We may remember Energy Recovery Inc. as the starting point for Clean Tech era in stock markets. Although not many are in line for the near future IPO window, strong commitments of VCs (here and here) would be reasonable indicators for a productive IPO market 5-10 years ahead.

Let’s mark the Energy Recovery Inc. IPO details here and track the progress to see whether this water desalination company with ever-efficient energy usage beats the market in the long run.

Ticker: ERII

Market: NASDAQ

IPO Price: 8.50 US$

Money Raised: 119 million US$

MCap: 471 million US$ (based on yesterday’s closing price of 9.83 US$)

Financials: In 2007, Energy Recovery’s earnings rose to $5.8 million from $2.4 million in 2006. The company’s revenue grew to $35.4 million from $20.1 million.

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I really wonder whether there is anything in the world that is, by nature, inappropriate for open-source porting.

When I read about DimDim in ReadWriteWeb here, I was surprised that nobody get into the field of WebEx with the open-source lenses that DimDim used. In three bullet-points I can summarize what DimDim does and why they do what they do in a great way.

1. DimDim lets people connect, write and talk to each other while sharing their desktops and slides. This is what many others (and other others) offer. The DimDim’s killer feature is that the connectivity features are all inside the browser, with no need of software installation.
2. Its revenue model is quite flexible for different types of organizations. Big corporations get the same fee approach with good savings vs. other services. Small companies share a percent of the revenues and start-ups get the service free in exchange of the start-ups’ engineering staff’s contribution to DimDim’s open-source platform.
3. Continuing from 2nd bullet, the platform being open-source is a huge gain by itself. And the penetration model for start-ups inherently supports the development of the system towards the excellence.

My only comment for DimDim, which is almost half joke and half opinion ( ), is that big corporations may see its funny name as a penetration barrier.

Great work…

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On September 27th, 2006 I was so enthusiastic. I wrote an e-mail to Tom Fischer, then VP of EMEA for Pay By Touch, an innovative Biometrics company. It was almost one year I got out of college and Pay By Touch was on top of my wishlist for my entrepreneurial aspirations. Among many ideas, Pay By Touch became my favorite beucase I thought it really cut some serious friction out of people’s lives, by giving them an alternative payment method: biometric identifying information tied to people’s credit cards and bank accounts. I guess I was wrong. Totally wrong. Yet, I am glad I learnt it the easy way.

The way I was denied was a bit of failure for me. I applied with a detailed business plan depicting how to expand into Turkey, which merchants to start partnership and which banking institutions to get alliance. VP Tom Fischer had replied with a standard e-mail of denial and the rest is history.

Here is the e-mail I received:

Dear Mr Dogan

I returned from my US trip this morning having discussed your proposals with my US colleagues. While we appreciate your interest in Pay By Touch, we are not looking to expand our operations into Turkey at this point.

We do believe that Pay By Touch is applicable globally and intend to provide the service around the world in the future. As our international expansion plans evolve we would be pleased to explore the possibility of a partnership with your organization. However, we would not anticipate this taking place for another 12–18 months.

We would like to keep your details on file and will contact you at the appropriate time. I have copied your details to my colleague Gus Spanos who is the Executive responsible for Investor relationships.

Thank you again for your interest in Pay By Touch.

Best regards

Tom Fischer

Vice President

And here is the Pay By Touch landing page as of March 28th, 2008 (click for a readable copy):

So, sometimes denial is really meant for good.

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I am pretty convinced that majority of the global population will not give up letting their computers open while they are not using it. The result? Millions of kilowatts lost to unnecessary heat and CPU computing time.

So why don’t computer producers preinstall some distributed computing programs (e.g. Stanford University’s Folding @ Home project) and give the users the choice to opt-out from the project, rather than today’s opt-in setting?

My words are especially emphasized for Sony, which overloads its laptops with trial versions of several software packages such as Sony Vegas, MS Office and Norton.

The catch here is that, the best thing an individual can do for environment is to shut down the computer while not in use. But if you won’t do it, then make that energy loss a little bit meaningful…

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Every weekday, I wake up at 06:30 and head for the rendezvous point for my company shuttle for a one-hour drive. Usually, the service shuttle picks me no later than 07:15, a point in time that most of the people are still asleep. Today was just one of those ordinary days with one slight difference. There was something wrong with my temperament and I couldn’t cope with the unnecessary horns of many bypassing cars and shuttles. I realized that, as it is free, most people do not refrain from using horns during very early and late hours of the day, with no sensitivity given for people sleeping or being educated. At that point, I wished for an text-message-based service that collects instantaneous reports from citizens about unethical, unlawful or dangerous behavior of drivers… And then I discovered that it is a potentially superb idea of collecting wisdom of crowds for the greater good of public.

I can not say that the citizen’s ability to ticket misbehavior in traffic is zero. If you are keen enough, you can call the 154 service in Turkey to directly connect Police Hotline and tell your complaint. Or in the case of commercial vehicle violations, there is usually an hotline stickered on the vehicle, which you can call and file your complaint. The problem is that both of these methods are effort consuming. Except quite serious circumstances, the effort to call the hotline, wait for the operator and tell the details outweigh the potential benefit of making the violent driver avoid another crossing while red light is on.

What I dream is a crowdticketing or crowdflagging system for traffic issues, which primarily rests on mobile phones. And the tagline should read "everyone is a policeman!".

Let’s say you are just at the pedestrian crossing area when a car ignored the red light and has gone by. You simply write its license plate number, the type of violation (in this case, it should be something like ‘violate pedestrian crossing’) and voila. The violation is received by the system and is instantly linked to the license plate. When there is the GPS function embedded in the mobile phone system, it is even better. You simply add the GPS data in the text message, and the system will know exactly when and where that license plate violated some laws or showed misbehavior.

I am not taking the highest proponent level that this database should form a strict source for issuing bans or fines. But it may help mainly with two ways:

1. When a serious complaint is made to police hotline, the officers can login to this system and see whether that license plate has received some similar flags from the crowdticketing system. By doing so, police can have its case reinforced and commit to a serious legal action.
2. In the case of multiple flagging, police officers can be convinced that a particular driver is ‘hot’, that is he is on a violating track right now. In this case, let’s say the first user reports a particular driver about speeding and 10 minutes later, another user reports the same car for dangerous driving or not stopping at a stop sign. In such situation, police officers would know that different, and independent, sources of information will reveal a outlaw driver case!

Although I foresee many opposing ideas to this case, I still believe this would be a great complementary service for public good and wealth. If that service existed, I would certainly flag many drivers using their horns unnecessarily early morning…

So what do you think? Anybody out there to turn this idea into another web 2.0 service?

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