How are the contenders to Cisco’s ever-growing sandbox faring, these days? This posting will focus on Juniper, often referred as No. 2 in the networking arena.
Junipers plays with: application performance; identity, policy and control; management software; routing, switching; security, and software-based network operations management - key technologies common with Cisco’s portfolio.

And, Juniper plays in; enterprise, service provider, finance, government, healthcare, and research & education, primarily.
These verticals also apply to Cisco.

One area that I will be keeping a key eye on are the verticals. Aside from lofty technology messages that are lost on the average investor, networking companies are trying to make their solutions more relevant and readily understandable on a per-vertical-market basis. No longer satisfied with being put in a closet and relegated to the geeks in IT labs, networking companies want to, well, see the light of day, out of the closet, as a trusted partner, at the business development table. Take healthcare, for instance. Networking companies such as Cisco and Aruba have long-standing relationships with many, if not most, major healthcare centers across the USA, even the world. Yet, when approaching key healthcare decisions-makers they are sent to the IT department.

One way of looking at advances that these companies make in vertical markets is to look at their partnering pages. These lists of partners can show how much penetration has been achieved in a given vertical. Solution specialists, like GE or Welch Allyn, to continue the healthcare analogy, can indicate if the company has yet figured out a relevant role for itself, outside of the routing closet, and gained some degree of market acceptance, among peers, let alone customers. I expect such lists to grow over time and would also expect that competitors will start to notice that bragging about such partnerships can, at least temporarily, put them ahead of other competitors, from a public perception perspective. Keep in mind that such partnerships are way more challenging to complete than the run-of-the-mill channel partnerships these companies are used to pulling together. And, the more specialized the vertical, the more intricate their needs are, and the more involved is the evolution of interoperability and inter-compatibility.

These partnerships go beyond marketing messages and cannot be managed by publicity deadlines and the barking of a sales team hungry to push more product through the channel. Often times, these relationships will take a hard-to-determine amount of time in R&D because of unforseen technical challenges in enabling products to ‘talk’ to each other, like an IP-enabled IV pump, and a network router, and, ultimately, a monitoring solution running on a PC, at a nursing station. And, we haven’t even covered regulatory compliance in all this. Indeed, networking companies chasing vertical markets will have their hands full for years to come and they will need to adjust their time-to-market expectations accordingly.

While Cisco is trying to make everything connect to everything else, all by itself, companies like Juniper have no choice but to partner their way to vertical solutions and to end-to-end connectivity. Looking at Juniper’s partnering page, we see seemingly unlikely partners like rivals Alcatel-Lucent and Avaya. Hats off to these players for finding a way to also cooperate!

Juniper’s main message is routing and switching, rapid deployment, consolidation of delivery and services (including applications), and scaling. I expect this message to evolve as it makes in-roads into various verticals and enables end-to-end solutions, like VoIP.

However, there could also be another play. Juniper could be the wind beneath the wings of solutions partners, providing the networking portion, behind-the-scenes. Let’s see what the future brings.

The company’s Q2 2008 results were released on July 24, 2008. Their Form 10-Q was filed August 8, 2008:

Gross Margin grew by 24.3% since last year. Operating Expenses grew by 16.6% and COGs grew by 24.7%. All-in-all a good year. The company cut back from its aciqusition of its own stock and retirement of stock, adding to net income, compared to the previous year. Geographic contribution to income was well balanced, with the Americas providing more of the share than other parts. Management declared a gross margin of 70%, quite respectable, indeed. The SP segment accounts for 72% or more of its revenue, compared with 25%, or less, for Enterprise.
The CEO’s message puts high-performance, reliability, and security at the forefront of Juniper’s commitment to customers, delivered through best-in-class products, with several 2008 industry awards to support the claim.

The CTO’s recent messages explains that the network is a prime point of consolidation enablement by leveraging the data center, by creating products with realistic goals (not boiling the ocean, so to speak), relentlessly executing on delivery, and keeping it simple by avoiding product complexity. It cites JUNOS, its operating system, as a prime example. JUNOS is one common software, with one release - a direct jab a CIsco’s very complex IOS which has multiple releases across its myriad of hardware platforms and a very complex migration strategy that can take top customers several years to fully implement. Take that, Cisco! However, Cisco has a breadth and depth of features and functionality that JUNOS is continuing to build. Nonetheless, Juniper’s appropriate positioning is the ‘keeping-it-simple’ philosophy, which, I’m sure, has many supporters.

From these two executive messages, we can see that Juniper is planting a firm stake in faster, reliable, and scalable routing and switching technology and counting on its SP base to drive dominance of the data center - a clear infrastructure play… on paper.

As we read, in my previous post, Cisco is trying to evolve away from this to a more new-generation innovative solution player.

Let’s look at some technicals, for JNPR, to determine any short-term opportunities. This stock seems to be on a downward 6-month trend, through a series of rolling peeks and troughs ranging from approx. $20.50 to $29/share. It is at a price consolidation point, just below a pricing peak, with the 10 and 20-day EMAs trying to touch, which may indicate a bearish trend… or not.. We should know towards the end of this week, if current rhythm holds up. Pricing reached a peak, early last week and volume has been tapering off. The MACD signal seems to be indicating a downward trend will continue. However RSI dipped below the 50th percentile, off from the 75th percentile, a week ago. In this range, the 6-month chart shows pricing can go either way. Fast Stochastic is down and the signal lines are touching, in an upward trend. The last two 1-day dojis are white but not above the Bollinger Band mid-point. Volume is low enough to possibly indicate a bottom.

In summary, I am expecting some price stability for the first half of the upcoming week, then it should slowly trend downward, once RSI gets near to or hits 80. My feeling, though, is that RSI can move upward very quickly, relative to JNPR stock price increases, indicating that there might not be a big price jump (maybe to $27, or so) before it deflates $25 or $24. I’ll try to run a pivot point analysis on Monday and post to this article as a comment.

MarketEdge is long on the stock and The Street and Jaywalk recommend to hold. The Beta is at 1.29. This stock could be a good long term play with returns above Cisco’s, on a per share basis, other things equal. If Cisco manages to pull away by repositioning itself, it could create a new pie and take a bigger piece of this bigger pie. However, with Juniper positioning itself as a strong network infrastructure enabler, it could dominate the IT closet.. but let’s see who else is out there putting pressure in the closet. Short-term, I’m not seeing any interesting volatility trend that can yield fairly predictable outcomes.

Former Wall Street Darling, Cisco Systems, recently announced earnings and, shortly thereafter, yet another major investment company downgraded this stock. That’s 4 wall street barons in 5 months. However, this is not a unanimous consensus, new comers are posting more bullish prognostications. Who’s right?

The Motley Fool, the internet’s quintessential buy-and-hold investing advice web site, says positive things about this networking company. Jim Mueller stated in his August 16, 2008 The Best Opportunity This Decade article: “…Finally, consumer products and tech have gotten interesting lately. Giants Kimberly-Clark (NYSE: KMB) and Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) are off significantly from their highs of late last year. All that talk about lower consumer and company spending in 2008 may have driven their prices down. For my money, I’m more interested in companies I can buy today to own in 2013 — so thanks for the bargains, Mr. Market!”

Well, even Mr. Chambers is being less than “cautiously optimistic,” these days. Cisco will be providing less forward-looking information than it has in the past. Gee, I wonder why? Mr. Mueller, above, does state that he is taking a long-term view of things… buy now ‘cuz everything is so cheap and wait 5 years to cash in. OK, but anything can happen in 5 years and I want my money to work harder for me. Below, we’ll look at some fundamental data and then peek at the technicals for some short-term opportunity analysis.

Also, please keep in mind that I am of the belief that the current economic contraction will hit bottom by late 2010 with the beginning of the turnaround in 2011. (See other recent posting on this blog.)

What we need to ask ourselves is exactly how will Cisco help us work, play, live, and learn better? Undoubtedly immediate access to information, thanks to the internet, has made life better in many ways: SMS messaging, even numeric paging, have greatly improved essential communication and organization. Now, the company seeks to take this to the next level, exponentially. Cisco is less about routers and switches, today, than it is about Unified Communications, Wireless Everywhere, and Telepresence, to name a few. That said, routers and switches still play a very important role in this company’s bottom line. But the point is that Cisco is trying to re-align itself with emerging needs in the business world and with service providers. It is going for high-end complex products, in my opinion, although it is also trying to become more relevant to the average consumer, at the same time.

Cheez! How about solving world hunger, AIDS, and world peace? Oh, but Bill and Melinda Gates are working on that. OK. It’s all good. Big bucks going after big problems. Why not? And let’s not forget that Mr. Chambers is closely involved with the John McCain presidential bid.

Meanwhile, back at the fort in San Jose, what’s interesting for short-term and medium term investors? On the fundamentals side, the stock is trading at 19 time earnings. Could be a good deal but what has been the performance trend, in the past 3 years, and what can we prognosticate about the next couple of years?

Cisco continues to show solid revenue numbers.  Dividing Cost of Sales by Operating Revenue, we see that the 33%, last year, compares to percentages in the 60s and 70s for previous years. Clearly the company took care of costs.

Year-over-year EBITDA growth was also fixed last year. In the previous few years, it ranged from .99 to 1.09.

Overall, Cisco’s fundamentals look solid.

What of the company’s forward looking statements? In the company’s fiscal year review statement, presented in Q&A style, Mr. Chambers answered the following:

”

How do you view the company’s position in the industry and how will you ensure Cisco and customers are benefiting from the longer term strategy?

John Chambers: We believe that we are very well positioned in the industry from a vision, differentiated strategy, and execution perspective. We believe we are entering the next phase of the Internet as growth and productivity will center on collaboration enabled by networked Web 2.0 technologies. We will do our best to provide the product architectures and the expertise to help our customers in the implementation of these collaborative capabilities from a technology and business perspective. We will also share with our customers how we have done this internally. In short, we are going to attempt to execute a strategy over the next decade that is similar to what we did in the early 1990s. As we have said before, execution on this strategy in the 1990s powered our growth for the next decade. We hope to have similar success in executing this strategy over the next few years, with an obvious difference being Cisco is now a far larger company, with a run rate of over $40 billion and with over 66,000 employees focused on this opportunity, and this may affect our growth rates compared to those we have achieved in the past pursuing this strategy. At this time, we believe our execution is on target in terms of results as measured by a customer partnership perspective, market share, and share of our customers’ total communications and IT expenditures as the network becomes the platform for delivering these capabilities.”

When asked about micro-economic factors affecting the company, Cisco’s CEO answered, in essence, by pointing to the company’s previous successes in navigating the ebbs and flows of the economy and by pointing to “market adjacencies.” Cisco will continue to acquire companies and introduce products into an ever-expanding circle of technology solutions.

Therefore, if old technology applications have been sold into irrelevance, the company will grab the next hot thing and move it through its marketing infrastructure.

This is an interesting piece of information. Cisco, it can be observed, commoditizes technological capabilities that affect the flow of information across a network. For example, when computer security became available, the likes of McAfee and Checkpoint made a decent living selling a then-unique product. As it became apparent that this capabilty could scale more effectively, if put into the network fabric, along came Cisco. Now, you can get some pretty solid network security software as an inherent part of their IOS, at no extra charge. It was originally sold as a separate product. So, Cisco has the capability of bringing a whole bunch of stuff into the network and commoditizing individual value-add.

It seems that this could be endless, on the one had, and that Cisco needs to acquire to move fast enough on market oportunities. Anything could get aspired into the network. Well, not necessarily. Cisco has a strategic approach to providing value-add to customers. In evaluating how Cisco will fare in the future, I would suggest focusing on its current offerings and determining, for yourself, what areas they seem to want to play in. Then, figure out where the holes are and determine if anyone in the market is doing a good job of filling those holes. Lastly, figure out if these ‘hole-fillers’ are a likely acquisition target. From the year-end review comments above, Cisco will seek to acquire in order to fill out its technological offering gaps, to add revenue, and to spread out. Put the pieces together and you will likely have a good guesstimate of how this networking leader will secure its future.
But not all runs smoothly. Dependencies to accomplish all this include market acceptance - do customers accept Cisco as a player in a new adjacency?  Market evolution - is the market or technology prime for commoditization in an area that benefits Cisco’s product portfolio? And, the presence on an emerging problem that can best be solved at the network level - is the advent of new technologies creating integration headaches or levels of complexity that are frustrating consumers?

Typically, customer integration and implementation problems were solved primarily by software and then by the evolution of hardware.  Now, as end devices get smaller and users demand more complete application functionality, there is the possibility of an imbalance between device capacity and customer demand. The network can play a role in providing more functionality as an integral part of the flow of data and messages. And, this, in turn is an opportunity for the likes of Cisco.
And, all this requires network equipment evolution in large enterprises and service providers. But these capabilities need to be sold, I daresay, individually, to large enterprise and service providers until that Gestalt realization occurs where Cisco’s high-end customers ‘get it’ and a mad rush for upgrading ensues. In a time of economic contraction, this will be an interesting challenge for Cisco… but a challenge that the company is well-suited to take on. Csico has been know to effectively articulate solutions to customer problems in a very competitive and effective manner.
For this reason, I believe that its human resources will be key to its success moving forward. The company has been going through a big change, hiring more outside candidates than before, and veterans have been leaving. As a result, the culture is changing, from what I’ve heard.

As long as Cisco’s message of immediate relevance continues to be well-received, this company will continue to enjoy a long and prosperous life… steady as she goes.

Next, let’s check some technicals to see if there’s any short-term profit that we can squeeze out of the market.

Looking at two short-term EMA lines (10-day and 20-day), we see that the stock entered a bullish turnaround at or near August 11 but, as price rose, volume dropped. Volume began to pick up, a little, late last week but not in a manner that would normally indicate an upward push, just yet. (All this is based on a 3 month chart.) RSI is in approx. the 70th percentile. (This stock typically turns downward when RSI hits 80.) Fast Stochastic is showing some stabilization in a high range, after a surge. MACD is also showing some stabilization after a surge but the signal shows that there can still be a little more growth, compared to the past 3 months.

In summary, from the technicals, I would suggest to hold but monitor closely through this week for an opportunity to sell high, possibly short through the small pullback, and re-read the technicals to see if a worthwhile second upward run could make some money.

Long-term, this stock can likely show growth but I would watch closely how it is managing human talent. This is not an area that one would typically keep an eye on, with a company such as Cisco, but many changes have been occuring and it is placing bigs bets in new directions.

This could be a good time to poll channel partners to hear what’s selling, what customers are intrigued with, and what will take time for customers to absorb. From what I heard, the channel is getting good traction with Unified Communications, Mobility, and Data Center. Assuming that’s true, this company will be solid through the next 2-3 years… unless competitors can nudge their way in to customers via better vertical insertion strategies.

I’d agree that, at a P/E Ratio of 19, the company seems like a good buy, based on past statistics. But we need to think about the future, not the past, and that’s why I’d like to see what the company is doing about recent bench changes and how this will affect its internal culture.

Now that oil is cooling down and alternative energy is showing signs of life, we have a few moments to look around the landscape. Food, despite rising costs, has been holding on, finance still has challenges as does transportation. Healthcare seems to be making interesting gains… blah, blah, blah. One sector that has been flying under the radar screen, however, has been high tech. This has-been sector still drives how we communicate. And, paradoxically, if nothing blows up or grinds to a halt, no matter how unassumingly this is accomplished, high tech is one of those sectors that ensures the lifeblood of the planet continues to circulate. But it doesn’t come cheap.

Do you remember when a $15 phone bill was the norm? Now, 30 years later, we can’t live without our high speed DSL connection, digital Hi Def TV and half-dozen or more networked IP devices in our home. High Tech has taken more of our wallet share than any other single provider of goods and services in the past century except for oil companies and mortgage lenders. And that’s what fueled the crazy ’90s.

So, where are they now? I’d like to throw this out to the rest of us. We all know about the internet, SMS messaging and smartphones. But some of us might not be aware of how, exactly, these toys have become so indispensible to various generations of users. Please post comments to this entry. Let everyone know which technology is most important to you and why. And, share with us how they can be improved. Also, you get bonus kudos for sharing an idea that goes beyond.

For example, I’d like to know why I can’t just simply beam an apointment out of Entourage, on my MAC, to my Blackjack Smartphone via a wireless connection, like bluetooth… in one keystroke? Why do I have to hardwire connect my phone to the MAC and use some imposing software application to broker a connection, ask me a few lame questions and make it look like a bloody miracle to update my calendar on my phone?

I think we’re at the point where stuff needs to inherently interconnect, without fancy machinations, extra, costly components and yet another excuse to upgrade something.

What does everyone else think?

This week, I’ll make an effort to review a few high tech stocks, like Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, Microsoft, Autodesk, and Symantec. Let’s see what’s happening in the Silicon Valley.

But, to re-iterate, I’d really like to know what it SHOULD be focusing on, according to you. Lastly, to our international readers, that means you as well. I’ll take posts in French, Italian, Polish, and Spanish, although I’ll admit to proficiency in French but only functional capability in the other languages.

California has seen a busy week in the area of alternative energy, this week. Apparently, Tesla Motors is considering to establish a car making plant in Silicon Valley.

PG&E, California’s electric company, will invest in large solar electricity generation sites: “

Utility Announces Two Photovoltaic (PV) Plants Equivalent to
Almost Double the Amount of Current U.S. Grid-Connected PV Capacity

The Solar Electric Power Association (SEPA) applauds Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), a California investor-owned utility, for today’s groundbreaking 800 megawatt (MW) photovoltaic announcement. With 473MW of grid-connected photovoltaics installed throughout the entirety of the U.S. as of the end of 2007, this announcement from a single electric utility to develop almost double that amount is a strong signal of the growing role of solar electricity in the nation’s future energy mix.

PG&E’s plans include a 550MW PV plant with Optisolar and a 250MW project with SunPower, both to be constructed in phases between 2010 and 2013. “PG&E’s announcement represents the largest single photovoltaic commitment from an electric utility anywhere in the world,” stated Julia Hamm, SEPA executive director. “It represents the pinnacle in a series of large and innovative U.S. electric utility solar projects that have been announced in the last six months.” “

(Clipped from the Solar Electric Power Association web site.)

And, in related news, Toyota, Ford, and Honda all announced that they are expanding their offering of hybrid cars. And this was on the heels of a similar announcement by GM, last week. Congratulations to these leaders for taking a chance on new technology and for doing all they can to help ween us away from oil-based energy and propulsion. In my opinion, the most interesting news was Toyota’s announcement that it will make the Prius plug-in. What this means is that, in addition to its hybrid (gas and electric) motors, the Prius will also have the ability to run for some miles on an all-electric motor. When this battery drains the hybrid motor will activate. Given that many of us primarily use our cars for short trips, this can become an enormous saver of oil consumption.

Also, I have heard that the US mid-west is investing heavily in wind mills, leveraging the windy climate in that area of the country.

Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!

Given that this is an election year, in the US, I wonder if any of our presidential candidates will work any of this really great news into some of their promise-making. Further, I wonder if they will chance some statements on a national energy policy and if this policy will even out the inordinate profits taken by oil producers and put it to use in creating a more secure future of energy creation and consumption?

But, once again, we see that if customers create new demand, manufacturers will find a profitable way to create supply to fill the demand. The entrepreneur really is the first-line problem-solver in society.

So the shorts have been bringing oil down to a less desperate level. But don’t break out the champagne just yet. There is still a lot more cost reduction to go. And, with inflationary pressures on the US dollar, there is a need to increase its value. Oil can alleviate consumer pressure and it can also help the dollar without the need to raise interest rates. So, falling oil prices are good for business, too, above-and-beyond cost of goods sold. It helps keep the SBA variable lending rates lower.

Needless to say that food costs are up. But do we all know exactly how much higher they are? If anyone has access to the National Restaurant Associations annual report, you will see that some foods are up dramatically, like milled rice (51%), flour (73%), fats & oils (56%), cheese (21%), and coffee (10%). Everything else is up as well but increases were kept to single digits.

Salaries have certainly not risen in lock-step with such increases in basic foods.

Some of these increases are due to oil costs, in the form of transportation and even production line processing, but some of it is also due to natural disasters and general commodity shortages, like rice. (See previous posts.)

Another interesting tidbit is P&L forecasting. When managers build spreadsheets and extrapolate current profit and loss information, we commonly use multipliers on base-year numbers. For example, if we want to forecast the cost of goods sold in Year 2, for a given business, we seek industry ratios for that particular business and verify Year 1 COGs versus gross sales. We then ascertain how close the result is to the industry ratio and seek to understand any discrepancies. Then, we determine what an appropriated ratio would be for Year 2. Then, we apply a growth multiplier on top of Year 1 gross sales to determine a possible Year 2 sales amount and apply the COGS ratio to determine the Year 2 cost of goods sold amount. This build-upon-previous-years forecasting method has an interesting effect. What happens in Year 1 has an effect on subsequent years. If that’s in effect true, I don’t know, but that’s a fundamental implication of using such a forecasting method.

Why are the cost of food and cost multipliers important? Because they can help us predict a possible end to the recession. Aside from the mortgage industry needing to flush itself and reset, the average entrepreneur is generally facing a challenging economic environment and wondering when it will end.

What the forecasting model, described above, implies is that high costs today can have a chain-effect on subsequent years, affecting net profit for several years. Only when the ratio of costs to sales changes, over a few years, will net profit normalize and eventually turn positive.

Today and for the past couple of years, the downward net profit trend has been due to rising costs, generally. Once these costs taper to a normal rate, it will take 2-3 years for net profit to turn positive. These same cost increases are also affecting consumption and less customers are coming through the front door. So, sales go down and costs go up. Yuck!

The length of time required for net profit to turn depends on top-line sales growth. So, if you, as a business owner, see organic growth at 2%, for example, growing sales at 4% can not only make a huge difference on the current year numbers but also has a cumulative effect on subsequent years.

Making positive changes to your product mix today, and promoting your business today, even in a declining market, can help you bottom out and turn around faster. It’s not enough to just cut back on expenses, you need to re-orient parts of your offering to emerging customer needs and to the shift in their capacity to spend.

Unfortunately, high-end products and services are vulnerable at this time. For such companies, diversification would be in order, like BMW buying Mini Cooper. They protect the BMW brand by not dropping prices but create another source of income, more in line with current customer spending thresholds.

Based on such a dynamic of costs tapering over time and customers being incented to continue buying, I expect minimal growth for the rest of 2008 and all of 2009. Some time in 2010 or 2011, sales should turn around. Costs seem to want to top off towards the end of 2009 through 2010. If this is proven to be so, and you managed your operations in line with a -2 to 3% growth rate and 6 to 9% cost increases, you should see small business turnaround from late 2010 through early 2012.

That means, small business has not hit bottom yet, but we’re not too far off, other things equal.

If unemployment shoots up, or we loose control over the dollar, in the form of runaway inflation, or we misstep in the mortgage industry recovery, the bottom could be yet further away.

This is certainly a time when the common good outweighs individual profit. There are many things that need to go right at the societal governance level. It is a time for experienced leadership for the common good.

For the small business owner, it’s time to get to know your customer, think creatively, and increase relevance.

In a CNet article published July 24, 2008, we learn that California is leading the charge in leveraging renewable solar energy. And other states are following.

In a related article, an new solar IPO came out. This manufacturer is facing a skeptical and uncertain buyers’ market. It seems that the public is waiting for the big breakthrough - the smaller, denser, more sensitive photovoltaic cell, that will drop production costs.

On the upside, we are seeing increased investment in the production of solar energy and component manufacturers are starting to build out. There is still more work to be done, and for the entrepreneur, that means opportunity.

You may not readily see it, at the bottom of this, and every posting, on this blog, but there is a link that enables you, the reader, to comment on what you are reading. This link, at the moment reads: No Comments. As comments are posted, it will show the number of comments. (Clicking on this gets you to a page where previous comments are shown and where you can post your own comment.)

I’d like to hear from you and you can use this link to post your thoughts on the topic of telecommuting. Ideally, I’d like both perspectives: employees and employers.

Many companies have adopted policies to enable telecommuting and I’d like to know how this is working for everyone. It seems self-evident that if you leave your car parked in the driveway, log on to company email and scheduling, hunker down to doing your work from a home office, and attend meetings via teleconferencing, an employer can save on office space, employees lower their gas bill (and therefore need less of a raise), and everyone has more air to breathe. But is this really the case? Are companies faced with rising operational costs to accommodate this style of work? Do managers feel that they have less oversight on employes?

Please share your thoughts and let’s determine together if telecommuting really is a leaner and greener business model.

(from Independent.co.uk as reported by Reuters on Thursday, 24 July 2008)

On the right-side column of this blog is a news widget in which the following story appeared. Given the recent focus of our postings, on how the economic environment affects consumers and taxpayers and what insights entrepreneurs and investors can gain from this, I thought that pulling the Amazon financial results summary out of an ever-changing list of recent stories would give it more exposure and add to the list of postings that I have been coming across that shows some silver linings in a general cloudy economy.

I continue to maintain my thinking that alternative energy and social networking enabled by the internet are key support pillars in this economy and will help in moving us toward stabilization. In the article below, an argument is made in favor of online shopping and how it can save money. Only the first few paragraphs are printed. Please follow the link for the full article.

“Amazon.com Inc says its quarterly profit doubled and sales grew 41 per cent, indicating to Wall Street that many cost-conscious shoppers are heading online to save money in a tough economy.

Amazon shares jumped 8 per cent, after zig-zagging in early extended trade because an unanticipated gain on an asset sale initially obscured the underlying earnings performance.

“The numbers are good, very solid,” Stifel Nicolaus analyst Scott Devitt said. “It shows the company is performing very well relative to the industry.” (More)

In CNet a article posted today, Google philanthropy funds Aptera and ActaCell, we learn that Google is betting $2.75 million on electric commuter vehicles and longer lasting lithium-ion batteries.

The electric vehicle being produced by Aptera, the article explains, will run for 120 miles on a single charge and plug into a 100-volt electric outlet. Apparently, it will reach an efficiency level of 200 mpg!

I’ve been saying, for quite some time now, echoing those experts around me, that a 100-mpg car is possible, today, and that car manufacturers have been holding out on us. (I posted, earlier, that car manufacturers sent a joint plea to government that the requirement to make most car fuel efficient to 30-35 mpg by 2010 was too aggressive. Poppycock! I said. Well, here starts the proof.)

As the electric car show, in San Francisco, unfolds, this week, we are being shown how a Toyota Prius can be modified to generate 100 miles per gallon. A $5,000 upgrade, enabling the car to be plugged in to an electric socket, makes it an electric car, in addition to its current hybrid capability. In this fashion, the first 30-50 miles are powered by an all-electric-fueled lithium battery. When the battery runs out, the conventional motor kicks in. For the average commuter, this represents the distance to and from work, where most of our travel occurs.

For those of us who are economically inclined, and know something of the engineering of power and motion, we would need to calculate the cost of charging this battery and factor it into overall gas costs for the modified vehicle. But, from what I’ve been hearing, it represents a substantial savings over the current cost of gas.

And, notwithstanding this calculation, there’s the issue of the $5,000 cost of modification. I hear that some people are working on influencing government to create some incentives.

Now, that’s the Power of the People in action! Let’s see how this all unfolds….