Google Makes First Clean Tech Project Investment

May 3, 2010

Search engine giant Google made good on its promise to invest in clean-technology projects, announcing Monday that it invested $38.8 million in a North Dakota wind farm.

The company has promised for months it would put money behind its advocacy of alternative energy and green development. The investment, completed Friday, is Google’s first in a utility-scale renewable energy project, thought the company has invested in green-tech start-ups.

Google invests $38,8 million in a North Dakota NextEra Energy Resources wind farm

In a blog post, the company said the 169.5 MW project stood out because it uses some of the latest wind turbine technology and control systems to lower the cost of generating renewable power. The turbines on the NextEra Energy Resources farm continuously adjust their blade angles to more efficiently turn wind into electricity, and larger blades sweep an area that is 15 percent bigger than with earlier models.

The farm has 113 turbines that stand 262 feet high.

“We’ve been looking at investments in renewable energy projects, like the one we just signed, that can accelerate the deployment of the latest clean energy technology while providing attractive returns to Google and more capital for developers to build additional projects,” said Rick Needham, green business operations manager in the blog post.

Google has previously invested in clean-tech companies including eSolar and AltaRock.

The news from Google came as NextEra said it sold $190 million in equity in the farm so it could pay down debt.

3 Comments | news | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet

Google Opens The Kimono On PowerMeter, Says Consumer Use High

April 29, 2010

The easy access to home energy data is a serious constraint to smart grid innovation.

But you would never know it from the success of Google’s PowerMeter, the online software that lets homeowners monitor their power consumption.

Forty-six percent of PowerMeter users check their energy use three times a day or more, says Google's Edward Lu

The growth in the use of the free product is high and consumers find it “sticky,” says Edward Lu, program manager of advanced products at the Internet search titan.

Eighty-six percent of users view their energy use once every three days, Lu said at GreenNet conference in San Francisco. Forty-six percent look at it three times a day or more.

Lu said Google has partnerships with 10 utilities, but expects more from the online product. New features are being tested, including a way to interface with electric cars. Google doesn’t yet have a business model in mind, but that isn’t holding back development, says Lu.

Despite its success, Google is quick to say that the incomplete access to consumer data is slowing its innovation, just as it is constraining development at the more than 100 other established companies and start-ups developing software, home displays and other products for the emerging home energy market.

Lu acknowledges that there is a mismatch between the speed of companies, such as Google, and the slower pace of utilities and regulators. By next year, companies may expect to see the data, he says, but it is likely to be another before many states and utilities finally open the gates.

Other innovators view the landscape in a similar manner. Access to consumer data is a key constraint, says Adrian Tuck, CEO of the smart grid display company Tendril. “Without it, the market will not flourish.”

Tuck says that only 10 of the 50 U.S. states are moving in the direction of open access. On the list are California, New York, Texas, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. The others are not.

At Microsoft, the company hopes to sidestep some of the restraints. Last month it struck a deal to put its Hohm home energy management software inside Ford’s electric Focus.

“We see this as a business” selling services to utilities and selling online ads for consumers to see, says Troy Batterberry, product unit manager. More auto partnerships are on the way, he added.

1 Comment | news | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet

[Video] SF App Show: Still No Android Mobile Apps Developers!

April 28, 2010

SF App Showcase organiser, Seth Socolow (left) and event moderator Ben Parr of Mashable.com

Larger and more organised than “meetups” but  more casual than larger run conferences, SF AppShow was started by boot-strapped mobile app publisher SF App Studio, to help fellow developers market their mobile apps.

SF AppShow is one those popular “micro-events” that are mushrooming in and around San Francisco, Calif. SF New Tech being another one.

“We needed a venue like this so app developer can come, show off their stuff to a lot of people in person, as well using social media and live video streaming to get this out to a much larger audience,” said Seth Socolow, the co-founder of SF App Studio and the event’s organiser.

Ben Parr of Mashable.com was hosting last night’s event where the following 6 new and upcoming mobile apps were showcased:

  1. TourRecorder by Geotrio, Inc.
  2. Expensify by Expensify
  3. Personal Assistant by Pageonce, Inc.
  4. Magic Window – Living Pictures by Jetson Creative, Inc.
  5. Diner Dash: Grilling Green by PlayFirst, Inc.
  6. And SF App Studio’s own LeanScale iPhone app

You can find the whole recorded show here.

Where are the Android app developers ?

So far, most of the apps showed at these events focus on the iPhone and more recently the iPad. But curiously, no Android apps yet!

“We actually haven’t seen any applications of native Android apps yet. It kind of surprised me. I would have expected by now we would. I think still there aren’t many people making any real money on Android but it’s going to come. It’s just taking a little while longer,” adds Socolow.

Leave a Comment » | Interviews, news, wireless | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

Router Company Highlights Failure Of Smart Grid Standards, Forms Independent Working Group

April 6, 2010

Smart-grid router company SmartSynch highlighted the failure of smart-grid standards Tuesday by forming an independent industry group to push for needed standards in communications gear.

Stephen Johnston said that despite three years of efforts, standards still are missing for smart meters and network equipment.

GridRouter maker Smartsynch hopes to push for IP-based communications standards on the smart grid. It has attracted a small group of supporters including AT&T and Motorola.

Now with utilities pouring billions of dollars of federal funds into early stage smart-grid efforts, projects risk of falling short from equipment that doesn’t interoperates or which can’t be easily installed.

Smart-grid standards initiatives date back more than three years. Yet smart meters from a company such as GE don’t work alongside one from Elster or Landis-Gyr, or connect smoothly to a GridRouter from SmartSynch.

“Without standards, we could be setting up the smart grid to be not as good as it could be,” Johnston said. “It’s a huge problem.” Prices also could be higher since competition among vendors is reduced.

On Tuesday, SmartSynch hopes to make a dent in the problem by forming an “ecosystem” group around its GridRouter. The group will push for interoperable, IP-based standards and has attracted several big name supporters: AT&T, Motorola, Rogers Communications, Itron, Cooper Power Systems and Battelle Energy. “We anticipate more,” Johnston said.

A day earlier, executives from Google, Intel, Honeywell, GE, AT&T and venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers made news with a letter to President Obama. They called on the Obama Administration to make the distribution of energy-use data to homes and businesses a priority.

But without standards, this could be more difficult than it seems. “If every utility deploys a proprietary system, those utilities can’t benefit from each other,” says Johnston.

1 Comment | news | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet

Best Of Launch Pad Startups At Where 2.0: Social Animal, Geomena, SimpleGeo (Video)

April 1, 2010

Social Animal created astounding virtual maps using an HD camera mounted on a Volvo!

Aside from the who’s who in geolocalisation (Google, ESRI, Navteq…) – somebody has to pay for lunch! – there were a lot of little known startups from all over the world attending Where 2.0.

And some of the most promising ones had the opportunity to launch their new product onstage during the “Launch Pad” session, just before lunch.

Follows are my 3 favourite launch pad startups and their respective video presentation:

  1. Virtual Tourism Through Mapping by Tyler Malin (Social Animal)
    Can HD interactive 360 video create more engaging mapping experiences? Social Animal creates HD 360 degree video with their SA9 camera system which provides high resolution video without the typical warping or distortion. This video is distributed in an interactive flash player that allows the viewer to control the video and click on objects in the map for additional information.
  2. Open WiFi Geolocation with Geomena by Adam DuVander (DuVinci, Inc.)
    The Geomena Project is creating a structured wiki database of access points that anyone can edit and use. Now that every browser can geolocate its user, let’s keep the data that makes it happen updated and available to all.
  3. Getting to Know SimpleGeo by Matt Galligan (SimpleGeo)
    SimpleGeo is a ready-to-use location platform to store, scale, and discover geodata that launched today.

1 Comment | news, web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

How To Import Mobile Phone Movies (3GP) Into iMovie ’09 For Free!

March 6, 2010

Quicktime Player 10 lets you convert a movie created with a mobile phone (3GPP format) to MPEG-4... For Free!

UPDATE: Just simply change the file extension from .3gp to .m4v and you’re done. Thanks Jason for the great tip!

Eureka!

This is something I’ve been trying to do for a long time, but just couldn’t found out how… until today!

And I thought, I’ll share it here as after all these years, I haven’t found anything on the Web to help me do this. Which by the way, I found out by pure luck.

The problem. All the latest mobile phones I had (from a Motorola Razr to the Google Nexus I’m trying out now) can record videos using the 3GPP format.

But, inexplicably so, Apple’s iMovie (I’m using the latest version 8.0.5) would not recognise nor import those mobile movies.

My solution. So to import a 3GPP movie into iMovie, I would first convert it, using the free Quicktime Player (i’m using version 10.0), to MPEG-4 (with the .M4V file extension). And then, import it into iMovie.

Here’s how I did it:

  1. Open the 3GPP movie in Quicktime Player: File -> Open File
  2. Share it with iTunes: Share -> iTunes
  3. Choose the Apple TV size (better quality but larger file size) and click Share
  4. Quicktime Player will add the .M4V extension to the original name of the file
  5. After the file appears in iTunes, you can import it using iMovie.

It’s not as straightforward as if it was possible to import a mobile phone video directly into iMovie, but it does the job. Moreover, it’s free!

18 Comments | news | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

[Video] Can Forbes Survive A Media 2.0 World ?

February 26, 2010

Forbes can not survive with only cheap Internet ads, publisher Rich Karlgaard admits

How long can Forbes magazine survive?

Last year, the cash-strapped company chopped 40% of its staff (about 100 employees) in an effort to stay profitable.

And just last month, it sold off its 125,000-square foot Greenwich Village headquarters to NYU for $65 million.

In total, in the past 6 years, Forbes raised over $600 million to save its far-flung empire.

At yesterday’s Churchill Club event, Forbes publisher and Club co-founder Rich Karlgaard provided a candid assessment of the media group’s struggle to survive in the new digital economy dominated by Google’s cheap performance-based advertising.

Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment | news | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

Benioff: Salesforce Chatter And Google Buzz Will Integrate

February 17, 2010

A tired Marc Benioff unveils Salesforce.com Chatter, a collaboration in the cloud service

It was a more subdued Marc Benioff that kicked off Salesforce.com’s Chatter luncheon event today in downtown San Francisco.

And this of course has nothing to do with the fact that there was hardly any new news about the company’s “Facebook for the Enterprise” collaboration service, which was originally unveiled last Fall, at the Dreamforce conference.

More likely, the culprit who sucked off Salesforce.com’s CEO stamina was his arrival late last night from Hawaii (and we all can imagine how tough that can be :)

“I’m on a different time-zone and it’s also a smaller room,” joked Benioff who will celebrate Salesforce.com’s 11th birthday on March 8.

Chatter to roll-out mid-year

Despite the lack of new features on Chatter (we’re still waiting for video conferencing), I was impressed to see how Saleforce.com managed to deeply integrate Facebook and Twitter-like features such as profiles and feeds inside its entire stack: from the platform (Force.com) to enterprise custom applications. Making it easy to “chaterrize” any customer applications running on Salesforce.com’s cloud.

“Facebook showed us a smarter way to do business,” told VP of Products Kraig Swensrud to a small audience of customers and press.

Specifically, Swensrud demoed how easy it was to “follow” people, documents, groups, projects and virtually any objects on the Salesforce.com platform.

Google Buzz is no Chatter competitor

When I asked Benioff about Google Buzz, he quickly dismissed it as a competitive threat to Chatter, despite the search engine’s intention to take Buzz to the enterprise.

“We will integrate the 2 systems, and you’ll be able to get your Chatter feed inside Buzz. Chatter is a core messaging architecture layer and you can receive those (feeds) either directly on our own interface or through other interfaces,” explains Benioff.

And on Yammer’s competition? “I’m not familiar with the product, so I don’t know,” he says. What do you think?

Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment | hardware, news, software, web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

Video: Google Buzz Adds Twitter Inside Gmail; Competes With Yammer, Chatter

February 9, 2010

Google Buzz is more useful for the enterprise, mobile setting

At a press conference this morning, Google unveiled yet another “real-time” Web initiative: Buzz.

To me, Buzz is nothing else but Twitter integrated to the Gmail user interface, and which gets status updates from your address book contacts.

But who really needs another Twitter-like? Especially after spending lots of time and efforts building, and perhaps monetising, a large number of “followers.”

So my guess is that Buzz will be interesting to try out (I just got mine activated on my Gmail account) but will certainly bore you quickly.

Google Buzz is Twitter for the enterprise, not the consumer

However, I can see how Buzz can be useful for the enterprise, a professional Twitter like Yammer or Saleforce.com’s Chatter.

No wonder Google quickly said it intends to add Buzz to its Google Apps enterprise offering. Something that Google never really talk about when it launches a consumer product.

Even co-founder Sergey Brin highlighted how Buzz improved his own productivity, accelerating the way he communicates with others inside Google.

So, more than a consumer product (who needs yet another Twitter/social network to worry about it), Google Buzz – like Yammer before it – could actually find success inside the enterprise, not outside.

Here’s what Google’s VP of product management Brad Horowitz has to say about Buzz in the enterprise:

And  Buzz’s demo by product manager Todd Jackson:

Leave a Comment » | news, web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

My 6 Most Useful High-Tech Hardware In 2009

December 31, 2009

Unlike most, trying to be smart – or dumb – about predicting next year’s trends, I wanted to reflect back on the most useful high-tech hardware in my life this year.

  1. First and foremost is my laptop. In this case, it’s an old Apple Macbook (2 GHz Intel Core Duo, 2 GB Ram) that I upgraded with a 500 GB hard disk drive from Western Digital. It still works fine for editing videos, photos and stories. There was a crack on the Mac’s case (next to the screen) and the Mac repair shop changed it (it was a known defect) and installed a brand new keyboard… all for free (I think it’s still under warranty)!
  2. A Logitech Performance MX mouse that works virtually everywhere, even on glass, thanks to its Darkfield technology. The only downside with this mouse was that they is no trap inside it to store the tiny wireless receiver when I need to free up one of the USB port. I’m always afraid to loose it as it’s so minuscule. Also I must always remember to bring the USB cable that ships with the mouse as it’s needed to recharge it;
  3. Livescribe‘s Pulse Smartpen was a lifesaver for me. It records everything I write and synch it with the audio recording. I never miss a word, during an interview or even a long-form presentation. Even more critical for me, I’m able to go back to a particular speech/interview by just tapping on my notes associated to it. It makes my reporting so much more accurate and faster. I couldn’t do without it anymore.
  4. iPod nano, 5th generation with the audio and video recording. I use it to record short interviews, instead of using the bigger video camcorder; as well as audio conversations/presentations when I don’t have my Smartpen handy. I wish the nano had an external microphone jack like the Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video camera which might replace in 2010, both the iPod nano and my hard disk based camcorder. I would have to check the battery life though;
  5. Google G1 smartphone. If you heard me complaining about my phone, you might be surprised to see it mentioned here. But despite its dismal keyboard, which I somehow got used to!, the G1 got even more useful when Google released its Navigation app. With Google Map Navigation I don’t need a seperate GPS system anymore. The G1 is now my one stop shop for voice, watch/alarm, email, Web browsing, calendar, twitter, occasional photo/video recording and lately, navigation. I’m not using much of the Facebook app yet but that might change next year;
  6. Last but not least, the Roku Netflix player was the most important device in my home entertainment centre, just after the plasma TV but way more than the DVD/VHS player or the intermittently connected Mac mini. Hopefully, Roku will open its media player up (as well as the USB port) so it can play content off a USB key/drive and from more Internet video sources like Hulu. One can dream!

Voila, that’s it for me. Have a wonderful holiday and see you next year!

Leave a Comment » | hardware, news | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 32 other followers