I suppose you and I have different frames of reference. I agree supercapacitors are important, but they are low on the totem pole considering the cutting edge info managment Google, Ebay and Amazon are doing. I don't mean to sound pompous but that's the stuff that's going to alter people's daily lives (with the possible help of supercapacitors of course!)
I suppose there's a tangential argument to be made that Google began from the research dept. at Stanford, but in my view the impetus behind their innovation was a couple of smart kids acting independently with a great idea (with help from Sand Hill Rd. of course). Ebay, Amazon and Yahoo don't have any connection with govt or corporate R&D that i know about.
I guess that was the point I was trying to make: don't assume all good ideas have to come from the R&D labs. Google and Yahoo are coming up with cutting-edge stuff everyday (not past tense) , and they do it by virtue of their own means.
Google is doing the same thing techically as AltaVista was ten years ago, but different as a business (until recently).
Ebay is doing almost exactly the same thing that it was in 1998, both technically and as a business.
Nothing new technically over at Amazon either, and they're still on the same business play as they were in 1997 (expand out of the books niche).
The underlying technology in all three commoditized years ago (in the case of Google, more recently, but yes, search is very much a commodity technology now). Not exactly my idea of "cutting edge".
Ebay, Amazon and Yahoo don't have any connection with govt or corporate R&D that i know about.
All three run on top of technology that was funded heavily by D/ARPA at Stanford and Berkeley, as well as the the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC. The infrastructure of the Internet, which (when it does its job) is largely invisible, large databases, superscalar CPUs, RISC microprocessors in and of themselves....the list goes on for a long, long time.