Does this mean I'm now a cover model?

Backbone Magazine has just published a great overview of the cleantech sector in Canada that contains quotes from a number of notable people in the space including Kirk Washington (Yaletown Venture Partners), Victoria Smith (BC Hydro), Rick Whittaker (Sustainable Development Technology Canada), Raul Pacheco-Vega (UBC), Helen Goodland (Lighthouse Sustainable Building Centre) and me. Thanks to the Globe team and Lisa Manfield the author for a great article. You can either jump to the article, to the table of contents of this issue, or to a list of all of the issues.

With that as a backdrop, it’s interesting to see CIBC announce this week that they have built a new cleantech specific team that will be offering a range of services to the cleantech sector. Related to this I saw this morning that RBC Capital has just funded the Greenscape Capital team (sponsors of Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room exercise here in Vancouver back in March). This will let the Greenscape team execute on their plan to build the world’s “greenest parking facility.”

Congrats to CIBC for finally doing what the European banks have been doing for years and to RBC/Greenscape for continuing to move things forward on large scale efficient buildings.

Dear (Friend):

You asked about my view on the cleantech sector after I took some time to survey it. Let me answer by starting with the big picture and the thing that prompted me to look at cleantech in the first place. Then I will be better able to answer your question at the bottom.

First, the global view.

Globally, we are standing at the confluence of two exponentially increasing tides. The power of one may help us address the risks of the other, but only if we engage them both head-on. One is the curve of resource usage, the other is the curve of technological change.

Curve 1: Overshoot and collapse and “peak everything”

We have used up half of our forests and half our our fish stocks on the planet to-date and given our “peak everything” 3.5%/yr compounding resource usage curve, we will use the same amount of resources in the next 20 years as we used in the last 260 years. It is widely understood that we have already exceeded the capacity of this planet to support our continued growth as a species by between 20-30% and are already going to have to plan for a “controlled crash.”

Curve 2: Double exponential technological advances

Simultaneously, technology is developing at a double exponential rate such that we can not even comprehend what our world may look like by 2050 from a technology perspective. A brief reminder: 30 steps taken 1 foot a a time moves you forward 30 feet. 30 steps taken exponentially moves you forward 1.07 billion feet. It’s hard for our brains to grasp. The next 10 years will be like our last 100 in terms of new technology and that is accelerating.  If predictions by people such as Ray Kurzweil come true, we could have nano solar devices providing 100% of humanity’s power requirements by 2030,  the wealthy and maybe even middle class will be iiving long healthy lives free of disease and many of them will be integrated into computers and robots. If we choose our technologies wisely, even the poorest will have the benefit of low-cost desalination and solar power.

In terms of scenarios, it will already probably be either a huge cliff, a controlled step-down crash, or in a miracle of miracles, a bounce off the bottom and a move to a regenerative world. Hopefully we still have those options.

Actions we need to take:

We need to understand and act on the knowledge that comes from both of these curves.

Regarding the first curve, we need to stop the denial, anticipate the issues, structure responses that address both the rational and irrational causes of inaction, address our flawed, emotional, homeostatic tendencies, and work towards creating a regenerative world, rather than the destructive negative overuse cycle we are in.  We know a lot about why we do not act. We don’t need “more information”, we need to build plans that take into account our very human responses to things. Jared Diamond and Joseph Tainter‘s work is key here.

Regarding the second curve, we need to stop sticking our head in the sand about technology and embrace and channel technological development. Relinquishment of technologies won’t work. That would be like standing idly by saying “I will have no part in that river coming dangerously close to the village” when that river is doubling in volume and power every year. We can’t stop it, but we can channel it. We need to slay our sacred cows by revisiting nuclear power (which is emissions free) and genetically modified foods.  We need to use every advantage we have to both increase resource generation and regeneration and also to decrease resource usage per person. This will require structuring government incentives for radical expansion of green technologies.  The Sustainable Development Technology Canada program is a great start. We need more. We need to think like Vinod Khosla who says “if we do not address maintech (building materials, concrete, water, chemicals, coal, oil, efficiency) and solve them at low-cost, that can get to market unsubsidized in China and India and scale to the whole planet, then we won’t solve our problems”. Since we don’t know where the innovations will occur, we need to structure capital to create massive “optionality” and R&D across the board, focusing on those areas that are most ripe for change / disruption / innovation and that are causing the biggest problems. Sadly, I think we should also continue to support companies and organizations like Space X and the LifeBoat foundation, both of which are trying to get off the planet in case we really make a mess and can’t live here any more.

We need to work the top line by increasing resources

We need to Increase outputs and resources and regeneration through restoration of forests, soils, forests, fisheries. We need to boost agricultural outputs (again) by raising land and water productivity and studying ways of producing protein more efficiently that with the standard corn-fed cattle approach. This includes continued research into genetically modified foods.

We need to work the bottom line by decreasing our resource usage per person

We need to also lower our resource use/person by restructuring economically through things like cap and trade, removal of subsidies on things like oil (we spend $700B annually across the globe subsidizing the exact wrong behaviours), restructure the energy landscape by decommissioning coal, shifting to renewables, pushing for all of the efficiency we can get now and every year going forward. We need to get MUCH better at urban design since in 30 more years, 80% of the planet will live in 3% of the surface area in cities and that means urban transportation, bikes, water use, city farming, squatter gentrification. We need to implement “third world” solutions in our own backyard – micro finance, entrepreneurial education, population stabilization (which happens automatically as people move to the city).

National leaders…aren’t leading

Global progress on our bigger issues is stalled. Copenhagen was widely regarded as a failure. Nations are too slow to act. China and the US refused to take material action at Copenhagen and that means that no other nations will follow. The US is frustrating cap and trade. Canada is also lagging. Within our borders, our provinces and territories are too heterogeneous and their populace has too many diverging interests.

We have structural capital issues that are impeding our ability to bring investment into Canada that will continue to haunt all forms of technology development, including cleantech, and they need to be addressed. The Section 116 problem has never been resolved and makes it difficult for investors to invest in Canada without great hassles. We need to fix this as it continues to scare US venture capital away and is causing a hollowing out of Canadian companies as US investors must move our companies south in order to invest in them. It’s easier for a US company to buy out and move a Canadian company than to simply invest in it.

This revolution will happen provincially, regionally and municipally:

BC is already the 10th largest “cleantech market” in North America.  We have top-notch universities that pump out research, we have core resource and mining people, law, and organizations in place that can be repurposed for cleantech company creation, financing, and implementation of things like carbon projects. We already have an excellent industry association leadership in the BCTIA, the Premier’s Technology Council is already very supportive of cleantech, and we have programs such as the newly launched CleanWorks BC marketing campaign intended to attract foreign investment to BC. We also have a large number of excellent cleantech companies here and we have strong core competencies in hydro electric power, power transmission, storage and battery technology, wastewater management, and bioenergy.

The Lower Mainland as a region and all of the cities inside it will be key. You can make a difference at the regional level. Cities are massive producers of the problem and they’re also massively incentivized to solve the issues for themselves – they are almost self-contained zones.

In Vancouver, we have a mayor who sees the benefit of working on all three pillars of sustainability: “people, planet and profit” as it is often referred to. He is building ties with Governor Schwarzenegger from California and Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room Initiative , among many other things. In short, he is trying to put Vancouver on the global map as a “Green Capital” in the world.

So what do we need to do next?

We need capital fixes. There are many others who know much more about this but I know that we have capital gaps. The exits are long and difficult for investors (10 years) for many of these green technologies and so many companies suffer or fail as do their investors.

We need to continue to back primary research at the universities that feeds into our technology landscape.

We need to build more funds that create small companies that can fail faster – allowing us to create promote “optionality” or the creation of as many options as possible.

We need to build a more unified province wide Cleantech BC association that unifies traditional energy, renewables, materials, efficiency, and water all into one cohesive strategic plan.

We need to survey our assets in the universities and our companies, scan the market for current and latent need and then really support those clusters where we can excel and build networks of inter-related and successful companies.

As a province, we need to realize we are competing globally, not within Canada.

As a province, we need to redefine “cleantech” to include all of our “maintech” – the stuff that will move the needle. That will require vision expansion and coaching. This means expanding our idea of “cleantech” from renewables to greening of the entire supply chain and all materials and energy usage.

We need to continue to push these changes bottom up because waiting for national governments (Canada, US, or otherwise) will take too long and be too ineffective. The only exception to that is major cap and trade policy and other regulation which mostly needs to happen federally. But even without it, cities and regions can adopt their own and enforce them locally as they’re doing now. It’s less effective but it’s a step until the national dithering is resolved.

The province must address issues of forest, agricultural land, fisheries and water restructuring in order to once again focus on maximizing sustainable, regenerative yields. One area I’m significantly concerned about here is water rights. It appears that we are selling off our water rights to foreign interests and that needs to be reversed. Peak water is right behind peak oil as a critical issue.

My final summary?

We have a lack of national leadership on the major environmental challenges ahead of us as evidenced by Canada’s embarrassing performance at Copenhagen, but that is countered by highly motivated provincial, regional, and municipal leaders. And we have a province filled with excellent cleantech companies, entrepreneurs, and teams that are highly capital efficient.

So, while my survey of the sector has tempered me with its long, difficult, unpredictable company builds and exits, the people working on those companies have excited me with their passion, vitality and energy for finding and creating solutions to our big challenges. That passion and energy is one of the key reasons I have decided not to return to the US and to instead, stay here and work to build BC’s local technology sector. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Let’s get to it.

Kevin Kelly tells the epic story of technology from the birth of the universe until now.

Then Bill Gates asks for his one big wish for humanity’s technological development: an energy miracle to help the poorest 2 billion people on the planet thrive.

Thomas L. Friedman wrote an excellent post over here at the NY Times pleading with the climate folks to go on offense with a simple 50 page grade six english report on the state of the world. It’s awesome. Read it. I agree with all of it and particularly getting rid of the phrase “global warming” because idiots then say “well it was warm today here in Arizona so Al Gore is OBVIOUSLY a lying idiot.”(sigh)

Key quotes are below:

What’s real? In my view, the climate-science community should convene its top experts — from places like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre — and produce a simple 50-page report. They could call it “What We Know,” summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed footnotes.

At the same time, they should add a summary of all the errors and wild exaggerations made by the climate skeptics — and where they get their funding. It is time the climate scientists stopped just playing defense. The physicist Joseph Romm, a leading climate writer, is posting on his Web site, climateprogress.org, his own listing of the best scientific papers on every aspect of climate change for anyone who wants a quick summary now.

Here are the points I like to stress:

1) Avoid the term “global warming.” I prefer the term “global weirding,” because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.

The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.

2) Historically, we know that the climate has warmed and cooled slowly, going from Ice Ages to warming periods, driven, in part, by changes in the earth’s orbit and hence the amount of sunlight different parts of the earth get. What the current debate is about is whether humans — by emitting so much carbon and thickening the greenhouse-gas blanket around the earth so that it traps more heat — are now rapidly exacerbating nature’s natural warming cycles to a degree that could lead to dangerous disruptions.

3) Those who favor taking action are saying: “Because the warming that humans are doing is irreversible and potentially catastrophic, let’s buy some insurance — by investing in renewable energy, energy efficiency and mass transit — because this insurance will also actually make us richer and more secure.” We will import less oil, invent and export more clean-tech products, send fewer dollars overseas to buy oil and, most importantly, diminish the dollars that are sustaining the worst petro-dictators in the world who indirectly fund terrorists and the schools that nurture them.

4) Even if climate change proves less catastrophic than some fear, in a world that is forecast to grow from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion people between now and 2050, more and more of whom will live like Americans, demand for renewable energy and clean water is going to soar. It is obviously going to be the next great global industry.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Global Weirding Is Here – NYTimes.com.

It allows all of the stakeholders to have a dashboard that lets them input their goals, and then track their progress towards those goals.

Congrats VS team and City of Berkeley on the launch!

]]> http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/17/city-of-berkeley-launches-their-climate-action-plan-using-vancouver-based-visible-strategies-see-it-wow/feed/ 0 http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/17/rinspeed-urban-commuter-perfect-for-yaletown-except-you-cant-buy-one-yet/ http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/17/rinspeed-urban-commuter-perfect-for-yaletown-except-you-cant-buy-one-yet/#comments Wed, 17 Feb 2010 08:07:15 +0000 Troy Angrignon http://www.troyangrignon.com/?p=960 Cool looking little commuter concept car from Rinspeed. Cute! It’s like a pug. Imagine owning a pug dog and a Rinspeed? They’d be the perfect Yaletown accoutrements.

Rinspeed UC: Want to Get More Miles Out of Your Electric Car? Take It on a Train | Technomix | Fast Company.

Their somewhat dodgy claim is that the vehicle “achieves 100mpg in daily driving.” The reason for that is that they know that most drivers drive less than 65 miles per day and that in that case, this vehicle drives the first 40 of those from the batteries and then kicks in the gas engine beyond that. But marketing jedi mind tricks aside, it’s still pretty damned cool. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger loves it and he’s one of the greenest politicians the U.S. has these days.

What vehicle would YOU want if you knew that it could get 100-120 mpg? Hmmmm, Hummers are still too ugly. But how about a Nissan XTerra Hybrid? Or aToyota Forerunner hybrid?

It is these sorts of discontinuous leaps that will be critical to addressing the automotive industry’s 100+ year old thinking. Congrats to the Raser and FEV teams.

Wow. This thing can get 60mpg??? I’ll believe it when I see it. But I have to say that it triggers some deep techno-lust for this geek.

Range Rover concept courtesy of Fast Company

Under the Radar Round 2 Calls!

As many of you know, I am extremely fortunate to be assisting the Dealmaker Media team as co-chair of the upcoming Under the Radar event on April 24, 2009 in San Francisco. This is round 2 of our call for companies in the cloud computing, virtualization, software as a service, and web services categories. This is an excellent opportunity for early stage startups to present their businesses and ideas to CIOs, CTOs, and Technology VPs at companies like AT&T, Getty Images, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc, as well as VCs, prospective partners, and industry press. Of the 400 companies that have presented on this stage in the past seven years, over 50% of them have been funded (more than $1.3B in funding so far) and nearly 20% of them went on to be acquired by companies such as Google, Salesforce, Cisco, and Microsoft. This event has practically become a rite of passage for early stage startups. Previous Under the Radar Alumni include: Ribbit (which was acquired by British Telecom), Zoho (do they EVER stop building cool applications??), Box.net, Animoto, Elastra, Jive Software, 3tera, Zimbra (acquired by Yahoo), Nirvanix, LinkedIn, SupportSpace, SlideRocket and Q-Layer (acquired by Sun Microsystems.)

The deadline for applications is March 20, 2009. You can apply here.

Some of the companies who are already invited include Boomi, Ctera, Eucalyptus, Heroku, Marketo, New Relic, Qwaq, Sauce Labs, Spigit, Symplified, Tap In Systems, Twilio, uTest, Virsto, Zephyr, Zimory, and Zuora and we have more exciting companies waiting in the wings for final confirmation.

Want to learn all about cloud computing? Sign up now for early bird tickets.

For anyone looking to understand the cloud space and see who’s innovating AND who’s buying -  this is a one-day deep dive into what’s happening. Tickets are still available at the early bird discount rate. To register for that rate, please click here.

Judges, Moderators, and Sponsors

Here are some of the judges who are committed so far (with more to come):

• Bipin Sahni, VP Technology Manager , Wells Fargo
• Steve Phillpott, Chief Information Officer, Amylin Pharmaceuticals
• Steve Heck, Chief Technology Officer, Getty Images
• Doug Harr, CIO, Ingres
• Gary Little, Partner, Morgenthaler
• James Urquhart, Market Manager: Cloud Computing & Virtualization, Cisco
• Joe Weinman, Strategy and Emerging Services Vice President, Corporate Bus.
• Development – AT&T
• John Foley, Editor, Information Week
• Larry Dignan, Editor, ZDNet
• Maha Ibrahim, Partner, Canaan Partners
• Matthew Glotzbach, Director of Product Management, Google Enterprise
• Mike Maggs, Director of Business Development, Azure group (Microsoft)
• Mitchell Kertzman, Managing Director, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
• Rob Hayes, Partner, First Round Capital
• Robin Vasan, Managing Director, Mayfield Fund
• Sunil Dhaliwal, Partner, Battery Ventures

We have also pleased to have some excellent moderators for the event:

• Rafe Needleman, Editor at Large, Cnet
• Jeremy Toeman, Stage Two Consulting
• Charlene Li, Co-Author – Groundswell
• Ellen McGirt, Sr. Writer, FastCompany

Of course, an event of this size is only possible with great sponsors and we have the best possible sponsors for this event:

• Gunderson Dettmer
• Microsoft
• Mosso – The Rackspace Cloud
• Salesforce.com

This April 24, 2009, I’m fortunate to be working with Dealmaker Media who will be hosting the 13th Under the Radar conference. In one day we will present a full roster of innovative startups, tech thought leaders, and REAL enterprise & big media customers who are buying cloud services to let you see for yourself what the cloud REALLY MEANS…

What is Cloud Computing?

We have a very simple but broad definition of cloud computing:

Applications, services, platforms, or infrastructure that are highly abstracted or virtualized, web service enabled, able to be automatically provisioned, and generally charged on a pay-as-you-go model.

As the market evolves, we predict that there will be a number of clouds from a variety of vendors with a range of performance characteristics. They will vary by location, security, pricing models, supported “stacks”, degree of regulatory compliance, location, service level agreements, and many other dimensions.

Benefits of cloud computing

The key benefits of cloud computing are that it allows organizations to:

• shift up-front capital expenditures to ongoing operational costs which can allow businesses to provision more quickly or scale faster than if they had to deploy capital;
• provision infrastructure more quickly than by their traditional infrastructure purchasing and provisioning model;
• dynamically match computing capacity to demand more accurately, which means less wasted resources in low-traffic times, and less downtime during high-traffic times;
• test ideas with a lower threshold by deploying test environments in the cloud and then shutting them down when not in use;
• scale up to computing capacities that would have been impossible to achieve in any other way cost-effectively;
• decrease the time-to-value of new IT projects because of the faster provisioning and lower costs.

In short, it allows organizations to do more, faster, with less resources. In some cases, it allows organizations to do things they could never have dreamed of doing before. 

Current Issues with Cloud Computing

It is still early days for this next generation of computing. There are many issues to work through including: security; performance; vendor lock-in; cloud interoperability;  stack selectivity (only certain clouds will support certain technology stacks); cross-cloud portability, administration, and management; regulatory compliance (current clouds do not comply with many regulatory frameworks such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, PCI, data protection regulation or others), and even common metering and billing models.

We believe that this is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to identify and fill those gaps by picking components of the stack and bringing them forward into this new era and we’re hand-picking the best ones to tell their story on April 24!

Early Bird Tickets are going fast. Register to be the first to meet and do deals with these innovators.

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

“It’s all about the infrastructure” by Debra Chrapaty, Corporate Vice President of Windows Live Operations

• The cloud sounds romantic but it’s 1.5 million pounds of batteries, 1 million pounds of steel, 300 miles of cable. Not so romantic. (Image courtesty of Niall Kennedy’s Flickr photos)
  

• Opex and Capex are THE KEYS: If your revenue goes up a hockey stick….and your CapEx and OpEx curves go up with it…you haven’t succeeded
• [finally!! Somebody else is talking about this!! This is super critical in SaaS. It's easy to make a company deliver apps over the web. It's hard to do it in a way that you can serve a lot of people cost effectively and make more profit as you scale.]
  

• Scale: can you scale up to 3.5GB/minute TOMORROW?
• Reach: Microsoft is running services in 235 countries around the world
• Servers: This is critical
• configration optimization: go for standardization / optimization
• Density: watts/square foot is important; drive density up by 200% you can drop power costs 40% (!).
• Storage costs: There has been an 85% drop in a Terabyte of data THIS YEAR.
• Technology evolution: staying on the curve helps you be operationally efficient.
• Data center critical success factors. (there are more but she wouldn’t share them)
• connectivity: critical
• location, location, location (close to connectivity and supplies and resources and people)
• materials and equipment: (if you buy a million pounds of steel and steel prices go up….you have a $5M bill)
• trades and labour: we have waited months for an electrical person
• power:
• we now count in terms of megawatts not square footage. That is a key metric.
• 30-40% of your power usage is COOLING!!!! so build green!
• looking at solar – it’s incredibly important to us
• Opening a data center in Quincy Washington that is completeley carbon neutral
• Additional useful links:
• Operations: The New Secret Sauce.
• Generators for Data Centers Getting Hard to Find
• Behold the Server Farm
• Microsoft bets big on Server Farm
• Wired / The Information Factories
• Data Centers on rise in rural areas
• Utility offers millions to help data centers go green

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

A Conversation with Jeff Bezos, Amazon

• S3 and EC2 are storage and processing. They should not be very interesting. So why are people so excited?
• Because the time from concept to delivery has been collapsed. We removed server hosting, contract negotitation, server infrastructure, etc.
• We have removed the “muck”; You come up with an idea, you wade through the muck, and then eventually you get to working on the fun parts.
• And then when you come up with your NEXT idea you have to go through the muck all over again.
• up to 70% of your time, energy, and dollars for web-scale apps goes into undifferentiated, heavy lifting and “muck”
• We want to swap the 70/30 to 30/70 (undifferentiated muck / differentiated work that makes you stand out). That will free up 40% for more creativity and differentiation!
• Web scale computing should be elastic; fast; always on; rock solid; simple cost effective; pay per use.
• It is being used by Xerox Global Services (S3, Simple Queuing Service and E3), Second Life; PowerSet (Natural Language Search) – now using EC2 as their back-end infrastructure;
• Tagline: “We make muck…so you don’t have to.”
• “We have been a low-margin, high volume business with aggressive cost structures for 11 years. I feel that that is the best and most defensible model because it doesn’t have a soft underbelly that people can come after aggressively unless they’re as good at it as you. “
• [For a long time I have been trying to come to terms with conflicting approaches. I now see that Dan Pena's model (>80% margin or don't do it) is great when you're consolidating an industry and need to do cashflow lending to buy the companies you are acquiring. And given that his goal is to consolidate, aggregate, and then re-sell, that model makes sense. Bezos' approach (which is also the Dell / Wal-mart approach) is viable when the intention is to build the business up and keep it. I have to admit that I hadn't considered that operational excellence in minimizing margin could be a defensible strategy but it makes sense now.]
• Battelle: Why are you doing this? Bezos: We think this is a great business and we’re good at it. We have three businesses: consumer facing, seller facing business, developer facing business. The consumer/seller businesses drive our revenues. The developer facing business will one day have significant impact.
• [I'm surprised that Battelle would ask this question but as the emcee, it is his job to ask the obvious and/or painful questions. Maybe that's why he's asking it. It only makes sense that Amazon, having developed this core competency, would turn around and resell it. Jay Abraham has a long set of principles, one of which is, figure out what your company has become really good at from a practices, systems, and technologies perspective and turn around and resell THOSE in addition to your core business.]
• Fulfillment by Amazon is a very simple service. We have a global network of fulfillment services. You can ship something to us and we’ll receive it. We get it. We stow it. And then you can send more calls to us and when you do, we’ll pick those out and we’ll send those things to you. We’re giving pay by the drink, variable cost fulfillment to the marketplace.  This allows developers to use us by writing software, to treat this 10 million square foot network of fulfillment centers as a peripheral device like a printer.
• Battelle: Sun tried to do grid computing before and failed. You are succeeding right out of the gate. Why? Bezos: We have a policy of not talking about other companies. But I’ll talk about S3. We think that there are three reasons it is succeeding: it is pay-per-use, it is self-service, and it is VERY simple for people to work with.
• [The shadow space of that statement is that Sun's attempt was none of those things...which was true. It was heavy to implement, heavy to negotiate the contracts, and relative to S3 - very inflexible. S3 is to Sun's grid as Google's AdSense is to Doubleclick.]
• Battelle: what is your cost of power? Bezos: Our biggest costs are not power, servers, or people. The largest cost is the opportunity cost of not fully using our facilities. And the same goes for our customers. The rest of the world is building data centers that they’re only using on average 17% of the time. People are buying 747s and parking them 83% of the time! This doesn’t make any sense.
• [This goes to the heart of the Abraham principle above. Not only does this type of service mean that Amazon is running at near 100% asset efficiency (or more, since they're making money on them?), but their customers can run at near 100% capacity as well, rather than at 17%. Higher asset efficiency = higher shareholder value.
• [Mike Cannon-Brookes and I were joking that it would be fun to build a company and take it from concept to bizplan to website to goods to online ordering to application development to online fulfillment to peer-based service and support….in 24 hours. Sounds ridiculous but with the number and type of services now available, it would be do-able.

Thanks to Justin Thomas for his nice blog post about this awesome car.

In one fell swoop, Mark has managed to hit on a whole bunch of my favourite subjects: the environment, structure driving behaviour, adaptation, complex system effects, social policy, cultural behaviour, global policy….he has hit it all.

The archive of his writings can be found here. The current article is below:

No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don’t you agree?

Here’s what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up ’78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV owners. Everyone else, 10 bucks a gallon, across the board. Eleven for premium.

It would take some finessing. Maybe also give a price break to some truckers and trucking companies (so vital to the overall economy), but not so much to global delivery companies (FedEx, DSL et al.), because not doing so would force them to raise shipping rates and force you (and me) to reconsider buying everything online and hence will encourage you to shop locally once again, thus reviving a stagnant local economy.

Voil

Does anybody have any information on negative health effects of waterless urinals??

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Steven Jones, the leader of the UBC Snowstar team  – a team of UBC students who are entering the NASA Beam Power and Tether Strength Challenges – two contests that are used to encourage research and development in technologies that could be used to build a space elevator.

The challenges are held during the Elevator Games in Mountain View California by the Spaceward Foundation; a group dedicated the development of a Space Elevator. The technologies that are required to win the competitions will have many uses and one of those will be in the construction of a long cable in stable geosynchronous orbit around the earth that will allow for equipment and people to be transported to space on a space elevator at a fraction of the current cost.

In the 2006 NASA Beam Power Challenge the team has to provide a robot that is at least 10kg and capable of climbing a 60 m cable in 60 seconds but it can not have any batteries or other stored energy on board. All of the power must be transmitted wirelessly from the ground by a beam source that the team also has to provide.

In the 2006 Tether Strength Challenge teams must create a 2 gram cable that forms a continuous loop with a circumference of 2 meters and is stronger than the cable supplied by Spaceward that is allowed to weigh 3 grams. UBC Snowstar is one of the few teams in the world to have experience at the Elevator Games through their participation in 2005 and in the Beam Power competition they were given the only award at the competition: “Most Likely to Win in 2006″.

The New York Times just ran a great story which the Snowstar team uploaded onto their site in a PDF.

If you are interested in helping Steve and his team by sponsoring them, please contact him directly at info@snowstar.ca.