In The "Close Only Counts In Horseshoes" Department ...

Or: "There's No Crying In Venture Capital! ... There's No Crying In Venture Capital"

If you are burned out on the Olympics (aka "The Michael Phelps Show"), Stumblin' Bumblin' John McCain's Low Road Express, previews of the new Cold War, or the endless yammering about John Edwards (yikes, we are planning on an Edwards post today), Hillary Clinton's planned coup in Denver, then you can reboot with this post.

Let's say you made a mistake, let a good thing get away, and want to stop beating yourself up, and realize that you are not the only person, ever, that has made a mistake and let something good get away, well, here's a good article for you to take a look at.

SiliconValley.Com had a feature the other day on "The Venture Deals That Got Away"

EVEN SILICON VALLEY PROS OFTEN MISS OUT ON THE NEXT BIG THING

"The most oft-told tale about Cowan concerns a visit to a college friend in Menlo Park eight years ago. She wanted to introduce him to Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were renting her garage and noodling on a search engine. But there were a lot of search start-ups back then.

Cowan asked her: "How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?"

The wealth of the Google guys has since been calculated as high as $18 billion each.

Check it out, it's rather entertaining ...


Bonus Silicon Valley Links

Life Imitates Art ... Or, Did Burt Lancaster Invent Google Earth?

Breaking News! Giant Search Engine Downed By GOP and RNC Staffers; Google Crashes! Besieged With “I’m Feeling Lucky” Searches From White House, Congress; Amazon, D.C. Novelty Stores Hit With Run On Magic 8-Balls

Apple Settles With Cisco!; Rolling Dice With New iBeckham Phone; Jobs Promises Aging Soccer Star Can Store "Billions of Photos" of Himself; New "Posh" Command Added

New iPod Phone Requires Downloading Calls

Top Ten Cloves: How The Amazon Kindle Can Effect The Legal World

HP To Auction CEO-For-The-Day On eBay

News In Brief - Wikimania Attendees Take Over Event; Wikimania Conference Ends Abruptly In Cacophonous Chaos; First Speaker Drowned Out By Attendees With Edits, Footnotes and Sub-Categories

You're Kidding ... Bug Shit!

"Surprise, surprise, surprise!".

And, as a former filling station attendant, by the name of Gomer Pyle, may exclaim - "Shazam!"

In a way, it almost sounds like something Gomer might have come up with.

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol; Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide 'renewable petroleum'

Inside LS9’s cluttered laboratory – funded by $20 million of start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems – Mr Pal explains that LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.”

Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.

Fill It Up With High Test ... And Check The Bugs!

If this thing pans out, you can expect a stampede to eBay, with people looking for those old, Gilbert Chemestry sets.

You can trade in the greasy overalls, for a starched-white lab coat.

Out goes the family room, or that finished basement, as the masses, to compliment the solar panels and rainwater buckets, begin farming their own LS9 bugs.

In fact, it could make gas stations obsolete, or, at minimum, they convert over to becoming "bug stations".

I just hope this isn't a hoax ...

It looks mighty interesting ...


Bonus Links

Top Ten Cloves: Ways Exxon Will Celebrate Largest Annual Profit Ever For A U.S. Company

White House Besieged With Would-Be Energy Inventors As Bush Backtracks From Pledge; All Looking To Cash In On President's New Energy Initiative - If Only President Meant It

Top Ten Cloves: Things About The Rocket Scientists' Party, Yuri Night