The debate which electric transmission technology to use – either AC (alternating current) or DC (direct current) – goes back to the time of Thomas Edison, a proponent of DC.
AC seemed to have won the debate since it is the method that is widely used to bring power into our homes and businesses. But surprisingly, the debate is not settled. In a smart grid world, DC is making a comeback.
The latest DC technology, HVDC, has been called the backbone of plans for smart grids or supergrids.
Two European companies are leading the charge in HVDC – high voltage direct current – technology. These companies are Germany's Siemens ADR (NYSE: SI) and Switzerland's ABB ADR (NYSE: ABB), which control about 80% of the market.
This technology allows the transmitting of electricity at higher voltages and over longer distances with minimal power loss when compared to current transmission technology.
Transmission losses and other inefficiencies due to the use of AC power is of some consequence in the developed world since semiconductors need DC power. Just think about all the electronics and appliances in homes that have semiconductors in them. These devices have to convert AC power into DC power, generating heat and wasting energy.
In the emerging world, it is of even greater importance. Rapid economic growth has given rise to surging demand for electricity. However, many end users are far away from the actual power sources making power losses incurred over transmission lines a vital issue.
Therefore, HVDC has become a growth industry. Both Siemens and ABB estimates that HVDC will be a $10 billion business in the next five years.
The companies forecast installation of new HVDC transmission lines by 2020 with a total capacity of 250 gigawatts. This is a dramatic increase since in the last 40 years there has been just 100 gigawatts worth of HVDC transmission lines installed.
One factor holding back this technology to date is the fact that such systems have lacked flexibility, allowing only one power source and end user. The users of such systems, electric utilities, would like to make multiple connections to these power lines allowing them to switch on or off individual sections of the line. This a must for power grids in the developed countries.
But there is a problem. Companies like ABB and Siemens have yet to develop effective circuit breakers to handle the DC voltages involved. The difficulty is that the technology involves more than simply breaking a physical connection between two pieces of metal, as with AC switch technology.
Instead, researchers at the companies are trying to adapt the advanced semiconductors used by both firms in the 'converter stations' of their HVDC lines, where AC and DC power are converted back and forth. At the moment, no breakthrough seems imminent, but is inevitable.
In the years ahead, as energy research firm Pike Research said, “the role of DC will increase, and AC will decrease”.
This makes sense if only from the standpoint that power generated from renewable sources such as wind and solar produce DC power. And DC power transmission lines to get this power to end users is certain to increase.
HVDC and the companies leading way in this technology will definitely be worth watching for those investors interested in the smart grid technology space.
This article was originally writtern for the Motley Fool Blog Network. Check out my daily articles for the Fool at http://blogs.fool.com/tdalmoe/
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Monday, February 6, 2012
Apple Takes Lead in Digital Learning and Online Education
School-age children are quickly moving away from the traditional ways of learning, involving the use of paper, pencil and printed textbooks.....
The age of digital learning is upon us.
At the forefront of this new era is a company known to every investor – Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL).
The company recently announced its long-anticipated entry into the digital textbook market. It did so by unveiling a new “bookstore” for its iPad tablet, a new application for sharing university courses, online classes and a free publishing tool to help authors create interactive courses.
This is the company's first launch of a new product line since the death of Steve Jobs and therefore quite important.
The potential to improve students' results is significant. After all, children today have grown up with technology all around them all their lives.
The CEO of Discovery Education, a subsidiary of Discovery Communications (Nasdaq: DISCA), had some valuable insight on this subject. He said, “When they [students] go to schools and are asked to 'power down' and put technology away, you're not engaging them and you're going to lose them.”
Apple has wisely joined with partners in the educational publishing field to help sell their product. Some of the partners include well known names such as McGraw-Hill (NYSE: MHP) and Pearson ADR (NYSE: PSO).
These publishers and others unveiled a limited number of digital textbooks that are priced at $14.99 or less. Apple will take a 30% cut of the sales from these textbooks sold over its new iBooks 2 app.
This is a steep cut for Apple but its partners believe Apple can give the industry, with 1.4 billion students enrolled worldwide, just the rocket boost it needs.
Sales in the global textbook market are expected to reach $19.4 billion by 2013. The share of that market taken by digital textbooks is forecast to jump from just 3.4% in 2010 to 18.3% next year, especially if iBooks is a success.
Publishers are hoping iBooks succeed because they will also benefit from the switch to digital textbooks since they would no longer be burdened by the costs of printing and distribution of a traditional textbook.
Of course, it will not be entirely smooth sailing for Apple in this market.
Holding it back will be the price of its iPad - $499. Many schools simply cannot afford to buy iPads for use by their students and Apple made no mention in its presentation of offering schools a discount on its iPads. Currently, there are 1.5 million iPads being used by schools for educational purposes.
This may open the door to this market for lower-cost rivals such as the Kindle Fire from Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) which sells for only $199. The same publishers who are working with Apple have stated they are also involved in projects with Amazon and other tablet makers.
The educational market is relatively small for Apple, but its rapid growth offers Apple a wonderful opportunity to continue growing the company after the death of Steve Jobs.
But it is unlikely that iBooks will dominate the market as Apple does with music. The real winners here in the long term will be the publishers like Pearson, McGraw Hill and others.
The age of digital learning is upon us.
At the forefront of this new era is a company known to every investor – Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL).
The company recently announced its long-anticipated entry into the digital textbook market. It did so by unveiling a new “bookstore” for its iPad tablet, a new application for sharing university courses, online classes and a free publishing tool to help authors create interactive courses.
This is the company's first launch of a new product line since the death of Steve Jobs and therefore quite important.
The potential to improve students' results is significant. After all, children today have grown up with technology all around them all their lives.
The CEO of Discovery Education, a subsidiary of Discovery Communications (Nasdaq: DISCA), had some valuable insight on this subject. He said, “When they [students] go to schools and are asked to 'power down' and put technology away, you're not engaging them and you're going to lose them.”
Apple has wisely joined with partners in the educational publishing field to help sell their product. Some of the partners include well known names such as McGraw-Hill (NYSE: MHP) and Pearson ADR (NYSE: PSO).
These publishers and others unveiled a limited number of digital textbooks that are priced at $14.99 or less. Apple will take a 30% cut of the sales from these textbooks sold over its new iBooks 2 app.
This is a steep cut for Apple but its partners believe Apple can give the industry, with 1.4 billion students enrolled worldwide, just the rocket boost it needs.
Sales in the global textbook market are expected to reach $19.4 billion by 2013. The share of that market taken by digital textbooks is forecast to jump from just 3.4% in 2010 to 18.3% next year, especially if iBooks is a success.
Publishers are hoping iBooks succeed because they will also benefit from the switch to digital textbooks since they would no longer be burdened by the costs of printing and distribution of a traditional textbook.
Of course, it will not be entirely smooth sailing for Apple in this market.
Holding it back will be the price of its iPad - $499. Many schools simply cannot afford to buy iPads for use by their students and Apple made no mention in its presentation of offering schools a discount on its iPads. Currently, there are 1.5 million iPads being used by schools for educational purposes.
This may open the door to this market for lower-cost rivals such as the Kindle Fire from Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) which sells for only $199. The same publishers who are working with Apple have stated they are also involved in projects with Amazon and other tablet makers.
The educational market is relatively small for Apple, but its rapid growth offers Apple a wonderful opportunity to continue growing the company after the death of Steve Jobs.
But it is unlikely that iBooks will dominate the market as Apple does with music. The real winners here in the long term will be the publishers like Pearson, McGraw Hill and others.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Smartphone Usage Expands in Emerging Markets
There is a trend in the technology and telecommunications spaces that has gone almost completely unnoticed by U.S. investors. That trend is the rapid expansion of entry-level smartphone usage in emerging markets.
Low-cost semiconductor technology has pushed down the price of a basic smartphone to below $100 in emerging markets over the past year.
In emerging markets such as India, high prices have been the main reason there has not been widespread use of smartphones. High prices have slowed the adoption of smartphones such as Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone and phones using Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) Android operating system in these markets.
The new microchip design changing the smartphone market in developing countries was developed by the British company, ARM Holdings ADR (Nasdaq: ARMH).
The company has another microchip, the Cortex A7 processor, in the works by 2013 that will further advance the use of low-cost smartphones. It will be one-fifth the size of those used in other smartphones and five times more efficient. Arm says it will enable entry level smartphones below $100 which will be equivalent to a high-end $500 smartphone in 2010.
This is an important breakthrough. The CEO of Arm, Warren East, said “The sub-$100 price point is when we can start to talk about connecting the next billion people to internet content and services over mobile devices.”
The base of smartphones costing less than $100 is already estimated to be about 200 million, with the majority of those phones have been bought in the past year.
Now research from the consulting firm Deloitte says adoption of these cheap smartphones is expected to be even more rapid. Deloitte forecasts take-up of these low-cost smartphones to more than double in 2012 to above 500 million!
This development will help Arm Holdings to maintain its dominance in the mobile phone and tablet market. Chips, using its designs, are already in on the most popular products like Apple's iPhone and iPad devices.
Needless to say, it will also raise demand for connected devices, applications and the spectrum needed to carry vast amounts of data in the emerging world.
Deloitte predicts, for instance, the number of applications available on smartphones to double in 2012 to more than 2 million as a result of the popularity of $100 smartphones in emerging nations.
It will also obviously help the manufacturers of these low-cost smartphones such as Nokia ADR (NYSE: NOK), which remains a leader in mobile phone sales in emerging markets. Nokia was expected to have sold over 400 million phones in 2011, of which more than 300 million were sold in emerging markets.
The worry here for Nokia and others is whether players like Korea's Samsung and Apple will come out with low-cost versions of their successful smartphones. These two companies have surpassed Nokia as the biggest global manufacturers of smartphones last year.
No doubt Apple and Samsung will do so – Samsung is already pushing $200 versions of its Galaxy smartphone in emerging markets.
So the window for Nokia to regain its dominant position in emerging markets may be a narrow one.
This artciel was originally written for the Motley Fool Blog Network. To read all of my daily article for the Motley Fool, please go http://blogs.fool.com/tdalmoe/
Low-cost semiconductor technology has pushed down the price of a basic smartphone to below $100 in emerging markets over the past year.
In emerging markets such as India, high prices have been the main reason there has not been widespread use of smartphones. High prices have slowed the adoption of smartphones such as Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone and phones using Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) Android operating system in these markets.
The new microchip design changing the smartphone market in developing countries was developed by the British company, ARM Holdings ADR (Nasdaq: ARMH).
The company has another microchip, the Cortex A7 processor, in the works by 2013 that will further advance the use of low-cost smartphones. It will be one-fifth the size of those used in other smartphones and five times more efficient. Arm says it will enable entry level smartphones below $100 which will be equivalent to a high-end $500 smartphone in 2010.
This is an important breakthrough. The CEO of Arm, Warren East, said “The sub-$100 price point is when we can start to talk about connecting the next billion people to internet content and services over mobile devices.”
The base of smartphones costing less than $100 is already estimated to be about 200 million, with the majority of those phones have been bought in the past year.
Now research from the consulting firm Deloitte says adoption of these cheap smartphones is expected to be even more rapid. Deloitte forecasts take-up of these low-cost smartphones to more than double in 2012 to above 500 million!
This development will help Arm Holdings to maintain its dominance in the mobile phone and tablet market. Chips, using its designs, are already in on the most popular products like Apple's iPhone and iPad devices.
Needless to say, it will also raise demand for connected devices, applications and the spectrum needed to carry vast amounts of data in the emerging world.
Deloitte predicts, for instance, the number of applications available on smartphones to double in 2012 to more than 2 million as a result of the popularity of $100 smartphones in emerging nations.
It will also obviously help the manufacturers of these low-cost smartphones such as Nokia ADR (NYSE: NOK), which remains a leader in mobile phone sales in emerging markets. Nokia was expected to have sold over 400 million phones in 2011, of which more than 300 million were sold in emerging markets.
The worry here for Nokia and others is whether players like Korea's Samsung and Apple will come out with low-cost versions of their successful smartphones. These two companies have surpassed Nokia as the biggest global manufacturers of smartphones last year.
No doubt Apple and Samsung will do so – Samsung is already pushing $200 versions of its Galaxy smartphone in emerging markets.
So the window for Nokia to regain its dominant position in emerging markets may be a narrow one.
This artciel was originally written for the Motley Fool Blog Network. To read all of my daily article for the Motley Fool, please go http://blogs.fool.com/tdalmoe/
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