Green Energy Reporter will be back after the Christmas break.

About that Google shopping spree, which has seen the company buy six companies since August: It’s actually only four companies so far.

That’s because Google’s plans to buy video compression outfit On2 have been held up by disgruntled shareholders. And the company’s plans to spend $750 million on AdMob, the mobile ad start-up, can’t go through until federal regulators sign off.

That may take a little longer than Google (GOOG) would like. The company announced today that the Federal Trade Commission has asked for more information–formally, a “second request”–as part of its review. From a post on Google’s Public Policy Blog:

…we know that closer scrutiny has been one consequence of Google’s success, and we’ve been talking to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over the past few weeks. This week we received what’s called a “second request,” which means that the FTC is asking for more information so that they can continue to review the deal.

While this means we won’t be closing right away, we’re confident that the FTC will conclude that the rapidly growing mobile advertising space will remain highly competitive after this deal closes. And we’ll be working closely and cooperatively with them as they continue their review.

Google was well aware that it was going to face regulatory scrutiny on this deal; in fact, CEO Eric Schmidt says the company assumes regulators will now look at every big deal it makes, simply because it’s Google.

And also because Google’s competitors are doing their best to make sure there is regulatory scrutiny. Microsoft (MSFT), which knows a thing or two about regulatory headaches, helped slow down Google’s $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick for a very long time. And it’s quite clear that Redmond intends to holler loudly in Washington about other deals. Googlers tell me they also believe AT&T (T) agitates against them.

I’ve tried getting Googlers to guess at how long they think the AdMob deal will take to clear, but they’ve been pretty reluctant to do so. “I thought DoubleClick would take a few months, and it took more than a year,” one would-be bettor told me recently. “I’m not making that mistake again.”

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

Ever been cut off by a bad driver and wished you could have given them a piece of your mind? Well, now you can. Virginia startup CarPong recently launched and is letting users write short messages to other drivers.

The site is simple and like most other social networking sites you must be registered to use it. Users can either send a message to a particular license plate or receive notifications on messages for up to three plates. All of this is done on a user profile page on the website, similar to a Facebook profile.

Here’s how the service works: To send a message, users are required to enter a license plate number and the state in which the vehicle is registered. They are then able to leave a message up to 250 characters. If the owner of that vehicle is registered on the site, they will receive the email instantly. However, if they aren’t, the message will go live on the site, become searchable and eventually be delivered if that driver ever joins. Users are also able to follow their own plates as well as others and be notified when those plates receive messages. For example, a father might be “following” his college daughters license plate to make sure she isn’t driving like a maniac while at school.

Founder Tony Mastrorio notes in a recent blog post that the service isn’t just for denouncing bad driver habits, but has other social possibilities too. For example, you can now drive by a good looking women and send her a message or let someone know their brake light it out. There are several more useful services for the site as well. My favorite is that drivers could learn when their vehicles have been towed, improving an archaic archaic process that usually leaves a driver not knowing when their car was moved or where it now resides. For businesses, it could allow business owners to track their fleet of vehicles — bringing a new meaning to those stickers on mack trucks that say “How’s My Driving – Dial …..”

Currently, the company is generating revenue through online advertising. However, as users are only allowed to follow three plates, a future revenue model will involve charging a small fee for users wishing to follow more than three plates.

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

We’ve got Facebook accounts, Twitter accounts, Delicious accounts, Flickr accounts and more, all vying for our constant attention and maintenance. All that means learning new systems for different applications with different purposes, remembering to use each service, and generally spending quite a bit of time keeping everything going.

That’s where Yoolink, a great new service, comes in. It’s a mix of tools like AddThis and ShareThis, bookmarking tools like Diigo and Delicious, and social news sites like Digg and Reddit. Its first and simplest use is as a universal sharing tool – as you’re browsing the Web, you click one button to share your current page with any or all of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, LinkedIn and more. There’s a plugin for Firefox or Internet Explorer, and a bookmarklet that works across browsers, so no matter what you use, Yoolink will work for you.

There’s also a section of the site, for every Yoolink user, that’s your own personal bookmarks reservoir. Every time you share or bookmark something, it gets saved into your Yoolink account, meaning Yoolink can replace Delicious or Diigo for you, although it also supports saving pages directly to Delicious.

Yoolink also pulls in all of the links and sites being shared, and creates a page full of the most popular things people are sharing, which has exciting potential. If one tool can be used to share things to all of the sites we already use, Yoolink (or whoever pulls this off) would be able to track, with incredible accuracy and size, what the Web as a whole is really talking about. As it is now, sites like Yoolink only track what’s shared using their tools, so the data is segmented across various apps; if one could dominate, the implications would be great.

What I really love about Yoolink is how devoted it is to working with the ecosystem of apps you already use. You can sign up via Twitter or Facebook, thus saving the creation of yet another account. There’s a WordPress plugin that lets you post your bookmarks on your blog and share them with your readers. Yoolink also supports Bit.ly links and Gravatar images, all of which means joining Yoolink requires almost no extra work for users. Yoolink’s product isn’t necessarily unique, but the ease with which it lets you work and the simplicity of getting started certainly is.

Though this social bookmarking from Yoolink is new, Yoolink has been around for a while, particularly in Europe. Its Yoolink Pro product lets employees of a company share and discuss various items and topics internally, creating a private social network.

With these new features, Yoolink is trying to extend its reach to the average user and make the Web a little more social, and a little more inter-connected.

Yoolink is a Paris-based company with six employees. It raised $800k in funding in 2008.

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

From left: Seoul Nat’l Univ. / Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci / AP

Glow-in-the-dark puppies, a naked “Mona Lisa” and gay-penguin parenting were among the weirder science stories of 2009. But wait … there’s much, much more.

So much weird science … so little time. It’s time to look back on the past year’s research and pick the winners of the 2010 Weird Science Awards.

In previous years, the top Weirdies have included glow-in-the-dark cloned cats and the rediscovery of an ancient marijuana stash. But if you think those stories are weird, this year’s candidates kick it up a notch. Heck, we’ve got glow-in-the-dark puppies and mushrooms as well as poop armor and gay penguin parents. (The last subject turns out to be surprisingly controversial.)

The problem is, there are so many deserving candidates that it’s hard to narrow them down to a manageable list of finalists. We’ve put 30 on the ballot, plus a few extra honorable mentions, and it’s up to you to decide which 10 topics win 2010’s Weirdies.

Just a few weeks ago Motorola’s Droid, available exclusively on Verizon Wireless, was raising the public’s awareness of Google’s Android mobile operating system. Now Google is preparing to release its own branded handset, the Nexus One.

By all accounts, the new phone, manufactured by HTC but prominently branded as a Google phone, is a “Droid killer.” Describing his brief experience playing with the new phone, Jason Chen of Gizmodo said the Nexus One will “certify (Google) as the premium Android phone brand out there right now. Even though it doesn’t have a hardware keyboard, it basically beats the hell out of the Droid in every single task that we threw at it.”

Greg Sterling, principal analyst with Sterling Market Research, agreed. “For sure, it’s a Droid killer,” he said. “Droid is just a really clunky design in my view.”

A ‘Really Fast Phone’

Two things stand out on the Nexus One, Sterling said: Screen quality and speed. “It has a really big screen, even though the handset itself is not much bigger than a conventional handset,” Sterling said. “And it’s noticeably high-resolution.”

Even more striking, “It’s really, really fast,” Sterling said. In Chen’s testing, the speed difference was most noticeable in loading web pages.

“In loading a web page over Wi-Fi, the Nexus One loaded first, the iPhone 3GS came in a few seconds later, and the Droid came in a little while after that. This was constant throughout many web-page loads, so it’s indicative of something going on inside with the hardware,” Chen wrote.

While Google’s search business and free online and desktop apps have been consumer-oriented, conventional wisdom has been that Android was a platform play, not a consumer one. So the news that Google will sell its own phone has confused some observers.

‘What the Heck Are They Doing?’

“I’m not sure what to make…

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

Today I had the tree main Windows Mobile Verizon phone. I wondered, maybe I should make a video to put them head to head and maybe help you guys make your choose this holiday a lot easier.

I would Go with the Omnia2 because it is nice, fast and has software to the infinity number(just kidding). The only fault I hate about the device is the standby freeze and the never ending error massages, but I bet that all of the problems can be fixed with an update/flash.

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

THQ’s WWE SmackDown vs. Raw won’t be going anywhere soon. The publisher has secured the license for an additional eight years, beginning next year.

“This agreement ensures that WWE games will continue to be an important cornerstone of THQ’s annual release schedule for the long term,” said THQ CEO Brian Farrell.

“We look forward to working directly with WWE to expand their brand in the video game space through continued game play innovation and increased online delivery of WWE content.”

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

Every year for the past few years some health expert has come out against Santa, saying that the big man is just too big to be a good role model for our children. One year there was even a skinny Santa who refused to wear padding because he didn’t want the kids on his lap to think that being as heavy as Santa is typically portrayed was a good thing.

This year the criticism of the jolly elf comes from Nathan Grills of Monash University in Australia, who says that Santa should start walking instead of relying on his sleigh to get around.

The trouble with Santa

Grills noted in his report in the British Medical Journal that there’s “very high Santa awareness” among young children, but he is a poor role model because of his size, frequent reports of cookie binges and refusal to wear a helmet when he slides down chimneys.

He said there’s a correlation between countries that have Santa as part of their tradition and overweight children, and Santa “is a late adopter of evidence-based behavior change and continues to sport a rotund, sedentary image.”

What’s more, Santa presents a public health nightmare as a potential vector for the spread of colds and flu among children who sit on his lap. (While the report is light-hearted, this is probably a real concern.)

The paper suggests Santa should ditch the cookies and start sharing carrots with the reindeer.

Skinny Santa no help

We’ve noted before that we don’t think a slimming Santa would help kids get the message about healthier eating, mostly because kids understand that he’s not real and therefore shouldn’t be a role model for any sort of behavior.

As we noted a couple of months ago in reference to a British anti-obesity campaign featuring “The Simpsons,” most kids know the difference between stories and reality and know not to take advice from folks who aren’t real. Which is a good thing, or we’d have a lot more kids trying to be superheroes out there.

(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

From the RSS feed of CalorieLab News (REF3076322B7)

Santa’s too fat, the annual edition

Filed under: Motorsports

Some motorsports fans take issue with the fact that the vast majority of NASCAR tracks are little more than a series of left turns. This is for you, roundy-round jokers. The official sport of the South is mixing in some right turns and working the brakes a bit more in 2010 with a pair of road courses. The first race, a June 20 Sprint Cup affair at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, California, was already on the books, and now the truck racing series has added a second road course on June 19. The Nationwide Truck Series race will be held at Road America near Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, where a scenic 4.04 mile, 14 turn course awaits tailgate-loving NASCAR drivers.

We joke about NASCAR and right turns, but Wisconsin native Paul Menard thinks the biggest challenge will come courtesy of the brake pedal. “Braking will be the hardest aspect. Strategy will play a big part in this race.” NASCAR hasn’t run a national cup race at Road America since way back in1956, back when race cars used carburetors weren’t as fast. Racing Road America will likely be a challenge for drivers who participate in both NASCAR Series, as a trip from Wisconsin to California inside of 24 hours sandwiched between a pair of tough races doesn’t sound at all easy to us.

Whether you love NASCAR or you can’t stand it, we’re thinking middle America’s racing sport of choice deserves hats off for mixing it up a bit this year.

[Source: NASCAR | Image: Road America]

NASCAR turns right, headed to Road America in 2010 originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Helix Wind expects to submit an application to the Department of Energy for two separate loan guarantees totaling $10 million early next year.

San Diego-based Helix plans to use the guarantees to finance it acquisition of U.S. turbine maker  Abundant Renewable Energy and Venco Power, which is based in Germany and manufacturers vertical axis small wind turbines.

Helix CEO Ian Gardner tells us that they are assembling the application package for submittal early next year. Deadlines to submit a DOE loan-guarantee application are February 18, 2010; April 22, and June 24.

Human-powered mobile answers service ChaCha has raised $7 million funding, according to an SEC filing. The company has confirmed the funding but declines to name investors. This brings ChaCha’s total funding to nearly $70 million.

ChaCha has been the subject of a little bit of ridicule at TechCrunch since its launch, thanks to its entertaining snafus and some issues with its business model. Despite its various problems over the years, the company has been able to raise a boatload of money adding $4 million to the pot earlier this year.

While ChaCha’s service currently attracts about 9 million unique users per month through mobile devices and its website, the model has had some problems ChaCha has cut guides’ payments quite a few times since its inception and was forced to lay off a significant part of its staff earlier this year. The startup recently branched out from the answers engine by launching a digital coupon service.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

YouTube: The Known Universe by AMNH
CICLOPS: Holiday greetings from Saturn! 
Washington Post: SETI quest gains momentum
POGO: Researchers accidentally blow up building
Pwned Experiments: All your data are belong to us
Interstellar mission studied (via Space Coalition Blog)
Science @ NASA: Voyager makes interstellar discovery
Cracked: Six adorable cat behaviors with evil explanations
ONN: Net archaeologists find ruins of ‘Friendster’ civilization …(read more)

This should come as a relief to all you anxiously awaiting your Barnes and Noble Nook pre-orders. We’ve received a statement from Barnes and Noble affirming that all pre-orders which had an original pre-holiday ship date will be fulfilled, and that the rest of the orders will be filled starting in Friday. Here’s the full, reassuring statement:

“We’re happy to report that all customers who pre-ordered nooks and were given a pre-holiday estimated shipping date will be sent their nooks in time to receive them by Christmas. As you know, there’s been an overwhelmingly positive response and unprecedented demand since Barnes & Noble announced its new eBook reader on October 20th. Customer demand continues to be strong and new orders will be fulfilled beginning February 1, 2010. “

Happy, happy holidays!

Nook shipping update assures pre-orders arriving on time originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Article

It’s now been over a year since the infamous announcement, leaked to the Wall Street Journal, that the RIAA was going to effectively drop its strategy of suing individuals in favor of agreements, worked out between the RIAA and ISPs with NY AG Andrew Cuomo adding pressure, to kick people off the internet on a “three strikes” regime. The whole thing sounded pretty ridiculous at the time. Cuomo had absolutely no legal standing to pressure ISPs into such a deal, since the ISPs had every legal right to say no. And, since the “leak” many ISPs have insisted, quite vocally, that they have never made any such agreement with the RIAA and that they would never kick their customers offline in such a manner.

And so Greg Sandoval, over at News.com, smartly realizes that these “preliminary agreements” we were told about last year are still nowhere to be found and goes exploring to find out why. Reading between the lines, it appears the answer is that the RIAA flat out lied (no surprise, but…) and the Wall Street Journal bought it (again, no surprise, but…). Basically, with various record labels hemorrhaging money, they started to cut back on their allowance to the RIAA, such that the legal strategy of suing tons of people was getting too expensive. But they didn’t want to make it look like they were just giving up.

So they concocted a myth: this idea that ISPs would cut people off. It was, in fact, what the RIAA and other international entertainment industry lobbying groups had been pushing for with little success (since then they have had a few wins on that front, but also many losses). But they couldn’t wait for their usual process of pushing through legislation (*cough* ACTA *cough*) to complete before they had to cut back on individual lawsuits. So they brought in Andrew Cuomo, because he had successfully threatened ISPs to get them to cut off Usenet, despite no legal basis for doing so. But, that worked because Cuomo threatened (again, despite no legal basis) to shame them for offering access to child porn. When it came to unauthorized access to music, the moral outrage aspect isn’t nearly as strong (not that the RIAA and their lobbyist friends haven’t tried six dozen ways to try to link file sharing to child porn — but most people realize how ridiculous that is).

Given that the ISPs seemed to have little interest (i.e., no interest) in moving forward with this plan, they leaked it to the WSJ, figuring that if ISPs thought others were doing it, then they’d start to sign up, and the whole thing would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Except they failed to account for the simple fact that people protested against any ISP dim enough to think that it’s smart to kick off customers based on accusations (not convictions), and ISPs quickly stepped up to deny any such deal, shedding light on the RIAA’s big lie.

So, here we are today, with no such agreements in place, and the RIAA back to trying to sneak through “three strikes” legislation through international treaties that they write (which the public has no access to). But, shouldn’t someone call them on the fact that they blatantly lied last year? And also, shouldn’t someone ask where the WSJ’s correction is on that story?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

When Apple unveiled the iPhone 3GS in mid-2008, it included serious improvements to the built-in camera hardware, bumping the resolution from 2 to 3.2 megapixels. That trend may well continue with the next version of the iPhone: the latest intelligence about CMOS image sensor supplier OmniVision suggests that the company will be supplying Apple with 5 megapixel sensors for the next-generation iPhone, expected to launch in summer.

The original iPhone and the iPhone 3G made use of compact and relatively low-cost imaging hardware consisting of a rather average-performing 2 megapixel CMOS sensor mated to a fixed-focus, fixed-aperture lens. This combination proved serviceable for most average picture taking—even downright good given ample lighting—but definitely suffered in low light, close focus, and tricky lighting scenarios.

For the iPhone 3GS, Apple switched suppliers to OmniVision, utilizing the company’s 1/4″ 3.2 megapixel CIS paired with a true autofocus lens. This combination offered increased resolution, a truly useful 30 fps video option, and vastly sharper close-up shots. Combined with a “touch to focus” software feature that linked focusing and metering to an area of the image that the user could choose by simply touching the screen, the new hardware proved far superior to previous iPhones.

Taiwan-based DigiTimes, which broke the news of the iPhone 3GS’s impending camera upgrade last year, reports that OmniVision is expected to double the number of image sensors—from about 20 million to about 40 million—that it will supply to Apple in 2010. Unnamed sources indicated that an unknown fraction of that 40 million will be the new, 5 megapixel sensors, which Apple will use in next summer’s expected iPhone hardware revision.

As many readers may know, packing more megapixels onto the same sized sensor generally results in smaller, less-sensitive pixels. However, OmniVision’s 1/4″ 5 megapixel sensor uses a technique called backside illumination to maintain—and in some cases increase—sensitivity of these smaller pixels. It works by flipping the traditional architecture of CMOS image sensors upside down, letting light fall on the “back side” of the sensor. This means that more light hits the actual sensing diode in each pixel location.

The result of using backside illumination is that Apple can use OmniVision’s 1/4″ 5 megapixel sensors as a drop-in replacement for the current 3.2 megapixel one in the iPhone 3GS. It significantly increases the resolution without compromising on low-light performance or requiring a larger lens to accommodate for a larger sensor. These sensors also offer full 1080p HD video resolution at 30 fps—a significant improvement over the iPhone 3GS’s paltry VGA video resolution.

DigiTimes was completely accurate when it came to revealing that OmniVision’s 3.2 megapixel sensor would be used in the iPhone 3GS, but not so accurate when it reported that cameras with such sensors would end up in revisions to the iPod touch, iPod nano (which ultimately ended up with a low-resolution video camera), and, of all things, the iPod classic. If this latest report is accurate, though, the next iPhone could pack some serious imaging horsepower. It should also keep the iPhone competitive with recently released smartphones such as the Motorola Droid, which have higher resolution camera sensors.

What is a “Brief” post?”

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Article