Tired NanoPeople and

Anyone who has tried to contact a key nanotech person in the last month, or tried to get them to meet a deadline or get a callback when they promised, has been finding it difficult at best. All the conferences between late September and early November that I previously referenced, have the glitterati swamped. Attendees, exhibiters, sponsors and speakers are all making their last minute plans, and the conference promoters are in the throws of last minute marketing and the total hassles of running one of these shows.

The result will be a lot of tired, burned-out folks straight through to early January. Don't expect to see much on the nanotech front (except the usual, regular drumbeat of astounding results from the key scientific labs) until 2006. There are always press releases and deal announcements around conferences, but don't expect it to amount to much for anyone but the participants and the "ball" that was dropped in the second half of 2004 has not been picked up and won't be for months. (We at nanotechnology.com are going to do our part, but this explosion of activity in the waning months of 2005 is marking more of a double-top of promotion than a bottom.)

A little publicized conference in December will focus on MEM's and nanotechnology's role in the future of defense and the military. This is an extremely intriguing area, and one not near the information saturation point. I don't know the promoters, but the speaker list looks promising.

Ed Zander of Motorola Teaches a Valuable Lesson by Naivete

I had breakfast this morning with small technology IP powerhouse, Motorola's CEO, Ed Zander, with a bunch of other people. Zander is an attractive personality, a great schmoozer and salesman for all things Motorola. So when I had a chance to ask him a question, I was looking for an entertaining, but highly informative look at the workings of the inner sanctum of corporate America - "circa" Fortune 500 decision-making among high-tech moguls and captains industry.

What I got was . . . well . . . different.

"Ed, switching gears (from much promotion of new wireless communications and entertainment devices) to display technology: could you please speak a bit about the corporate decision making process at Motorola related to your interesting IP related to NED (nano-emissive displays)? Specifically, given competition from LCDs, OLEDs, and plasma can you tell us about the process the company goes through on these types of decisions related to which direction you are going and how you 'place bets' on emerging technology?"

He gave a winning smile, sort of combined with a blank stare and just said, "I haven't a clue?"

He went on to make some additional comments about how "process engineering" and folks at the "executive VP level" are the ones who would work on subjects like this, and pretty much begged off on the question, but he left no doubt that he wasn't involved, and (really, nothing against Mr. Zander here) that he could probably not give a good description of the key elements of NED, that it involves carbon nanotubes, much less have the ablility to compare and contrast the key display technologies any better than you or I.

At first I was disappointed, then I experienced Samadhi - ok - not Samadhi so much as enlightenment . . ok, not that either, but I realized something.

Whether the company will ever use NED or ANY OTHER TECHNOLOGY OR IP IT DEVELOPS, the decision to make, use or manufacture it will be STRICTLY BUSINESS. A day will come when the engineers and finance guys (maybe marketing and sales by that time) will have to show Ed Zander the costs and benefits to switching to NED or starting to incorporate it. On that day, just like today, Ed Zander won't care a whit about whether the technology is new, cool or even if it's better. The hard cold numbers will tell him all he needs to know about it.

The End of the Nano Stock Selloff and How Solar Shows Nano the Way

When I started writing Nanotech Fortunes: Make Yours in the Boom; Winning Strategies in September 2003, two months before the President signed the National Nanotech Initiative, I thought the selloff in small tech stocks would not abate until sometime between mid 2006 and the end of 2008. When I finished writing in May of 2005, I had seen nothing to change my mind.

Today, whether you use the Lux Index or the Merrill Lynch Index (or even the soon to be "king of them all", the developing Nanotechnology.com International Small Tech Index) you can see the clear top in December 2004 followed by a choppy, downward trend through yesterday. I STILL don't see the end in sight until psychology and the natural market cycles climax in the mid 2006 to late 2008 timeframe.

Somewhere in there, I still contend we will begin a major bull move.

People ask me all the time (even some of the same people who asked me the same thing in 2001, 2002 and, again in 2003), "Why, Darrell, with all you know about the markets and your incredible long-term optimism about nanotechnology are you so 'bearish'?" My answer remains the same: "Too much misplaced optimism; too much "crying wolf"; too much money blown; too little return/too much delayed; too many deals mismanaged; too many companies NEEDING NEEDING NEEDING . . . In my professional experience, (which sad to say includes the pre - and post 1974 period, the horror show of 1981/82, the '87 crash and multiple, rolling bull and bear markets in tech, mining, oil and gas, biotech, etc. over more than 3 decades) these things take a long time to wash out. Enthusiasm dies hard, and we are just in the 3rd or 4th inning of this death." - to mix metaphors and confound grammarians.

Sad, but true: A lot of weak deals have to go "bye bye" and a lot of investment has to go to money heaven.

The September 19th Barron's has a cool article by the usually very interesting Eric Savitz on the coming commercialization of solar energy. The article is interesting to us for two reasons: First - in a section called "The Next Generation" Savitz lists private, small tech standouts, Konarka, Nanosolar, Miasole, COLED Tech and CSG Solar AG in a sampling of VC funded solar deals. Second, and more importantly, he points out that BP, Sharp, Shell, and GE, among other GIANT companies, have divisions that are the major players in solar. How and whether these divisions are spun out by the majors to play the solar card and increase shareholder value will hold tremendous predictive value in determining how and whether this will play out in nanotech.

Will IBM, GE, Chevron, Intel, et al. spin out subs and divisions that are nano, microfluidic or MEMs-focused today in the future? Watch how this goes in solar very carefully. If it happens successfully in solar over the next 1-3 years, count on it for the small tech divisions in 2-6 years.

The Omnipresent iPod Nano and "Too Many Damn Vampires"

"The iPod Nano? - there's nothing "Nano" about it, it's just a marketing ploy and Jobs' usual great promotion by using what's becoming the hottest prefix, er, suffix on the planet, " I said.

My associates in Seattle weren't buying it. You better talk about this, Darrell, or - or what? I wasn't sure, but I sure didn't want to find out.

Well, that's what you get when the most read article on Yahoo is all about Samsung ALSO "stealing" the Nano with their NAND flash memory chip. OR WERE THEY? . . . . .hmmmmm

"Samsung said the new memory chip can store data equivalent to 200 years of a 40-page broadsheet daily newspaper, 8,000 digital music files or 32 hours of DVD-quality movie files on a single memory card.

The 16Gb NAND density was achieved with the use of 50-nanometer (nm) technology directly applicable to mass production processes and by using Samsung’s 3D-transistor architecture."

That's a heck of a lot of storage! And while the 50nm features alone don't make it "nanotech", they are nothing to sneeze at, ESPECIALLY FOR CONSUMER ELECTRONICS, and certainly fall gracefully into the small technology space. How cool is that?

Jobs, you old son of gun, you.

Now, on another related (yeah, sure) subject: Grandpa's last word's in the 1987 cinematic classic "The Lost Boys" - To wit: "One thing that always bothered me about Santa Carla . . . all the damn vampires." Some of the best minds in nano are saying the same about the plethora of nanotech conferences from mid-October through early November this year. It's a sickness.

Someone at Foresight said it best to me today, "The big losers are the attendees, who could have benefitted from attending several over a longer period of time, but have to pick one, now, because they are so bunched up."

These are all first-class folks, and I personally would encourage you to support all these - Foresight's, Lux's, SEMI/NanoBusAlliance/SmallTimes, NSTI and the rest, (yeah, unbelievably there are even others) but I guess people looked at the profits flowing in 2003 to a few key NanoConference promoters (because it takes an endless amount of time to plan and pull off these things) and said "we gotta do one" - I just wish there had been some coordination or mutual planning, and they weren't all squished together in a few weeks this Autumn.

If the situation happens again we might hear people saying, "One thing that always bothered me about nanotechnology, all the damn conferences."

Self-Replicating Molecular Machines - Once and For All

Christine Peterson who does a usually interesting blog for The Foresight Foundation challenged me to debate their scientists about my comment to wired.com To wit: "The concept of self-replicating molecular machines is science fiction. It's not a matter of waiting 30 years to develop them. They're never going to develop."

Never one to take the affirmative side of a negative debate proposition, I wisely demurred. After all, you can't prove a negative. I, together with my world-renowned Scientific Advisory Board made up of the 2005 Japan Prize recipient, 1998 Feynman Prize winner (by the way, that prize is awarded by Foresight), National Academy of Science, Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Engineering members, can't prove a negative.

Just because I can't prove you can't jump to the moon doesn't mean you can. Besides Nobel Prize winner R. Smalley and Foresight's godfather, E. Drexler, debated this at length in 2004 (google this), and to most all but Drexlerian diehards Smalley won.

Now "self-replicating", "self-reproducing", and "self-assembling" all mean different things and "never" is a long, long time, BUT the popular conception (popularized by Foresight's godfather himself in the mid 1980s) of so-called nanobots is of self-assembling, super-tiny machines, that build themselves up from individual atoms and molecules, then build others that build others etc. and then can be used to build anything! (a veritable factory that could build a pencil or glass on your desk).

Someday in the next few decades I expect we will see something arising from biology that looks a bit like something like something that exhibits a few of the traits one would expect to see in such a self-assembling molecular machine. (yes, I know that sentence meanders and implies a pretty flaky something or other) Some might argue that "Science Fiction" is too strong a term for the nanobots but I wouldn't spend any time arguing with them.

One day new laws of physics may be discovered. One day current laws may be better interpreted. One day, in some respected learned journal like Science or Nature or a dozen others a scientist might present scientific evidence that supports or proves the controversial concept. (Should any of these things happen, we'll be the 2nd to applaud - Christine, some at Foresight and a few scientists will be first).

BUT the best scientists respect only what can be done in verifiable conditions, not what can be conjectured, posited or shown in a simulation or with software modeling, and for the popular conception of self-replicating nano machines it hasn't been done yet. Until then, discussions of this sort are not scientific discussions, they are "religious" discussions about belief, and my parents taught me not to discuss religion.

I think what Foresight's new CEO, Scott Mize, has been doing there since he took over has been great. They have a really impressive lineup for their upcoming conference on October 22nd, and he has moved them from a focus on futurism and philosophy to a focus on nanotechnology that benefits mankind - a worthy cause for sure.

So much great science is being done and so much interesting and useful technology is emerging. At nanotechnology.com we don't have time to entertain debates about what might and might not be. To those who say to look at the examples of scientists who proved the naysayers wrong decades or centuries later, I say for every ten you can name (they are the "Exception") - there are a thousand where the naysayers were right! No need to advertise them, they are common as weeds - They are the "Rule". Just because one says something can't happen doesn't make one wrong. And just because one says something can happen doesn't make one right. The burden of proof is on the believer. It's harsh, but true - Until the proof, it is all in the believer's head, and that is our last word on the subject until that day arrives. If you disagree, we'll just have to agree to disagree.