Financial Advice

You Goldbugs need to stop listening to Gordon Liddy. The only metals worth collecting right now are brass, copper and lead.

Overheard in the comments at a blog.

USA Losing Its Innovation Edge, China Rising

Test and Measurement World is looking at the innovators of the world and finds that China is rising.

China has a reputation as a production powerhouse but generally doesn’t get much respect as a source of innovation, despite efforts to change that. Now, those efforts may be paying off, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, which reports that China is climbing up the world innovation rankings faster than other countries.

“Since the Economist Intelligence Unit first published its global innovation index two years ago, China has moved up from 59th to 54th in the rankings—an improvement we thought would take five years has been achieved in just two,” the organization reports.

However, China at number 54 in the rankings is no match for the USA at number three/four. However all is not peaches and cream. The US has dropped from number three in 2006 to tied for number three/four in 2008. And who has moved into a tie with the US? Finland. In the point ranking system used Japan is 10.00, Switzerland is 9.71, Finland is 9.50, and the USA is also 9.50.

The news is not all bad. The USA moved its rating up from 9.48 in 2006 to 9.50 in 2008. However, Finland improved even more. From 9.43 to 9.50 between 2006 and 2008. Which means we in the USA must try harder. Now of course to some extent the rankings are arbitrary. Even so, with Japan at 10.00 there is considerable room for improvement. And according to the report [pdf] the future is not so bright.

The slippage of the US confirms the gradual erosion in recent years of the country’s traditional position as the world’s technological leader — a trend we expect to continue. To some extent, the erosion in the US’s position reflects the fact that other countries are catching up. But it is also a result of the weakening US innovation environment—and this is likely to be accentuated by the current economic crisis.

I have noted earlier that Obama's attacks on venture capital are not helping. And neither is the Sarbanes-Oxley Law's hindrance of innovation. Mr. President and Congress, are you listening?

You can read how the report by Cisco was done by following the links at the Economist.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Mobiles Overfeatured

There is a joke in engineering that goes like this: some people think the glass is half empty, some people think the glass is half full, engineers think the glass is too big. And so it is with mobile phones. They have too many features.

“Only 20% of mobile phone users prefer to use their phones as an all-in-one multimedia device for music, videos, Web surfing, and other activities beyond making phone calls,” the research firm said today.

Customers of T-Mobile are mostly likely to use advanced features, followed by customers of Sprint, and trailed by customers of AT&T. “Verizon Wireless customers are least likely to embrace their phone as an all-in-one multimedia device,” NPD said, despite that company often being cited for having the industry’s best customer service and widest coverage.

Verizon, as of Friday this week, will officially be the nation’s largest mobile phone company.

"Carriers and other handset retailers have an opportunity to educate customers as to the capabilities of their handsets in the wake of slower overall handset sales," analyst Ross Rubin explained.

Of the customers who do want more features than just simple telephony, the most requested option is a cameraphone, followed by text messaging, Rubin said in another recent study.

Of course text messaging is over priced. Some one could enlarge that market if the texts were charged by the connection and by the minute instead of by the message. It is only a matter of time.

Printed Circuit Boards Up Consumer Confidence Down

Electronic Design Magazine reports.

US consumer confidence fell to its lowest level in 28 years in the month of June, amidst high energy costs and rising joblessness. US new orders for computer and electronic products dipped in June with US economy registering a lower retail sale when compared to the month of May.

However printed circuit board (PCB), semiconductor and electronics manufacturing services (EMS) shipments continued their upward momentum. The long-term outlook for the EMS industry remains positive with ever increasing global demand for consumer electronics.

That is interesting. In the past when times were tough the entertainment budget was the first to be clipped. It appears that that is the case in the US. However, the low value of the dollar encourages US exports. How much longer that will last with the US dollar rising is a question. Time will give us the answer.

A lot of electronics is used for manufacturing. However, it is not enough to drive the market. The big drivers are cell phones, computers, and entertainment devices.

A Whole Lot Of Talking Going On

I just read a fact that totally amazed me. Americans bought 28 million cell phones in the second quarter of this year. It is a yearly rate of 112 million a year. That is a cell phone for every man woman an child in America in a little less than three years.

Who are all these people talking to?

Competitive Advantage

Michael S. Malone is discussing in The Wall Street Journal some big changes coming in the global economy. Some two billion new consumers connected to the Internet. He says America has some big challenges ahead. He has some thoughts about how American can compete for these new customers.

Ultimately, our strongest competitive advantage is the ingenuity and entrepreneurship of the American people. One of the miracles of the last few years is how, in places like Silicon Valley, smart young men and women have still managed to create great new companies in the face of every impediment Congress and the regulatory agencies have thrown at them.

But these advantages are slowly shifting to elsewhere in the world. The single most important thing Washington can do right now is to unleash these people and support new company formation in the tech world – and then enable the most successful of those companies to go public again. This means not just patching Sarbanes-Oxley, but killing it.

That would be a very good start. He has six other proposals for improving America's competitive position. GRTWT

H/T Instapundit