Investing Daily

Entire industries that have dominated the competitive landscape are struggling for relevance, while new insurgent businesses are gaining momentum and disrupting the status quo. The goal of New World 3.0 is to embrace these changes, not to shrink from them. In this space, we identify investment opportunities that are emerge as much of the world rethinks, retools and rebuilds its industries and technologies.

If you don’t change the distribution model, you can put up all the solar/wind/wave systems you want, but you don’t have a game changer. It’s like inventing toothpaste but not having a tube to put it in.

You can either work finding the gold or you can work selling the picks, pans and shovels to the miners. Generally speaking, it's a much wiser strategy to be a pick-and-shovel guy. And those are the companies I like the most when it comes to up-and-coming nanotech companies: FEI Company (NSDQ: FEIC, microscopy), CVD Equipment (NSDQ: CVV, solar and nanotech manufacturing equipment), Industrial Nanotech (NSDQ: INTK, advanced coatings) and Spire Corp (NSDQ: SPIR, solar turnkey manufacturing).

After inking a big sale earlier this month, CVD Equipment (NSDQ: CVV) has announced that its sales have hit $25 million in the first three quarters of the year. Last year’s total sales were $14 million.

As alternative energy production grows and “Made in America” energy becomes a hot topic, the real facts about technology get lost in the mix. Mostly it’s because the details—or as we call it, science—is far more complex than the cool concept it represents. For example, electricity is a very cool thing. But how we distribute it and how it’s actually produced makes heads loll and eyes drift shut.

Spire Corporation, a global solar company providing turnkey solar factories and capital equipment to manufacture photovoltaic modules worldwide, announced yesterday that it has received a contract from GreenBrilliance to provide a turnkey photovoltaic module assembly line for that company’s operation in India.

The increasing scarcity of water around the world is forcing a global reevaluation. In much of the developed world, wastewater infrastructure has been built on the assumption of a temperate climate. However, the problem now facing first-world countries is adapting to current wastewater infrastructure amid climate change and more extreme bouts of rainfall. Add in global warming, which will bring more severe storms and flooding interspersed with cycles of drought, and that assumption no longer holds firm.

If there's one segment of the energy industry that's often overhyped, it's alternative and renewable technologies. Proponents speak of these technologies as the key to solving both the world's dependence on increasingly scarce, expensive fossil fuels and reducing pollution. 

My biggest issue with the whole Green Tech trend is that most people are looking for that one big solution and betting all their money on a horse that not only isn’t in the race but isn’t even born yet.

The following originally appeared in my complementary e-zine, Nanotech Investing News.

Solar power is becoming the latest niche frenzy in the Green Tech and nanotech space. There’s all sorts of talk about thin film solar and printable photovoltaic (PV) cells using nanorods or nanotubes.

Let the climatologists, the activists and the politicians debate the issue of global warming as what most of us really care about is cashing in on the global question of climatic changes. Whether or not you side with the likes of President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic or former Vice President Al Gore on the question of global warming, you can still pursue the green.

Whether or not you side with the likes of President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic or former Vice President Al Gore on the question of global warming, you can still pursue the green.

President Bush announced in his State of the Union Address that he plans to focus more attention on alternative energies and biofuels, which we can expect to create more discussion about this part of the energy patch. Though alternative energies, ...