Innovation Toronto » NY Times

The Lithium Chase

innovation2 — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:32:26 +0000

: Image by lennox_mcdough via Flickr

For many years, few metals drew bigger yawns from mining executives than lithium, a lightweight element long associated mostly with mood-stabilizing drugs.

Suddenly, the yawns are being replaced by eurekas. As awareness spreads that lithium is a crucial ingredient for hybrid and electric cars, a global hunt is under way for new supplies of the metal.

Toyota Tsusho, the material supplier for the big Japanese automaker, announced a joint venture in January with the Australian miner Orocobre to develop a $100 million lithium project in Argentina. That deal came only days after Magna International, the Canadian car parts company that is helping develop a battery-powered version of the Ford Focus, announced that it was investing $10 million in a small Canadian lithium firm that also has projects in Argentina.

They were the latest in a series of deals and projects announced over the last year, reflecting a new urgency among companies to assure themselves future supplies of the metal.

“There is a sea change under way,” James D. Calaway, the chairman of Orocobre, said. “We are at the front end potentially of a very significant increase in the demand for lithium for the emerging electric transportation sector.”

Mr. Calaway added, however, that the timing of any increase in lithium supply and demand was difficult to predict in large part because electric cars had yet to take off in any big way.

About 60 mining companies have begun feasibility studies in Argentina, Serbia and Nevada that could lead to more than $1 billion in new lithium projects in the next several years, while dozens of smaller projects are being proposed in China, Finland, Mexico and Canada.

The companies are competing for construction financing, and the future of most of the projects will depend on how popular electric cars eventually become. That is an open question since batteries remain expensive, recharging stations need to be developed, and consumer taste for cars that depend on regular stops at electric outlets remains untested.

“It’s moving so fast,” said Edward R. Anderson, president of TRU Group, a consultancy firm that specializes in the lithium industry. “There are a lot of people throwing money into this, and a lot of people are going to lose their money.”

In the meantime the four biggest current producers, which mine and otherwise gather lithium in Chile, Argentina and Australia, say they are planning to expand long-running projects as future demand warrants.

In Bolivia, which has almost half of the world’s reserves, the leftist government is building a pilot production plant and is drilling exploratory holes. That Bolivia is a remote, unstable country often hostile to foreign investment has helped spur interest in producing lithium in neighboring Argentina and Chile, in Australia, and in the United States. Several Canadian and American companies are making claims about future production prospects in Nevada, though few analysts foresee large-scale production from that state.

While most experts are skeptical that meaningful amounts of lithium can be produced domestically, they maintain that adequate supplies will be available from sources outside of Bolivia for many years to come and note that the biggest producer, Chile, is a dependable American ally.

Most of the lithium market serves a variety of industrial applications. About a quarter of all lithium produced is used for energy storage, in everything from cellphones to laptop computers to digital cameras.

That proportion stands to increase sharply if battery-powered cars take off. Lithium-ion batteries are the favored battery type for electric and hybrid vehicles because they carry more energy with less weight than other materials and because they lose their charge more slowly. They store about three times as much as energy per pound as a nickel-metal hybrid battery.

Read more . . .

Is Lithium 21st Century’s Oil? Part I (seekingalpha.com)
Blog – New Charging Method Could Slash Battery Recharge Times (technologyreview.com)
Toyota secures lithium supply in Argentina (sfgate.com)
Living With The Side Effects Of Lithium-ion Batteries (treehugger.com)
Google Reader Share: Toyota locks down lithium for hybrid batteries with new mining deal (green.venturebeat.com)

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Building a Better Teacher

innovation2 — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:08:42 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.

Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.

But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Students disobeyed teachers’ instructions, and class discussions veered away from the lesson plans. In one class Lemov observed, the teacher spent several minutes debating a student about why he didn’t have a pencil. Another divided her students into two groups to practice multiplication together, only to watch them turn to the more interesting work of chatting. A single quiet student soldiered on with the problems. As Lemov drove from Syracuse back to his home in Albany, he tried to figure out what he could do to help. He knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach.

Read more . . .

Can Teachers Be Taught to Teach Better? (learning.blogs.nytimes.com)
John Bridgeland: Teachers on America’s Schools (huffingtonpost.com)
Education Theory (slideshare.net)
Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers (newsweek.com)
Firings no answer for schools (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
Elizabeth Bisbee Silber: Mind the Gap (huffingtonpost.com)

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China’s Cyberposse

innovation2 — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:48:20 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

The short video made its way around China’s Web in early 2006, passed on through file sharing and recommended in chat rooms. It opens with a middle-aged Asian woman dressed in a leopard-print blouse, knee-length black skirt, stockings and silver stilettos standing next to a riverbank. She smiles, holding a small brown and white kitten in her hands. She gently places the cat on the tiled pavement and proceeds to stomp it to death with the sharp point of her high heel.

“This is not a human,” wrote BrokenGlasses, a user on Mop, a Chinese online forum. “I have no interest in spreading this video nor can I remain silent. I just hope justice can be done.” That first post elicited thousands of responses. “Find her and kick her to death like she did to the kitten,” one user wrote. Then the inquiries started to become more practical: “Is there a front-facing photo so we can see her more clearly?” The human-flesh search had begun.

Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results.

There is no portal specially designed for human-flesh searching; the practice takes place in Chinese Internet forums like Mop, where the term most likely originated. Searches are powered by users called wang min, Internet citizens, or Netizens. The word “Netizen” exists in English, but you hear its equivalent used much more frequently in China, perhaps because the public space of the Internet is one of the few places where people can in fact act like citizens. A Netizen called Beacon Bridge No Return found the first clue in the kitten-killer case. “There was credit information before the crush scene reading ‘www.crushworld.net,’ ” that user wrote. Netizens traced the e-mail address associated with the site to a server in Hangzhou, a couple of hours from Shanghai. A follow-up post asked about the video’s location: “Are users from Hangzhou familiar with this place?” Locals reported that nothing in their city resembled the backdrop in the video. But Netizens kept sifting through the clues, confident they could track down one person in a nation of more than a billion. They were right.

The traditional media picked up the story, and people all across China saw the kitten killer’s photo on television and in newspapers. “I know this woman,” wrote I’m Not Desert Angel four days after the search began. “She’s not in Hangzhou. She lives in the small town I live in here in northeastern China. God, she’s a nurse! That’s all I can say.”

Only six days after the first Mop post about the video, the kitten killer’s home was revealed as the town of Luobei in Heilongjiang Province, in the far northeast, and her name — Wang Jiao — was made public, as were her phone number and her employer. Wang Jiao and the cameraman who filmed her were dismissed from what the Chinese call iron rice bowls, government jobs that usually last to retirement and pay a pension until death.

Read more . . .

Human-Flesh Search Engines: China’s Mainstream Net Vigilantism [Vigilantism] (gizmodo.com)
Websites that are windows in China’s great firewall (telegraph.co.uk)

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Dreaming the Possible Dream

innovation2 — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:22:51 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

USA-centric but world important

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The thing I love most about America is that there’s always somebody who doesn’t get the word — somebody who doesn’t understand that in a Great Recession you’re supposed to hunker down, downsize and just hold on for dear life. I have a couple of friends who fit that bill, who think a recession is a dandy time to try to discover better and cheaper ways to do things. They both happen to be Indian-Americans — one a son of the Himalayas, who came to America on a scholarship and went to work for NASA to try to find a way to Mars; the other a son of New Delhi, who came here and found the Sun, Sun Microsystems. Both are serial innovators. Both are now shepherding clean-tech start-ups that have the potential to be disruptive game changers. They don’t know from hunkering down. They just didn’t get the word.

As a result, one has produced a fuel cell that can turn natural gas or natural grass into electricity; the other has a technology that might make coal the cleanest, cheapest energy source by turning its carbon-dioxide emissions into bricks to build your next house. Though our country may be flagging, it’s because of innovators like these that you should never — ever — write us off.

Let me introduce Vinod Khosla and K.R. Sridhar. Khosla, the co-founder of Sun, set out several years ago to fund energy start-ups. His favorite baby right now is a company called Calera, which was begun with the Stanford Professor Brent Constantz, who was studying how corals use CO2 to produce their calcium carbonate bones.

If you combine CO2 with seawater, or any kind of briny water, you produce CaCO3, calcium carbonate. That is not only the stuff of corals. It is also the same white, pasty goop that appears on your shower head from hard (calcium-rich) water. At its demonstration plant near Santa Cruz, Calif., Calera has developed a process that takes CO2 emissions from a coal- or gas-fired power plant and sprays seawater into it and naturally converts most of the CO2 into calcium carbonate, which is then spray-dried into cement or shaped into little pellets that can be used as concrete aggregates for building walls or highways — instead of letting the CO2 emissions go into the atmosphere and produce climate change.

If this can scale, it would eliminate the need for expensive carbon-sequestration facilities planned to be built alongside coal-fired power plants — and it might actually make the heretofore specious notion of “clean coal” a possibility.

Read more . . .

Calera and Novacem use concrete to capture CO2 (innovationtoronto.com)
Vinod Khosla: In energy, ignore the experts (news.cnet.com)
Putting ‘Green’ Technology Into Bricks (online.wsj.com)
On the price of coal (economist.com)

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The Newest Hybrid Model

innovation2 — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 01:17:24 +0000

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In former swamplands teeming with otters and wild hogs, one of the nation’s biggest utilities is running an experiment in the future of renewable power.

Across 500 acres north of West Palm Beach, the FPL Group utility is assembling a life-size Erector Set of 190,000 shimmering mirrors and thousands of steel pylons that stretch as far as the eye can see. When it is completed by the end of the year, this vast project will be the world’s second-largest solar plant.

But that is not its real novelty. The solar array is being grafted onto the back of the nation’s largest fossil-fuel power plant, fired by natural gas. It is an experiment in whether conventional power generation can be married with renewable power in a way that lowers costs and spares the environment.

This project is among a handful of innovative hybrid designs meant to use the sun’s power as an adjunct to coal or gas in producing electricity. While other solar projects already use small gas-fired turbines to provide backup power for cloudy days or at night, this is the first time that a conventional plant is being retrofitted with the latest solar technology on such an industrial scale.

The project’s advantages are obvious: electricity generated from the sun will allow FPL to cut natural gas use and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. It will provide extra power when it is most needed: when the summer sun is shining, Floridians are cranking up their air-conditioning and electricity demand is at its highest.

The plant also serves as a real-life test on how to reduce the cost of solar power, which remains much more expensive than most other forms of electrical generation. FPL Group, the parent company of Florida Power and Light, expects to cut costs by about 20 percent compared with a stand-alone solar facility, since it does not have to build a new steam turbine or new high-power transmission lines.

“We’d love to tell you that solar power is as economic as fossil fuels, but the reality is that it is not,” Lewis Hay III, FPL’s chairman and chief executive, said on a recent tour of the plant. “We have got to figure out ways to get costs down. As we saw with wind power, a lot has to do with scale.”

For solar power, scale is still a relative term. At its peak, the solar plant will be able to generate 75 megawatts of power, enough for about 11,000 homes. But that is dwarfed by the adjacent gas plant, which can produce about 3,800 megawatts of power. (A megawatt is enough to power a Wal-Mart store.)

Read more . . .

Blog – Cheaper Solar with Natural Gas (technologyreview.com)
Loan to Kick-start U.S. Solar Thermal Industry (technologyreview.com)
Solar costs set to plummet 50% by year’s end (green.venturebeat.com)

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Money sharing comes to Facebook

innovation2 — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:37:35 +0000

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Friends on social networking site Facebook can now send small payments directly to each other via an application called Buxter.

Buxter handles transactions in Euros or US dollars, with plans to launch in Sterling in the next four weeks.

Other currencies are subject to a 5% conversion fee at the point of upload to a Buxter account.

The company behind the application is ClickandBuy which operates an online payment service across the web.

More than 13 million people across the world already have accounts with it, and a ClickandBuy account is required in order to use Buxter.

Read more . . .

Buxter money transfer service launches on Facebook (telegraph.co.uk)

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Scientists Strive to Map the Shape-Shifting Net

innovation2 — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:02:38 +0000

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In a dimly lit chamber festooned with wires and hidden in one of California’s largest data centers, Tim Pozar is changing the shape of the Internet.

He is using what Internet engineers refer to as a “meet-me room.” The room itself is enclosed in a building full of computers and routers. What Mr. Pozar does there is to informally wire together the networks of different businesses that want to freely share their Internet traffic.

The practice is known as peering, and it goes back to the earliest days of the Internet, when organizations would directly connect their networks instead of paying yet another company to route data traffic. Originally, the companies that owned the backbone of the Internet shared traffic. In recent years, however, the practice has increased to the point where some researchers who study the way global networks are put together believe that peering is changing the fundamental shape of the Internet, with serious consequences for its stability and security. Others see the vast increase in traffic staying within a structure that has remained essentially the same.

What is clear is that today a significant portion of Internet traffic does not flow through the backbone networks of giant Internet companies like AT&T and Level 3. Instead, it has begun to cascade in torrents of data on the edges of the network, as if a river in flood were carving new channels.

Some of this traffic coursing through new channels passes through public peering points like Mr. Pozar’s. And some flows through so-called dark networks, private channels created to move information more cheaply and efficiently within a business or any kind of organization. For instance, Google has privately built such a network so that video and search data need not pass through so many points to get to customers.

By its very nature, Internet networking technology is intended to support anarchic growth. Unlike earlier communication networks, the Internet is not controlled from the top down. This stems from an innovation at the heart of the Internet — packet switching. From the start, the information moving around the Internet was broken up into so-called packets that could be sent on different paths to one destination where the original message — whether it was e-mail, an image or sound file or instructions to another computer — would be put back together in its original form. This packet-switching technology was conceived in the 1960s in England and the United States. It made delivery of a message through a network possible even if one or many of the nodes of the network failed. Indeed, this resistance to failure or attack was at the very core of the Internet, part of the essential nature of an organic, interconnected communications web with no single control point.

During the 1970s, a method emerged to create a network of networks. The connections depended on a communication protocol, or set of rules, known as TCP/IP, a series of letters familiar to anyone who has tried to set up their own wireless network at home. The global network of networks, the Internet, transformed the world, and continues to grow without central planning, extending itself into every area of life, from Facebook to cyberwar.

Everyone agrees that the shape of the network is changing rapidly, driven by a variety of factors, including content delivery networks that have pushed both data and applications to the edge of the network; the growing popularity of smartphones leading to the emergence of the wireless Internet; and the explosion of streaming video as the Internet’s predominant data type.

Read more . . .

What is cloud computing ? (mediacyclone.eu)
Mobile Data Traffic Expected to Surge (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)

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6 Months, $90,000 and (Maybe) a Great Idea

innovation2 — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:27:42 +0000

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THE print hanging behind the receptionist’s desk at Foundation Capital screams,

“Our greatest thrill is to loan you money” — in chunky, capitalized red letters. That’s encouraging news for Michael Bauer, because he wants money and has put himself in a prime position to get it.

Mr. Bauer has set up shop on the second floor of Foundation Capital’s offices here to pursue his dream of creating an energy company from scratch. He pays no rent to operate out of the building, which is designed to evoke a Mediterranean villa. And he’s free to enjoy all the trappings of this venture capital firm, including its ample parking, woodsy surroundings and outdoor patio.

Mr. Bauer has won these cozy environs through a new role as an “entrepreneur in residence.” This coveted position, called an E.I.R. in Silicon Valley shorthand, is emblematic of the valley’s economy of ideas. Most E.I.R.’s receive a monthly stipend of up to $15,000 to sit and think for about six months. In return, the venture capital firm usually gets the first shot at financing the idea that emerges from this meditation.

“The E.I.R. takes out some of the risk because they are known quantities,” said Adam Grosser, a partner at Foundation Capital. “They have a track record of success and a proven ability to disrupt a market with their ideas.”

Venture capital firms have been struggling to find a company that will make them not just rich, but fabulously rich. They dream about investing in the next Intel, Apple, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo or Google. But after Google appeared in 1998, the hunt to find the next superprofitable household name stalled. The likes of Facebook and Twitter have garnered plenty of attention but have yet to strike on a business model capable of sending an I.P.O. into the stratosphere. Ten-year returns for the venture capital industry have sunk to 8.4 percent, annualized, in the decade ended last Sept. 30, from 40.2 percent in the 10 years ended Sept. 30, 2008, a number inflated by the spectacular success of Google and other dot-com companies at the beginning of that period.

The entrepreneur-in-residence model has gained prominence as a calculated way for a venture capital firm to nurture a successful company into being and to increase the odds of solid returns. The firms often tap someone who has successfully started and sold a start-up, hoping that lightning will strike twice.

Read more . . .

The Fathers of the Venture Capital Industry (ventureblog.com)
Does being a VC mean “trying to change the world?” (informationarbitrage.com)
Intel, VC partners, set to invest $3.5 billion in U.S. tech firms (computerworld.com)
The venture capital industry isn’t broken (vator.tv)

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Cellphones Let Shoppers Point, Click and Purchase

innovation2 — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 03:02:45 +0000

: Image by Norma Desmond via Flickr

Shoppers will soon be able to stand outside the designer Norma Kamali’s boutique in Manhattan, point a phone at merchandise in the window and buy it — even late at night when the store is closed.

Ms. Kamali is at the forefront of a technological transformation coming to many of the nation’s retailers. They are determined to strengthen the link between their physical stores and the Web, and to use technology to make shopping easier for consumers and more lucrative for themselves.

The main way they plan to do it is by turning people’s mobile phones into information displays and ordering devices. Can’t find the flour at the grocery store? Grocers will offer phone applications that tell shoppers exactly where to go. Is the department store out of size 8 jeans? Retailers want to make it simple to punch a couple of buttons and have the desired size shipped home.

Some supermarkets intend to offer real-time coupons while people shop. For example, a promotion for milk may be sent to a shopper’s mobile phone the moment her cart rolls into the dairy aisle. Drugstores will offer loyalty programs on cellphones, not on plastic cards. And specialty chains will allow shoppers to breeze through the aisles compiling a wedding registry, just by pointing at merchandise.

It remains to be seen how readily shoppers will embrace such aggressive merchandising, which will generally require them to download free applications onto their phones and consent to being tracked electronically while in a store. But many stores are betting they will go along. After all, people already wander city streets guided by maps on their mobile phones. Why shouldn’t the same technology lead them to the toilet paper in Aisle 3?

Read more . . .

Vogue?s iPhone app turns ads into shopping links (newstatesman.com)
iPhone Apps for Designer Collections (textually.org)

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Local TV for Devices on the Move

innovation2 — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:25:47 +0000

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Who has time to sit on the couch and watch TV anymore?

In the last 10 years, broadcasters have lost 25 percent of their audience. So to win back some viewers, the industry has a plan to grab their attention while they are on the move.

Beginning in April, eight television stations in Washington, D.C., will broadcast a signal for a new class of devices that can show programming, even in a car at high speed. In all, 30 stations in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington have installed the necessary equipment, at a cost of $75,000 to $150,000.

“Younger generations want programming on the go,” said Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters. “To access TV on a cellphone, on a laptop or in the car is a game changer for local broadcasters. It will provide a renaissance for over-the-air broadcast TV.”

If enough people watch using the mobile TV technology, known, for lack of a more marketable name, as “ATSC Mobile DTV Standard,” local stations will be able to charge more for commercials and increase their revenue.

Getting a signal on a portable TV was not always a challenge. When analog television was the nation’s standard, a small set could pick up a signal at the ballpark, at the beach or in the car, though viewers often put up with a fuzzy, ghost-filled image.

But digital TV, the standard that went into effect last year, was developed for stationary televisions.

The mobile devices must catch a special signal, a slice of the broadcast frequency, and software processes it to display a clear picture on the go.

Read more . . .

Mobile Digital TV Standard Adopted in the U.S. of A. (mobilecrunch.com)
Technology: Television That Streams, Even if Traffic Doesn’t (nytimes.com)
Changing channels: Who will switch on to mobile TV? (cnn.com)
Samsung develops first chip for US mobile digital TV transmission, provides no release date (engadget.com)

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Innovation Toronto » NY Times

The Lithium Chase

For many years, few metals drew bigger yawns from mining executives than lithium, a lightweight element long associated mostly with mood-stabilizing drugs.

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Building a Better Teacher

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China’s Cyberposse

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Dreaming the Possible Dream

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The Newest Hybrid Model

In former swamplands teeming with otters and wild hogs, one of the nation’s biggest utilities is running an experiment in the future of renewable power.

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Money sharing comes to Facebook

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Scientists Strive to Map the Shape-Shifting Net

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6 Months, $90,000 and (Maybe) a Great Idea

THE print hanging behind the receptionist’s desk at Foundation Capital screams,

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Cellphones Let Shoppers Point, Click and Purchase

Shoppers will soon be able to stand outside the designer Norma Kamali’s boutique in Manhattan, point a phone at merchandise in the window and buy it — even late at night when the store is closed.

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Local TV for Devices on the Move

Who has time to sit on the couch and watch TV anymore?

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