No Life Insurance for Bull Riders
I write a lot about technologies, companies and industries, some about economics, but hardly ever about stocks or trading, so this column is an unusual one. But because of the hard work of a couple economist friends of mine I’m finally coming to understand a stock market phenomenon that has been hurting tech startups for over a decade — Exchange Traded Funds. Forget about bad banks, cooked books and even the recession: Exchange Traded Funds are forcing more and more good tech companies to abandon the idea of ever going public.
We saw this trend on this summer’s Startup Tour where not one of more than 30 companies we visited saw an Initial Public Offering (IPO) […]
Nearly every day I hear from at least one person who thinks I am an idiot. Typically they are complaining about something I wrote months or even years before, so I often confirm my idiocy by not even remembering what has them so upset. This week, however, I was contacted by an upset reader who may well have a good point, so let’s reconsider for a moment the security of Global Positioning System — GPS.
Rested, rejuvenated, and — most important of all — replenished with good ideas, the Startup Tour is getting back on the road, revisiting the companies we saw last summer. That first visit set a baseline, introducing the startup companies, but this trip is our chance to help.
Something has been bothering me lately and it is our assumption that China is the world’s next superpower and that we’d darned well better get used to it. Hogwash. We’re into the Chinese decade, not the Chinese Century.
Photovoltaic solar cells have been part of renewable energy planning for as long as such planning has existed, with most of those solar cells made from crystalline silicon with energy conversion efficiencies above 20 percent. But crystalline cells are expensive and take a lot of energy to create, reducing their net energy contribution. Fortunately there are other types of solar cells including thin film, amorphous, plastic, and others. All of these are cheaper than crystalline cells though they also tend to have shorter working lives and lower efficiencies. We care about them, though, because organic plastic solar cells in particular offer the prospect of producing the cheapest electric power of all. That is if one […]