- Freedom from wires: What if you could power your devices via Wi-Fi?
- VR like the film industry a century ago: Ray Blanco reports from Vancouver
- What’s the military doing with “cold fusion”? We may soon find out…
- America’s revival of innovation? Fuggedaboutit, say federal bureaucrats
- The 5’s ellipses, decoded in full!
Do you remember the day Wi-Fi liberated you?
Your editor does. I was late to the party. It was the spring of 2005, and I’d squeezed every last bit of use out of a 1996-vintage desktop Mac. Sure, I’d made the move from a dial-up modem to broadband. But I was still tethered to wires connecting the machine with the wall if I wanted Internet access.
With a laptop machine and an Apple AirPort wireless base station, I was free to take the Web into whatever room of the house I wanted. Freedom! Sounds ridiculous now, but it was a revelation at the time.
Hold that thought… because a similar revelation is unfolding over the next month. Early investors have the potential to make a small fortune. Or even a big one.
For all the advances of the last decade, there’s still one obstacle to a truly wireless world.
We can transmit gobs of data through the airwaves now — not only Wi-Fi, but high-capacity LTE mobile-phone networks. But we still can’t transmit power. At the end of the day, you still need to plug in somewhere to recharge the battery of your phone, your tablet, your laptop, etc.
Fact is, the technology’s already there to transmit power using radio waves. On a large scale, transformers change voltages and currents in the power grid wirelessly. On a smaller scale, those “wireless charging pads” do the same thing for your small electronics.
But… and it’s a huge but… they can only do so over short distances.
What if your device could charge up within, say, 15 feet of a power source — with no wires?
Sure, you might have to stay in the same room, or maybe the next room… but at least you’d no longer be tethered.
And what if this technology were already validated by Underwriters Laboratories as the real deal?
Yes, this technology is already up and running. You just haven’t heard about it — yet.
Let’s put some numbers on the growth potential of this wireless-power technology.
The company that’s well in front of the pack currently brings in about $2.5 million a year in revenue. Now… tech industry experts figure about 50 billion smart devices will be online by 2020. That’s smartphones, laptops, plus all the new devices attached to the “Internet of Things,” like those refrigerators that warn you when your milk’s about to go bad.
Say this company makes just $1 per device and its technology winds up in only 4% of those 50 billion devices.
That’s $2 billion. Compared with the firm’s current revenue, that’s 79,900% growth.
And our team has reason to believe that trajectory begins within the next month.
Imagine what a boon it would be to this tiny company if its technology wound up in the homes of millions of people with an Apple device.
As it happens, Apple has one of its huge dog and pony shows coming up next month — its 2016 Worldwide Developers Conference starting June 13 in San Francisco. A partnership announcement might well come then and there — much to the benefit of this tiny company’s shareholders.
Here’s the thing. The company has a market cap of less than $170 million — microcap territory. If only 2,000 people acted today to buy $2,000 of shares each, the share price would pop nearly 2.4% within hours — or much more if “momentum traders” saw the action and swooped in.
We don’t want that to happen. We want the share price to grow on its own and the company’s potential to develop “organically,” as the saying goes, over the next month.
So today we’re allowing only 500 readers access to the special report spelling out the name and ticker symbol. If you don’t want to miss out, give it a look right now. If we’ve already reached the 500-reader cap, we’ll tell you more about this technology later in the week, and you’ll get another shot.
As a new week begins, stocks are in rally mode.
Crude is rallying to six-month highs at $47.78… and crude and stocks have been moving in sympathy most of this year. Meanwhile, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has declared a $1 billion stake in Apple. Thus, the S&P 500 is up half a percent, at 2,057. Gold is holding steady at $1,275.
There’s little cheer to be found in the morning’s economic numbers — both of which offer a glimpse into how the economy’s performing so far in May…
- New York State manufacturing: Shrinking again after two months of anemic growth, according to the Federal Reserve’s Empire State survey. That’s nine negative readings out of the last 12
- Homebuilder sentiment: Still in solidly positive territory, according to the Housing Market Index from the National Association of Home Builders, but there’s no sign of growth — the figure’s been ruler-flat for four straight months.
“I expect there will be a widening field of ways to profit from virtual reality,” says our Ray Blanco — who was in Vancouver this week for the first international consumer VR conference and exhibition.
“It’s important to remember that VR isn’t just headsets and their related hardware,” he reminds us. “It’s also hardware for capturing the world, whether through 3-D, 360-degree images or using full virtualization with computer models built out of scans.”
Plus all the related software and content. “We’re already seeing VR content being created in sporting events,” says Ray. “The NBA is moving aggressively to figure out how to use VR in its games.
“I’ve heard VR in 2016 compared to the film industry in 1910… an industry at the beginning of many years of strong growth and increasing technological sophistication.
“Fortunes were made as that industry evolved from silent films to Technicolor glory — and increasing box office profits. We’ll see the same happen in the nascent VR industry… only it’s going to happen faster.”
There’s still time to jump in… but as Ray explains here, you don’t want to dawdle.
As fabulous as a future of wireless power and VR might be, imagine how much better it would be with easy transportation not dependent on fossil fuels.
That’s long been the promise of “cold fusion” — dismissed by most mainstream scientists but defended by a few die-hards, who’ve taken to labeling the phenomenon “LENR,” or low-energy nuclear reactions.
Now comes word the House Armed Services Committee is asking the Pentagon to furnish “a briefing on the military utility of recent U.S. industrial-base LENR advancements” by Sept. 22.
If it’s for real, cold fusion would be a big deal for the military, points out Popular Mechanics. “It would enable ships, aircraft and tanks to continue indefinitely (or at least for months) without refueling, with abundant power for lasers or other directed-energy weapons.”
The committee cites a Defense Intelligence Agency finding that “Japan and Italy are leaders in the field and that Russia, China, Israel and India are now devoting significant resources to LENR development.”
“Cold fusion has long been in the Navy’s wheelhouse,” says our Byron King — who knows a few things about both the energy industry and the Navy.
He points out the Navy pioneered nuclear power for submarines. Modern nuclear subs can go for 33 years without needing a core replacement. New aircraft carriers can go for 40 years without refueling.
But that’s plain-ol’ atomic age fission. Fusion, though? “A few years back, Lockheed Martin started throwing private money into it,” he tells us. It’s a project at the firm’s “Skunk Works” unit that takes on the most bleeding-edge projects. Lockheed’s website boasts about it…
“Skunk Works was the home base of the U-2, the SR-71, stealth fighters and much more,” Byron says by way of background.
Early results look, at least, promising. “It’s a high-risk, high-payoff idea — build things smaller than a 40-foot truck trailer, generate enough to power a city. The goal — five years to a working prototype, 10 years to commercialization.”
Hmmm… Maybe we’ll know more come September.
So much for America’s entrepreneurial revival: It’s just been strangled in its crib by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Hey, this is The 5: Despite our other exciting content today, we have a gloom-and-doom reputation to uphold!
The SEC’s new rules for “equity crowdfunding” kick in today. We’ve been following this story for three years now. One day last October, we got so giddy as to title a crowdfunding-themed episode “America’s Revival Begins Today (We Hope).”
A quick refresher: Crowdfunding is how some entrepreneurs raise seed money — pitching an idea for a new gizmo on Kickstarter or a similar website. People who get jazzed by the idea pony up money in exchange for dibs on the gizmo once it reaches the market. (That’s how the developers of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset got their start.)
“Equity crowdfunding” is supposed to be the next step in this evolution — allowing ordinary folks like you to take an ownership stake in such a startup, even that neighbor kid working in his garage who you might suspect is the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
For decades, the feds limited such investments to deep-pocketed folks who attained the status of “accredited investors”… but a 2012 law sought to remedy that.
So far, so good: But it fell to the SEC to write the rules implementing the law.
We tempered our enthusiasm back on October by pointing out “the devil will be in the details.” Turns out Satan runs rampant through the 500-plus pages of regulations. How many garage startups will want to file papers with the SEC that have been reviewed by an independent accountant?
“Financiers say complexity and uncertainty about the rules have discouraged many companies from trying to raise money at the outset,” says this morning’s Financial Times, “with some warning that the SEC’s regime will backfire on investors.
“Only companies with no alternative would tolerate the cumbersome regulations, said Rory Eakin, founder of CircleUp, an online investment platform. As a result, the rules will lead to ‘adverse selection’ that will leave only weaker companies using crowdfunding, he said.”
The salmon-colored rag talked to a former SEC official who worked on the regulations. He said he and his fellow bureaucrats sought a “balance between unleashing the promise of crowdfunding and not opening the door for boiler rooms and drug traffickers.”
There’s a novel argument: We have to tie one hand behind the back of American innovators to fight the “war on drugs.” Who knew?
“Wow, I got published — that is a first,” says the reader who facetiously said the ellipses we use in The 5 are really a coded message.
He sent us the full translation over the weekend…
THE DEEP STATE GOVERNMENT IS ALREADY IN YOUR
SHORTS. GET LOTS OF TOILET PAPER AND RUN FOR THE
HILLS.
Another reader went to the trouble of filling in the blanks the first reader furnished… heh.
“Loved your response saying to drink your Ovaltine!” another reader writes of our facetious reply to the coded message. “Now just don’t shoot your eye out.”
Says still another reader, “I thought I was the only one still watching that movie on Christmas Day.”
Best regards,
Dave Gonigam
The 5 Min. Forecast
P.S. “Central Bankers’ Wisdom Faulted as Gold Holdings Surge 25%,” says a Bloomberg headline today.
Indeed, holdings in gold ETFs have grown to their highest levels since late 2013 as it becomes apparent central bankers don’t know what they’re doing.
But… we emphasize now is not the time to add to your gold holdings. Rather, Jim Rickards says you should do something else instead. Click here for his urgent gold message.
