cdjje.com

(Credit:
Solyndra)

Even though the DOE made a point in acting quickly by approving a loan to Solyndra, bureaucratic delays or mismanagement are another risk.

“Investors should expect neither loans for renewable energy, manufacturing facilities and transmission projects nor matching smart grid and facility construction grants to add materially to 2009 expectations. The lion’s share of these funds will be released in 2010 and impact sales and EPS (earning per share) in late 2010 and beyond,” Bachman wrote.

“I’m happy to see our government supporting advanced research initiatives particularly in regards to energy because the country needs it,” said John Walecka, a founding partner at RedPoint Ventures, one of the investors in Solyndra.

The Department of Energy said last Friday that it expects to provide $535 million in loans to California start-up Solyndra, which has a novel design for rooftop solar arrays. The alternative-energy loan, the first of its kind in four years from the DOE, is a positive sign for the finance-challenged green-tech industry, investors and entrepreneurs said this week.

Depending on the industry within green tech, the financial impact from stimulus-related investments won’t necessarily be felt this year, Mark Bachman, an equity analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, said in a research note Monday.

In the short term, loans and changes in the way the federal government subsidizes renewable energy will help finance projects that might have been stalled because a lack of tax equity, Kevin Walsh, managing director of renewable energy at GE Energy Financial Services, said at the Jefferies conference. Utilities are also expected to invest in their own renewable energy projects, rather than rely on third parties.

Solyndra's rooftop solar arrays are made up of hundreds of tube-shaped solar cells. Will more green start-ups get government assistance this year?

Wind and solar benefit

Businesses involved in building large wind farms or solar projects will directly benefit from stimulus spending, according to investors. Companies that sell smart-grid equipment and software to utilities, meanwhile, could benefit indirectly from investments to modernize the grid.

In anticipation of a big inflow of money, green business people have reported spending a lot of time in Washington, D.C. Everyone–from small start-ups to established wind project developers–is hiring lobbyists to influence policy.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu has revamped the DOE’s loan-vetting process to break the logjam of these loans, which many high-profile green-tech start-ups such as Tesla Motors and battery maker A123 Systems have applied for. Meanwhile, the government’s economic stimulus plan calls for $1.6 billion for research through the national laboratories and for investments to bulk up and modernize the transmission grid to transport solar and wind power.

But even with the hefty commitment to clean energy in the stimulus plan, many of the rules surrounding those policies still need to be worked out, Walsh said. He called the current period “the implementation phase” and noted that there is more energy-related legislation in the works, including an expected energy bill this year and climate regulations.

Because of the troubled credit markets, the DOE program has become the “provider of last resort” to companies that need financing to expand and build manufacturing plants, said venture capital investor Paul Holland of Foundation Capital, who was in Washington this week at a meeting of energy professionals at the White House.

“Any time you have a big new initiative, you have to assume a certain amount of waste and a certain amount of mistakes,” Foundation Capital’s Holland said. “However, directionally, these are really the right things for the country.”

Government-funded bubble?

In all, the stimulus plan has $39 billion in direct investments through the DOE and another $20 billion in tax incentives, Obama said earlier this week. The challenge with implementing these policies is setting subsidies at the right level to promote nascent industries without funding flawed companies, said Paul Clegg, an equity analyst from Jefferies.

“The government doesn’t have any intention of running businesses. But from what I can see, they are sophisticated and thoughtful in how to structure deals–that’s very clear,” he said.

“There is a risk that we overstimulate or we keep some of the wrong companies in business,” he said. “We’re likely to see a lot of boom and bust cycles and, as a result, a lot of volatility.”

“If you just take wind, every developer in the country will be knocking on the DOE’s door and asking to get a piece of the pie,” Jim Barry, chief executive of renewable energy project developer NTR said at the Jefferies Global Clean Technology conference in New York earlier this month. “The higher quality projects will rise to the top.”

After weeks of supportive words from the president, U.S.
green-tech professionals saw something else this week: money starting to flow.

Related: GroceryGuide: Local food deals and sales database extraordinaire

(via Alternate Search Engines)

The service hasn’t launched yet, and is rolling out in limited markets to begin with, but you can see a demo of how it works here. Something tells me this would be a huge hit with college students if you could narrow it down to just beer and snacks.

(Credit:
Grocio)

Add items to your list and price check them at various retailers with Grocio.

Assuming you’re the kind of person who sticks to their shopping list, and nothing but what’s on that list this could end up being an incredibly handy service. It plugs into pricing provided by local retailers (including any coupons you might have on hand) to let you know which store has the lowest price, along with how much your shopping list will cost at each retailer.

Based on the growing size of our layoff tracker and the number of pitches we get starting with “in today’s tough economic climate…” it’s a great time to launch a service that helps save people cash. Grocio is no stranger to that idea, and lets you comparison shop for groceries without even having to leave the house.

Which raises the question: how much marketing should Microsoft do for Windows anyway? Rumors have been flying about a $300 million rehabilitation campaign for Vista. Why bother if OEMs like Dell are going their own way anyway? Instead, Microsoft should focus on building the most reliable, secure, multipurpose operating system it can, one that the OEMs will be happy to put on their PCs and that end users will be happy to adopt. Forget the user interface bells and whistles. Scale back on the included apps, which Microsoft now has to pay OEMs to place anyway. Just build a great OS, let the OEMs figure out how to use it, then leave the sales, marketing, and user experience details to them.

Instead of relying on Microsoft to fight back against Apple, Dell’s taking matters into its own hands. The company’s been focusing on better design for some time now–that’s phase one, since Apple consistently wins praise for its hardware design. Phase two: create a differentiated consumer experience for digital media and entertainment, and make it available only on a Dell. The MP3 player’s just a side note.

The Dell DJ Ditty, discontinued in 2006.

(Credit: CNET reviews)

Dell gave up on MP3 players in 2006, after three years of fighting the
iPod juggernaut. Initially, Dell’s players relied on Musicmatch software for library organization, content syncing, and online music purchases, although they synced with the Windows Media Player as well in case of problems with Musicmatch (which CNET reviewer John Frederick Moore encountered back in 2005 with the flash-based Dell DJ Ditty). The reviews were middling at best, and the players never got much above 3 percent market share.

This is about something much bigger and more interesting: the shift of power in the PC market away from Microsoft and toward the hardware manufacturers. The process has been going on since the Department of Justice’s antitrust settlement with Microsoft back in 2001–a lot of onlookers derided that settlement as toothless, but it actually made a difference with regard to Microsoft’s relationships with OEMs (original equipment manufacturers–Microsoft parlance for the big PC makers like Dell and HP). Instead of being allowed to push them to include whatever software Microsoft bundled with Windows, the OEMs were free to choose their own bundling strategies. If Microsoft wanted placement, it would have to pay like everybody else.

According to a report in today’s Wall Street Journal, Dell is considering re-entering the MP3 player market later this year. This time, the company is considering building its own software based on technology it gained in its acquisition of Zing, as well as a modified version of somebody else’s subscription music service, most likely Rhapsody’s.

Let’s leave aside the question of whether the world needs yet another end-to-end hardware-software-services play in the MP3 player space. (Ask Microsoft how that’s going with
Zune.)

Fast forward a few years. Vista launches to mostly bad reviews. Apple launches a series of brilliant advertisements slamming Vista. These advertisements, combined with the popularity of the iPod and a generally smoother experience on the
Mac (even Ballmer admitted it last week) create a big spike in Macintosh sales. That hurts Microsoft a little bit, as Windows still has more than 90 percent of the market for personal computing operating systems. But it hurts the PC makers more: even the biggest ones, Dell and HP, have only about 30 percent share.

commentary

Will it go mainstream? Almost certainly not. But perhaps the Wiz will point the way for Nintendo and other gaming manufacturers to improve the transparency and malleability of their own devices to make innovation more of a community effort. Probably not, but it’s possible.

It’s a capable device (ARM9 533MHz processor with a 3D accelerator, 64MB of RAM, 1GB of built-in NAND flash memory, etc.), with a capable community: unlike many open-source projects, the Wiz has a built-in developer audience that loves to play games and hence may turn its attention to creating games for the Wiz, as well as updating its Linux-based firmware to improve the Wiz.

I don’t think there’s much of a mainstream future for the Wiz, a new open-source gaming unit from GamePark Holdings, but that may be the point:

…[T]he question of whether or not the device can truly challenge the Nintendo DS and the
PlayStation Portable is liable to arise when discussing the advent of any mainstream open-source portable. While the Wiz may never be able to capture the mass market in a significant way, the attractive device could become a hit amongst savvy gamers: the flexibility of the device is extraordinary, and making use of homebrew doesn’t require time-consuming firmware hacking that could irreversibly damage the device.

The Windows version of Safari 3.1.1 can be downloaded from CNET’s Download.com here and the Mac version here.

Apple has more information about Safari 3.1.1 here.

Apple on Wednesday released an update to the
Safari browser that plugs security holes on Macintosh and Windows machines.

The other WebKit vulnerability could lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. Apple credited Robert Swiecki of the Google Security Team and David Bloom for reporting this issue.

The remaining two vulnerabilities, which affect only Windows XP or Vista, could lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution, or control the contents of the address bar and spoof the contents of a legitimate site.

One of the two WebKit vulnerabilities could put computer users at risk of a cross-site scripting attack that can inject malicious code onto a victim’s computer. The vulnerability was discovered during the PWN to OWN contest at CanSecWest last month by Dan Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff, and Mark Daniel of Independent Security Evaluators.

Safari 3.1.1 fixes two Safari vulnerabilities that affect Windows XP or Vista and two WebKit vulnerabilities that affect
Mac OS and Mac OS X Server versions 10.4.11 and 10.5.2, as well as Windows XP or Vista.

See: Linux developers petition for open Linux kernel drivers and ZDNet report here.

“Nvidia does a reasonable job of Q-and-A-ing (quality assurance) of a certain number of configurations but the problem is that their configurations (are) a lot less than what’s actually out there on the market,” Bottomley said.

The Linux Foundation is trying to push Nvidia to make its graphics drivers more accessible. The Foundation’s beef: closed drivers make Linux look unstable to end users.

“We…consider any closed-source Linux kernel module or driver to be harmful and undesirable,” the official statement begins. “Vendors that provide closed-source kernel modules force their customers to give up key Linux advantages or choose new vendors.”

Though a statement issued Monday does not cite Nvidia by name, Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board Chair James Bottomley cited Nvidia in a phone interview. “My intent is to point out the problems Nvidia has been causing themselves with their binary-only (drivers),” he said. “They are certainly one of the few companies sticking to a binary-only strategy.” Binary-only means the drivers are essentially closed.

“We try to make things open source whenever it makes sense,” Nvidia said. The company cited examples here and here.

But Bottomley gets much more specific than this. “Their (Nvidia’s) binary module is one of the top causes of kernel crashes, which makes Linux look bad,” he said.

But the graphics chip maker defends its binary-only policy. “Nvidia’s fully featured Linux graphics driver is provided as binary-only because it contains intellectual property Nvidia wishes to protect, both in hardware and in software,” according to Nvidia.

“It’s basically a reflection of the fact that graphics is one of the most complex and most difficult areas of technology that sits in a computer nowadays,” he added.

“To assume that customers won’t have access to open-source updates from Linux kernel.org if they use closed source modules is not correct,” Nvidia said. “Nvidia’s Linux graphics driver kernel module is structured so that all the code that is Linux-specific is provided in source code as a ‘kernel interface layer.’ When customers upgrade their kernel to get the latest from kernel.org, they have everything they need to rebuild (and even patch, if necessary) the Nvidia’s driver’s kernel interface layer.”

In the past, Intel had been the target of open-source advocates, but the chipmaker is now a leading open-source code provider. And graphics-chip supplier ATI Technologies, acquired in 2006 by Advanced Micro Devices, is open source too, Bottomley said. He did, however, cite some outstanding problems with an ATI “FireGL” driver.

Nvidia says it provides a high-quality Linux driver. “Nvidia supports Linux, as well as the Linux community and has long been praised for the quality of the Nvidia Linux driver,” Nvidia said in a response to an e-mail query.

Cables come in a lot of complex variants and that makes them a relatively expensive item to stock for local retail. I’d maybe buy this for oddball stuff (which, in fact, tends to be hard to find in local stores at all), but I don’t see anything about a common HDMI cable that makes it an unusually expensive item to stock.
Retail packaging and display cost more. Again, there might be some small effect, but it couldn’t begin to account for the magnitude of the observed markups.
Cable purchases are relatively insensitive to price. Here, I think we’re getting to the heart of the matter. The scenario I described for myself is pretty typical. You buy a new THINGAZON 2000 and you need some cable to hook it up so you run into a Best Buy, grab what you need, and head home to play. You may grumble a bit at the price, but you probably buy the item anyway because you need it (or at least really want it) NOW. Conversely, if it were half the price? You probably wouldn’t buy two. Nor would you probably buy a random cable on impulse just because some store was selling it for a good price. (In other words, consumer cable purchases are fairly price-inelastic.)
People tend not to comparison shop. It’s something you need now. Prices are in tens of dollars not hundreds of dollars and are often considered in the context of the more expensive electronics the cable is being used with. Plus, in many cases, shoppers have to ask the store staff for help. All these contribute to an environment where the buyer tends to go into the most convenient store and are just happy to find the missing piece that they needed. Reduced price range of cables. I suspect that this is a secondary effect, but keeping the generic cables in the $30 range, rather than the $10 range, doubtless creates much more opportunity to sell even higher-margin $50+ premium cables. Someone who might be willing to spend 2x for the perceived "good stuff" (leaving aside whether it is or not) wouldn’t necessarily make the same decision were the premium 5x or more.

This experience got me to playing economist. Why, in a free market, are cables so flipping expensive? After all, these same stores carry all manner of items that are priced very competitively relative to online.

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And I’m not talking Monster Cable fancy-pants stuff either. The cheapest generic 6-foot HDMI cables that I could in Best Buy and Target in-store inventory were going for $29.99–a 300 percent premium over the $9.95 I spent at Amazon.com (which wasn’t even that great an online price, but the shipping was free).

I finally have a new receiver to replace my accursed broken Sony (but that’s another story). In any case, I also needed an additional HDMI cable to connect my
Xbox and TiVo through the receiver. I ordered one online, but the receiver got to my house before the cable did.

Here are some theories and related thoughts. Economists, professional and otherwise, feel free to contribute your take in the comments.

Have I missed anything?

You know how it is when you get a new toy. You really want to get everything hooked up and play with it. So I looked around to see what it would cost me to just pick up a cable locally. What I got instead was a reminder that, almost universally, cables sold at retail carry an incredible markup relative to their cost or even to what you can find online in quantity one.

Interestingly enough, of the three services offered in Google Docs, only the word processor and presentation tool were truly down. If you had a link to a spreadsheet you could apparently view and edit it just fine.

“For a short period this morning, our users had difficulty accessing Google Docs. Some Google Apps users were also affected … We have now resolved the problem. We know how important Google Docs is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously.”

As a reminder, outages for Google Results should not result in data loss. Google’s GFS (Google File System) backup method is one of the most rigorous systems used by any data host. As I mentioned in a post from last year, a lost copy of your data on one server is backed up in a dozen other places, so you won’t even notice.

The service, Google’s online productivity suite, went from having some features not working, like the log-out button and the document creation drop-down menu, to coming up with a 404 page.

As for any reimbursement or discounts to paying enterprise class Google Apps users (who were also affected), we’re waiting to hear back if any such thing will be offered. Freidenfelds says Google is serious about keeping all of its services, both free and paid running at all times and that the problem in question should not happen again. If anything, this blip should give any business using these Web-only tools some idea of having a backup solution on hand in case the service goes down again.

Google’s Documents and Spreadsheets service went down for approximately 45 minutes earlier this morning.

The Official Google Docs blog has not been updated with any additional notes, or an explanation of what exactly went wrong, although Google Docs’ help section has some small notes first acknowledging the problem, along with a note to say it was fixed.

The downtime calls into question the importance that online Web applications play in business use, as well as how Google’s free document services have come to replace software solutions such as
Microsoft Office for some users or teams that use Google’s real-time collaboration features.

Update: Google has responded to The Register’s query about this morning’s outage with this statement:

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Update 2: Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds tells us the problem stemmed from the servers that control the view of the document workspace as well as the home document listing. The data where your documents were stored suffered no down time.

Before you rush out and try to duplicate the image, you should know that you’ve got to have perfect conditions and fairly expensive gear. Still, it’s incredible that a 2-megapixel, fixed-focus camera can see more than 500 million miles.

(Credit:
Mike Weasner and Mac Observer)

It was aimed through a telescope to create a 267x magnification. He then cleaned it up in aperture on a
Mac and posted it to Mac Observer.

The fact that an amateur astronomer named Mike Weasner was able to take a photograph of Jupiter and its moons is hardly something worth a mention on Crave, but the fact that he did it with his
iPhone camera is rather remarkable.

As a result, those companies that need late-stage financing could have trouble going from product development to commercialization. Rather than try to tap public markets or investment banks for capital, clean-tech companies may look to other sources like hedge funds or large corporations.

“If you take the long view, the sector is a good place to be,” he said. “But the big caveat is that we’re just in the third or fourth inning of this.”

Solar and geothermal projects often use the same funding mechanism of project financing and a government tax credit. That subsidy program is set to expire at the end of this year, creating more uncertainty.

But with fewer investment banks offering financing amid strong demand, wind project developers may get less favorable terms, ultimately making the energy from those projects more expensive.

VCs still flush

Whereas companies that rely on public markets for financing have less attractive options, the private equity side of the business hasn’t yet shown the same signs of distress.

The same is true for the clean-energy sector, overall, even for those companies now vulnerable to the public-market turmoil, Zindler said.

The crisis rocking the U.S. financial sector is rippling into the clean-energy business, bruising more mature industries like wind while leaving young start-ups relatively untouched so far.

The unraveling of debt-heavy investment banking firms–including the demise this week of Wall Street icons Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch–means that financing for large-scale renewable energy projects will get harder and more expensive, according to analysts.

Energy technology companies and projects typically require a lot more capital to develop and commercialize than, say, a software venture. Several start-up biofuels or solar companies have raised tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to scale their technology to commercial level.

“People need to be concerned. This needs to be worked through and resolved because it’s hard to have a springboard to do other things when everything intersects with financial services,” Immelt said.

But so far, the main funders of early-stage companies have not hit the brakes.

Because it is the most mature, wind energy will likely get hit hardest by a squeeze on credit. Wind farms rely on project finance from banks or other institutions to fund construction and development.

“If you look at the other investment banks, their survival is probably more critical to clean energy,” Zindler said.

Lehman and Merrill Lynch were involving in financing clean-energy deals, but to a far lesser extent than Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and General Electric’s renewable-energy financing arm.

In fact, over 90 percent of venture capitalists and investors expect investment in green technology to increase in 2009, according to the results of a KPMG survey of 301 VCs scheduled to be published next week.

At an event to announce a Google-General Electric energy policy and technology partnership on Wednesday, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt said that the financial crisis may affect the company’s energy interests, which includes a multi-billion dollar wind turbine business.

“This isn’t good news for anybody–it’s going to have an impact economy-wide,” said Ethan Zindler, head of north American research at New Energy Finance.

In general, early-stage investors say long-term trends point to demand for clean technologies and supportive government policies.

About two thirds of respondents said that the
green tech investment cycle is sustainable, and not a bubble as many fear.

New Energy Finance’s clean-energy stock index is down about one third so far this year–lower than the Dow–and the sector has been volatile, Zindler noted.