Dean Kamen, Water Invitation & A123 Battery IPO

Here’s three things for your Labor Day weekend.

First, join me and Dean Kamen at the NanoBusiness Conference next week in Chicago at www.nanobusiness.org

Second is a private invitation to listen to a Lux Research webinar: “Lux Research Water State of the Market: Global Energy -- Unshackling Carbon from Water” on Tuesday, September 15, 2009 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM EDT Register here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/269154627

The huge water footprint associated with energy production plays second fiddle to worries about carbon dioxide output in the popular imagination, but it is a vitally important consideration in our increasingly parched world. New energy technologies – from advanced methods of extracting fossil fuels to low-carbon renewable energy – may look appealing, but they exacerbate water worries, creating ugly trade-offs between carbon and water. As water stresses, multiply energy technologies’ water intensity will often play as great a role as their carbon footprint in determining the future makeup of the global energy mix.

In this webinar, Lux Research will examine conventional and alternative fuels and electricity generation and investigate the myriad of technologies – including water reuse and recycling, increases in energy production efficiency, and large-scale distribution – and answer the following questions: How much water is used today to produce electricity and fuels through conventional means? What is the relationship between water intensity, carbon intensity, costs and reliability for alternate energy sources? How does the water relationship affect the viability of biofuels and alternative methods of extractive fossil fuel? What technologies and approaches are available to reduce energy related water intensity while allowing for a reduced carbon footprint? What are the implications of water intensity on the future roll-out of energy technologies? Which companies stand to win or lose and how will this affect investors?

Third, here’s fellow Forbes columnist Mark Mills citing Lux Research’s battery team in his newest piece: “Battery IPO Could Recharge New Issue Market”

“Confidence, the Rorschach of economic indicators, is a weird thing. Easier to recognize than define or measure. We may soon learn something about confidence in our economic future via the market's reaction to the forthcoming IPO of A123, a Boston-based energy green-tech company just over half a dozen years old with cool new MIT-derived battery technology.

The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index (CCI), benchmarked as 100 in 1985, dropped to 65 in 2008 and plummeted to 25 earlier this year, even lower than post 9/11. We're a long way from the heady days of confidence exhibited during tech mania when the CCI approached 200, but the index has been tracking up recently, hitting 47 in July and 54 by late August.

For calibration; the index was 100 in 1985, the year Nintendo came out; one year earlier Apple had launched the Mac at a time when only 40,000 people in America used cell phones.

Confidence both reflects and creates the economic future we want more than any single characteristic of the human enterprise. Of course confidence is what drives people to create new companies, and jobs, to compete with big established guys, and, apropos of emerging from our Great Recession, let us not forget that small businesses with one to 499 employees account for nearly two-thirds of job creation..."

The full article can be found on Forbes.com, to be linked to the article click here.