Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

Netflix is blowing the doors off its business, with $3 billion in annualized revenue and a $12 billion market cap driven by the transition to streaming online video. In terms of hours watched, streaming surpassed DVDs for Netflix in the fourth quarter, but CEO Reed Hastings has been preparing for this moment for more than decade. The name Netflix itself always held the promise of movies delivered over the Internet. The problem, says Hastings in an interview today at the Wired business conference, was that back then they couldn’t stream movies over 56K modems.

But there was Moore’s Law and improvements in bandwidth which could be plotted, and that is exactly what Hastings did. “We took out our spreadsheets and we figured we’d get 14 megabits/sec to the home by 2012, which turns out is about what we will get.” So what does his spreadsheet tell him about the next ten years? “If you drag it out to 2021, we will all have a gigabit to the home.”

One advantage consumers will see with streaming over cable settop boxes or DVD players is that upgrades to the quality can happen much faster because they are not dependent on switching out boxes in everyone’s home. While streaming is just now catching up with high-definition streams, that progress should keep advancing and even leapfrog hardware solutions that really only change every ten years or so. Streaming Netflix movies to multiple high-def screens is only a matter of time.

As it turned out, however, the DVD business was not just a way to bide time while the network caught up. It laid the economic groundwork for the streaming business to become established because of the need to license content, which it doesn’t have to do with DVD rentals. “If we had tried to launch streaming in the beginning,” says Hastings, “I’m sure it wouldn’t have worked because we couldn’t have written big checks. Now we can write a $50 million or $100 million check which gets the content flowing. As we get more subscribers, we can write bigger checks.”

Asked whether Netflix threatened the cable companies, Hastings was careful to say that he doesn’t want to replace cable. That is why Netflix continus to focus on older movies rather than new releases, sports, or news. “We have consistently said that would not be profitable for us,” he says. “It would start an Armageddon battle, and we would not emerge alive from that battle. So we are concentrating on our niche.” And yet, Netflix is experimenting with licensing better programming and even original series. You can bet those experiments will continue.

Google Ad chief Susan Wojcicki has some advice for Web companies wondering if their products will be a success. Reminiscing about the early days of AdSense to Steven Levy at Wired’s business conference here in New York City, she says: “You know really soon if your product is going to be successful. That is what I love about the Web. When we turned on AdSense, within the first hour we had people signing up every other minute. We were shocked, there was so much demand.”

And this was after a colleague told her it could never come anywhere close to AdWords. He was right in terms of bottom line profitability, but AdSense is part and parcel of the Web at this point. Why did AdSense take off so quickly. “I know this is obvious,” says Wojcicki, “but most people don’t get this. There are more people who want to be paid than actually pay.” In other words, AdSense was a product that promised any Website owner a way to get paid.

Levy mostly lobbed softballs at her, but he did ask one question about Google’s social ambitions. He noted that many people think that social is simply not in Google’s DNA. “I’ve heard that before,” replied Wojcicki. “I’ve heard that advertising is not in our DNA. That was not true. Or that display advertising is not in our DNA. That is not true either. This is such a fast moving market that every company has to be able to learn quickly and adapt, and we will.”

Maybe, but it is obvious that Google is still thinking of social as one more factor to add to its all-encompassing algorithm (Google’s hammer that it applies to every problem). “Social is an important signal,” she notes. “There is an opportunity for us to incorporate that to serve more relevant and useful ads.” So far, it is difficult to determine whether that approach is yielding better results.

Wojcick, a Google veteran, is one of the SVP’s who is part of Larry Page’s new executive team.

Way back at TechCrunch 50 2008 we saw the launch of GoPlanIt, a startup that looked to help you generate a travel itinerary in just a few clicks. The company was addressing a problem that everyone has, and while it was entering a crowded space, it looked like it had some potential. And then the market went to hell, startup funding dried up, and people stopped traveling. So founder Steve Chen (not the one who founded YouTube) and the rest of the team decided to put the company — which they’d largely funded using their own money — on the back burner.

Now GoPlanIt is back for round two, and it’s tweaking its monetization strategy to be ever-so-2011. That’s right, they’re getting into group deals. But unlike the countless deal site clones, they’re taking a slightly modified approach that might just work — they’re catering primarily to travelers.

Chen explains that most of the existing deal sites are focused on the city you live in. But there’s a big opportunity to help people save on the attractions, restaurants, tours, spas, and other things they’d do while traveling. Currently tourist-oriented businesses can have a tough time reaching customers — they have to rely on classifieds, pamphlets, and hotel concierges. Chen adds that he’s faced this problem himself as co-owner of 5A5 Steak Lounge, a popular San Francisco restaurant that draws plenty of locals but has a hard time targeting tourists. With GoPlanIt’s deals, these businesses gain another channel optimized for reaching people who are only in town for a short stay.

GoPlanIt isn’t scrapping the one-click itinerary generation that it originally launched with. Instead, these deals can be integrated as part of a suggested itinerary (you can also browse through available deals in the city you’re visiting). Each deal will offer a 35-70% discount. At this point deals are only available in San Francisco and NYC, though the company hopes to ramp this up over time. GoPlanIt isn’t sourcing all the deals itself — it’s currently working with HomeRun (which does a rev share) and is in talks with the other daily deal providers.

Chen says that the company now has a team of five and that its founders have infused more of their own capital — they’re currently looking to raise a round of outside funding.

Also see Trip Alertz, which is a ‘Group for Travel’, but focuses primarily on hotel and resort deals.

Just in time for Mother’s Day, co-founders Antoine Grant and Stuart Felkner are launching responsibly, a gift giving platform with a social good component. responsibly (yes, small “r”) is basically a daily deals site that lets you donate 100% of an item’s purchase price to US public schools in need of project supplies and funds.

responsibly allows you to choose the specific education project you’d like to donate to, and 50% of the original proceeds of every gift purchased will go to the school, matched by another 50% of corporate sponsorship via Donor’s Choose.

The responsibly website integrates with Facebook, and you can send a message announcing the gift to the reciever via Facebook or through email. Right now both its inventory and its project offerings are sparse (currently you can only gift aromatic Stone Candles) but the co-founders are working on building up a queue during the beta.

“The education system is in dire need of our help, and we want to start a movement that spreads awareness, brings people on board with our mission and gives them a really easy way to help directly and contribute to saving America’s  education,” said Grant on the motivation behind the startup’s for profit mission (they take a cut of sales).

The co-founders are committed to the cause, and actually turned an old school bus into a home office, outfitting it with solar panels and makeshift beds in order to take a 15 city tour all around the US in April. The responsibly tour visited schools and leaders from the KIPP, Greendot, Teach for America programs across America, getting a better idea of the issues faced by US educators in order to figure out the best way responsibly could help (watch the video above for an in-depth on-the-bus interview). The bus’ return home to LA coincides with the company’s beta launch.

“Our goal is to be more than a simple commerce platform – we want to connect consumers and companies with charitable giving in an easy and cost-effective way that benefits everyone,” said Felkner.

Interested TechCrunch readers can join the beta here.

Xobni, the social email plugin that makes your inbox smarter, is going to make your Outlook email more productive today with the launch of a Gadget Store with apps from collaboration and productivity services such as Dropbox, Evernote, JIRA, Klout, Salesforce, WebEx, and Yammer.

Xobni’s social email plugins essentially makes your e-mail smarter (Xobni is inbox spelled backwards). The plugin integrates LinkedIn, Twitter Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, Hoovers and more into your Outlook inbox. The company, which has raised over $30 million in funding, also recently debuted a plugin for Gmail as well as iPhone and Android apps. To date, Xobni’s Mirosoft Outlook plugin has seen nearly seven million downloads.

The Gadget Store allows users to access free and paid apps for productivity apps and services from within Xobni for Outlook, enabling developers to integrate their services seamlessly into Outlook’s email workflow. Related to this, the company launched a feature last year that allowed users to integrate Gmail Gadgets within Outlook.

Gadgets are included as part of the Xobni sidebar, and users can choose from nearly 20 services and applications for web-based document sharing, lead tracking, issue reporting and monitoring, note-taking, and more. Current Xobni gadgets include Dropbox, Evernote, GoldMail, Google Translate, Atlassian JIRA, WebEx, Huddle, Microsoft SharePoint, Salesforce Chatter, Yammer, Facebook, Flickr, Hoover’s, Klout, LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing, YouTube, Yelp and Salesforce CRM.

For example, you can add the Evernote gadget to Xobni to allow users to access their notes directly from the inbox. Or you could access data from your Salesforce CRM or Chatter account within your Xobni Outlook inbox.

While the Gadget Store is exclusive to the Xobni’s Outlook version, it will eventually extend to the Gmail plugin.

We’ve covered Booshaka, a startup that takes Facebook search and adding a few bells and whistles to allow users to segment search by topic and provide trending topics around what people on Facebook are talking about. Today, Booshaka is bringing an intelligent layer to your likes, by ranking and classifying all of your activity on Facebook Pages using social signals such as posts, comments and likes.

Booshaka has indexed over a million pages on Facebook, and matches this against your activity on these pages. So when you login to Booshaka with Facebook connect, the site will categorize all of your likes of Facebook pages, as well as posts and comments on these pages, showing you a list of these pages. Booshaka also categorizes the types of pages you’ve liked by TV Shows, Musicians, Public Figures and more.

You can then click on these pages to see where you and your friends rank on leaderboard that measures activity and quality of activity. You can also view a particular fan’s stats and activity by clicking on them in the leaderboard. Brands, individuals and companies can also register their Facebook page with Boshaka if it is not already indexed.

And Booshaka is offering a brand-focused product that allows Facebook page owners to install an app that will create a leaderboard tab on their page, allowing fans to see who is commenting, and posting the most on a page.

You can check out our top fans on our Facebook page here.

By now, you may have run across a SoundCloud audio track somewhere out there in the wild, wooly Interwebs — perhaps during one of your mad, late-night music searches. In which case, you’re familiar with the tell-tale signs: The scrolling orange cursor, the messages tagged mid-song, and that distinctive social waveform layout.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, SoundCloud is the fast-scaling, Berlin-based audio sharing platform that enables music-makers and audio-lovers to upload and share audio tracks. Because of SoundCloud’s somewhat unique visualization (tracks are laid out horizontally in waveform, as they might appear were they fresh out of the studio, or playing in GarageBand or some other music creation app), users can add comments to the waveform at specific times during the track. (Like, “you clearly stole this guitar riff from Steve Vie, loser”, for example.) You can then share your tracks privately with your family, publish to social networks, or embed your sounds on your site — all the while allowing your listeners to tag tracks with their comments.

SoundCloud has grown steadily since its launch in 2006, and just a few weeks ago, crossed 4 million users, according to SoundCloud Evangelist David Noel. That’s 3 million new listeners since this time last year. I first came across SoundCloud when I was attempting to review an album by an Argentinian musician that had not yet been released on CD or on iTunes, nor was it available in the U.S. But, luckily, the artist had posted the album on his SoundCloud page to test the proverbial waters among his local fans.

For this very reason, many lesser-known musicians are using the platform as a way to test fan reactions to new music, and it’s become a great tool for the many amateur music-makers producing tunes around the globe to share their music and interact with their audience.

Up-and-coming musicians have more distribution tools at their disposal thanks to the Web than ever before, but aside from those lucky few who see their videos go viral on YouTube, it remains difficult for the lesser knowns to manage all those social networks, and have their music heard by their target audience.

With so much music out there, finding the right listener is still largely serendipitous — hence the growing popularity of music discovery tools, like Pandora. But sites like Pandora don’t necessarily cater to the little guy or girl, and, sure, building an audience one-fan-at-a-time can be rewarding, but it seems like it’s much more effective to have other well-establish bands reaching the audiences you want to reach, promote your band for you.

So, today, SoundCloud is announcing a partnership with Headliner.fm, a realtime social media recommendation exchange for artists and bands. Headliner’s exchange platform enables bands to reach their target audience by encouraging them to promote their fellow musicians by using a reward system of “Band Bucks”.

Essentially, the more you promote other, similar musicians, the more Band Bucks you receive, which you can then use to have your favorite big acts promote your band on their social media pages. As soon as you join Headliner, you connect with your band’s Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace pages, and the Band Bucks you earn will allow you to have artists like Diddy or Maroon 5 (who are already using the platform) promote your band on one of their social media accounts.

And thanks to this new partnership with SoundCloud, when a Headliner user creates a promotion, they can now easily embed one of their SoundCloud tracks in a Facebook wall post. Instant Facebook promotion with audio! So, if Diddy is promoting my barbershop quartet on Facebook, his post to his fans will no longer just be limited to “Check out this hot new barbershop act”, it will give his fans an opportunity to actually hear my music, too.

Since its founding in 2009, Headliner.fm has grown to over 50,000 artists — ranging from up-and-comers to stars like Maroon 5, Travie McCoy and Rob Thomas, and in the last month alone, over 16,000 artists (reaching 40 million new fans), joined the network. Like SoundCloud, Headliner is growing fast.

Headliner’s exchange is free to use, which is a great start, but it also offers various pay-as-you-go premium services, in which you can not only discover new bands with similar audiences and find them based on location, but use analytics that keep track of the actual reach of your social media promotions — how many new fans you’re reaching, what platform they’re on, and so on.

This social recommendation exchange is a brilliant idea, and now with the integration of SoundCloud tracks (which are already socially-outfitted) directly into that Facebook promotional content, Headliner is starting to look like a business that is offering a truly valuable service to small-time musicians. A group that is always in need of a legup.

And it’s also worth pointing out how easy it’s become to use SoundCloud’s API to integrate audio into your web content. For those building apps, sites, and platforms, and for musicians looking to promote, I’d say this is definitely something to check out. It will be interesting to see if Headliner can bring this SoundCloud integration to other platforms, though it’s hard to imagine this working for Twitter.

It’s a great idea, but can it last?

For more on Headliner, check out the video below:

Late last year, we wrote about ProFounder, a startup that offers entrepreneurs ways to raise money for their startups and ideas. At launch, ProFounder allowed entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues with investors (their friends, family, and community) over time in exchange for an investment. Today, ProFounder is launching another option for fundraising-an equity term sheet.

Entrepreneurs can apply to Profounder, upload a pitch to offer to potential investors and then create a term sheet with Profounder’s templated forms and compliance sheets. ProFounder then gives businesses a page where they can invite friends, family, and investors to a destination page that allows users to make contributions and investments directly on the site. The bonus of using ProFounder is that the platform allows unaccredited investors (i.e. friends and family as opposed to a venture firm) to participate, so anyone can be an investor.

And entrepreneurs can set their own investment terms and ProFounder facilitates all of the compliance, including tracking the number of investor seats in each state where each of their investors live, making sure entrepreneurs know which compliance documents they need to file, making sure entrepreneurs know which filing fees to pay, etc.

Entrepreneurs can customize their equity terms on ProFounder using tools such as pre- money valuation calculators, dynamically-updating graphs to show stock ownership percentages, and more. ProFounder’s equity term sheets currently offer non-voting common shares to investors.

ProFounder, which was is the brainchild of Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley and fellow Stanford Business School alum Dana Mauriello, has seen steady traction since its public launch last fall. The platform has coordinated 14 successful raises with over $350,000 raised. The total average individual raise is $26,000 and the average number of investors is 20. Currently 530 startups are in the process of raising funds using ProFounder.

ProFounder faces competition from CapLinked, Angelsoft and others.

Hey, remember those Italian guys who spent 2 years trying to get their startup funded in Italy and raised $101K in 19 days when they arrived in the States? There’s a tendency on this side of the Atlantic to criticize European investors but it turns out they may not be so different from their American counterparts after all. The proof? It has just surfaced that Jimmy Fairly – a brand new “buy one give one” startup that was born at Startup Weekend Toulouse in November – managed to score €200K in just 3 weeks.

Considering that the Web is changing and evolving every single day, the learning curve for newcomers — and even old-hands alike — can be steep. For those who are starting businesses and looking to learn more about how to use certain sites, products, or tools, the onramp can be difficult to find, not to mention maneuver.

Back in October, a startup called Grovo launched with the goal of tackling this very problem. Dubbing itself “the field guide to the Internet”, Grovo positioned itself as an online education and training platform to enable Web users to find and learn how to use the Web’s most-frequented sites (and vice versa) — beginning with sites like Twitter, Mint, and Amazon.

Hiring an in-house professional team to create high-quality (and free) instructional videos, Grovo focused primarily on Web companies (unlike some nominal competitors like, say, eHow). Today, Grovo offers over 600 video tutorials to everyday consumers looking to increase their Web street cred. And, since its launch, Grovo has begun giving more of that special attention to business owners looking to build a Web presence and make the most out of social media, eCommerce, and business productivity sites and apps.

In March, the startup launched its first real money-making effort by adding premium content, available at $19 a month, or $190 annually. These premium guides offered beginner roadmaps to sites like Basecamp, Facebook Pages, Google Apps and Analytics, Retargeter and Twitter for Business. While paywalls can sometimes kill a young business, Grovo has apparently benefited: “We’ve have seen triple digit traffic growth since March, and are now delivering 2,000 to 3,000 lessons a day”, said Grovo Founder Jeff Fernandez.

Expanding its reach to enable individual businesses to make how-to and instructional videos for their customer-base is an intelligent move on the company’s part. As a young startup scales, its team often experiences difficulties in educating its customers about new product offerings, new tools available on the site, and so on — while maintaining that critical level of customer service and training. It should be a natural extension for a site that calls itself the “Field Guide to the Internet”, amirite?

To further help young startups with education and business training, the startup is today announcing that it will now be offering an embeddable widget to allow companies to take that user training to the next level. In doing so, Grovo has recruited inDinero, a Mint-competitor which we last covered back in September, and ReTargeter, a re-targeting
platform for online advertising, to embed Grovo’s video lessons on their own sites, to help train, educate and retain their users.

“But, can’t sites just suck it up and do this themselves?” I hear you asking. Of course. If your business is simply looking to create a video explaining why users should use your site or product — say, a single introductory video — it’s probably easier to do it yourself. But for those sites who may have several layers to their company or product, or perhaps software that performs a very specific or complicated task — this can be difficult. Not to mention, Grovo’s training programs are agnostic, so they’re not marketing fluff. And for many startup teams, immersed in their visions, it’s hard to step back and be objective.

For these reasons, Grovo can be fairly handy. You can think of them as your video pit crew, considering they’ve spent their early stages hiring a professional writing team, video production crew, and voice talent. And each Grovo tutorial comes with pre-written notes, quiz questions and glossary terms.

So, what are these startups using Grovo for? inDinero, already with a robust FAQ and customer happiness team, is using the Grovo Widget on its help page to showcase the site’s intuitive financial dashboard and automated data entry. Retargeter is using the widget before the site’s pay wall to help users better understand the experience that awaits them. The Widget presently constitutes Retargeter’s entire “help” section; the site also plans to feature the Widget behind its paywall shortly. The startup is also working with Aviary and Hy.ly to add customized how-tos to their respective sites.

To further help its macro-Web-guide vision, Grovo is also announcing today that it has closed its first round of seed funding, led by Krishna “Kittu” Kolluri, general partner at New Enterprise, who invested personally. Ajay Vashee of New Enterprise, Andy Dunn (Founder and CEO of Bonobos), Mareza Larizadeh (Larizadeh Capital Partners), Jon Emery (Chairman, Linkstorm), Steve Kowarsky, (Cofounder and CFO, CosmoCom), and Ajay Rajani (GEIG Tech Farm), among others, also participated in the round.

The seed funding will be used primarily to drive the startup’s product development, the Grovo CEO said. In the future, Grovo is looking to position itself as an education and training platform that companies can also use to assign courses, track progress and manage employee development.

Eventually, Grovo will have to decide whether it wants to be Joe The Plumber’s Web For Dummies, or whether it will primarily focus on being a full-service video training agency for startups and SMBs. Until then, it may experience a bit of an identity crisis. I could see myself using Grovo under either scenario, especially if it offers me a How-To for WordPress or Drupal or Python, but in the end, it’s one or the other. I’d go with the startups. They could always use more help, those startups.

But either way, you should check ‘em out. Let me know if this sounds like something you’d use.

Electronic Arts (EA) has acquired Firemint, a privately held mobile development studio based in Melbourne, Australia.

Firemint is the 60-people strong company behind games like Flight Control (see video below) and Real Racing.

EA says the deal is not material to the company, overall. Terms of the acquisition, which is expected to close within four weeks, were not disclosed.

Firemint was founded in 1999 (as “ndWare”) by CEO Robert Murray, and will now become part of EA Interactive (EAi), a division of Electronic Arts focused on digital business that includes EA Mobile, Pogo and social gaming outfits like Playfish.

The deal follows in the footsteps of EA’s purchase of Mobile Post Production, a specialist in cross-platform development and porting of games for smartphones.

EA also recently bought Angry Birds publisher Chillingo for $20 million in cash.

Some people like mice. Other people like trackpads. Apple likes both as long as they come with their credit cards.

The updated iMacs offer both as options for no additional cost. During the build process, buyers are presented with the option of either the the Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad, or, for an extra $69, they could get both. The standard Apple Mouse is also available for those not digging the whole multitouch control scheme, which just so happens to be one of the best things about OS X.

Read More

Super angel investor Chris Sacca doesn’t like all the new competition pushing up valuations in angel deals and seed rounds these days. “It is a train and it is kind of running away,” he says on a panel this morning at the Wired business conference. “That layer of the market has an abundance of capital.”

Sacca, who funded Photobucket from his credit card and was one of the first to put money into Twitter, is now shying away from early stage deals. “I have definitely refocused Lowercase Capital on later stage deals and my existing portfolio.” Everyone wants to be an angel investor all of a sudden. “It is very hip to be an angel investor now,” he laments. “There used to be a dozen, two dozen guys at these demo days writing checks. Now there are hundreds.” And half of them don’t even read the term sheets! How retail of them.

So are we in a bubble? Quoting Chris Dixon, Sacca contends, “We are not in a bubble, but it is a bad time to be an early stage investor.” But it’s a good time to be a founder, that’s for sure.

Asked about his $1 billion Twitter fund with J.P> Morgan, Sacca blurted: “I am not going to confirm or deny the existence of a billion dollar fund. I cannot really speak about my fund or the fund that doesn’t exist or whatever.”

He did talk about Twitter, however, and the increasing drumbeat of opinion in investing circles that at some point it needs to sell to Google or another acquirer. “Anyone encouraging them to sell wasn’t watching Twitter the other night when Osama Bin Laden was killed.” Start paying attention, folks!

Long before Twitter launched a proper mobile website with enough bells and whistles to be actually worth using (December 2009) there was Slandr, a mobile website that allowed Twitter users, even those with feature phones, to access the service on the go. ReadWriteWeb gushed about the site back in May 2008, calling it the best (non iPhone) mobile Twitter app available. And I did use it at one point.

Fast forward to today and it looks like Slandr developer Roeland P Landegent wants to give someone else a go at running the site. The Slandr mobile site is currently up for sale on Flippa, and if you want to ‘buy it now’ you’ll have to cough up $25,000.

My guess is that’s far too steep a price for the site, given how good Twitter’s own mobile site has become – not to mention the recent proliferation of mobile Twitter applications, which are even better, and more often than not free of charge. All in all, I’d be very surprised if anyone bid more than perhaps a couple of thousands of dollars for Slandr.

The only potential buyer I can think of is UberMedia, which has been snapping up mobile Twitter apps and service left and right lately. Might even give them some consolation for missing out on the TweetDeck purchase after all.

According to the auction page, the site generates between $100 and $250 per month (only) through mobile advertising, and attracts up to 40,000 unique users on a monthly basis.

Engagement is high, though: Landegent claims users stick around on the site for 7 minutes per visit, on average, and the site has racked up close to 1 million pageviews last month.

Landegent tells me he decided to put Slandr up for sale on Flippa to be able to focus on another venture, namely location-based audio recordings site Shoudio.

After the nuclear disaster in Japan at the Fukushima reactors, the general public is understandably skittish about nuclear energy once again. But not Bill Gates. Speaking today at a Wired business conference in New York City, he is talking up the benefits of nuclear energy, particularly next-generation designs. The backlash, he thinks, is overblown. “If you compare it to the amount that coal has killed per kilowatt hour,” he points out, “it is way, way less.” When an accident does occur, however, its effects are much more visible. “Coal kills fewer people at one time, which is highly preferred by politicians,” he says.

Gates is putting his money where his mouth is. He is an investor in his friend Nathan Myrhvold’s nuclear reactor startup Terrapower, which is designing one such next-generation nuclear reactor which produces one thousandth as much radioactive waste. But he also has investments in “dozens” of other energy companies, from battery companies to solar to biofuels. “We should pursue them all,” he says. “The amount of IQ working on energy today and the tools they have to simulate compared to 20 years ago is night and day, but it is unpredictable whether we will get a breakthrough.”

Solar and wind power have great potential, but they are intermittent sources of power. That is why Gates is bullish on nuclear. Advances in energy are necessary for the economy in general to keep moving forward, he argues. Gates sees three main problems which need to be addressed: cost, security, and environmental impact: “Other than it is too expensive, you can get cut off at any time, or it can destroy the planet, it’s okay.”

Cost is the key challenge new energy sources must surmount. “We get sloppy” in the rich world, he says, because we can afford to pay extra for solar or wind power. But in order to make a real impact, the costs have to become competitive with current fossil-based energy. “In 80% of the world, energy will be bought where it is economic.” says Gates. “You have to help the rest of the world get energy at a reasonable price.”

WHat about distributed energy where every house generates their own and feeds it back into the grid? Gates thinks that is a “cute” idea, but “it’s not gonna happen.” Bigger power generation facilities, such as solar fields in the desert, are necessary. “If you are going for cuteness, go after the those things at the home. If you want to solve the energy problem go after the big things in the desert.”