I've always wanted to attend the annual thinkAbout event organized by "Experience Economy" co-authors Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore, whose new book "Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want" is due out any second from Harvard Business School Press. (I'm reading my advance copy now.) I love their ideas and the event sounds like a hoot. Case in point: the promotional materials for the event include the lyrics of "Corporate Renegade," the "Official Theme Song of thinkAbout." If like me you can't make it this year, at least you can listen to the theme song on Pine and Gilmore's Strategic Horizons site.

In these posts, I try to call attention to items that may have slipped past general awareness... because, maybe you misplaced your copy of NanoTech Weekly or Ultracapacitor Illustrated.

Actually, this news item did appear on CNN.com, and it's one of those stories that either could change the world, or alternately be a bunch of hype. If it's true, then solar energy would become economically viable for almost all our energy needs. And fully-electric cars would become standard transportation. It's kind of a "holy grail" tech story -- from a company you never heard of: EEStor.

EEStor has filed a patent for an ultracapacitor that could replace electrochemical batteries (like all the batteries you use in laptops, watches, flashlights, etc.) According to the story on CNN:

"We've been trying to make this type of thing for 20 years and no one has been able to do it," said Robert Hebner, director of the University of Texas Center for Electromechanics. "Depending on who you believe, they're at or beyond the limit of what is possible."

EEStor's secret ingredient is a material sandwiched between thousands of wafer-thin metal sheets, like a series of foil-and-paper gum wrappers stacked on top of each other. Charged particles stick to the metal sheets and move quickly across EEStor's proprietary material.

The result is an ultracapacitor, a battery-like device that stores and releases energy quickly.

According to Wikipedia: "If the technology works as claimed, a five-minute charge costing $9 would give the capacitor enough energy to drive a small car 500 miles."

Of course, there are lots of skeptics as well. So, how do we assess whether it's hot air or hot stuff? The most promising indicator is that their primary investor is venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. They're one of the top Silicon Valley VCs, and their track record for picking startups includes Google and Amazon. I'll be watching for an EEStor IPO!

Hats off to the new Alloy College Explorer 2007 study, which provides some interesting insights into college students in the US. Some insights confirm what we'd already suspected, like the fact that over 9 in 10 college kids own a cell phone; almost 6 in 10 an MP3 player; and over half visit a social networking site like Facebook at least once daily. Unanswered: how do they get any work done?

But by far the most intriguing insight (again a confirmation) for this reader: the fact that word of mouth is the medium in which they most often learn about brands (66%). WOM is also cited by the majority (61%) as the type of communication that most influences their buying decisions. Jack Morton's own research also shows that WOM is a strong influence.