Dana Blankenhorn

The Green Boom Begins

A new Brookings Institution report illustrates an important point I have made here many times.

The next economic boom has begun, and it lies in renewable energy.

Some 2.7 million people are now working on reducing energy drain, increasing efficiency, or producing green energy, the report says. Most of those jobs are located in major cities, where jobs are most needed.

While Brookings may be dismissed as a “liberal think tank,” the report was produced in concert with Battelle's Technology Partnership Practice.

Right now, for instance, over 43,000 Atlanta jobs are tied to “green” technoogies, with conservation jobs having grown 6,000% between 2003-2010. This is the cheapest form of renewable energy, the easiest to capture, the low-hanging fruit.

Why Gore Does Not Speak For Me

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 30 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Big problems can be solved if they are turned into business opportunities.

Government can help by seeing the opportunities and making sure capital reaches the people seizing them.

This is the true story of America. It always has been.

• Government power directed capital to complete the Erie Canal, and support the construction of railroads.
• Government power limited the monopoly rents of utilities so large-scale manufacturing could happen.
• Government power created demand for goods so producers could get a price.
• Government power fought the Cold War with technology, leading to computer chips and the Internet you have today.

In all these cases government power got behind trends that already existed in the marketplace, and because it did American businesses were able to seize these opportunities ahead of competitors.

Which is why Al Gore does not speak for me.

The Business of Pissing People Off

So we find ourselves, once again, debating two Internet companies pissing people off.

Facebook is blocking tools that might let people move to Google+. Netflix is forcing through a price increase.

What reporters don't understand is that these moves are necessary, part of a balance between acceptance and rejection any proprietary company must engage in. Proprietary advantage is an asset. If you don't monetize your assets, you are leaving money on the table. So it's vital that all proprietary companies do this little dance, pushing customers for money or power, pushing as hard as they can, risking their ire in the name of profit.

Contrast this with open source. And with open source ideals.

A Very Local Story in Kirkwood, Atlanta

Let's see just how powerful this blog technology thing is. I'm going to give local reporters in Atlanta, Georgia a beat on a story then watch to see if they fill in the details.

The story is about race in my neighborhood of Kirkwood.

The goal of white yuppies who began moving in over a decade ago was to have a quiet, single-family residential area with a cutesy little downtown where they could eat and shop.

They got their wish when Kirkwood Station opened a few years ago, replacing some abandoned storefronts reportedly owned by Hosea Williams himself with ground-floor shops under two-story condos and townhomes. (The main street through Kirkwood is called Hosea Williams Ave.)

The neighbors love Kirkwood Station, so much so that when a developer recently tried to redevelop the land behind it as senior housing, they rejected the application.

The anchor was a restaurant, originally called Vinocity, then the Kirkwood Public House. In both incarnations it was yuppie-friendly, with fine wines, table service, and community gatherings.

Both restaurants failed.

The Real Open Source Battle

Open source began as a way to produce competitive software.

It's shared infrastructure, written cooperatively by corporations, private individuals, and employees of private foundations and the government.

It doesn't just make sense for software. As Don Tapscott notes, there are other industries where the cost of basic infrastructure is such that sharing makes sense. Drug companies, music companies, banks, manufacturers and health care companies could all benefit from having a commons all can draw from.

The lesson of software is that big companies should have little to fear from this sharing. But the legal environment, as I noted yesterday, is running counter to this obvious truth. The reason for that is an assumption, by Americans and western Europeans, that general sharing will eliminate the advantages they have over Chinese, Brazilian and Indian competitors, and that the only protection their own industries can gain is that of the law.

The Google Party

The patent fight over Android is leading to an inescapable conclusion.

Google has a business problem that demands a political solution.

The problem here is software patents. More precisely, business method patents encoded in software.

Ever since the State Street case of 1998 it's been open season for patenting business methods through software.

Before State Street, software patents were highly limited. You had to tie the patent claim to a particular device. Software might control a patented machine, but it was the machine that was patented, not the software. Certainly not what the machine did.

State Street changed this. By making methods of doing business subject to patent, all someone had to do was implement a business method through software and run to the patent office. This was made worse by the normal patent game of getting narrow protections through the patent office, then making broad claims for those patents in court.

That's what has happened to Android. Just about anything you could do in a smartphone has been patented. It doesn't matter that the Android design is based on Linux. In fact, Microsoft claims it has patents on Linux, which was created in the early 1990s out of Unix, a technology from the 1960s.

What has changed and why this matters can be seen by looking at a business that is very much pro-patent and built on patents, medicine.

A Modest Proposal On The Currency

One of the biggest long-term problems with American money is that dollar bills wear out quickly, but no one likes the dollar coin.

If we could get enough dollar coins into circulation to replace the dollar bill, we'd save billions of dollars per year. And if we could add a $2 coin to the mix, that would also be easier. We might even retire the penny.

Previous attempts to create a $1 coin, with Sacajaweja and Susan B. Anthony, failed because conservatives just refused to use them, and in time so did everyone else. The women didn't sell.

But you know what would sell?

Ronald Reagan would sell. A $1 coin with the Gipper on the front and maybe his Simi Valley museum on the back would be snapped up by conservatives like lemonade on a hot day. Once conservatives started spending the $1 coin and rejecting the bill, the bill could even be retired -- that's the aim of the game, after all.

The Real Impact of Cloud Computing

A lot of people are talking about cloud computing, but what they mainly see is an industry or (perhaps) a second industry (social media) spawned by it.

They're missing the point. The real impact of "the cloud" has yet to appear.

We're starting to see snatches of that future in things like this, IBM and ETH Zurich using clouds to to analyze disease-causing proteins and, hopefully, fight bacteria that are resistant to current antibiotics. It's one of the great "oh noes" that has the doom-and-gloom crowd expecting the destruction of civilization at any moment, the idea being that flesh-eating bacteria are going to get all of us and there's nothing we can do about it.

Well, now there is. Clouds let you set up immense jobs and run them in real time, combining two great breakthroughs of the last decade -- distributed computing and virtualization. What it means is that asking the question in the right way is the whole of experimental design, that the answers to big questions arrive faster.

In addition to handling big questions, clouds also can handle huge data sets efficiently. Not all the implications of this are good -- people don't like their lives being an open book to the police. What must be controlled are what police agencies do with this new power. We need to trust that there are relatively few terrorists and big drug runners out there, compared with the general population. And you know what? There are.

When Everyone is in the Pool, Online and On the Grid

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 29 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The big difference between the developed world and the developing one has always been infrastructure. We have it. They don't.

Now they do. Or they will. Thanks to satellite, Internet, and solar technology, remote villages that previously had no access to electricity or the Internet can now get it.

For electricity this comes in the form of a mini-grid, a local 11 KV village electrical network that may be powered by solar, wind or biomass.

Sophisticated sensing, control and communication is required to make such a grid possible, but that's just chips and software. As one Indian customer told the AP, “Now we have light. We can move on, maybe expand with another solar panel and get a TV."

You can't imagine what it means to have electric light or a TV unless you have never had it. It brings light to the night, allowing people to read and learn after a long day's work. This can transform the lives of children, connecting them to the outside world for the first time.

But it's not as good as an Internet connection.

Nancy Grace Wrong Again

You can't tell from watching a trial on TV what jurors were told to consider, or how they consider it. Yet newspapers and TV outlets try cases anyway, and get very upset when they're wrong. That's our problem, and their problem, not that of the jury system.

I'm pretty sure Nancy Grace and her lynch-mob friends are still furious the kid got off in "12 Angry Men." We have too many Lee J. Cobbs on TV and not enough Henry Fondas.