Creative Connectivity

How HP valued Humane

Last week HP announced that they were acquiring the patents and key staff from Humane for $116 million. A few years ago, I wrote an article questioning the value of patents for startups (of which more later), so it seemed a good opportunity to try to dissect the purchase price to see if it’s possible to put a value on Humane’s patent portfolio.

Humane’s not your average startup. From the start it was viewed as a potential unicorn. Its first product – the AI Pin, which turned out to be its downfall, had high ambitions. Although few reviewers appeared to notice it, if it had succeeded, it would have been the first nail in the coffin of the smartphone. The product failed to meet that promise, and the company appeared to be heading for a fire sale. Fortunately for the core team, HP saw their value and snapped them up for the bargain price of $116 million. Let’s look at how they might have worked out that purchase price.

EPCs and Net Zero Coercion

If you live in the UK and own or rent a property, you’ll know about EPCs. Their official name is an Energy Performance Certificate, although most people are more likely to consider them as Entirely Pointless Certificates. They were introduced by the UK Government in 2007 to give anyone buying or renting a property a guide to its energy efficiency, rating houses in much the same way as electrical appliances on a scale of A (good) to G (worst). The letter signifies how much carbon dioxide your property is likely to produce each year. EPCs also provide guidance of how you could “improve” your home, with suggested measures to reduce the CO₂ emissions, along with an indicative cost of doing it.

If you sell or rent your home you have to obtain an EPC. Currently you are not allowed to rent a property unless it has an A to E rating. There were proposals to tighten this to an A to C rating, but those proposals have been pushed back. However, many owners feel that EPCs are likely to be used as a stick to force them to make changes to meet net zero targets. Although that has been consistently denied, a recent survey by the Social Media Foundation titled “Whose energy transition is it anyway?” shows that concern is still real. That is reinforced by a new Government consultation on Reforms to the Energy Performance of Buildings Regime, which implies that EPCs may be turned into a net zero coercion tool.

Is Carbon Capture the new Fusion?

I’ve just finished reading Charles Seife’s “Sun in a Bottle” – an account of the first fifty years of nuclear fusion research. It is a fascinating story, not least for the optimism that has driven research into fusion reactors. At the start of that development, we were repeatedly told that fusion power might appear at five years notice, giving us energy that was “too cheap to meter”. That last claim was made in 1954. It was a great vision, which may yet come true, although I doubt that the “too cheap to meter” will ever happen, as there’s a lot of infrastructure needed to deliver electricity. However, the prospect of fusion as our major source of electricity is still largely a dream.

What struck me about much of the language used to promote the fusion dream over the last seventy years is that it is almost identical to the promises being used to sell the latest miracle technology – Carbon Capture and Storage. Carbon Capture and Storage is being promoted as the means of saving the world from climate change with a similar evangelical zeal to the way that fusion was in the 1950s. You could take any article or press release about either, swap the phrase “Nuclear Fusion” for “Carbon Capture”, or vice versa, and it would feel just as convincing. Sadly, Carbon Capture’s imminent arrival is just as tenuous as that of nuclear fusion. Its credibility is being held together by a mesh of minor achievements, suggesting that small academic advances will somehow scale into vast plants which will save us from climate change. The same optimistic requests of “just a few more year’s work” and “just a few more hundred billions of investment” are blinding our technically-illiterate politicians into believing that the promise is real, without noticing that they are being fed the same story. In the UK, Ed Miliband sees it as the saviour of his net zero plans. The bad news is that he thinks he can make it happen by adding the billions of pounds of development costs to future domestic energy bills.

What if Moore’s Law is different in China?

Ever since the US started to place an embargo on supplying high tech chips and semiconductor production equipment to China, I’ve wondered what the ultimate effect of that policy would be; in particular, whether it might be self-defeating. We had the first intimation of this last September when Huawei’s launched their Mate 60 Pro phone. It included a new 7nm processor, that appeared to compare favourably with the smaller geometry processors Chinese companies no longer had access to. Last week we saw a second example, with the unveiling of DeepSeek’s R1 AI application, which seems to achieve similar results to ChatGPT, but using a fraction of the power. That came as a bitter blow to the nascent VC funded nuclear industry, which had been angling for a future of fusion and fission powered data centres. It also got Wall Street panicking about whether it might have misjudged the value of AI.

To anyone who has read Michael Rosen’s children’s book, “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt”, this news shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

The UK ponders Proportional Representation

On Thursday 30^th January we are finally going to see a debate in Parliament about changing the UK’s “first-past-the-post” voting scheme, which will probably suggest some form of proportional representation, more commonly known as PR.

Two years ago, when it was looking pretty certain that the Conservatives would lose the 2024 election, I wrote an article suggesting that Rishi Sunak should devote his final term to bringing in Proportional Representation. If he had, we might have a very different Government to the one we have today. In 2024, Labour won the election, gaining 411 seats with 33.7% of the votes, The Tories slipped to 23.7% of the total votes, which gave them only 121 MPs. One reason for their poor performance was that the right wing vote split between them and Reform, with Reform picking up 9 seats for 14.3% of the vote. Had Rishi gone for Proportional Representation, and then found a way of working with Reform, their combined 38.0% of the vote would have given them 247 seats, compared to 219 for Labour.

Welcome to the year of PC landfill

Now that we’re into 2025, Microsoft is ramping up its reminders that we only have nine months of Windows 10 support left, so now’s the time to go out and buy a shiny new Windows 11 PC. The implication is that after 14^th October, when security updates for Windows 10 stop happening, every hacker around the world will be stealing your data, turning this into the new Y2K disaster. (For younger readers, Y2K was the belief that computers would stop working on Jan 1^st, 2000, sending the world back to the stone age.)

So, we all need to plan for the W10 Armageddon, whether you’re a PC owner, a hacker, or just the manager of the local landfill tip.