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Nikola Tesla. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

Last night I tweeted a link to this video, about the legendary scientist Nikola Tesla pitching Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and commented that the truth is sometimes funnier that comedy. And I was surprised by the sheer number of people who agreed with that sentiment. I went to sleep thinking about that reaction, and also thinking about it in the context of the decline of long-term thinking in our society.

If Tesla (I assume you know who he is) did indeed walk into a VC meeting, he wouldn't get the attention or the money for his idea because it wouldn't fit the time-scale of what venture-capital investments have become. Having followed the business of technology for a long time, I have seen that time-scale get shorter and shorter. I guess it's the price to be paid for the excesses of the internet bubble of the 1990s.

The Bubble After Effects

During that time the business changed from funding innovation to funding concepts and eventually to projects. The fallout of the internet bubble was that venture-capital firms shifted focus. This shifting time-frame is one of the main reasons we are seeing fewer and fewer investments in hardcore technologies and more of the dollars being shifted to the softer aspects of technology.

Yes, bloggers like me like to harp on the fact that many investors are infected by short-termism. But let's not forget that some of these folks have taken big risks, and sometimes have failed big, too.

Cleantech has ruined many reputations and resulted in billion dollar loses. Yes, there are a couple rare big bet successes that will come out of cleantech, like Tesla Motors and Nest, but the overall trend has been losses.

Now many of the investors that aggressively backed cleantech are trying to find a more cautious approach to cleantech that more closely aligns with the traditional short VC time frame. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Beyers, which lead the charge on cleantech investments only to be left wounded, has recently changed tact in many ways, and in particular to go after social so it can get back into the quick returns on its investments.

That's the trend that all investors, in some respects are, moving toward. They're all looking for the next Facebook or the next Twitter, but no one wants to look for the next Juniper or the next Intel or even the next ARM. I am not saying Facebook and Twitter are not great companies and have not scaled dramatically and impacted the world. What I am pointing to is the fact that Silicon Valley funds fewer and fewer silicon companies.

Why are we assuming that we are all done with developing new kinds of chips for uses that we are not even imagining yet? Are we done inventing the routing technologies of the future?

It's hard to invest in the future

Think of it this way: Had Vinod Khosla not backed Pradeep Sindhu to work on Juniper, we would all be living in Cisco's vision of the internet future and using its hardware, which it would have made and sold at its own pace and at its own prices. Today, if you need to build a big company like that, you need to have deep pockets. Luckily Andy Bechtolsteim has those and that is why Arista Networks exists and is proving to be a major disrupter.

The point is not to just rant, but to note that there is a lot more innovation to be done. All of today's stars - from Dropbox to SnapChat to every little hot company that pops up - is built on those basic building blocks, and we have to continue to make better, cheaper and beefier building blocks.

Yes, I understand that there is a chill around chip stocks, and Wall Street investors are showing more interest in pokes than petabyte speeds. I don't necessarily think that this kind of rational thinking is bad for the investors, but when it comes to fundamental innovation, it points to a a real challenge ahead. And forget what Wall Street thinks, isn't venture capital really risk capital? Risk, unfortunately, is a four-letter word around these parts these days.

Failure is an option

Elon Musk in front of the frunk

Forget chip startups, does anyone think that the Sand Hill Road firmament could have funded Amazon Web Services, a disruptive economic force, if they had a chance? Probably not. How about the iPhone? The same story. If you look at those two examples, and add Google's self-driving car, Google Glass and what companies like Tesla are doing, you understand that patience is a virtue. Unfortunately, patience is in short supply in the Valley these days.

I wrote this on the first anniversary of Steve Jobs' death, and I want to resurface it:

A dear friend put it best when he said that Jobs allowed himself the freedom to dream big and most of us need to learn from him and supersize our dreams. While that is true of everyone, the Silicon Valley of 2012 needs to pay heed. Silicon Valley of quick flips, petty jealousies and rampant short-termism needs to remind itself of a greater purpose than a public offering. Change is more than a headline. It takes patience. It is more profound. And it is thinking about more than just us.

Maybe this video is a reminder to all of us that while we might be living in great times, the future is still to be invented.

More about the video: The video is in support of a Kickstarter campaign that hopes to collect enough money to build a statue of Nikola Tesla. While to many Tesla might be a car, in reality Tesla was a scientist who worked on difficult things. As an aside, we at GigaOM are fortunate that our New York offices are in the Radio Wave Building, the very building where Nikola Tesla lived.

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Read the rest of The Best Green Designs from ICFF 2013 Day One!

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Think of water rushing in through the open hatch of a submarine, and you get an idea of the forces at work underwater. Atmospheric pressure and the weight of the water combine to create pressures that compound with increasing depth. At a depth of 400 meters (almost a quarter mile), for example, the pressure is that of 40 atmospheres, one atmosphere being the pressure we experience at sea level. Subhydro envisions installing large concrete tanks at depths of 400-800 meters, and the deeper the better for maximizing energy generation.

When the “hatch” is opened, water is allowed to flow into the tanks through a turbine that drives an electric generator. The more and larger the tanks, the longer the generation can go on. When the tanks are filled, the turbine can be reversed to pump out the water, a process that draws on the power grid and consumes energy. In this way, the pumped storage plant functions like an underwater battery that can be re-charged, much like a hydroelectric plant on dry land pumps water into an upper reservoir after it has passed through a turbine.

According to Subhydro, the efficiency of the underwater plant is about 80 percent, comparable to efficiencies achieved at conventional plants. Integrating the pumped storage plant with wind or solar farms could create a grid storage system that harnesses excess renewable energy generation to pump out the tanks and flood them during peak hours of production.

Another approach to underwater grid storage is in the works at a depth of 80 meters in Lake Ontario, just off shore of Toronto. There, Hydrostor will begin building underwater tanks that will hold compressed air. Surplus energy from renewables (wind, solar) will provide the energy to compress air from the atmosphere and pump it in to the tanks. To put energy back into the grid, the air is allowed to surface, driving generators as it expands back into the atmosphere.

Hydrostor is partnering with Toronto Hydro to build the 1MW/4MWh compressed air energy storage demonstration facility. The system will run at 70 percent efficiency, according to Hydrostor. Earlier this month MaRS Cleantech Fund announced an investment in Hydrostor’s tech.

Clearly, there are still some hurdles to overcome before energy companies everywhere take the plunge. The environmental impact of offshore submerged facilities will need to be considered, as will the building materials themselves. To withstand the underwater pressure, Subhydro is working with research partners to develop thin concrete reinforced with steel fibers, while Hydrostor’s system will use inflatable polyester bags to hold compressed air. Building underwater facilities is itself energy-intensive, so whether the process can be made cost and energy-effective will determine whether cleantech is ready to get its feet wet.

Image via Knut Gangåssæter/Doghouse

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The League of American Bicyclists reports today that the cities seeing the biggest jump in bike commuting are, by and large, also the cities that have been recognized by the League as "bike-friendly" for their efforts to make biking safer and more convenient.

Image: LAB

The Bike League's Carolyn Szczepanski writes:

From 2000 to 2011, the bicycle commuting rate has risen 80% in the largest Bicycle Friendly Communities — far above the average growth of 47% nationwide and more than double the rate of 32% in the cities not designated as bicycle-friendly.

In some Bicycle Friendly Communities, bicycle commuting rates have skyrocketed by more than 400% since 1990, including cities as diverse as Portland, Ore., and Lexington, Ky. Meanwhile, cities like Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Denver have more than doubled their bike commuter share since 2000.

Take it from League President, Andy Clarke: “I see the dramatic increase in ridership on my own daily bike commute, and it’s definitely more pronounced in those communities — like Arlington County and the District of Columbia — that are proactively improving conditions for bicycling and following the Bicycle Friendly Community blueprint.”

Elsewhere on the Network today: People for Bikes files a dispatch from a gathering in Austin, Texas, exploring how bike infrastructure can benefit city residents equitably.

“Bike lanes are coming to my neighborhood, and now I will no longer be able to afford living there,” is a common reaction in low-income Portland neighborhoods says Olivia Quiroz, Educator for the Multnomah County Health Department.  Some minority and low-income people view bike lanes as signs of imminent gentrification.

That was a central topic debate at a Summit on Bike Lanes & Equity, an ethnically diverse gathering of more than 30 transportation leaders and public officials from around the country held Wednesday and Thursday in Austin, Texas under PeopleForBikes' Green Lane Project sponsorship.

Indeed, there was skepticism among poor and minority communities in Portland (declared America’s #1 bike city by Bicycling magazine) about protected bike lanes on North Williams Avenue planned for their neighborhood. The project went forward only after transportation officials and bike advocates slowed down in order to listen carefully to the concerns of community members, some of whom had been displaced by other projects in recent Portland history. A genuine process of engagement emerged over a series of meetings and forged the consensus to go ahead with the project, says Gerik Kransky of the Portland’s Bicycle Transportation Alliance.

For example, rural Kenyan farmers can easily spend 30 percent of their income on fertilizer, but 80 percent of that fertilizer can be wasted because there is little data collected about the best places and times to use it. The lack of info isn't just from the farmer's perspective. Aramburu says when he met the CEO of a major fertilizer company recently, he asked him what he knew about his customers - his response: "very little."

Re:char CTO Luke Iseman (L) and founder/CEO Jason Aramburu (R) showing off an early prototype of SoilIQ

A soil data cloud in the sky

The two young entrepreneurs latest project emerged from this black hole of information. Working within French telco giant Orange's first accelerator program, called Orange Fab, Re:char plans to build a $5 plug-in device, called SoilIQ, for an Android phone that can read the moisture levels in soil. During our interview, Iseman takes a very early prototype of the device out of a pouch and shows me how it plugs into the Android phone and taps into the phone's computing power to detect moisture levels between two screws.

Down the road such a gadget could be developed to pick up other soil data, like fertilizer-level readings. Iseman, an avid gardener, schools me on NPK - nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium - which he says are the holy grail of fertilizer readings. When SoilIQ is a commercial product, farmers could buy the gadget to take these types of readings, and enhance their farming productivity and the efficiency of their fertilizer use.

But the real value of such a system will likely be in the data collection, and the data analytics and services. The hourly and daily micro readings, which are coded with GPS data, could be used to create a cloud-based location data map of the quality and details of the land. This information could be used to launch data-focused services for both farmers, fertilizers companies, government groups, and others.

Re:char envisions using the data to launch a subscription service for farmers that can alert the farmers to the most fertile land, or even if there's the danger of crop disease anywhere in the region (maize rot is a huge problem in rural Kenya). Fertilizer companies could use such data to offer better products to farmers, and potentially learn more about the end farmer customer (fertilizer can change hands ten times in Kenya until it reaches the person who will use it, says Aramburu).

Such land data could even be valuable outside of the farming communities. A massive data soil map in the cloud could help determine things like land values, or land ownership issues.

SoilIQ is part internet of things, part sustainability, and part data analytics. The entrepreneurs are actually very focused on developing tools that encourage the more efficient use of resources, which could (and should in my opinion) be the next-generation of cleantech focus.

The core concept also reminds me of what Safecast has been trying to do with its grass roots nuclear radiation sensors and data mapping in Japan. Safecast is bringing that concept to air pollution in L.A., too.

Orange interest

For telco Orange, which has a substantial presence in Kenya, such a system could help them increase mobile data use among customers. The Android devices obviously send the data to the cloud over the cellular networks. And Android phones - as Google announced this week at Google.io - are being used by 900 million people globally.

But potentially even more important is the branding involved. As Orange’s Executive Director of Business Services, Vivek Badrinath, told me in an interview at the Orange Fab event on Monday night, the mobile phone is often times the first branded product that a customer in a developing country has. That brand in turn has a unique ability to transition into offering core services, like mobile banking, and credit.

Orange has a mobile payment system, Orange Money, that is growing nicely and Re:char could plug into it for its planned services. And if SoilIQ becomes a killer app for the bottom of the pyramid, Orange would have a key position in it. Orange is interested enough in Re:char's new idea that it not only brought the company into its accelerator program, but is investing in its angel round.

Re:char hopes to close an angel round by the end of the program, and later this year raise a series A round. By the end of the three months, Re:char also plans to have its soil moisture-reading gadget developed enough to move it into production.

If you're a backyard composter or gardener - like Re:charge CTO Iseman - you're probably wondering if you can get your hands on SoilIQ one day. Aramburu and Iseman tell me that they'd like to make it available in the U.S., too, so the gardening hobbyist could collect their own data.

Clearly, the team is in the very early stages of making SoilIQ, so a lot of their plans will hinge on these next few months. They plan to keep running the kiln bio charcoal business, and think SoilIQ could even help grow that business, too. They also might split the businesses in two down the road.

Ultimately if they can deliver a simple, easy to use, and cheap device, and convince Kenyan farmers to start using it, they could be on their way to unleashing data from Kenya's rural landscape.

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One of the underwater Streetview cameras, on display at Google I/O.

Google launched Streetview for the world's oceans in cooperation with Underwater Earth the at the end of last year, and has mapped a total of six sites so far, including the Great Barrier Reef in Australia as well as reefs in Hawaii and the Philippines. Vevers explained that his organization's Catlin Seaview Survey has been using divers carrying custom-made cameras that shoot photos every three seconds, with divers being able to cover about two kilometers during every expedition.

That's slow - maybe too slow. The world's coral reefs are receding quickly, which has been one of the main motivations behind the project. “We set up our project to reveal the reefs of the world,” Vevers said, adding: “People don't want to protect anything they can't see.”

However, Verers said showing off the beauty of coral reefs to the world is only “half the story.” The project has also been working on image recognition technologies, with the goal of mapping species and giving scientists around the world access to new material to work with.

So why did Google get involved with the project? Foulkes said that it wasn't driven by commercial motivations, but freely admitted that it was also about showing off the capabilities of Google Maps. One example: Vevers' team uses Google's business photos tool, which is meant to give stores the ability to upload panoramic photos, to create its underwater photospheres.

Vevers' plan is to capture and reveal all of the world's coral reefs within the next three years. “We feel this is very much a race against time,” he said. That's why the project now wants to enlist amateurs in its quest as well. Divers can simply use their cell phones in water-proof cases and then upload their photospheres to Google Maps. And he urged volunteers to become active soon: “What happens in the next ten years is likely going to affect our oceans fo the next 10,000 years.”

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Milwaukee is a city that lost 0.4 percent of its population between 2000 and 2010. Over that time, the larger five-county region it anchors grew 3.5 percent, or at about a third the rate of the national average.

Wisconsin's proposal for a double-decker freeway. Image: Milwaukee Rising

And yet, bizarrely enough, WisDOT wants to stack highways on top of highways, reports Gretchen Schuldt of Milwaukee Rising:

The Wisconsin Department of Transportation is expected to pursue an I-94 east-west freeway expansion project that would cost up to $1.2 billion and include six additional lanes of concrete in many places; double-decking through west side cemeteries; additional elevated, overlapping lanes east and west of the double-decked section; and absolutely no transit.

The double-deck proposal will raise freeway lanes 40 to 45 feet in the air through cemeteries just west of Miller Park. Estimated project costs are $950 million to $1.2 billion, the elected officials said; proposals for less expensive projects that would replace the freeway in its current configuration or include spot improvements are not favored by WisDOT.

All this is taking place, keep in mind, as WisDOT faces a civil rights lawsuit stemming from claims that the agency is starving all other modes of transportation to pursue outlandishly expensive highway projects, Schuldt reports:

WisDOT’s expansion options will come on the heels of a federal judge’s ruling that the Zoo Interchange reconstruction plans probably discriminates against minorities because they do not include transit improvements. Ald. Robert Bauman said WisDOT should immediately suspend the I-94 environmental review process and cancel next week’s public meetings so that the impact of Judge Lynn Adelman’s decision can be fully assessed.

Gov. Scott Walker is seeking delays in some of the Zoo Interchange work because of a lack of available funding.

Elsewhere on the Network today: The Green Lane Project explains the importance of Walk Score's city and neighborhood bikeability rankings. I Bike TO shares a new study that finds helmet laws can actually reduce public safety. And the Metropolitan Planning Council gives an overview of DC's performance parking policies on its blog.

There has been a lot of confusion between statistics that show that helmets reduce head injuries and helmet laws which are designed to force everyone on a bike to wear a helmet. While helmets arguably reduce head injuries (although even here there is some contra-evidence), the fallout of helmet laws have been unclear at best and negative at worst. Dennis' study focused on rates of hospitalization across Canadian provinces and compared provinces that implemented helmet laws to those that didn't with their relative hospitalization rates for head injuries. They found little evidence that helmet laws did much to reduce injuries across a population.

Rates of hospitalizations for any cycling-related injury decreased by 28% (95% CI 22.8-33.2) among individuals younger than 18 in provinces with helmet laws and by 22.3% (95% CI 15-29.6) in areas without the laws, "suggesting fewer young cyclists, improvements to cycling safety, or a change in hospital admission policies," according to the researchers.

Hospitalizations for any cycling injury among adults hovered around 10 per 100,000 person-years in provinces with and without the helmet laws, with no significant differences seen.