Out of 18 companies on the list, Apple has slipped all the way to 9th place from 5th place in the May 2010 edition, “not because it has lost any points,” Greenpeace explains. (Apple has the same score of 4.9, out of a possible 10). Rather, “several other companies have overtaken it.”

Apple scores most of its points based on criteria for toxic chemicals, since virtually all Apple products are now made without the polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) — two nasty chemicals. Greenpeace calls for the company to disclose more information, however, about its supply chain and management of chemicals, as well as future plans for phasing out toxic chemicals.

Dell, which took Apple to task last year over Apple’s claims that it had “the world’s greenest family of notebooks,” boosted its score to 4.9 from 4.3 in the previous guide, holding steady at 10th place. Greenpeace credits Dell in the areas of chemicals and electronic waste, but the computer maker “continues to be hampered by the penalty point imposed for backtracking” on an earlier commitment to eliminate PVC plastic and BFRs in all products by the end of 2009.

HP is among the biggest gainers in Greenpeace’s ranking, climbing to 4th place with 5.5 points, up from 8th place with 4.9 points in the previous ranking. The improved score is partly due to new notebook and desktop lines that are free of PVC and BFRs, a PVC-free printer, and a pledge to phase out beryllium and beryllium compounds by July 2011.

In its statement about the latest scoring, Greenpeace centers much of its criticism on Toshiba and Microsoft, while praising Philips and HP’s recent efforts to clean up their act. Microsoft took a penalty point for the first time for “backtracking on commitments” to phase out BFRs and PVC by the end of 2010. The company aims to phase out BFRs and phthalates from all products by 2012, notes Greenpeace, “but its commitment to phasing out PVC is not clear.” The company fell to 17th place from its previous spot at no. 16, with a score of only 1.9 points.

Toshiba, ranked at no. 16 with 2.3 points, got dinged for its lack of a PC product line made without PVC or BFRs. It also lost a point for failing to make good on a pledge to launch new models of all its consumer electronics products without PVC plastic or BFRs by April 2010.

Earning 5.5 points, Philips ranks in third place, behind Nokia (7.5 points) and Sony Ericsoon (6.9 points). Philips won accolades for its Econova TV, which Greenpeace describes as the first TV free of PVC and BFRs. According to the group, Philips’s Econova puts the company “well ahead of other TV manufacturers.”

For more research on the intersection of green and IT check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• Facebook’s Coal-Powered Problem
• The Developer’s Guide to Home Energy Management Apps
• Smart Algorithms: The Future of the Energy Industry

The study, which is being published by Geographical Research Letters, looks at the potential impact of commercial space tourism by running simulations of the black carbon, or soot, emissions from Las Cruces, N.M., Nature.com reported on Friday. Las Cruces is home to the recently opened Spaceport America, where companies such as Virgin Galactic plan to launch commercial space flights within three years.

Sir Richard Branson isn’t the only tycoon who wants in on the space party. Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk also dreams of bringing space travel to the common folk. Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, in 2002 and has poured a lot of his personal fortunes into the company. SpaceX, based in southern California, ran a successful flight to the Earth’s orbit with its Falcon 9 in June this year.

The simulations, conducted by researchers from Aerospace Corp. in Los Angeles and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., show that black carbon emitted by 1,000 rocket launches per year over a 10-year period would lead to a layer of soot hovering in the stratosphere within 10 degrees latitude of the launch pad. With this many launches, temperatures at the polar regions would be expected to change by 1 degree Celsius and melt polar sea ice by as much as 15 percent.

Nature points out plans by some companies, including Virgin, to use a hybrid rocket engine that burns synthetic hydrocarbon and nitrous oxide, will produce more black carbon than what can come from conventional rocket engines, which run on a cocktail of kerosene and liquid oxygen.

The researchers want to do more detailed studies on the potential impact of commercial space flight and hope to enlist the help of this fledging industry. Certainly, it’d be a good idea to start planning for ways to cut the industry’s carbon footprint before it becomes a big business. Spaceport is already eager to market itself as a greentech supporter. It’s looking for developers to build solar power plants on site.

The federal government already has committed big money to help these private companies become space carriers. Congress recently approved $1.6 billion for NASA to fund private projects that can bring astronauts and cargos to the International Space Station.

For more research on demand response and the smart grid check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• Demand Response as the Back Door Smart Grid?
• Moving Into Substation Networking, Cisco Seizes Smart Grid’s Low-Hanging Fruit
• Smart algorithms, the future of the energy industry
• New Opportunities in the Smart Grid

Dead or on Life Support

It’s been a little over a month since the last Apple Media event. The aftershock in the tech industry from that has yet to be fully felt, and there are some additions to the casualties I listed in September.

If Apple and Facebook can work things out regarding Ping, the final nail in MySpace’s coffin may be struck. Some of the new features in iTunes, like the artwork viewer, make certain add-ons like Sophiestication’s CoverSutra a little less appealing. Rogue Amoeba is sitting on the fence waiting to see if it’ll be able to participate in the updates to iOS 4.2 regarding Apple’s new AirPlay. While competition is still healthy among GameCenter’s competing services, iAd is starting to pick up some steam as it continues to innovate in the smartphone advertising space.

Next in Line for Execution

That’s what happened last time around. Here’s a short list of what’s on the chopping block after yesterday’s revelations:

The End of Disks (and Discs, Too) — A Timeline

• The floppy drive was the first to go in 1998 when Apple released the iMac G3. Rather than pursue disk-based alternates like the Ultra High Density Floppy disk, Zip disks or an Imation drive, Apple opted for a USB port.
• In the last several releases of iLife, one of the original cornerstone software programs, iDVD, has not seen any new features or updates.
• Apple has also been very vocal in its reluctance to support Blu-ray.
• Earlier this year, the icon for iTunes was updated, removing the disc from the icon entirely.
• When the iPod lineup was refreshed this year, the only model not updated was the iPod Classic, the one with an HDD inside.
• Then, following the quarterly earnings call where Steve proclaimed Apple’s love of flash, Apple announced an update to a drive-less MacBook Air: a MacBook which already lacks a SuperDrive.

See the pattern? Hard drive manufacturers sure do.  Western Digital has warned investors that with the advent of the iPad and the decline in low-end notebooks, the hard drive market is slowing drastically.  The MacBook Air announcement couldn’t have helped matters much.

Online Software Version Trackers for Mac

As developers flocked to iOS, many OS X development efforts were left high and dry. There was a notable dearth of new titles on the market, and bundle programs like MacHeist started offering wholesale pricing to boost sluggish sales. App discovery, purchase, download, install, and update are what Apple sees as missing. Yet that’s exactly what I use MacUpdate for. We’ll have to see how quickly developers adapt to Apple’s Mac App Store, and also what value-add sites like MacUpdate and CNET’s Downloads.com (formerly Version Tracker) can offer in order to stay afloat.

Apple Desktop Widgets

This one isn’t quite as clear as it could be. It appears as if iOS apps or something like an iOS app could run in some capacity on OS X. Changing the paradigm and allowing for multi-touch gestures and full screen apps could spell the eventual end of dashboard widgets as we know them today on OS X.

There’s a good reason everyone pays attention to Apple when they decide to speak to the media. Apple’s successes spell success for other companies as well. Samsung, a major flash supplier, no doubt benefits. And LG, supplier of the iPhone’s Retina Display, makes out pretty well. But not everyone comes away a winner when Steve Jobs opens his mouth. For some businesses, in fact, Apple’s idea of progress marks the end of the line.

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IBM’s new consulting services are Cloud Security Strategy Roadmap, Cloud Security Assessment and Applications Security Services for Cloud. In a nutshell, the new offerings do what they say: assess current or planned cloud environments and advise customers on the best methods to proceed. IBM also rolled out two new managed services: Managed Security Services Hosted Security Event and Log Management, and Managed Security Services Hosted Vulnerability Management. Like the consulting services, these new cloud-based services do about what their names suggest.

HP’s new services target personnel, perhaps those concerned their jobs are in danger as new IT architectures take shape. The ExpertONE program “trains professionals in the design, deployment and operation of open, standards-based networks and [c]onverged [i]nfrastructure.” What’s interesting is that ExpertONE trains clients in multi-vendor environments, a derivation from what might be expected given level of competition in that space. Taking it a step further, HP also is offering the ExpertONE Network Certification and the Master Accredited Systems Engineer Converged Infrastructure certification.

In many cases, these types of programs might represent the deciding factor for large enterprises looking to act on their cloud computing plans. While many startups are offering turnkey clouds that don’t outwardly address the larger IT environment, vendors like IBM and HP acknowledge that existing (and even new) environments are complex, and that risk-averse IT departments will appreciate a little handholding.

Image courtesy of Glyn Baker.

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As I wrote in a pre-VMworld report (subscription required) on VMware’s “cloudy ambitions,” opportunities abound, and VMware has its fingers in all of them. Public or private; IaaS, PaaS or SaaS; VMware has an offering. Furthermore, although competitive hypervisors are definitely eating away at market share, there’s still plenty of business to go around. Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer have been growing far faster in terms of license revenue growth, but that doesn’t mean VMware can’t still grow. Have you seen the pick-up in adoption for Cisco UCS and VCE Vblock appliances? There’s VMware, tied to each one of those purchases.

But cloud computing remains the elephant in the room in terms of potential revenue. That market is so nascent that no one really knows who will prevail and how much money that will bring in, although virtualization/cloud management software means higher margins than do hypervisor licenses. Who’s to say what it will mean for revenue if VMware’s approach to internal clouds attracts a large number of customers, or if its cadre of vCloud service-provider partners — a list that now includes Verizon Business (with offerings targeting both enterprises and SMBs) — start to rake in users. Everyone thought Amazon Web Services wasn’t operating an overly profitable business, but UBS estimates showing high profits and sustained exponential growth changed a lot of minds.

My point: It’s too early to tell whether VMware can keep on growing like it is right now. Even if it loses hypervisor market share, and its cloud market share never reaches such stratospheric levels, there’s no guarantee of a tight correlation to revenue. Throw a few more acquisitions into the mix, or the prospect of VMware getting acquired itself, and I’d say you have a crapshoot in which the only question is how much money VMware will earn. Even if it falls off, I don’t think you’ll hear many complaints about a meager 20 percent growth rate.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

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That said, the rumor whips up a bunch of financial questions, because EMC owns 80 percent of VMware. EMC has a market capitalization of around $43 billion, and VMware around $32 billion. Match that up with EMC’s annual revenues of around $15 billion and VMware at $2.4 billion, and it isn’t hard to figure out where most of the value is, as well as where Oracle might be able to get a good deal on the multiple leading storage platforms.

So yes, the idea of Oracle buying EMC and VMware is a little crazy. But the idea of buying EMC and not VMware is within the realm of possibility, at least on paper, with The Register estimating that the non-VMware portion of EMC could be worth as little as $7.9 billion.

This is where things get interesting. The industry appears to be pushing towards server, network and storage consolidation following the moves of HP, IBM, Cisco, and Dell. Even Oracle has pushed a complete hardware and software package with Exalogic and Exadata using technology from Sun Microsystems to deliver an integrated solution. EMC and Network Appliance remain the large pure-play storage companies that could add significant heft to a server vendor that wants to dominate integrated stacks. HP and IBM have too much product overlap, and Dell can’t afford EMC, so that leaves an opening for Oracle and Cisco.

It seems likely that Oracle could be considering an EMC-only bid. I’ve heard some speculate that the reason Oracle became so tied to NetApp for certain solutions was the fear of EMC data center account control. Make no mistake; EMC knows how to close big deals, as their revenue number proves. If the goal for Oracle is to reach $100 billion, NetApp wouldn’t help them as effectively. NetApp currently has an $18 billion dollar market cap and just over $4 billion in revenue.

With Oracle, and potentially Cisco, interested in looking at a the EMC part of the equation, there could be impetus to move this deal forward. Even though Sun had plenty of great storage technology, they never had the commercial product success and storage revenues of EMC. If consolidation between servers and storage is the future, EMC better get cozy with someone soon.

Gary Orenstein is host of The Cloud Computing Show

Photo courtesy of Flickr user ell brown

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• VMware’s Cloudy Ambitions: Can It Repeat Hypervisor Success?
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010
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Oracle and I.B.M. Agree to Java Pact (From the New York Times Bits Blog) I suppose this is good news for enterprise Java developers, but it sounds like the Google lawsuit could have greater implications. Either way, the future of Java under Oracle is starting to shape up.

Intel Outlook Quells Worries; We See Healthy Global Demand Ahead (From ZDNet) Thank goodness, Intel is struggling to turn a profit. Seriously, though, given its ubiquity in computing technology, good news for Intel probably means good news for everyone else.

CSC Cloud Features VMware vFabric for Java Apps (From Business Wire) This is a pretty big deal, actually. As far as I know, CSC is the first cloud provider of its ilk to incorporate a PaaS-like functionality into its offering. Oh, and it’s good news for VMware (and Spring) too.

VMware Boosts vCloud Director Cloud Creator (From The Register) This is a must-have tool for VMware, which everyone knew had to be part of the vCloud Director portfolio. The new breed of cloud-management platforms all incorporate self-service.

Businesses Liable for Data Breaches with Cloud Computing (From TechEye) Another look at liability issues in cloud computing. Like I’ve said before, cloud customers need to know what they’re signing up for and negotiate/choose cloud providers accordingly.

For more cloud-related news analysis and research, visit GigaOM Pro.

Image courtesy of Flicker user SixRevisions.

Easy Books (Free)

Easy Books was anything but! For a business using strict accounting methods, I’m sure the application has merit, but for balancing your checkbook and tracking credit cards, it doesn’t cut it. The app gives you a variety of templates to choose from, but it was extremely confusing for tracking money coming into and out of accounts.

Annoyingly, all data must be entered by hand since there’s no direct bank download option. The in-app purchase option does give business owners the option to create invoices ($16.99) and track hours worked ($12.99) on the iPad, but without a desktop companion application, all your work has to be done on-device.

MoneyDance(Free)

MoneyDance acts as a satellite application to its desktop version ($49.99). Transactions can be edited and classified on the iPad, but account setup and transaction downloads must be done on your computer. Synchronization with the desktop was clunky, requiring you to type a very long string of alphanumerics to establish pairing, a process which wasn’t always successful.

As a cross-platform Java-based app, MoneyDance was slow and clunky and not very Mac-like. If all you want to do is modify transactions while away from your desktop, MoneyDance for the iPad will suffice, but otherwise, this app is probably one to avoid.

PocketMoney ($4.99)

PocketMoney has the potential to be a great financial management app. The program can stand on its own, and allows you to add accounts and transactions. Budgeting is included, as are options for in-app upgrades for charting ($2.99) and photo receipt tracking ($.99).

It also synchronizes with a full cross-platform desktop client. And though this release doesn’t yet allow for direct downloads from banks, the feature is slated for a future release. If you just want to track your checkbook and credit cards and don’t mind typing in transactions directly, PocketMoney is an excellent choice for the average user.

SplashMoney($4.99)

SplashMoney is by far the most powerful iPad financial app out there, and it’s extremely easy to use: a rare combination when dealing with money. SplashMoney can run fully independent of the desktop. Setup of accounts, budgets and reports can all be done on the iPad.

Unique among its competitors is the ability to download transactions from your bank while away from the desktop. The ability to fully manage credit card downloads while away from a computer is a killer feature. Obviously, printing of reports or registers isn’t currently supported by the iPad OS, but that will likely change in iOS 4.2.

Because SplashMoney fully supports .qif import and export, I can try it without commitment, but I suspect as time marches on, I’ll have a long-term relationship with this app.

PageOnce Premium($6.99)

PageOnce is a direct competitor in terms of both features and benefits to Mint. Unfortunately Mint doesn’t yet have an iPad app.  Like Mint, PageOnce downloads your transactions from your bank and credit cards in order to give you a dashboard view of your spending, and is nearly identical to its web counterpart.

No direct registers are supported and an Internet connection is required for usage. PageOnce take full advantage of the iPad’s real estate to give you a great overview of your financial situation. The application and its website counterpart don’t allow for budgeting or reclassification of transactions. Many users will find this annoying, but fortunately no commitment is involved, so you can test it out for yourselves.

Unlike Mint, PageOnce gives you a dashboard view of your entire digital life and includes your frequent flyer miles, gift cards, social media accounts, etc. If it can be accessed via the web, PageOnce has it. The Premium version includes the ability to password lock the application, and additional travel options.

I can’t recommend the free version because of the inability to secure the data in the app. Lovers of Mint will find this application just as sweet with a few extra benefits.

Overall, Splash Money seems to be the only mature application in the iPad financial management field and is the recommended choice. PageOnce is a great alternative or companion to existing applications out there, but shame on them for not allowing free users to lock and protect their data.

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As Om reported when the company launched earlier in the year, Membase has its share of fans. Among them are Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund and North Bridge Ventures, which have invested $15 million in the company, as well as notable users of the product Zynga, Loggly, AOL and ShareThis. Uses range from storing and serving gaming data at Zynga to collection of massive amounts of log traffic at Loggly. In the past few months, Membase Server has become a database option within the Heroku and RightScale cloud platforms.

In a crowded field of NoSQL options, Membase’s relative success is noteworthy, owing much to some technological differences from other offerings. Because Membase Server grew out of the popular memcached tool (which webscale companies like Facebook use to limit latency between their SQL databases and their web servers), it maintains familiarity for users and memcached reliability, while adding the performance benefits of a distributed key-value store. According to Membase co-founder and senior vice president James Phillips, Membase Server performs so well because the company is focused on maintaining its purity as a key-value store without adding excess functionality to the database itself.

However, the company might owe as much to its corporate structure as to its technology. As Phillips points out, sometimes customers want the proverbial throat to choke, even with an open source database. Because Membase Server is the intellectual property and source of income for the company that developed it, as opposed to being an open source project with a few startups commercializing it, customers get a next-generation product with that old-school service. Phillips, for example, tells the story of sending two support staffers to India for two weeks to help a customer get its Membase deployment live.

As for the wisdom of rebranding itself after just one product in what could become a multi-product portfolio, Phillips hopes Membase will be successful enough to face that problem some day.

Butterfly photo courtesy of Flickr user Susan E Adams.

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Although much was made of the iPhone 4 antenna at launch, it turned out to suffer from a technical defect, and a much larger public relations problem. At the same launch, the glass on the iPhone 4 also received a little publicity. Made of aluminosilicate glass, it was described as “20 times stiffer and 30 times harder than plastic” and “comparable in strength to sapphire crystal.”

Not so, says Block, who cites “sources both inside and outside Apple” as confirming “another potential design flaw,” resulting in a “quiet panic” within the company. The issue is supposedly that the glass backing is prone to scratching, cracking, and fracturing, especially when used in conjunction with certain cases, specifically slide-on cases.

According to Block, to prevent another “Antennagate,” Apple temporarily halted sales of almost all third-party cases, and slide-on cases for the iPhone 4 are still “conspicuously absent” from the Apple Store. Further, there may not be a solution to the “design flaw,” and Block suggests that this will be the end of the glass backing for the iPhone.

While it’s difficult to disprove any of those assertions, mostly because they are based on somewhat questionable data, it’s hard to see how the so-called “Glassgate” situation could be as big a problem as the iPhone 4 antenna. First, unlike with the antenna, there haven’t been nearly as many anecdotal reports on the issue, either in the media or in discussions at Apple Support.

While you can still find some discussions on the issue, the number of views and participants are insignificant compared to what happened with the antenna. Apple also hasn’t tried to cover up the issue by removing discussion threads, as was the case with the iPhone 4 antenna. More importantly, unlike the iPhone 4 antenna, the glass backing can easily be replaced should it fail.

That doesn’t mean the glass backing is impervious to harm, just that an alleged design flaw in this area hardly seems comparable to the antenna issue. Nonetheless, for those who own an iPhone 4, or are thinking of buying one, a survival kit is a good way to protect your iPhone 4′s surfaces from scratching.

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Now in its fourth year, NewTeeVee Live is the premiere event covering the paradigm shift in video creation and distribution, from traditional TV and film formats to a growing number of online and mobile outlets. Past speakers have included Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, former CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and Felicia Day, creator of The Guild. This year we have another great lineup, with representatives from Adobe, Vevo, Google TV, Samsung and Fox Broadcasting, among others.

Confirmed speakers for this year’s event include:

• Kevin Lynch, CTO, Adobe
• Hunter Walk, Director of Product Management, YouTube
• Rio Caraeff, President and CEO, Vevo
• Oren Jacob, Executive Producer, Ready, Set, Bag!, Ensemble Pictures
• Rishi Chandra, Senior Product Manager, Google TV
• Olivier Manuel, Director of Content, Samsung Electronics America
• Bryan Perez, SVP and GM, NBA Digital
• Hardie Tankersley, VP of Innovation, Fox Broadcasting Company
• Bram Cohen, Chief Scientist and Co-founder, BitTorrent

Topics of interest covered at NewTeeVee Live 2010 include:

• Cutting the cord – With the rise of ubiquitous broadband and the availability of popular shows through online portals, cable “unsubscribers” are the new trend.
• Touch TV – What impact will the iPad and similar devices have on viewing habits? Will new devices and audiences herald a new wave of content formats and innovation?
• Google TV – Can Google succeed where Microsoft and others have failed? Will Google’s strengths in search and its YouTube service allow it to create a killer product proposition?
• Multiplatform Storytelling – People are now watching shows on their TVs, netbooks, laptops, set-top boxes and tablets. How is this endpoint proliferation transforming both mainstream television and web-only content?

Come join us November 10 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Early Bird Tickets are available now for just $345 (with discount code NTV50) through September 11, or $445 with a GigaOM Pro subscription.

Black & Decker Shows its Green Thumb in PlantSense Deal: San Francisco-based startup PlantSense has signed a deal to market its garden soil sensors through tool giant Black & Decker, with the new sensors expected to be rolled out this fall.

France To Cut Solar FIT 12%: France has decided to cut its feed-in tariff for solar power by 12 percent, according to French newspaper Le Figaro which cites an anonymous government source.

New TVA Rate Structure Supports Demand Response, Energy Efficiency: Smart grid companies, take note — huge federal power entity Tennessee Valley Authority has approved a 2011 budget that aims $135 million at energy efficiency and demand response programs.

Trina Solar’s Margin and Shipments Beat Guidance: Chinese solar company Trina Solar has posted record shipments and better than expected gross margins for the second quarter, continuing a string of recent strong reports from the solar industry.

Meet Obama’s Point Man on Electric Cars: “David Sandalow starts his five-mile commute each day by unplugging an orange extension cord connecting his Toyota Prius hybrid to an outlet in his brick carport.”

Image courtesy of BONGURI’s photostream.

China Plans Charging Standards for Electric Cars: The Chinese government plans to introduce standards for technical requirements for charging stations for electric vehicles in October, according to news reports citing an unnamed official in China’s State Electricity Regulatory Commission.

UN Board Could Rein in $2.7 Billion Carbon Market: Carbon offsets are under more scrutiny. The United Nations panel overseeing a $2.7 billion carbon credit fund are asking five Chinese chemical plants to prove they aren’t overproducing, then destroying, ozone-harming chemicals merely to claim the income from offsetting their greenhouse gas impact.

40% of Consumers Want to Test Drive EVs: “Forty percent of consumers report they are likely to test drive an electric vehicle, according to a new study of online American adults from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA).”

Southern California Edison’s Smart Energy Center: Utility Southern California Edison (SCE) will open up its smart energy exhibit tomorrow that features smart appliances, smart meters and a smart home.

Image courtesy of BONGURI’s photostream.

Senate Bill Would Make Energy-Efficient Mortgages Mainstream: Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) plans to introduce the SAVE (Sensible Accounting to Value Energy) (PDF) act, a bill that would force lenders to calculate household energy costs before issuing a federally insured mortgage, after the August congressional recess.

Yingli Quarterly Profit Tops Wall Street View: Chinese solar company Yingli Green Energy posted second-quarter earnings of $32.1 million, or 21 cents per share, beating Wall Street expectations of 19 cents per share.

Largest U.S. Ocean Device Generating Electricity: Ocean Renewable Power Co. reports that its 60-kilowatt tidal turbine off the coast of Maine has been delivering consistent power to the state’s grid, good news after a previous first test turbine broke down in the Bay of Fundy.

Tesla Co-founder Eberhard on 500-Mile Rang EV: “Electric vehicles will have a range of more than 500 miles within the next 10 years. That is the view of Martin Eberhard, a man who sprang to prominence when he co-founded the Tesla electric sports car company in July 2003.”

10 Year VC Returns Turn Negative: “U.S. VC funds posted their first negative 10-year returns in a decade, according to new data from Thomson Reuters.”

Image courtesy of BONGURI’s photostream.