Why Silicon Valley Funds Instagrams, Not Hyperloops

[xoxoxoBruce]

Jerzy Gangi takes his fellow entrepreneurs to task for becoming sheep.
He uses a comparison of Instagram vs Elon Musk's Hyperloop, but it's really about neither.

My thesis is simple. We haven’t seen Silicon Valley develop a company like Hyperloop — even though the plans have been out there for over a decade — because there’s a systemic failure in the startup ecosystem. In short, Silicon Valley has killed major innovation.

Has the Valley become a bunch of sheep?

In all of the hype around companies like Facebook and Instagram — what really are just glorified websites — we’ve lost sight of some real innovation opportunities, most of which occur in the offline world.

The entire culture of Silicon Valley, and entrepreneurship around the globe, has taken on a groupthink that prevents truly novel inventions, like the Hyperloop, from reaching the market. The result is a major loss. It’s a loss to our society. It’s a loss to our capital markets. It’s a loss to private investors. And it’s a loss to entrepreneurs.

He goes on to outline nine reasons this has happened.

[tw]

Who says innovation is not happening?

From EDN Magazine of 15 Nov 2013 and related sources

We're still 220 years away from the birth of Captain James T Kirk, but that hasn't stopped engineers from making the technology of Star Trek a reality today or in the near future. In fact, in some cases, you’ve made the visions of Gene Roddenberry look like child's play.

"the famous Star Trek medical scanner"
Warp Bubble
Pulling particles using light rather than pushing particles with light
Star Trek-style 'tractor beam' is created on tiny scale
replicator
Holograms and Holodeck
Transparent Aluminum
Voice Commands
Cloaking Device
Transporter and Quantum Teleportation
Communications
Vision for the Blind

At no point was profit the motive for innovation.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Pure research/science is necessary and useful. But venture capitalists aren't interested in it. I believe the article was about angel investors and venture capitalists.
I see more wishful thinking than actual product in that list. Sure transparent aluminum would be cool and useful. But until they actually figure out how to make it, Me thinks they've got the cart before the horse.

[tw]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Pure research/science is necessary and useful. But venture capitalists aren't interested in it.

That is the point. He has confused Fundamental (pure) research with application research. They are different and must be kept separate to be useful.

Concepts were well demonstrated in places such as the Bell Labs. But my experience says most under the age of 40 do not even know what basic research is let alone know what the Bell Labs were. Does Jerzy?

[xoxoxoBruce]

I don't think he's confused, he was talking about the silicon valley angel/capital boys and how their investment strategy is stifling them and killing inventors. These people were never interested in pure research, that's for big corporations and the government, where a clear path to profit isn't required for every penny invested.

[tw]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

These people were never interested in pure research, that's for big corporations and the government, where a clear path to profit isn't required for every penny invested.

And that is the problem. Pure (fundamental) research is no longer being conducted by big corporations when great labs such as Bendix, Sarnoff, and Bell created so many world class innovations. Take Big Pharma as an example. Once these companies (about 42) had 7 drugs in the innovation pipeline. Today there are less than 13 (due to M/A and other business school money games) with only 3 drugs in the innovation pipeline. Most research comes from outside sources (ie universities) and is paid for by government and other sources. Since profits are now more important than the product, Big Pharma now does less research.

Wall Street will not invest even in application research. Wall Street will freely invest in non-innovative companies like Kodak, airlines, Xerox, ethanol producers, GM, or hedge funds. A growing company for 3D printing in NYC needed crowd sourcing for capital. Wall Street cannot invest is a product that cannot be measured by dollars on spread sheets. Other companies that innovate find other and fewer who actually pay for, understand, and promote application research such as Venture Capitalists.

Unfortunately Jerzy does not know the difference between investors who invest based upon product's potential verses investors who actually think the spread sheet can predict future profits (as Carly Fiorina so boldly claimed). Instead his arguments assume profits (not the product) motivate innovators.

[glatt]

Are you saying we might be able to run cars on water? Wouldn't that be cool?

[Lamplighter]

Ummm..... what's wrong in the lead paragraph:

Stanford researchers have developed an inexpensive device that uses light
to split water into oxygen and clean-burning hydrogen.
The goal is to supplement solar cells with hydrogen-powered fuel cells
that can generate electricity when the sun isn't shining
or demand is high.

If the Stanford process works, why not just use it instead of solar cells
Is it because there is always a loss of energy in every process.

Somehow the "something from nothing" never seems to work out quite right.
That is, Lucy always yanks the football away.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Lamplighter

Ummm..... what's wrong in the lead paragraph:



If the Stanford process works, why not just use it instead of solar cells
Is it because there is always a loss of energy in every process.

Somehow the "something from nothing" never seems to work out quite right.
That is, Lucy always yanks the football away.

For the experiment, the Dai team applied a 2-nanometer-thick layer of nickel onto a silicon electrode, paired it with another electrode and placed both in a solution of water and potassium borate. When light and electricity were applied, the electrodes began splitting the water into oxygen and hydrogen, a process that continued for about 24 hours with no sign of corrosion.

The solar cells would provide the electricity, presumably, to generate and store hydrogen to burn at night.

No doubt Lucy will pull the football away, but it isn't inherently suspicious to have them work in tandem. Burning stored hydrogen WILL be more effective at night than solar cells, but burning hydrogen as it is produced may not be as effective as the cells in the daylight. This would essentially be a way to set aside a certain amount of sunlight for use at night.

There are any number of potential football-yanking opportunities, though.
- How long past 24 (or 80) hours it goes without corrosion.
- Whether the potassium borate (and lithium, mentioned elsewhere) get used up either chemically or mechanically as water goes through the system.
- How expensive those chemical are, or become (with electric cars, lithium could get more expensive).
- How to deal with impurities in the water accumulating as the water is turned to gas. The chemicals added to the water make this a huge issue, as you can't as easily rely on the flow of water to clean the system if the water needs additives for the chemical process to work. If you feed water into a reservoir at a replenishment rate, then impurities will build up. If you let it flow through, then you need to continually dump more chemicals into the intake, and potentially clean them out again on the other side.
- How much solar real estate needs to be allocated to this mechanism instead of solar cells
- How much power from the solar cells goes to the mechanism instead of going out to the grid

[edit - ] Or does this work as a closed system, without a water intake, where a set amount of water is converted to gas and back as needed? That could mitigate the impurities issue.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Instead of systems based on standard solar panels, Duke engineer Nico Hotz proposes a hybrid option in which sunlight heats a combination of water and methanol in a maze of glass tubes on a rooftop. After two catalytic reactions, the system produces hydrogen much more efficiently than current technology without significant impurities. The resulting hydrogen can be stored and used on demand in fuel cells.

For his analysis, Hotz compared the hybrid system to three different technologies in terms of their exergetic performance. Exergy is a way of describing how much of a given quantity of energy can theoretically be converted to useful work.

"The hybrid system achieved exergetic efficiencies of 28.5 percent in the summer and 18.5 percent in the winter, compared to 5 to 15 percent for the conventional systems in the summer, and 2.5 to 5 percent in the winter," said Hotz, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering.

link

I guess KISS is passé.

[Lamplighter]

...how much of a given quantity of energy can theoretically be converted to useful work.

Actually, xoB, I see the point of hybrid systems.
In driving around Oregon/Washington, we have "wind farms" with similar constraints.
If the wind is not blowing...

...and we don't yet have ranches to raise enough gerbils to keep the blades turning.

[Clodfobble]

I thought fresh water was already going to be in ever-shorter supply in the coming decades. Maybe if it can use salt water...