A new generation, between ages 10 and 19, has garnered little attention from investment professionals but it should and it will. Everyone focuses on the impact that aging baby boomers are having on society and the financial markets.

But one of the best ways to make money in the stock market is to pay attention to things the crowd is overlooking. And the rapid growth of the youth population in the U.S. is being largely ignored. Fact: the 10 to 19 age cohort in the U.S. is actually bigger today (42 million people) than the 65-plus age group (37 million).

Of course, young people have less money to spend than their parents and grandparents. But they have more than you might think. Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg says this group of people, part of Generation Y, spends around $120 billion annually. For better or worse, young people are adopting “adult-like behavior at increasingly early ages,” he says. Median income is $1,500 among 12 year olds and $4,500 among 17 year olds. So the key for investors is to focus on where these 42 million Americans spend their time and their money.

That’s not too difficult. Surveys back up what parents already know. They hang out at malls, eat fast food and shop at discount stores. Their top-purchased items are clothes, CDs, electronics, video games, jewelry, entertainment, fast food, soft drinks, cosmetics and magazines.

Teens are actually very sophisticated in terms of their shopping selection. One surprise: Their spending is influenced more by advertising in magazines than in other media sources, such as television, radio and the Internet.

Stores and restaurants aren’t the only beneficiaries of these hordes of young people. For-profit education companies should thrive, too. Almost 90% of 17-year-olds plan to go to college. By comparison, only 30% of people over 65 ever attended college and less than 60% of people between age 25 and 54.

The ethnic group to watch is Hispanics. Six million 10 to 19 year-olds are Hispanic today. And Hispanics in this age group are increasing at six times the rate of the overall age group.

Where do the 10 to 19 year-olds live? The South is the main beneficiary, while the Northeast is the big population loser. The U.S. has far more young people than other developed nations. In fact, there are more 10 to 19 year olds in the U.S. than in Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany and France combined, so don’t think only global brands are worth following.

Also, these young people will be working for decades to come, paying money into Social Security and Medicare and making the retirement and health-care time bomb easier for the U.S. to defuse than for other developed economies with aging baby boomers. All this should counter some of those fears that as the boomers retire and turn their investments into cash income, the stock market will tank.

I have been in Seoul, Korea quite a bit these past few years working with Korea Telecom, LG and SK.

Seoul has a metropolitan area population of more than 22 million people and is the second most populated metro area in the world and second to none in terms of modern technology.

Seoul is home to some of the biggest telecommunications and technology companies in the world, including SK Telecom, KT Corporation, Samsung and LG. If you’re looking for the latest and greatest cell phone or miniature wifi gadget, Seoul should be your first stop.

When it comes to broadband penetration, South Korea is the world leader with an 83 percent penetration rate. This is in part due to the full-blown broadband revolution that has been taking place in Seoul for the past 8 years.

Seoul is full of Internet cafés, wireless hotspots and gaming areas (called “pc baangs”) making it the ideal city to use the Internet on the go. In most areas, a pc baang can be found on every corner. How’s that for service?

Koreans have a fascination with PC gaming unlike any other country in the world. In South Korea, there are multiple television channels dedicated solely to broadcasting the day’s video game events. Talented video game players are treated like celebrities similar to famous basketball players in the United States.

At the center of all of the gaming is Seoul, which has played an important part in expanding Internet usage throughout all of South Korea.

Internet access in Seoul is extremely cheap, averaging around $20 per month for a 10Mpbs connection — that’s more than 4 times as fast and half the price of the average broadband connection in the United States.

Some areas of Seoul boast commercial Internet speeds of more than 100Mbps for merely $30 per month. With speeds that fast it would only take you 5 minutes to download a two-hour high definition movie.

Seoul’s current expansion plans include a $439 million project to add wireless Internet access to the subway trains. “The plan would be to create a wifi network, and then charge roughly $20 per month for access.”

With such a huge broadband presence and a dedication to offering cheap, fast Internet solutions, Seoul is the definition of wired.

In 2003 Communist leaders planed to amend China’s constitution to formally enshrine the ideology of Jiang Zemin, the recently retired leader who invited capitalists to join the Communist Party. Despite sweeping economic and social changes, the political status of China’s entrepreneurs is still ambiguous.

They included the communist era’s first guarantee of property rights. Certain amendments are still needed to promote economic and social development, said the party newspaper People’s Daily. It said the changes were meant to cope with accelerating globalization and advances in science and technology.

Jiang’s theory, the awkwardly named “Three Represents,” calls for the 67 million-member party to embrace capitalists, updating its traditional role as a “vanguard of the working class” and for the constitution to formally uphold property rights and the rights of entrepreneurs. Anyone who has visited Shanghai since and saw Beijing last summer will attest to the populace there embracing capitalism for sure.

As someone who has more than a passing acquaintance with China, I see this is as a big change indeed. Even under most dire oppression you cannot entirely stop people exchanging goods and services.

And so it was in the countries of the former Communist bloc, although the private sector was not officially recognized, there were shades of grey in the ‘socialist worker economy’.

Former Yugoslavia, for example, ventured furthest in its recognition of private enterprise and some semblance of property rights and in return relatively prospered. Also in practice, Poland and Hungary were kinder to their small landowners and tradesmen than the communist ideologues allowed.

Nevertheless, there was no question of formally acknowledging property rights and any form of private enterprise by governments whose grasp of economics was based entirely on Marxism. It was one thing to tolerate existence of non-state markets and even benefit from them, but changing their opposition to individual’s property rights, so firmly embedded in political systems that were barely surviving, would have been a political, ideological and social suicide.

China’s development has been very different to that of Eastern Europe, politically and economically, although both were waving the Red Flag. The proposed change to the China’s constitution may have amounted to a symbolic amendment given that China’s entrepreneurs have driven its two-decade-old economic boom. But then, symbols can be very powerful. Once the gates are open as they were during the Olympics it will be nearly impossible to close them.

The young Chinese love and embrace capitalism, heck they have downloaded Avril Lavigne’s music and images 38 million times. And that love affair with consumerism has created a new non-violent and more powerful revolution than Tiananmen or the West could ever have hoped to achieve with sanctions and posturing.

This blog was inspired by two icons I pinched from “Wheretonext_quotes”…thanks again for finding them

I will ask Ms. Domoto to speak at the Global Summit tomorrow…she is very aggressive with industry here making sure they are green and clean…her state or prefecture as they call them here in Japan has many steel mills.

She realized that the mills produced tremendous heat and that the heat generated could produce vast amounts of electricity for her state. her vision was achieved there as well as many other projects that she shared at the Global Summit in Rio last year.

Since he was a teenager, Takeshi Uchiyamada’s dream was to make a car. But as he entered his 50s as a Toyota engineer, he had all but given up hope he would ever head a project to develop a model.
In 1994, he finally got his dream. Little did he know that the car he was about to design — the Prius — would revolutionize the global auto industry.

Uchiyamada, 61, now executive vice president, was tackling the first mass production gas-electric hybrid, which celebrates its 10th anniversary in December.

With other engineers, he trudged away at 16-hour work days, patiently testing hundreds of engines. Fistfights broke out over what option to take to overcome engineering obstacles.

The Prius was a big step forward for the future of green cars. Up next for Toyota and its rivals: Far more powerful batteries for next-generation hybrids, plug-in electric cars and eventually zero-emission fuel-cell vehicles powered by hydrogen, which combines with oxygen in the air to form water.

In an interview, Uchiyamada recalled the exhaustion, the loneliness and the gambles as his team debunked Toyota’s image as a safe and boring imitator of rivals’ successes.

Introduced in Japan in December 1997, and the following year in the U.S., the Prius, now in its second generation, gets about 46 miles per gallon switching between a gas engine and electric motor. It has been by far the most successful hybrid, selling a cumulative 829,000 vehicles — making up for most of Toyota’s nearly 1.2 million hybrid sales.

Toyota has gotten a kick from the Prius, an enhanced global image for technological innovation, social responsibility and fashionable glamour, analysts say.

The Prius is also one solid bright spot for Toyota, whose reputation for quality is starting to tarnish as it targets a record of selling 10.4 million vehicles globally in 2009. Meanwhile, its recalls are also ballooning.

But when it all began, Uchiyamada wasn’t even thinking hybrids.

Orders from management — then president Hiroshi Okuda and Shoichiro Toyoda, the company founder’s son and chairman — were ambiguous: Come up with the 21st century car, the vehicle that would hands-down beat the competition in mileage and environmental friendliness.

Uchiyamada initially proposed an advanced gasoline engine that was quickly rejected as lacking imagination. But advanced technologies like fuel cells and the electric vehicle were too expensive for a commercial product.

Creating a hybrid would demand excruciating labor, and management had moved up the deadline to 1997. The engineering obstacles were tremendous, especially the development of the hybrid battery, which must deliver power and recharge in spurts as the car is being driven.

Uchiyamada ditched the usual back-up plans and multiple scenarios, focusing his team on one plan at a time and moving on when each failed.

As Uchiyamada tells it, the Prius wasn’t the kind of car Toyota would have ever approved as a project, if standard decision-making had been followed. It was sure to be a money loser for years.

Conventional wisdom was wrong; Toyota’s once skeptical rivals are now all busy making hybrids. The Frankfurt auto show in August had hybrids galore.

Porsche AG showed off a version of its Cayenne sport utility vehicle that is powered by hybrid technology developed with Volkswagen, and BMW pulled back the curtain on its X6, an SUV coupe crossover hybrid.

I certainly hope Uchiyamada san comes to our Global Summit in November

Apple’s new iPhone 3G will be launched on July 11 in green packaging.

According to a report in ENN (Environmental News Network), Apple has ordered millions of potato starch paper trays from PaperFoam, the same Dutch company that supplies other cell phone companies with product packaging.

The result is a 90 per cent reduction in carbon footprint over plastic and a tray made entirely from a natural resource, as opposed to the visually appealing but environmentally appalling Styrofoam.

This move is a result of Apple’s legal tussle with Greenpeace last year, which prompted Apple Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs to promise to rid the company’s products of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and its flat-panel displays of arsenic by the glass by the end of 2008.

Apple is talking more about its products and their impact on the environment than ever before and this announcement’s convenient appearance just over a week before the new iPhone 3G’s big launch is sure to generate interest among the fans of this phone.

Starbucks has expanded rapidly in China…it has spawned great “Copycat” versions as well. Even a Google cafe with internet cafe attached of course no relation to the real Ggogle.

We plan to invite Kenji Hasegawa to the Global Summit for Ecology in November to introduce his Super Hybrid Tree to the world community…here are just some screen shots describing the species and the great promotion that we will do in Japan to plant these trees.

The T Card is a points card from a retailer called Tsutaya where you collect points when ever you rent videos, buy music and books at over 1000 shops in Japan.

Tsutaya does several community service projects yearly and are concerned about the environment. The point system has nearly 3 billion points in its bank.