Pike Research, a worldwide toddler

In less than two years, Pike Research in Boulder has grown legs in the clean-tech analyst industry, and toddled off to Washington D.C., London, South Korea and other parts of the Asia/Pacific.

Clint Wheelock, founder and the sole principal of the firm, says the company is doing that with about 40 people, 25 full-time employees and another 15 contractors. That's a small business that the new governor's economic-development administration should keep an eye on.

"Things have really been moving quickly," said Wheelock, after announcing the opening of the Washington office last week. "Faster than I orginally thought," and despite the national and global recessions.

But clean-tech, a worldwide industry that itself is in its infancy, is like that. Reaching out, growing fast, and learning quickly, without much help from any particular mentor, unless the Chinese government can be considered some kind of rich uncle.

Pike Research, according to its own press releases, "is a market research and consulting firm that provides in-depth analysis of global clean technology markets ... [including the] Smart Energy, Clean Transportation, Clean Industry and Building Efficiency sectors."

Wheelock said the opening of offices in Washington and London adds the fuel-cells sector to the firm's expertise. It's "a big new focus for us, and although fuel cells have been around for a long time, we really think the industry is on the cusp of some real growth -- for probably the first time, despite a lot of (earlier)talk."

"We have specialists in smart-grid and renewable energy, and in energy-efficient buildings and in clean transportation, including electric vehicles and other alternate-fuel vehicles," Wheelock said.

The analysts write research reports that include market size for a particular area of clean-tech operations, like software for smart-grid electricity distribution, Pike's latest research report. The reports estimate current and future market size and segmentation. That latest report, for example, predicts software and services for smart-grid technology will increase from a "relatively small" $356 million annual market in 2010 to $4.2 billion in annual revenue by 2015.

Pike sells that kind of advice in a single report -- "What we call a basic license and which is essentially one to five users within an organization," Wheelock said -- for $3,500. "There's also an enterprise license for large companies that want to post it on their corporate intranet, and that's typically 1.5 times the basic license, so in a typical case it would be $5,250" for an enterprise.

Pike sells its large clients subsciptions that allow access to its analysts for consulting and custom research. Wheelock said the "bulk" of the firm's revenue comes from subscription sales.

"A lot of the larger clients," he said, "are the large multi-national technology and energy companies that have an ongoing need for this, and so they'll sign up for a subscription or multiple subscriptions."

Opening the Washington office has been on Wheelock's radar since he started the company with his own savings. A London office is also in the future, and probably South Korea, Wheelock said.

Big market-research firms have retrenched during the economic downturn, he noted, but that has given Pike an opportunity to establish itself as a brand name for clean-tech analysis.

"The level of competitive intensity is very low, and much lower than I expected," he said. "One of the key things that we're trying to do is take advantage of that competitive vacuum and really assert ourselves as the authority on several of these key emerging areas....

"I absolutely anticipate that there will be a lot more intense competition in a couple of years, and I think we're just trying to get ourselves in a good position as the leader in the States before that happens," Wheelock said.

"It seems to be working very well."

Be thankful for advertising

Remember Black Friday 2010. It marks the beginning of the nation's recovery from the Great Recession of 2008-2010.

The mighty American consumer, taught the harsh lesson of credit-card debt, is back in the market, but this time buying with cash in the bank.

Online shoppers boosted online retailers' revenue by 16 percent on the Friday after Thanksgiving, according to the Associated Press, while long lines in the dark hours before dawn Friday proved before doors even opened that brick-and-mortar shops were going to have a good day.

Locally, you could tell that advertisers were back in force in the Denver Post.The Post has been selling the bottom of its Sunday front page for more than a year now, it seems. Since summer, the newspaper has sold the top-right corner of the page, labeled "Today's Daily Deal," to a variety of advertisers. And now the newspaper is selling off the bottom of page 2 as well, depriving readers of the interesting short items it has regularly showcased in that space but driving up ad-sales revenue that much more.

After all, what's a newspaper for? To share the news and serve the public interest? Not necessarily.

Newspapers survive today by selling space to advertisers; and the Great Recession for Newspapers, which began even before the nation's latest financial crisis, has proved unarguably that business survival is the ultimate goal of any newspaper, just as it is for any business.

In fact, newspapers, today, are not much different from any retailer; the ad sale is king, and not much will get in its way. Walmart, for example, long prided itself on not having to advertise in media because its low prices would lead consumers to its aisles simply by word-of-mouth. Today, however, Walmart is inserting ads in the Post like any other big-box seller.

I no longer argue with newspapers on that score. My profession as a journalist is dependent on the ad sale, and plenty of jobs collapsed when advertisers moved from newspapers to other venues to deliver their messages.

And if Today's Daily Deal for pole-dancing lessons, symphony performances and home-security packages do the trick (pun intended), then I'm all for using the deals to give working journalists some white space to fill with news.

And you can't argue with the results. If ads spur consumer spending, and consumer spending creates jobs and jobs create more spending, then an economy that is sputtering back to life is what every American, even the underemployed and unemployed, can genuinely be thankful for on this holiday weekend.

I am.

Baby Boom bust II

When you write as one of the many bloggers few people read, you are encouraged when a national writer addresses the same topic you've already taken up, confirming your instincts about what's happening in the world around you.

Take Michael Kinsley, for instance, writing in The Atlantic magazine about the bust of the Baby Boom.

Look down this page, and you'll see that in my last piece, written over Labor Day weekend, I took a slightly different and much shorter tact than Kinsley.

We both generally conclude that until now Baby Boomers, that great generation of Americans born between 1946 and 1964, have blown it.

Kinsley suggests in his article that our generation has 19 years to save its reputation, by allowing ourselves to be taxed to the point that we pay back all the money we and our parents borrowed to finance the society we have enjoyed over the past half century in America.

My suggestion was there was no way to make repairs.

But Kinsley has a point, and people who read me know I am all for making amends for our sins while we can.

Check out Michael Kinsley's piece. It's politically impossible, but at least he offers a solution.

Doing 'right' by the nation

"I think we misinterpreted what the markets wanted," [Federal Reserve Board Gov. Emmett] Rice said. "I thought they wanted us to stay tight. After the ease, I was concerned about how the financial markets would react. When they reacted positively, I was surprised."

Rice was a governor on the Fed when Ronald Reagan was president and the nation was suffering through the longest recession since the Great Depression until now. His words then, quoted by William Greider, in his 1987 book "Secrets of the Temple," sound a familiar ring for today.

Here's more of Greider's quote of Rice, along with a paragraph in Greider's own words about that time in 1981 and 1982:

"Market participants talk tough as individuals and they're hard-liners [Emmett Ricce said], but they wanted to see interest rates come down and they welcomed it. When they saw rates come down, they were very quick to jump on the bandwagon and benefit from it. If you talk to individuals in the market -- dealers, bond salesmen, investment bankers, commericial bankers -- they will say: 'Stay tight.' Yet they welcomed the lower interest rates. It was the same with the Federal Advisory Council, advising us to stay tight. Then we ease and the markets rally and the same advisory council says to us: 'You did the right thing.'"

Greider continues in his book:

"For months, the Federal Reserve had held tight, insisting that this was what the financial markets demanded. The politicians from Congress and the White House, pleading for lower interest rates, were dismissed as mere politicians. Governor Nancy Teeters was ignored, too. The economy was driven deeper and deeper into contraction. In effect, the national government's management of the economy was being guided by the self-interested commentaries from a few hundred thousand financial experts in Wall Street. The Fed was steering -- or was being steered -- by the opinions of bondholders and their representatives and what they alone thought would be good for the nation. Only, in this case, the investors and investment experts from Wall Street were mistaken. Because they were wrong, the Federal Reserve was wrong, too."

Ben Bernanke, current chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Timothy Geithner, secretary of the Treasury, were determined not to get it wrong again in 2008 and 2009, and that's why anyone who wants to understand how the 2009-2010 economic recovery is occurring should consult Greider's book as a blue print.

Their mentor, and one of the chief architects of this slow recovery, is Paul Volcker, who was the Fed chairman during the early Reagan years, and who joined in making the mistakes Rice was quoted as admitting. Volcker, like Bernanke and Geithner, also doesn't want to see the same mistakes made now that were made then.

And to ensure that, the 21st century architects of recovery are following a precept intimated in Rice's comments from "Secrets of the Temple." He admits the Federal Reserve Board was trying to do back in 1981 what it thought Wall Street wanted it to do.

The Fed was not trying to "do the right thing" for the nation.

The Obama administration has made it quite clear to Wall Street this time around that it will being doing the right thing by the nation, rather than cater to the financial industry's traditional beliefs.

And if it steps on some peoples' toes, Obama is a guy with big feet and so far has shown he doesn't mind appearing politically awkward in public. Lets hope the same goes for his health-care reform.

In the meantime, Greider's book remains an outline for financial-industry reform. It's long and I'm still reading it, but I plan to write more about about it here in the future.

You can order it for $16.38 on Amazon here.