Power Pal

Just flipped through a quick slide-show on BusinessWeek titled " Recession Lessons " about companies that were founded during recessions and that have hence been quite successful.  Here's the list: GE - 1876 (1873 - 96 recesssion) - leveraged US financial system to grow Johnson & Johnson - 1887 (1873 - 96 recession) - same Allstate - 1931 (Great Depression) - pulled together smart team from collapsed banks, took advantage of financial upheaval Morgan Stanley - 1935 (Great Depression) - same Krispy Kreme - 1937 (Great Depression) - cheap comfort food when people needed both Hewlett-Packard - 1939 - cheap Burger King - 1954 (decade's first recession) - rode the expansion of the Interstate Highway System Hyatt - 1957 (decade's second recession) - rode the wave of mass standardized travel Trader Joes - 1958 - rode demand of discount dry-goods from "Russia scare" IHOP - 1958 - piggy-backed on trend of eating cheap lunch and dinner out of your house So...

I just read a good article in BusinessWeek titled " The Biofuel Bubble ".  The gist of the article is that biofuels start-ups (particularly those focused on ethanol) are going to fail or be absorbed by oil and gas majors.  Ethanol will be limited by the infrastructure that can absorb it (i.e. current automobiles can't take much more than 10% ethanol in the gasoline mix).  Firms, like LS9, that are more focused on diesel or gasoline-like fuels will be better off.  The article also discusses some of the limitations around feedstock.  The article highlights: Producing 30 billion gallons of fuel takes 300 million or more tons of plant material. That's more than the total weight of cars and light trucks sold in the U.S. over the past 10 years. Growing this much cellulose would take at least 30 million acres of land. "I think the biggest problem for everybody is how are we going to grow, gather, store, and treat the biomass," says Brent Erickson, lobbyist for the ...

I just read this posting in VentureBeat about the FCC's $7.2 billion investment in broadband infrastructure coming from the stimulus package.  The investment is focused on developing the rural and underserved areas of the US.  What I found most interesting was how far behind the US is in terms of broadband penetration around the world.  We are 20th!  Here's the excerpt: To understand the vital nature of these hearings, it’s important to first understand how widespread the lack of broadband access is in the U.S. It might come as a surprise, but the U.S. is at at No. 20 in the world for per- capita  broadband penetration. A study by  Point Topic says that only 26.4% of people in the country have regular broadband access. To give you some context,  another report issued by the  Brookings  Institute and MIT  determined that for every percent increase in per- capita  penetration, 300,000 more jobs are created. This is an opportunity that can’t go overlooked right now. Incidentally,...