Renewable energy is obviously a hot topic right now, but some segments of the sector are warmer than others. Here's the search-volume for four of the main alternative energy themes, courtesy of Google Trends.



Interestingly, "marine power", "ocean power" and "wave power" were all less popular search terms than "tidal power" on Google Trends. To see if the low interest in ocean power was reflected in media coverage, I scoured recent cleantech news from Renewable Energy Access. Over the past three days there have been 17 solar news stories, 10 about wind power, eight about biofuels but just a single story on ocean power (a discussion of hybrid wind and water power projects).

This dearth of coverage isn't due to any lack of companies exploring the potential of wave and tidal power. Venturepedia currently tracks 35 companies working in this space, based in eight different countries - although the majority (nearly two thirds) are in the United Kingdom.

I was surprised to see that the influx of money into this area over the past five years has been quite steady. The number of grants exceeds both institutional or non-institutional investments, but this seems reasonable given government interest in finding new sources of energy. Although the number of investments has been steady, the median investment size increased dramatically over the past two years. After hovering at around €400,000 from 2001 to 2004, it jumped to nearly €3m in 2005 and 2006.

Generating power from the oceans faces technical complications such as high construction and maintenance costs, as well as regulatory issues in international waters. I suspect there is less momentum in marine power because of the diversity of approaches ranging from harnessing waves, currents, tides, or thermal variations in the ocean. Hopefully, the consistent funding over the past few years coupled with recent increases in investment amounts will yield some commercial successes and increase attention on this opportunity. Maybe it's a bit simplistic, but if three-quarters of the earth is covered in water one would expect that could serve as a major source of energy.

Note: Over the next two weeks I'll be posting regularly on solar and wind power to highlight some of the topics that will be discussed at Library House's Essential Cleantech conference on April 17.

Last weekend I attended the wedding of a former colleague at Microsoft which attracted a gaggle of other Microsofties. During the inevitable "cool new technologies" conversation, I described Trampoline Systems and its ability to identify social networks and expertise within large organisations. This didn't elicit much excitement because Microsoft is actually implementing this functionality as an add-on for Sharepoint Server 2007 under the name "Knowledge Network". This bodes well for the spread of Enterprise 2.0 functionality (or E2.0 as Nic Brisbourne describes it) but the most noteworthy point is the technology's origin.

Knowledge Network is a product of the Information Worker Greenhouse, a small incubator group within Microsoft charged with fostering new products. In essence, ideas are pitched to the group, good ideas are prototyped, and eventually the Greenhouse team tries to sell the result to a product group for commercialisation. Microsoft is secretive about its projects so other than media speculation and passing references in recruiting material there's not much information about this. Knowledge Network was able to break out of the Greenhouse, but I suspect that corporate shackles will make future releases few and far between - the requirement that projects must be shipped with existing products could prove stifling. Is there a better way to prise technology from an existing software powerhouse?

It turns out Yahoo! has a similar program, with a similar name but a more radical approach. Brickhouse is officially part of Yahoo! but it is geographically separated and populated by employees "on sabbatical". The first produce of this was Yahoo Pipes and it aims to release four to six projects a year. The group was originally led by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake but recently TechCrunch announced that Salim Ismail, an experienced entrepeneur, will take over the top job.

Google's approach to fostering "intrepreneurship" is not siloed (and it's free from a "house" name). Presumably, most of its entrepreneurial innovation comes from the famed 20 per cent time. However, its biggest incentive for innovation is probably the Google Founder's Award. The first award in 2005 distributed about $12m in stock to two groups of about a dozen employees whose individual contributions were considered to have dramatically improved Google. The idea behind this regular award is to give top contributors a reward on par with what an entrepreneur might receive if he or she were to start their own company and then sell the technology to Google.

The cynic in me says huge corporates aren't the place for innovation, but with unique new programs to foster innovation that might just be changing.

Last month, I wrote about Continuous Partial Attention, which had been identified by Harvard Business Review as a Breakthrough Idea for 2007. This concept has since been thrust further into the mainstream thanks to Twitter, a service that allows users to share brief comments (140 characters or less) with friends and strangers via the web, their phone, or instant messaging. Some pundits have suggested it was the dominant undercurrrent at the recent SXSW conference.
Given that there are hundreds of people blogging about this and orders of magnitude more twittering responses, I'll keep this post concise. Here are three thoughts on Twitter (in Twitter-friendly sub-140 character format of course):

• Does anyone else find it ironic that Twitter has fantastic growth in the US even though most people agree the US lags Europe in SMS usage?


• Given the huge mobile charges that Twitter users incur, does anyone NOT think a mobile provider will ultimately acquire Twitter?


• Is Twitter's growth a symptom of continuous partial attention or is it creating an epidemic?

As an antidote to these quick-fire thoughts, here's an entertaining visual about where Twitter fits in the history of blogging (thanks to Pete Cashmore at Mashable):

This month saw the return of two well-hyped annual events. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) and SXSW (South by South West) both offer an intriguing mix of art, ideas, and industry. Some accuse TED of being elitist thanks to a $6,000 ticket price, but with a line-up of speakers this year that included Bill Clinton, John Doerr, Richard Branson and dozens of other innovative thinkers, one can hardly question its credentials. The more accessible SXSW has established itself as a music and film festival but its interactive festival now claims to be "ground zero for the world's most creative web developers, designers, bloggers, wireless innovators and new media entrepreneurs". No less. Despite the frothy billing, with over 450 panelists and speakers, it may just have lived up to it.

While many people have posted highlights and summaries of these events on the web, I felt most coverage lacked a "big picture" perspective. I wanted to hear what changed between last year and this. What topics have faded away? What new trends were reflected?

A quick comparison between SXSW panel topics in 2006 and 2007 yielded a few insights.

• Discussions about "video" and "mobile" were much more prevalent this year. Fourteen panels explicitly covered these areas compared to four last year.


• Five panel discussions talked about standards in 2006 but these were not mentioned in session titles this year. I suspect this reflects a general acceptance of standards, although I'd be interested to hear other opinions.


• "2.0" is alive and well in the world of SXSW 2007. Eleven panels found cause to add a "2.0" to the name of their session. Clearly someone didn't get the message that this phrase is becoming a little trite.

An informal comparison of TED speakers between 2006 and 2007 shows a consistent focus on the environment and social responsibility, but one speaker stood out in my mind. Jan Chipchase, a "user anthropologist" for Nokia, described his role as "travelling the world observing the quirky, revealing and often surprising ways in which people interact with today's technologies in real life". This sounded startlingly similar to Charles Armstrong, founder of Trampoline Systems, who performed a year-long ethnographic study on the Isles of Scilly to establish a better understanding of social behavior and information distribution. He used this insight to grow Trampoline Systems and clearly it's working since the company raised £3m last week.

If you'll excuse a brief (but relevant) tangent, I'd like to throw out a question for entrepreneurs out there. Search engines focus on identifying the presence of information but are currently unable to report on the absence of it. Admittedly, it's a  complex problem to solve because people only want to know relevant items that is missing. It would be useful to develop a search engine that, for example, could report what topics are no longer covered at TED or SXSW. This need is actually something that has ethnographic parallels. Consider a fisherman (perhaps off the Isles of Scilly?) who is looking for new fishing grounds; not only is he looking for the presence of good fish stocks but he is also seeking the absence of dangerous currents or unfavourable winds. Search technology that addresses the need to find what is missing is probably a way off, but it could represent an evolution in the way search works.

With the shock waves still reverberating from Viacom's billion-dollar copyright infringement lawsuit against Google/Youtube, one wonders when and where further copyright lawsuits might arise. On this side of the Atlantic, it seems possible that Dailymotion and Metacafe could be in the sights of the big content owners. Even though both are backed by big name VCs (Tel Aviv-based Metacafe has funding from Accel and Benchmark, while Paris-based Dailymotion is backed by Atlas and Partech International) they both appear to host a significant amount of copyrighted content. Searching for TV shows referenced in the Viacom complaint, such as Spongebob Squarepants or The Daily Show returns significant numbers of results in both websites. I've contacted Dailymotion and Metacafe to get their thoughts but neither have responded yet.

Another area in which the Viacom lawsuit is having an impact is in the burgeoning sector for detecting the sources of digital content. Om Malik, the technology writer and founder of Giga Omni Media, has declared a bull market for video fingerprinting. In Europe, Advestigo SA and iPharro Media GmBH have developed software that can find copyrighted content by identifying and matching video "fingerprints". Since both technologies require comparison with a library of copyrighted material, a key indicator of success in this area will be who forms the most partnerships. Could a consortium of media producers try to acquire one of these companies and then enforce this technology standard on anything that wants to show their content?

And surveying this space prompted an intriguing hypothetical question. People are generally wary of venture capitalists who have competing companies in their portfolio, but what if an investor backed both a video sharing site and a digital asset management company? In theory, these two companies should complement each other. However, the reality is that a video sharing site gets more traffic (and more revenue) if the copyright detection does not work well. Has anyone come across situations where seemingly complementary companies in hot new areas produce a subtle conflict of interest?