From Possible to Profitable
By Joel Stonington
The most successful entrepreneurs are those who don't follow the herd but anticipate the needs of the
market earlier than the competition. Of course, such anticipation is not without risk, but the payout can
be considerable. After all, seminal inventions, such as the automobile, the Internet, and the smartphone,
were all regarded with high degrees of skepticism when first introduced. Equally important, the impact is
not only cultural but economic as well. The automobile gave rise to a global network of small businesses,
such as parts makers, dealerships, and service centers. The Internet has spawned a host of online
companies, many of which, such as Amazon.com and eBay.com, have grown from small operations to
very large ones indeed. So what are the small businesses of the future, and where will we find them? The
fields of energy and cleantech seem to be among the ripest areas for growth, as do nanotechnology,
entertainment, and the growing demands of adapting the planet to accommodate its burgeoning
population--even if they might strike some of us now as being a bit far-fetched. In forming the jobs and
businesses that might arise out of necessity, pleasure seeking, and technology, we generally followed the
first of the late British author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke's three "laws" of prediction, which goes as
follows: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost
certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong."
Fabricating items in low-cost printers, Plenty of hype but 3D printers are still extremely
expensive : Need a new lens cap? Print it up. That's the way of the future. Instead of fabricating in a
factory and shipping the item wherever it's needed, 3D printers are expected to produce everything from
architect models to sinks to spare camera parts. "It's already happening at service bureaus," says Jackie
Fenn, an analyst at Gartner. "It hasn't happened at a physical shop like Kinko's, but I think it's very
possible."
It's time to exploit space, Slightly beyond sci-fi : Since resources are running out here on Earth,
the value of rare metals and minerals may someday be worth the cost of lunar or asteroid mining,
especially when you consider that deep sea drilling requires investments of billions of dollars. "It's an area
of personal passion," says Peter Diamandis, commercial space pioneer and founder of the X PRIZE
Foundation. "If you realize that everything we hold of value on earth is in near-infinite quantities in
space, you realize there will be vast wealth created on the space frontier." Diamandis is not concerned
with the difficulties inherent in mining an asteroid; he's already convinced it's possible and lucrative. "It's
really about taking the steps and clarifying the regulatory structure of who owns these resources."
Use degrading polymers and stem cells to engineer tissue, Early uses and testing : This is not
about growing a foot or an arm in a lab. It's about growing skin or tendon or muscle--in other words,
single types of tissue. But the possibilities are immense. For instance, Soft Tissue Regeneration is a
Connecticut company working to heal ACL tears without taking tendon from another part of the body to
surgically repair it. The company uses a degrading polymer placed where a tear occurred and lets stem
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cells in the blood do the healing. "We use a device that looks like a high-tech shoelace," says Joseph
Reilly, president and chief executive of Soft Tissue Regeneration. "It's braided. It looks like about a 5-inch
shoelace from your sneaker made from very small fibers, like smaller than a human hair. After about 12
months it absorbs into the body, and you're left with a regrown ACL." The device is still years of clinical
trials from market, but the idea is being tested by numerous companies for myriad applications. It's the
oldest approach to healing: Let nature do what nature does best.
Ubiquitous natural resource as product, Still in the realm of Spaceballs : If water can be bottled
and sold, why not air? In 2009, bottled water was a $10.6 billion business that involved packaging 8.1
billion gallons in the U.S., according to Beverage Marketing Corp. in New York. But air is somewhat easier
to find than a cold sip of water. Still, oxygen bars went through a mildly popular phase in the '90s, and
seven or eight companies still market oxygen canisters to the action sports set. "It's pure oxygen," says
Daniel Jungers, managing partner of Big Ox, a company in Springfield, Mo. "It increases the oxygen
content in your blood and gives you a boost when you're tired or fatigued." Thus far there are no plans
for pure mountain air in bottles, unless you're talking pure irony. A Hong Kong activist group protesting
air quality in the city--reportedly three times as bad as New York City air--posted a video selling canned
fresh air that instantly went viral this year.
Electric vehicles hitting the U.S. market, Hundreds of charging stations have been built,
thousands to go : The all-electric Nissan Leaf completely sold out before the car even arrived in U.S.
showrooms, according to Agence France-Presse. With that kind of demand, the charging stations to get
those cars running are also going to be in high demand. "Our mission is to insure that people don't
hesitate to buy electric because they're worried about fueling," says Richard Lowenthal, CEO of Coulomb
Technologies, a Campbell (Calif.) company that builds charging stations. "The key is that they fuel a little
differently." In general, the cars take hours to charge, so stations are needed where cars are parked.
Although garages are often referred to as the perfect place, Lowenthal says there are better spots. "In
the U.S. there are 250 million cars and only 50 million garages. We're busy putting them elsewhere, like
the workplace."
Reading DNA gives clues to disease, DNA reveals some diseases, much more to come : In
May, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration put the whammy on a genetics company, San Diego's
Pathway Genomics, which was trying to put DNA testing kits on shelves at Walgreens. The company
pulled the kits. But testing DNA for patterns that correlate with diseases won't disappear so easily.
BioNanomatrix, a Philadelphia company that provides technology solutions for reading DNA, is working on
a grant to get DNA sequencing under $100 by 2015. The long-term possibilities of cheap DNA testing,
says Edward Erickson, BioNanomatrix's president and CEO, involve a better understanding of aging and
endless possibilities for new ways to cure and treat disease. "The great dream is that you take a person's
DNA when they are a baby and you profile it in a very thorough way," Erickson said. "You say look, this
baby is healthy in most ways, but this baby's DNA shows us the baby is at extreme risk." In one example,
if the risk were for heart disease, therapies could start at a young age rather than waiting decades before
early symptoms show up. "We are already capable of looking at the total amount of DNA that one sees in
the human genome."
Private companies audit polluters, Dependent on policy : Doing a greenhouse gas audit is
endlessly complicated, because so much of our daily lives, from heating to transportation to food, involve
contributing to climate change. As policy shifts to stop impending environmental degradation, the jobs
will follow. Michael Gillenwater is an expert in greenhouse gas measurement and co-founder of the
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Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. "There are going to be a more roles related to greenhouse gas
management," he says. "Auditors are one role that a lot of people focused on initially. It has been the
most clearly defined role in these early days of carbon markets. But there will be a whole population of
carbon specialists." In the end, the objective is to make the information that has been collected useful.
And that depends in large part on policy. "It will have to develop," says Gillenwater, "assuming we take
the problem of [climate change] seriously and start to implement policy to mitigate it."
Beyond 3D, Princess Leia has arrived : The hologram of today is a clever version of an old illusion
called Pepper's Ghost. In the mid-19th century, the trick was done with thick glass between the audience
and image that could make a figure appear to be floating in the air. Current illusionists use highly
reflective polymer, invisible to the audience, to create life-size images. "People walk into the room and
say, 'now that's a hologram,'" says Ian O'Connell, director of Musion Systems in London. A top application
for the technology is using holograms for real-time telepresence for meetings. The capacity already exists
for numerous people in different cities to appear on stage on another continent, in real time. Of course,
hologram theaters could replace 3D, as well. In Las Vegas this summer, Musion provided the technology
for the first U.S. nightclub with holographic entertainment. That way they can go from comedy to
mariachi with the push of a button.
Personal flight, Finally, commercially available : A New Zealand company, Martin Aircraft, is taking
orders for the first commercially available jetpack. It's recreational, so you'd need to go fly in a field
somewhere, rather than to work. It's also expensive, with the Martin website stating a price of $100,000.
If that price comes down, however, it's not hard to imagine that folks might want to fly to work instead
of drive. That is, until air traffic looks like the freeways of today.
Pay-to-play lunar travel , Lunar mission in the next few years : "Accessing space used to only be
the province of governments or large aerospace giants," says commercial space pioneer Peter Diamandis.
That is no longer the case, with numerous companies sending paying customers into the heavens. That
may go a step further, with lunar missions, in the next five or 10 years. Ever since Eugene Cernan
stepped off the moon on Dec. 14, 1972, the moon has been devoid of human contact. The next person
to return may well pay for the right to do so. Diamandis is co-founder of Space Adventures, a company
planning a lunar mission for tourists in the next three to four years. The expected mission has two seats.
Price: $100 million each.
Legalization of drugs, Still officially black market : California's legalization measure didn't pass on
Nov. 2, but California and a number of other states are already well into a gray area of legalization.
Further, legalization advocates say the vote itself was as step forward. "It elevated and legitimized the
discourse about marijuana legalization like nothing ever had before," says Ethan Nadelmann, director of
the Drug Policy Alliance Network in New York. "It shifted the debate from whether marijuana should be
legalized to how." For the small pot farmers and joint rollers, business is good, and few are looking
forward to the Phillip Morris of weed. That doesn't stop the push for legalization. Nadelmann says it will
happen with states first. "When will we see a repeal of the federal prohibition? It's impossible to say."
Grow meat in a lab, The tech works but the taste may be off : Using techniques that come out of
stem cell technology, numerous groups of scientists have grown meat in the lab. Stem cells are placed on
scaffolding and soaked in nutrients to grow. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) are
behind the push for lab meat. In 2008, the group offered a $1 million prize to the first group that can
grow commercially viable amounts of chicken meat in a lab. New Harvest is a nonprofit founded by Jason
Matheny in 2004 to do just that. In May he told Bloomberg Businessweek, "It's a way to satisfy the
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growing global demand for meat in a way that's healthier, more energy efficient, and sustainable."
SeeBloomberg Businessweek's profile of New Harvest founder Jason Matheny.
Use nanotechnology to repair cells, Very small and very, very small : A report commissioned by
the British Government earlier this year, "The Shape of Jobs to Come," flubbed in suggesting that
nanotechnology would lead to subatomic medical treatments and hence, nanomedics. We're on board
with nanotechnology providing advances in medicine, but this was a problem of size. Bruce Donald, a
computer science professor at Duke University, has been creating microrobots that could possibly insert
electrons into neurons in the brain. The world's smallest untethered, controllable robots, Donald's
nanobots are about 60 microns wide (200 could fit on an M&M). It's not hard to imagine medical
applications for the robots. But subatomic is a whole different scale. An atom is just a few femtometers
across. That's less than one billionth the size of the robots. Hence, femtomedics aren't going to be
making an appearance soon.
Smaller is better, Getting cheaper all the time : As satellites get smaller, the costs of launching
them get lower. That's the major limiting factor. Nanosatellites and the even-smaller picosatellites can be
packed with all sorts of useful equipment that have business applications. "The types of nanosatellites
and microsatellites that can be built by small companies and universities will become more robust," says
Peter H. Diamandis, a pioneer in the field of commerical space flight. "We're heading in a direction where
small teams and small companies will be able to do far more in smaller packages."
Your private info at risk, The need for data protection and reputation management growing
rapidly : From credit-card numbers to photos from the latest kegger, more private information is online
than ever before. Businesses need to protect that information, and individuals need to be careful with it.
Mike Spinney, a privacy expert in Townsend, Mass., says states are only now beginning to pass laws that
require companies to have written security plans to prevent data breach. Beyond data, a cottage industry
is developing in the field of reputation management. "The bad things we do online can be seen by just
about anybody," says Spinney. "The good things you do online can be your social media résumé, as it
were. But you don't want an impertinent comment on Facebook to be the difference between landing, or
not landing, a job."
Personal robotics expected to expand, Vacuuming floors but not doing dishes : Thousands of
robots have been blown up or damaged by improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan. So
robot mechanics already exist. But we're talking about something as ubiquitous as a computer repair
shop. The world robot population is growing rapidly, with an estimated 13 million robots by the end of
next year, according to IFR World Robotics. Many are industrial robots, but personal robotics is growing
rapidly, with research robots doing dishes and ironing. "People have play dates with their Roombas," says
Ryan Cato, director of the Consumer Privacy Project at Stanford University's Center for Internet and
Society. "Soldiers risk their lives trying to save bots on the battlefields. It will accelerate massively."
Space tourism, Only for the very, very rich : "The punchline is that we are now seeing the birth of
the Googles and Apples of the space business," says Peter H. Diamandis, a pioneer in the commercial
space industry. "There are a number of companies working on space hotels." At the forefront is Bigelow
Aerospace, which launched two prototypes of space hotels and currently plans a commercial space
complex by 2014. Called Sundancer, the hotel is expected to have space for up to six people on a short-
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term basis. A Russian company called Orbital Technologies is also racing to have the first commercial
space station. A vision of the station is in the photo above.
Healing with cells moves medicine away from drugs : Stem cells are already used to model
diseases and test new drugs, but as the technology advances, stems cells may actually push drugs aside.
Even now, stem cells are showing promise for degenerative diseases and regrowing cells after surgeries.
Pharmacies full of drugs, however, could well be replaced with pharmacies of cells that are more natural
and work better. "Using stem cells will shift medical practice away from the pharmaceutical or chemical
approach," says Robert Margolin, associate director of the Genetics Police Institute. "This is the first time
we're actually using living cells to help treat or mitigate disease."
Local food in growing cities : Single-story, high-tech greenhouses save significant amounts of water
and increase productivity. So why not stack them up and makes cities self-sufficient? The idea for vertical
farms came from an infectious disease ecologist, Dickson Despommier, who turned his knowledge of
parasites into a way of looking at cities. "Instead of the city behaving like a parasite, it should be a
symbiant," Despommier says. "The future city has to take a big lesson from nature and start behaving
like an ecosystem." By that, he means zero-waste cities: Even the idea of waste is anathema to a
working ecosystem. So Despommier envisions skyscrapers of the future producing the majority of food
consumed by citizens, with brown water and food compost used for farming. "City life," says
Despommier, "demands city food."
Bottled water already a billion-dollar business : It has been said that water is the oil of the 21st
century. But humans don't need to drink a liter or two of oil every day. Early signs of coming conflicts
over water are already apparent around the world and in the U.S., where the Southwest is ever-thirsty.
Dickson Despommier, a professor of microbiology at Columbia University, says water issues are a coming
tidal wave, especially considering the amount of water needed for agriculture. "People will actually make
a choice: I could drink this water, or I could let my plants drink this water," Despommier says. "It's going
to be the subject of conflicts and wars."
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