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- THE FRIDAY LETTER -
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for friends and subscribers)
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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 339.0/May 2, 2008
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HEADLINES:
- The Week / When Moore Meets Metcalfe
- Friday Feature / Memristor Created: Rewrite the textbooks?
- Friday
Blogger Bonus / The State of the
Global Telecosm
- Readings /
|
GILDER/FORBES
TELECOSM 2008: The exaflood Nicholas CARR: The Big Switch: Rewiring
the World |
The Week / When Moore Meets Metcalfe
George Gilder, Forbes.com
(04/30/08): For
investors who know that human-caused global warming is hokum, as proved by the
new book The Deniers by Lawrence Solomon, this is a supreme moment of
contrarian upside promise.
Solomon
shows that hundreds of the most prestigious and knowledgeable scientists in the
field, from paramount physicist Freeman Dyson to venerable climatologist Reid
Bryson, are debunking the climate catastrophists. But a clueless U.S. venture
capital community keeps on throwing their investors' money at futile chimeras
based on the idea of a climate crisis.
Even
Silicon Valley paragons such as Vinod Khosla, John Doerr and the Google boys
are promoting potted plant investments to suck up CO2 and angling for sunbeam
subsidies from Washington. Going so far as to hire Laureate Lobbyist Al Gore,
Kleiner-Perkins--once the pantheon of venture capital--has become a florid
greenhouse full of climate cranks and weather bores.
Meanwhile,
behind their backs, the world is cool and the Internet economy is heating up.
The
"exaflood" is at hand, with torrents of high definition and
three-dimensional video and Web-based services that will inundate public
networks. Ultimately demanded will be hundreds of billions of dollars of new
investment over the next five years paid for by trillions of dollars in new
economic upside.
All
current computer and networking systems suffer from missing elements that could
enable the integration of electronic logic and memory with ever accelerating
photonic and wireless communications.
Moore's
Law is facing a fiber speed challenge and a mobile power crunch. Not only must
chips operate hundreds of times faster but they must also consume radically
less power. Resolving these issues offers the path to huge Druckerian profits
over the next decade.
Filling
the gap between Moore's Law and fiber speed and Moore's Law and mobile speed
per watt are architectural innovations in both networks and systems. These
advances enable faster electronic systems that can be integrated with fiber
speed and wireless networks.
These
advances also provide investment opportunities that span the industry's supply
chain from semiconductor wafer fabrication to microprocessor design to
optoelectronic devices to network architectures to new computer and handset
input-output. All supply currently missing elements to complete the prevailing
system of information processing and communications.
Although
venture capitalists are mostly out-to-lunch or taking a tan, SemEquip of
North Billerica, Mass., has launched a new ion implantation system that
addresses the mobile power challenge. It reduces transistor leakage by up to a
hundred fold while enhancing transistor performance by some 30%. Virtually
every semiconductor company in the world is going to have to use their machines
for the next generation chips.
Meanwhile,
Luxtera in Carlsbad, Calif., has invented and massively patented an
entirely new way to integrate optics with electronics to meet the fiber speed
challenge. It will establish a new standard for the industry. Azul Systems
in Santa Clara has broken through with radical new datacenter processors that
operate at terabits per second using operating-system-neutral upgraded Java
machines. In Los Angeles, Jules Urbach of Jules World and OTOY has
launched spectacular new real time graphics engines that outperform existing
technology by a factor of thousands.
At the same time,
huge opportunities are opening up in the public markets, which have collapsed
under the strain of the loony-bin politicians supported by the venture
capitalists. According to the media, most scientists believe in climate change,
and politicians believe in protectionism, high tax rates and rearview mirror
pollsters, while economists imagine that the U.S. is falling behind the world
in technology and enterprise.
This widespread
dementia in high places offers a huge contrarian opportunity. All that has
happened is that the dollar sunk, meaning that relative U.S. output and market
capitalization diminished. But the U.S. economy continues to thrive,
spearheaded by world leading information technology companies, from Apple and
Cisco to Google, Qualcomm and Intel.
In
my public investments, however, I focus on smaller companies that supply
critical path elements that complete the systems pioneered by these leviathan
leaders. For the Apple, Qualcomm and wireless worlds, I invest in
Synaptics and Anadigics; for Cisco in EZchip and NetLogic,
for Google through datacenter leaders such as Equinix, and in the Intel
wafer fabrication world through such companies as Semitool. All of these
companies will be presenting at our Gilder-Forbes
Telecosm Conference in late May….
Read Complete Article on Forbes.com:
http://www.forbes.com/finance/2008/04/30/telecosm-gilder-intel-pf-ii-in_gg_0430soapbox_inl.html
|
FRIDAY LETTER BOOK OF THE MONTH Covering the range of global warming
claims, from the famed "hockey stick graph" to a predicted rise of
mosquito borne diseases, the book is fascinating and even profound on the
flaws of computer modeling, the irrelevance of consensus to science, the
crippling effects of excessive specialization, and the mounting evidence of a
coming cooling trend. It ends with a cogent explanation of how carbon taxes
and offsets devastate the environment. --
George
Gilder |
Friday Feature / 'Missing link' memristor
created: Rewrite the textbooks?
R. Colin Johnson, EE Times (4/30/08): The long-sought after memristor--the "missing link" in
electronic circuit theory--has been invented by Hewlett Packard Senior Fellow
R. Stanley Williams at HP Labs (Palo Alto, Calif.) Memristors--the fourth
passive component type after resistors, capacitors and inductors--were
postulated in a seminal 1971 paper in the IEEE Transactions on Circuit Theory
by professor Leon Chua at the University of California (Berkeley), but their
first realization was just announced today by HP. According to Williams and
Chua, now virtually every electronics textbook will have to be revised to
include the memristor and the new paradigm it represents for electronic circuit
theory.
"My
situation was similar to that of the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev who
invented the periodic table in 1869," said Chua. "Mendeleev
postulated that there were elements missing from the table, and now all those
elements have been found. Likewise, Stanley Williams at HP Labs has now found
the first example of the missing memristor circuit element."
When
Chua wrote his seminal paper, he used mathematics to deduce the existence of a
fourth circuit element type after resistors, capacitors and inductors, which he
called a memristor, because it "remembers" changes in the current
passing through it by changing its resistance. Now HP claims to have discovered
the first instance of a memristor, which it created with a bi-level titanium
dioxide thin-film that changes its resistance when current passes through it.
Read the 3-page report:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207403521
|
The Gilder Telecosm Forum To
learn how to join this powerful network of talented, tech-savvy investors and
thinkers online daily to debate, discuss, and decode new and emerging
technologies and share valuable and actionable investment advice, visit www.Gildertech.com today. |
Friday Blogger Bonus / The State of
the Global Telecosm
Mark
Williams, Technology Review (May/June 2008):
The most notorious promoter of the 1990s telecom boom has been proved right.
This past February, with the Southern California days already warm and the
sunlight reflecting off the bay and the high-rises along the waterfront,
12,000-odd members of what is perhaps the most important technology industry on
the planet converged on San Diego's convention center for their annual
conference.
Since
2005 this event has been called the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and
Exposition and the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference. It's a
mind-numbingly dull name with an unpronounceable acronym (OFC/NFOEC). But the
nearly one terameter (1,000 million kilometers) of fiber-optic cable encircling
the earth effectively makes up our global civilization's central nervous
system, since it carries Internet traffic and all international
telecommunications--including voice calls, which nowadays are transmitted as
packets of digital data. The world's data traffic, moreover, is doubling in
volume every two years. Industry critic Robert X. Cringely claims that the
only reason video didn't overwhelm U.S. Internet services in 2007 was that
broadband ISPs capped bandwidth and closed switches to control traffic, while
pretending that they were taking no such measures. People have been predicting
that the Internet would crash as long as it's existed, of course. Still, it's
worth considering that if, for instance, all of YouTube's users were to upload
their videos in high definition, it would nearly double U.S. Internet traffic.
I
went to San Diego because I wanted a better picture of the state of the global
telecosm in 2008. What's a telecosm? As I entered the convention center on the
conference's third morning, I ran into an older gentleman dressed in a blue
blazer and beige chinos, trying irritably to get into the main hall.
Recognizing him, I said, "You're George Gilder."
Read
on:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20592/page1/
__________________________________________
Readings /
The irrelevance of silicon
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207402126
WSJ: Microsoft Does The Bad Cop / Not-So-Bad Cop Routine
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/05/wsj-miscrosoft.html
Greenspan and His Critics Misread Housing
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2008/05/greenspan_and_his_critics_misr.html
Aggressive Price Reductions Could Paralyze MEMS
Revenue Growth Warns Bourne Research
http://nanotechwire.com/news.asp?nid=5909
__________________________________________
Friday Letter Editor: Mary Collins George / mcollins@gilder.com
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