U.S. companies will almost certainly produce biofuels in enough volume to help curb global warming from automobiles and other vehicles.
But it will take time and patience from a world eager to move away from the oil economy and its reliance on supplies of crude from the unstable Middle East.
“We will have the technology,” said biofuel booster and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. “We just have to be patient.”
Khosla, during an appearance at the AlwaysOn Going Green conference in San Francisco, said biofuels will quickly prove themselves less expensive than $100-a-barrel oil and within 10 years be cheaper than $50 oil.
According to a panel of startups at the event, bio-ethanol has come a long way from its initial reliance on corn crops. A second-generation fuel is being developed from non-food crops – wood clips and grasses, for instance, and stalks of food crops that typically get discarded. They come with high energy-yields and less water use; in some cases, genetically engineered microbes break down the material.
Algae also are being used, with high yields and low cost.
Khosla said he no longer supports obtaining ethanol from corn. “I do believe it will be expensive and will be blown out of the market on cost.”
Over the next couple decades, hundreds of bio-ethanol facilities (probably supplied by other kinds of plants) will be built across the country, went on William Roe, CEO of the startup Coskata.
Ask General Motors and it will say that until 2030 the only alternative to take a bite out of oil consumption is ethanol, added Roe, whose company received an investment from the car maker.
“You would have to see oil prices plummeting to put us out of business,” joined in Bruce Jamerson, CEO of the bio-fuel company Mascoma.
Online video and the explosion of IP messages around the world boosted computer network traffic by a whopping 55 percent last year.
Growth this year may be even more dramatic, according to Cisco Systems. And a compounded 46 percent growth through 2012 should lift the data flow to half a zettabyte.
That would be the equivalent of 125 billion DVDs, said Mike Capiano, a director of marketing.
Cisco made the point to show that new, more capable networks will be needed – linking routers and switches with high-speed optical equipment. And on Monday, Cisco showed off some of its new gear, a 7600 Series edge router with double the capacity and a new Mobile Wireless Router 2941 for cellular networks.
San Jose has ambitious green-tech plans – and it is eager to hear from startups with burgeoning technologies.
The Silicon Valley city’s goals are broad. It wants electricity made from renewable sources, vehicles that run on alternative fuels, more efficient lighting, water that can be recycled and to create jobs in the process.
Silicon Valley has changed the world before, Mayor Chuck Reed told entrepreneurs Monday night at the start of the three-day AlwaysOn Going Green conference in San Francisco. “I know it can happen again” and it will “make a lot of money for a lot people,” he said.
San Jose has to be cautious about picking winners, Reed said of his purchasing plans. “I hope people see us as a collaborator and potential partner.”
He promised quick city permits for companies eager to set up businesses.
This morning, Intel officially launched its 6-cores chip code-named Dunnington at a press conference in San Francisco's Regis Hotel. The new Xeon 7400 processor is targeted at 4-processors servers and is the last iteration of Intel's current "front-side bus" (FSB) architecture. Dell, HP, IBM and Sun are some of the "launch" partners for Dunnington.
Inspite of some great "number crunching" performance (50% increase in some cases, Intel claims) and a 10% power efficiency improvement over a quad-core chip, Dunnington's FSB architecture still creates a bottleneck when applications need to access large chunks of memory or input-ouput interfaces like the network card, the USB/Firewire ports, etc. An issue that VP and general manager of Intel's digital enterprise division, Tom Kilroy (pictured), tried to minimise pointing to Dunnington's large 16 megabyte memory cache subsystem, ideal for virtualisation servers.
"We made great strides in improving the bandwidth in these architectures [current front-side bus server chips]... [Dunnington is ideal for] database, virtualisation, ERP, performance crunching applications... Workloads that maybe don't require as much memory period then tend to move to 2 sockets...", said Tom Kilroy.
It is no secret that corporations are turning their attention from traditional in-house software packages to more agile services delivered over the Internet.
But how they are making this transformation is less well known. Executives at Hewlett-Packard say they see four keys steps and major benefits when the change is completed – including at H-P itself.
With digital data doubling every 18 months and data overall doubling every five years, managing the information flow is becoming one of the modern corporation’s biggest challenges. Data is not only expensive to handle, but its careful use can lead to new revenue streams.
It seems clear the enterprise market is moving to services, said CEO Mark Hurd (pictured) on a Monday conference call discussing his company’s acquisition of EDS. (H-P announced it would cut 24,600 jobs over three years in the integration of the firms.) To get there, they will need to modernize their data centers by consolidating facilities and adopting standards-based servers and technology.
The virtualization leader took the occasion of its user conference in Las Vegas to unveil a strategy for extending its market into virtual datacenters.
The plan is to extend its flagship virtualization products into a “virtual datacenter operating system,” allowing businesses to pool servers, storage and networking into a single computing “cloud” and allocate resources more efficiently.
“The next generation of innovative technologies in the Virtual Datacenter OS will enable companies to realize the promise of enterprise cloud computing – where applications are automatically guaranteed the right quality of service at the lowest (costs) by harnessing internal and external computing capacity,” said new CEO Paul Maritz in a press release.
Women and girls at both ends of the age spectrum are coddling up to online gaming.
Overall, females playing online games in August grew 27 percent compared with a year ago to nearly 43 million, according to comScore. The number of players in the 12-17 year-old category and 55-64 age segment grew at substantially faster rates: 55 percent for the younger group and 43 percent for the older one.
Here’s an explanation from a comScore press release issued Monday:
“Contributing to strong growth in the category among younger girls is the increasing popularity of fashion and dress-up sites, such as Stardoll.com, DressUpGames.com, and I-Dressup.com, and virtual worlds such as Neopets and Gaiaonline.com. Meanwhile, the growth among older females is in part due to partnerships between women’s content portals and casual game sites, such as iVillage.com’s partnership with Pogo.com games.”
Yahoo's 24-hour hack-a-thon aka Open Hack Day 2008 finally wrapped up on Saturday evening at the company's Sunnyvale campus. More than 330 developers representing 12 countries attended and submitted 47 hacks.
The Xoopit team, including developer Jerry Su (pictured), won the top prize for Best Overall Hack for hacking the email media manager tool directly into Yahoo's email environment. Nearly 25 prizes were given out all together.
Here are some few fun Open Hack Day highlights:
- 400 pizzas, 106 dozen doughnuts and 20 cases of energy drinks and lots of beer were consumed over 24 hours!
- Nearly 20 tents were pitched on Yahoo!’s lawn
- More than 650 people rocked out to Girl Talk on Friday night
Check also the short video after the jump to get an idea of the crazy ambiance at the Yahoo Hack Day.
Juniper Networks is scheduled to introduce a pair of powerful new firewalls on Monday.
The new products, the SRX 5800 and 5600 services gateways, will be 2 to 4 times faster than the company’s present firewall and use less power.
But the Silicon Valley company says they also break new ground with a design aimed at providing more user flexibility. Both devices can grow over time with a customer’s needs and incorporate other services, such as intrusion detection or routing, by adding extra cards, or circuitry.
“We believe it is a new category,” said Michael Frendo, senior vice president.
The products target corporations and telecommunications service-providers. They are presently shipping.
I've attended both Google I/O and Facebook f8 developer conferences which both were held in San Francisco and were much bigger than Yahoo's Open Hack Days, with more than 1,000 attendees.
When you compare with Yahoo's event that only attracted 300-400 developers, that makes you wonder if the Sunnyvale company is losing touch with developers. Well, according to Yahoo's head of its developer network, Chris Yeh (pictured), the smaller size event was actually done by design. And the fact that it's held at Yahoo's headquarters, favour relationships between re-energized Yahoo's own developers and third party programmers.
"This is our equivalent to the developer conference... For us the way we approach developers is very personal and one on one. This our approach to doing a developer conference. So there are aspects of that, like tracks with various experts talking about different products today but at the same time there's emphasis here on looking with people. So tonight you'll see many of our Yahoo programmers working with third party programmers to make sure they can build their hacks tonight. I think it's more of our style", explains Chris Yeh.
Check our video interview with Chris Yeh after the jump.
This our friends at MomentiMedia photo album of the Yahoo Open Hack. A developer event I found smaller and more personal then let's say f8 or Google I/O.
Following the lead of Facebook and other companies of the Web 2.0 vanguard, Yahoo took a big step toward opening itself up to third-party applications Friday.
Independent applications have been immensely popular on Facebook since the startup offered access to some of its programming interfaces, or APIs, last year.
Yahoo on Friday accelerated its efforts to do the same. “We need to move as quickly as possible here,” said David Filo, chief Yahoo (pictured).
Imagine an Internet company, such as Yahoo, collecting personal information on its users and making that data available to other people and third party developers.
Now stop imagining. Yahoo on Friday kicked off its ambitious “Open Strategy,” part of which includes the first-time collection of personal data from across its many online properties.
The company says the information – who a user is, who that person knows and what that person does – is only collected when a person allows it to be shared. And it is not to be used for the behavioral targeting of advertising.
But the program will let data be seen by other people – your friends may have access to your movie and music ratings, for instance.
And third-party developers writing applications to work on Yahoo would be able to use the information in their programs. Yahoo also envisions allowing consumers to take their own data and copy it to other Web sites for convenience.
Mark and I are at Yahoo's Silicon Valley campus in Sunnyvale to cover the Web company's "Open Hack" event.
Think of Open Hack as Yahoo's developer conference - although the company has until this day not organised a single one per se! - as half hackathon a-la Facebook f8, half "classic" developer workshops.
