However when it comes to hiring employees at the early stages of a company, no one really has a clue about how they should be compensated — cash, equity or what combination of both? Why is that? Because a lot of the salary and equity related data is never really shared by startups, argues Naval Ravikant, co-founder of startup funding market place, AngelList.
The market, he points is very opaque and as a result you have not much consistency in terms of who gets paid how much and more importantly how much equity an early stage employee gets.

AngelList wants to offer up aggregate data to its startups and create more transparency. Angel List offers job listings for its member companies (most of them at early or very early stage of their development cycle) and asks them to list the salary and equity they are going to offer for specific jobs.

Ravikant looked at listings across 60 startups and plotted the salary and equity data on a chart — and as you can see it — it is all over the map. From the data I saw companies that are offering hefty packages — cash and equity and others that are being stingy. The compensation for the much in demand iOS developers is worse than the EKG chart of a cardiac patient.

Apart from the opaque market, Ravikant believes that Google and Facebook are paying top dollar for engineering talent and as result salaries are all over the map. Startups, today, have to compete not only on salary but also on the equity company. The problem is only going to get worse as 2012 progresses. As I wrote earlier, the Facebook IPO could act like a spark for further startup creation activity which in turn would overheat the job market.

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Here’s what you need to know about the proposed budget and energy:

• A total of $27.2 billion in discretionary funds for the DOE, which is a 3.2 percent increase above the 2012 level.
• $2.3 billion for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), which is a rise of 21 percent.
• An elimination of $4 billion in fossil fuel subsidies for 2013, as well as $40 billion in fossil fuel subsidies over the next decade.
• Maintaining and expanding funding for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program, and asking for $350 million.
• $5 billion for basic energy research through the Office of Science.
• $310 million for the SunShot Initiative to help get solar to grid parity by the end of the decade.
• $95 million for wind energy, including off-shore wind technologies.
• $65 million for geothermal energy.
• $770 million for the Office of Nuclear Energy, which includes funding for advanced small modular reactors R&D.
• DOE Secretary Steven Chu said on a call with reporters that some funding was being pulled from energy projects, and 35 projects “did not reach research milestones.”
• Through the USDA, the budget calls for $6.1 billion in loans to rural electric cooperatives and utilities that will support the transition to a clean energy generation and job creation.
• Via the USDA, $200 million for support advanced biofuels.

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Of course, I’m hardly the average consumer: I’ve been covering cable’s TV Everywhere initiative since launch, and got my first taste of the services available as soon as they first started coming available. Nor am I wholly dependent on my family connection for streaming video content — I regularly request access to new TV Everywhere services as they’re launched, using test accounts provided by networks and distributors to try out new streaming products and services that might not be available through my family’s service. I also pay for Netflix and Hulu Plus to keep track of what they’re doing, and have frequently bought season passes to certain cable programs — like Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, and Breaking Bad — that weren’t available through TV Everywhere or any of the other services.

But the bulk of my “TV viewing” over the past two years has been streaming HBO or Showtime shows like Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, Dexter, Game of Thrones, Shameless and, most recently, Luck, either to my laptop or to my iPad. For good measure, I’ve even gone back and watched series I love like Deadwood and The Wire. The TV Everywhere experience, I’m happy to say, is generally a good one, and a great value-add to paying cable subscribers.

But remember, I don’t actually pay for cable.

The rules of TV Everywhere, or lack thereof

I write this for a few reasons. TV networks like HBO and operators like Comcast are leading the charge on the TV Everywhere front, hoping to give viewers more of a reason for subscribers to stay by giving them access to more content in more places. But by making that content available on multiple screens and devices, they’re also opening up the possibility of paying subscribers like my family members to create or share passwords with loved ones. That allows users like me, who wouldn’t usually have access to that content, to view all their favorite shows without actually paying for cable.

That’s not what they intended, of course, but it’s certainly something that the cable companies are thinking about. When the very first TV Everywhere offering from Comcast came to market, for instance, the company was pretty stringent about the number of user name and password combinations were available per household, as well as the number of devices that could access an account. That hasn’t changed, really, either for Comcast or any other operators that have introduced TV Everywhere-type services.

In fact, if anything, operators have become less open about the terms of service for their TV Everywhere offerings. I surveyed a bunch of them to find out how those services were enabled — i.e. How many user accounts per household were available, how many simultaneous streams were available per account, etc. — and all were pretty cagey about giving details on how those accounts could be used. Most declined to comment entirely, while others agreed to speak only off the record. One cable spokesperson told me that the company didn’t want to give a road map for subscribers who might choose to share passwords.

What’s clear is that there’s no current set of best practices for TV Everywhere authentication. Those operators who provide multiple accounts generally seem to limit each one to one simultaneous login per stream. Other operators enable users to login only with the master account, generally to ensure that subscribers won’t want to also share their billing information, usage data and parental controls with others. But they’ll allow multiple simultaneous streams on that account. Others will have one stream and one account. It’s the Wild Wild West out there, possibly for good reason.

The password-sharing phenomenon

So how prevalent are these shared accounts? At this point, probably not very. For now, I’m probably the exception rather than the rule — but I’m sure I’m not alone.

Anecdotal evidence tells me that subscribers to video services tend to share within a household or amongst a group of friends regardless of the price. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I’ve seen friends share usage of a Netflix or Hulu Plus account. More surprisingly, some friends who share tend not to expect payment back in return for shared access.

But that’s just $7.99 a month, for a range of older library content. What happens when you are charging upwards of $100 for cable access and are offering up content that is only available with a cable subscription. HBO shows, for example, are only available on DVD and Blu-ray long after a season ends, generally about a month or so before a new season begins. And you won’t find them anywhere online unless you have a TV Everywhere account. But if you do, you’ll be able to watch episodes the next day, and increasingly on the device of your choice.

A problem for the college generation?

For now, sharing of TV Everywhere accounts is still limited to those who know what those services are — and the industry as a whole, still has a long way to go to educate their customers about the streaming content that they have access to. But there’s one demographic which seems perfectly situated to take advantage of TV Everywhere logins: college students.

As a whole, college kids are tech-savvy, watch content on multiple platforms, and generally don’t have a lot of disposable income. Moreover, they don’t have a lot of choice when it comes to whatever content is available through their university dorm’s cable offering. So being able to keep tabs on some of their favorite cable programming while away from home can be a value-add, indeed.

One cable network spokesperson, who wished to remain anonymous, told me that it’s not necessarily a bad thing for college students to have access while at school. After all, it only drives interest in the programming when they graduate and get their first jobs. But the question remains whether TV Everywhere will eventually convert them to become paying cable customers when they graduate, or if they’ll continue to use Mom and Dad’s account. That’s something big cable might have to worry about, especially as the cost of services continues to increase.

Sharing versus stealing

So am I a thief? How about other users who share accounts? What happens when more people realize that they can use their family’s, friend’s or neighbor’s login to get access to a lot of the same content they would otherwise have to pay for, as long as they’re willing to wait a day or two to watch it? What if they’re willing to go halfsies on the account. Is that the same as hooking a splitter up to your coax and running it to the neighbor’s house? And what, if anything, can the cable industry do about us?

All of these are not necessarily questions that cable companies need to answer today. But they’re definitely things that those companies should be thinking about.

Photo of money courtesy of Flickr user sushi♥ina

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In the wake of ensuing outrage, the company changed its policies and is now asking for explicit permission. It also issued an apology and deleted the data uploaded to its servers. As hours (and then days) went by, it was obvious that Path wasn’t the only company or mobile app that was indulging in this behavior. Other apps, such as photo-sharing service Instagram, quickly changed their policies and issued software updates.

The whole issue seems to have boiled over with Nick Bilton’s piece in the New York Times – So many apologies, so much data mining. Today, we have seen a lot of discussion, including some like angel investor Chris Dixon wondering why is Apple allowing this behavior and not forcing apps to ask for permission? These are all legitimate arguments and counter arguments.  However, the most important question is, what do we learn from all this and where do we go from here? What is that question we should be asking ourselves?

Do The Right Thing

Apologies, outrage, anger and blaming Apple for not being more strict overlooks one of the most important aspects – the moral imperative. As I sit here are watching the white-hot arguments, I wonder why we aren’t talking about doing the right thing. Why do I bring this up? Today’s apps are inherently more social and thus by extension more human. The relationships on this social web are going from increasingly virtual to more real. In a sense, these apps have started to reflect our daily lives. As many have said before, we are the social web and the social web is us.

Dave Winer in his post, How industries react to crisis writes:

It’s time to make this change in tech, once and for all. Your products are not toys, they are used seriously by real people. You need to show respect for your product, and that means respect for your users.

Our daily lives have many layers of trust built into them. There is an implicit social contract that implies that trust. Doing business with your bank, dry cleaner, green grocer and coffee shop is built on that trust. We are friends with others whom we trust. We work with people we trust. And that trust is what drives us to do the right thing. As my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote in his piece, Lessons from Path and Pinterest:

The lesson here is that for social apps, the trust of users is paramount, and the best way to maintain that trust is to be as open as possible about everything that is occurring, particularly if it involves a user’s personal data. Whatever you are doing with it may not seem like a big deal to you, but better to be open about it than have it revealed by someone else, at which point you look sneaky. As Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has put it, “Trust is the new black,” and it never goes out of style.

Social apps of today need to understand this concept of trust and doing the right thing. Just because Apple doesn’t have a “permission” behavior imposed on the apps, doesn’t mean that the apps have to do it. Just look at Marco Arment’s Instapaper. It uses the address book access on the iPhone in a manner that is respectful of his customers, their privacy and yet balancing it with the needs to grow his business. Here is what he wrote:

When implementing these features, I felt like iOS had given me far too much access to Address Book without forcing a user prompt. It felt a bit dirty. Even though I was only accessing the data when a customer explicitly asked me to, I wanted to look at only what I needed to and get out of there as quickly as possible. I never even considered storing the data server-side or looking at more than I needed to. This, apparently, is not a common implementation courtesy.

Could he have grown faster had he followed the herd? Perhaps. What I am saying is that as the web becomes more social, we need to think about “people” first when designing software. Instead of asking for forgiveness, the app makers have to start by being explicit in what they do or don’t do.

As we look into the future, the web of today is not that of early adopters. It includes moms, grand-moms and others who may not be savvy about permissions and privacy. And that is why the imperative is on the app developers to do the right thing. Is it hard? Perhaps. Will it slowdown the growth of some of these companies? Maybe, maybe not — we won’t know until someone tries it. However, building trust and being upfront about how apps work and how our data is consumed and relates and impacts us can’t necessarily be a bad thing.

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To do so, users will need to download the TV Anytime desktop application — which unfortunately is Windows only for now. Once they have it, all it takes to prepare a DVD for transfer is to put it in the DVD drive with the application open. They enter a title and description of the DVD they’re ripping, and the app goes to work.

Like the earlier version of the TV Anytime application, which helped users record web videos and upload them as mobile-ready files to their phones or tablet devices, the DVD ripper works by playing the requested content and frame capturing it. That means that it takes the entire length of a film to be captured and transcoded before being transferred to the mobile device. You can watch it while waiting, or, if you’re busy or impatient, run it in the background. Once the video has been captured, it can be transferred to the mobile app via Wi-Fi or USB.

The TV Anytime app is a bit of a stopgap measure for those with lots of DVDs who might want to have remote access to them on the iPad or other mobile device. After all, the movie industry is trying to being its new UltraViolet digital rights locker to market, which could eventually let users add DVDs that they’ve previously purchased to their virtual movie library, making the app unnecessary. But that feature has yet to be rolled out.

With the addition of the DVD ripping functionality, TV Anytime has also added a fee for the app, which used to be free. Now, the purchase price on the Apple App Store or Android Market is $4.99. The app still lets users record the top 25 TV shows on the web for free, but those who want access to a larger catalog of web video can also pay $1.99 a month.

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Dr. Jonathan Koomey, Stanford University

This essay is the first of a series of four appearing this week on GigaOm. It draws from material in Jonathan Koomey’s latest book, Cold Cash, Cool Climate:  Science-based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs, which is being released by Analytics Press on February 15, 2012.  

Written for entrepreneurs and investors, this book describes how to profit from tackling climate change, one of this century’s greatest challenges. The author acts as your company’s scientific advisor, summarizing the business implications of the climate problem for both new and existing ventures. Koomey helps you effectively allocate scarce time and resources to the most promising opportunities, drawing upon his more than 25 years of experience in analyzing and implementing climate solutions.

A big lesson from climate science for entrepreneurs

One of the reasons I wrote the book Cold Cash, Cool Climate was because the climate and energy sciences have some important lessons to teach entrepreneurs seeking to reduce emissions and make a profit at the same time. Unfortunately, these lessons have not until now been summarized for that audience. My new book aims to change that.

The most sophisticated analysts of the climate problem think in terms of emissions budgets, defined by questions like “How many greenhouse gases (GHGs) can we emit in the next century and stay under some specified warming limit (like the widely accepted temperature goal of 2 Celsius degrees above preindustrial levels?” Because some important GHGs (like carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide) stay in the atmosphere for centuries once emitted, it’s the cumulative emissions that matter. That’s why people use emissions budgets over many decades to think about the problem.

In the book I lay out a carbon budget and an associated emissions pathway that I call the “Safer Climate case”, which has about a 2/3 chance (based on the latest climate simulations) of keeping global average temperatures from rising more than 2 Celsius degrees from preindustrial levels. This case implies that we’ll keep most fossil fuel reserves in the ground, or find a way to safely sequester that carbon if we choose to burn these reserves. It also implies very rapid emissions reductions: For about three decades, starting in 2012, we’ll need to reduce global carbon emissions by on average almost 7 percent per year (compounded) to meet the constraints of the Safer Climate case, even as population and economic activity grow substantially, and poorer countries continue striving towards modernity.

We’ll also need comparable reductions in other greenhouse gases. This rate of emissions reductions is historically unprecedented, at least over decade long time-scales, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible.

Feasibility depends on context, and on what we are willing to pay to minimize risks. What if there’s a big climate-related disaster and we finally decide that it’s a real emergency (like World War II)? In that case we’d make every effort to fix the problem, and what would be possible then is far beyond what we could imagine today.

At the start of World War II, the US auto industry took six months to transition from building a few million autos a year to building planes and tanks for the war effort. This shift wasn’t easy, but it happened, and it offers a lesson in what is possible when we really put our minds to attacking a problem.

This example illustrates another important point about rapid emissions reductions: they will likely result in some capital being scrapped before the end of its useful life. This is a problem from a political perspective, of course, but many analysts dismiss scenarios with premature capital retirements as infeasible. Based on the analysis in Chapter 5 of the book, I suspect strongly that we won’t have that luxury, given the rapid reductions we’ll need to achieve (and the problem will grow in size if we continue to build high carbon infrastructure after 2012).

Since the constraints of the Safer Climate case will probably force us to scrap some capital stocks before the end of their useful lives, it’s the entrepreneur’s job to make existing capital stocks obsolete more quickly. That means developing replacement products (and ways to retrofit existing buildings and equipment) that are so much better than current ways of delivering energy services that people are willing to scrap or repurpose that equipment to gain the advantages your product provides. That approach will allow us to minimize and sometimes sidestep the difficult political choices caused by premature retirements of existing capital.

As one example of such a product, consider light-emitting diode (LED) down lights that fit in those recessed ceiling cans that are so common in U.S. homes. We installed almost 50 of these in our new house last year to replace our aging fixtures. We would have had to spend $20 to replace each fixture anyway, according to the contractor, and the LED fixtures we bought instead cost $50 each and fit right into the existing cans.  Not only do they look better than what they replaced, they deliver bright and directional light, they come on instantly and dim just fine, their color rendition is so good that even my wife (who is a stickler in such matters) thinks they are great, and they will last 35,000 hours, which is probably 20 years at the rates that we use most of these fixtures.

The long lifetime (compared to at most a few thousand hours for incandescent bulbs and about ten thousand hours for compact fluorescents) was what put them over the top for us. We have relatively high ceilings throughout the house so the prospect of climbing a tall ladder more than a dozen times a year was not an enticing one. The LEDs eliminate that hassle, and in fact are so good that they will surely encourage others to replace their fixtures before the end of their useful lives, because they are so better than what they replace.  And did I mention that they cut lighting electricity use by more than 80 percent?

Conclusions

Because the required emissions in the Safer Climate case are so rapid, some existing energy sector capital will need to be retired in coming decades (and the more high-carbon infrastructure we build in the next few years the more that will have to be scrapped later).  An entrepreneur can assist that process by building low emission products that are so good that people are eager to buy them and happy to scrap existing capital to put them to work. That won’t make all the difficult political problems of the climate issue go away, but it will help.

Image courtesy of Julipan.

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The failure of the space has spawned a loosely-organized grassroots movement in the devops community to address the challenge, and led to numerous blog posts, an IRC channel and a collection of GitHub repos.

Although there is a litany of complaints, I would submit that this pain is rooted in a way of monitoring that ignores the realities of growing and scaling businesses along with the demands of fast-paced infrastructure teams. Perhaps it’s time for us to think of monitoring in a new way.

A new (old) model
During the Korean War, United States Air Force Colonel Robert Boyd formulated the “OODA loop.” OODA stands for observe, orient, decide and act. Boyd theorized that the faster a team could understand what’s happening, orient themselves to the situation, decide how to respond to it, and act — the greater their readiness and haste of response. Boyd’s insight suggests that teams iterating through the loop faster gain a competitive advantage over opponents. I’d suggest that any well-designed monitoring tool can help automate the OODA loop for operations teams. Below are the essential components of monitoring infrastructure for fast-paced teams.

1. Deep integration
Most open source monitoring tools only tackle one aspect or a subset of the OODA loop. For instance: Graphite and Cacti provide trending (orientation), Nagios provides alerting (decision and action) and Statsd and Collectd gather metrics (observation). But integrating these projects is a daunting task and often takes the form of a Frankenstein’s monster of Perl scripts and PHP dashboards. While each of these tools are helpful, they only paint part of the picture. An ideal tool might integrate all four steps of the OODA loop into one harmonious system. Where necessary, one would also expect API endpoints to allow for custom behavior and flexibility to further automate a team’s action.

2. Contextual alerting and pattern recognition
Most monitoring tools require the user to predefine all of the conditions on which to alert. For instance, one would set static thresholds that say, “Notify me when disk usage goes above 90 percent,” or, “Notify me when CPU usage goes above 75 percent.” However, static thresholds are a poor substitute for pattern recognition, the basis of cognitive decision-making. Setting static thresholds for applications whose load varies throughout the day, week, or month is hell. At any given point, monitoring infrastructure should be able to reflect upon its current state, past state, and forecasting and ask, “Are current trends sufficiently deviant enough to warrant action?” And if so, it should immediately notify the team with context. What if ops teams could look at a graph and say to the system, “Alert us when something looks (or doesn’t look) like this?”

3. Timeliness
The term “real time” has been watered down, but it carries a specific meaning. Real-time computing concepts in monitoring systems relate to an intrinsic property of events: they happen on a timeline. Monitoring systems must be real time, because the timeliness of the data impacts its correctness and utility. All aspects of a monitoring system must respond immediately to events. The OODA loop is only effective when it is faster than the environment or opponent that it is running against. If you’re operating on assumptions that are a minute old, it’s hard to say much of anything about what’s happening now.

4. High resolution
The resolution of monitoring systems is critical. With most options offering updates once every one to five minutes, low-resolution monitoring obscures a world of patterns that are invisible until you’ve zoomed in. The difference between a one-second graph updated in real time and a one-minute graph updated every five minutes is the difference between a fluid HD film and a paper flip-book.

5. Dynamic configuration
The fluidity of modern architectures demands monitoring infrastructure that can keep up with the changes that ops teams require. The rise of virtualized infrastructure combined with dynamic configuration management systems means that there may be a great deal of host churn. This churn challenges the concepts of host identity that traditional monitoring tools have built in as fundamental abstractions.

What’s next for monitoring?
The pace of business today requires tools that help teams move rapidly through the OODA loop. Smarter software can push this process forward, offering deep integration across infrastructure, pattern recognition to quickly spot problems, real-time updates at high resolution and automatic adaptation to changing environments. With a set of tools like that, operations teams can respond to incidents, resolve them for good and drive business value while leaving competitors’ heads spinning.

Cliff Moon is the founder and CTO of Boundary, a provider of real-time network and applications monitoring-as-a-service. The views expressed here are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of any Company with which he is or has been affiliated.

Special thanks and acknowledgement goes out to Coda Hale for his views on monitoring and metrics (read Metrics, Metrics Everywhere).

Image courtesy of Flickr user purpleslog.

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I’m a huge fan of cloud computing in general and AWS in particular. But I’ve long had an instinct that the economics of the choice between self-hosted and cloud provider had more texture to it than the patently attractive sounding “10 cents an hour,” particularly as a function of demand distribution. As a case in point, Zynga has made it known that for economic reasons, they now use their own infrastructure for baseline loads and use Amazon for peaks and variable loads surrounding new game introductions.

An analysis of the load profiles

To tease out a more nuanced view of the economics, I’ve built a detailed Excel model that analyzes the relative costs and sensitivities of AWS versus self-hosted in the context of different load profiles. By “load profiles,” I mean the distribution of demand over the day/month as well as relative needs for bandwidth versus compute resources. The load profile is the key factor influencing the economic choice because it determines what resources are required and how heavily these resources are utilized.

The model provides a simple way to analyze various load profiles and allows one to skew the load between bandwidth-heavy, compute-heavy or any combination. In addition, the model presents the cost of operating 100 percent on AWS, 100 percent self-hosted as well as all hybrid mixes in between.

In a subsequent post, I will share the model and describe how you can use it for scenarios of interest to you. But for this post, I will outline some of the conclusions that I’ve derived from looking at many different scenarios. In most cases, the analysis illustrates why intuition is right (for example, that a highly variable compute load is a slam dunk for AWS). In other cases, certain high-sensitivity factors become evident and drive the economic answer. There are also cases where a hybrid infrastructure is at least worthy of consideration.

To frame an example analysis, here is the daily distribution of a typical Internet application. In the model, traffic distribution is an input from which bandwidth requirements are computed. The distribution over the day reflects the behavior of the user base (in this case, one with a high U.S. business-hour activity peak). Computing load is assumed to follow traffic according to a linear relationship, i.e. higher traffic implies higher compute load.

Note that while labor costs are included in the model, I am leaving them out of this example for simplicity. Because labor is a mostly fixed cost for each alternative, it will tend not to impact the relative comparison of the two alternatives. Rather, it will impact where the actual break-even point lies. If you use the model to examine your own situation, then of course I would recommend including the labor costs on each side.

For this example, to compute costs for Amazon, I have assumed Standard Extra Large instances and ELB load balancer for the Northern California region. The model computes the number of instances required for each hour of the day. Whenever the economics dictate it, the model applies as many AWS Reserved Instances (capacity contracts with lower variable costs) as justified and fills in with on-demand instances as required. Charges for data are computed according to the progressive pricing schedule that Amazon publishes. To compute costs for self-hosting, I assume co-location with the peak number of Std-XL-equivalent servers required, each loaded to no more than 80 percent of capacity. The costs of hardware are amortized over 36 months. Power is assumed to be included with rackspace fees. Bandwidth is assumed to be obtained on a 95th percentile price basis.

Now let’s look at a sensitivity analysis. Notice in the above example, that a bit more than half of the total cost for each alternative is for bandwidth/data transfer charges ($35,144 for self-hosted at $8/Mbps and $36,900 for AWS). This is important because while Amazon pricing is fixed and published, 95th percentile pricing is highly variable and competitive

The chart above shows total costs as a function of co-location bandwidth pricing. AWS costs are independent of this and thus flat. What this chart shows is that self-hosting costs less for any bandwidth pricing under about $9.50 per Mbps/Month. And if you can negotiate a price as low as $4, you’d be saving more than 40 percent to self-host. I’ll leave discussion of the hybrid to another post.

This should provide a bit of a feel for how I’ve been conducting these analyses. Above is a visual summary of how different scenarios tend to shake out. The intuitive conclusion that the more spiky the load, the better the economics of the AWS on-demand solution is confirmed. And similarly, the flatter or less variable the load distribution, the more self-hosting appears to make sense. And if you’ve got a situation that uses a lot of bandwidth, you need to look more closely at potential self-hosted savings that could be feasible with negotiated bandwidth reductions.

Charlie Oppenheimer is a serial-CEO and currently an executive-in-residence at venture-capital firm Matrix Partners. His most recent company, Digital Fountain, was acquired by Qualcomm, and his previous company, Aptivia, was acquired by Yahoo. He blogs at stratamotion.com. 

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Amyris’ stock fell close to 30 percent on the news, to $6.99 per share. The company uses genetic engineering to turn biomass into chemicals and fuels, and its first product turns sugarcane syrup into Biofene, a form of the industrial chemical farnesene, which is a fragrant hydrocarbon that’s used to make cosmetics, lubricants and other materials. This is the company’s stock over the past year:

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Thomas Hawk, a longtime member of the Flickr community writes:

Today is Flickr’s 8th Birthday. Whatever you may or may not think of the service today, without a doubt Flickr pioneered social photography. I joined Flickr during year one in August of 2004, shortly after it was launched to the public. What I found there was more than just a place to host my photos, I found a vibrant community full of great photographers who were willing and eager to engage with each other through the site. I found an audience that appreciated creativity and the ability for us to come together and share art in mostly a non-commercial setting.

When Yahoo bought the company — I broke the news – it was pretty clear that Ludicorp, the tiny Vancouver-based company behind Flickr, could change the search engine, which at that time was trying to differentiate itself from its main rival, Google. Of course, none of that came to pass. Flickr today languishes in the shadow of newer photo sharing services such as Instagram. It never really adapted to mobile. The beautiful, simple user experience has become cluttered.

Yahoo has never really appreciated what it has in Flickr: a community of passionate people who share moments and experiences through photos — a concept  that has since found its way into Path, Instagram, 500px and Facebook. Talking about Facebook — it is 8 years old too and is about to become the greatest wealth creation engine since Google.

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The primary “mission” of late has been to sort possible future energy resources into boxes labeled “abundant,” “potent” (able to support something like a quarter of our present demand if fully developed), and “niche,” which is a polite way to say puny. In the process, I have clarified in my mind that a significant contributor to my concerns about future energy scarcity is not the simple quantitative scorecard. After all, if it were that easy, we’d be rocking along with a collective consensus about our path forward. Some comments have  asked: “If we forget about trying to meet our total demand with one source, could we meet our demand if we add them all up?” Absolutely. In fact, the abundant sources technically need no other complement. So on the abundance score alone, we’re done at solar, for instance. But it’s not that simple, unfortunately. While the quantitative abundance of a resource is key, many other practical concerns enter the fray when trying to anticipate long-term prospects and challenges—usually making up the bulk of the words in prior posts.

For example, it does not much matter that Titan has enormous pools of methane unprotected by any army (that we know of!). The gigantic scale of this resource makes our Earthly fossil fuel allocation a mere speck. But so what? Practical considerations mean we will never grab this energy store. Likewise, some of our terrestrial sources of energy are super-abundant, but just a pain in the butt to access or put to practical use.

In this post, we will summarize the ins and outs of the various prospects. Interpretation will come later. For now, let’s just wrap it all up together.

The Matrix

Would you like to know what the matrix is? Okay. I’ll tell you — in a bit. For each of the major energy hopefuls I have discussed on Do the Math, I characterize their various attributes in a three-tier classification: adequate (green); marginal (yellow); or insufficient (red) — possibly a showstopper. The scheme is qualitative, and I am sure some will disagree with my assignments.

Before I go any further, let me say that I will not entertain comments griping about why I made a certain square the color I did. I won’t have time to respond at that level, given that there are 200 colored boxes in the matrix. But the beauty is, you can change the matrix any way you see fit and make your own custom version. Go buy some crayons today!. The matrix I’ve created is not without its biases and subjectivity. Whose would be?

Okay, I’ll keep the suspense going a bit by describing the fields.

Abundance: This is essentially the “abundant,” “potent,” and “niche” classification scheme reflected in the preceding posts. Green means that the resource can in principle produce far more power than we currently use and keep it up for many centuries. Red means a bit-player at best. Yellow is the stuff that can be useful, but is incapable of carrying the full load—not that we require everything to do this. We can tolerate a mix of of items, but will not get far by mixing reds together.

Difficulty: This field tries to capture the degree to which a resource brings with it large technical challenges. How many PhDs does it take to run the plant? How painful is it to maintain or keep churning? This one might translate into economic terms: difficult is another term for expensive.

Intermittency: Green if rock-steady or there whenever we need it. If the availability is beyond our control, then it gets a yellow at least. The possibility of going without for a few days earns a red.

Demonstrated: I don’t mean on paper, and I don’t mean a prototype that exhibits some of the technology. To be green, this has to be commercially available today, and providing useful energy.

Electricity: Can the technology produce electricity? Most of the time, the answer is yes. Sometimes it would make no sense to try. Other times, it is seriously impractical.

Heat: Can the resource produce direct heat? Yellow if only through electric means.

Transport: Does the technology relieve the liquid fuels crunch? Anything that makes electricity can power an electric car, earning a yellow score. Liquid fuels are green. Some may get tired of the broken record in the descriptions that follow that a particular resource does not help transportation, wanting to shout “electric cars, fool” every time I say it. But our large-scale migration to electric cars is not in the bag. They may remain too expensive to be widely adopted. Meanwhile, this does not help air travel or heavy transport.

Acceptance: Is public opinion (I can really only judge U.S. attitudes) favorable to this method? Will there likely be resistance—whether justified or not?

Backyard?: Is this something that can be done domestically, in one’s backyard or small property, managed by the individual?

Efficiency: Over 50 percent gets the green. Below about 10 percent gets red. It’s not the most important of criteria, as the abundance score incorporates efficiency expectations. But we will always view low efficiency negatively.

Okay, enough holding out—here’s the matrix (click to expand; see here for colorblind-friendly version).

Yellow boxes tend to deserve explanation. It is usually clear why something would swing red or green, but yellow often has several things tugging at it. If green boxes are given a +1 score, yellow boxes zero, and red boxes −1, adding the boxes with equal weight yields the scores on the right, by which measure the table is sorted: best to worst. The only place I cheated was to give D-D fusion a −2 for difficulty. It’s the hardest thing on the list, given our decades of massive effort invested to date on D-T fusion, while D-D is too hard to even attempt.

Now, equal weighting on all ten criteria is boneheaded. But the assessment is imprecise enough not to warrant a more elaborate weighting scheme. I do not stand firm behind the order that results, and am half-tempted to monkey with weighting schemes until a more preferred order emerges. But I would be cooking the books to further match my preferences. Feel free to weight any way you see fit, and change anything else while you’re at it. Just remember. No griping.

Note that conventional fossil fuels, matrixed-out above, score green in almost every category, except—unfortunately—abundance (see here for R/G colorblind version). The efficiency is high for direct heating (most often natural gas), and middling for electricity or transport. Coal gets no points for transportation, and natural gas is of limited use here (although the bus I’m riding as I type this is powered by natural gas, so I can’t entirely nix its transportation capability). All things considered, all of the fossil fuels get a score of 7 or 8. Note the striking gapwe face between fossil fuels and their alternatives, topping out at a score of 5. One might ding the fossil fuels a point or two for their greenhouse gas contributions, closing the gap a bit.  None of the options in the alternatives matrix are intrinsic carbon emitters.

Quick Lessons

Looking at some of the main trends, very few options are both abundant and easy. Solar PV and solar thermal qualify. A similar exclusion principle often holds for abundant and demonstrated/available. There is a reason why folks (myself included) like solar.

Intermittency mainly plagues solar and wind resources, with mild inconvenience appearing for many of the natural sources.

Electricity is easy to produce. We have loads of ways to do it, and are likely to pick the easiest/cheapest. We won’t necessarily get far down the list if we’re covered by things at the top end (assuming my rankings have any validity and some economic correlation).

Transport is hard. Concerns over peak oil played a huge role in making me sit up to pay attention to our energy challenges. Electric cars are the most obvious way out, but don’t do much for heavy shipping by land or sea, and leave airplanes on the ground.

Few things face serious barriers to acceptance: especially when energy scarcity is at stake.

A few options are available for the homestead. A passive solar home with PV panels, wind, and some method to produce liquid fuels on site would be a dream come true. Here’s hoping for artificial photosynthesis!

The missing category here is cost, although difficulty may be an imperfect proxy. As a result, some of the high-scoring options may more be costly than we’d like. Actually, some of the lowest-scoring options are the costliest! If you’re expecting that we’ll replace fossil fuels and do it on the cheap, you might as well learn to bawl on the floor kicking and pounding your fists, tears streaming. This is our predicament. We have to buck up and deal with it, somehow.

Individual Discussion

For each topic, the link at the beginning points to a more complete discussion on Do the Math.  Here, I just briefly characterize each resource in relation to the matrix criteria.

Solar PV: Covering only 0.5% of land area with 15% efficient PV panels provides the annual energy needs of our society, qualifying solar PV as abundant. It’s not terribly difficult to produce; silicon is the most abundant element in Earth’s crust, and PV panels are being produced globally at 25 GW peak capacity per year (translating to 5 GW of average power added per year). Intermittency is the Achilles Heel of solar PV, requiring storage solutions if adopted at large scale. Solar PV produces electricity directly, which could be converted to heat or transport. Most people do not object to solar PV on rooftops or over parking areas, or even in open spaces (especially desert). I’ve got some on my garage roof as we speak (with storage), so they’re well-suited to individual operation/maintenance. Clocking in at an efficiency of 15%, don’t expect PV to vastly exceed this ballpark.

Solar Thermal: Achieving comparable efficiency to PV, but using more land area, generating electricity from concentrated solar thermal energy automatically fits in the abundant category—though somewhat more regionally constrained. It’s relatively low-tech: shiny curved mirrors tracking on (often) one axis, heating oil or other fluid to run a plain-old heat engine. Intermittency can be mitigated by storing thermal energy, perhaps even for a few days. Because a standard heat-engine follows, fossil fuels can supplement in lean times using the same back-end. A number of plants are already in operation, producing cost-competitive electricity—and heat if anyone cares. As with so many of the alternatives, transportation is not directly aided. Public acceptance is no worse than for PV, etc. But don’t expect your own personal solar thermal electricity plant.

Solar Heating: On a smaller scale, heat collected directly from the sun can provide domestic hot water and home heating. In the latter case, it can be as simple as a south-facing window. Capturing and using solar heat effectively is not particularly difficult, coming down to plumbing, insulation, and ventilation control. Technically, it might be abundant, but since it is usually restricted to building footprints (roof, windows), I take it down a notch. There will be lean days, but my friends in Maine do not complain about their solar heating comfort (with occasional propane backup). Solar heating is useless for electricity or transport, but has no difficulty being accepted and almost by definition is a backyard-ready technology.

Hydroelectric: We have seen that super-efficient hydroelectric is doomed to remain a small player (in the rubric that we maintain today’s energy consumption levels). It’s the low-hanging fruit of the renewable world, and has therefore already seen large-scale development. It has seasonal intermittency (typical capacity factor for a hydro plant is 40%), does not directly provide heat or transport, and can only rarely be implemented personally, at home. Acceptance is fairly high, although silting and associated dangers—together with habitat destruction—do cause some opposition to expanded hydroelectricity.

Biofuels from Algae: I was somewhat surprised to see this entry rank as highly as it did in my admittedly unsophisticated scoring scheme. Because it captures solar energy—even at < 5% efficiency—the potential scale is automatically enormous. But it’s not easy, at present. Dealing with slime will bring challenges of keeping the plumbing clean, possible infection in a genetic arms race with evolving viruses, contamination by other species, etc. At present, we don’t have that magic algal sample that secretes the fuels we want. Heady talk of genetic engineering pledges to solve these problems, but we’re simply not there yet and cannot say for sure that we will get there. Otherwise, the ability to provide transportation fuel is the big draw. Heat may also be efficiently produced, though electricity would represent a misallocation of liquid fuel. Can it be done in the backyard? I could imagine a slime pond in the yard, but care and feeding and refining the product may be prohibitively difficult.

Geothermal Electricity: This option makes sense primarily at geological hotspots, which are rare. It will not scale to be a significant part of our entire energy mix. Aside from this, it is relatively easy, steady, and well-demonstrated in many locations. It can provide electricity, and obviously direct heat—although far from heat demand, generally. It provides no direct help on transportation. Objections are slim to non-existent. I don’t think houses tend to be built on the hotspots, so don’t look for it in a backyard near you.

Wind: Wind is a sensible option that I imagined would float higher in the list than it did. It’s neither abundant nor scarce, being one of those options that can provide a considerable fraction of our present needs under large-scale development. It’s pretty straightforward, reasonably efficient, and demonstrated the world over in large farms. The biggest downside is its intermittency. It will not be unusual to have a few days in a row with little or no regional input. Like so many other things, electricity is naturally produced, while heat and transport is only available via electricity. I sense that objections to wind are more serious than for many other alternatives. Windmills are noisy and tend to be located in prominent places (ridge-tops) where they are extremely visible and scenery-altering. You can’t hide wind in a bowl, or you end up hiding from the wind at the same time. Another built-in conflict emerges on wind-rich coastlines, where many like to take in unspoiled scenery. Small-scale wind is viable in your own backyard.

Artificial Photosynthesis: A very appealing future prospect for me is artificial photosynthesis, combining the abundance of direct solar with the self-storing flexibility of liquid fuel. Intermittency is thus eliminated to the extent that annual production meets demand: storage of a liquid fuel for many months is possible. The dream result of a panel sitting on your roof that drips liquid fuel could provide both heating and transportation fuel. In a pinch, one could also produce electricity this way, but what a waste of precious liquid fuel, when we have so many other ways to make electricity! The catch is that it doesn’t exist yet, that it may never exist, and that feeding it the right ingredients and processing/refining the fuel may eliminate the backyard angle. Still, we all have to have something to gush over. For some, it’s thorium and for others it’s fusion, etc. This one excites me by its potential to satisfy so many purposes.

Tidal Power: Restricted to select coastal locations, tidal will never be a large contributor on the global scale. The resource is intermittent on daily and monthly scales, but in a wholly predictable manner. Extracting tidal energy is not terribly hard—sharing technology with similarly efficient hydroelectric installations—and has been demonstrated in a number of locations around the world. It’s another electricity technique, with no direct offering of heat or transportation. No unusual level of societal objection exists, to my knowledge, but it’s not something you will erect in your backyard and expect to get much out of it.

Conventional Fission: Using conventional uranium reactors and conventional mining practices, nuclear fission does not have the legs for a marathon. On the other hand, it is certainly well-demonstrated, and has no problems with intermittency—unless we count the fact that it has trouble being intermittent in the face of variable load. Compared to other options, nuclear runs a tad on the high-tech side. By this I mean that design, construction, operation, and emergency mitigation require more brains and sophistication than the average energy producer. Nuclear fission directly produces heat (seldom utilized), and is primarily used to generate electricity via the standard steam-driven heat engine, but offers no direct help on transportation. Acceptance is mixed. Germany plans to phase out its nuclear program even though they are serious about carbon reduction. No new plants have been built in the U.S. for over thirty years in part due to public discomfort. Some of this is irrational fear over mutant three-eyed fish and the like, but some is genuine political difficulty relating to the pesky waste problem that no country has yet solved to satisfaction. Nuclear power is not possible on a personal scale.

Uranium Breeder: Extending nuclear fission to be able to use the 140-times more abundant ²³⁸U (rather than 0.7% ²³⁵U) gives uranium fission the legs to run for at least centuries if not a few millennia, so abundance issues disappear. Breeding has been practiced in military reactors, and indeed some significant fraction of the power in conventional uranium reactors comes from ²³⁸U turned ²³⁹Pu. But no commercial power plants have been built to deliberately access the bulk of uranium, turning it into plutonium at scale for the purpose of power production. Public acceptance of breeders will face even stiffer hurdles because plutonium is more easily separated into bomb material than is ²³⁵U, and the trans-uranic radioactive waste from this option is nastier than for the conventional cousin.

Thorium Breeder: Thorium is more abundant than uranium, and only comes in one flavor naturally, so that abundance is not an issue. Like all reactors, thorium reactors fall into the high-tech camp, and include new challenges (e.g., liquid sodium) that conventional reactors have not faced. There have been a few instances of small-scale demonstration, but nothing in the commercial realm, so that we’re probably a few decades away from being able to bring thorium online. Public reaction will be likely be similar to that for conventional nuclear: not a show stopper, but some resistance on similar grounds. It is not clear whether the newfangled aspect of thorium will be greeted with suspicion or with an embrace. Though also a breeding technology (making fissile ²³³U from ²³²Th), the proliferation aspect is severely diminished for thorium due to highly radioactive ²³²U by-product and virtually no easily separable plutonium. Of the future nuclear prospects, I am most optimistic about this one—although it’s no nirvana to me.

Geothermal Heating with Depletion: A vast store of thermal energy sits in the crust, locked in the rock and moving slowly outward. Being the impatient lot that we are, we could drill down and grab the energy out of the rock on our own schedule, effectively mining heat as a one-time resource. In the absence of water flow to convect heat around, dry rock will deplete its heat within 5–10 meters of the borehole in a matter of a few years, requiring another hole 10 meters away from the first, and so on and so on. I classify this as moderately difficult, requiring a never-ending large-scale drilling operation across the land. The temperatures are pretty marginal for running heat engines to make electricity with any respectable efficiency (especially given so many easier options for electricity), but at least the thermal resource will not suffer intermittency problems during the time the hole is still useful. Given its inconvenience (kilometers of drilling), I do not know if examples abound of people having tried this for the purpose of providing heat in arbitrary (not geologically hot) areas. Public acceptance may be less than lukewarm given the scale of drilling involved, dealing with tailings and possibly groundwater contamination issues on a sizable scale. While such a hole could fit in a backyard, it would be far more practical to use the heat for clusters of buildings rather than for just one—given the amount of effort that goes into each hole (and considering short-term lifetime of each hole). I gave this technique high marks for efficiency if used for heat, but it would drop to reddish-yellow if we tried to use this resource for electricity.

Geothermal Heating, Steady State: If we turn our noses up at depletion-based geothermal heat, steady state offers far less total potential, coming to about 10 TW of flow if summed acrossall land. And to access temperatures hot enough to be useful for heating purposes, we’re talking about boreholes at least 1 km deep. It is tremendously challenging to cover any significant fraction of land area with thermal collectors 1 km deep. So I am probably being too generous to color this one yellow for the abundance factor. That’s okay, because I’m hitting it hard enough on the other counts. To gather enough steady-flow heat to provide for a normal U.S. home’s heat, the collection network would have to span a square 200 m on a side at depth, which seems nightmarish to me. But at least depletion would not be an issue in this circumstance. Otherwise, this category shares similar markings and rationale as the depletion scenario.

Biofuels from Crops: We’ve seen that corn ethanol is a loser of a scheme on energy grounds, although sugar cane and vegetable oils fare better. But these compete with food production and arable land availability, so biofuels from crops can only graduate from “niche” to “potent” in the context of plant waste or cellulosic conversion. I have thus split the abundance and demonstration in two: food crop energy is demonstrated but severely constrained in scale. Celluosic matter becomes a potent source, but undemonstrated (perhaps this should even be red). I do not label the prospect as an easy one, because growing and harvesting annual crops on a relavent scale constitutes a massive, perpetual job. If exploiting fossil fuels is akin to spending our inheritance, growing and harvesting our energy on an annual basis is like getting a real job—a real hard job. The main benefit of biofuels from crops is that we get a liquid fuel out of it—so hard to come by via other alternatives. Public acceptance hinges on competition with food or just land in general. Scoring only about 1% efficient at raking in solar energy, this option requires commandeering massive tracts of land. A small-time farmer may make useful amounts of fuel for themselves in their back “yard,” if refining does not create a bottleneck.

Ocean Thermal: The ocean thermal resource uses the 20–30°C temperature difference between the deep ocean (a few hundred meters down) and its surface to drive a ridiculously low-efficiency heat engine. The heat content is not useful for warming any home (it’s not hot). But all the same, it’s a vast resource due to the sheer area of the solar collector. Large plants out at sea will be difficult to access and maintain, and transmitting power to land is no picnic either. The resource suffers seasonal intermittency at mid-latitudes, but let’s imagine putting these things all in the tropics to get around this. Sound hard, you say? Well yeah! That’s part of what makes ocean thermal difficult! No relevant/commercial scale demonstration exists. Like so many others, this is electricity only (and this time, far from demand). Probably nobody cares what we put to sea: out of sight, out of mind. Ocean thermal isnot a backyard solution!

Ocean Currents: Large-scale oceanic currents are slower than wind by about a factor of ten, giving a kilogram of current 1000 times less power than a kilogram of wind. Water density makes up the difference to make ocean current comparable to wind in terms of power per rotor area. Not all the ocean has currents as high as 1 m/s, so I put the total abundance in the same category as wind. Maybe accessing a thicker column of water than we can for wind should bump ocean currents up a bit, but the currents are relatively confined to surfaces. But why dunk a windmill underwater where it’s far from demand and difficult to access and maintain, when a comparable power can be had in dry air? So I classify this as difficult. On the plus side, the current should be rock solid, eliminating intermittency worries, unlike wind. Still, not one bit of our electricity mix comes from ocean currents at present, so it cannot be said to have been meaningfully demonstrated. For the remaining categories: it’s electricity only; who cares what’s underwater; and no backyard opportunity.

Ocean Waves: While they seem strong and ever-present, waves are a linear-collection phenomenon, and not an areal phenomenon. So there really isn’t that much arriving at shores all around the world (a few TW at best). It’s not particularly difficult to turn wave motion into useful electricity at high efficiency, and the proximity to land will make access, maintenance, and transmission far less worrisome than for the previous two cases. There will be some intermittency—largely seasonal— as storms and lulls come and go. I’ve seen a diverse array of prototype concepts, and a few are being tested at commercial scale. So this is further along then the previous two oceanic sources, but not so much as to get the green light. There will be moderate push-back from people whose ocean views are spoiled, or who benefit from natural wave energy hitting the coast. There are no waves in my backyard, and I hope to keep it this way!

D-T Fusion: The easier of the two fusion options, involving deuterium and tritium, represents a longstanding goal under active development for the last 60 years. The well-funded international effort, ITER, plans to accomplish a 480 second pulse of 500 MW power by 2026. This defines the pinnacle of hard. Fusion brings with it numerous advantages: enormous power density; moderate radioactive waste products (an advantage?!); abundant deuterium (though tritium is zilch); and surplus helium to liven up children’s parties. Fusion would have no intermittency issues, can directly produce heat (and derivative electricity), but like the others does not directly address transportation. The non-existant tritium can be knocked out of lithium with neutrons, and even through we are not awash in lithium, we have enough to last many thousands of years. We might expect some public opposition to D-T fusion due to the necessary neutron flux and associated radioactivity. Fusion is the highest-tech energy we can envision at present, requiring a team of well-educated scientists/technicians to run—meaning don’t plan on building one in your backyard, unless you can afford to have some staff PhDs on hand.

D-D Fusion: Replacing tritium with deuterium means abundance of materials is no concern whatsoever for many billions of years. As a trade, it’s substantially harder than D-T fusion (or we would not even consider D-T). D-D fusion requires higher temperatures, making confinement that much more difficult. It is for this reason that I gave D-D fusion a −2 score for difficulty. It’s not something we should rely upon to get us out of the impending energy pinch, which is my primary motivation.

End of an Era

Not only does this conclude the end of the phase on Do the Math where we evaluate the quantitative and qualitative benefits and challenges of alternatives to fossil fuels, it also points to the fact that we face the end of a golden era of energy. Sure, we managed to make scientific and cultural progress based on energy from animals, slaves, and firewood prior to discovering the fossil fuels. But it was in unlocking our one-time inheritance that we really came into our own.  Soon, we will see a yearly decrease in our trust fund dividend, forcing us to either adapt to less or try to fill the gap with replacements. What this post and the series preceding it demonstrates is that we do not have a delightful menu from which to select our future. Most of the options leave a bad taste of one form or the other.

When I first approached the subject of energy in our society, I expected to develop a picture in my mind of our grandiose future, full of alternative energy sources like solar, wind, nuclear, biofuels, geothermal, tidal, etc.  What I got instead was something like this matrix: full of inadequacies, difficulties, and show-stoppers. Our success at managing the transition away from fossil fuels while maintaining our current standard of living is far from guaranteed. If such success is our goal, we should realize the scale of the challenge and buckle down now while we still have the resources to develop a costly new infrastructure. Otherwise we get behind the curve, possibly facing unfamiliar chaos, loss of economic confidence, resource wars, and the unforgiving Energy Trap. The other controlled option is to deliberately adjust our lives to require fewer resources, preferably abandoning the growth paradigm at the same time. Can we manage a calm, orderly exit from the building? In either case, the first step is to agree that the building is in trouble. Techno-optimism keeps us from even agreeing on that.

This post originally appeared on Tom Murphy’s blog, Do the Math: Using physics and estimation to assess energy, growth, options.

Tom Murphy is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. An amateur astronomer in high school, physics major at Georgia Tech, and Ph.D. student in physics at Caltech, Murphy has spent decades reveling in the study of astrophysics. He currently leads a project to test general relativity by bouncing laser pulses off the reflectors left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts, achieving one-millimeter-range precision. Murphy’s keen interest in energy topics began with his teaching a course on energy and the environment for nonscience majors at UCSD. Motivated by the unprecedented challenges we face, he has applied his instrumentation skills to exploring alternative energy and associated measurement schemes. Following his natural instincts to educate, Murphy is eager to get people thinking about the quantitatively convincing case that our pursuit of an ever-bigger scale of life faces gigantic challenges and carries significant risks.

Image courtesy of Patrick Hoesly.

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Why is microwave faster? Electromagnetic waves travel at different speeds depending on the materials they traverse, said Gary Croke, director of product marketing for Aviat Networks, the vendor McKay selected to supply its Eclipse Packet Node radios. Optical fiber has a much higher refraction index than plain old air, thus slowing down light waves moving through it, Croke said in an e-mail interview. By sending microwaves over the air, McKay is able to cut down the round-journey of a packet by 4 milliseconds, Croke claimed.

That may not sound like much, but according to McKay and Aviat, those 4 millionths thousandths of a second can make all the difference in the world to a high-frequency trader. Executing a trade even the tiniest fraction of a second earlier than a competitor can lock in the smallest change in pricing, which, when applied over massive volumes of shares or commodities, can translate into millions dollars. Aviat estimated said that a single millisecond advantage could equate to an additional $100 million a year to large high-frequency trading firm.

McKay isn’t revealing the exact route or number of towers of radios used in the network, which is scheduled for completion this summer, though it is sure to use as few links as possible. The more times a transmission passes from radio waves to electronic components the more it’s slowed down. Fiber transmissions have the same limitations, passing through routers and repeaters many times along their journey. McKay wants to ensure its not only using the fastest medium for transport but also that it has the fewest hops.

Fiber also has to move burrow under streets and wind around obstacles, lengthening the overall distance over which signals must travel. Meanwhile, microwave, in most cases, can take the most direct path as transmitters must only be within each other’s line of sight. The only fiber components in McKay’s network will be in the end cities itself, completing the final mile link between the end-point transmission towers and McKay’s financial firm customers.

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Tesla decked out the car with innovative design features that could attract the soccer-mom crowd. That includes the so-called falcon-wing doors that open vertically and enable passengers to stand up in the car when packing in items like kids and groceries.

In addition Tesla is also telling the world that it’s bloomed into a full-fledged automaker that has a line of cars for all demographics, not just an expensive luxury car (the Roadster) for the One Percent.

To read my full analysis go check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

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Elon Musk explaining falcon wings

At a sneak preview in Hawthorne, Calif. on Thursday, electric car maker Tesla unveiled its third car, an all-electric SUV, minivan hybrid called the Model X, for the first time. And yep, true to the rampant speculation on the Interwebs, it’s got so-called “falcon wing” doors, which are a Tesla-designed double-hinged play on gullf wing doors, named after Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Falcon rocket line for his other company Space-X (yeah, Tesla is just one of his three companies).

In contrast to gull wing doors that sweep out and up and take up considerable horizontal space, the Model X falcon wings lift up and have a double hinge so they take up a lot less horizontal space. Tesla designed the doors not only to add that extra cool-factor, but also to appeal to, say, a Mom or family driving to the mall and parking in a tight spot.

Because the doors open up vertically there’s also room to stand in the car while getting in and packing cargo (see photo) like kids and groceries. I fully stood up in the car with the doors open and I’m 5’11 and I had ample head room. The Model X is as roomy as any minivan out there and then some — it seats seven, and has cargo space in both the back trunk, and the front trunk (please don’t make me say frunk).

Rear of the Model X with trunk closed

The Model X is built on the backbone of the Model S, Tesla’s sedan that will be delivered to customers this Summer, and the Model X prototype that we checked out on Thursday was Tesla’s most advanced prototype at a launch to date and little will be changed for the production version, said Musk.

Tesla execs drove us around a short driving track and the car handled like the Model S — it has the same low, long, bottom battery pack design. It’s pretty amazing to ride in a minivan/SUV that can handle like a sports car. Musk says the Model X can go zero to 60 in 4.4 seconds. Think of it as the first cool, green, sporty minivan.

The Model X will be priced similarly to the Model S, said Musk, (Model S costs $50,000 to $70,000) and will have about the same electric driving range, with potentially 10 percent less range, because it’s a heavier car (the Model S has three range option, 160 miles, 230 miles and 300 miles).

OK, enough talk, I know you want to see the first photos of Tesla’s Model X! So here you go:

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Amazing, because I just finished a post about Google’s me-too-ism affliction. Amazing, because as MG Siegler points out, the Mountain View, Calif.–based Internet giant will make hardware.

Amazing, because Google thinks that it will actually be able to crack the consumer electronics marketplace. Amazing to think that this company will build a supply chain and manage relationships with retailers and get people to buy it. (Or it can sell directly over the web, much like it did with its Nexus phones — pun intended.) Amazing, considering that the company’s track record on products beyond its core offerings — search, advertising and communication-oriented software — is spotty at best.

Amazing, to see one of smartest companies show such lack of discipline and self awareness. Amazing!

P.S.: By the way, this is the mystery Google device that Stacey Higginbotham reported last week.