Because each year, a staggering $21 billion worth of gold and silver goes into the electronics we buy.

Gold & Silver Buyers, one of the many we’ll-buy-your-gold firms that have sprung up in the last few years, says that the precious metal content of our throwaway devices is up to 50 times higher than the ore in a gold mine. And with 50 million tons of electronics waste every year, that’s a lot of coin going in the garbage.

Urban miners can reclaim most of the 320 tons of gold and 7.5 tons of silver that is embedded into each year’s crop of iPhones and tablets by processing the waste. One of the biggest centers is in Guiyou, China, which processes 1.5 million tons a year, taking $75 million out of trash on an annual basis.

All the data, in visual form:

photo credit: Madison Guy via photopin cc

SparkFun is an online retail store and hub for electronics projects. It sells “bits and pieces”  like capacitors, cellular antenna cables, and various other mysterious-looking parts to make successfully building a GPS device or a Wi-Fi Dongle possible to the average person. The company’s “Department of Education” features online tutorials and classes to guide people through their projects.

The National Education Tour intends to stop in every state in the U.S.. The program will teach web development, soldering, circuit-building, and more in an effort to demonstrate that electronics are an important component of education, touching on science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics.

“We’re trying to bring a hands-on, kinesthetic style of learning back into the classroom,” said Lindsay Levkoff, SparkFun’s director of education, in a statement. “I think the most important aspect of this technology and model of learning is that it gives students a chance to have more lasting memories of the information they’re being taught. Rather than just talking about what electricity is, we’re providing a hands-on experience for the student, which creates a deeper understanding of what they’re trying to learn.”

At the same time as America’s test scores in math and science are worryingly low, the “maker” movement is taking off. Hardware is having its heyday due to advancements in technology like 3D printing, crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, and a growing interest among investors, entrepreneurs, and consumers in the next cool gadget. SparkFun’s mission is to make science education more relevant by introducing current and actionable technology into the classroom.

“There’s a whole different experience that seems to go on when kids see that LED blink for the first time,” said educational outreach coordinator Jeff Branson. “It’s not just a flat screen anymore. It’s something that’s really happening in the real world. It’s made the material come alive for the kids. And for teachers, it renews their enthusiasm about tackling some pretty thick topics.”

Workshops will be open to students of all ages as well as teachers, librarians, after-school coordinators, community organizers, and others. The person spearheading the effort will choose one of three concepts to focus on — programming with Arduino, e-textiles, or Scratch programming with the PicoBoard. Each “lab pack” includes enough kits for between 20 to 40 students, three instructors, and supporting materials. The workshops last for a day and either entail teaching the students or providing professional training to the educators. After that, it is up to the instructors and the students to continue.

SparkFun was founded in 2003 by Nate Seidle, an electrical engineering student who was frustrated by how difficult it was to find electronics parts he needed. He built SparkFun to address that need. Now 10 years later, the company sells over 2,000 components and has 138 employees. This national tour not only seeks to inspire people in his wake, but also raise awareness about SparkFun and sell its products. It is based in Boulder, Colo.

Photo Credit: rumtopf/FLickR

Andy Grove ran Intel as CEO for many years. Gordon Moore co-founded Intel with Bob Noyce.

The pioneers of Silicon Valley gathered for a rare reception last night for the debut of a film about them. The film is a rare documentary with the highest production values, featuring the real revolutionaries who changed the world (as opposed to the silly kids from Bravo’s Start-ups: Silicon Valley reality TV show).

Source: Dean Takahashi

Federico Faggin, co-inventor of the microprocessor

The documentary, Silicon Valley: Where the Future Was Born, will run on TV as part of PBS’s American Experience history series. Some of the luminaries gathered at the event were Gordon Moore (above right), co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel; Andy Grove (above left), former chief executive of Intel; Arthur Rock, the venture capitalist who funded Intel; marketing wizard Regis McKenna; Les Vadasz, the earliest employee at Intel; and Ted Hoff (below left) and Federico Faggin (right), co-inventors of the first microprocessor.

Source: Dean Takahashi

Ted Hoff, co-inventor of the microprocessor

The film chronicles the formation of the semiconductor industry in the 1950s and 1960s in Santa Clara County, the region from Palo Alto to San Jose that became the heart of Silicon Valley and a regional technology ecosystem that spans nine counties in the San Francisco Bay Area. The film airs on PBS at 8 pm on Tuesday Feb. 5.

Hari Sreenivasan, a host at the PBS News Hour, hosted the event and invited the pioneers on stage at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. The museum and Intel hosted the event, but the film was fair enough to include all of the pioneers from rival companies, including Charlie Sporck, longtime chief of National Semiconductor, and Jerry Sanders, founder of Intel arch rival Advanced Micro Devices. All of the companies grew up in the same region and became multinational juggernauts of the electronic age. But many also faltered and died along the way.

Mark Samels, executive producer of the American Experience, said in front of the crowd, “It’s sort of like doing a film on the founding fathers with Adams and Jefferson in the room.”

For me, it was a reminder of what is great about Silicon Valley, where the founding pioneers are still living among us.

The film tries to convey the “sense of possibilities, the risk taking, and the moment in time that allowed Silicon Valley to happen,” said Randy Maclowry, director of the film.

I walked around the reception and snapped pictures of the people who were responsible for the beginnings all of the devices that we now take for granted. My kids don’t even know this ancient history, so the film, narrated by authors Michael S. Malone and Leslie Berlin, comes at an important time. It captures history before those who made it have all passed away.

Bob Noyce, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, died in 1990. But he is very much the central figure of the film. He founded Fairchild with the “traitorous eight” defectors who left William Shockley’s Shockley Laboratories. Shockley won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the transistor, but he became increasingly “erratic.” So Noyce led the team (pictured below, with Noyce in front) to start Fairchild.

Fairchild was in the right place at the right time. In 1957, the Russians scared America with the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik. President Eisenhower created NASA within the next year and launched the American space program. Fairchild was positioned to make the chips that would go into the rockets and space ships.

The traitorous eight, with Bob Noyce in the foreground. They founded Fairchild Semiconductor.

But first, the team had to create working chips. Noyce was so charismatic that he landed a contract with IBM, promising to deliver 100 chip prototypes to them — even though those chips hadn’t been designed yet. Texas Instruments gave Fairchild some serious competition, stunning them with a patent for the “integrated circuit,” which packed together transistors and other components in an electronic system in a single chip. But Noyce and Jean Hoerni created designs that made the integrated circuit practical. The companies came to blows in court over the invention, but it was settled after a decade. By that time, TI was using Hoerni’s planar process to manufacture integrated circuits.

In contrast to Shockley’s dictatorship, Noyce and co-founder Gordon Moore gave out stock options and managed in a way that was more egalitarian, building a company based on meritocracy. They infused this egalitarianism in the rest of the Valley, which came to be a collection of many companies that spun out of Fairchild. Noyce and Moore, fed up with the East Coast management of Fairchild, spun out themselves, forming Intel in 1968.

Moore and Noyce were brilliant at science and management, but Intel’s task master was Andy Grove, who got the operations working to churn out chips in highly specialized factories. He instilled some serious, military-style discipline that included “late lists” for those who showed up late in the morning. Intel created cutting edge chips that helped make Silicon Valley the world leader in electronics. The work included the designs of Federico Faggin and Ted Hoff, inventors of the 4004, Intel’s first microprocessor, which hit the market in 1971. The chip had 2,300 transistors. Decades later, chip makers like Intel can put multiple billions of transistors on a chip. That is why we can access Facebook at blazing speeds from mobile devices.

A reproduction of the famous dollar bill signed by the traitorous eight

The film footage includes women who were on the assembly line, like Ginger Jenkins, who had the dexterity to assemble chips with tiny wires. But the 1950s-era Silicon Valley was a place where men ruled the companies and gathered at bars such as Walker’s Wagon Wheel. They traded tips over drinks, and the Valley quickly became a place where there were few real secrets.

The film starts with the Shockley defectors, who gathered at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco for a meal. They were ready to follow the charismatic Noyce, a brilliant scientist and a Pied Piper for talent. They signed their names on dollar bills (pictured right) to seal their contract.

If Noyce was the father of Silicon Valley — alongside David Packard and Bill Hewlett — then the “Fairchildren” were the ones who scattered to the winds and created the startup culture that became the Valley that’s famous around the world today.

Ann Bowers, Noyce’s widow, said the egalitarian attitude came from Noyce’s belief that you should respect people. She recalled how Noyce often talked late into the night with the young Steve Jobs as he was starting Apple. If Noyce were alive today, Bowers said, he would have been very interested in all of the medical devices chips are enabling.

“I can’t imagine Bob tweeting,” she said.

The National Retail Federation’s latest poll says 147 million shoppers is a slight decrease from the 152 million who shopped last year’s Black Friday, possibly due to this being the earliest Thanksgiving since 2007. But per-shopper spending looks to jump 25 percent, according to a Consumer Electronics Association poll, to $218.

“The 2012 Thanksgiving weekend has the potential to be the biggest shopping weekend on record [in the U.S.],” the CEA’s chief economist, Shawn DuBravac, said in a statement.

Sixty percent of U.S. adults — about 140 million Americans — plan to buy at least one Christmas gift this weekend, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. That one gift — plus whatever goodies we buy ourselves — will add up fast.

Multiply the 147 million American shoppers that NRF predicts may hit stores this weekend with the average per-shopper spend CEA is estimating, and you’ve got almost $32 billion in gifts and assorted goodies flying off both real and virtual shelves this weekend — $32,046,000,000, to be exact.

That would be a major increase from last year, which saw about $11.4 billion in Black Friday sales and $1.25 billion in Cyber Monday revenues. But it does cover the entire weekend: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and combines both offline and online sales.

According to new Nielsen poll, a lot of those gifts will be electronics, as kids are hoping for iPhones, iPads, and Nintendo Wii Us under the tree. The same is true of gifts Americans present to themselves, and adults’ wish lists are full of tablets, smartphones, and laptops.

According to the CEA a third of Americans will visit a bricks-and-mortar store, while another 20 percent will prefer to let their fingers do the walking, online.

But not all is sweetness and light.

As the U.S. government deals with an impending “fiscal cliff,” half of consumers surveyed by the CEA say they’re worried and that it will affect their spending — perhaps in anticipation of taxation increases in the new year. Eighteen percent said the fiscal cliff will have a “large impact” on their spending.

But perhaps not very large, if we’ll be spending $32 billion in four days this weekend.

photo credit: Michael Holden via photopin cc

The good news for online retailers is that a third of shoppers plan to spend more, according to FatWallet’s consumer survey of 600 consumers across the U.S, while 54 percent are planning to spend the same amount. And most shoppers — 62 percent —  believe they’re going to get the best deals of the holiday season at the beginning of next week.

(One caveat on those numbers: they’re based on a subset of consumers who plan to shop on Cyber Monday, so they likely de-emphasize those with skinnier wallets to begin with. On the other hand, of those who plan to shop online this Cyber Monday, only three-quarters said they did the same last year.)

50% of people are looking for toy deals on Cyber Monday

But it’s a bit surprising to see what people are looking to buy on Cyber Monday. It’s not technology, at least primarily. Here’s what people will be shopping for next week:

• 70%: clothing deals
• 50%: toy deals
• 34%: appliance deals
• 32%: tablet deals
• 32%: laptop deals
• 26%: HDTV deals
• 23%: smartphone deals
• 26%: other deals

Clothing, toys, and appliances. Ignoring the fact that the main point of Cyber Monday is online shopping, there’s not a lot of technology showing up … especially the traditional technology purchases such as computers, smartphones, TVs, and home stereo systems.

Which I guess is the good news for online retailers: online shopping is now truly widespread.

photo credit: Kevin Marks via photopin cc, spieri_sf via photopin cc

Panasonic, which had already trimmed its workforce by 36,000 jobs last year, will be looking to sell or close any business units that cannot achieve at least a 5 percent project margin, the company’s chief financial officer told Reuters.

Japanese electronics companies are fighting surging Korean electronics companies such as LG and Samsung — and losing. Sony’s stock is down almost 80 percent in the past five years. Sharp is down 90 percent, and Panasonic itself is down about 75 percent and currently at a 10-year low. LG stock, on the other hand, is up about 30 percent since mid-year, and Samsung’s stock has almost tripled since early 2011.

Source: Google Finance

Sony, Panasonic, and Sharp stock prices: down, down, down.

The Korean manufacturers have taken the majority of Panasonic and other Japanese companies’ TV business and have been quicker to jump on profitable new segments such as smartphones, where Samsung has a global lead.

Panasonic’s last profitable year was 2010, but it is aiming to return to profitability in its March 2013 to March 2014 fiscal year, aided by the sale of $1.4 billion-worth of land and buildings in Japan.

But it has a tough job ahead, with 88 business units to review and fix, close, or sell.

photo credit: joimson via photopin cc

2011 was a dark year for electronics giant Sony: a slew of natural disasters, terrible TV business, and slow sales all around, pushed Sony to its worst annual earnings ever, with a loss of $5.7 billion for 2011.

On the bright side, that was lower than the $6.5 billion loss the company previously predicted (mostly due to a tax hit) — but it’s still the lowest point in the company’s 66-year history. For the fourth quarter ending in March, the company reported its fifth straight quarterly loss of $3.2 billion.

Sony pointed to supplier and factory damage in Japan — a result of last year’s earthquake and tsunami — as a big reason for its poor year. The company was also impacted by the floods in Thailand last year, which affected its production suppliers.

“This year remains crucial for a recovery in our electronics business,” Sony chief financial officer Masaru Kato said, who also noted the company was on track to turn around its struggling TV business. “A fifth straight year of losses should never be tolerated.”

Sony has high hopes for 2012 though, with projected profits of $375 million on revenues of $2.2 billion.

It seems that this year will be a major transition period for Sony, as it tries to correct the mistakes of the past. The company tapped Kazuo Hirai as its new CEO back in February, who quickly laid out a plan to save Sony. Hirai unveiled his new One Sony restructuring last month, which aims to streamline the company’s innovation and focus it on gaming, mobile devices, and digital imaging. The company is pouring $1 billion into the restructuring effort, even after it just laid off 10,000 employees.

It’s unclear how Sony will combat Samsung’s new lead in HDTVs, as the Korean competitor has focused heavily on creating quality displays and building the connected experience in its sets. Sony is looking to streamline its display efforts, but its Google TV partnership could lead to some interesting sets in the next year.

Via AP, Sony (PDF)

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Sony plans to cut 10,000 jobs, or 6 percent of its workforce, in a bid to get back to being profitable, according to a report from Nikkei.

The drastic move makes sense for Sony because it has been unprofitable for the past seven years, and it faces heavy competition across device sectors from companies including Samsung, Apple, Microsoft, and LG. On top of that, TV manufacturers like Sony and Panasonic have been hit especially hard in the current climate. In early February, Panasonic forecast a staggering $10.2 billion loss for 2012 because of the TV business.

Layoffs are likely part of new CEO Kazuo Hirai’s plan to turn around the company. Hirai took over as chief executive from Howard Stringer this month and he will give a briefing this Thursday to investors where he is expected to talk about layoffs and other strategies for moving the company into the black.

Previously, Hirai laid out a four-point plan to save Sony that will see it focus on its core business, further streamline its TV business, cut costs, and move forward with innovation. Hirai was one of the key executives who helped make the PlayStation game console a success in North America and it is widely expected that he will leverage his game credentials to help make Sony a success in mobile gaming.

Looking for a job photo: Luna Vandoorne/Shutterstock

Apple, Foxconn, and the Fair Labor Association have each responded to ABC’s “iFactory: Inside Apple” news special, which aired last night on ABC.

The iFactory Nightline episode told the story of Foxconn, a Chinese factory that produces iPads, iPhones, and MacBooks for Apple. The factory has been criticized for poor working conditions and suicide threats. Apple invited the Fair Labor Association, along with ABC’s Bill Weir, to take a look into its assembly lines. The factory, while clean and seemingly safe, still has suicide nets that scale the sides of its buildings to protect employees from themselves. Top complaints from factory workers are low wages, no benefits, and long hours.

The three entities issued one clarification each, and ABC ran the statements on its site.

Apple

ABC caught up with a young woman working at Foxconn who only makes enough to visit her family once a month. She explained that she eliminates extra material from the Apple insignia on 6,000 iPads a day, though Apple disagrees with that number.

ABC said: Zhou Xiao Ying admits, “A lot of times I think about how tired I am.” Around 6,000 times per shift, she grabs an iPad housing and files the aluminum shavings from the iconic Apple silhouette.

Apple responded: “In manufacturing parlance this is called deburring. Her line processes 3,000 units per shift, with two shifts per day for a total of 6,000. A single operator at Ms. Zhou’s station would deburr 3,000 iPads in a shift.”

Foxconn

Thousands of Chinese hopefuls line the Foxconn gates during hiring season. Weir contended that the starting salary for Foxconn employees wasn’t enough to qualify them for regular Chinese payroll taxes. Foxconn says that, with overtime, 75 percent of its employees could hit the tax target.

ABC said: “Starting salary is around $285 a month or $1.78 an hour. And even with the maximum 80 hours of overtime a month, the Chinese government considers them too poor to withdraw any payroll taxes. “

Foxconn responded: “We have over 75 percent of the employees in the category of earning at least 2,200 RMB ($349/month) basic compensation standard. That means they are earning 13.75 RMB ($2.18) per hour. If they work overtime on the weekend, they will earn 27 RMB ($4.28) per hour. In order to reach 3500 to be taxable, they will have to work 47 OT hours to reach 3,500.”

“If the overtime hours are in weekdays, they have to work around 63 hours per month to reach that level of salary to be taxable.”

“Your statement is only true when applying to the entry-level workers while over 75 percent are already over the probation and earning more than 2,200 RMB basic salary.”

Fair Labor Association

Suspicions abound whether the Fair Labor Association will go too easy on Apple, given that Apple is the first electronics company to join the FLA. Additionally, it is paying dues to be in the association and is paying for the audits, which the FLA will perform. The FLA clarified how long it had been in talks with Apple. Weir had interviewed FLA president Auret van Heerden.

ABC said: “Was Apple resistant to this idea when you first approached them?” I ask. “It was a long conversation,” van Heerden smiles. “We’ve been in this conversation for about five years,” he says. Apple joined the F.L.A. on Jan. 13, eight days before the New York Times ran a series examining the company’s labor practices.

Fair Labor Association responded: “The discussions began in April 2007 but stalled in March 2008. We then resumed them in April 2009 and decided to do a small pilot survey so that Apple could get an idea of how our tools might add value to their program. That pilot led to a second activity that I believe contributed to the decision to join the FLA at the end of 2011. I, of course, cannot speak for Apple but I do believe that the decision to join was probably taken some months before (and therefore well before) the New York Times articles.”

via ABC

The consequences could be tough for electronics that don’t have the proper shielding. Solar storms can knock out satellites in orbit and force planes to alter their routes that go over the polar caps, where the planet’s geomagnetic shielding is thin, according to Scientific American. They can also create a light show, bringing the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, down to lower latitudes, perhaps as far south as Illinois and Oregon. It could cause blackouts, disrupt satellite-based navigation systems, and interrupt radio communications.

The last time this happened on this scale was 2005. The so-called Coronal Mass Ejection could hit the Earth around 6 am Pacific time on Tuesday Jan. 24, but the timing is not certain.

[Update: the event has come and gone without widespread reports of fried electronics. So it was safe to take your iPad out of the house.]

Photo via NASA

Around 10:20 on Thanksgiving night, the unidentified woman shot pepper spray inside the store when the coverings were lifted off items she intended to purchase.

“Somehow she was trying to use it to gain an upper hand,” police Lt. Abel Parga told The Associated Press.

The use of the chemical agent appears to have set off a small panic in the store, resulting in 20 minor injuries, according to fire department officials who said that “rapid crowd movement” was to blame for the injuries.

The store remained open after the incident, and people on the scene continued to shop, though many probably wish they had made their purchases online instead.

The woman fled the scene, according to police, and we can assume she didn’t get her Black Friday discounts.

via Washington Post. Hat tip: Anup

Image via mag3737/Flickr

Gazelle simplifies electronics recycling by inviting people mail in their old electronics. Gazelle appraises the devices and pays a fee to the sender, then sells the used products on eCommerce sites like eBay, NewEgg and Amazon.

It’s a pretty efficient business with the company’s revenue up 155 percent year-over-year to $21 million in 2010, Gazelle CEO Israel Ganot told VentureBeat. But, at its heart, the company is still a clean technology company, he said.

The iPhone is the company’s most popular device sent in by the company’s 175,000 customers. The newest versions of the phone usually net around $200 to $300, which, including subsidies from telecommunications companies, is about the purchase price of a new iPhone. The iPad is also a popular device.

“It’s the whole notion that doing things that are right for the environment around renewable energy, cleantech in general, those things are good for your wallet too,” Ganot said. “It really creates a more efficient way to consume the product.”

Gazelle will use another large portion of the funding to roll out in-store mechanisms for turning in and recycling old electronics. That includes training for staff and “some technology” that the company wouldn’t disclose. That could include kiosks or just back-end technology to handle trade-ins.

“We haven’t disclosed who we’ll roll out with, but we’ll be very focused with rolling out with one of our retail partners,” Ganot said. “We’ve done tests in the last year with Walmart, Office Depot and GameStop.”

The Boston, Mass.-based company has 90 employees. It has raised $46 million across four rounds of funding.

In a statement today, Sony revised its previous estimates from February to account for the loss and it also lowered its revenue forecast from $88.2 billion to $87.9 billion for the year. The company’s expected operating income remained the same at $2.5 billion. The impact of the quake is expected to decrease sales by about $269.4 million.

The impact on operating income from the quake is expected to be about $208.1 million for the fiscal year ended March 31, while it will be $1.8 billion for the fiscal year ended March 2012. Because of the quake-related losses in the coming fiscal year, Sony has been forced to take a write-off of $4.4 billion against deferred tax assets in Japan. The valuation allowance is a non-cash charge and it does not have any impact on Sony’s operating income or cash flow.

Sony also said that the cost of the cyber attack against the PlayStation Network is expected to be about $171 million for customer support, legal expenses, network upgrades and other costs. Sony plans to release full results on May 26.

[photo credit: gujinowe.comlu.com]