CNG Rickshaws finaly arrive in Karachi

If you haven’t taken a rickshaw ride in Karahi, you are really missing a terrific (and terrifying) experience. For a virtual rickshaw ride, check this out:

As you may notice in the video, the rickshaw is really loud and, though you can’t see it here, it is really polluting. Most rickshaws burn tons of oil which sends not just oil and smoke into the air, but also large quantities of metallic particles (ash) which come from components of lubricant oil.

All that may be set to change now. Thanks to some governmet regulations and some other incentive schemes, it is expected that all gasoline powered (usually 2-stroke) rickshaws in Karachi will switch to CNG powered rickshaws. These CNG powered rickshaws create lots more nanoparticles in emissions, but at least the visible smoke (soot) and carbon monoxide and unburnt hydrocarbon emissions are lower. These engines are also extremely quiet and ggiven the price of CNG, they are also expected to be cheaper to operate. All in all, it is a positive step forward, though I am sure in a few years we will need to really worry about emissions control technologies on these rickshaws, especially if they ar enot maintained properly.

Here is the image of such a rickshaw recntly spotted in Karachi. Many thanks to Jamash of Karachi Metblogs for pointing this out:

What is Energy Worth?

I found this to be a fascinating calculation done by Richard T. Stuebi at the Cleantech Blog. We all ask about the price of electricity - investors ask if the energy produced by the latest and the greatest alternative energy technologies is cheaper than the market price of electricity or not….well read this:

Everyone pays attention to — and often whines about — the price or cost of energy. I would like to pose a different question: what is the value of energy? What is energy really worth?

It turns out to be a more interesting question than it might first appear. Let me present a few illustrative calculations.

A healthy adult can exert about 100 watts of effort for a reasonably sustained period. (Have you ever worked out strenuously on an exercycle with an output display? If so, have you ever pushed it to over 200 watts for very long?) Thus, over the course of a 10-hour day, a human might produce 1000 watt-hours — or 1 kilowatt-hour. From your local utility, you probably pay about a dime for a kilowatt-hour. On the other hand, if you were to pay that adult a (low) wage of $5/hour for that degree of effort, that kilowatt-hour would cost $50.

In other words, electricity is priced about 1/500 the equivalent value of human effort.

Oil is even more of a steal. There are 3412 Btu in a kilowatt-hour, meaning that an adult can produce about 3412 Btu of energy effort in a 1o-hour day — or 341 Btus per hour. In a barrel of oil, there are 6.2 million Btus — equivalent to over 18,000 man-hours, which would cost over $90,000 at a (low) wage of $5/hour.

At $60/barrel, oil is priced about 1/1500 the equivalent value of human effort.

And we complain that energy is expensive? Try replacing our taken-for-granted energy forms with the work of humans — and paying a wage for it! Content provided by and all rights reserved to CleantechBlog.com, the premier site for commentary on clean technologies, news, and issues relating to next generation energy and the environment.

Hawkeye, an ethanol company pulls its IPO

I have written about ethanol before, and regular readers will recognize that I tinge at the thought of an ethanol IPO valued at hundreds of millions of dollars! For what? What need is it fulfilling, and what sustainability does the industry project? I strongly support research in biosciences for understanding the enzyme based conversion of plant cellulose into ethanol, but that is not the same as the standard ethanol refining capacity that others have invested in over this past summer.

Now the market has also given the message loud and clear (at least for the time being) to the ethanol investors: Study the fundamentals before doing a quick flip to make a buck or two from unsuspecting investors. Hawkeye Holdings, an ethanol company owned by Thomas H. Lee Partners, today pulled the plug on its proposed $350 million IPO. This comes after an initial delay in th IPO that was announced back in September. This was a classic attempt by Thomas H Lee Partners to do a quick flip because they had barely bought their shares in the company in may (80% ownership acquired), and as Dan Primack of PEHub reports, prospectuses for the IPO arrived 3 weeks later. Fortunately, that stunt was rejected by the market at large.

I was astounded when a few ethanol companies, such as VeraSun and Aventine Renewable Energy, had blockbuster IPOs this summer. However, it seems the investor population that bought into ethanol at that time not only mistimed, but also bet on what is otherwise a commodity product at high technology growth prices (P/E ratios very very high). They learnt their lesson fast. PEHub reports the following on their performance:

VeraSun Energy (NYSE: VSE) seemed like a big hit when it raised $420 million back in June, with a stock price that climbed up to $30 per share on its first day of trading. But it’s been almost all downhill from there. The stock slipped below its $23 per share IPO price just two months later, and even fell as low as $14.88 per share. For the past week it’s been at around $22 per share. Aventine Renewable Energy (NYSE: AVR) has suffered even worse since its June IPO, which raised around $390 million. The Pekin, Ill.-based company priced at $43 per share, but opened trading today at 23.14 per share.

A stock chart obtained from Yahoo finance for AVR is given below.

Dan Primack is pointing an article in Buyouts magazine to say that eventually the deals might still work out for the investors, thanks to a drop in ethanol prices. Well, one hopes so. I do so too, partly because a failure of ethanol stocks may be perceived as additional risk in investments in the broader clean-tech category, which would be totally misplaced and wrong. Clean-tech is not just an emerging area, but most of it is entirely based on new science and technology which promises to bring new and exciting prospects for energy, storage, and emissions reduction technologies in the future. Investments in novel clean technologies should be valued for growth, but not those in standard ethanol refineries.

10th death anniversary of Prof Abdus Salam - Pakistani Nobel laureate

This is no ordinary day. It is the 10th death anniversary of Prof. Abdus Salam, the only Nobel laureate of Pakistani citizenship. Prof. Salam received the Nobel prize in 1979 for his “contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including inter alla the prediction of the weak neutral current”. Prof. Salam was more than just a towering figure in Science. His life, his history from humble beginnings, and his love and passion for his country and faith, provide guiding principles to scientists like myself acros the globe. He is more than just an ideal, he is someody we need to enshrine, somebody we can use to cast a light of ponderence on ourselves as a society and learn all that we have done wrong.

I have written about Salam before, and Adil has just posted a terrific piece on pakistaniat.com on Salam’s 10th death anniversary. Below, I reproduce the speech that Salam gave at the banquet in honor of his Nobel Prize. His Nobel lecture can be seen here. It is said that when Salam went to India to meet his old high school Mathematics teacher, who was still alive at that time, he took off his Nobel prize and put it aroundhis teacher. The thought of that humility, that respect, and that realization of the real success in this world and hereafter, brings tears to my eyes. I wish I had met him, just to know I had seen into those eyes and known for sure that a better Pakistan can exist as long as better pakistanis exist.

Is The dot-com Boom 2.0 “on” Now? Here’s One Way to Get “in” On It.

Oh God. I am soooo behind on posts.

This has been a hectic time at work, working hard towards getting the product (vversion 1.0) out of the door and into testing. Well, i think we have finally made it that far. Our product is now in testing at an independent lab and we anxiously await the results. Product development never stops and hence this is just our first big test in a series of tests to come. We expect to have a few problems, but that will just help us guide in the right direction….

Enough on that. I have a lot of things I want to vent about but I will take it easy and chose a few ideas to share over the next few days/weeks.

Is the dot-com boom 2.0 on now? I sure think so. The dot-com boom has returned, even though we all hope that the forces to be have learnt from the last experience and there will be a lot more survivors this time around when the boom ends. Why do I think its another boom? Well, for two reasons:

1. There are now dozens of IT/internet startups propping up, some of which are hardpressed to even fully describe what they are all about. Essentially, once again, if you have an internet business idea which has at least the qualification that it is not exactly the same as someone else, you can start a company and get some funding from a VC or other investors. Lots of dating sites, social networking sites, music sharing sites, photo sharing sites, and shopping sites are propping up with revenue models that are far from certain, or even well thought out.

2. Check out http://www.agloco.com. The presence of this site definitely sends a signal that the boom is on. And this time, I will try to be “in” on the boom if I can in a small way. Heck, why should I not try to make a buck or two, esepcially if it does not cost me anything

Here’s the thing (and how you can get “in” on this dot-com boom 2.0:

Companies like Google (yes, the master Google-dom) are making billions of dollars in revenue generated by ads. By the simple virtue of getting people to search using their search engines, Google has been able to generate so much revenue that its stock price topped the $500 mark yesterday. And it is us, yes we as in you and I, that are helping Google make that revenue. Google has nothing to offer to its adevertising payors if you and I decided to move to Yahoo or to somebody else not using Google engines (AOL does not count since it uses Google. But check this out: Google pays AOL ~10 cents for each search conducted by AOL users).

Recharging batteries wirelessly - Wireless electricity?

Now this is an invention worth noting: Wireless Electricity!!!

As the number of mobile gadgets that I use regularly has gone up (laptop, cell phone, ipod, camera, video camera, etc), the desk where I usually put the equipment to recharge the batteries has started to look messy and disorganized. On top of it, it has now become a pain to bring all the devices to their respective charging stations over night to charge ‘em up. No wonder I often find my devices only partly charged just when I need to use them.

How wonderful would life be if their batteries would get recharged without me having to plug in them into a wall power outlet? Imagine a bluetooth like connection between electrical devices with batteries and their charging stations?

So far this idea had remained a dream. Now, time may have come for the dream to become reality. A few cool inventors from MIT may have found a way to send electric power wirelessly in the neighborhood of a central power outlet. The technology isdescribed as following: In a state called magnetic resonance, one device wirelessly transmits electrical power to another.

Here’s some additional info available from the latest edition of ScienceNOW.

ScienceNOW Daily News
14 November 2006

Imagine recharging your cell phone without plugging it in. Or powering your iPod while you walk around the house with it. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have taken the first steps towards such wireless energy transfer by conceptualizing a way to transmit electricity over room-size distances. One day, they say, the technology could power whole households or even motor vehicles wirelessly. The MIT team calls the concept a nonradiative electromagnetic field. It involves two simple ring-shaped devices made of copper. One, connected to a conventional power source, would generate magnetic fields similar to those that power electric motors. These fields would stretch outward a few meters and would only affect the receiving–or companion device–which would be outfitted with a second copper ring tuned to a specific frequency. Team leader Marin Soljačić says he began working on the concept because he wanted to find a better alternative to having to recharge his laptop computer and cell phone so frequently. He presented the team’s findings today at an American Institute of Physics forum in San Francisco, California.

The technology shouldn’t harm other electronics or humans, says team member John Joannopoulos. Computer simulations, he says, have shown that the essential mechanism–magnetic resonance–means little or no power is transferred to extraneous objects, such as computer hard drives or even magnetic stripes on credit cards. Joannopoulos says that “for certain designs, the effect on a person is weaker than the Earth’s own magnetic field.”

Although the concept has yet to be verified–the team is preparing prototypes that will be tested sometime next year–Joannopoulos says he is confident the tests will be successful. “Our computational experiments have been as close to reality as they can be,” he says. In principle, he adds, “you could power everything in the room,” and looking much farther into the future, he predicts that someday this technology could power motor vehicles down highways, using transmitters buried in the pavement.

It’s an “extremely original” and “extremely exciting” idea, says physicist Mordechai Segev of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. If the concept is found to be reasonably efficient, he says, it “could revolutionize technology by making many battery-powered products lighter and smaller.”

Is Less Worth More in Early Stage Startup Funding?

There has been a debate recently in the VC community if angels are becoming more important for early stage startups because of the financial gains required by VCs on their investments. Angels also invest small money, and hence it is being discussed if startups that are funded with small seed investments have a better chance of survival (and success). Frugality is expected to lead to hard work, dedication, and less distraction. (Note: It is estimated that US angel investments in early stage companies is more than $20 billion, vs about $5-7 billion for VC).

This debate was started when Charles River Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm, launched a new investment strategy to offer rapid but tiny $250,000 checks to Internet start-ups. In not so subtle words, the idea is simply to invest in larger number of ideas and place a bet that even if a small number of ideas make it to success, the company will find itself hugely profitable.

In many ways this is not much different than Angels investing small seed amounts in very early stage companies, vs traditional VCs who now want to invest so much money in their portfolio companies (to make large returns worth their overhead costs), that they are going ever more later stage in their investments.

However, what triggered my post here is a recent item from VentureBeat:

Angel investor Paul Graham, who runs the Y-Combinator incubator gives a notable quote in a New York Times story about the how cheaply a new Internet company can get started — and how angels like him have a much easier time with this than elephantine venture capital firms.

“We are like mice, and VC’s are more like elephants. They can only make a few deals, so each one has a whole amount of weight and worry attached to it,” he said

From the article:

As for the target investment of $6,000 for each employee, an explanation on Y Combinator’s Web site makes it clear that Mr. Graham and his colleagues are not looking for computer science entrepreneurs who want to be pampered: “C.S. grad students at M.I.T. currently get $2,000/month to live on, so this represents three months’ living expenses. Though in fact most groups make it last longer.”

Would this model work in companies outside the IT space? I am left thinking what would I do with a new idea if all I had was $10K? Maybe I can put together a business plan and get some research reports to make sure my business plan had some meat on the bones. But give away 10% to do something like that? i can’t build a website and launch a cleantech business, can I?

I think there is a kernel of an idea here but others should develop it further. Having been an entrepreneur, I would certainly advise first-time entrepreneurs to be wary of what I could call ‘investor sharks’ though. Be apprehensive if you see someone too interested in your idea for no good reason. A good advice I heard recently is “Do your due diligence on investors like you would for your core employees’.

A good investor invests in people, and not one-shot gimmicks. First-time entrepreneurs need encouragement - yes they need the money but they also need counseling, advisory services, and a smart/been-there-done-that person to bounce ideas off of.

The fracas over muslim women veils in the UK

Generally I would be among the last people you would expect to support Muslim women putting on the veil. Not because I have anything against the veil, but historically, and culturally, the veil has been used by Muslim men to dominate their women and to keep them away from open social interactions which has jeopardized their economic independence and growth.

However, the recent fracas in the UK over the wearing of veils has left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. How dare anyone determine what a person should and should not wear, especially if they are not causing any harm to others, nor are they creating a ruckus in the society at large. The comments by British MPs, especially Jack Straw, are not just outlandish, they are also provocative and offensive to the independence of British Muslim women.

I am no expert at this topic, but I think I am good at spotting experts when I see them. Karen Armstrong is among them. If you haven’t read her books, please do try to. I have read 2 so far, and am amazed at the depth and intensity of her knowledge and experience.

See below for what I think is the most articulate note on why no outsider should have a right to force people to discard veil. Muslim women will need to figure out for themselves if the veil is a chain around their neck, dragging them down. And if yes, I am sure they will figure out a way to discard it. We can support their indigenous struggle, but cannot impost a struggle upon them. Forced liberation is only tyranny, sugar-coated.

Proposition 87 in California: A battle over ethanol

I have written before on the ethanol craze (here, here, here, and here). I have acknowledged VC Vinod Khosla for his efforts to bring research dollars into alternative technologies, but I have also chided him for using inappropriate political tactics to armwrestle people into going along for a ride with him. The recent vote in California for a tax on oil, called Proposition 87, is one example of such arm-wrestling going on.

I actually do not care either way on Proposition 87, partly because I am not a California resident, and partly because I do not believe a yes or a no vote would make a dent of a difference to the larger issue. Alternative energy technologies will continue to be funded because, slowly but surely, the world is coming around to realize that global warming and energy security are going to be the most important challenges in this century (with clean water security as a close second). Hence, markets will continue to open up, and thrive under some circumstances, and as long as their are markets, investments will come.

My big problem is with people not being honest about their real reasons for backing one set of technologies over the other, and not allowing market place to decide for itself what it will bear. Proponent of hybrid vehicles think it is the best thing to have hit man since sliced bread, when I can tell you that a well kept standard gasoline Honda Civic, or a diesel Honda 2.0 ltr would give you equal or even better fuel economy (approx 55mpg on highway). Similarly, ethanol lovers talk about oil security, and do not mention how food security is an issue we all must grapple with as well… We think oil is difficult to find, try asking anybody by ADM and the corn growers of MidWest if ethanol will be abundantly available in any part of the world? Yes, Khosla tells us about the cellulosic ethanol future, but no, it is still in future and research can continue until some results starts to show. We cannot change oil for ethanol just because of national fuel security concerns. The environmental concerns are far more important and need to be considered when making tough choices between technologies to support and promote. Ethanol doesn’t do that for me, even if it provides some protection against against the Saudi control of fuel resources.

Karachi Dream Cruise

This note has also appeared on ATP

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While many of us have grown up all our lives in Karachi, a port city, it is difficult to find Karachiites who have ever been out to the sea on a boat. At the most you will be able to find people who have traveled to Keemari and the Manora Island. Somehow the port-city residents do not seem to have access to the sea-going vessels.

Well, that is expected to change now, at least for the financially privileged group. Gulf Dream Cruise, ocean going luxury liner, has reached the Karachi port and is set to launch on its first Karachi-to-Dubai trip on November 7th. This will be the first such trip for Karachi in decades. Several other licenses to other port-destinations have also been issued, including Bahrain, Oman and Qatar.