A new study describes the larger picture.

Grant Thornton, a large accounting firm, has published a study that shows the connection between IPOs and the health of the US economy.

And it shows how new listings in Asia are helping to shift wealth and competitiveness outside of the US.

Here are some of the findings:

The scale of the decline in IPOs:

- Just 12 companies went public in the US in the first half of 2009 - 4 were non-US.
- 1997 was a peak year for IPOs, since then it has declined 39% (55% decline if adjusted for GDP growth.)

Asian IPOs:

- Asian growth in new listings is far higher than its GDP growth.
- Hong Kong new listings have doubled since 1997, tripled since 1991.

The US is losing the number of listed companies:

- Just to maintain US listings at the current level would require 360 new listings a year - a level not reached since 2000. There were only 54 in 2008 and an average of 166 a year since 2001.

- The US would require 520 new listings a year to keep pace with GDP growth of 3%.

The study claims the US has lost 22 million jobs because of the lack of new listings.

Pascal Levensohn, Board Member of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA):

“The inability for emerging growth companies to access U.S. public equity capital by completing IPOs below $50 million inhibits job creation and hurts American entrepreneurs more than any other group. Starved for long-term risk capital in the U.S., the next generation of innovative private enterprises will continue to move to non-U.S. emerging innovation hotspots, where startups are nurtured through attractive capital incentives, if we can’t repair the bridge into public markets.”

The study offers a long list of possible solutions that include creating new types of markets and changing a long laundry list of regulations governing the stock market and investors.

Such as:

- Create an alternative public market segment

- Make enhancements to the private market

- Free companies to market their securities more broadly

- Overhaul verification of QIBs and accredited investors

- Exempt companies from SEC registration

- Self-regulate trading spreads

- Exempt market participants from holding period

- Encourage centralized information, control and custody systems.

-Research permitted to work with banking

There is no doubt that the lack of IPOs is harming the economy. However, this study appears to be an excuse to drive large changes in regulations governing the stock market and investments.

This will be difficult to do given the current lack of trust in Wall Street and its enthusiasm to exploit any arbitrage opportunity no matter the cost to society.

There would be plenty of new loopholes for Wall Street to discover with such a large number of new rules.

Also, there is nothing said about changing Sarbanes-Oxley. This is a huge burden on young companies and it is one of the largest obstacles to an IPO.

It would be far better to leave the stock market and investor regulations in place and to focus on reforming Sarbanes-Oxley.

This would be a much faster strategy in opening the door to new IPOs than persuading Congress to pass the many changes in stock market regulations that the study’s sponsors have requested. There’s little chance of that happening.

You can see the whole study here.

There were about a dozen demonstrations. They are designed to show off the kind of research At&T is working on in its labs.

I also had a chance to ask John Donovan, chief technology officer at AT&T if Apple’s success in attracting more than 100,000 apps had affected the research projects at AT&T and if any apps projects had been cancelled.

He said that there hadn’t been any effect on research programs and that the company was working on platform technologies and specialized apps that require tight integration with networks.

He did say that AT&T would soon be releasing some apps of its own such as one that allows users to quickly report any dropped calls and other problems.

These are some of the things I saw:

- Air Graffiti, an application that allows you to use your phone to leave digital graffiti at any location. The graffiti can be anything, text, picture, a link. The core of the app is a geo-database platform.

- Medical monitoring technology in the form of a “telesole.” This is an insert into a shoe that monitors the quality of each step. It can send an alert if it detects abnormal steps or a fall. Also, an electronic pill box that helps people to track and take the right number of pills.

- A compact laser projector. This uses a three color laser system connected to an iPhone to project very high resolution images onto any surface without the need for any focusing. Applications in medical institutions. Made possible by new green laser semiconductor generating devices.

- A second-life type simulation of home and work/lab environments where turning on a lamp, for example, turns on a real lamp in the home. It maps the virtual world directly into the physical and vice-versa.

- A geo-location technology that allows mobile phones to communicate with each other using their local Wi-Fi capabilities without the need for a network. Could be useful in emergency situations such as earthquakes where rescuers can communicate directly with each other. This relies on the establishment of a geo/comms standard that is accepted by phone makers and network providers. It can also be used for geo-games.

- AT&T speech recognition technology that can understand terms such as “find all Chinese restaurants around here.” It shows map location and contact details. This works surprisingly well and is much more useful than AT&T’s 411 service, which costs money, while this is a free app. The speech recognition technology is also used for a TV remote control that recognizes show titles and show times.

The apps were interesting but with with very little information on when, or even if, they will be released, it’s difficult to assess if the work by AT&T’s researchers is useful in anyway.

It wasn’t until he had come back to Apple and reinvented the company time and again, and taken risks and failed at some things that I began to appreciate his talents.

In Silicon Valley it is very rare to be able to continue being able to build new businesses and continue being successful. Steve Jobs has done that time and again. And he has built incredible shareholder value.

For example, the New York Post, Oct 21, 2009 reported:

shares of Apple soared to a new yearly high and helped Apple’s market cap sail past search-engine giant Google for the first time, reaching $179.3 billion, vs. Google’s market cap of $174.3 billion.

Money invested in Apple on the day of Google’s IPO would have returned far more profit. And the company continues to beat Wall Street expectations nearly every quarter.

Do we have to mention Pixar? The studio hasn’t had a single flop - what other movie studio can say that?

You might not like Apple’s marketing or the legions of obnoxious fan boys, and you probably wouldn’t enjoy working with Steve Jobs because of his notorious micro-management style but you have to give credit where credit is due. Steve Jobs is Silicon Valley’s Babe Ruth - he continues to hit them out of the ball park.

Here is Chris Foresman at Ars Technica:

Not a bad list of accomplishments for a man that, despite a bout with cancer and a recent liver transplant, is still a decade away from retirement age.

Fortune Magazine writes:

Youthful founder gets booted from his company in the 1980s, returns in the 1990s, and in the following decade survives two brushes with death, one securities-law scandal, an also-ran product lineup, and his own often unpleasant demeanor to become the dominant personality in four distinct industries, a billionaire many times over, and CEO of the most valuable company in Silicon Valley.

I’m looking forward to Steve Jobs next decade. There’s still room on the scoreboard.

“When I’m asked about this, and I’ve been asked this for years, I answer this the same: It is the weather. There’s a reason why generations of young people who are willing to challenge assumptions and so forth have ended up in the Bay Area, and the weather is not a small part.”

That’s what Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google told the Wall Street Journal.

I think the weather is a nice cherry-on-a-cake thing to enjoy. But I think people are here for the cake, the layer cake of fine universities, venture capital, and the smartest collection of people on the planet.

I’ve never had anyone tell me that they are here for the weather. Yes, people do say how nice it is that they don’t have to dig their car out of the snow each winter day, as they did in Michigan or elsewhere.

But if the weather is the draw then shouldn’t Silicon Valley be concerned about innovation centers springing up in Hawaii or in the Caribbean? Is the secret to innovation as simple as that? I don’t believe it.

For starters, San Francisco weather, where I live and where a lot of startups are based, isn’t that great. We get four seasons in one day, and three of them aren’t anything to write postcards home about. Some districts, like the aptly named Sunset, might not see the sun for months in the summer. Its residents have a pasty white sheen, no matter what their ethnicity.

So we will see Google recruitment posters on campuses promoting the good life: sun, fun, and php? It would seem so.

EETimes reports:

”We believe Nvidia could enter the x86 CPU business,” said analyst Doug Freedman of Broadpoint AmTech. ”Nvidia could become a supplier of x86 CPUs by necessity to preserve both GPU and chipset revenue.” Nvidia (Santa Clara, Calif.) has been quietly hiring former employees of Transmeta, a now-defunct, x86-based processor supplier. ”We believe internally developed x86 solutions are more likely than external acquisitions (i.e. Via Technologies),” he said in a new report, referring to rumors that Nvidia would acquire Taiwan’s Via. ”We believe that Nvidia has hired former Transmeta staff extensively, and that instruction code “morphing” requirements have declined as more x86 instructions have come off of patent coverage,” he said.

Nvidia needs an X86 capability so that it can better compete against Intel in key markets such as netbooks — a fast growing sector.

It used to be a big project to create an X86 compatible chip, it required establishing a “clean room” where engineers could reverse engineer the microprocessor instructions. But with patent restrictions expiring it could be a faster process.

In today’s world graphics processing functions are very important because of the proliferation of graphics user interfaces across nearly all computing devices, and also a wide variety of web browsers available for different types of computers. And video also plays a big part in the user experience. These all rely on graphic processors rather than general purpose microprocessors.

While Nvidia has some of the best graphics processors it can’t sell chipsets that also include X86 technology, essential for Windows operating systems and Windows applications. Chipsets with X86 processing capabilities reduce production costs which makes them popular with manufacturers. Nvidia is locked out of these large chipset markets unless it can add X86 compatibility.

Hiring former Transmeta engineers indicates that Nvidia might try the approach that Transmeta used in developing low-power X86 compatible chips. It created a very high performance processor using what is known as a RISC architecture and then ran the X86 code in a virtual environment.

Nvidia, armed with X86 technology, could become a formidable competitor to Intel, and also Advanced Micro Devices in several key markets. It would be a very smart move.

iSuppli reports: “Global cloud storage system revenue is set to rise to $5 billion in 2013, up from $1.6 billion in 2009.”

Fang Zhang, storage analyst for iSuppli, said,”A few areas—such as government, finance and health care—may never move to cloud storage in the face of difficult issues related to privacy regulation, lack of adequate standards, potential power outages, and safeguards on physical security, access control, and speed.”

The same concerns over data storage in the cloud are the same ones that must be harming the uptake of cloud computing in general. It would seem that solving the issues around privacy and security of data are the keys to much faster adoption of cloud computing in general.

The highlights:

- iPhone users are more attracted by a partner’s cool gadgets than their college degree.

- 20% of iPhone users watch adult material on their phones (seems very high to me.)

- One third think “old gadgets” are a “turn-off.”

- one-third have broken up with their partners by text or email.

- one-quarter have broken up with their partner because they spent too much time on their mobile device (I’m not surprised they spent a lot of time on their mobiles if this is the kind of iPhone user typified by the above behavior.)

I use an iPhone but I don’t identify with any of these users. How about a comparison against Android users?

Ribbit is an impressive company. You can read more about the company and the Ribbit mobile service here.

Writing about Ribbit I was struck by one of the features of Ribbit Mobile that allows you to “clone” your phone in that you can make calls seemingly from the phone, via any web browser. It’s very handy if you’ve lost your phone.

What intrigues me is that if this concept is taken a little further, it potentially creates an end-run around the “phone wars.” All this discussion about which phone is better goes away.

While it is not Ribbit’s ambition to fight in the phone wars - third party developers could use its technology and its APIs to create full functioning software clones of mobile phones with full voice and data capabilities.

If you can clone a phone and run its applications within a virtual software environment, you could then potentially map that against a physical phone that isn’t limited by the telecom network or the phone manufacturer. Users would be able to create phones with the functions and features they want.

And if you can also come up with a way of rewarding apps developers, you have a tremendously potent combination.

While Apple loves to boast about the huge numbers of iPhone app developers — it is not a sustainable model if only a fraction of the developers can make money. The same is true for Android app developers.

Ribbit has figured out a good way to reward app developers by sharing revenue based on usage. Give away the app for free and get paid on how much usage it gets. It’s a perfect meritocracy.

Also, Ribbit has access to BT’s billing systems and the many millions of billing relationships it already has with households and businesses. This is bound to attract developers.

The Ribbit/BT model is a great example of how innovative telephony applications can become if they are freed from their physical constraints — the phones.

Google’s Andy Rubin, head of the company’s Android development, would like to clear something up: Google is not in the phone-making business.

Google: We’re not making Android hardware

On October 20 I wrote: There is no Google phone

I didn’t need to call up Google to ask, I knew there was no Google phone because I have been reporting on the company since its very beginnings and know and have met their founders and most of their top executives.

Every company has a core philosophy and culture and once you understand it it helps to guide your reporting.

The Street.com originated a story that Google is working on a phone. It clearly does not understand the company.

Google is not building an Android phone, nor will it buy a newspaper, like some have said it should buy the New York Times. Google doesn’t need to be in the phone business or in the newspaper business — it can benefit from other companies being in those businesses.

People think that companies can jump from one business into another. Companies are like trains on a track — once they are on one track it is very difficult to shunt them onto another track — even if it is an adjacent track. Even if it makes good business sense (which in both these Google examples does not make good business sense.)

Let’s take a look at its beginnings:

The first command typed in was “lo” which crashed the entire Internet - all two machines. Internet Reaches 40th Birthday Milestone

Undergraduate Charley Kline was given the simple job of logging on remotely from UCLA to the SRI machine; his one command was “login”.
The first attempt, however, proved too much for the “interface message processor” or IMP for short - the system crashed as young Charley reached the letter “g”.

… 12 years on, only 213 computers being linked up to the network.

The Guardian is collecting stories for its “A people’s history of the internet.“

To mark the 40th anniversary of the first stirrings of the internet we asked you to tell us your experiences of life online. Hundreds of you responded, and here we present an interactive documentary of your stories and videos, alongside our own research and interviews with key figures (About this project)

Without doubt, the Internet is the most significant collection of technologies ever created. It enables huge numbers of new types of businesses and services, many of them replacing pre-Internet businesses.

Anything, any service, business, that can be digitized is now open to disruption because of the Internet. The Internet devalues everything it touches.

I define “devalues” in a monetary sense, dollars and cents because clearly it creates tremendous amounts of value. But that value often cannot be quantified or measured, or recovered, in a financial sense. For example, look at the transition to online journalism — it creates tremendous amounts of value because huge numbers of people read online journalism but we don’t have (yet?) a good way to recover the value of that work in dollars. And journalism is not the only sector being disrupted in this way because of the Internet.

The challenge for Internet based companies is to figure out how they can transform the value that they create into dollars and cents.

The challenge is that competitors can continually undercut each other because the costs of providing Internet based services is relatively inexpensive and it is difficult to lock up customers. Switching costs are very low for customers.

It helps if you are government regulated. The Telcos, for example are able to make use of VOIP and other advances in communications technologies to reduce their costs of doing business yet they are still able to raise the price of their services. Being a government regulated industry helps them keep competition away.

But if you are in the music industry, movie industry, journalism, software services, cloud computing, if you are a software engineer, if you are a web designer, if you design logos, if you do any kind of digital work you are exposed to a huge amount of competition, you are exposed to the lowest cost provider in your sector — thanks to the Internet.

It’s interesting that countries spend billions of dollars to protect their living standards by limiting immigration because they know that low-cost labor hurts the living standards of their citizens. Yet there are no controls on exporting jobs via the Internet.

That will change or at least there will be efforts made to change this and other aspects of Internet use, because of the disruptive effects that it enables. It’s not a good thing but some governments will try to do this.

I believe the Internet will eventually enable a new golden age but getting there will be messy.

These are interesting times. Happy birthday Internet.

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Please see: The Internet devalues everything it touches . . .