You might have noticed that this publication has largely refrained so far from posting about Nanotech. Simply a matter of focus and indeed I do not think the area can live up to the hype.

However the Economist features a survey of Nanotech with some interesting insights:

- there is no Nanotech industry as such as inventions in this space tend to help many different industries

"If there is one thing everyone agrees on, it is that nanotechnology is neither an industry nor a market. Lumping together different nanotechnology firms may be as sensible as assembling a group of firms whose names start with Z. A company selling nano-improved fabrics has little in common with one developing solar cells. To add to the problems, some of these indices include big companies for which nanotechnology is only one of many activities."

- the Nanotech Bubble will hardly be as inflated as the Internet bubble

"It is easy to see why a nanotechnology bubble might form, but if so, it will be nothing like as big as the ill-fated internet one, for several reasons. One of them is offered by Steve Jurvetson at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a venture-capital firm based in Menlo Park, California: the number of people who can enter the business is limited by the number of science graduates available. In America, there is currently a shortage of science PhDs. Business-school graduates working in banking or consulting cannot start nanotechnology companies in the way they created new internet companies.

Another anti-bubble factor is the high capital cost of setting up business in nanotechnology. Start-ups need many millions of dollars to pay for equipment, proof of concept and salaries for highly trained staff. Mr Jurvetson's investment firm specialises in investing in early-stage nanotechnology companies. All of them, he says, are spun out of university or government labs, not Silicon Valley garages."

- Nanotech has huge potential as a newly discovered material mostly has several applications and could often save millions alone if it succeeds

"In the next decade, says Mr Nordan, nanotechnology will be incorporated into products worth $2.9 trillion, and most of this revenue will be from new and emerging nanotechnology. But such estimates have to be treated with caution. They would include a $30,000 car with $200 side panels improved by nanotechnology.

All the same, this kind of work is useful because it gives an indication of where money could be made. Most nanomaterials, says Mr Nordan, will rapidly become commodities, with operating margins in the high single digits---the sort of figures typical of specialty chemicals. Ten years from now he would expect this business to be worth about $13 billion---a tiny share of the market for materials in general. He says that new materials will not be able to command large margins because that would make the economics for downstream manufacturers unattractive. Margins on nanointermediates and nano-enabled products, he predicts, will be similar to those in traditional product categories. For example, the margins on drugs will be far higher than those on clothing."

My biggest issue with Nanotech is that I simply can not 'feel' if a single material will suceed and therefore find it very hard to make an investment decision (anyways my investments wouldn't really rock considering the time to market). In my eyes it's similiar tricky as biotech investments.

"The past couple of decades have seen a huge increase in inequality in America. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think-tank, argues that between 1979 and 2000 the real income of households in the lowest fifth (the bottom 20% of earners) grew by 6.4%, while that of households in the top fifth grew by 70%. The family income of the top 1% grew by 184%---and that of the top 0.1% or 0.01% grew even faster. Back in 1979 the average income of the top 1% was 133 times that of the bottom 20%; by 2000 the income of the top 1% had risen to 189 times that of the bottom fifth."