Memristors on Seeking Alpha: the Investors Perspective on Science. Reality?

Its always interesting to take a slice of the non-scientific perspectives on emerging technology… particularly in politics and economics, as those fields can have a profound impact on which science does get pursued, and which doesnt. An easily accessible way to see things through the eyes of the market Investor community is to take a sample social-investor website, like Seeking Alpha, and get a chronology of mentions of particular scientific advances, in order to see how they see things. So heres a cursory, interesting, and completely unscientific (unless you call Quants scientific?) compendium of all mentions of “memristors” on the current “Seeking Alpha” stock site.

May 1, 2008: “Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) Labs engineers say a recent discover called “memristor” could allow future memory chips to retain information, unlike today’s DRAM. They could ultimately succeed the flash-memory chips used in digital cameras and other devices. The discovery, documented in May’s Nature journal, is the first major announcement since HP revamped its labs in March. Memristors will have to compete with the emerging Numonyx technology jointly developed by Intel (INTC) and ST Microelectronics (STM), among others.” – [full article]

December 31, 2008: The 10 Most Important Technology Developments of 2008. At Number 2: “The evolution of the CPU, by other means: There are other disruptive developments occurring in chip technology. They include HP’s (HPQ) recent announcement of the memristor (a new on-chip component that will change the architecture of the cpu itself) and advances in using graphine, which promises chips that run 100x faster than now. Both show sufficient promise to suggest they could have an early impact on the industry.” – [full article]

May 19, 2009: Market Currents: “A Silicon Valley start-up unveils its long-awaited efforts to replace memory chips. Unity Semiconductor Corp. says its technology can store four times more data than a conventional chip and record data 5-10 times faster.”, to which flyingdutchman comments: “Seems there is a possible patent problem with Unity relating to earlier patents that HP filed for their memristor based RRAM which cover the crossbar design used by Unity. But someone must think these are moot as the money rolls in.” – [full article]

January 28, 2010: Hewlett-Packard, Past, Present and Future: “Innovation. The tablet computers are not new to innovation as HP has been supplying them to the educational market since 2004. If there is a boom in tablet pc sales, HP is there and ready. HP has a full line of touch screen multimedia systems with reasonable graphics for home use. The HP iPAQ is a fully functional business communications device, complete with PC apps, Wi-Fi rollover, and Bluetooth capabilities. The memristor technology has yet to revolutionize the technology offerings, but holds promises for near-term offerings.” – [full article]

April 12, 2010: Huge Bullish Bet on Hewlitt Packard: “In the final hour of trading, optionMONSTERs Heat Seeker system showed that 47,990 calls changed hands at the November 70 strike in a strong buying pattern against no open interest. The vast majority of the buying took place in a single print of 45,449 calls at $0.25. [..edited..] On Thursday the computing giant was reportedly scheduled to disclose major advances in “memristor” technology invented in the 1970s that can replace standard transistor switches at an atomic scale. Hewlett-Packard is scheduled to release its next earnings report on May 18. For the calls purchased Friday to turn a profit, the stock would need to rise some 30 percent by the Nov. 19 expiration.” – [full article]

And there you have it.