Here’s the latest action:
1) Bizarre claim made by academic: France shipping nuclear waste to U.S.
2) Google up against new rivals, which can see what you surf
3) MingleNow is leaving the party
4) Solar’s scaling challenges may have an answer
5) Incandescent lighting heading for the door
6) Gaming feud could cause aftershocks
7) Freewebs relaunches as Webs.com
8) More money heads to Hollywood
U.S. denies France is shipping nuclear waste to South Carolina — At the ThinkGreen conference in San Francisco, University of Florida professor Yogi Goswami (pictured left), a former President of the International Solar Energy Society, made the bizarre claim that “a large majority of the nuclear waste from France is actually shipped to the U.S,” specifically to Savannah River Lab in South Carolina — and that not even the Department of Energy knows about it (story carried by Cleantech.com). Coming from an accomplished academic, at an investors conference, you’d think there is something to this (we talked with the Cleantech folks, and they say Goswami is respected). But the DOE denied Goswami’s claim, calling it inaccurate and misleading. Anyone know anything about this? We’ll do some digging, meantime.
Watch out, Google, the wolves are circling — The online ad business is hot, and there potential rivals to Google are numerous. Internet service providers like CenturyTel and Embarq Communications are starting to use their innate advantages to do ads, with targeting that really works: Since they serve their customers with internet service, they can track every Web site the customer visits. That’s far more than Google can do. The Wall Street Journal reports on their progress; for more on the actual technology, check out our own article on NebuAd, one of the technology companies behind so-called “deep packet inspection” techniques.
MingleNow decides to leave the party – A social network for the bar and club scene (our coverage) will close on January 7th, according to their blog, a little more than a year after launching. Perhaps nobody expected it to really succeed (see the comments on our original post), but Read/Write Web says an anonymous source tipped them off that the site was actually forced to close by Yahoo, which bought BlueLithium, owner of MingleNow.
Solar power may not find large-scale success — At least in its current form, says the American Scientist Online. The power required to manufacture photovoltaic equipment may make it difficult to scale installations quickly enough to satisfy global power demands. However, an upcoming technology called dye-sensitized cells may be cheap enough to solve an early production crunch. Check out the original article for more.
Incandescents speeding their exit from the market — As the above story implies, efficiency is a big part of the cleantech equation, which is why everyone from the Department of Energy to Wal-Mart is trying to eliminate incandescent lighting. It’s no news that initiatives to replace them with compact fluorescent bulbs and LEDS are going well, but an update on the progress is always nice; for the best one lately, check out this article on Chemical & Engineering News.
Gaming feud could have industry consequences — The peremptory and unexplained canning of an editor by popular gaming review site GameSpot may seem like a minor scuffle at first, but it could have broader implications for gaming as a whole, says GigaOm. The controversy the firing caused may push the industry further along the path to casual games with a broader market appeal and hurting the business of established gaming websites.
Freewebs launches social gaming, changes name to Webs — Freewebs, a social media company that hosts personal websites, is relaunching itself as Webs.com. The new site will include a social publishing site called Pagii, the old Freewebs site, and the Social Gaming Network, which offers games for play on the site or on social networks like Facebook. More coverage from Techcrunch.
More investment going to Hollywood — A new $200 million private equity fund raised by FilmBankers International LLC will invest directly in the production of independent films in the United States. The firm is still fundraising, but plans to use the money for films with a budget range of $10-20 million. FilmBankers bases funding decisions on a “credit score”, which attempts to predict the potential success of a film. The fund is part of a new wave of private capital headed for Hollywood, with hopes of outmaneuvering the time-worn blockbuster model of the big studios. News via TheDeal.com.
