David Fuller and Eoin Treacy's Comment of the Day
Category - Autonomies

    Tesla Wants to Power Wal-Mart

    This article by Dana Hull for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section: 

    Jackson Family Wines, based in Santa Rosa, has a new partnership with Tesla involving battery storage and several vehicle charging stations, according to the February issue of Wine Business Monthly. The winery declined to comment.

    Mack Wycoff, Wal-Mart’s senior manager for renewable energy and emissions, said the company is intrigued by energy storage. “Instead of pulling electricity from the grid, you discharge it from the battery,” he said. “Ideally you know when your period of peak demand is, and you discharge it then.”

    Mike Martin, Cargill’s director of communications, declined to provide details about how the company plans to use Tesla batteries at the Fresno plant. The 200,000-square-foot facility, one of the largest of its type in California, produces nearly 400 million pounds of beef each year.

    Janet Dixon is director of facilities at the Temecula Valley Unified School District in southern California, which plans to install solar panels at 20 of its 28 schools this summer. Dixon said that SolarCity is the solar provider, and five of the facilities will have Tesla batteries.

    “We spend roughly $3 million a year on electricity, and most of that is lighting and air conditioning,” said Dixon. “We are going solar to reduce our overall costs and the battery storage should help us manage our peak demand.”

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    Email of the day on oil prices

    Today I listened to a presentation by Torbjørn Kjus, oil analyst at DNB Markets. He has become quite a guru in the last years so it was interesting to hear what he had to say. Interestingly, after having been possibly the most bearish oil price analyst for quite some time, he is now among the most bullish forecasters, see pages 7-9 in the presentation. He believed that the oil producers would continue to cut investments and particularly exploration costs, even if we see a move to $70-80 bbl. The majors will prefer to maintain dividend payouts. This will be particularly painful for oil services. As such one should expect oil producers to gain more from any oil price rise, rather than oil service companies.

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    Buttered Coffee Could Make You Invincible. And This Man Very Rich

    This article by Gordy Megroz for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section: 

    He calls the mixture Bulletproof coffee. Drink it, the name implies, and you’ll feel invincible. “Fats and caffeine help stimulate the brain,” Asprey says in his office, taking another sip. The coffee, along with the drug cocktail he’s just downed, which includes vitamins K and C as well as aniracetam, a pharmaceutical designed to improve brain function, is intended to provide hours of enlightenment. “There’s a sense of cognitive ease, where everything you want to say is at the tip of your tongue,” he says. “It’s like getting a new computer—you never want to go back to the old one.”

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    The Tricorder, An All-In-One Diagnostic Device, Draws Nigh

    Thanks to a subscriber for this article from readwrite.com concentrating on the Qualcomm sponsored Tricorder X-Prize. Here is a section: 

    “We’re pretty confident that the majority of the 10 finalist teams will actually be able to deliver,” senior director Grant Company said. “Some may merge, and some may fall out, just because they can’t pull it together. And that just reinforces how big of a challenge this really is. It’s because the goals are very high.”

    The winning “tricorder”—and its competitors—likely have a long FDA approval process ahead of them, which means their consumer release could be years away. But when they do arrive, they will be able to diagnose problems like stroke, anemia and tuberculosis—tasks that have always been reserved for doctors.

    Diagnosis: Home Diagnosis
    Such devices will arrive at an interesting time in medical history. With the emergence of mobile phones and wearable devices, home diagnostics are poised to explode.

    Company said the Apple Watch and affiliated software development, will be a welcome boost for the space.

    “I think it’s a good first step, and a useful barometer of what the public’s appetite is for this type of technology,” Company said. “There’s going to be a need of collection and analysis, and these types of tools are going to be absolutely critical. If the masses are able to start building capabilities, using these research kits, it’s the first step toward adoption.”

     

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    U.Ks FTSE 100 Rides Past Record, Reaching 7,000 for First Time

    This article by Inyoung Hwang and Roxana Zega for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section: 

    “U.K. stocks have had a strong rise given the headwinds,” Richard Hunter, head of equities at Hargreaves Lansdown Plc in London, said by phone. “Mining, oil and bank stocks make up a big part of the index, and we all know the difficult time these three sectors have had. Despite that, the FTSE 100 has managed to make progress.”

    It’s been a good week for the benchmark: Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne on Wednesday unveiled higher economic growth and lower deficit and unemployment forecasts along with help for the North Sea oil industry. The latter has helped energy stocks trim declines spurred by a rout in oil and metals prices. Banking shares have been hurt by a series of scandals ranging from manipulation of interest-rate benchmarks to tax- evasion schemes.

    Even with the FTSE 100 at a record, the advance in British equities this year is about a third that of gains in European peers, which was boosted by additional stimulus from the region’s central bank.

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    Radical new high-speed liquid technology could bring 3D printing into mainstream manufacturing

    Thanks to a subscriber for this article from Kurzweil which may be of interest. Here is a section:  

    The technology, called Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP), manipulates light and oxygen to fuse objects in liquid media. It works by projecting beams of light through an oxygen-permeable window into a liquid resin to rapidly transform 3D models into physical objects.

    Working in tandem, UV light, which triggers photo polymerization, interacts with oxygen, which inhibits the reaction, to control the solidification of the resin, creating commercially viable objects that can have feature sizes below 20 microns, or less than one-quarter of the width of a piece of paper. This is the first 3D-printing process that uses tunable photochemistry instead of the layer-by-layer approach that has defined the technology for decades.

    Faster, stronger, predictable
    CLIP enables a very wide range of materials to be used to make 3D parts with novel properties, including elastomers, silicones, nylon-like materials, ceramics and biodegradable materials, and could allow for synthesizing novel materials that can advance research in materials science.
    Conventionally made 3D printed parts are notorious for having mechanical properties that vary depending on the direction the parts were printed because of the layer-by-layer approach. Much more like injection-molded parts, CLIP produces consistent and predictable mechanical properties, smooth on the outside and solid on the inside, the company says.

    “By rethinking the whole approach to 3D printing, and the chemistry and physics behind the process, we have developed a new technology that can create parts radically faster than traditional technologies by essentially ‘growing’ them in a pool of liquid,” said Joseph M. DeSimone, professor of chemistry at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and of chemical engineering at North Carolina State and CEO of Carbon3D, who co-invented the method.

     

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    Tag Heuer teaming up with Intel and Google for Android Wear-powered smartwatch

    This article by Chris Wood for GizMag may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section: 

    The collaboration was announced at a press event at the Baselworld watch show in Switzerland, with Tag Heuer CEO Jean-Claude Biver welcoming Android Wear director David Singleton and Intel's Michael Bell to the stage to discuss the project. While the announcement served as official confirmation that a luxury, Swiss "connected watch" is on the way from the company, we'll have to wait until the end of the year to get details on the device.

    Powered by Intel, it's unclear whether the device will include features specific to the Tag Heuer product, or whether it will run the exact same version of Android Wear that we've seen on the Moto 360, Asus ZenWatch and others. To this point, Google has forbidden OEMs from "skinning" Wear with custom UIs (though they can throw in their own add-on apps).

    While Tag Heuer was keen to point out that up to 80 percent of the components and labor for the watch will take place in Switzerland, the fact that the device's processor will be constructed outside of the country means that it will be not legally be able to carry the respected "Swiss made" label.

     

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    Macau Gaming

    Thanks to a subscriber for this report from UOB which may be of interest. Here is a section:

    No signs of improvement. Since our previous adjustment of gaming revenue assumptions in early-January, Macau’s gaming market has shown further deterioration. In 2M15, gross gaming revenue (GGR) dropped 48.6% yoy to MOP43.3b, with VIP and mass-market GGR falling 40.3% yoy and 25.8% yoy respectively. As the trend suggests that 1Q15 GGR will fail to meet our previous MOP75.1b expectations, and various factors suggest fundamentals may deteriorate further before reaching the bottom, we further cut our expectations on future gaming revenue assumptions, with growth assumptions reduced to -21.2% (from -3.1%) for 2015 and +9.0% (from 12.7%) for 2016.

    Besides declining revenue, we foresee that rising labour cost due to a labour shortage will put additional pressure on casino operators’ earnings. Several casino operators will be raising casino workers’ salaries by 5% in 2015. Hence, we lower 2015 and 2016 industry EBITDA assumptions by 27.0% and 32.4% respectively vs our previous estimates. We also lower our valuation multiples for casino operators because of the worsening market outlook

     

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    AIG Targets 8% Debt in Buyback Plan for More Than $1 Billion

    This article by Sonali Basak and Doni Bloomfield for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section: 

    American International Group Inc., the largest commercial insurer in the U.S. and Canada, has offered to buy back more than $1 billion of its bonds as the company targets debt issued when interest rates were higher.

    The insurer is redeeming notes in currencies such as the dollar, the yen and the Swiss franc, New York-based AIG said Tuesday in a statement. An offer for securities including $1.2 billion of 8.175 percent junior subordinated debentures expires April 13, subject to extension. Those bonds were issued near the depths of the financial crisis.

    AIG has been repurchasing stock, expanding through acquisitions and redeeming old debt after returning to profitability and repaying a taxpayer bailout that started in 2008. Debt-reduction efforts last year cut annual interest expenses by about $250 million, the company said in a Feb. 13 conference call.

    “AIG’s leverage metrics are now on par with higher rated peers” Fitch Ratings said in a statement on March 2. The firm raised its outlook on the insurer to positive, citing “improvement in AIG’s capital position and debt servicing capabilities over the past several years.”

     

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