Why do I think perpetual motion machines will be appearing frequently in the news? Because, with today’s focus on clean and efficient energy, we are going to find numerous good-willed, if scientifically challenged, inventors producing machines that seek to defy that little, old field we like to call “physics.”

Background Reading

Perpetual Motion (Wikipedia)

History of perpetual motion machines (Wikipedia)

The Museum of Unworkable Devices

Powertread: Stealing Power from Cars

The first PMM post is highlighting Powertread, a device for capturing energy from cars in traffic and converting it into electricity.

It’s literally a series of tubes filled with water that, when run over, force their contents through a turbine to generate electricity. One car driving over one of the things generates 580 watts of electricity at 36 amps. That’s not an awful lot power, but imagine a dozen of the things lined up at a busy off-ramp, run over by thousands of impatient drivers every day, and you can see the potential. The Singaporean government does too, providing grants to fund the project and two shopping malls there have already signed up to purchase the results.

via Powertread turns gridlock into electricity with a series of tubes from Engadget.com

Here’s what’s wrong this idea:

Any energy that is captured by this device must be taken directly from the vehicle crossing its tubes. If the device captured, say, 100 Joules from a passing car, the car itself will end up with about 300 Joules less energy, once the efficiency of electricity generation is considered. (These numerical values are assumptions for the sake of this post.)

In essence, what’s been created is a very roundabout method of electricity generation. Gasoline is converted from chemical energy to kinetic energy in a moving vehicle. This energy is then transferred from the vehicle to water to a turbine blade to a generator. The overall efficiency of this system can’t be greater than 10%, and it will certainly be expensive, to boot.

Now, the argument of the inventors is that cars in traffic will be braking anyway, and this device will slow down vehicles rather than allowing the vehicle’s braking energy to be wasted as heat. From an energy standpoint, that is a more defensible. However, the device is still worthless from a practical standpoint.

First, we are growing our fleet of hybrid vehicles which have built-in capabilities to recapture braking energy and store it in batteries. If cars already have the capability to capture braking energy everywhere they drive, why try to capture energy outside the car only where you’ve placed Powertreads? Second, the energy captured by these devices will be very intermittent-not a continuous flow of steady wattage-and that creates practical challenges for inverters and storage devices. Third, driving over these tubes will feel like hitting a speed bump, and drivers will certainly hate the experience.

I’m glad these inventors are working to help save energy, but I’m sorry to say that they should tread away from the Powertread idea today and start working on something a bit more practical for tomorrow.

The utility industry has some serious work ahead to prepare for the emergence of plug-in electric vehicles from the development pipeline. Customers will be expecting high-voltage power in places where it’s not available today, like parking lots at the office. Customers will also need a way to pay for this electricity, with a new metering and billing system. In the long-run, a smart-grid that can pull power from vehicles, as well as charge them, could help smooth out the variation in solar and wind power.

It’s not surprising that one of the utilities working at the edge of electric car infrastructure is in California — the state leads in renewable energy and energy efficiency deployment as well. Southern California Edison isn’t blanketing its territory with upgrades, an unaffordable venture; rather, it’s using innovative measures to estimate where electric vehicles will be parked in the future and beginning the upgrades far in advance.

It’s refreshing to see forward thinking like this in the utility industry. Between the Smart Grid deployments funded by the recovery act and these preparations for electric vehicles, we’ll have much more flexibility to take advantage of renewable energy and next-gen vehicles in coming decades.

Electric Vehicle-Ready Smart Grid

Find more details at FastCompany:

One utility that thinks it will: Southern California Edison. The utility covers a massive swath of land that includes 5 million meters, 14 million residents. By 2020, the utility’s customers could have up to 1 million EVs on the road. But SoCal Edison is already gearing up for the early adopters, explained Pedro Pizarro, the executive vice president of Power Operations for Southern California Edison. “If you have a block with three or four Priuses, that’s probably an early adopter neighborhood,” he said. SoCal Edison is in the midst of surveying its customers to find out which ones plan on buying EVs early. The zip codes with the highest amount of early adopters will likely receive upgraded wiring and circuitry that can handle all the excess pressure on the grid from EVs.

Well, when you skydive from 22.7 miles above the earth, it turns out you have time for 6 minutes of life flashing before your eyes.

I’ve got a lot of living left to do; I’m not sure there are six minutes of highlights from my life worthy for that montage.

Six minutes is more like a short film, or an infomercial, than it is any fleeting vision of memories past.

But Felix Baumgartner, the Austian lunatic who will attempt this record-breaking skydive, is an adventurous guy, so six minutes shouldn’t be a problem for him.

Excerpt:

Baumgartner, who became the first person to cross the English Channel in freefall in 2003, will be lofted to a height of 36,575 metres in a helium balloon. After floating up for roughly three hours, he will open the door of a 1-tonne pressurised capsule, grab the handrails on either side of the exit, and step off, potentially breaking records for the highest parachute jump, as well as the fastest and longest freefall.

He will face extreme peril. He should reach supersonic speeds 35 seconds after he jumps, and the resulting shock wave “is a big concern”, the project’s technical director, Art Thompson, said at a press briefing on Friday. “In early aircraft development, they thought it was a wall they couldn’t pass without breaking apart. In our case, the vehicle is flesh and blood, and he’ll be exposed to some extreme forces.”

Still, project medical director Jonathan Clark noted there has been one known instance of a pilot surviving the destruction of a plane at three times the speed of sound. “We know it’s not just theoretically possible, it’s possible,” he said.

After falling for about six minutes, Baumgartner should open his parachute at roughly 1520 metres.

The jump height is above a threshold at 19,000 metres called the Armstrong line, where the atmospheric pressure is so low that fluids start to boil. “If he opens up his face mask or the suit, all the gases in your body go out of suspension, so you literally turn into a giant fizzy, oozing fluid from your eyes and mouth, like something out of a horror film,” Thompson explained. “It’s just seconds until death.”

via ‘Space diver’ to attempt first supersonic freefall – space – 22 January 2010 – New Scientist.

Now a British architectural design firm is giving the more conventional combustion power plant a much-needed makeover. Of course, this plant doesn’t burn coal, but substitutes palm kernel shells instead.

Why not make these facilities good-looking and integrated into the environment? Sure, they lose their attraction as a movie setting for climactic clashes between humans and alien invaders, but they’re likely to endear much more good will with the surrounding community who views the plant out their kitchen windows.

Fancy-schmancy biomass plant

Excerpt:

Heatherwick Studio has just released its design for a biomass station on the banks of the River Tees in British town Stockton-on-Tees, for British company BEI.

The facility is expected to pump out 49 MWe–enough to power 50,000 homes. Those homes are expected to see their per capita carbon footprint cut by as much as 80%, since the electricity will be generated simply by biomass generators that will burn palm kernel shells, rather than coal.

Thomas Heatherwick, Heatherwick Studio’s founder, has a genius for offbeat architecture, made with experimental techniques–for example, he designed a colony of houses with tinfoil and a bridge that curls up like a snail.

This time, the building has been conceived as less of a power station, and more of a local attraction and amenity. The building’s skin will literally be green, made up of exterior panels planted with local grasses. Inside, in addition to offices and the biomass factory, there will be a visitor’s center.

via Heatherwick Turns Biomass Into a Thing of Beauty | Design & Innovation | Fast Company.

Have you ever heard a pianissimo on the radio? Nope. How can a song build to a rewarding musical climax without crescendo?

As we come to the end of the decade, we turn to one of the more dramatic changes we’ve heard in music over those 10 years: It seems to have gotten louder.We’re talking about compression here, the dynamic compression that’s used a lot in popular music. There’s actually another kind of compression going on today — one that allows us to carry hundreds of songs in our iPods. More on that in a minute.

But first, host Robert Siegel talked to Bob Ludwig, a record mastering engineer. For more than 40 years, he’s been the final ear in the audio chain for albums running from Jimi Hendrix to Radiohead, from Tony Bennett to Kronos Quartet.

Bob pointed to a YouTube video titled The Loudness War. The video uses Paul McCartney’s 1989 song “Figure of Eight” as an example, comparing its original recording with what a modern engineer might do with it.

“It really no longer sounds like a snare drum with a very sharp attack,” Ludwig says. “It sounds more like somebody padding on a piece of leather or something like that,” Ludwig says. He’s referring to the practice of using compressors to squash the music, making the quiet parts louder and the loud parts a little quieter, so it jumps out of your radio or iPod.

Ludwig says the “Loudness War” came to a head last year with the release of Metallica’s album Death Magnetic.

“It came out simultaneously to the fans as [a version on] Guitar Hero and the final CD,” Ludwig says. “And the Guitar Hero doesn’t have all the digital domain compression that the CD had. So the fans were able to hear what it could have been before this compression.”

According to Ludwig, 10,000 or more fans signed an online petition to get the band to remix the record.

“That record is so loud that there is an outfit in Europe called ITU [International Telecommunication Union] that now has standardization measurements for long-term loudness,” he says. “And that Metallica record is one of the loudest records ever produced.”

via The Loudness Wars: Why Music Sounds Worse : NPR.

Take Christmas lights. As a teenager, I had no intrinsic motivation to hang the family Christmas lights. In my mind, hanging the lights had competition only with before-school snow-blowing as the most torturous task associated with miserable Midwest winters. Lights tangle. Ladders are a hassle and liability. And, inevitably, no amount of pre-hanging electrical testing will prevent one strand from inexplicably dying as soon as the decorating is complete.

But Ric Turner sees the winter differently. And he certainly has a better touch with electricity and lights. Take his recent project, turning his house and yard into an interactive Guitar Hero game sprinkled with over 21,000 lights.

Ric, you are engineering geek (guitar) hero of the week. I’m impressed by your imagineerativity. (Aren’t you impressed by my language innovation?)

By the way, I can safely compliment Ric only because I live too far from home to be conscripted into light-hanging service.

Read this explanation from Ric of how he created the lighting system.

And watch the video here:

Well, novel if you don’t count the fact that evolution invented this technique first.

A company called Carbozyme is finishing lab tests to mimic the method used by our bodies for transporting CO2 by applying it to the challenge of capturing and sequestering CO2 from coal power plants.

As cells pump CO2 produced during respiration into the blood, the enzyme carbonic anhydrase converts the gas into bicarbonate for easier transport to the lungs. There the same enzyme works in reverse, turning the molecules back into the CO2 gas you exhale. This action could play the critical role of selectively capturing CO2 from mixed gas emissions for later sequestration.

The company Carbozyme is finishing up lab tests of a system that consists of millions of microscale, porous tubes coated with a synthetic version of the enzyme. As a mixture of smokestack gases passes through the tubes, the enzyme pulls CO₂ from the mix and turns it into bicarbonate and back, isolating CO₂ so it could be pumped underground and stored in layers of basalt rock. Based on lab tests and models, the system should use about a third less energy than other methods while avoiding the hazardous chemicals typically used to grab CO₂.

via Human Blood May Hold the Secret to Clean Coal | Popular Science.

So cool. Don’t give up on this challenge just yet.

This sounds like a significant technical challenge. If one desires to take advantage of aerodynamic gains, as the article suggests, the vehicles will need to be driving with very little space between (think NASCAR). Safely executing automated bumper-hugging driving will require nearly instantaneous ability for the auto to perform an emergency breaking procedure, in the case of the vehicle directly in front doing the same.

Better hope you’re not about to take a sip of hot coffee when your car decides to do that.

Excerpt:

Researchers in the European Union are using telematics to create “road trains” that join the benefits of carpooling with the freedom of driving alone.

The latest concept, part of the EU’s Safe Road Trains for the Environment initiative, groups cars with similar destinations into road trains over long stretches of highway. The lead vehicle will be driven by an experienced motorist — it may even be a bus that regularly travels the route — while the functions of each following vehicle will be automatically controlled and tethered to the actions of the lead car so that individual drivers can hammer out e-mails or eat breakfast. Despite the project’s name, cars can exit at any time.

While the project, which goes by the acronym SARTRE, sounds futuristic, all it requires are navigation systems that communicate with the lead vehicle and control acceleration and steering. The project’s lead agencies estimate that vehicles will begin testing in 2011 and say a full-scale rollout is likely within a decade.

With Road Trains, Highways Become Public Transportation | Autopia | Wired.com.

For example, take a simple-sounding question like, “How much energy is required to produce a ton of iron?”

This is a relatively straightforward analysis if the scope of energy usage includes only the iron plant. You count the fuel and electricity going in; you count the iron coming out. Divide the former by the latter and badda-bing. Done.

But what about the energy consumed to mine the iron ore out of the ground? And to transport the ore to the iron plant? And to transport the iron from the plant to its destination? And to mine the coal out of the ground? And to convert the coal to coke? And to manufacture the bulldozers and trucks that mine the coal and ore? And to manufacture the steel that goes into the equipment? Now we’re back to iron, again. We’re not close to done and we’ve already tied ourselves in a knot.

In practical terms, it’s impossible to include all the factors in an energy analysis like this. At some point, the analyst has to draw an arbitrary line and say, “Good enough.” Hopefully, this line is drawn in a place where the ignored factors constitute an insignificant percentage of the total result.

A recent report from the National Research Council tries to expand the scope of the analysis of energy costs. It takes into consideration the health impacts of energy use, which are rarely specified in quantitative terms.

By design, this report does not include the costs of energy use in terms of climate change, but that is a beast of a study on its own. Analyzing climate change costs requires forecasting the future, while this report is based on historical data.

The report also ignores the national security costs of energy use. I understand why this is hard to measure, but it should definitely not be ignored. What is the cost of wars over control of the terrorist-riddled oil-producing nations that we are dependent upon for importing petroleum, both in dollar terms and in lives lost?

Food price increases are not considered, either. What is the cost, particularly to the poorest in the world, of using food crops to produce ethanol? An economist could, if necessary, produce a figure tying these figures together. “Malnutrition deaths per gallon”, perhaps.

Nonetheless, this is a valuable report that will hopefully illuminate for many the hidden costs of our energy use. Understanding these costs allows us to make better-informed decisions, considering all the benefits and pitfalls before creating unforeseen negative side effects.

Don’t forget the importance of scope. It’s always a bigger picture than you can imagine.

Excerpt:

“Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use,” a new report from the National Research Council, a branch of the National Academies, tries to put a dollar figure on what economists call externalities.

The study, however, comes with a major caveat: it did not look at the impact of energy on climate change and ecosystems, or at rising food prices and the risks to national security.

Still, the report, which was requested by Congress in 2005, estimated that the hidden cost of energy on human health was $120 billion in 2005, the last year for which full data was available.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest contributors to these extra costs were coal-fired power plants, which generate half of the nation’s power but which also accounted for $62 billion in hidden damages associated with the emissions of pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, and particulate matter like soot or fine dust.

The report also found that in 2005 the vehicle sector produced $56 billion in health and other non-climate-change damages, with $36 billion from light-duty vehicles and $20 billion from heavy-duty vehicles.

via Report Shows Hidden Costs of Energy – Green Inc. Blog – NYTimes.com.

In essence, cheaper CCS will produce a greater volume of carbon credits, thereby dropping the price of the credits supply-and-demand-style.

Hopefully this reevaluation of the costs of capping carbon emissions will give a helping hand to cap and trade regulations that have yet to reach the Senate floor.

Excerpt:

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS — There’s good news for supporters of the Waxman-Markey climate bill from Professor Stefan Reichelstein. Although passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in June 2009, the bill is expected to spur a contentious debate in the Senate starting this fall. Opponents argue that the bill’s proposed “cap-and-trade” system will take a high financial toll on energy consumers and companies alike, and devastate the economy at a time the country can least afford it.

Reichelstein and doctoral student Ozge Islegen believe they have evidence to the contrary. Reichelstein and Islegen have examined the financial impact of regulating coal-fired power plants that produce carbon dioxide emissions under a cap-and-trade system and found the financial burden to be much less than previously projected.

via Reducing CO2 Emissions Could Be Significantly Less Costly Than Predicted.

How about designing a power system that needs to survive temperatures ten times hotter than the center of the sun?

This is the intimidating challenge facing the scientists and engineers who are blazing a trail in nuclear fusion research. The technical scope and scale of this challenge is as large as the clean energy reward should they ever succeed in their mission.

If you are attracted to high risk and high reward technology, this might be the place to be.

Excerpt:

At a fusion power plant, the fuel needs to be burned on human, not cosmological, timescales. The heavier isotopes deuterium and tritium are a little easier to burn than ordinary hydrogen, but even so, to get a good blaze going inside ITER the temperature will have to be racked up to a hellish 150 million kelvin. That brings a mountain of engineering problems. Not least is how to contain a plasma of electrons and atomic nuclei that is 10 times as hot as the sun’s core.

Even the most hardy of construction materials cannot withstand temperatures of more than a few thousand kelvin. So the solution is to weave a cage for the plasma from magnetic fields.

via Building a second sun: Take $10 billion, add coconuts – tech – 12 October 2009 – New Scientist.

Why is the Chamber so opposed to our nation taking action to prevent further climate change? According to at least 3 major reports, a green economy will create a net number of new jobs, anywhere from 3 to 30 million, depending on your source.

All these new green businesses are just the kind of company that should find friends in a chamber of commerce. But something tells me the clean tech industry and the Chamber don’t see eye to eye today.

Excerpt:

A new report released today says that if we shift our economy — to a greener, low-carbon economy — we will have more jobs, not fewer.

Earlier this week, Tony Blair (former prime minister of the UK) and the Climate Group reported that if we worked to avoid climate change we’d create 10 million new jobs by 2020 — worldwide. Another recent study by Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council says that such a shift could increase employment in the EU by 2.7 million jobs by 2030.

One more report, released today by the Global Climate Network (an alliance of nine influential think tanks) comes to similar conclusions.

via Green Economy = More Jobs : CleanTechnica.

Excerpt:

The clear message Chu took home from China was that its leaders are dead serious about climate change and clean energy. They won’t accept an emissions cap before we do — understandably, since our per capita emissions are still four times higher — but they’re preparing for a carbon-constrained economy. They already have cars that are more fuel-efficient than ours, and they’re developing more-advanced transmission lines. They’re still building a new coal-fired plant almost every week, but two years ago, they were building two of them every week. They’re making a huge push into wind and solar and should be the world’s largest producer of renewables by 2010. “Every Chinese leader I met was absolutely determined to do something about their carbon emissions,” Chu said. “Some U.S. policymakers still don’t think this is a problem.” (Read “One Voice in a Billion: Changing the Climate in China.”)

In fact, GOP leaders have said that global warming is a hoax, that fears about carbon are “almost comical,” that the earth is actually cooling. When I asked Chu about the earth-is-cooling argument, he rolled his eyes and whipped out a chart showing that the 10 hottest years on record have all been in the past 12 years — and that 1998 was the hottest. He mocked the skeptics who focus on that post-1998 blip while ignoring a century-long trend of rising temperatures: “See? It’s gone down! The earth must be cooling!” But then he got serious, almost plaintive: “You know, it’s totally irresponsible. You’re not supposed to make up the facts.”

Welcome to Washington, where a Nobel Prize winner’s opinion is just another opinion, where facts are malleable and sometimes irrelevant. It’s tough to be Mr. Outside in a town where policy happens on the inside. Congress is blocking Chu’s plan to create eight “Bell lablets” to investigate his game changers, along with his efforts to scuttle hydrogen-car research he considers futile. He’s trying to make DOE’s bureaucracy more nimble, but it still pushed less than 1% of its stimulus funds out the door in five months. And while Chu ends speeches with Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote about “the fierce urgency of now” — one of Obama’s favorites — the clean-energy bill is on hold until health care is done. There’s still a broad perception in Washington that dealing with climate change will require sacrifices that Americans won’t tolerate.

The Chinese don’t seem to worry about that. At one point, Chu acknowledged that democracy makes change a lot tougher, although he hastened to add that he’s a big fan of democracy. “We just have to do a better job communicating the facts so the electorate can educate themselves,” he said. Soon he sounded like he was talking to himself again: “Let’s be positive. The facts really do matter to the American people.”

via Steven Chu, A Political Scientist — Printout — TIME.

Obama at Newton, Iowa factory

Obama used the town of Newton, Iowa and the Trinity Structural Towers factory there as an example of the potential for clean energy businesses to replace jobs lost in mature manufacturing industries. The Maytag appliance factory in Newton — now inhabited by Trinity with 90 employees — once employed 4,000 people before closing entirely as manufacturing shifted overseas.

This is only one example, but it does illustrate the gap between America’s past manufacturing heyday and the size of today’s clean energy industry, even considering the potential growth of the latter. We certainly need these new jobs in order to replace those recently lost, particularly in the auto industry. But how do we encourage the manufacturing of these new clean energy innovations to occur in the US rather than overseas? Will clean energy companies make their global operations decisions any differently than hundreds of other industries already have, shifting production to low-cost countries like China?

I hope so. This is not only an employment issue but a national security issue. We need control of local clean energy resources to replace our dependence on petroleum from the Middle East.

I am excited to hear that a cap-and-trade program might finally emerge in the US. As I’ve written before, until carbon emissions impose a cost on emitters commensurate with the impact of the emissions on the climate, none of our ambitious goals to cut energy consumption and increase renewable energy usage will be feasible.

Obama’s speech barely addressed the piece of the clean energy economy that will have the greatest impact on the state of Iowa — biofuels. Iowa already produces large amounts of corn-based ethanol, but most agree that ethanol derived from food crops is not a long-term solution. Moving forward, advanced liquid biofuels will be essential to reduce petroleum consumption, as many applications, particularly diesel engines, cannot typically not be replaced with batteries and electric motors. Future biofuels, such as cellulosic ethanol, will grow into a huge section of the agricultural economy, and agriculture is certainly Iowa’s backbone.

I look forward to watching these initiatives move forward. Let’s see what Congress does next.

This particular talk is by Jan Chipchase, principal researcher at Nokia, and is titled, Our Cell Phones, Ourselves. He’s got a pretty sweet gig. He travels around the world, observing people and their use of mobile phones, amongst other individual and social behaviors.

I always find it valuable to be reminded that adoption of a given technology globally does not necessarily occur fit the same pattern as in developed nations, much less the US.

For example, listen to the story about African makeshift “banking” via mobile phones. Would we call sending money in this manner a “wireless transfer”?

Would you consider the research and development Microsoft is doing on the social networking aspects of email communication to be innovative?

My answer: Yes. Just from this short video I can tell Microsoft is one of the leaders in terms of investment in the way established communications methods, such as email, can be mined for increased usability, efficiency, and added value.

Why isn’t Microsoft recognized for innovation to the degree that they are, in reality, actually innovating?

My answer: Because they hide this stuff inside their monstrous corporation and don’t release it for the world to play with!

I have been reading about innovative enterprise collaboration research from Microsoft for years, but it seems that very little of these products actually get released into the wild. Microsoft is still stuck in its old behavior pattern of keeping products locked up internally and working to incorporate every desired feature before releasing the product to the public. 

That worked with operating systems (except maybe Vista, the scourge of my computing life) and office suites because they were used primarily by individuals perform siloed tasks.

Collaboration and communication software, on the other hand, is used to perform work across groups of people and the tool’s efficacy is largely determined by how well it integrates into human social behavior patterns.

Microsoft needs to kick these in-development projects out of the next and see if they can fly in the real world.

Microsoft needs to leverage the desire of its users to collaboratively participate in the development of their own solutions, collecting feedback from users and incorporating this voice of the customer into the next revision.

Take the lid off, Microsoft, and let us see what you’re cookin’! 

Social Views of Email on the Desktop | Chris Pirillo.

UPDATE: This post pokes a bit of fun at Nokia. I do this for the sake of humor, not because I dislike Nokia or its products. They’re making some great devices, and as they roll out more CDMA phones in the future, I wish them the best of luck. Plus, I’m on Verizon and I would love to have a smartphone option besides a Blackberry!

I’m adding a conclusion to the top of this article to ensure you get something “useful” from reading. Then you can continue reading the rest of the post and just have fun!

Conclusion

Much of the focus of innovation in the mobile industry is around user experience and interaction, which is great news for us users. From mobile gaming experiences to social networking to web browsing to usability to voice recognition to location-based services to music and multimedia innovation, companies like Nokia are focusing on making their devices more capable, more versatile, and easier to use. Mobile startups will be excited to hear that the global corporations are open to accepting “not invented here” technologies and integrating them into their products.

Example of a sexy cell phone. This is the kind of outfit your phone should wear to high-tech speed dating.

The Rest of the Story

San Diego’s CommNexus periodically hosts the business equivalent of speed dating sessions with mobile companies.

In the words of CommNexus:

“MarketLink a.k.a. High-Tech Speed Dating:

MarketLink is a FREE program that pairs local companies with multinational corporations hoping to identify and license new technologies. MarketLink brings parties of mutual interest together by orchestrating an event that will offer selected companies the opportunity to present to technology executives from visiting corporations in a personalized 1-on-1 session.”

These events are intended to match the innovation needs of the global corporations with the innovation strengths of the small companies and startups that otherwise might be ignored or by their larger, more popular peers. (Like a standard Hollywood depiction of high school, the jock/quarterback spends an entire semester sitting next to his one true love in chemistry class, but doesn’t realize she exists until she takes off her glasses and lets down her hair for prom.)

I recently received notice of an upcoming “High-Tech Speed Dating” session with Nokia. (According to the email, Nokia had 37% of the global device market share in Q4 2008, which is all the more remarkable considering they haven’t sold a device in the US since candy-bar phones in the ’90s.*) The list of prospective technologies, titled provides useful and concrete insight into the R&D focus of the mobile industry today. Here’s Nokia’s list with my comments in red:

What Nokia is Looking For:

Nokia is interested in engaging and partnering with firms that have next-generation or disruptive technologies in the following areas:

Social Networking

– Looking to combine the best characteristics of Twitter and 12Seconds with their new microblogging service, 12Characters. The most common message sent is, ironically, “12Characters”. (Go ahead and count.)

Mobile Internet and Browsing

– Researching nanotechnology advances such as nanotubes, because the internet is a series of tubes, and the smaller the tubes, the more internets you can fit in a phone.

Multimedia (Future Innovations)

– Not just plain multimedia, but future innovations multimedia, like special episodes of Lost made just for mobiles. They’re like the TV series, but edited down to only scenes where the plot is advanced. They’re 15 seconds long and come out once every two weeks. (Can you tell I’m a frustrated Lost fan?)

Music (Future Innovations)

– Not just plain music, but future innovations music, like when guitars have been replaced UFO Flutes (blowing into an alien’s ear while covering combinations of his 8 nostrils to produce different pitches)

Email and Messaging Solutions

– Nokia is rushing to roll out integrated email in its phones before anyone else thinks of it. It’s considering naming the phone the Belatedberry.

Location Based Services and Applications

– They’re calling their location-based service the “System To Always Locate & Know Everyone’s Region” (or STALKER)

Audio / Voice Quality

– Why do you keep asking me, “Can you beer me now?” I wouldn’t be talking to you on a cell phone if you were close enough to hand you a beer.

Voice Recognition

– Until I can whisper sweet little nothings into my phone and it replies with confidence-building compliments about my wonderful personality and dazzling good looks, voice recognition has room for improvement.

High Speed Connectivity and Side Loading

– Nokia is turning up high speed internet to the max. They’re skipping from 3g up to 11g.

Enhanced Usability

– I think these “enhancements” are related to the implanting of silicone cases to make the phone owner’s pocket bulge bigger.

User Interface

– We need something to compete with the iPhone

Touch UI Innovations and Performance

– We really, really, really frickin’ want to beat the iPhone!

Antenna Technologies

– I hope they’re not bringing external antennas back, they haven’t been gone long enough to be retro yet

Sensors

– The accelerometer senses when the phone user consumes too many shots and falls of his barstool, automatically playing “Another One Bites the Dust” in response

Battery Technologies and Power Management

– Some day in the future, Nokia cell phone batteries will be so powerful that when you plug your phone into your hybrid’s lighter jack, the phone charges the car

Video / Photo Editing for Mobile Environment

– Because navigating a timeline of hundreds of clips, transitions, titles, and effects is so much fun on a 24″ monitor, why wouldn’t you want to do it on your 3″ phone screen while waiting in line at the grocery store?

Gaming Experience Enhancements for Mobiles

– You’ve already heard of iPhone apps where the accelerometer is used for hitting an imaginary golf ball or where shaking the phone finds a restaurant. Nokia is combining an accelerometer with a blood alcohol content (BAC) sensor near the microphone for its new game “The Drunken Stumbler.” You score points based on the combination of high BAC + low stumbling + # of dials to ex’s.

Mobile OS

– Rumor is a San Diego biotech firm is doing genetic engineering to crossbreed the iPhone OS, Android, and the Palm Pre OS into some sort of super-mobile OS. Only time will tell how many extra camera eyes it will have.

* I didn’t actually research this fact. I just don’t see Nokia phones around.

BUGbase with keyboard and display modules

No, this is about the BUG do-it-yourself gadget from BUG Labs.

From their site:

BUG is a collection of easy-to-use electronic modules that snap together to build any gadget you can imagine. Each BUGmodule represents a specific gadget function (ex: a camera, a keyboard, a video output, etc.). You decide which functions to include and BUG takes care of the rest, letting you try out different combinations quickly and easily. With BUG and the integrated programming environment/online community (BUGnet), anyone can build, program and share innovative devices and applications. We don’t define the final products – you do.

BUG debuted around CES 2008, and this year, at CES 2009, they announced five new BUGmodules. The BUGprojector sounds awesome, enabling the projection of a 480×320 screen (using DLP® Pico™ technology from Texas Instruments) anywhere. Another new module is BUG3g GSM, adding phone functionality and SIM card input. So, you can basically build your own custom phone with off-the-shelf hardware.

The BUGbase is an ARM-based computer running a Linux kernel and all the software is open-source. I know what you’re thinking… “An open-source, Linux-based phone. Are we talking about Android here?”

No, this is separate from Android, although there has been talk on the BUG boards about modding Android and running it on the BUGbase. But there is definitely some crossover in possible applications and customizability with important implications for the BUG Labs team and the future of their product.

Now that developers can buy an Android Dev Phone (or use a normal T-Mobile G1), many of the hobbyist applications that might have been created on the BUG can be built on Android instead. The G1 has many of the same features out-of-the-box that BUG provides in BUGmodules, including: touchscreen, keyboard, accelerometer, camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, microphone, and speaker. Of course, the G1 doesn’t have a video projector yet, but the aforementioned features cover the most common use-cases for a handheld gadget.

The BUG product initially struck me as a great toolkit for college students studying computer and electrical engineering and computer science, or even mechanical engineering. The platform is entirely open and documented, including the electrical and mechanical CAD files. As someone who studied engineering, I can say that the BUG sounds like a more exciting project than the usual programmable rolling robots I played with in school. All those robots could do is run into walls.

With the BUG, I can build a gadget that hangs around my neck, detects when I’m walking, pulls my GPS location, and searches the internet (via Wi-Fi or 3G) for nearby ice cream shops. (This search behavior is based on the following logic: if I’m moving, I’m burning calories, so I’m probably hungry, so I definitely want some ice cream.)

But with Android and the G1, we can do the same thing (at least in theory), and the phone is smaller and cheaper than a BUGbase with all the necessary modules. Plus, if I write this application and other people like it, too, I can share it with thousands, or millions, of other Android users. The Android userbase is undoubtedly many times larger than the BUG community.

It seems that BUG is up against some serious obstacles, so what do they do to carve out their own niche?

I love ideas like this that encourage creativity, play, and learning, so I hope that the BUG is successful. Here’s a few stratey suggestions:

Evolve the BUG developer environment to a point where someone like me, a non-programmer, can handle creating simple applications. At that point, the device will be accessible to kids and can serve as a enriching learning environment. This puts BUG in the neighborhood of toys like LEGO Mindstorm. Android is focused for use by professional programmers, so BUG won’t have the competition in this market segment.

Create lower-cost components. This corresponds with the above recommendation. If there were a BUGbase with a reduced feature set and a lower cost, it could be used by children and by schools.

Focus on gadget applications not served by Android and smartphones. As a generalized and versatile platform, the BUG won’t be able to compete directly against devices designed to be phones and mobile internet browsers. So, focus on the capabilities that the Android and G1 can’t touch. This includes applications using the projector module and… well, I’m not sure what else. But I’ll keep my eyes open for cool ideas and add them when I find them.

That’s all for now. Do you have any more ideas? How does the BUG stand out against Android as a platform for gadget experimentation?

It's all a big social media circle

It all started when I decided to apply for the position of Founder’s Associate at Twitter. Rather than a standard cover letter, I submitted a strategic analysis outlining Twitter’s current competitive state and its options to win the microblogging battle and larger social communications war. The primary tools used were scenario planning and Porter’s 5 Forces.

I then presented this analysis in a session at BarCampSD (San Diego) on November 12, 2008 to an audience with great interaction and sharing of thoughts.

Fast forward to the present. I have been a bit off the grid the last couple weeks while traveling home for Thanksgiving and working on the family business. So, just yesterday I read the news that Facebook had, so far, unsuccessfully negotiated an acquisition of Twitter.

About time. Their partnership was my first recommendation in the strategy presentation.

In my mind, at least an attempt by Facebook to acquire Twitter was inevitable for these fundamental reasons:

It’s a mutually beneficial relationship

Twitter gets a business model, as tweets are displayed amongst advertisements in users’ feeds.

Facebook buys Twitter’s large, existing userbase and brand recognition rather than battling Twitter head-on with a modified status feature.

They need each other

Twitter has, by far, the largest userbase of all microblogging services. But yet its size pales in comparison to the number of people using Facebook. It’s hard to imagine another way Twitter could scale its userbase so quickly.

Facebook is missing out on all the conversations that occur outside its walls on Twitter. It would be beneficial for Facebook user frequency and volume to have Twitter conversations integrated with profiles, the Facebook platform, and the rest of the user’s social graph.

I called this scenario “Slap in the Facebook World”, describing a situation where Twitter must either partner with Facebook or watch as Facebook builds a Twitter clone and leverages its size to bully Twitter out of the ring.

Other scenarios included in the presentation:

• “Twitter in the Cloud Behind the Curtain” — Twitter as a service provider, with revenue coming from premium API access
• “Microblogging the Microsoft Way” — The microblogging platform with the largest corporate userbase wins the consumer game
• “Open Sesame” — Open standards and open source win (e.g. Laconica) and no company makes significant revenues directly from the product

If you’d like to check out the strategy presentation, I’ve embedded it below.

Disclaimer: I made this presentation quickly and for the purpose of sharing indirectly, not for delivering a speech. Therefore, I don’t advise following my example in such text-heavy slides and lack of graphics. You will put your audience to sleep!

(For a concise summary of Detroits economic woes over the last few decades and through the recent loan requests, read here.)

The government has two fundamentally different questions on its hands in making these loan decisions.

Car Company CEOs at Bailout Hearing

For the Big (and shrinking) Three, the question is,

“Should the government bail out an industry that, regardless of the current recession, is responsible for driving itself to the brink of bankruptcy because of poor strategic decisions in product offering and labor management?”

For Tesla, the question is,

“Should the government bail out a high-tech startup that perhaps overreached in its goals for reinventing the automobile power system?”

Tesla Roadster

While all the companies concerned are “US automobile manufacturers”, the two questions are drastically different in reasoning.

Many have argued that bankruptcy is just the medicine Detroit needs to cure its financial woes. Others feel the painful restructuring process will do more damage to the local and national economies and related industries than is worth suffering, including the auto executives requesting the assistance.

I think the correct response lies somewhere in between. Now that the government has significant leverage over the auto companies, let’s use this bargaining position to our advantage. The EPA has always butted heads with auto industry lobbyists over fuel economy standards. Now the government can write the standards on its own terms. For example, we could model new standards after those in Europe with regulated CO2 emissions.

I’d like to avoid bankruptcies, if only for consumer psychological reasons. Consumers will avoid purchasing cars from bankrupt companies, and this will only exacerbate market share losses to foreign competitors.

But if Congress needs to send Detroit back home a couple more times (driving in their hybrids!) until they return with appropriately detailed and significant plans for their use of the loans, so be it.

Tesla is in a separate universe from the established companies. With its small size, it does not have the gravity in the national economy and its failure won’t send the US plummeting into an economic black hole.

On the other hand, its lofty vision of selling all-electric autos is a force far beyond its fleet size. While the sale of a few hundred Tesla roadsters will not make a significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions, the same bunch of battery-powered cars will exert undeniable pressure on the Big Three to respond with similar offerings.

Sure, Tesla’s only product costs $100,000 and is far out-of-reach for most Americans. But consumers will look at that vehicle and then walk into a Ford, GM, or Chrysler dealership and ask for the same thing at a third of the price. They’ll figure that with the R&D capabilities and scale of a major auto manufacturer, a plug-in auto at a reasonable price should be feasible.

Let’s face it. History shows that American auto companies lack the foresight to take longer-term, strategic factors (like the inevitable rise in cost of oil) into consideration when they do research and design vehicles. So, if they don’t possess the internal initiative to develop cleaner vehicles, then maybe Tesla is just the thorn in their sides we need.

Is it worth $400 million in loans to keep Tesla in place as a carrot to lead Detroit?

I think that is some produce that will really produce.

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist!)

But this post isn’t about that kind of automobile noise. This is about the noise emanating from Detroit in regards to the future of our nation’s decimated auto industry and how we — yes we, the people and our government — will be responsible for keeping the industry afloat.

Thomas Friedman opened an article in the New York Times, called “How to Fix a Flat”, on the subject with this:

Last September, I was in a hotel room watching CNBC early one morning. They were interviewing Bob Nardelli, the C.E.O. of Chrysler, and he was explaining why the auto industry, at that time, needed $25 billion in loan guarantees. It wasn’t a bailout, he said. It was a way to enable the car companies to retool for innovation. I could not help but shout back at the TV screen: “We have to subsidize Detroit so that it will innovate? What business were you people in other than innovation?” If we give you another $25 billion, will you also do accounting?

As usual, Friedman’s ideas were thought-provoking. He received 594 comments on the article before commenting was closed.

Friedman paints a picture where auto executives steered their companies away from any long-term competitiveness toward short-term fixes and Michigan’s legislators shielded the industry from the regulation that would have forced it to compete globally.

And now the industry just isn’t asking for votes in its favor it’s asking for billions in financial support. See the industry’s latest innovation below in a comic by Signe Wilkinson.

Detroit's Latest Plug-In Design

Or Nick Anderson’s comic take:

Catch Detroit

I think it is the gift of a truly talented cartoonist to create comics like these, images that make the viewer laugh out of one side of his mouth while he winces with the other. These comics are painfully entertaining.

Friedman unfortunately chose to close the essay with a tired cliche: that all the auto industries need for redemption is a year of leadership from Apple’s Steve Jobs.

While I have deep respect for Mr. Jobs and his achievements leading Apple to design some of the most popular products of this generation, the problems facing Detroit are larger than any one person can repair.

The fundamental, underlying market mechanisms that steer the behavior of the American auto industry are like, well, a buggy GPS system — they told the industry to turn left in the middle of a bridge and now the industry is through the guardrail and plunging headfirst into the abyss. (For a visual, refer again to Nick Anderson’s comic above.)

Why are the product offerings of the Big (but shrinking) Three so out of line with current consumer demands? Because the companies tuned their product lines to produce the greatest possible short-term profit, without regard to their long-term global competitiveness.

When oil was cheap and carbon even cheaper (aka free), it made economic sense to build the most expensive vehicle a customer would buy, because the pricier the vehicle, the larger the profits. And by the way, this is America, and in America, we like to get a lot for our dollar, so the bigger the vehicle, the better. It’s the same game that restaurants are playing with ever-increasing portion sizes, in a way.

Cheap oil refines into cheap fuel, and cheap fuel does not provide much financial incentive for consumers to purchase fuel-efficient vehicles.

Free carbon (dioxide) means that the emission of greenhouse gases has no cost, and this leads to a similar outcome as cheap fuel, because fuel-efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions are related (inversely).

The problem is that oil isn’t cheap (the falling prices are only temporary) and greenhouse gas emissions aren’t free. Ultimately, greenhouse gas emissions have a cost and the price is paid by the environment in the form of climate change.

So, Detroit has been shielded from economic reality in the US by a curtain of cheap oil and cheap carbon. Suddenly the curtain is pulled back and, uh-oh, Detroit is caught on stage with its pants around its ankles.

It turns out that where Detroit’s competitors live — primarily Japan, Korea, and Europe — fuel is a few times more costly and greenhouse gas emissions are regulated by the Kyoto Protocol. The competitors have been preparing for the automobile market of the future for decades, but the Big Three were thrown into reality over the course of about half a product development cycle, and what a cold shower of reality it was.

Yes, the US has Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, but I won’t even bother to dive into that controversy. Let us just agree that the regulations haven’t prepared Chevy, Ford, and Chrysler for today’s sudden market reality. After all, it was CAFE that laid the red carpet for the arrival of minivans and SUVs to displace place of wagons. Wagon, as “passenger cars”, were required to have higher fuel economy than minivans and SUVs, as “light trucks”.

In the end, the US was lacking the necessary indicators of cost to influence purchasing behaviors towards sustainable automobile designs. Additionally, the stock market rewarded short-term performance, so the auto companies had no incentive to take responsibility and guarantee their own long-term competitive strength. Since the industry was blind and could not look forward to plan for its own future, we — the US people and our government — are now responsible for taking the industry by the hand and saving it from running into a wall of bankruptcy.

The government may soon step in with financial aid, it looks like we the people might all be proud new owners of auto industry stock. Of course, that stock looks less like a stork carrying a bundle of joy and more like a burning, stinking bag on the doorstep.

Just don’t step on it.

One great iPhone feature is its ability to feed a user’s GPS coordinates into a location-based service, or LBS. This expands the usefulness of GPS beyond navigation to enhanced social networking activities. TechCrunch recently reviewed the state of major LBS applications for iPhone, and I recently attended the Web 2.0 Mapping and Social Networks Meetup, so it’s time for me to throw my two cents in the pool.

Regarding the title of this post: No, I’m not yet overly concerned with privacy issues regarding the sharing of a person’s location at this point. I just couldn’t think of any other good acronyms at the time. But privacy will a serious matter for the creators of LBS software, and I’m sure they will be working hard on getting the balance right between sharing location with wanted friends and avoided unwanted threats.

The major problem with the LBSs I’ve seen so far is they could more accurately be described as LBFs, or Location-Based Features. These applications don’t provide a full user social experience and don’t really stand up on their own.

As soon as Facebook and MySpace release their own location-based channel into their massive existing user bases, these LBS forerunners, as admirable as their pioneering work is, will be trumped out of the market. I don’t see significant, proprietary innovation occurring at the existing LBS firms, thereby reducing the incentive for Facebook and MySpace to acquire the technology rather than just building it themselves. Plus, any integration tasks would be as significant as building the service in the first place.

Many of the current LBSs seem to be aiming to compete with Yelp’s user-generated business review service. Again, they can quickly be trumped as it will be easier for Yelp to build an iPhone app that pulls GPS coordinates than it will be for a brand-spanking new LBS to build a competitive database of user reviews. Loopt has partnered with Yelp to use its reviews, but again, once Yelp builds the app, why won’t I just use that? Yelp already has my bookmarks and personal reviews, both which would be very useful on the mobile app.

LBS Logo Collage

Venturing a little off topic:

Imagine creating a review while you’re still at the restaurant! (Or after walking out the door if your girlfriend doesn’t approve of you tinkering on your phone during dinner.) The app knows what restaurant you’re at (as long as you have a GPS signal). It can ask you questions to prompt things you might forget later: “Was the service attentive?” or “Were the bathrooms clean?” You can upload photos of the food or interior while you’re still there.

Back on topic:

One last thing.

We don’t know how a LBS should be designed yet because it creates a new paradigm for the way society interacts.

This isn’t the fault of the current providers, but it does highlight the challenge they face it meeting customer demands and continuously upgrading and modifying interactions. For example, how often will I want even my friends to know where I am? How often will I end up changing my discoverability status back and forth? What if I turn discoverability off for an annoying “friend” but then we run into each other at the bar — will I have to lie to cover the fact that I’m digitally hiding from him? Will my phone prompt me for my status every time it detects I’m walking out of my house?

Nobody knows the answers to these questions just yet, but I think we’ll know soon enough.

One of the great things about taking a trip to the West is the peaceful serenity of the plains, prairies, buttes, and mountains. Everyone needs to disconnect from the grid occasionally and reflect on our amazing planet and the beauty that surrounds us, typically missed because his nose is buried in a cell display sending a text or checking status updates. At that point, even a 21st century man feels a connection to his ancestors who roamed this country on horseback, their newest ‘gadget’ the carbine rifle.

But then, even a nature-loving man like myself begins to miss a few things about the Internet, discovering firsthand the withdrawal induced when a beer falls over in the tent and quickly transforms a high-tech mobile gadget into a tent stake hammer.

Here are the top 5 things I miss now that I no longer have on-the-go mobile Internet access:

1. Can’t send mobile updates to this blog!
I had set up a couple methods to post in addition to the normal web interface, namely Jott and email-to-post. (Note: I haven’t found a way to post to WordPress.com from email, just self-hosted WordPress.)
I’m setting up Shauna’s phone now so we can hopefully Jott to the blog from it instead.

2. No more GPS
I used my LG Voyager not only as a mobile phone, texting machine, and Internet device, but also as a GPS navigator. This is not a good function to lose on a cross-country trip, as it’s one of the most useful features! It’s valuable for many reasons: get directions, find your current location, search for local businesses, and see how long it will take to get somewhere.

3. No mobile campground searching
It turns out it’s difficult to find a comprehensive, printed listing of campgrounds — at least one that’s not the size of a phonebook. I miss being able to search sites like Woodalls for campgrounds in a given radius.

4. No instant online photos
Until my camera adds a cell phone, I’m getting by with the cell with added camera. It doesn’t provide great photos, or even a flash, but it does the job of getting a photo from capture to sharing across the world in less than a minute.

5. No more phone
I thought I was done after #4, but then I realized that I do occasionally use my cell as a phone. I am so 2007…