The Atom is a bicycle accessory that charges USB-powered devices using energy generated by the cyclist. This little 300 gram gadget mounts onto your bike and captures your kinetic energy while you cruise around.

“The only limit to how much electricity you create is how often you ride,” said founder and CEO Dave Delcourt in an interview with VentureBeat. “We are transforming the daily ride by turning the energy, desire, and passion of riding into something with everyday use. The bicycle becomes infrastructure for distributed energy. As long as you have calories to burn and power in your legs, you have power for your phone.”

The energy is also made available to the rider through a portable 1300 mAh battery pack (about the same as the battery in the iPhone5), which you can unclip and take with you on-the-go. When riding at 10 mph, the Atom outputs 3 watts. Any USB chargeable device can be plugged in and powered up, and the device will only provide “juice” when the device needs it. The Atom consists of three removable parts and is “super intuitive” to install, the company says.

Delcourt and cofounder Aaron Latzke first began developing the technology in 2011. Latzke is a mechanical engineer and avid biker and wanted to feel more connected to the people he was designing for. The two realized that this basic principle of converting kinetic motion into electricity, which was developed in the 1940s, had not been updated for the 21st Century.

“The bike market is $6 billion a year, and $2.5 million is from parts and accessories,” Delcourt said. You have 39 million adult cyclists in the US, and 23 million that cycle on a frequent basis. And for some reason, the energy they create does not exist in a way that is palpable and out of the box.”

Now, after years of research and development, the duo are launching a Kickstarter campaign to bring the Atom to market. The goal is $85,000 to help with manufacturing, tooling, molding, and materials and to cover the first production run. Their goal, Delcourt said, is to ship 10,000 units in the first months of operation.

Siva Cycle’s vision for the Atom extends beyond American commuters. The company will donate 1 generator for every 10 purchases to someone who needs it in the developing world. Power is often unreliable in developing countries, and 1.5 billion people do not have electricity access. However, people in these regions are rapidly adopting mobile technology, and Delcourt said there is a big opportunity to “put power in the spokes of people who need it most.”

The first 200 people to sign up pay $85; after that, Kickstarter backers are charged $95. Post-Kickstarter, the price will be around $105 per unit. Siva Cycle is based in San Francisco, Calif.

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Google announced today that it closed an investment in Spinning Spur Wind Project, a West Texas wind farm than can generate enough power for, on the average, 60,000 U.S. homes.

Source: Siemens

A Siemens turbine

The 161 megawatt facility is 35 miles from Amarillo, Texas, and brings the total amount of renewable energy that Google has invested in to a fairly staggering 2 gigawatts. That’s enough, it says, to power 500,000 American homes for an entire year or for a car to travel around the world 190,000 times.

Spinning Spur is new, a facility EDF Renewable Energy finished before the end of 2012, with 70 2.3 megawatt Siemens wind turbines. If you’re wondering whether you’re going to be using any renewable energy from the project, SPS buys the the power from Spinning Spur. SPS is a subsidiary of Xcel Energy that primarily serves Texas and New Mexico.

Google says it invests in wind projects for ecological reasons as well as financial: They’re good investments. The company has invested over $1 billion in renewable energy projects and has a goal of using 100 percent renewable energy.

Its largest wind project is the Shepherds Flat wind farm, which is about four times the size of Spinning Spur, at 845 megawatts.

photo credit: Sebastiano Pitruzzello (aka gorillaradio) via photopin cc

Trying to offer a different solution to our gadget power woes, Lilliputian Systems today unveiled the Nectar Mobile Power System at an early CES press event. The power system puts the convenience and longevity of a fuel cell into something that’s easy to pocket or throw in your bag.

Unlike rechargeable battery packs, the Nectar is entirely dedicated to disposable power. The $300 core system can juice up any gadget that can be charged through USB (including smartphones, tablets, e-readers, and more), and it’s powered by fuel cell pods that cost $10 a pop.

Lilliputian claims that each pod generates around two weeks of battery life. Once a pod is used up, simply dump it in the recycling bin. It may sound wasteful, but a portable fuel cell solution like the Nectar could be helpful to anyone out in the wilderness, far from a power socket to juice up a typical rechargeable battery. Batteries are also typically heavy, while Lilliputian’s system and pods are far lighter and easier to store. The company assures me that the Nectar and its pods have been approved for carry-on use on airplanes.

The Nectar is powered by the company’s patented Silicon Power Cell technology. Simply put, Lilliputian is able to fit the brains of a fuel cell on a silicon chip.

Check out a Lilliputian rep showing off the Nectar below.

While imagery of a powerless Manhattan is common in disaster movies, it’s something that New Yorkers have been seeing firsthand since Sandy struck on Monday. But it won’t last much longer: New York power company Consolidated Edison confirmed this morning that it expects to restore power to Manhattan on Saturday.

Con Ed spokesperson Mike Clendenin made the announcement this morning, correcting another spokesperson who had claimed Manhattan’s power would be restored later today, Bloomberg reports.

Update: Con Ed has clarified the above comments further. 6,500 lower Manhattan customers will get power today, while the rest of the island will be restored tomorrow.

Around 900,000 New Yorkers lost power when Sandy hit, and today 570,000 still don’t have any service. Con Ed says the majority of its affected customers should have power again by November 11. Altogether, Sandy knocked out power from around 8.5 million on the East Coast. The storm has so far claimed 39 lives in New York and 14 in New Jersey.

Manhattan lost power below 34th Street, which made for some eery imagery where the lower part of the island was in the dark (see picture above), while everything seemed fine in Midtown and above.

“As of 5 a.m. today, Con Edison had 226,000 customers without power in Manhattan, 84,000 in Queens, 35,000 in Brooklyn, 54,000 in Staten Island and 31,000 in the Bronx,” according to an earlier Bloomberg report from this morning. “In Westchester County, the company reported 140,000 customers out of service.”

Economic losses from Sandy could reach $30 billion to $50 billion, the New York Times reports, based on figures from analysis firm Eqecat.

Restoring power to Manhattan is just one step in a prolonged process to make things normal again in New York City. The subway system is only partially restored, thanks to continued flooding and equipment issues, and there’s still plenty of cleanup left. Commuters are making their way into Manhattan via partially restored commuter rails, bus service bringing people over from Brooklyn (bridging disabled subway lines), and carpooling to meet the city’s three-person requirement for passenger vehicles.

Business were also brought to a standstill after Sandy’s onslaught. The New York Stock Exchange opened yesterday after being shut down for two days, while others in the city are scavenging for coworking space. But many won’t be able to do anything until the lights are back on.

Photo: David Shankbone/Flickr

Liquid Metal Battery Corporation, which says it found the solution to storing energy from renewable sources, is getting a new charge in funding.

Led by cleantech investor Khosla Ventures, the battery tech company has raised $15 million in a second round of funding. LMBC has also attracted the attention of energy company Total and  investor Bill Gates, who returned for this second funding round.

The company is the brainchild of Dr. Donald Sadoway, an MIT professor who developed the battery technology to be low cost and easy to deploy.

“The way things stand today, electricity demand must be in constant balance with electricity supply,” Sadoway said in March during a Technology Entertainment and Design talk titled “The Missing Link to Renewable Energy.”

One big problem with renewable energy sources today is that there’s no good way to store power for when you actually need it (current battery technology hasn’t scaled well for this). LMBC’s liquid battery solves that problem, splitting energy demand from storage and allowing clean energy sources to have a hand in energy generation.

“With a giant battery, we’d be able to address the problem of intermittence that prevents wind and solar from contributing to the grid in the same way that coal and gas and nuclear do today,” Sadoway said.

One of the biggest advantages to the battery is that it can be added to existing systems, eliminating the need for further build outs. This, coupled with its flexibility, means that the system is cheap — a factor that has kept much of energy investment focused on established technologies.

“We need to think about the problem differently. We need to think big. We need to think cheap,” Sadoway said in the TED talk.

“The public has no say in the control of the board, which in my view is terribly harmful to any notion of accountability,” Charles Elson, a University of Delaware corporate-governance professor, told Bloomberg. “It’s very troubling to investors, and it’s a bad bet for them.”

Is Elson just a worry wart? Not exactly. Facebook listed Zuckerberg’s total control of the company as one of the risk factors on its S-1. ”So long as the outstanding shares of our class B common stock represent a majority of the combined voting power of our common stock, Mr. Zuckerberg will be able to effectively control all matters submitted to our stockholders for a vote, as well as the overall management and direction of our company.”

Early investors and close friends like Dustin Moscovitz and Sean Parker gave Zuckerberg  “irrevocable proxy”, meaning where the big boss goes, their votes will follow.

Starting in 2013 Zuckerberg’s salary will drop to just $1. Meanwhile, as Bill Gurley notes, Facebook is unique among big tech companies in paying a full 40 percent on its taxes. “Warren Buffet’s secretary would be happy. Facebook’s tax rate is already north of 40%. Other multi-national companies typically have found a way to reduce this. Facebook is paying full-boat.”

Zuckerberg isn’t alone among Silicon Valley founders in his need to concentrate power. As VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi noted, Zynga’s Mark Pincus put together a complex system that left him with 70 times the voting power of ordinary shareholders.

Flashback to 2004 and the public offering for Google,  the biggest tech IPO until Facebook arrived. There also, the founders chose to grab a controlling stake of the voting shares. At the time CNET noted that this gave Larry Page and Sergey Brin “rare control over the company.”

When it comes to domineering founders of high-growth tech startups, history shows this kind of arrangement isn’t as rare as the press likes to think.

On Forbes’ list of the world’s most powerful people, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg falls somewhere between the pope and Warren Buffet.

Not bad for a hoodie-wearing college dropout.

Zuckerberg (pictured above onstage with pal Andy Sandberg) is listed as the world’s ninth most powerful person on the Forbes list; he is also number 14 on the Forbes 400 and number 52 on Forbes’ Billionaires list (number 22 in the list of U.S. billionaires).

So, why does Forbes place Zuckerberg, the social networking king, in such high regard?

In its write-up of the young CEO, Forbes says, “What the CIA failed to do in 60 years, Zuck has done in seven: knowing what 800 million people — more than 10 percent of the world’s population — think, read and listen to, plus who they know, what they like and where they live, travel, vote, shop, worship.”

And while his Forbes profile says the entrepreneur is single, don’t get your hopes up ladies (and/or gents): Zuckerberg’s engagement was announced over the summer in a slip of the tongue from Bill Gates.

We last caught up with Zuckerberg (from a distance only, unfortunately) at f8, his company’s developer conference.

“Millions of people have spent years curating the stories of their lives,” he said from the San Francisco stage to a crowd of thousands.

“The next year is going to be defined by the apps and the depth of engagement that is possible now that everyone has their networks in place and connections established,” he said.

The conference was also where Zuckerberg unveiled Timeline, the radical new redesign that is coming soon to all Facebook profiles.

Facebook has also recently been in the news for its ground-breaking work in open-sourcing its super-green data centers — a move that was prompted by Zuckerberg’s top-down philosophies on using and creating open-source projects.

That dour assessment comes despite the fact that there little damage at chip production facilities has been reported. But iSuppli is now taking into account the disruptions in transportation and power infrastructure, which will hobble the factories for an unknown length of time. The current nuclear radiation scare isn’t helping.

Components that will be impacted include NAND flash memory, which is used in everything from iPad 2s to smartphones; dynamic random access memory, used in most computers and consumer electronics gear; microcontrollers for toys and industrial gadgets; standard logic for a wide variety of components; liquid crystal display panels used in TVs and laptops, and LCD display parts and materials.

Japan is also the world’s largest supplier of the raw silicon ingots that are used to make semiconductor chips. It supplies about 60 percent of the total. If this supply is disrupted due to logistical and electrical problems, the disruption will spread to many other electronic components, including the plankton of electronic devices such as MOSFETs, bipolar transistors and small signal transistors.

Infrastructure challenges will halt or slow shipments from Japan for about two weeks. The global supply chain has about two weeks of excess component inventory in the pipeline now. So shortages may not appear until the end of March or the start of April. The shortages and price impacts could linger until the third quarter.

Based on fears about this unfolding scenario, prices have already risen. Pricing for high-density NAND flash chips has already climbed as much as 10 percent on the spot market, where buyers and sellers sell small amounts of excess parts. Spot-market DRAM pricing is also up as much as 7 percent since Friday. Big computer makers, on the other hand, are not likely to buy goods in this way. Rather, they usually get their supplies under long-term contracts that are not subject to price spikes. Contract pricing is holding steady for the time being.

Most of the actual electronic component production takes place south of the epicenter. Damage was negligible, but companies are facing problems shipping components, receiving raw materials and getting workers to their facilities. Sony, for instance, shut a number of factories so workers could help with recovery efforts; it also had to deal with damage.

Toshiba, the second-largest worldwide producer of NAND flash, said that output from its Japan plant could drop 20 percent. Hitachi, which supplies displays for the Nintendo DS handheld game system and for LG cell phones, said it had to halt production on Monday as it assessed the impact of the quake.

Electric power availability could also curtail production at factories such as Panasonic’s LCD factories in Japan.