Well before the Web 2.0 and cleantech, the Silicon Valley was all about nanotech—the idea that sub-atomic particles would suddenly be the building blocks of everything.
According to a new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Project on Emerging Technologies more than 1,000 nanotech products are available to consumers now, up from only 212 products in 2006. The director of the study David Rejeski told PEHub he expects the number of products to reach 1,600 within the next two years.
Following the Pew study three conclusions are noted:
Markets for products that are too small companies cannot scale as they anticipate, the products and science is just too incremental to turn into a big hit from the nanotechnology.
This is not too different from the Web 2.0 generation. Critics say that most of the nanotech startups are companies offer features and apps that at best will get acquired for million or so.
The difference with Web 2.0 is these sites and apps are incredibly cheap and quick to build and host. Designing sub-atomic particles are not.
Cleantech investments are down 30% this year in terms of deals and 60% in terms of investment—with a big shift going away from energy generation towards energy savings. It’s in danger of looking a lot like nanotech several years from now.
As oil prices have spent much of the last year in more reasonable territory and the whole Inconvenient-Truth-fad has faded, cleantech needs a huge Netscape-like IPO to get everyone excited and ignite real investment in needle-moving science and development, not play-it-safe software programs to manage smart grids more effectively. VC Paul Holland of Foundation Capital says in the Press:Here clip below that there are a few contenders on the horizon right now.
Others have speculated that several cleantech companies were readying themselves to go public before the crash, signaling a potentially active 2010. But most of these are well under the billion market cap level.
No doubt the opportunity is huge for cleantech to remake nearly every old-line industry in the world. The question is whether it succeeds where nanotech failed.
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