VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action (updated):

1) Solar panels have a dark side, too
2) Yahoo collects about 811 pieces of data on you per month
3) National cable companies want targeting too
4) Attaching numbers to the face of ad targeting
5) Adobe AIR brings Userplane to Macs
6) Calacanis’ tips for saving money in a startup

Solar panels have a dark side, too — Solar may be good at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but actually making the panels could wreak environmental havoc, according to an expose on the Washington Post. This is yet another case of a foreign country polluting itself to sell us popular items — in this case, most of the offending companies are based in China. There’s a bit more concise commentary on Earth2Tech. (Photo via.)

Yahoo is collecting about 811 pieces of data about the average user per month — That, according to a startling report by Comscore, as reported by the NYT. Web sites from Google to Microsoft are also collecting a lot of information about individual surfers as they move around the internet — things like location, personal preferences and past actions. This information can be used to deliver ads that people care about more — bringing in more advertising dollars. The New York Times digs into the current state of online advertising and public awareness. Meanwhile, some 85 percent of Californian adults think websites should not be allowed to track them. The NYT’s Bits blog has more details.

National cable companies want targeting, too — While we (and the New York Times) are on the subject of targeting, it’s not just happening on the internet. The nation’s largest cable television firms, including Comcast, Cox and Time Warner, are joining up to try to attract more targeted ads for their networks in an initiative called Project Canoe. These kinds of partnerships are becoming more common as old media battles the effect of the internet sucking away ad dollars; last month, it was four major newspaper publishers working on their own ad network of sorts.

Attaching numbers to the face of targeting — Last privacy-related item, we promise: ComScore came up with an interesting chart showing the number of data points the Googles and Yahoos of the world pull up on you in a month. They don’t just know your zip code, they know it hundreds of times over. See the full chart on Valleywag.

AIR brings Userplane to Mac desktops — Userplane, the AOL-owned start-up that makes chat and instant messaging tools for web sites, has re-released its Userplane Desktop application on Adobe AIR. Like the avalanche of AIR applications that launched in February (our coverage), Userplane’s new app allows a web site to communicate with your desktop — in this case, by delivering messages from sites in real-time, even when you’re offline. The company previously offered a desktop application, but the AIR release makes it Mac-compatible.

Calacanis’s tips on saving money in a startup — Jason Calacanis has a list of interesting startup advice tips he’s accumulated on how to run a startup. He has plenty of unconventional tidbits of wisdom, like “buy cheap tables and expensive chairs,” and “buy everyone lunch four days a week.” Make it a four-day work-week, Jason, and I might just apply to Mahalo.