The Innovation Index Weekly Report for the week ending 01-31-07

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) continues to lead The Top 20 Innovators in stock performance of The Innovation Index, with 11% gain for the year.



The Innovation Index was flat for the week ending January 31, 2007, and is up 4% in 2007. S & P 500 lost 1% last week. NASDAQ is up 2%, whereas S & P 500 and the Dow Jones Index are each up 1% in 2007. It was another tough week for the Top 20 Innovators – 12 innovators declined last week, only 4 gained some ground, and 4 stayed even.

The Innovation Index closed at 71.86 on January 31, 2007, up 2.48 points from the closing price of 69.38 on December 29, 2006.

Weekly Advances

eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) led all Innovators with 8% gain in just one week, and is now up 8% for the year. eBay had a solid quarter, showed strength in the core auction business, and is reaping the benefits of innovations introduced in 2006. eBay is perhaps the dark horse of 2007. Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) and IBM - (NYSE: IBM) each gained 2% for the week. Intel Corporation (NYSE: INTC) was up 1% for the week. I posted a story on Intel – The Innovator of the week touting Intel’s recently announced breakthrough innovation. There were no significant gains from other innovators last week.

Weekly Declines

3M Company (NYSE: MMM) dropped 7% last week owing to quarterly results that missed the analyst estimates, and the future outlook that did not really excite the analysts either. 3M is now down 5% for the year. However, this is still early in the year. Look for the seasoned innovator 3M to bounce back before the middle of the year. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) hot on the heels of the huge launch of Windows Vista was still down 1% for the week. The investors shrugged off the launch, and are perhaps looking at Microsoft to deliver on the promise of Vista - money, money, money. The key question: how many existing Windows customers will convert to Vista? We will be sure to watch when Microsoft announces next quarter's revenues, in particular existing customers who are moving to Vista.

Yearly Winners

Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) is leading the top 20 innovators with 11% stock performance gain for the year. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is next with 9% gains for the year; however, as I write this weekly report, Google is down in the last couple of days as the investors reacted less favorably to Google's latest quarterly results. eBay and Target Corporation (NYSE: TGT) are both tied with 8% gains for the year. Look who is on the rise again: Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) has almost quietly notched gains of 5% for the year already. HP was tied as The Top Innovator of 2006, and had a huge gain of 45% last year. HP is back again with 5% gain in the first month of the year.

I posted The Innovation Index Annual Report earlier in the year that included three Chapters:

Chapter One - Total Innovation Activity at The Top 20 Innovators
Chapter Two - The Top Innovator - The Innovator of Innovators
Chapter Three - The Innovation Insights and Roundup

About The Innovation Index

The Innovation Index introduced in December, 2006 is a weighted stock price index of the top 20 Innovators in North America.

The Innovation Index has returned 119% over the last five years. This assumes an investment in each stock of The Innovation Index (buying each stock). An average of $100 invested in The Innovation Index on December 31, 2001 returned $219 as of December 29, 2006. By comparison, $100 invested in each of S & P 500, NASDAQ and Dow Jones Index returned $124. The Innovation Index beats the S & P 500, NASDAQ and Dow Jones Index by 77% over the last five years.

The Normalized Innovation Index is even more impressive, and has returned 174% over the last five years. This assumes equal investment in each stock of The Innovation Index.

The alphabetical list of the top 20 Innovators of The Innovation Index along with their stock ticker symbols are presented below:

3M Company - (NYSE: MMM)
Amazon.com, Inc. - (NASDAQ: AMZN)
America Movile - (NYSE: AMX)
Apple Inc. - (NASDAQ: AAPL)
Cisco Systems, Inc. - (NASDAQ: CSCO)
Dell Inc. - (NASDAQ: DELL)
eBay Inc. - (NASDAQ: EBAY)
General Electric Co. - (NYSE: GE)
Google Inc. - (NASDAQ: GOOG)
Hewlett-Packard Co. - (NYSE: HPQ)
Intel Corporation - (NYSE: INTC)
International Business Machines Corp. - (NYSE: IBM)
Microsoft Corporation - (NASDAQ: MSFT)
Research In Motion Limited - (NASDAQ: RIMM)
Southwest Airlines Co. - (NYSE: LUV)
Starbucks Corporation - (NASDAQ: SBUX)
Target Corp. - (NYSE: TGT)
The Proctor & Gamble Company - (NYSE: PG)
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. - (NYSE: WMT)
Yahoo! Inc. - (NASDAQ: YHOO)

The Innovation Index will analyze the positions and standings of the top 20 Innovators at the end of each year. For 2007, there will be no further changes in The Innovation Index.

References:

The Innovation Index
The Innovation Index Annual Report – Chapter One
The Innovation Index Annual Report – Chapter Two
The Innovation Index Annual Report – Chapter Three

Disclaimer: I invest in the stocks comprising The Innovation Index, beginning in 2007.

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Bravo England

A break from our regularly scheduled Travel Program. I shared the Schadenfreude of one of the greatest English own goals of all time so it is only fair that I say Bravo England for beating Australia tonight in a one day cricket match. Here is the final score.

It has taken a flogging in 5 test matches, 3 one day matches, a Twenty20 match and as well as a handful of domestic embarrassments including losing the "unloseable" second test in Adelaide and scoring the lowest one day total (110) in (by coincidence) Adelaide other than a minnow (cant remember if it was Bangladesh or Zimbabwe) for England to find the magic touch and convincingly beat Australia- but they have. Well done to Freddie/Vaughanie's lads.

Intel - The Innovator of the week

Intel Corporation (NYSE: INTC) is one of the Top 20 Innovators of The Innovation Index. Intel Corporation is The Innovator of the week. Intel stock is up 4% for the year (through Jan. 31) owing to better revenues and profitability in the latest quarter, and recently announced breakthrough product innovations.

Intel announced game changing, record-setting innovation in transistor technology last week comprising of two new materials used in making transistors: high-k and Metal gates. How big is this innovation? This 45nm technology represents the biggest technological change and creativity in 40 years, extends Moore's Law into the next decade, and increases Intel's lead by more than a year over the rest of the semiconductor industry with working 45nm processors codenamed "Penryn".

Background

According to Moore's law, the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every two years - this does not just happen by itself. Intel methodically and rigorously innovates and integrates, "adding more features and computing processing cores, increasing performance, and decreasing manufacturing costs and cost per transistor." Intel creates new technology that shrinks transistors to ever-smaller sizes. However, using current materials, the ability to shrink transistors reached fundamental limits because of increased power and heat issues that develop as feature sizes reach atomic levels. Hence, Intel sought to implement new materials for this killer innovation.

Gordon Moore

Intel co-founder and creative leader Gordon Moore made a comeback and told the world: "The implementation of high-k and metal materials marks the biggest change in transistor technology since the introduction of polysilicon gate MOS transistors in the late 1960s." It should be noted that Moore has not made public statements on behalf of Intel for the past several years, especially as it alludes to transistor technology. For Moore to come out of retirement and essentially state that this is the biggest change since the late 1960s makes this innovation significant.

Disruptive Innovation

"Transistor gate leakage associated with the ever-thinning Silicon Dioxide gate dielectric is recognized by the industry as one of the most formidable technical challenges facing Moore's Law. To solve this critical issue, Intel replaced the silicon dioxide with a thicker hafnium-based high-k material in the gate dielectric, reducing leakage by more than 10 times compared to the silicon dioxide used for more than four decades.

Because the high-k gate dielectric is not compatible with today's silicon gate electrode, the second part of Intel's 45nm transistor material recipe is the development of new metal gate materials. While the specific metals that Intel uses remains secret, the company will use a combination of different metal materials for the transistor gate electrodes."

Key Product Benefits

What are the key product benefits of 45nm technology over today's 65nm technology?

- Approximately twice the transistor density (great for smaller chip sizes or increased transistor counts)
- Approximately 30 percent reduction in transistor-switching power
- Greater than 20 percent improvement in transistor-switching speed or a greater than 5 times reduction in source-drain leakage power
- Greater than 10 times reduction in transistor gate oxide leakage for lower power requirements and increased battery life
- Increased computing performance by up to 20%

Mark Bohr, Intel senior fellow states: "Meanwhile our engineers and designers have achieved a remarkable accomplishment that ensures the leadership of Intel products and innovation. Our implementation of novel high-k and metal gate transistors for our 45nm process technology will help Intel deliver even faster, more energy efficient multi-core products that build upon our successful Intel Core 2 and Xeon family of processors, and extend Moore's Law well into the next decade."

Penryn - The new Intel processors

According to Intel, the new Penryn family of processors will be based on the new process technology and new microarchitecture. The combination of Intel's leading 45nm process technology, high-volume manufacturing capabilities, and leading microarchitecture design enabled Intel to develop its first working 45nm Penryn processors.

Intel announced that there are more than 15 products based on 45nm in development across desktop, mobile, workstation and enterprise segments. With more than 400 million transistors for dual-core processors and more than 800 million for quad-core, the Penryn family of 45nm processors includes new microarchitecture features for greater performance and power management capabilities, as well as higher core speeds and up to 12 megabytes of cache. The Penryn family designs also bring approximately 50 new Intel SSE4 instructions that expand capabilities and performance for media and high-performance computing applications.

Bottomline

Intel become the world's number one microprocessor and semiconductor company decades ago, and has remained in the leadership position in the microprocessor market ever since. However, AMD has been recently disrupting Intel's market share, gaining market share and taking market share away from Intel. Can Intel stall AMD with the new Penryn and 45 nm technology? Can Intel create the new Penryn using efficient manufacturing yield and economical prices? Can Intel regain the market share from AMD and reverse the tide?

Would consumers and businesses crave for the extra power, extra performance, and better efficiencies that Penryn and the new 45 nm technology offers? This would depend heavily on the adoption of new media such as on demand video, audio, multimedia, and the transformation of the Internet and Information from static to dynamic, multimedia, compute intensive applications. As more consumers embrace YouTube, Flickr, Myspace, on demand media, images, animations, home entertainment centers powered by computers and faster processors, better operating systems such as the new Windows Vista, Apple iPod + iTunes and MP3 music and on demand video, Apple iMac computers powered by Intel processors, Dell computers, HP computers, and users all over the world purchasing computers with Intel processors – Intel is sure to benefit. One thing is certain: Intel has created a game changing innovation, and is planning to ship Penryn processors based on this innovation in the second half of 2007.


Intel is The Innovator of the week.

References:

www.intel.com
Intel Press Release

4 Simple Secrets for NetMarketing Success

I loved this! It is so on target. Check it out.

4 Simple Secrets for NetMarketing Success

by: J.L. Campbell

Starting an internet based business when you have zero marketing experience is, to say the least, bewildering. I speak from personal experience as I started out with no specialized knowledge. I gradually weaved my way through what seemed like hundreds of sites selling just about everything and tried to resist buying every white elephant that was offered.

In the interim, I purchased my first package which turned out to be of little practical use. While I was doing that, I somehow went off in another direction and bought another “package deal”, hardly stopping to think that I did not have the requisite skill and knowledge to make this programme work either.

To cut a direct path through the dense forest, I’ll tell you now that I spent much more that I originally intended. Thankfully, I learnt a few lessons along the way.

1. Stay Focused

It is easy to become swamped and distracted trying to run several programmes at the same time, on zero experience. Leave diversification to the pros until you have garnered some experience and at least have some sales/profit (whichever you prefer) from your first venture. Needless to say, you will find yourself floundering around aimlessly, watching your money burn, having done no research before making a purchase. If you feel a burning urge to buy anyway, read the material again, do some research, sleep on it and then make a decision. Twenty-four hours delay won’t kill you and remember, one venture at a time.

2. Allow some “Opportunities” to pass you by

As God is my witness, I believe I became a member of at least fifty programmes that promised me anything from “massive profits” to “dramatic sales explosion, traffic, profit, great downlines”….you get the idea. Unless you have twenty-four dedicated hours to spend on your e-business each day, you cannot market all these web sites; and without the ability to create traffic to each site (and you get one for just about every programme you join), you are back where you started. …And, by the way, did I mention the sea of email from other members? That’s right, I didn’t get beyond the hype at the top of the sales page either. So then, limit yourself to a manageable number of traffic generation ventures. Better to pay for leads or hits even if on a tight budget than to try to do the impossible. Allow some opportunities to pass you by. If they are too good to be true, they are!

3. Free Information….A hidden gold mine

I have hundreds of pages of free information (yes, I have printed them out, this works for me) received when I bought something or subscribed to an ezine. I have two words of advice…Use them! They are valuable, even if you have to wade through tons of information for a few golden nuggets. If your business is to grow, you have to be learning constantly. If all else fails, you can always rebrand the books, give them away to your subscribers or make some money from them by reselling the information. I read somewhere that a great percentage of ebooks remain unread by those who receive them. What a shame! Do your best to use that information, it is there to help you get ahead.

4. Keep at it, Rome was not built in a day

If you (1) stay focused on one or two manageable ventures, (2) channel your marketing energies wisely (pay where you can and forget the freebies), (3) read the complimentary material you get and (4) develop some stick-to-itiveness, you will eventually begin to see rewards from your investment. You may never make millions, but you will at least derive a steady income from your efforts.

Any questions or comments about this article, feel free to contact me at articles@ebizentrepreneur.com

About The Author E-biz Home Business Resource is hosted online by J.L. Campbell and is a valuable, creative tool used by people starting an online business as well as the experienced entrepreneur. Get your *FR*EE* subscription today at ebiz-netrepreneur@getresponse.com or visit http://www.ebiz-netrepreneur.net to embark on your e-business voyage to success.