Nanosys strengthened its competitive standing in the clean-tech market by securing as much as $30 million in new funding and striking a deal to have Samsung use its solar technology.
The Palo Alto start-up that became a poster child of the nanotech craze six years ago, has been steadily remaking itself into a supplier of technology to electronics and green-tech companies. The heady days are gone, as are the plans for a 2004 IPO.
But the company has built a respectable portfolio of technologies that boost the capacity of lithium ion batteries and improve the quality and efficiency of LED displays and solid-state lighting.
Now it has received validation of its solar technology in the form of a licensing agreement with Samsung. As part of the deal, Samsung Venture Investment Corp. will take a $15 million equity stake in Nanosys – on top of the millions more the company will pay for the license.
Previous Nanosys investors Arch Venture Partners, El Dorado Ventures, Polaris Venture Capital and Venrock will join the funding round, contributing $10 million. Nanosys expects to add another $5 million to the round by October.
CEO Jason Hartlove says the Samsung money will allow Nanosys to build a Silicon Valley plant and ramp production volumes.
But more importantly, Samsung will license Nanosys’ nano-particle coating technology and nano-inks to improve the efficiency and lower the cost of its thin-film solar cell production.
Samsung, a relatively latecomer to solar, announced earlier this week that it would more than quadruple solar cell production by the first half of next year. The company kicked off a 30 MW solar pilot last September and now has set its sights on 130 MW. It is reportedly working with both crystalline cells and thin film technologies.
Hartlove says his nano-particle coatings shift the infrared and ultraviolet wavelength light that thin film can’t process to colors the cells can absorb. Efficiency goes up. Meanwhile, nano-inks are quicker and cheaper alternatives to the chemical vapor deposition reactors that thin-film producers often use.
Samsung also will work with Nanosys on Nanosys’ quantum dot technology for LED chips.
“This is a very important deal for us,” says Hartlove.
Remember the late 90′s, when Intel was throwing billions in its quest to become a telecommunication powerhouse, to finally write it all off?
Well, sounds that the chipmaker is at it again with the recent acquisitions of Infineon’s cellular and GPS technology as well as the assets of small 4G vendor Comsys.
Hopefully, the mastermind of Intel’s first telecom foray, Sean Maloney, might remember one or two things learned from his first failed attempt to build a communications empire!
As analyst Linley Gwennap writes it,
“Making it clear that money is no object in its quest to become a major player in the smartphone market, Intel plans to acquire the wireless operations of Infineon in a deal valued at more than $1.2 billion. Infineon’s cellular and GPS technology will complement Intel’s Atom processor and Wi-Fi expertise, allowing Intel to deliver a complete solution for the rapidly growing smartphone and tablet-computer markets.”
Infineon ranked fourth in cellular-baseband shipments last year with 10.7% unit share, according to a recent report from The Linley Group. Infineon is a major supplier to Apple, Nokia, and Samsung.
But “the German vendor lacks an application processor, however, making success in the smartphone market difficult, and it has struggled to sell its 3G baseband outside of Apple,” adds Linley.
The analyst adds that in a quieter but significant move, Comsys acquisitions brings a processor for WiMax phones and was working on converting that design to support LTE.
Intel’s secret goal (well not anymore!) is to merge Infineon and Comsys technologies to create its own 4G solution coupled to its Atom chip for smartphones.
“Intel is clearly focused on smartphones, leaving the future of Infineon’s popular 2G processors in doubt. This deal could end up helping vendors such as Broadcom, MediaTek, and ST-Ericsson, which could step into the breach with their own 2G processors. Conversely, the deal gives Intel the technology it needs to develop an integrated 3G-smartphone processor, allowing it to compete against vendors such as Qualcomm and Marvell,” says Linley.
In a report published today, MobileTrax principal analyst Gerry Purdy calls Apple to fix the iPhone 4 faulty antenna design.
Apple will need to fix the faulty design of the iPhone antenna. I can assure you that the iPhone 5 won’t have that problem. It might have another problem, but it won’t continue the antenna problems in the iPhone 4. I’m confident that Apple engineering will ensure the future iPhone (and iPad) products will have antennas that work properly.
Apple’s faulty design has consumers wonder if they should buy Apple’s smartphone or not
It has been a real nightmare for Apple, certainly a cause for consternation with millions of iPhone customers, and perhaps a “Wait a minute, should I buy one of these?’ hesitation for a number of prospective iPhone buyers.
And the real winner of Apple’s “Antennagate” ? Antenna engineers!
Simply holding a device should not interfere in any significant way with the network signal reception. And Antennagate will cause other firms such as HTC, Motorola, RIM and Samsung to increase antenna design capabilities to ensure that they won’t have a repeat of the same problem as Apple experienced. It should be a ‘field day’ for antenna design consultants to help all SmartPhone manufacturers fix antenna problems.
Apple's latest New York store, it's 4th, in the Upper West Side district
Before kicking off the “meat” of his keynote i.e. introducing Apple’s iPad tablet, CEO Steve Jobs started with an update on his company’s latest achievements.
250 million iPods sold since 2001;
284 retail stores;
50 million visitors went to Apple’s retail stores last quarter;
Apple opened its 4th store in New York City;
App store: 140,000 apps and 3 billion downloads in 18 months;
Apple has a “run rate” of $50+ billion a year.
A last figure, that gives Steve Jobs the bragging right to claim the #1 spot as the world’s largest mobile devices company.
Selling more mobile devices – iPods, iPhones and Mac laptops – than Sony (camcorders, walkmans, cell phones…), Samsung and Nokia!
Later in his presentation, Jobs added the following numbers:
75 million iPod touches and iPhones sold so far. Meaning 75 million customers that already know how to use the iPad!
The AppStore has 125 million active accounts with credit cards all ready for one-click purchases
Finally, Apple sold 12 billion products through its AppStore and they’re ready to take orders from iPad customers buying music, videos, ebooks and more!
California’s energy standards for flat-panel televisions are the toughest in the world, requiring a 33 percent efficiency improvement by 2011 and a 50 percent gain by 2013.
Critics complain they will stifle innovation and raise prices for televisions affected – those 58 inches and smaller.
Ultra thin, energy efficient LED TVs might benefit from the California standards
But manufacturers such as Samsung disagree. About three quarters of the televisions on store shelves already meet the 2011 standards and about 25 percent pass the 2013 ones.
Samsung says it produces some of them. “We’re already there today,” says Scott Birnbaum, vice president in the company’s LCD business. “We’re not intimidated by these standards.”
An array of new technologies will help manufacturers keep pace with the market changes. The result is an acceleration in innovation, says Birnbaum.
For instance, Samsung is working to further reduce the power demands of LCD backlights with fewer bulbs, more transparent optical screens and transistors with wider apertures. It also is deploying technology to dim areas of the screen that don’t need the most intensive light – such as nighttime skies. Backlights can consume as much as 60 percent of a set’s electricity.
Yet the Golden State’s market is likely to see significant changes in the next several years. Plasma screens, which use more energy than LCDs, will probably see slowing sales. At the same time, more efficient LED will capture a greater share of the market, despite their higher price.
LEDs already are a fast growing segment, says Birnbaum. The bright pictures and micro-thin designs are a powerful draws.
Consumer electronics giant switches printer cartridge program from FedEx
Samsung had been working with FedEx.
Starting last week, it switched its allegiance. The consumer electronic giant said Tuesday that consumers are now able to recycle spent printer cartridges through the U.S. Postal Service.
The four-year old recycling program is free. Just print a postage label from the Samsung Website, enclose the old cartridge in the box the new one comes in and take it to a post office.
The aim is to keep cartridges out of landfills – and to create an environmentally sustainable business.
If IDC's bearish forecast materialises, then more Flash memory makers will have to declare bankruptcy
For a change, research firms agreed to disagree in forecasting the emergence of the solid-state disk (SSD) drive market.
During a panel hosted today at the Flash Memory Summit conference in Santa Clara, Calif., small technical research firm Forward Insights blasted its larger competitors (including IDC and Gartner) for their hockey-stick-like projections of the SSD market.
But first, to set the stage, IDC research manager in hard-disk drive (HDD) components and solid-state disk (SSD) drives Jeff Janukowicz said he expects the SSD market to reach $3 billion in sales next year, compare to $733 million in 2008 and less than a billion dollar this year.
IDC’s forecast will lead Flash memory makers to bankruptcy
A bearish growth that for Janukowicz will be mostly driven by enterprises adopting SSDs to improve the performance and lower the consumption of their data centres and by early-adopters in the PC market like gamers in the desktop segment or executives’ laptops.
Here’s a video excerpt of Janukowicz remarks:
Great outlook, right?
Well, not really according to Forward Insights President Greg Wong who thinks that this kind of hyper growth can not be done in a profitable way.
“If you take a look at the industry right now, profitability is a big challenge for everybody. So where will they get the money to invest and expand at the big growth rate that you see here [pointing at competitors' forecasts]… wether its through technology migration, plus 3-bits per cell, plus 20% CAPEX. That’s what you need to achieve those rates that [competitors] are predicting for next year. If you believe that it’s feasible, then I guess you’ll have to use their projections… And even if demand is quite strong next year, where will they get the cash?,” explains Wong.
A more prudent sentiment that was echoed during the conference by Sandisk CEO Eli Harari and Samsung vice president of memory marketing Jim Elliot.
In this video excerpt Wong explains his opposing arguments to the explosive growth of the Flash memory market:
Objective Analysis believe SSDs will never reach prices of HDDs
In his presentation at the Flash Memory Summit today, Objective Analysis principal Jim Handy was quite optimistic on the future of the NAND flash memory market; for the near term.
Flash memory market business to remain viable until 2011
Handy pointed to current product shortages and price stability that will probably last until 2010-2011 due to growing demand combined with production and capital investments cutbacks; which is music to the ears for the 5 Flash memory makers left (Hynix, Micron, Samsung, Sandisk, Toshiba) in the market which are still recovering from their deep losses in 2008.
Looking at SSDs, Handy believes this market is ripe for consolidation; which will go from the 171+ Flash-based drive makers of today to just a handful. “Remember that there were 282 companies that used to make disk drives before the market consolidates to about 5 today,” recalls DISK/TREND founder Jim Porter.
Handy also expects SSDs to stay weak in the PC market due to higher costs compare to hard-disk drives and the upcoming launch of Braidwood, the codename for Intel’s update of its Turbo Memory technology, a flash-based caching technology that should improve disk access performance which is scheduled to be featured on mainstream motherboards in 2010.
To add insult to injury, Handy doesn’t see a price crossover between SSDs and HDDs… actually this may never happen.
Samsung has climbed abroad the global warming bandwagon. But the Korean conglomerate hedged its do-good initiative to protect the bottom line.
The electronics and semiconductor maker set out commendable goals for cutting greenhouse gases from its manufacturing plants. It said it would slash emissions by 50 percent in the five years through 2013. It also said it would reduce the carbon impact of its products by 84 million tons.
Samsung ties eco-manufacturing initiative to sales, not overall emissions
But then it backed away from the manufacturing targets – explaining that its reductions would vary depending on sales.
Global warming of course is the environmental crisis threatening the world’s climate (and indirectly its animal and plant life). Corporations with true altruism are stepping to up reduce emissions of gases, such as carbon dioxide, just as the administration of Barack Obama reverses the head-in-the-sand approach of George Bush.
But in Samsung’s case, the reductions will be made on a “financial emissions intensity basis,” whatever that is. In plain language, the company appears to have based its reductions on sales levels, not overall emissions.
To the company’s credit, it said in a Monday press release it would invest 5.4 trillion Korean won in the manufacturing and product efforts. But then why dent the initiative with the “per-sales” restraint? Unfortunately global warming is coming whether sales increase or decrease.
The “technology collaboration” announced today between Intel and Nokia was a non-event.
On the call earlier today, both companies executives including Intel ultra-mobile guru Anand Chandrasekher who refused to talk about specific products, saying it was too premature, and only referring to some future “new class of devices.”
Furthermore, Nokia’s devices chief Kai Oistamo reiterated that the Intel deal “has no impact on our long-term relationship with ARM suppliers.” So why bother really?
Nokia and Intel to combine mobile Linux systems
But what we know however is that this “new class of devices” will run a Linux mobile operating system – probably a combination of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin – on top of a low-power Atom chip coming up next year.
“A new class of devices” that sounds very much like a netbook or a Mobile Internet Device (MID) in Intel’s lingo, to me!
Even Intel’s decision to license Nokia’s 3G data modem technology for its chips sounded like old news. Last month Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini said in an analyst briefing that Nokia’s modem technology will be used in Moblin.
So why so much noise, for so little or actually no news? Probably to remind people that unlike ARM-based competitors like Freescale, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung or Texas Instruments, Intel does not have a low-power enough chip for the “ultra-mobility” space yet!
Posted by Mark Boslet 
In a report published today, MobileTrax principal analyst Gerry Purdy calls Apple to fix the iPhone 4 faulty antenna design.
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Mark Boslet