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Technorati Tags: Energy | Solar Thermal | Mike Harding Blog

A former Sun colleague sent me this article (thanks Scott) and I thought it was interesting on a number of fronts.

Risking $15B to build a moon factory to manufacture rocket fuel named after a failed South Pole explorer is simply too much to pass up! Let’s hope these folks have more success than the namesake of the mission, Ernest Shackleton. The quote that pulls it all together for me is “If we have fuel up there at a reasonable price, they will come.” I can’t tell you how many business plans I’ve seen with “build it and they will come” as the plan, and with very few exceptions, each of those companies are now in the “deadpool.”

A VC acquaintance of mine would call investing in this venture “sucker money” – and $15B is alot of it! Dreamers are an important part of progress and you have to aim high if you’re going to break through. But I do have to wonder about this particular idea…..

Good luck Shackleton Energy Company, you’re going to need it.


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Technorati Tags: Rocket Fuel | Moon Refinery | Mike Harding Blog

Somehow, I don’t think this is what the gnomes had in mind…..A Japanese construction worker managed to steal some 4,000 different undergarments over a period of years. This world has some strange people with strange collections.


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Seems like a headline from another age, right? Well, replace Luddites with Viacom and power loom with GooTube and you’ve got the present day headline. It’s an instructive model of technology is disintermediating a group whose living depends on the “old way.”

Garden Variety Hand Loom



For those not quite up to speed on Luddites, they are a group led by Ned Ludd who were against the technological advances of the industrial revolution. Specifically, they were hand loom workers being threatened by the adoption of mechanical power looms. There were incidents of Luddites attacking and destroying power looms all over England in the 19th century. Alas, the technology of the power loom existed, was more cost effective, produced more, was broadly adopted, and ultimately displaced hand looms in the textile industry.

Yes, a $1B judgment, or threat thereof, is the functional equivalent of destroying a power loom factory. But in the end, don’t expect the outcome to be different in the present day Luddites vs. technology struggle. It’s simply a matter of time. Investment advice: Short Viacom.


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Technorati Tags: Viacom | Law Suit | Luddites | Mike Harding Blog

Since October 2006, I’ve been cooking up a new company called Montara Energy Ventures (MeV.) With the move to our new server and software upgrades, I’m ready to introduce the company. We’ve setup a new area on this server specifically to host the new content and keep folks up-to-date with the latest information on renewable energy overall and specifically with what we’re up to at MeV (as we can, our detailed plans are still confidential at this point.)

The easiest and best way to keep up with what we’re doing at MeV is to subscribe to our content feed. To make things convenient, you can get our content in a daily email digest, read through your favorite RSS aggregator, or simply visit our home page.

As for this site, it will revert to being my personal blog. So if you’re interested in what I’ve been publishing, please keep visiting. The same subscription options are available for this site, get a daily email digest, read through your favorite RSS aggregator, and/or simply visit the home page. I’ll continue to post here, though the energy content that was being published here will by and large now appear on the MeV site.

I hope you’ll check out Montara Energy Ventures and that you’ll continue to visit here.


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