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Here’s a sampling of
green-tech news with quick commentary:,Pearl Jewelry

Solazyme adds $45 million - Private Equity Hub
Algae-grower Solazyme is taking a different path to algae production than most to make renewable diesel,wholesale specialty chemicals,cell phone, and food oils.
Google ups investment into wind start-up Makani - Cleantech Group
Makani Power makes kites designed to make electricity from high-altitude wind.
Sunrise Solar introduces solar sunroof - press release
From the company that does solar
car parks is a solar sunroof for a car.

(Credit:
BBC)

Solar plane makes record flight - BBC News
A solar-power plane goes for three days using stored energy in a solar-powered battery.
10 things to know about Biden and energy - Earth2Tech
Good summary by Katie Fehrenbacher of Biden’s energy-related policy positions.
Bacteria power: Future for clean energy lies in ‘Big Bang’ of evolution - Science Daily
More research in mimicking photosynthesis to make fuels, this time with ancient bacteria.
From rustbelt to greenbelt - Green Wombat Fortune.com
Solar helps bring manufacturing back to the Midwest U.S.
India’s Suzlon Energy encounters headwinds at home - WSJ.com
Word that some wind turbines are having technical problems.
Where cell phones go to die - Technology Review
Cool photo gallery showing the inside of a cell phone recycling operation.

The takeoff a three-day solar-power plane flight. Click on image to see a video.

Right now, the primary horse we are betting on will be 3G and 4G solutions for wireless.

But as far as offering Wi-Fi in hot spots or covering whole communities with Wi-Fi, we’ve tried it. We provided Wi-Fi in Manhattan, but we no longer offer that service.

In the lowest-density areas, it’s hard to justify new wireline deployment. And technically, DSL is available over copper. But it has limitations on long loops. Wireless solutions are attractive in these rural areas. We are looking at options in that area. But it’s worth noting that even many of the small towns in our footprint are still within miles of a city center. So it’s only about 30 percent that is out in low-density areas.

Q: As you know, Comcast got caught slowing down peer-to-peer traffic on its network. As a network provider yourself, do you think it’s necessary to manage your customers’ traffic?
Wegleitner: I think we can come up with scenarios where network management would be necessary. While there might be plenty of bandwidth out there, you can’t really guarantee that you can get an error-free transmission of, say, a video file that will be guaranteed at a specific point in time. That is why you might need rational network management.

But is it acceptable to identify and slow down specific types of traffic like BitTorrent or other peer-to-peer applications?
Wegleitner: Well, it’s sort of a glass-half-full situation. Degrading traffic for one application enables another to work better. But we have to allow people who use the peer-to-peer applications for lawful and legitimate purposes to do so.

Verizon is working with several peer-to-peer companies to find ways to use the technology to distribute content more efficiently. How can the P2P protocol benefit service providers like Verizon?
Wegleitner: Peer-to-peer is a distribution enabler. But often when people talk about P2P, it gets lumped into a category with things that are bad, mainly because it takes up so much capacity on the network. But whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, there is underlying technology for P2P that can be used to everyone’s advantage to get content like video, which everyone is asking for, distributed in the most efficient way.

Fios also has helped future-proof Verizon’s network. While its cable competitors buckle under the pressure of peer-to-peer traffic on their networks, Verizon has enough capacity in its network, thanks to its fiber upgrades, to weather the storm unscathed and work on its own timetable to find more efficient ways to handle peer-to-peer traffic.

Verizon’s original Fios plan goes through 2010. What happens after that? Will Verizon continue to deploy fiber to more customers in its footprint, or will you focus more on DSL?
Wegleitner: I think there is more gas in the engine for fiber-to-the-home beyond 2010 that will help us get into the remainder of households in our footprint. Will we cover all the homes in our footprint? Probably not.

The fiber-to-the-home network called Fios has enabled Verizon to supercharge broadband speeds and compete against cable in the TV market.

Are people really using the 50Mbps service?
Wegleitner: Under specific circumstances, transferring files at 50Mbps is better than 10Mbps. The key here, though, is concurrent use. In the old days, when you had one PC, there probably wasn’t much need for these kinds of speeds. But now there are multiple devices connected to broadband in the home. And that number is only going to grow. So it’s important to have the performance there.

So when you talk about new voice services, are you talking about offering unified communications in the home?
Wegleitner: Yes, we can offer a unified communication experience in the home today with point solutions. And we have run way left for more sophisticated and converged services.

I remember that. A few years ago, you guys turned your existing phone booths in Manhattan into Verizon Wi-Fi hot spots. But when you rolled out EV-DO service, you shut down the Wi-Fi hot spots. Why?
Wegleitner: The economics just didn’t pan out. I think right now, the primary horse we are betting on will be 3G and 4G solutions for wireless.

There’s no question that Verizon Communications hit a home run with its aggressive fiber strategy.

Verizon has said it expects to pass 18 million homes with its Fios fiber- to-the-home service in 2010. Where are you guys in that deployment?
Wegleitner: I’d say we are slightly ahead of schedule for homes passed. But in general, I’d describe us as on schedule. We will have 12 million homes passed this year, which is the goal we had previously stated.

And we’re still working cooperatively with P2P companies and the rest of the folks in the P4P group to employ the technology in a way that would maximize its impact.

So what would you consider to be acceptable network management?
Wegleitner: It’s still a work in progress. But it’s important to ensure the capabilities of applications.

The specification for that calls for 200Mbps to the home, with 400Mbps peak utilization. But we’ll probably see the next generation of technology allow us to deliver between 125Mbps and 175Mbps to the home. We are working with suppliers for that technology to go even faster. But 100Mbps is within range, and we could even go a little higher.

Degrading traffic for one application enables another to work better. But we have to allow people who use the peer-to-peer applications for lawful and legitimate purposes to do so.

Speaking of 4G, there’s been so much talk about moving to the next generation of wireless networks. What do you see as the biggest challenges in building and running the next-generation broadband wireless networks?
Wegleitner: One challenge will be the sheer number of new devices on the network. It’s a double-edged sword. There’s more capability for end users, but it also means that the network provider has to understand these capabilities. There’s not going to be a common denominator, so we will have to be able to identify and recognize the devices and their capabilities, and adapt to it.

Verizon announced recently that it’s increasing the speed of its Fios service to 50Mbps on its high-end tier of service. How much faster can the speeds on Fios get?
Wegleitner: The original specification for the Passive Optical Network, or the FTTP network, we are using allows us to provide 100Mbps to the home. So that’s probably a reasonable ceiling, given the current technology. But we are also deploying GPON, which is an enhancement to the original fiber technology we’re using.

When will we see these services?
Wegleitner: We can already provide the ability to forward calls. But the find-me and follow-me services haven’t caught on as rapidly as we thought. Sometimes the first time an application comes out of the shoot, it doesn’t catch. But then later, it does. I don’t think we’ve created enough selection or a compelling-enough template to drive mass-market adoption of some of these services yet. But that will come. I don’t think we’re talking more than a couple of years away.

We conducted some tests with the P4P group and Yale University, and showed that customers have a better experience, and we use fewer resources, when we used the P2P technology. It’s really a win-win situation for us and the customer.

Verizon has begun selling a bundle that includes Verizon Wireless service and high-speed Internet and video, and no home phone line. How long before you think that the old landline telephones will be obsolete and will disappear altogether?
Wegleitner: In the broadband world, voice service is a small increment of traffic, in terms of bandwidth and cost. And in a converged world, we can give people who keep a voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) landline a rich set of features. So I don’t know that it won’t be a useful service for a large portion of the population. I don’t think the last chapter has been written on voice yet.

The other thing is that we’ll need additional management for all these devices. We’ll have to be able to localize problems, identify them, and be able to fix them. And we’ll have to make sure we can do this at a reasonable cost.

Would Verizon use LTE or WiMax to provide wireless broadband in those rural areas?
Wegleitner: Well, LTE is the horse we are riding right now. So that will likely move to the head of the line, in terms of the high-speed wireless-broadband data service we’ll offer. We are already offering direct broadcast satellite for video delivery where we aren’t offering Fios TV. So we could pair DBS with wireless data to also offer a triple-play offering in those rural areas.

Below is an edited excerpt from that conversation. Feel free to share your thoughts after in the “TalkBack” section.

Some of your cell phone competitors, such as AT&T and T-Mobile, are using Wi-Fi in different ways to extend their broadband networks to public hot spots. T-Mobile is actually using it to augment its cellular voice service. Will Verizon use Wi-Fi?
Wegleitner: We might see Wi-Fi used in the home to provide multiple device interconnection. Right now, we are using the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) cable standard to deliver connectivity using the existing cable infrastructure in the home. But we could use other kinds of connectivity in the home, such as Wi-Fi or power line.

Mark Wegleitner, Verizon’s senior vice president of technology in charge of broadband and consumer services, has helped develop and drive Verizon’s fiber strategy. I sat down with him at the Nxtcomm trade show in Las Vegas last week to talk about a wide variety of topics, including the controversy over Comcast’s treatment of BitTorrent traffic, faster speeds for Fios, and what the company plans to do next when it reaches its 2010 goal of passing 18 million homes with fiber.

For that, open source is a critical requirement. Open source, unencumbered by silly patents, closed APIs, and such. Open source because, quite frankly, the enterprise is often not going to want to be bothered by or with a vendor during the integration process. A real-life case study may help to convince those incapable of seeing past their proprietary noses.

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Unfortunately for proprietary vendors, open source is setting the agenda here, as can be evidenced by Microsoft slowly ceding control (Shared Source Initiative, anyone?) of its code back to the customers who really should own it. They pay for it, after all.

No, not everyone wants to modify source code. Nor do they need to do so. This is a benefit that some exercise directly, while others benefit as surrogates.

I was meeting with an Alfresco customer recently in London. The customer is a top-10 financial services company with a small army of developers. In this, it is atypical of many enterprises, but I’ve heard similar stories from an increasing number of enterprises that view IT as a strategic differentiator.

But I’ve been surprised by the diversity of companies who do precisely this. I’ve been less surprised to see IT people from all sizes of companies actively getting involved with their support issues because they can with open source. They may call with a support issue but it’s no longer the passive “I broke, you fix” (or, really, “You broke, you fix when it’s convenient for you”) relationship that proprietary software demands. Instead, they’re investigating their issues before calling so that the support process is easier.

For the moment, “You make believe that you are still in charge,” as Thom Yorke sings in “The Clock.” But eventually the charade will end. Customers are in control. Or should be. That’s how grown-up industries act.

Typed to the tune of Thom Yorke’s “Atoms for Peace.” Blame him.

Enter open source. Because this Alfresco customer has absolute rights to view and modify our source code, it is actively working with us to integrate its authentication system with the Alfresco content collaboration/management system. It’s a great partnership. Where it is using community-developed open-source software (Apache, Linux, etc.), it is simply making the changes on its own with the assistance of members of that community.

The customer was having some issues getting single sign-on to work with Alfresco. My sales engineer logically asked, “What directory are you authenticating against? Active Directory? eDirectory?” The answer was, “None of the above. We developed our own authentication system.”

Open source lends itself to true interoperability much better than proprietary software does, if for no other reason than the reality that most software does not involve a vendor. It involves a customer solving its own itch. Open source fits nicely into this, the way software is actually developed and used in the real world.

Bravo to Microsoft for making much of its interoperability with Novell! Unfortunately, this hardly resolves even a rounding error’s worth of the industry’s need to interoperate with enterprise-developed software.

With all the talk about interoperability rumbling around, I thought a quick sanity check would be in order. Vendors are fond of talking about interoperability, but myopia-challenged as we are, we tend to forget that most software is not developed by vendors. It’s developed by so-called “customers.”

Well, I’ll be damned. I never thought I’d see this day, but after numerous delays, Garmin-Asus is finally releasing its Nuvifone models, starting with select Asian markets.

The Garmin-Asus Nuvifone G60 will be the first out the door and will go on sale in Taiwan on July 27, and then in Singapore and Malaysia by the end of August. The Garmin-Asus Nuvifone M20 will also go on sale in August, shipping in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia.

As for us here in the States (and Europe), Garmin-Asus says the Nuvifone G60 is on schedule for delivery in the second half of the year. However, there was no mention of a North American release of the Windows Mobile-based Nuvifone M20. However, I have to wonder, does it even matter? Today’s market is full of so many capable and proven smartphones and mobile GPS solutions; is anyone going to go for this?

It’s a wonderful headline for a wonderful life: “Technology found to strengthen U.S. families.”

Technology doesn’t allow people to ignore their parents, siblings and pet rats and disappear into their own hugely self-referential, self-reverential world, otherwise known as Facebook.

No, technology promotes family love.

So, at least, say the headlines from a survey published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, an organization that “creates and funds academic-quality research.”

Because life and love interest me greatly I decided to look at the report, which was prepared by two researchers from Pew and two from the University of Toronto.

Here is the good news: “American spouses often go their separate ways during the day, but remain connected by cell phones and, to some extent, Internet communications. When they return home they often have shared moments of exploration and entertainment on the Internet.”

Thankfully, despite the immeasurably positive headlines this report has already enjoyed, it doesn’t actually avoid honesty. The next paragraph is headlined: “Busy and tech-using families are less likely to share meals and less likely to report satisfaction with their leisure time.”

But let’s not think about that for now. Let’s stick with the positives.
Thirty-three percent of those Internet users surveyed said that the Web had improved their connection with friends “a lot.” Meanwhile, only 23 percent said it had increased the quality of communication with family members with a similar intensity.

Ah, well, hmm. So where do headlines such as “Technology found to strengthen U.S. families” come from?

They don’t seem to come from the 11 percent who said that the Internet has increased the amount of time they spend working at the office. Or the 19 percent who said it made them spend more time working at home.

Here it is. Barry Wellman, one of the research team and a sociology professor at the University of Toronto said: “There had been fears that the Internet had been taking people away from each other. We found just the opposite.”
Indeed, the report claims that a majority of adults said that technology allows their family to be as close or closer than they experienced in their own families when they were growing up.

"And here's the family before the cell phone was invented."

(Credit: CC Nathanus)

I can hear you cheering. You are cheering very loudly. But wait, I have just rummaged to Part 5 of the Report, where it says quite clearly that 60 percent of respondents actually thought that cell phones and the Internet “hadn’t made much difference” in bringing their families closer together. Only 25 percent actually said it had made relations better.

Perhaps sociologists have a different interpretation of “just the opposite”

What would you like to conclude from all this? Here’s an entirely unscientific attempt.

Life is harder. Employers are using technology to make you work harder. You feel like you don’t see your families as much. You feel that sometimes the only way you can connect to them is with an amusing e-mail (”Hey, did you see this funny picture of the elephant kissing a baboon?”), a text or a quick phone call as both you and they are on their way to somewhere else. Life has changed. And technology is perhaps the only thing that keeps families from going just very slightly nuts.

The survey, which was very light on single-parent respondents, concluded that married families with children are far greater users of technology than either single-person households or married people without children. But aren’t single-person households now the majority in America?

Oh, I don’t know. Research is such a difficult thing to interpret. So I thought I’d go check out divorce rates. Seems like they’re pretty steady.

So perhaps this might be evidence that technology is actually keeping families together. How are things in your family?

By the way, I forgot to tell you how they did this research. On the phone, naturally.

Microchip Technology and On Semiconductor have made a $2.3 billion bid for semiconductor maker Atmel Corp., the companies announced Thursday.

Atmel designs and manufactures microcontrollers, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory, and radio frequency (RF) components.

The two companies sent a letter to Atmel CEO Steven Laub proposing a $5 per share buyout, which represents a 52 percent premium over Atmel’s closing share price on October 1, 2008.

The letter follows earlier discussions between Atmel and Microchip.

“We appreciate your having taken the time to meet with (Microchip CEO) Steve Sanghi on September 5th to discuss Microchip’s potential acquisition of Atmel,” the letter says. “However, we were deeply disappointed to learn subsequently that the Atmel Board of Directors appears unwilling to consider a transaction at this time under any circumstances.”

The plan calls for Microchip to lead the acquisition and then sell Atmel’s nonvolatile-memory and RF and automotive businesses to ON to partly finance the deal. ON said it would finance its purchase using a combination of existing cash resources, borrowings under its existing credit facility and additional financing.

Atmel also said that if the deal goes through, it intends to dispose of Atmel’s ASIC business upon completing the acquisition or shortly thereafter, and has spoken to an interested third party about the sale.

In a statement, Atmel said its board of directors would “review and consider the proposal in due course.”

It’s Our Tree is a genealogy service that lets people create very simple family trees using Adobe Flash. Like Geni (review) and Kindo (review), the idea is to get your entire family involved by inviting them to join and add family members they remember. It doesn’t offer some advanced services like DNA sleuthing using cheek cells, but it’s incredibly simple to get started, and the finished product can double as a Rolodex, birthday reminder, and private e-mail system for you and your family.

Like Geni and others, to get started you simply add family members using the directional arrows found on each person’s block. There’s support for divorces, first, second, and third marriages, half siblings, and any other oddly conceived (literally) member of your extended family. It also supports nine different languages, meaning if you’re trying to share your tree with your Italian grandmother she’ll be able to see it in her language, including the invite to participate. It’s a nice touch if your family is spread out.

Each family member you (or others) create gets his or her own profile in case you feel like turning the service into an updatable family phone tree. My one irk with this is that they don’t take advantage of a pre-existing contact-management service like Plaxo, Gmail’s contact list, or LinkedIn to save you some time of having to dig all that up. What does make these profiles interesting is that you can add all sorts of geo-data to your family members including the place of birth, death, burial, and present location. This information can be toggled on a large Google map, which can lead to some really great exploration if you’re willing to spend the time researching and inputting it all. Ancestry.com’s DNA service will do something similar, although it actually shows you where your family is from based on cultural migration.

I’m giving this service a thumbs up, although if you’re already tied to one of these services, its feature set is nearly identical to Geni and Kindo, so give it a look before trying to get your whole family to convert. Grandma will say grazie.

Make your family tree quickly and easily with It's Our Tree. It's got support for half siblings, deaths, and geo-location for where people were born. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit:
CNET Networks) polls - Take Our Poll

Which are the other top-10 brands? General Electric, Microsoft (but going down according to other research), Coca-Cola, China Mobile, IBM, Apple, McDonald’s, Nokia, and Marlboro. It’s fascinating to see how technology brands dominate. Maybe we really do rule the world?

In WPP-owned research company Millward Brown’s annual study of the world’s top-100 brands, Google came out on top for the second straight year, registering a 30 percent increase in the value of its brand to maintain the ranking. Google’s market capitalization is $169 billion as a I write this, but the value of its brand?

$86 billion.

I think that means I can’t even afford one pixel of its logo. That’s one heck of a brand.

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“Panasonic will be introducing a freestanding Blu-ray recorder/player in the US during the first half of 2009. (BTW, Blu-ray recorder prices have really dropped in Japan. I spotted a Sharp Blu-ray recorder at Yodobashi camera for around $800 US).”

One of the more frequent e-mails we receive is, when are Blu-ray recorders coming out? Blu-ray recorders have been available in Japan for quite some time now, but we haven’t seen any manufacturer planning to offer a recorder in the U.S. However, HD Guru recently blogged about the CEATEC trade show in Japan, and we noticed this little nugget buried in the middle:

Will Blu-ray recorders finally reach the U.S.?

Although we do get plenty of reader e-mail concerning Blu-ray recorders, there’s plenty of reasons to believe they won’t be popular in the U.S. First up is the high price. An $800 recorder might be a big price drop, but it’s still much more than standalone Blu-ray players, which most consumers already consider too expensive. Secondly, HD DVRs are relatively cheap and convenient, especially when you consider that a blank 25GB BD-R Disc costs about $8-$10. Lastly, we’ll be interested to see exactly what you’ll be able to record with a Blu-ray recorder. We’re assuming people would be most interested in recording premium content from networks such as HBO, but we’d be surprised if content providers didn’t start using copyright protection to make that impossible. Meanwhile, remember that anything you record off of most network and cable channels will be chock full of onscreen ads and snipes–hardly the sort of version we’d want to archive to our permanent collection.

That’s news to us. In fact, we met with Panasonic engineers recently, and when we brought up Blu-ray recorders they had no news for the U.S. market.

So while there’s certainly a limited market for Blu-ray recorders, it will be interesting to see if they’re able to expand beyond that niche audience.

According to screenshots posted at iPhoneYap.com, the navigational instructions work for driving, walking, and the bus. Given Google’s recent Google Maps improvements, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it working for subways and other public transit, too.

And as with the Maps application, there’s an unobtrusive gray Google logo in the lower-right corner of the screen.

(Credit: iPhoneYap.com)

Google Earth for iPhone isn’t the only geographically significant news Monday for Apple phone users. It appears that the second beta version of the
iPhone 2.2 firmware is out, and it includes not just Google’s Street View, but also navigation instructions to give people step-by-step directions when walking or on the bus.

Google can’t release its iPhone software directly, as it can with the Android phone operating system or the Google Maps for Mobile application running on Java-enabled phones such as BlackBerrys. “Things are different on the iPhone,” Birch added.

(Credit: iPhoneYap.com)

It looks like Street View on the iPhone 2.2 firmware will sport an inset map to help with orientation.

It appears the iPhones mapping application will be able to give bus and walking instructions too.

(Via InformationWeek.)

Also in the second beta, according to MacRumors, the 2.2 release notes “indicated that line-in audio accessories are now supported in the SDK,” or software development kit. So perhaps the iPhone and iPod Touch will become a better audio recorder.

“We had the opportunity to work with Apple from the beginning to get Google Maps integrated in the phone, which creates a great maps experience. We’d like to see the (other maps) features we’ve developed get to the iPhone as quickly as possible,” Burch said. “I’d fully expect that over time, it will continue to bring in features.”

The Street View addition to the iPhone was expected, but the screenshots show a bit better how it likely will work. It includes not just the driver’s view of the world, but also a small inset map that shows street names and the orientation of the view.

With the current iPhone 2.1 firmware, the phone gives only driving directions.

No word yet on whether the new beta will make another round of improvements to what I find the single most annoying aspect of the iPhone: the persistent, if reduced, problem of dropped calls.

About 6.9 million iPhone 3G models sold in the third quarter, making it an increasingly important product for Apple and for anyone offering applications on the phone and its close relative, the
iPod Touch.

When I asked Google Earth Product Manager Peter Birch on Friday about when we’d see Street View for the iPhone, he was unsurprisingly enthusiastic but noncommittal.

Updated at 9:33 a.m. PDT to correct navigation details. Updated at 1:29 p.m. PDT with screenshots.

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Did you know Microsoft fanboys still exist? They’re not as powerful as they once were, but they do.