Smart Money Map of the Market is a must view daily for everyone looking to get a birds eye view of wall street. Its an interactive graphic with the top news and trends in a single page.

Will asked yesterday for the China graphic, and I thought it would be good to see the relative spend India and China on the same items. Needless to say China is WAY ahead on every item in terms of consumption.

Below is the spending on various goods and services for India from the NY times article, but their graphic is MUCH better.

Great NYT interactive flash graphic on how much people spend on Electronics, Clothing, Alcohol & tobacco, Household goods and recreation the world over. Its a pseudo world map with relative sizes of spending depicted by the size of the box.

Its clear the developed nations have the lions share of the spend, but its very revealing to see the size of recreation spend.

hat tip. Flowing data is one of my favorite blogs BTW.

Who knew wind energy has a mortality rate that mirrors mines and coal plants. Wind-works does.

WindStats has recently re-examined the mortality
data in light of wind’s rapidly expanding generation. The mortality rate
is a function of not simply the number of deaths, but the number of deaths
relative to the amount of electricity generated.

In the mid-1990s, 14 men had been killed on wind turbines or working
with wind energy. Since then six more have died, including the first member
of the public, a parachutist who literally flew into a turbine in Germany.

Total cumulative generation reached nearly 130 TWh from 1975 through
the year 2000. The number of deaths per TWh of cumulative generation steadily
dropped through the 1990s.

The high number of deaths in the USA may be connected to the typically
frantic nature of year-end, tax-subsidy driven installation booms.

The data clearly indicates that the wind industry will have to do
a better job at improving safety if it wants to live up to its promise of
being clean, green, and–benign.

Imagine a car that gives 65 miles a gallon. Its made by Ford! Why cant you buy it in the US? Businessweek has a host of good reasons (below).

1. People’ perception that diesel is awful.
2. Taxes aimed at commercial trucks mean diesel costs anywhere from 40 cents to $1 more per gallon than gasoline.
3. The engines are built in Britain, so labor costs are high.
4. The pound remains stronger than the greenback. At prevailing
exchange rates, the Fiesta ECOnetic would sell for about $25,700 in the
U.S. By contrast, the Prius typically goes for about $24,000.
5. No tax breaks for diesel vs. hybrid
6. Ford plans to make a gas-powered version of the Fiesta in Mexico for
the U.S. So why not manufacture diesel engines there, too? Building a
plant would cost at least $350 million.
7. The automaker would have to produce at least 350,000 engines a year to make such a venture profitable.

Hat tip.

The economist has a good piece on auto fuel.

LNG (primarily Methane converted to liquid form) is used by a lot of public transport vehicles in Asian countries.

Natural gas can be considered as the most environmentally friendly of the fossil fuels, because it has the lowest CO₂ emissions per unit of energy and because it is suitable for use in high efficiency combined cycle
power stations. Because of the energy required to liquefy and to
transport it, the environmental performance of LNG is inferior to that
of natural gas,
although in most cases LNG is still superior to alternatives such as
fuel oil or coal. This is particularly so in the case where the source
gas would otherwise be flared.

CNG is propane fuel. It is considered by some to be a more environmentally “clean” alternative to those fuels, although it produces greenhouse gases, and it is much safer than other motor fuels in the event of a fuel spill: natural gas is lighter than air, so it disperses quickly when leaked or spilled.

Compare those to the hybrid Prius.

CNG car gets about the same fuel economy as its petrol equivalent, but
emits 80% less smog-forming nitrogen oxides. The Environment Protection
Agency rates the Honda Civic GX—the only production car sold in America
that runs on CNG—even cleaner than the Toyota Prius.

image credit: Volvo

Cyndy of Industry standard laments the Web is very US Centric. I think she is more ignorant than wrong.

Granted most startups and services cater to US users initially since they are early adopters and have relatively good broadband adoption.

1. She’s ignorant of the many South Korean and Chinese companies that exclusively to their local audiences.
2. The number of Internet users with broadband in China, Korea and Japan exceeds that of US.
3. The Internet traffic now has begun to bypass the US.

It maybe that Europe is largely focusing more on the mobile web and hence their participation in the Web might be less (which I doubt), but Asia is alive and kicking.

Old but really funny. Its actually more dark humor than light, cos most of it is true.

How many forum members does it take to change a lightbulb?

My favorite:

13 to say “do a Google search on light bulbs before posting questions about light bulbs”

image: magazine.uchicago.edu/

I pre-ordered a FitBit. What is it? Its a way for you to track your daily calorie usage & expenditure. I already use Rescue Time which tells me how much time I waste spend invest on facebook. For most people that have to know, this is the best way to track your exercise time, sleep time, time spent on the laptop, yay.

Go get one. Its out in Dec / Jan.

BTW, I am not sure why Yammer won TC50 instead of this device. This is more useful and revolutionary in my opinion.

Rediff has a list of India’s most admired entrepreneurs. The list comprises of individuals at very large companies in India. Here are the most interesting items I gleaned from it.

1. 16 (about 60%) of them inherited their companies. They took their companies from good positions to great positions. Examples include the Wipro Chairman – Azim Premji, Ambani’s, Wadia’s etc.
2. 10 of them were first generation entrepreneurs. They started their companies from scratch and built it within their lifetime. Examples include the Infosys founders, Tulsi Tanti and Airtel founder.
3. 11% of them are in Information technology & telecommunications (Wipro, Infosys, Airtel) etc.
4. Over 80% of the entrepreneurs have their wealth spread across multiple industries and have a Group of companies.
5. No women. That’s sad. I can think of several that are doing an awesome job – Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and Archana Bhatnagar of Haylide
Chemicals.

I would love to see the same picture in 2020. With 60% companies from first time entrepreneurs, and 30% of them being women entrepreneurs.

What will it take to get there? a) Determined entrepreneurs b) Mentorship and c) Access to capital.

I can help solve (b) and (c). We need more (a).