Nanotech Investing News Blog

Well, it’s finally happened. Under mounting internal and external pressure, Motorola has spun off its handset business.

The company’s handset division has been lost in the desert since the successful launch of the Razr a couple years ago. Since then, it’s lost market share and has been less than imaginative in developing new mobile handsets. This kind of product pipeline strangulation isn’t unusual at Moto.

Activist investor and perhaps the only guy who can light a fire under the posteriors of the stifling upper management at Motorola, Carl Ichan is going to start a blog. Here's the story.

This shreds the concept of old rich guys not grasping the power of the Internet and is very good for corporate governance. Cheers to Icahn. Now, all he says may not be brilliant but that's the point; as a billionaire Master of the Universe to put yourself out in this kind of forum where you know something un-brilliant or downright silly may come out is the true act of integrity. I can't wait to read it.

Altairnano (NSDQ:ALTI) announced to today that the it just landed a $2.5 million contract with the US Navy for backup power systems for naval applications.

I've like Altairnano's strategy and CEO Alan Gotcher continues to do a good job exploiting strategic opportunities for the company. Now the Navy and major global utility AES are working with Altair on stationary energy storage products.

While most people think the big money for battery companies is in the motive sector (cars, trucks, etc.) the fact is, stationary power dwarfs the motive sector.

The stock has been spanked in the past few weeks so it's at very good buy levels, even with this news and the rally today. Get on board.

The first week of January I was in Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the largest show of its kind in the world. About 100,000 people descended upon the city for this four-day event. It was nuts.

I've been to a few conferences over the years, and this thing was a zoo. It's so big. It's really hard to make your way around, much less get down to business with any of the merchants.

That's my other issue with these consumer-side conferences: They're all end-user stuff, so it's not really about the steak; it's about the sizzle. You get 150-inch HDTVs or Bluetooth WiFi geegaws.

Actually, at CES, this year's theme seemed to be connectivity. There weren't any major developments; things got smaller (or bigger), faster and more connected.

I talked with a few companies I like and found a couple worth noting. In the next issue of Personal Finance, I'll be doing a little piece on a handful of my top tech companies, some that I found at the show and others that I've been following in The Real Nanotech Investor.

All in all, it's a lot of fun if you like a lot of people and enjoy walking around with them all day. I'm a misanthrope at heart, so I did this for you, dear reader, and my morbid curiosity to see how much humanity I could withstand without having my head explode.

The hot story is yet another banking scandal. This time it isn't a sin of commission--greed--that has sucked $7.1 billion out of French mega bank Societie Generale's coffers; it's the sin of omission--a complete breakdown of oversight on its trading desk.

The unnamed trader is like Nick Leeson (of Barings infamy) on steroids, the Barry Bonds of rogue trading. He/she lost $7.1 billion. And the bank just figured it out.

I think if I was short say a few hundred million, I'd start asking questions. I might even put in firewalls so I might be alerted before my losses hit the big B word. Apparently not SocGen.

The whole mortgage debacle in the US credit markets is bad but ultimately the system can't collapse. Even the US government has stepped in to help these poster children for free markets and unfettered capitalism. Odd how that happens isn't it? The louder you champion capitalism, the more you seem to get in government help. It's like a spoiled kid who keeps trashing all the new cars you give him and never appreciates the fact that he needs to change his ways.

Anyway, an interest rate cut helps stop all those ARMs from advancing and may help slow down defaults. Then we all get a check for $600. Be still my heart. In the meantime, no one has mentioned to the banks that maybe they could lower their predatory lending interest rates and perhaps more people would pay back their maxxed out credit cards and the banks could use the cash.

Instead the financial institutions continue to sink their talons into consumers and expect them to thrive.

This kind of idiocy will be one of the key reasons these Old School masters of Wall Street will transform this country into a lesser power in the next five to ten years. The EU, India, China and even Russia are going to be the fulcrums of the global economy and the US will be more a big, spoiled child that everyone else will get tired of catering to. If we can't get some fresh thinkers running the game on Wall Street, we're in for some interesting times ahead.

That said, on the other side of the Atlantic you have these stunning sins of omission. I mean $7 billion. Can you imagine the kind of healthcare and educational systems that kind of money could have purchased for the US, to say nothing of France? And it's gone. Poof. Merde.

This kind of thing disturbs me even more than greedy finance guys wheeling and dealing in the mortgage market because it happened and no one knew. Everyone knew there would be a reckoning for the housing boom.

The whole world swooned when Countrywide teetered on a few billion in losses. There's nary a blink when one guy loses $7 billion. Odd don't you think?

Nanotech still is a fuzzy concept for a lot of individual investors. And it isn't just little firms with big dreams that are really making headway in this incredibly important sector. Nanotech is one of the fundamental enabling technologies for the whole Green Tech movement and it's big multinationals that are scoring the big gains in nanotech at this point.

But instead of blathering on here, our colleague Ryan McGuire at http://www.wallstreetreporter.com was gracious enough to interview me about nanotech as well as my impressions of the Consumer Electronics Show held in Vegas last week. I've got the lowdown on the technologoy, the latest sector news and great stocks that are worth your time. Check it out here.

The pink elephant in the room when talking about nanotech is safety issues.

This extends past the end-product issue of, say, developing a nanotech sunscreen with nano-sized zinc oxide particles or anti-aging creams (wrinkle smoothers). These cosmetics and body applications/ingestions have already made headlines in most countries.

But before I address my view on the end-product side, I want to spend some time looking at the manufacturing side of nanoparticles and worker safety. This doesn't get a lot of buzz because there aren't a lot of people making nanomaterials (carbon nanotubes, fullerenes, wet- or dry-method nanoparticles, etc). But you should be very interested in this aspect because this significantly affects the businesses in which you invest.

Government regulations or interpretations can spell life or death for a company-even a relatively large company. And startups in certain sectors are now starting to feel the pull of having a phalanx of lawyers on retainer as they wait to see when and how the government decides to regulate production of these materials.