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President Kabila, with UNSG Ban Ki Moon looking on. Photo: AP

Leaders from 11 countries met yesterday (Sunday 23rd Feb) in Addis Ababa and signed a Peace, Security and Cooperation Framework agreement intended to bring peace to the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo. After nearly a year of renewed fighting in eastern DRC between rebel groups and the Congolese Army, the number of internally displaced people increased by one million to 2.7 million. This comes after months of negotiations and was welcomed by the UK Government in a statement  by the Foreign Office Minister, Mark Simmonds.Meanwhile, last week another peace agreement was signed, at a much more local level, reminding us that conflict in the DRC is not just about the east of the country. Last Monday, following a two year peace process, members of four communities met in Equateur province to sign non-agression accords.

The inyelle rebellion

Peace Rally in Gemena, DRC

In 2009, long-standing socio-economic and political tensions between two tribal groups, exacerbated by local tensions over access to fishing ponds, exploded into a conflict that caused 200,000 people to flee their homes. The initial burst of conflict rapidly drew in local politicians and businessmen and the dispute was rapidly transformed into an armed rebellion that became a platform for others to vent political grievances, including troops loyal to Mobutu living in neighbouring Republic of Congo. The rebellion and the impact on thousands of families demonstrates how fragile peace in the DRC really is and how important it is for us to understand the local political economy and conflict drivers. More than that, it illustrates the potential for instability way beyond the headlines of eastern DRC. A local peace accord

25 car convey into town

Last week,  I accompanied the UN Secretary General’s Deputy Special Representative, the national Minister of Interior and the diplomatic corps to Gemena in northern Equateur to witness the signing of the peace accords between these communities. After two years of reconciliation work and repatriation efforts, the ceremony brought together the four communities. Despite my heart dropping as I was bundled into one of a 25 car convoy from the aiport to the ceremony (maybe I should just get over my dislike of the idea of these jamborees), it was a fascinating day and in fact an interesting example of senior political engagement in a province that is often ignored by national and international press.

Male community leaders smoke together

The ceremony itself  – arranged by the UN peacekeeping force, MONUSCO and the national government, was an interesting insight into local conflict resolution. It was also surreal at times, particularly the smoking ceremony, where the men from each of the four communities – having handed over their weapons to the interior minister – chain-smoked together as a sign of their new-found solidarity and brotherhood. More disturbingly, this was followed by a ceremony designed to demonstrate the invincibility of the tribes represented, that included young men from the four communities jostling in line to be whipped.This local peace process was a practical illustration of the importance of action on local conflict in the DRC, the subject of Séverine Autesserre‘s book “The Trouble with the Congo”.

It struck me, watching the violent display of strength and personal resilience in Equateur last week, how different this ceremony would have been from the pomp and ceremony of the events in Ethiopia, but also how important it is that we focus on the local causes of conflict and ensure that our diplomatic and development interventions go beyond the east.

If the latest Java security scares have persuaded you to ditch the technology forever, then removing it from your PC is normally straightforward. Java’s regular uninstaller should do the job in just a few seconds.

If this doesn’t work, though — or you just want to remove and reinstall Java, because of problems with your system — then it might be worth trying JavaRA, a compact tool that can help you to update or cleanly uninstall the Java Runtime Environment.

The program comes in a compact package (a 139KB zip file), with no unwanted extras. And launching it presents a simple and straightforward interface, with just four large buttons (and only two of those are particularly important).

This doesn’t mean that JavaRA is lacking in options, though. So click “Update JavaRA Runtime”, say, and the program provides no less than three ways to proceed. It can open a web page to perform an online version check; use another executable to do this for you; or download and install the latest version, regardless of what you have got installed right now.

If you click “Remove Java Runtime” then that will first prompt you to run the official uninstaller, before itself trying to clear up any files, folders and Registry keys associated with Java.

And there are a few other settings which might be helpful. Click “Additional Tasks”, say, and there’s an option to “Remove outdated JREF Firefox extensions”.

For all this, JavaRA didn’t always quite work as we’d like.

The program needs to run as an administrator, for instance, but doesn’t prompt for that — you’ll need to remember.

You have to click “Update JavaRA Definitions” to make sure it has the latest information about which files and folders to remove; again, this should happen automatically (by default, at least).

And the program didn’t detect the regular Java uninstaller on our test PC.

Still, JavaRA did correctly update our test Java installation, and then correctly and cleanly remove it. So while we’d always try the normal Java uninstaller first, if that’s not working for you then JavaRA provides a quick, easy and effective alternative.

All eyes on the Hungarian central bank this week.  Not so much on tomorrow’s policy meeting (a 25 bps rate cut is almost a foregone conclusion) but on Friday’s nomination of a new governor by Prime Minister Viktor Orban.  Expectations are for Economy Minister Gyorgy Matolcsy to get the job, paving the way for an extended easing cycle. Swaps markets are currently pricing some 100 basis points of rate cuts over the coming six months in Hungary — the question is, could this go further? With tomorrow’s meeting to be the last by incumbent Andras Simor, clues over future policy are unlikely, but analysts canvassed by Reuters reckon interest rates could fall to 4.5 percent by the third quarter, compared to their prediction for a 5 percent trough in last month’s poll.

A rate cut is also possible in Israel later today, taking the interest rate to 1.5 percent. Recent data showed growth at a weaker-than-expected 2.5 percent in the last quarter of 2012 while inflation was 1.5 percent in January, at the bottom of the central bank’s target range.  But most importantly, according to Goldman Sachs, the shekel has been strengthening, having risen 7 percent against the dollar since November and 6.8 percent on a trade-weighted basis in this period. That could prompt a rate cut, though analysts polled by Reuters still think on balance that the BOI will keep rates unchanged while retaining a dovish bias. A possible reason could be that house prices — a sensitive issue in Israel — are still on the rise despite tougher regulations on mortgage lending.

Spotify has made its first connected car appearance. At Mobile World Congress, Ford and Spotify announced that the subscription music service will soon be available over the Sync AppLink platform and integrated with the Sync’s voice command system in Ford vehicles in the U.S., Europe and Australia.

According to Spotify Global Head of Hardware Partnerships Pascal de Mul, the updated iPhone and Android apps will soon be able to pair with the dashboard AppLink system, streaming music through the car’s entertainment systems. Users will be able to play their songs, playlists and radio stations and even be able to create new radio stations on the fly with simple voice commands, he said.

Ford has been loading up on music streaming apps in AppLink, making it a key initial focus of its connected car strategy. Its library of supported services includes Pandora, Amazon Cloud Player, MOG Music, Slacker, and Rhapsody as well as multiple radio station’s digital apps.

Ford CTO Paul Mascarenas said digital music streaming figures right into Sync’s sweet spot. Ford doesn’t have to explain the utility of the services to the driving public since music is already the most popular form of entertainment in the car. The integration of a streaming service into Sync is relatively simple. And since the content is audio only and can be manipulated through Sync commands, the apps all easily meet Ford’s requirements that no connected car app distract a driver from the road, he said.

At the show Ford also revealed it is adding AppLink connectivity to its EcoSport crossover SUV (pictured at top) just in time for its European debut. For also brought several apps Europe that were previously available in U.S. cars: Kaliki, Glympse and Aha Radio.

We got a chance to sit down with Mascarenas for a few minutes at MWC to get a quick update on Ford’s new open development platform, originally unveiled at CES. Though the program is barely more than a month old, 2500 developers have already signed up and downloaded the SDK. Many of those devs have already completed apps and have submitted them to Ford, and a few those apps actually received final approval, Mascarenas said. Mascarenas said Ford plans to announced those apps in the coming weeks.

Spotfiy doesn’t count since it began working with Ford before the development program was launched, Mascarenas said, but the program has opened up Sync to a lot of smaller developers who wouldn’t usually get Ford’s direct attention. Ford is now faced with a distribution and discovery issue. “If you go into an app store, there’s no easy way to find the apps that AppLink-enabled, Mascarenas said.

When the number of Sync apps was small, Ford could promote them individually. But there are now 63 AppLink-optimized apps, and that number will grow significantly as the apps start emerging from the developer program. Ford is working on ways to catalog them. Whether that means creating its own app store or portal Android or working with Apple and Google to spotlight connected car software, Mascarenas didn’t say. Ford could also go with the approach, GM appears to be adopting and create a catalog in the dashboard itself.

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Call me crazy, but I love Mondays. Why? Because there is a new AOKP build coming just in time to kick off my week. The team behind the popular custom distribution Android Open Kang Project did not disappoint this time around either. Jelly Bean MR1 Build 4 made its way onto our modding hands with support for new devices and a much-awaited Android 4.2.2 base.

Jelly Bean MR1 Build 4 is the first release based on Android 4.2.2, the latter of which incorporates a number of new features including improved security as well as bug fixes for Bluetooth and other areas. The latest AOKP build touts minor changes, however, compared to its predecessor. The team behind the project says that the focus was on bugfixes, a “flawless AOSP merge” and the expansion of the lunch table (the lunch table is comprised of build configurations that can be compiled into per-device ROMs).

Support for new devices comes courtesy of new AOKP maintainers and includes the HTC One XL for AT&T (codename “evita”), Motorola Droid 3 XT862 (codename “solana”), Motorola Droid 4 XT894 (codename “maserati”), Motorola Droid Bionic XT875 (codename “targa”), Motorola Droid RAZR in both Verizon and international trim (codename “spyder” and “umts_spyder”, respectively) and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus for Sprint (codename “toroplus”).

It is recommended, as usual, to wipe data before switching from another custom distribution or AOKP distribution, the latter based on previous major Android iterations such as Ice Cream Sandwich or the first Jelly Bean version.

AOKP Jelly Bean MR1 Build 4 is available to download from AndroTransfer and Goo.im.

Troubled operating system webOS isn’t defunct yet. According to CNET, LG just acquired software, licenses and the team working on webOS from HP. LG plans to implement it in its smart TVs — not in its phones. In yet another surprising event, Palm’s OS will experience a third (or fourth) life.

While LG states that it will only use webOS for its smart TVs, it’s a good strategic move to obtain an independent mobile operating system. Samsung has become overwhelmingly dominant when it comes to the Android ecosystem. webOS could be a fallback OS.

The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but webOS now has a very small user base, making it less valuable. LG effectively acquired a dying yet beloved operating system.

Back in January 2009, Palm stole the show at CES by showcasing its brand new and surprisingly good-looking mobile operating system called webOS. But the Palm Pre and later models failed to catch the attention of potential buyers, leaving the company in a bad shape.

HP acquired Palm for $1.2 billion in July 2010. At the time, the company wanted to get into the tablet business, and use Palm’s operating system as a foundation.

But the TouchPad was a failure. HP experienced some leadership troubles on its own. Then-CEO Leo Apotheker announced that it would sell HP’s PC business — including its webOS assets — before reconsidering this move.

Instead of getting rid of webOS, HP just let it slowly die by open-sourcing it. With no official hardware to support it and no company standing behind it, the webOS community had no choice but to fall appart.

WebOS fans, your last hope now resides in LG’s TV land. While the app ecosystem is not as essential on a TV as on a smartphone, webOS remains very resource intensive and unknown to most developers. Most of the webOS team left HP long ago. But letting an operating system die three times is no fun when you can let it die four times.

Update: CNET just pulled its original story. Here’s a cached version while we await LG’s confirmation.

Samsung might have received a $1.05 billion bloody nose in its battle against Apple last year, but the South Korean giant is coming back fighting, by launching the next version of its flagship smartphone on US soil next month. The first such launch in three years.

Confirmed today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and in a tweet, Samsung will be unveiling the Galaxy S IV in New York as part of the Samsung Unpacked event on March 14.

According to the South Korean Edaily news website, JK Shin Samsung Electronics’ mobile division chief said: “We introduced the Galaxy S III in London last year, and this time we changed the venue (to New York)… as we were bombarded with requests from U.S. mobile carriers to unveil the Galaxy S IV in the country”.

The new flagship device is widely expected to offer a higher-resolution display, Exynos 5 8-core processor, and much better front and rear cameras than its predecessor. One thing we do know for certain is it will be rocking the latest version of Jelly Bean 4.2.2.

Samsung Electronics unveiled the original Galaxy S at the CTIA mobile trade show in the US in 2010, but the S II and S III were launched in Spain (2011) and the UK (2012) respectively.

Are you excited by the announcement, and do you plan to buy the new device when it becomes available?

If you’re confident enough with hard drives to have tried editing them before at the sector level, then you’ll know that most disk editing software is, well, less than helpful. Open a drive and you’ll generally be presented with a basic hex view of your data, then left on your own to figure out what it all means. And okay, it’s true, sector editors are only for the most knowledgeable of PC users, but even experts could benefit from a little help, occasionally.

You don’t have to put up with this, though. Some editors do make a real effort to help you interpret what you’re seeing while browsing a drive. And you don’t always have to pay big money for them, either: Active@ Disk Editor can be yours for free.

On launch the program presents a clear dialog which prompts for the device, partition or logical drive you’d like to view. You can also open disk images in DIM, Microsoft’s VHD and VMWare’s VMDK formats. And whatever you select is then displayed in a familiar hex editor-type view: but that’s just the start.

There’s no need to start guessing where key drive structures are, for instance. If you want to look at the boot sector, directory entries, the MFT and various other NTFS/ FAT/ FAT32/ exFAT/ HFS/ ext2/ ext3 structures, all you have to do is choose the appropriate template from the list. Select “Master Boot Record”, say, and the hex editor view will jump to that point on the disk, while the Templates window interprets the data for you (you’ll see bootstrap code, details on individual partitions, the disk serial number, and more).

And this low-level knowledge of how your disk works can be very useful. Choose the “NTFS Boot Sector” template, for example, and Active@ Disk Editor doesn’t only display a table of its core values (“Signature”, “Bytes per sector”, “Sectors per cluster” and so on), but also shows the same values for the boot sector copy. If you spot a problem then you can edit these directly (so you’re working with decimal values rather than in the raw hex view), and that alone could be enough to get a drive working again.

Typically you’ll have a more complex problem to solve, though, perhaps interpreting some figures of your own — and Active@ Disk Editor can help here, too. Just browse to the sector you need, click at the relevant point, and check the Data Inspector view. This looks at the data you’ve selected, then interprets and displays it as a binary value, ANSI character, Unicode character, 16/ 32/ 64-bit value, even a time (DOS, Windows or Unix) — just pick the one you want.

If you’re looking for particular data but aren’t sure where it is (the contents of a lost file, for instance), then a Find option will help you locate them. You can search for a specific ANSI, hex or Unicode sequence, and there are even options to use regular expressions or wildcards.

Of course you can also edit the disk, too. A Navigate option helps you locate the sector you need; you’re able to edit individual bytes, copy and paste information, clear or fill selected blocks; and if things go wrong then Undo and Revert Changes options should help you to avoid disaster.

And perhaps most remarkably, all this comes in a free package with the absolute minimum of dependencies, which means it’s able to run on anything from Windows 98 to 8.

Active@ Disk Editor still needs to be used with extreme care, of course. As with any other low-level drive editing tool, a single mistake could very easily cause a major loss of data.

But if you know what you’re doing, give it a try: we found the program to be an excellent way to inspect and edit the contents of our drives.

Photo Credit: Balandina G/Shutterstock

Nokia has used Mobile World Congress to unveil a series of new devices, taking some of its high-end Windows Phone features to lower price points. The standouts there are the Lumia 720, which offers a camera with good low light capabilities at $329 before subsidies and taxes, and the Lumia 520, which will be Nokia’s new cheapest Windows Phone at just $184.

This will help Nokia hang onto its position in emerging markets — good news for its fortunes in the next year or two. But the really interesting announcement from the Finnish firm today was that it is opening up its Here mapping, location-based services and augmented reality suite to other mobile platforms and to third-party developers who might now be able to use it for innovative applications. This is a much more long-term play.

“By gaining scale, we can increase the quality and quantity of the data we receive,” Nokia CEO Stephen Elop told his audience here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. That’s a valid motivation and, along with the potential new Here services that third-party developers will create, this move will probably make Nokia’s devices more attractive. It also gives Nokia a serious platform that is abstracted from the underlying smartphone OS. But greater exposure for this core Nokia service could also serve as a hedge against a post-smartphone future.

Bear with me here.

The more I think about Google Glass and the wearables revolution that it presages, the likelier it seems to me that “glass” will eventually supersede the smartphone. With the rise of tablets, particularly small tablets, a vast amount of functionality is now being replicated across two devices that people carry around with them regularly. Smart glass could take over some of the functionality that today works better on the handset – particularly talking, navigation and simple messaging – leaving web surfing and gaming for the bigger screen, with less overall overlap.

If that happens, if people have maps in front of their eyeballs more than they do now, if augmented reality becomes more than a nice idea with few essential use cases, then we’re looking at a wave of service innovation that is hard to imagine in the current smartphone paradigm. There will be limited opportunity for hardware differentiation — the quality of these core mapping and AR services will be where most of the action is.

Someone in the audience asked Elop today whether Nokia would bring out smart glass. “We clearly have established a pattern for being leaders in augmented reality,” he replied. “You can well imagine there’s a whole array of new experiences with new platforms coming in the future.”

A vague, non-committal answer, yes. But Elop and his company have clearly been thinking a lot about this trend. If they make Here the go-to location-based services and augmented reality platform, they’re as well placed as any to take advantage and maybe, just maybe, take the lead. The company has reinvented itself many times before, and it can certainly do so again.

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Nokia has just confirmed two new Lumia smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The entry-level Nokia Lumia 520 will be priced at $185 (before taxes) off contract, while the mid-range Lumia 720 will cost $338 (also before taxes).

Nokia now has five Windows Phone 8 devices, covering all price points and making it easier for would-be customers to find a model that suits their requirements and budget.

The Lumia 520 boasts a 4-inch display, at a resolution of 800 by 480, and is powered by a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor. It comes with 512MB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. A Micro SD card slot will allow owners to boost this by a further 64GB, plus users get the standard 7GB of free online SkyDrive storage. The 520 also sports a 5-megapixel rear camera capable of recording 720p HD video. The device comes in the usual range of bright colors – yellow, cyan, red, white and black.

The mid-range Lumia 720 has a 4.3-inch display at 800 by 480 with a ClearBlack filter offering better outdoors viewing. It has a dual-core 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, 512MB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot. The biggest difference between this model and the 520 is in the photography department. The rear 6.7-megapixel camera has a f1.9 Carl Zeiss lens designed to let in more light, while the front-facing camera has a 1.3-megapixel HD wide angle lens which will allow self-shooters to pack more friends into the shot.

Nokia is aiming the Lumia 720 at younger, trendier users and so includes a digital lens feature called Glam Me which can be used to whiten teeth, enlarge eyes, and banish skin imperfections.

The Lumia 520 will be available to purchase in the US, via T-Mobile, in the next few months. The Lumia 720 will initially be available through China Mobile in the Asia Pacific market. No word on when or if it will reach the US or Europe.

Russia’s Yandex has finally rolled out the alternative Android store that it was talking about last year, adding a major piece to its Google-rivaling suite of services for Android-based phones. The company now offers users search, maps, mail and apps, all without a Google logo in sight.

“We are joining the game to contribute to competition that ensures freedom of choice for the end user and other members of the market,” Alexander Zverev, head of the Yandex.Store project, said in a statement.

Yandex is fast becoming a serious contender: its search dominance in Russia has helped it overtake Microsoft’s Bing on a global level (at least, measured by searches, rather than users) and it’s also becoming increasingly popular in the Ukraine and Turkey, where its Yandex.Store will soon open.

The store’s mostly free 50,000-plus apps include familiar fare such as Skype and Foursquare, but also local treats such as the VK and Odnoklassniki social networks. Users can download it for themselves, but in its core markets, the Yandex.Store will be preinstalled on Android devices from manufacturers PocketBook, texet, Wexler, Oppo, Explay and 3Q. App sales revenues are shared between Yandex and those manufacturers, and the web firm also gets to make money off mobile search, much as Google does.

But that’s not the end of the story – Yandex.Store is also available as a white-label product for operators around the world, from the U.S. to Germany. And in those cases, Yandex will share revenues with the carriers. One Russian operator, MegaFon, is already using a rebranded Yandex app store called GetUpps.

In the case of both manufacturer and carrier partners, Yandex is also offering the opportunity to add payment methods of their choice – operators could for example make their own mobile payment service the mechanism for buying these Android apps.

To top it off, Yandex is also offering an updated version of its 3D Yandex.Shell UI, which device manufacturers can license.

This company keeps adding new ways to take the Google out of Android. And why not? It’s there for the taking, and Amazon has already done more-or-less what Yandex is doing on the Kindle Fire. If you take the view that Google is displacing the Android brand with its own, it’s a completely logical reaction on the part of any company that sees Google as a rival, not a partner.

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Sony Mobile Communications chief Kunimasa Suzuki took the stage to deliver something of a state of the mobile union address at MWC early this morning, and took a very brief detour to talk availability for one of Sony’s most promising products. As expected, there was no mention of any new hardware during Suzuki’s address (sorry Xperia SP hopefuls), but he did confirm that the company’s Xperia Tablet Z would begin to rollout globally starting in Q2 of this year.

In the United States, the 16GB model is slated to retail for $499, while a larger 32 GB model will sell for $599.

The Tablet Z, if you’ll recall, is an exceedingly trim Jelly Bean-powered tablet that was first announced for the Japanese market back in late January. Nestled inside the dustproof chassis are a 1.5GHz quad-core Qualcomm processor, 2GB of RAM, and 32 GBs of flash storage, as well as Wi-Fi, LTE, and NFC radios. It’s also one of the only Sony Android tablets in recent memory that doesn’t rely on peculiar (some would say gimmicky) design decisions to stand out from the pack — it’s a decidedly far cry from the downright weird style of the dual-screen Tablet P and the folded magazine aesthetic of the Tablet S.

Sony also provided an exceedingly brief glimpse at some of the services that will appear on its svelte tablet. There’s TV Sideview, a universal remote application that also provides guide information for local programming, and a handsome new gallery app allows users to view geotagged photos on a globe.

Devices like the Tablet Z and its smaller cousin the Xperia Z prompted some (including our own Matt Burns) to wonder if Sony had finally hit its mobile stride. That certainly seems to be the sentiment in Japan, at least for now — Suzuki also noted that the Xperia Z eventually became the top-selling smartphone in Japan (though he didn’t mention if the device managed to hold onto the top spot for any significant period of time). While 2012 wasn’t exactly one of Sony’s best years to date, Sony started to turn the tides at the end and that Suzuki seems sure the company’s mobile division will continue to pick up steam.

“I am confident that 2013 will be a breakthrough year for Sony in mobile,” Suzuki remarked.

Note: An earlier version of this post mistakenly referred to Sony Mobile CEO Kunimasa Suzuki as Kunihiro Suzuki — I’m a dope, mea culpa.

There’s glitter all over the carpet in the hallways at the Gaylord National Resort, a sprawling hotel that sits on the shores of the Potomac River just south of Washington, D.C. It’s definitely not from the thousands of energy geeks that are arriving at the hotel on Sunday night to kick off several days of discussions and meetings about next-generation energy technology for the ARPA-E Summit. It’s the aftermath from thousands of preteen girls, decked out in hotpants, ponytails and ribbons, that just spent two days cheering and dancing their way through a large cheer competition.

The two events seem about as different as when the Consumer Electronics Show used to coincide with Adultcon in Vegas. But the clean energy and energy efficiency industries could use some of the cheerleader’s glitter and cheer spirit right about now.

Following the close of a year which saw the politicization of clean energy technologies, the struggles of dozens of solar manufacturers and electric car companies, and a “cleantech cliff” that saw investments in cleantech startups drop by a third, the 2013 ARPA-E Summit will likely be a pretty sober affair.

As MIT Tech Review wrote recently, government energy R&D spending in 2013 is facing a fiscal cliff, and venture capitalists won’t likely flock back to pumping money into energy companies this year. Both of which mean funding for entrepreneurs, innovators and researchers that have bright ideas for things like next-generation batteries, low cost biofuels, or futuristic solar materials will be difficult to get this year. Or at least it’ll be a lot harder to find money for these technologies than it was a few years ago.

The silver lining of money being tight is that only the most promising technologies will get funding, and there will be less “dumb money,” so to speak. As a seatmate of mine on the flight over this morning put it: the state of clean financing is awful but it inevitably had to correct itself at some point.

Altaeros Energies High Altitude Wind Turbine shown off at ARPA-E 2012

But in the face of these more difficult times, another way to look at the ARPA-E program — which gives small grants to early stage projects and was modeled on the Defense Department’s DARPA program — is perhaps it could be the energy industry’s bit of glitter and cheer. It’s one of the few funding programs from the Department of Energy that has bipartisan support, will likely be able to maintain its current annual budget and is widely celebrated by entrepreneurs, politicians and academics alike.

The ARPA-E Summit itself draws some of the bigger names in technology and politics as speakers — this year New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In previous years Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Arnold Schwarzenegger have given rousing speeches.

ARPA-E 2013 will be one of the last places that we’ll be able to hear from soon-to-be-leaving DOE Secretary Steven Chu. Chu has been one of the biggest influences on the U.S. Department of Energy over the last several decades.

I’m personally looking forward to moderating a discussion between IDEO’s David Blakely and Otherlab’s Saul Griffith about the importance of storytelling and narrative for early stage energy technologies (we’ll be live streaming it here for free on Monday at 4:30 PM EST). Particularly in difficult times, creating compelling narratives for next-gen clean energy technologies that could be decades from commercialization will be crucial.

As the energy geeks wake up on Monday morning ready to talk about kilowatts and sunshots with their peers, the cheerleaders will have mostly gone home. But perhaps, in a strange way, they don’t have so little in common after all.

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