DOE, USDA hand out $24M to biomass projects
Biomass is often overlooked in favor of sexier renewable energy sources like solar and wind — it’s dirty, capital intensive and not emissions free — but it is one of the only drop-in technologies in the alternative fuel space (meaning that it will work with legacy technology, traditional gas tanks and the like). Finally, it has captured the attention of the Department of Energy, which partnered with the Department of Agriculture to give out $24.4… Continue Reading
Spore: The Movie. Sounds like a bad idea
Some adaptations of video games to movies just leave you shaking your head. The Angelina Jolie/Tomb Raider movies made a lot of sense. But Spore?
Electronic Arts announced today that Twentieth Century Fox and EA are teaming up to adapt the game Spore into an animated feature film. Ice Age’s Chris Wedge will direct. Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, who wrote the screenplay for The Princess and the Frog, will write the screenplay for the Spore… Continue Reading
314 of the Forbes 400 richest Americans poorer than last year
Warren Buffett’s wealth took a dive this past year, losing $10 billion in value on his shares in Berkshire Hathaway. At least he’s not alone. More than three-quarters of Forbes’s annual list of the 400 richest Americans lost wealth in the past year.
Buffett tosses around easy catchphrases: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.” Easy to say when you’ve got $3 billion to lose on General Electric, Mr. Buffett.
Clustered… Continue Reading
Who rules real-time search? A look at 11 contenders
Real-time search engines have proliferated over the last month, with a series of launches from start-ups like Topsy, almost.at and Scoopler. The companies are hoping to edge in on a space that Google co-founder Larry Page has admitted is a weakness for the search giant. And they’re using microblogging and social bookmarking sites as tools to figure out what content is relevant up to the second.
Real-time search is valuable because it lets you know what’s… Continue Reading
Is the video game exercise trend getting overloaded or just starting?
In video games, Nintendo starts the trends and then the copycats pile in. At some point, gamers get jaded and the trend collapses.
Nintendo made the exercise-gaming trend into a phenomenon with Wii Fit, which has sold more than 10 million copies since its launch a year ago. That’s more copies than the original Halo. Now other companies are piling into the exercise game craze as couch potatoes get off the couch. Sega announced Daisy Fuentes… Continue Reading
UC Berkeley’s CITRIS lab: a haven for startups tries to solve big problems
Most university research centers can’t say they’ve produced 76 startups.
But that’s the record of University of California at Berkeley’s micro-fabrication engineering lab. Now a new lab with a new building and a new nano-fabrication facility — the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society — aims to create a foundation for future innovation that could keep Silicon Valley competitive with the rest of the world.
Built with a budget of $300 million over… Continue Reading
Game industry maverick Bernie Stolar: unplugged and worried about crappy games
Bernie Stolar, former games evangelist at Google and a veteran of many game companies, is one of those unfiltered loose cannons. He had a fireside chat on Friday with Forbes writer Mary Jane Irwin at the SD Forum games conference at Microsoft’s office in Mountain View, Calif. Stolar has been around the block. He joked about being the old guy of the game industry. But he has played a key role at Atari, Sony, Sega,… Continue Reading
OwnEnergy shoots for $100M to fund wind power
OwnEnergy just brought in an undisclosed amount in first-round funding, but the 1-year-old wind and alternative energy company is already looking ahead to the full $100 million it needs to raise to develop its first project, a 51-megawatt wind farm in north Texas — and to have it up and running by the end of 2009.
It’s unclear how close the Brooklyn-based company is to this goal, and I haven’t been able to reach OwnEnergy executives… Continue Reading
Vivox scores deals for voice-communication in online games for 38 Studios and Sony
Once considered an afterthought in games, voice communication is becoming a bigger part of the online gaming experience. Now players can use sound strategically in large games known as massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). You can engage in a high-quality group voice chat with a large team of players to coordinate play. You can disguise your voice so that you sound like a game character instead of a 12-year-old kid. And with 3-D directional sound,… Continue Reading
Web companies organize massive effort to patch fundamental Internet flaw
The entire underpinnings of the Internet are vulnerable to a major bug in how Internet addresses are managed, security researchers announced today. The problem is so big that dozens of companies and government organizations have secretly synchronized an effort to fix it.
The companies — from Microsoft to Cisco to AT&T — are all releasing patches today or in the next few days to eliminate the major vulnerability, which was discovered early this year by security… Continue Reading