more generously. People should take way less than they are worthy when they are favored by life. People are willing to pay tens of millions of dollars to be U.S. senators. Most of these people would pay to be CEOs….There is a lot to be said for backing off and taking less than their worth.”

He specifically criticized the $400 million compensation package for recently retired Exxon (XOM) CEO Lee Raymond. While he said Exxon might be “the best managed big company that has ever existed,” he says it “damn stupid” to walk away with a “$400 million bonanza.” Said Munger: “It would have been better behavior to take less. ”

One other interesting topic Munger discussed was the concentration of power in the hands of big company CEOs. “We want very good leaders who have a lot of power,” he said, “and we want to delegate a lot of power to those leaders….It’s crazy not to distribute power to people with the most capacity and diligence…Every time I see an opportunity to choose somebody, the second best guy is just awful compared to the guy we hire. Usually the decision is a no-brainer. We have to give power to the people who can wield it efficiently in serious game of survival.”

But he had a caveat to offer. Munger says there will be times in the course of running a company that you have to offend some people to get the job done, but he says you should try “not to offend people needlessly And corporate compensation in America is offending a lot of people needlessly.” One ironic example he offers is the idea that CEOs ought to pay more for using corporate aircraft. “Warren doesn’t like when I talk about corporate aircraft,” referring to the Berkshire ownership in the corporate jet leasing company NetJets, “but there is a lot to be said for charging CEOs more for using the corporate aircraft. There is no reason that we can’t all pay a little more.”

Finally he had some smart answers to questions from the audience.
# On the role played by lawyers versus accountants in recent corporate scandals: “Accounting incomes were reduced by miscreancy,” he notes, but “the net amount paid by lawyers for lawyerly miscreancy is close to zippo. In this case, the goddess of justice was blind.”
# On Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett’s decision to donate most of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation: “Is anyone really surprised that Warren, who is the ultimate embodiment of concentrated decision-making power, picked somebody who he thinks is like him in many important ways? It was a noble and sensible decision.”
# On reforming the SEC: “The SEC does way more good than harm – the last thing I would do is get rid of the SEC…if accounting were thoroughly fixed, a lot of other sins would go away. We’re paying a huge price for deterioration of accounting.”
# On the interaction between government and business: “We’re here at an institution [Stanford] founded by a man [Leland Stanford] who bribed Congress to get his railroad franchises…I’m not constantly bewailing the failures of government – it’s not our main problem at all.”
# On the influence of hedge funds: You ask a heard hedge fund operator why the charge 2 and 20, and they say because I can’t get 3 and 30, he says. “[For hedge funds], it’s not about thinking what is fair and right – but merely how much can I get. It’s a ghastly culture…there will be terrible scandal in due course”

GE Gets Small

Another timely reminder of why nanotechnology should be on investor's radar screens.
srw

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General Electric Team Shines Light On Nanotechnology's Huge Potential

BY J. BONASIA

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 7/12/2006

One of the biggest of the big, General Electric, (GE) is making a big bet on the science of the remarkably small — nanotechnology.

Margaret Blohm manages 50 people in GE's advanced technology program for nanotech. The corporate research center serves all of GE's business units, with a special focus on high-risk, long-term research.

GE has a long history of being on the leading edge of technology, says Blohm, who joined the company in 1987.

"Pretty much our whole business is differentiated by materials, either to make better scanners, appliances or aircraft engines," she said. "There's no way to lead the way without the best technology."

One nanometer equals one billionth of a meter. Matter and energy display unusual properties at that super tiny scale. Scientists are exploiting nanotech to create new materials that are much lighter yet stronger than standard metals or ceramics.

Nanotech already is used in such consumer products as tennis rackets, sunscreens and auto body parts. Manufacturers, chemical makers, agribusinesses and the military are pursuing a slew of other nanotech applications.

Health care firms say nanotech research could unlock new drug therapies and cancer treatments. At the same time, inventors — and investors — hope to create clean nanotech fuel cells to curtail the use of fossil fuel.

Blohm holds more than 10 U.S. patents, with a specialty in the chemistry of polymers. She recently spoke with IBD about GE's ambitions in nanotech.

IBD: How do you explain nanotechnology to nonscientists?

Blohm: Nanotech involves anything at the length scale of a billionth of a meter. The technology is based on that size because you see a lot of surprising behavior at that length scale.

We have to re-examine the laws of physics to understand what's going on. When scientists find something so unexpected, it's like a gold mine because of the opportunities to do new things that were never imagined before.

IBD: Why is GE so interested in nanotech?

Blohm: We view nano as the ultimate materials science. It allows us to do new things we couldn't have done before. We know that nanotech is going to be disruptive across all parts of our business, so we have to be in nano.

IBD: What are your top research priorities?

Blohm: The biggest areas for us are in health care and energy. In terms of health care, we have a whole spectrum of work around diagnostics and hardware. We're trying to build better instruments for CT scanners and MRI equipment.

In chemistry, we're in what we call the wetware diagnostic area. This involves imaging agents that are used in conjunction with that equipment. Diagnostic imaging agents look at nanoparticles that are less than 10 nanometers in size.

The goal is to make diagnostic imaging that can demonstrate a disease at an earlier state. We might be able to look at a tumor earlier to determine if it is malignant. We want to improve the ability and speed of disease diagnosis, without doing invasive surgery.

IBD: Have you made any breakthroughs?

Blohm: Yes. We do lots of in-vitro studies to look at what types of particles work in imaging. We want to see if they're compatible with different types of disease cells.

One day this guy came into my lab with a picture showing the uptake of our nano particles into the diseased cells, and not anywhere else. That is, the particles went into diseased cells specifically, not the healthy ones. This could help doctors spot problems much earlier.

On that day we immediately knew we could make this work, and it was very exciting. It's still research with plenty of ups and downs. But it's great when you can really make a difference in people's lives.

IBD: What are the most promising areas in nanotech for clean energy?

Blohm: We're looking at making our equipment run more efficiently, with better lightweight materials. We're also looking at alternative energy, mostly around solar power, but also wind power. We're using nanotech to improve solar power. With nano structures in photovoltaic cells, we can improve the efficiency and lower the cost.

IBD: How might nanotech be used for materials science — say, to make lighter GE turbines or stronger jet engine parts?

Blohm: We're re-engineering common bulk materials such as metal alloys. Steel, for instance, is a natural nano composite. When its particles cool, they give it strength, but they're not thoroughly stable.

That's why we want to create new nano structures for alloys. This will allow for improved strength at higher temperatures. It means you can run an engine hotter and still make it stronger and lighter.

IBD: Is GE applying nanotech for any security or military purposes?

Blohm: We're doing some work in sensing, but it's relatively small compared to our efforts in health care and energy.

We're doing detection for biological and chemical agents, with a variety of nanomaterials and particles. Nano sensing is enabled by having such a small size with a high surface area. There's a lot of nanotech work being done around the world now on bio sensing for germ warfare.

IBD: Should we be concerned about the relative lack of regulatory oversight — or even public awareness — as nanotech spreads into many consumer and industrial goods?

Blohm: We're doing all that we can to help the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and other government agencies to effectively and appropriately regulate the field to ensure the safe use of nanotech.

One point to make, though, is that nanotech is not new. We've been using nano safely for decades. Car tires have nanoparticles of carbon that make them appear black. GE has also used nanotech for several products in hard coatings, but we just never called it nano.

Of course, now we have more different materials coming out at a much greater volume. So we need to continue safe practices and extend them and be aware of the many risks.

Reprogramming Biology

Here's an interesting piece by futurist Ray Kurzweil on how tinkering with our genetic programs will extend longevity.
Enjoy!

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Biology is now in the early stages of an historic transition to an information science, while also gaining the tools to reprogram the ancient information systems of life. Few of us go more than a few months without changing the software programs we use in our electronic devices, yet the 23,000 software programs inside our cells called genes have not changed appreciably in thousands of years (although recent research suggests that a few have changed as recently as a few hundred years ago).

Medicine used to be hit or miss. We would find something through "drug discovery" that performed an apparently useful function such as lowering blood pressure, but lacking effective models of how these interventions worked, many of these drugs turned out to be crude tools with unanticipated side effects. We are now beginning to understand biology as a set of information processes, and we're developing realistic models and simulations of how the processes involved in disease and aging progress. Moreover, we are developing the tools to reprogram them.

RNA interference (RNAi), which science learned about only in the past several years, can turn specific genes off by blocking the messenger RNA those genes produce. Because viral diseases, cancer and many other types of illness depend on gene expression at some crucial point, RNAi heralds a breakthrough technology. One example of a gene that we would like to turn off is the fat insulin receptor gene, which tells fat cells to hold on to every calorie. When that gene was blocked in the fat cells of mice during a study at the Joslin Diabetes Center, those mice ate a lot but remained thin and healthy. They lived almost 20 percent longer, obtaining the benefit of caloric restriction without the food restriction.1

Innovative means of adding beneficial genes to patients' bodies are starting to overcome the hurdles for gene therapy, which have often involved difficulties with placing the modified genetic information precisely within the genome. United Therapeutics, a company I advise, has developed a technique that modifies cells in vitro, verifies that the new genetic information has been properly inserted, replicates the modified cell millions of times and then injects the modified cells back into the bloodstream, where they embed themselves into the right tissues. In animals, this method has cured pulmonary hypertension, a fatal disease; it is now entering human trials.

We also have new means of activating and deactivating enzymes, the workhorses of biology. Pfizer's compound Torcetrapib, for example, inhibits the enzyme that destroys high-density lipoprotein (HDL), the good cholesterol, and thereby allows HDL levels to soar. Phase II FDA trials showed that the drug was effective in halting atherosclerosis, the cause of most heart attacks. Pfizer is spending a record $1 billion on phase III trials.

Another important line of attack is to regrow our own cells, tissues and even whole organs, and to introduce them into our bodies without surgery. One major benefit of this "therapeutic cloning" technique will be the ability to create tissues and organs from versions of our own cells that have been made "younger" by correcting DNA errors and senescence-related changes (such as the shrinkage of the telomeres at the ends of chromosomes). Such capacities constitute the emerging field of rejuvenation medicine. For example, we will be able to create new heart cells from your skin-derived stem cells and introduce them into your system through the bloodstream. Over time, the new cells will replace your old ones, resulting in a rejuvenated heart that has your own (corrected) DNA.

Rational drug design has been around for 20 years, but it is only recently that we have had the requisite genetic data, information models and reprogramming tools to accomplish it. While almost all drugs on the market today were created by way of traditional drug discovery, most new drug development is applying these increasingly intelligent targeted therapies.

Implants being developed at the University of Rochester and Boston-based StemCapture, Inc., imitate the mechanisms used by stem cells in trolling the vascular endothelium for damage signals, which indicate a need for repair. Molecules key to this trolling mechanism are coated onto the device to capture stem cells out of the bloodstream. DNA or RNAi molecules can also be sprinkled on this molecular coating to correct genetic errors and senescence-related changes in the captured stem cells.2

Nanotechnology can go beyond the limitations of biology. Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have designed nanoparticles with aptamers, genetic chunks that recognize the surface molecules on cancer cells. These nanoparticles can latch onto a cancer cell, burrow inside and release toxins to destroy it.3

Another scientist cured type I diabetes in rats with a nanoengineered device containing seven-nanometer pores that controllably release insulin while blocking antibodies. There are hundreds of other such examples.

Our ability to understand and even reprogram the brain, although in early stages, is also accelerating. We are doubling the spatial resolution of voxels (3D volumes) in brain scanning each year. The latest generation of in-vivo scanners can image individual interneuronal connections firing in real time. Effective simulations of about two dozen brain regions have been demonstrated, and IBM has begun an ambitious effort to simulate a substantial portion of the cerebral cortex at a detailed level.4

Rising numbers of artificial neural implants can replace diseased tissue, such as an FDA- approved implant for Parkinson's patients, the latest generation of which allows the patient to download software updates from outside the body.5,6

Now that biology is becoming an information technology, it is subject to what I call the "law of accelerating returns." Information technologies, including biological ones, double their price performance and capacity in less than a year. Sequencing DNA, for example, has come down in price by half annually, from $10 per base pair in 1990 to under a penny today.7 The amount of genetic data we have sequenced has more than doubled every year. It took us 15 years to sequence HIV, but we sequenced the SARS virus in only 31 days. This rate of doubling means that we will increase the capability of these technologies by a factor of 1,000 in less than a decade and by a billion in 25 years.

Human life expectancy was only 37 years in 1800.8 Such technologies as sanitation, antibiotics, and other medical advances have more than doubled it in 200 years. Our ability to reprogram the information processes of biology will dramatically increase it again, but this progression will be much faster because of the inherent acceleration of information technology. I expect that within 15 years, we'll be adding more than a year each year to remaining life expectancy. So my advice is: take care of yourself the old- fashioned way for a while longer and you may get to experience the remarkable century ahead.

1Flier SN, Kulkarni RN & Kahn CR. 2001. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA., 98:7475-7480.

2King, M.R., and Hammer, D.A. 2001. Multiparticle Adhesive Dynamics. Interactions between stably rolling cells. Biophys. J. 81:799-813.

3Farokhzad, O.C. et al. 2006. Targeted nanoparticle-aptamer bioconjugates for cancer chemotherapy in vivo. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 103: 6315-6320 http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/103/16/6315.

4Graham-Rowe, D. Mission to build a simulated brain begins. 2005. NewScientist.com News Service. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7470.

5Berger TW, et at. 2005. Restoring lost cognitive function. IEEE Eng Med Biol Mag. 24(5):30-44. http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~desa/200/2005_09_EMBS.pdf.

6Abbott, A. 2002. Brain Implants Show Promise Against Obsessive Disorder. Nature. 419: 658.

7Carlson, R. The Pace and Proliferation of Biological Technologies. 2003. Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science Volume 1 Number 3. http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0614.html.

7Oeppen, J and Vaupel, J.W. 2002. Broken Limits to Life Expectancy. Science 296.5570,1029-3.

The Long Tail Defined

Here is a great defintion of what the Long Tail is according to author Chris Anderson:

"A Long Tail is just culture unfiltered by economic scarcity."

indeed!

Of head-butts and terabytes

Here's a cool piece on trends in storage from my buddy Kevin Maney, who covers technology for USA Today. Enjoy!

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So you're on an airliner over Butte, Mont., which, without the "e" would be Butt, which in turn suddenly makes you think of Zinedine Zidane's World Cup head-butt and wonder whether head-butts are common in soccer because maybe soccer players don't use their hands even when fighting.
You'd like to search the Internet to find out. Except there's no Wi-Fi on your domestic flight and there's not likely to be airborne Wi-Fi in the near future even though JetBlue says it's going to try. You just have to go on wondering about soccer head-butts, leaving a maddening hole in your life.

How to avoid this kind of situation in coming years? Well, you probably will be able to download the entire Internet to a laptop before you get on a plane.

It seems preposterous. It sounds like saying you might eat a refrigerator full of food before a trip so you don't have to stop at restaurants for a couple of days.

But this week, Freescale introduced the first commercial memory chip based on a new technology called magnetic random access memory, or MRAM. It's a big step toward putting unimaginable amounts of data on something smaller than an Advil tablet.

Storage capacity is improving at a phenomenal 60% to 70% every year, and other amazing new technologies, such as holographic storage, will bring yet greater leaps in the next decade.

As a result, entrepreneurs are thinking about how they might use almost limitless storage to solve real-world problems. And this is how I came to be sitting across from Rakesh Mathur as he suggested that we could download the whole Internet and then search it — instead of searching the Internet and then downloading what we find. He is launching a company, Webaroo, to eventually help people do that.

Mathur, who in the 1990s co-founded recommendation-engine Junglee and then sold it to Amazon.com, had gone to Alaska to photograph the aurora borealis. He was in his car, freezing, bored, miles from the nearest Wi-Fi, and wishing he had the Internet.

He thought about the trends in storage — the kind of thing a tech entrepreneur does while waiting in a car near the Arctic Circle. IBM made the first commercial hard drive in 1956 — 50 disks, each 24 inches wide, that held a total of 5 megabytes. By 1980, one 5.25-inch disk held 5 megabytes. In 1991, a 2.5-inch disk held 100 megabytes.

Fast-forward to this year, and Seagate introduced a hard drive that holds 750 gigabytes and costs about $500. No technology in history has seen that kind of price-performance improvement in so short a time.

And the pace is picking up. MRAM inventor Stuart Parkin of IBM Research once told me that by early next decade, an MRAM-based iPod might hold 10,000 movies instead of 10,000 songs. In June, Israeli start-up Matteris unveiled a 5.25-inch storage disk with a holographic coating that can hold a terabyte of data. The entire Library of Congress is about 20 terabytes. You could put it all on 20 disks that could fit in a shoebox.

Mathur told me that he was thinking about these trends, and about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, author Douglas Adams' fictional reference device that holds all the universe's knowledge and does not rely on searching the Internet because Adams never imagined Wi-Fi in space. Why, Mathur thought, couldn't laptops or Treos work that way?

"We could use storage and memory to solve the problem of connectivity," he says.

Now, nobody knows how big the Web is — maybe 1,000 terabytes, which is a petabyte. No device will be able to hold that much for a long time, and by then, the Web will be bigger. But Mathur designed Webaroo to grab and store the most useful slices of the Web.

As storage increases, the slices can get bigger. You might never store all of the Web but enough to almost always find what you want. If you search Google for "head-butt red card," you get 211,000 results. Pretty much anything you'd need to know is in the first 20.

A service like Webaroo is only a subset of what the storage boom means to everyday life. We've already seen some really cool benefits, such as the iPod and TiVo. Fifteen years ago, nobody would've imagined that we'd store all our music and hours of video on hard disks and memory chips.

Technologists such as Gordon Bell of Microsoft Research believe we'll use storage gadgets to record video and audio of every moment of our lives. Why would you want to? Most people never even look at most of the digital photos they take, much less review video of all their waking hours. (And then would you have video of you reviewing the video? That's weird.)

One possibility is you'd use that information for personal data mining. If you get hives, you might have software sort your personal life file to look for patterns that suggest what food or activity seems to bring the hives on.

Then again, imagine the privacy issues if someone hacks your personal-life recorder. It would make the incident with Paris Hilton's T-Mobile Sidekick seem quaint.

But, who knows. The trends in storage are so mind-blowing, any predictions of how it will affect life will probably be as off-base as the 1970s idea that home computers would be used by housewives to store recipes.

Mathur's idea, though, sounds plausible. And if you could store the Web and look up head-butts while in the air over Montana, you'd find that two Roma players were sent off for head-butting in a famous 1960s soccer game in Europe. And Ariel Ortega of Argentina got thrown out for head-butting the Dutch goalie in a 1998 World Cup game. So this does seem to be a rather nasty habit of soccer players.

The Economics of Abundance

Started my summer reading by cracking open "The Long Tail." Came across this passage, which resonated strongly with me:

"Hit-driven economics... is a creation of an age in which there just wasn't enough room to carry everything for everybody: not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and video games produced; not enough screens to show all the available movies; not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs; not enough radio waves to pay all the music created; and nowhere near enough hours in the day to squeeze everything through any of these slots.

This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. The differences are profound."