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Telecommunications provider Ericsson is putting some wind power into its network with a new radio communications tower unveiled today. The Swedish telecom partnered with turbine maker Vertical Wind AB and Uppsala University to incorporate a vertical-axis wind turbine into the tower that houses radio base stations and antennas. The tower is now undergoing trials to see if the design will enable low-cost mobile communications to spread throughout remote regions with minimal environmental impact.

The rig is a conceptual riff on Ericsson’s energy-lean Tower Tube design. Ericsson claims it has greatly reduced the station’s power demand, eliminating the need for feeders and cooling systems and slashing energy consumption up to 40 percent. It’s not clear how much of the tower’s energy needs will be fulfilled by the turbine, but due to wind’s intermittent nature, it will likely need to be grid-connected to ensure a stable signal, although it could use an energy storage system in far-flung locals.

This project is part of Ericsson’s ongoing Communications Expander campaign, under which the company is boosting efficiency and using solar and wind energy to power its network whenever possible. Aside from the environmental benefits, Ericsson says this will cut operation costs and make telecommunications available to more people in more parts of the world. For the full story, head over to Earth2Tech.

Even though Apple has yet to show off turn-by-turn directions on the GPS-enabled iPhone, navigation is one of the fastest-growing categories of mobile devices apps. As comScore recently noted, map use on cell phones in the U.S. during the three-month period ended May 31 was up 82 percent over the same period last year.The demand is particularly high for step-by-step pedestrian navigation. GPS makers are responding by getting their services onto phones or, in some, cases, making phones around their services.

TomTom, based out of the Netherlands, deployed its Navigator 6 software at the end of 2006 on a wide array of handsets including models from Nokia, HP and Palm and included a Bluetooth GPS receiver to allow phones with no GPS chip to use the service. Intrepid TomTom-ers say they’ve even gotten it to connect to their BlackBerrys. And although it hasn’t yet been approved by Apple to be sold in the company’s App Store, the GPS maker has already gotten its service to run on the new iPhone. “We have made our navigation system run on the iPhone; it looks good and works very well,” a TomTom spokesperson wrote us in a statement. “We will have to look more closely to Apple’s strategy before we can say more about what kind of opportunities this will bring us.”

Meanwhile GPS veteran Garmin started offering its navigation software for the likes of BlackBerry and other smartphones last year. Continue »

Could Kevin Rose be latest convert from info tech to cleantech? In a recent video blog post, the Digg founder fleshed out an idea for making managing the power consumption of your home’s many gadgets a little more eco-friendly and way more gizmo-geeky. The idea combines ideas that startups like Tendril and Green Plug are already working on but adds a location-based twist. Not only will your devices be remotely controllable, Rose proposes, but the system will ping the GPS in your phone to find out if you’ve gone out and turn off the lights you left on. Keep reading at Earth2Tech.

Andy Grove, the former chairman of Intel turned plug-in vehicle advocate, challenged the attendees of the Plug-In 2008 conference on Tuesday to put 10 million plug-in hybrid electric vehicles on the roads in four years. Those plug-ins should be retrofitted from vehicles with poor mileage like SUVs, pickups and minivans, he said.

Grove called on the auto industry, Detroit giants and Silicon Valley startups to form an inter-industry task force to achieve this goal. He said the auto industry has much to learn from the Internet world and thinks that it is critical to foster the same atmosphere of collaborative competition that helped Internet development boom over the last 15 years.

For the full story, and a video of Grove’s presentation, head over to Earth2Tech.

While there are plenty of iPhone line-standers poking at a variety of digital devices to pass the hours, a number of iWaiters are working on their summer reading lists with some books. You remember books, right? Square-ish things made of dead trees with words (often written by dead people) in them?

Steve Jobs doesn’t seem to have much faith in books. He told the NYTimes earlier this year: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Looking at the lines forming in front of Apple stores everywhere, it seems many of Jobs’s own customers are still bibliophiles. A quick poll of the Monday lunch-hour line at Apple’s flagship San Francisco store yielded a diversity of titles:

“The Pillars of the Earth” - Ken Follet
“You Can’t Win” - Jack Black
“Ulysses” - James Joyce
“The Conquest of Bread” - Peter Kropotkin
“Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich” - Robert Frank
“Snow Blind” - Robert Sabbag
“Dérive à Partir de Marx et Freud” - J. F. Lyotard

One booking-toting iPhone customer told me: “Books might be dead, but reading isn’t.”

What do you think? What reading material did you bring to the iPhone line?

Iran’s missile project may need more rocket scientists to help gets its projectiles off the ground, but its marketing team desperately needs some talented photo retouchers to better cover up its ballistic shortcomings. The duping of numerous newspapers by a digitally altered picture of Iran’s missile test is just the latest case of a Photoshopped picture being taken at face value. But while the sophistication of forgery detection software is way behind that of photo manipulation, with the help of government funding, it’s starting to catch up.

Hany Farid, a computer science professor at Dartmouth College, has developed software for faux photo detection, also known as digital forensics. His lab is funded by the Department of Justice and the FBI, which has already made use of it.

Continue »

Professor Fogg, iPhone clutched in hand, began the class by asking if everyone had received his Facebook message alerting them to that morning’s OpenSocial announcement. The class nodded. Of course they’d seen the message, they’d all been logging insane hours on Facebook. But not in the usual stalker sense. They were students of the now hyped Stanford class, CS377W: Creating Engaging Facebook Apps.

The explicit goal of the class is to have students produce two functioning apps for the social networking site by the end of the quarter. This past weekend the class’s first apps went live; yesterday was demo day. Between stories of crashing servers and yet-to-implemented functionality, the class — some 85 students, from freshman undergrads to MSEs and MBAs — presented a staggeringly creative 25 live apps. One student commented, “It’s weird having an app out there with people using it. You kind of have to babysit it.”

Here are our top five favorites from demo day. Continue »