Word: teche
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Environmentalists can't decide whether to celebrate the recession or dread it. Conventional wisdom holds that the green movement will be one of the first casualties of the downturn. "The clean-tech industry is at risk because of a real lack of access to capital," says Paul Maeder, who helps oversee clean-tech investments for Highland Capital, the global venture-capital firm he co-founded. But in his next breath, Maeder explains why the current economic mess may end up being a boon to environmentalism - by forcing change. "We're in a crisis because of oil prices and climate change...
There's a fine line between optimism and denial. The WilderHill New Energy Global Innovation Index, which tracks the stock prices of clean-tech companies, is down about 80% since the beginning of September. (By contrast, the S&P Index lost about 25% of its value over the same time period.) The cost of oil, which has driven much of the investment in alternative energy in recent years, has halved since the summer. And new green industries, like wind farms and solar-panel factories, are no less affected by the credit crunch than any other business...
Problem is, the essential issue addressed by clean-tech development has less to do with the economy than with climate change, dependence on foreign oil and energy waste - all long-term threats. If green tech will be to the 21st century what high tech was to the last, then this is no time to scale back. With investors rightly spooked, however, governments on both sides of the Atlantic need to show more leadership. "Seen in the right way, people can learn important lessons from [the crisis]," says Nicholas Stern, the British economist whose 2006 report laid out the financial merits...
...think it's about time the Office suite is free," says Zoho's tech evangelist Raju Vegesna. "We paid $500 for an Office suite when the price of the hardware was $5,000. Now the price of the hardware has come down to $500, and it doesn't really make any sense for a piece of software to cost...
...began contributing to certain candidates in the state. There were five benefactors: David Bohnett of Beverly Hills, Calif., who in 1999 sold the company he had co-founded, Geo-Cities, to Yahoo! in a deal worth $5 billion on the day it was announced; Timothy Gill of Denver, another tech multimillionaire; James Hormel of San Francisco, grandson of George, who founded the famous meat company; Jon Stryker of Kalamazoo, Mich., the billionaire grandson of the founder of medical-technology giant Stryker Corp.; and Henry van Ameringen, whose father Arnold Louis van Ameringen started a Manhattan-based import company that later...