“…Amazon also said that three newspapers, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, would begin offering devices this summer at a reduced price to subscribers who sign up for long-term subscriptions. But few details were available, and both Amazon and the newspapers described it as a pilot program.”

Since the new Kindle is very expensive at $489 list, I doubt this meets the necessary price point, but I’ll be looking at the deal as a way to supplement the fast- evaporating LA Times.

The discussion about what to do about the death of newspapers has been marked by futile hand wringing from obsolete newspaper people, and silly statements from the internet Pollyannas, with a few interesting experiments in hyper-local news coming online. But it comes down to the fact that reporters and editors need to be paid , and so news organizations need a revenue stream.

On the hardware side, newsprint will be replaced by something. Laptops, iPhones ( yes, really) , and desktops, are not comfortable for sitting around reading, especially for the over 40 set who actually read newspapers. The technical problem is the screen. Size, weight, resolution, power need, and color are all issues to be solved. In the small formats, like the Kindle and Sony eReader, the E Ink screen is said to be quite good, but lacks size, and color. Large format screens like your desktop suffer from weight, power, portability, and illumination issues. Laptops fall into the barely good enough for a work-around category. News reports have been saying that larger color versions of the E Ink screen will solve the hardware problem. And today stories appeared saying just such a screen is near delivery, and deals are being made with newspapers ( see references below).

Stretched Kindle Image by Gizmodo

Selling the new screen will not solve the news organizations’ revenue problem, even if they get some of the profit from screen sales, which is doubtful. Until and if ad revenue fills the gap, they need subscription sales to fund the business, and likely thereafter. The Wall St Journal and Bloomberg have had some success at selling content, but few if any other services have attracted subscribers. (and Bloomberg uses dedicated terminals)

Proposed: Subscribe the Screen

News organizations could rent you a reader, as cable companies do now with set-tops and DVRs. Twenty to forty dollars a month should be quite a nice sum over three years hardware lifetime say, and subscribers would be tied, but not locked-in, to the supplier, in the way they are tied to cable companies. Subscribers wouldn’t have to worry about getting stuck with an unusable reader, or repairs. Because they would have hardware and software control, news orgs could figure out the marketing balance of exclusive content ( perhaps lasting 24 hours) vs free internet. Obvious tie-ins would be available like click-through ads to generate more revenue. There are many angles to be worked out in this model, but the elegance of it is that it removes the two essential problems: the initial cost hurdle of the $300+ readers and reinstates control over content distribution ( like the Bloomberg terminal), yet leaves an open platform that can be upgraded. Additional services can be tested later in the market because the basic platform would be there, and generating income.

Less Appealing Alternatives:
Google and the other companies with major internet ad revenue could set aside some percentage of their take for a non-profit AP-like version of NPR and PBS, without government support, or corporate interference. Or we could have a BBC, funded by a tax on devices. Or we could have ad-funded internet sites and flabby TV news as we do now, with virtually no local coverage (hooray! say the local pols until they realize “no coverage” means invisibility) and reality-show news aimed at the ninth-grade set.

What Amazon May Be Planning:
The Kindle costs over $300 and requires a monthly subscription, and creates a locked-in market for Amazon e-book sales. If Amazon lowered the initial cost for the new large-format reader to compete with monthly newspaper subscription costs, they undoubtedly would get a huge customer response. But if this is Amazon’s model, it won’t feed the reporters who create the content. In effect it feeds the weakest link in the delivery system, the aggregator, where the actual value is created by the device maker and the content provider. It is being reported that News Corp, Hearst and Plastic Logic are also planning to market large-format readers soon, so we might see multiple strategies.

So count this as gallows humor.

AIG has been given roughly $185 billion.

Zero electric motorcycles announced today that they are selling a street legal version of their electric dirt bike at about $10,000 less a ten percent federal tax credit.

Zero street legal lithium-powered supermotard

Tesla automobiles has already sold a few of their all-electric high-performance sports cars at about $100k.

Tesla electric roadster

If we had used the money from the AIG bailout to actually support American companies that make things, it could have funded:

9,250,000 Zero electric motorcycles or equivalent.

(Honda sold about 15 million units world-wide in 2008. All makers sold about 1 million motorcycles and scooters in the US in 2008.)

Plus,

925,000 Tesla cars.

(BMW sold about 1.4 million cars in 2008 world-wide.)

So with one bailout package we could have created an American motorcycle company selling electric bikes as the second-largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world. And we could have jump-started an all-electric car manufacturer to nearly two thirds the size of BMW. Not to mention establishing a dominating presence in the clean transportation industry of tomorrow.

Somehow I’m not laughing all the way to the bank.

references:
motorcycle sales
Zero
Tesla
AIG bailout

Accounting methods which shortsightedly neglect maintenance across all types of private infrastructure, causing future breakdowns and vast repair costs.
The declining maintenance and investment curve of oil companies as they see increasing taxation, and reduced assets into the future.
A nasty interaction between fluctuating oil prices, supply, credit, and infrastructure maintenance.
Yet another example of simplistic free-market economics failing to handle long-term community issues.

Clump it altogether under Peak Oil, and the interrelationship of a pessimistic oil future ( POV: oil companies), unpredictable supply vs demand and hence price, plus a crashing world economy, the general failure of political institutions to plan for the future, and the complete failure of macro-economics to guide us though this change from an oil economy to some other energy source(s).

Unlike almost all other Web2.0 sites, the comments are a must-read. In an area ripe for conspiracy theorists, actual oil industry engineers weigh in. Just like grown-ups. Imagine!

by sicasu

My comments: Just yesterday articles ran on the anniversary of the Exxon Valdez spill pointing out that Exxon still runs the same type of tanker today. If Exxon thinks that a fresh fleet of tankers won’t be have enough oil in future to carry to full amortization, then this makes a lot of financial sense for them, but not for us. In fairness to the oil companies, their supplies outside the developed world are more and more being controlled by governments, including China, their distribution and sales in the developed world are likely to be squeezed harder and harder by various carbon taxes and environmental rules, and the two great growth markets, China and India, are closed or government controlled. Yet they sell an absolutely essential product, one that will remain essential for decades. Perhaps just knowing it will all come to an end in their childrens’ lifetime is enough to deflate them a bit.

One point rarely covered in the economic press, but with almost daily comment on The Oil Drum, is the connection between the end of the petroleum economy (Peak Oil) and our current financial meltdown. Failure to plan our energy infrastructure worldwide is central to our current crisis. Later on we will be hit with the costs of global warming, and right now we have to spend immense sums to retool for more sustainable energy sources. The few billion allocated in Obama’s first budget is just a trickle of what’s to come.

If Reagan had not been elected to wipe out the nascent Carter-era sustainable energy subsidies, we in America might be 10 or 20 years ahead of our current situation. If Bush had not wasted eight years… but that’s all the past now.

try
“motorcycle=red”
“chair=brown”

here’s more information from Google.
They say “(you can replace “red” with “blue”, “green”, “teal”, “purple”, “yellow”, “orange”, “pink”, “white”, “gray”, “black” and “brown”)”

Messing with the URL also works, and produces different results:
http://images.google.com/images?q=bird&imgcolor=red

If I was the only person who didn’t know this, so be it.

bad banks

I’ve been wondering, probably most people have, just why we need to support these elephantine vampires, The Banks, while they’ve been run into the ground by sociopaths. I mean, what have they ever done for me? Well this very pleasant episode illustrates what they are and how big they are, and what might be done about them, and whats been done the last few times this has happened. I recommend it, but since I heard it once, and have the special privileges of the convalescent, I am going to watch some Rocky and Bullwinkle DVDs instead.

Listening to NPR today ask a pundit about the proposed shut-down of Saturday mail service, I went through the usual 3 steps of techno-guy reaction.
First I sneered at snail mail. Second, I questioned the value of Saturday mail and mail delivery in general. Third I thought of one entity that would be hurt, the biggest single user of the US Mail, Netflix.

But then it hit me: ending Saturday mail delivery will save one sixth of the greenhouse gases and nasty pollution and fuel use and depreciation caused by that huge fleet of mail trucks. It might also have a tiny, but measurable effect on traffic, which would also save a little pollution and fuel. Plus all those workers won’t be commuting, and those long-haul trucks won’t be delivering to the distribution centers.

Then I thought: what if all non-retail non-essential business shut down on Saturday, wouldn’t that have the same positive result, only much larger?

Last I realized that the very best way to do this is just have a voluntary 4 day work week. Sure, some large segment of the economy can’t do this, but I bet the majority of firms could. We could run the stock exchanges 4 days, the government offices 4 days, office workers could go 4 days. It doesn’t need to be enacted into law, that’s too rigid and inefficient. But here’s a chance to ask for a nationwide sacrifice that might actually have personal benefits, like more time with children, more time to help others, more time to learn new skills. More time for relaxing would itself pay dividends. Employers would save money on energy, at least.

Victory gardens and war bonds may come later in this down cycle, but for now, I think a four-day work week would be a good idea.

here are three of thousands of sites that have also suggested it:
MotherJones on a 4 day school plan
Utah tries it
a blog discusses the ramifications

The Situation
Many of us have been stunned by the size of the banking collapse and bailout. First, old pinstripe investment banks turn out to be mountains of toxic paper and leverage, run by con men, then vast amounts of taxpayer money are thrown at the banking system overnight to no effect, only to be followed by literally trillions of unaccounted dollars from the Fed. Then, when actual manufacturing businesses, the automakers, come to Washington, the New York set couldn’t care less.

Without repeating the details covered elsewhere, let’s just say that the heretofore academic and obscure critique of American business as too little manufacturing and far too much F.I.R.E. ( finance insurance real estate) has become a commonplace in the media. Now we are in real danger of losing the domestic part of the auto industry to bankruptcy.

Some Introspection
Who are we, this nation whose wealth is based on financial transactions? Where is the economy built on farmers, ranchers, and mechanics? Who are these frightened fat people who buy buy buy at Walmart, and have no town pharmacy or clothing store? When did bankers become PT Barnums running a gigantic Ponzi scheme? Is there really no one left outside the Berkshire-Hathaway empire and the computer biz that builds a business year by year?

We Need a Standard
Clearly there are jobs that must be done, like firefighter, cop, and doctor. There are jobs that can make other jobs more efficient or valuable, like sales, accounting, and insurance. There is a powerful fast-moving global financial system that can underwrite world-wide trade. And then there are jobs that make something. These are the jobs that produce real wealth. These are the jobs that provide the raison d’etre for the supporting jobs. The current crisis makes it clear that runaway FIRE business not only detracts from real wealth and prosperity by rerouting resources that should have gone into valuable jobs, but can actually reach a toxic level where it destroys the financial infrastructure. Put differently, we can afford a few residents of Richistan, but turning over the whole banking sector to them leads to a looting of the nation’s wealth.

The nation is in for some tough times restructuring the economy. We need a value standard to use when planning new business and government spending. What jobs are valuable and what are a drain on the society? We can’t go with my personal list or with yours: we need a general way of evaluating work that we can all agree on. For instance, we have to decide what banks will be allowed to do, and what they will be required to do.

Value Added
Here’s a simple way of looking at the value of economic work: Value Added. Value Added simply means that your work took some raw materials and made them into something more valuable. Whether you added dollar value or social value is irrelevant, you made something better. It’s as simple as that, value added is good, value consumed is bad. Any individual job is hard to quantify, and all of us backslide some days and march forward others. But maybe when you are deciding to call your next meeting, you might think, ” Will we lose more production by taking these people off-line, than we gain by meeting?” When you invest, ask, ” Is this a company that makes something, or are they just moving paper around?” When we examine governmental health care proposals, lets ask, “Will this help us compete with foreign sources, will it make health delivery more efficient, will it allow people to work for small companies and start-ups with no insurance?”

Parasitic Work
There has been a ubiquitous de-coupling of wealth from value-creation. We folks outside the inner financial circle hardly knew how much before this collapse, but people of real wealth no longer feed it like the Founding Fathers on trade and agriculture, or like the rust-belt barons on steel and cars. Real wealth today is built like the Robber Barons, on sleazy governmental give-aways and land deals and stock manipulations, and now complex computer-generated pseudo-money-contracts. And giant retailers like Walmart are just growing by squeezing out the smaller competitors, they aren’t making anything new. Or making anything at all.

“The Kept Dollar is a Stinking Fish”
This free-floating wealth is parasitic, it is not beholden or dependent on a region, a nation even. It does not rely on a workforce or raw material. And worst of all, it’s not available capital for businesses: it’s locked up in credit-default swaps, insurance on insurance on paper, and other abstruse and dubious entities. When the wealth has no social ties, it naturally encourages a kind of rich-man’s anarchy. In the past, wealth was based on agriculture, manufacturing, and trade. Sure there were plenty of sleazy deals, swindles, and usury, but they weren’t the majority of the economy. Now, wealth is based on swooping in, and making a bet, gathering up the chips and vanishing.

Let’s test the idea of Value Added:
Farmer – takes soil, and seeds and makes food. Value added.
Hedge fund manager – takes capital, borrows more capital, and risks it all in an attempt to make more capital. The capital never goes to work, nothing is created, so this behavior is parasitic. Value depleted.
Venture capitalist – takes capital and funds new business with it. Value added.
Traditional banker – Lends for housing, construction, manufacturing plant and equipment. Businesses are built, jobs created. Value added.
New style bonus-driven banker – Constantly searching for new and bigger short-term wins to make his annual bonus bigger. Never invests in long-term projects. Nothing created except risk. Parasite. Value depleted.
Corporate raider, CEO, investment banker – they may improve efficiency of system by reorganizing sick companies, but almost always they just spend on non-productive mergers, or loot current value-added assets. Usually parasitic. Value depleted.

Conclusion:
Sure there are lots of edge conditions where its hard to say what value is added or subtracted. Environmental and social costs are not well accounted for in our system, but that’s a subject for the Green Economic Revolution. But two simple words express the general idea- Value Added. If you are not adding value, you are a net cost rather than an asset. Think about it.

References:

Niall Ferguson article on the immense size of F.I.R.E
Chris Martenson series on the whole enchilada of financial upheaval.

What’s to be done?

The choices:
	The ice floe: Let them die with the polar bears. Suppliers will crash and burn, and who knows how Michigan will survive.
photo by Reason	Show them the money: Nobody will buy their assets in this market. ( Solarworld offered to take Opel as a freebie today) Bankruptcy isn’t going to provide quick revenue to support the whole rickety framework, so the Feds would have to provide some kind of guaranteed market like Federal fleet sales and buyer rebates, and support for R&D, and try to get a rapid program in place to retool.

The problem with letting them die, is that they may drown us too. A huge number of jobs and businesses depend on the Big 3 car businesses. Numbers are quoted as high as 10% of all jobs are indirectly affected by the car business. Cities will be besieged with falling taxes, failing business, collapsing housing. Unemployment will soar, and Federal costs will too as the safety net gets hit with a wave of the jobless.

The problem with bailing them out is that it may be throwing good money after bad. The basic problem with pumping money into failing behemoths is you are using a very expensive, blunt instrument to do surgery. It very well may not work, and political pressures could easily pollute the Congressional effort with giveaways. Bickering between the Democratic leadership in Congress and the lame-duck Bush administration is not helping. The folks in Richistan have long ago taken their money out of manufacturing, and indeed out of the country, so they don’t care.

The long view:
Either the prognosticators are right and the Big 3 are already zombies, or they aren’t and there is some hope for restructuring of one or two. In both cases it’s the suddenness of the collapse and the terrible timing that make it so awful. The Big 3 have been giving away market share for decades and the Republic is still standing, sort of. So if you could slow the demise, and at the same time strongly encourage lightweight, modern cars and trucks, with a frantic race to hypercar manufacturing, it might be possible to avoid the worst effects of the collapse, and use the direness of the situation to push through much-needed restructuring of labor and management.

The greatest obstacles to this approach are the blockheads in management, the blockheads in Congress, and the desperate UAW. Bankruptcy of some sort is so attractive because it means some judge, and not an elected representative, will be telling the UAW folks that 50% are laid off and the other 50% are getting wages cut in half. Presumably the same judge would seize control and clean house in the white-collar departments, sell off the fancy buildings, cancel the golden parachutes, and generally machete his way through the mess. It still might not work, because car sales are so slow that competing with the healthy carmakers is a daunting prospect. It would take a big discount to get a sensible buyer into a Ford Focus/Chevy Cobalt over a Toyota or even Hyundai, when everyone knows Ford and Chevy may go kaput, taking their dealers with them.

The ugly:
I think a lot of the pious declarations of free-market discipline are fueled by irrational anti-union sentiment. It is clear the UAW is dying, but union inefficiency does not mean jobs ought to be wasted. Sure a Democrat really can’t deliver the death sentence to a unionized industry, but they might well allow the lame-ducks to do it.

What if:
What if a benevolent industrial dictator from the WWII era were given the nationalized hulk of GM? Leaving Chrysler to die, and Ford to try it alone, he could forget profits while revamping the company from top to bottom. Of course this presumes there is something worth saving.

My guess:
Stretching out the process may be the best that can be done with the Big 3. Facing extinction, might, just might, startle them into serious change. Ford is most likely to survive. The most important long-term goals for the nation are restoring our manufacturing capability, and providing 21rst century green transportation as soon as possible. The Big 3 and the UAW can get on the train or be left behind. For the computer-biz kids from the coasts the idea of re-starting an industry from scratch may seem commonplace, but if that’s the way it goes, then surely those people in the Midwest are in for some cascading failures of small business, and some really tough times.

The Problem:
GM, Ford and Chrysler are spending more money than they take in. The burn rate is fast enough to leave GM penniless in a few months. No one, except possibly the taxpayer, will lend them money, figuring it would be good money after bad. The stock market is devaluing GM to the point than a billionaire could simply buy all the stock (which is really buying the debt).

GM falling stock price chart There is not much value left there….

A good article at Seeking Alpha

	Two truly stupid models.
Pontiac Aztec		Ford Excursion

The Money Situation:
The market seems to think privately-owned Chrysler is a goner. Ford has a little more money than GM, but is essentially in the same boat, even if it could take over GM’s domestic market share. Vast numbers of vendor and related jobs depend on the Big 3, 2-3 million has been quoted. Its easy to guess that a sudden loss of that many jobs would tip us into a depression. Worldwide, manufacturing and transportation businesses are in deep trouble, from Boeing and Airbus, to the world-wide shipping industry, to China itself.

The Political Situation:
It’s hard to see how any President, let alone a Democrat who just carried the Midwest, can suck it up and let GM die. And then there is that Depression looming. Nobody wants to be Herbert Hoover.

The Design Problem:
American companies have once again ( see 1970’s) failed to plan for rising gas prices, and are caught with aging designs that weigh too much, push too much air, and consume too much. They have not diversified with small vehicles, in spite of having successful off-shore small-car companies. They have not invested in in-house powertrain research, like hybrids and batteries. Their bit of fuel-cell research is pie-in-the-sky stuff, with no path to manufacture. The one bright spot is the Chevy Volt, not yet ready for manufacture, and never intended to be sold in large quantities.

The Culture Problem:
In four decades while the Japanese and Germans were optimizing their labor-hours-per-car, time-to-market, and reliability, Detroit was selling SUVs and trucks as commuter cars, with haphazard work on future manufacturing. With a few loss-leader exceptions like the Dodge Viper and Ford GT40 and long-running Chevrolet Corvette, Detroit made cars carelessly for people who are careless about cars, neglecting both the Apple Computer (cars as digital appliances) end of the market and the performance end (import tuners). They did great with the size-is-status market.

The Labor Problem:
The labor problem is partly the healthcare and pensioner problem. The Big 3 hourly employees are still dependent on the mother company for healthcare ( there’s an unfunded plan to transfer to UAW) and so are the pensioners, whose healthcare and pensions are not fully funded either. Further, the future is not with the UAW, so it may end up fighting the greater communal good in favor of its own survival.

The Rewards Problem:
The short-sightedness of Detroit has long been publicly discussed. Foreign manufacturers seem to be planning design changes in sync with changing market conditions with success, though all will be hurt by the sudden downturn in world-wide sales. Rewarding dismal failure just ain’t American somehow.

Past Examples

examples of the kind of thing I mean:
Switch from whale oil to petroleum
The rudder
Industrial steel
Aniline dye and the synthetic chemical industry
Packet switched computer networks
Semiconductors
Telegraph and so on…

Past successes look obvious from the future, but it is inherent in the nature of disruptive technologies that the really important ones solve problems that aren’t obvious at all. So by this measure whatever is not on this list could be a real whiz-bang idea. But I’ll plunge forward anyway, heedless of the cost.

Future

With the looming greenhouse gas crisis, and massive over-population, energy ideas top the list. But some think that water and good agricultural dirt may be the scarcest resources in the future.

Energy

Most obvious:
Cheap and efficient solar cells. Solar roofing, thin flexible films, solar paints and printing. Current glass-mounted cells cost roughly $700 for 100W, which is too much to pay back even with $0.15/kwh grid power. Many researchers are working on the problem, and new announcements come weekly. For example catalytic breakup of H2O.

The low-tech route: cheap parabolic solar and MIT group builds a low-cost reflector to generate steam.

infra-red solar power Useful for both daytime, and nighttime, plus waste heat recovery.

Everybody’s favorite, fusion power:
Imagine multi-megawatt generators without pollution. Commercial success is still decades away, though the Europeans and the Brits are spending on research.

One attempt to commercialize fusion.

Small energy harvesting:
Various schemes have been proposed for reclaiming small amounts of waste energy. Just as hybrid vehicles recover some motive energy from braking, we could recover energy from waste heat at air conditioners, auto engines, sun-heated paving. Medical researchers are proposing to generate electricity from body chemistry, and from movement. More radical are the self-powered sensors that harvest enough energy from their environment to forgo batteries.

Using radio signals to power sensors
Parasitic power devices.

Artificial photosynthesis
The grand pattern for harvesting solar energy is photosynthesis. An understanding of how it works could lead to genetic manipulation, and creations of more efficient bio-fuels.

One of many starts

Small scale wind power without tall towers:
Efficient wind turbines need to be well above rooflines and trees. This is a problem for residential generation. Some have proposed tethered kites and blimps. Windbelt. There are pilot projects that use harmonic vibration in wires to make small amounts of power. These do not require complex turbines or towers, and so may be useful in the third world.

Clean, sustainable bio-fuels:
Bio-fuels are already being made from all manner of organic materials, from sewage and manure, to algae, to waste agricultural products, crops, even coal. The problem is that none of these processes are truly carbon-neutral and most have other negative side-effects like disruption in agricultural markets.
Craig Ventner has announced that he will produce carbon-negative fuel from genetically-engineered bacteria that feed on CO2.

Efficient hydrogen storage:
Hydrogen is extremely clean, and good for fuel cells, even internal combustion engines, but it is devilishly difficult to store. Current technologies use extreme pressure, liquification or chemical matrices, none of which are suitable for cars. Some work is being done with ammonia and catalyzed water, as liquid fuels are ideal for transportation.

Efficient hydrogen production:
Hydrogen is extremely common, but bound up in compounds which are expensive to break down. Researchers are working on various biologic methods of producing hydrogen, similar to those for methane and the alcohols. This gets into artificial photosynthesis, where the bio-fuel research is also headed.
Here is a very interesting development.

Cheap powerful batteries:
Today’s Lithium batteries today are expensive, and extremely awkward to make into usable packs for electric cars. Researchers are working on nanotech methods of improving the weight, cost, and maintenance, though the power density may not go up much. And today’s power density isn’t high enough for gasoline-like range at low weights.

Low power lighting
Low power lighting has been with us since the 1980’s, but in the form of compact flourescents that use mercury and have an awkward package. LEDs are reaching the same efficiency, their price is coming down, and they are wondefully small and long-lived. For instance, Toshiba makes white LEDs at about 51 lumens per watt (a 100 w oldfashioned lamp is 17 lumens per watt) and is comparable with CFLs and even with the best gas discharge lights like automotive HID.
Cree may be even better.
More data.

Materials

You can argue that much of the quest for new materials is just the flip side of the quest for cheaper energy. After all, the problem with current materials is that they are too heavy or they require too much energy to mine, process, or machine. But Nanotechnologists may also claim that they are making materials that do things that couldn’t be done at all before. There are two basic patterns for new materials: lighter-stronger-cheaper-less corrosion, and chemically or electrically active.

Cheap wiring:
Electrical wiring is almost exclusively copper. It is expensive and environmentally unclean in production, prone to corrosion, heavy, and inelastic. A cheap, elastic, conductive alternative could save money and weight in all kinds of machines.

High temperature superconductors:
(see cheap wiring)
Transmission wires for the electrical grid that have little to no resistance at room temperature.

Smart mulch:
An agricultural mulch that generates electricity from sunlight to power irrigation pumps, and controls moisture loss, rain penetration, insects, and diseases.

Structural composites:
Composites to substitute for aluminum and steel, with less weight, more elasticity, more corrosion resistance, lower manufacturing costs, Carbon fiber and its relatives already hit some of these points, but it is inelastic and very expensive as a material and in the manufacturing process. Amory Lovin’s Rocky Mountain Institute has been developing a carbon-reinforced plastic that can be mass-produced.
Here’s a patent.

Spider silk:
Spider silk is famously the strongest fiber known. It is also bio-degradable. Various genetic engineering and nanotech approaches are being used to copy or duplicate it in industrial form. Tensile strength is one of the most important qualities in hundreds of products, from tires to structural composites to cables and ropes, so success here will make all manner of light, strong products available.

Resources

Water purification and desalinization:
The third world especially will need small, cheap, low-energy ways to clean water for drinking and irrigation. Global warming changes are accelerating damage done by over-pumping and polluting.
Deka generator/purifier

Farming without soil degradation:
The Romans knew how to do it, but failed to execute. So too the Mayans and virtually every other agricultural civilization. Soil is produced naturally from rock, but the process is much slower than the erosion cuased by bad tillage, and the ecologic depletion caused by hyper-cultivating monocultures.

Robots

The harder problems in robotics – machine vision, autonomy, voice recognition and speech synthesis are finally yielding to sustained research. ( see jawfish ) The first widespread use of mobile robots is in the military, where the cost equation is very favorable. Surely just as cheap IEDs defeat expensive Humvees in Iraq, there will be a tidal wave of cheap, disposable, attack robots used against expensive complex and human targets. I can’t see any good coming out of this prospect, but I can see disruptive change.

But civilian robotics could restore some manufacturing to first-world countries, making supply-chains shorter, and re-invigorating the economy. But don’t expect a good house-cleaning bot any time soon.

Medicine

There may be more innovation coming in health and medicine than all the other fields listed combined, and so I’ll just focus an a couple that might have very-wide reaching effects.

Brain science:
Suddenly, teams of biologists, physicists, doctors, and engineers are building an empirical science of the how the brain works. While the anecdotal guesses of Freud are long behind us, understanding of even the most basic brain traits is a long way ahead. At least we know and agree that we still don’t understand very much, but we do know some things about brain performance. It’s not unreasonable to think that great advances in brain-drugs and brain-training are possible, leading to greater happiness and intelligence, however unmeasurable. Simply learning to control our metabolism to keep neurons strong and fat low would be a huge boon in the developed world. The dark side is also always there, though, development of these drugs will also target addiction pathways and abuse.

Long range birth control:
Pure Speculation Department- if the political will existed, use of cheap, long lasting implantable birth control would be a huge boon. We seem so close to this, and yet we still can’t have programs that pay girls to avoid pregnancy.

Who’s holding up the train?

What’s stopping all this innovation? In some cases nothing, for instance, the cost of petroleum is now high enough to create a bio-fuel industry. Lack of capital and researchers may hinder many projects, though venture capital is finding its way into many of these ideas because the commercial prospects are huge.

But there are many technical solutions that require infrastructure changes, or market regulation, or temporary subsidy. There are many powerful entrenched Luddites who deny the science of global warming out of ignorance or for political ends. American governmental capital has been re-routed into war in the oil-fields for more than five years, and now into the Wall St. bail-out. Many solutions require global cooperation, which is increasingly difficult across the developed vs developing vs undeveloped divides. In short, while our mechanical and chemical and computing skills increase every year, our human skills and institutions barely change. And the very worst of all the human problems, over-population, is not up for discussion in the fastest-growing parts of the world.

Over-population is like a rising flood that will eventually negate the ability of third-world countries to develop, and will continue to plague first-world countries with intractable immigration issues.

So the technology that is going nowhere is human-management. We don’t seem to be much better at making group decisions based on rationality than we were as cavemen or even chimps. And our innate aggression has been outrun by our technical ability to make weapons. The coming robot revolution in the military may make that dilemma even worse.