Like its cable compatriot Time Warner, Comcast isn’t just latching onto the established managed Wi-Fi networks in coffee shops, restaurants and shops. It’s building an extensive outdoor hot zone network as well, exposing its access points to the elements to capture high-traffic pedestrian zones and public gathering spots.

Until now Comcast has been mainly concentrating on the eastern seaboard where it has built extensive networks using Ericsson BelAir Networks equipment in and around Boston; Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Va. But now it has cast its eye on the left coast. Comcast has also struck up roaming pacts with Time Warner and Cablevision that will eventually allow them to create a unified national hotspot network, though so far its only been implemented in New York City.

Comcast’s California rollout doesn’t appear to be quite as dense as its mid-Atlantic deployment, but it covers a lot of markets. A complete list of cities and towns is at the end of this post, but you can also see detailed coverage maps at the Xfinity website.

Comcast’s Wi-Fi hotspots are detailed in red

As with its east coast network, Comcast is offering Wi-Fi access to its residential broadband customers for free. For non-Comcast subscribers, the cable operator is selling access by the hour, day and week. The SSID for the network “XfinityWiFi” and can be accessed from any laptop, tablet or smartphone.

Apart from the Bay Area the new Comcast network is in the following markets: Aptos, Atwater, Buellton, Cameron Park, Carmel, Chico, Chowchilla, Colusa, Corcoran, Davis, Diamond Springs, Dinuba, El Dorado Hills, ElkGrove, Fairfield, Folsom, Fresno, Galt, Grass Valley, Hanford, Kerman, Lathrop, Lemoore, Lodi,Lompoc, Los Banos, Madera, Manteca, Marysville, Mendota, Merced, Modesto, Monterey, Murphys, Nevada City, Newman, Oakdale, Oroville, Parlier, Patterson, Placerville, Rancho Cordova, Reedley, Roseville, Sacramento, Salinas, San Andreas, Sanger, Santa Maria, Selma, Solvang, Sonora, Soquel, Stockton, Tracy, Tulare, Twain Harte, Vacaville, Vallejo, Visalia, Willows and Yuba City.

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The lawsuit was brought by California man Betsalel Williamson who had to replace the screen of his brand new iPhone after he knocked it off the arm of a chair, resulting “in spider cracks across the back glass panel.”

In his ruling handed down this week, US District Judge Edward Davila wrote that “it is a well known fact of life that glass can break under impact” and said the iPhone owners failed to show that Apple breached a warranty or violated California’s consumer protection laws.

The lawsuit argued that Apple ads touting the glass as “20 times stiffer and 30 times harder than plastic . . . ultradurable and more scratch resistant than ever” were misleading. It cited a study that the glass on the iPhone 4 breaks at a 82% higher rate than earlier iPhones, forcing consumers to to pay $29 to replace a cracked screen and $199 if the glass housing breaks.

Judge Davila didn’t buy the claims, however, and wrote that Steve Jobs’ claims about the glass were “mere puffery” rather than a promise that could be the basis of a lawsuit:

A “reasonable consumer” viewing a commercial showing the iPhone 4 in use as a phone, but without a cover, would not be misled to believe that the iPhone 4 could withstand any particular level of impact if the phone was dropped.

The judge noted in several other parts of the ruling that a phone without a case was more vulnerable.

Davila gave permission for the plaintiffs to amend the complaint in order to show how specifically Apple deceived them.

The judge’s ruling, which was first reported by Law360 (sub. req’d), is below with relevant portions underlined:

iPhone Screens

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Here are a few other notable bits that came out of the meeting:

• Apple doesn’t hate Facebook. Cook reportedly called the social networking giant (with whom it has had previous disagreements) “a friend.” He also expressed that he “always thought that the two can do more together,” reports Forbes. Still, Apple has no plans to incorporate Facebook into any of its operatings systems the way it has with Twitter.
• Cook has near-unanimous support from shareholders. He got 98 percent “yes” votes in his nomination to Apple’s board of directors, according to AppleInsider. While he got the highest percentage of yes votes, all board members were re-elected.
• Even though there was no dividend announcement Thursday, Cook didn’t rule it out. According to AllThingsD, he said, “My message there is that the board and the management team are thinking about this very deeply … and we will do what we think is in the best interest of shareholders.”
• Despite repeated jokes about it on Twitter, Apple has not looked into buying Greece with its $98 billion in cash and liquid assets.

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Kamala Harris worked with Amazon, Apple, Google, HP, Microsoft, and Research in Motion on what appears to be a formal agreement to help app developers comply with an already existing California law that requires them to have privacy policies. The main change is that the six companies responsible for the vast majority of app downloads in the U.S. must now provide app developers with a way to link to an app’s privacy policy on their own Web sites or insert the text of the policy within the app. But the statement released by Harris’ office was “not intended to impose legally binding obligations on the (mobile companies).”

It’s hard to imagine the new agreement having too much of an effect on mobile privacy. Even if “the majority” of mobile apps lack privacy policies (per Harris’ office), the majority of those downloading apps blow right past those privacy policies in order to install their new toy. Those who do read the policies are in store for some of the finest legalese yet created as to hide as much as possible the notion that free apps depend on the collection of personal data. Having a policy is much better than not having a policy, but greater emphasis on making those policies easier to understand would be appreciated.

Harris’ agreement stops short of pinpointing specific uses of personal information that might harm consumers, but it does make it easier for app developers to post policies and for consumers to report violations of those policies, so it’s probably better than nothing. The AG’s press release said the parties will reconvene in six months, at which point there will likely have been yet another incident along the lines of Path’s address-book snafu that drew widespread attention.

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On Monday, Citrix Systems said its new Citrix CloudStack 3 will let customers of all sizes build their own “Amazon style clouds.” The offering is actually the next release of Cloud.com, a private-cloud provider (and service) that Citrix purchased last July.

The new CloudStack, the first to come out under the Citrix brand, adds new support for Swift, the OpenStack object storage technology. And CloudStack 3 includes a “cloud-optimized version of Citrix XenServer as a core-integrated feature,” according to Citrix. Public cloud powers Amazon. Rackspace, GoGrid and SoftLayer all use XenServer or Xen virtualization. Having said that, CloudStack 3 will also support rival KVM, OVM, vSphere and Xen virtualization, Citrix said. CloudStack 3 is now in beta and will be broadly available later this quarter. The product also adds support for Swift, the OpenStack object storage technology.

Cloud.com has seen some good traction as a private cloud platform, with customers including Zynga, Tata Communications and Edmunds.com.

Also on Monday, Nimbula said its new Nimbula Director 2.0 private-cloud software adds support for VMware, which Nimbula will deliver Amazon EC2-like functionality to VMware ESX users. That’s an interesting claim since the company’s co-founders, Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljion, led development of EC2 at Amazon.

The ESXi support means Nimbula can layer its EC2-like management function directly atop the VMware hypervisor. In a full VMware stack, the customer would use vSphere, vCenter and vCloud Director. In this case, Nimbula Director running atop the hypervisor brings Nimbula’s “developer friendly” functionality and management right to the hypervisor itself. According to a Nimbula spokeswoman, classic enterprise applications run great on VMware, but newer apps built to run on Amazon EC2, don’t necessarily run properly on the full VMware stack.

Carl Brooks, cloud analyst for Tier1 Research, a division of The 451 Group said Nimbula has “better technological bona fides than almost any other cloud platform, thanks to the pedigree from Pinkham and Van Biljion.”

He did note that Nimbula’s reference customers, VirtualScale and Solers, are a systems integrator and a solution provider, respectively. “That’s not the creme de la creme enterprise win everyone wants, but the fact that [Nimbula] developed this capability for VMware shows you that the technology is filtering into enterprises via the channel, and no matter how much noise anybody makes about enterprise wins, the majority of cloud platforms are getting sold to service providers and the channel. That’s a fact,” Brooks said.

In general, these private cloud infrastructure providers are pretty much in the same boat. They have customers, but many of them are third-party channel partners as opposed to the enterprise end-user accounts these vendors crave. But, Brooks said, they should embrace that.

“Everyone is chasing Amazon like it’s the gold standard when [what Amazon does] is just one way to do cloud and hardly the way enterprises care to think about it,” Brooks said. “Tell an IT guy at a big shop you can give him a platform to spin up servers in minutes, and he’ll look at you like you’re yesterday’s catch — he’s been able to do that technically since forever. It’s just not the point for enterprise IT; it is the point for IT infrastructure providers.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user theaucitron.

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Shareaholic's survey (click to enlarge)

Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic on the web than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn — combined. That’s according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 referral traffic report, which is based on aggregated data from more than 200,000 publishers that reach more than 260 million unique monthly visitors each month.

In January Pinterest was responsible for 3.6 percent of referrals tracked by Shareaholic, up from 2.5 percent during the previous month. That means the site is quickly gaining ground on Twitter, which drove 3.61 percent of referral traffic in January, down from 3.62 percent in December. Pinterest’s ascent has been especially rapid when viewed through a longer lens: The site owned just .17 percent of the traffic in Shareaholic’s July survey.

Not surprisingly, Facebook is holding steady at the top of Shareaholic’s survey, as it was responsible for more than a quarter of all referral traffic in January. Next in line was StumbleUpon, with 5.07 percent. It bears mention that while the Shareaholic survey is global, in the United States market alone StumbleUpon has in the past unseated Facebook as a top driver of referral traffic.

It’s exciting to see a relative newcomer growing so quickly in the web space. While the web’s more established companies are quite powerful these days, the fact that a startup like Pinterest has successfully established its own foothold shows that the competitive landscape is still alive and mainstream users are open to trying things from new players.

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The transition, though the company said it’s planned, still raises questions about the company’s well-being. Nanosolar is among a group of thin-film startups that have received hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital but have yet to become meaningful players in the solar market. Corrales replaces Geoff Tate, who arrived at the helm of Nanosolar two years ago in 2010. Before that, the company was led by its colorful founder Martin Roscheisen.

The company makes copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) solar panels, and it has built a reputation for making promises it can’t deliver. Part of that came from Roscheisen, who said the company began commercial production of solar panels in Dec, 2007, which meant it should have begun to steadily increase its shipments, line up more customers and expand production. But he then divulged few details that would show progress, such as its technology, factory capacities, customers or projects, and he did so for long enough to draw suspicion, then ridicule from analysts and competitors.

It turned out the company wasn’t ready for prime time. Nanosolar announced in Sept. 2009 that, for sure, it was entering mass production that time around. The company became more circumspect about its work and opened its factory in San Jose, Calif. for tours to show it was making progress.

Nanosolar has announced some big contracts, technology improvements and completion of projects by its customers since Tate took over, but the company also was trying to right itself during a time when the solar market was beset by an oversupply of panels and falling prices for solar panels. Many of the much larger solar manufacturers have closed factories, laid off a big percent of their workforce, or gone bankrupt (see our list). Whether Nanosolar can survive remains a big question.

Corrales started at Nanosolar in 2010 and the company says, “under Corrales, cumulative shipments have gone from zero to 10MW; and median panel efficiencies are now 11.5%,” the company said in a statement. Tate is “returning to retirement.”

Corrales previously worked for two other solar companies, including SolFocus. Before that, she was the VP of operations at Cisco Systems.

“Eugenia’s track record at Nanosolar and prior speaks for itself, and this planned transition will allow the company to maintain its momentum and trajectory. We are confident that under her stewardship we can grow the market for Nanosolar Utility panels and expand our global footprint,” said Erik Straser, Nanosolar board member and general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, in a statement.

Other solar thin-film CIGS startups that have replaced and lost CEOs of in recent years include MiaSole, SoloPower and HelioVolt. Solyndra got a new CEO in mid-2010, and a year later it went bankrupt.

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It was also the year that direct current (DC) took a back seat to alternating current (AC) after Niagara Falls Power Company chose AC transmission for its power plant.

Although we live in an AC-dominated world, DC seems poised for a comeback, particularly in data centers. Facebook adopted a DC architecture in its Prineville, Ore., data center. SAP spent $128,000 retrofitting a data center at its offices in Palo Alto, Calif., to rely on DC power. In 2010 it cut SAP’s energy bills by $24,000 per year.

ABB, the Swiss-Swedish conglomerate, bought a controlling interest last year in Validus DC Systems, which specializes in DC data center equipment. ABB also opened a factory in North Carolina to produce HVDC (high voltage DC) equipment for delivering power from solar and offshore wind farms to the grid. The Tres Amigas “superstation” will rely heavily on HVDC.

General Electric, meanwhile, bought Lineage Power, which produces DC equipment, and it has talked about using DC to power mining shovels and other heavy-duty equipment.

Nextek Power Systems and the EMmerge Alliance are also promoting DC as a way to cut power in buildings.

Behind the DC drive

What’s driving it? Although AC became the standard for electronic transmission, DC didn’t disappear. It just hid. Servers, large numbers of electric motors, batteries, even ships and airplanes run on DC. Solar panels produce DC power. Wind turbines can produce AC or DC power, but the extreme variability of wind power means that electricity generated by turbines has to pass through battery banks before it gets to the grid. As a result, wind farms are effectively DC.

The landline telephone system runs on DC too, notes Brian Fortenberry, a program manager at the Electric Power Research Institute.

To solve the mismatch, a whole industry of AC-DC converters has been developed. National Semiconductor sells billions of dollars’ worth of chips to convert power. Inverters in the solar industry exist to convert DC from solar panels to AC that can run on the wires in your home.

In data centers, the AC-DC gymnastics top the charts. Typically, AC from the grid has to be stepped down in voltage so it can be routed safely in building equipment. Lower-voltage AC then gets converted to DC so it can go to an uninterruptable power supply (UPS). DC power from the UPS then gets converted to AC so it can go over the wires in the building. Then it gets converted back to DC. Usually five conversions, or steps, downward take place.

By converting grid AC at the door of a data center to medium-voltage DC or converting stepped-down AC to DC at the last possible moment, a data center can cut utility bills by 10 to 20 percent or more, according to Trent Waterhouse, the VP of marketing for power electronics at General Electric.

Validus and others have also eliminated some of the technological hurdles involved in transmitting via DC, namely the monster-sized copper cables.

The same dynamics work in buildings. In a retail establishment, DC power from solar panels could go directly to DC-powered LED lights with not-intermediate conversions that sap energy, according to Nextek. Perhaps not coincidentally, Redwood Systems, the lighting networking company, touts that its technology is actually an example of DC networking.

More savings comes in real estate. DC data centers require 25 percent to 40 percent less square footage than their AC counterparts, largely because computer equipment can connect directly to backup batteries.

In a hypothetical example, a 2.5-megawatt data center power module in the AC world might need 7,295 square feet, Ronald Ranaldi, the VP of sales at Validus, told me last year. An equivalent DC power module might occupy only 5,102 square feet, a savings of 2,193 square feet. What’s more, a single data center might consist of several 2.5-megawatt modules.

“Real estate is often greater than the energy savings,” says Ranaldi. “In large, green field data centers, you are literally eliminating buildings.”

DC won’t take over the world. And not everyone is sold. Google is not taking DC for its data centers in part because of the cost that would be involved in retrofitting their existing architecture. But it seems that an idea that was current when Grover Cleveland was in the White House and Japan was just adopting the Gregorian calendar could make a comeback.

Image courtesy of The Planet

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As an introduction, it’s probably good to have an understanding of how Google Insights ranks search interest. Essentially, it normalizes data to give a picture of how likely people in each state are to search for a particular term, not necessarily what states had the most overall searches for any particular term. Here’s how Google explains it:

Just because two regions show the same percentage for a particular term doesn’t mean that their absolute search volumes are the same. Data from these two regions – with significant differences in search volumes – can be compared equally because the data has been normalized by the total traffic from each respective region.

The state maps are accurate as of Jan. 8, 2012. The embedded charts are live and will change over time.

Cloud computing

Search interest in cloud computing peaked in April 2011, the same month Amazon Web Services suffered a four-day outage that made national headlines. Coincidence?

Somewhat interestingly, people in Massachussetts, Maryland and Washington, D.C., were more likely do search for “cloud computing” than were people in California. However, there is a respectable tech and venture-capital scene around Boston, and a large federal presence (both government and military) in D.C. and the surrounding areas.

Big data

It’s hard to call the November 2011 the peak for interest in big data, as it has been growing consistently for the past year and might well go even higher.

Utah? Hmm. I’ll chalk up New York’s presence to the banking industry.

Hadoop

Cloudera launched in March 2009, the same time interest in Hadoop began its steady ascent.

I’m not sure what to make of the disparity in interest between “Hadoop” and “big data” among the states. Perhaps the two aren’t as tightly aligned in people’s minds as I thought. Although, “big data hadoop” was the No. 4 search term for “big data”.

NoSQL

The peak in October 2011 might have something to do with Oracle getting into the NoSQL space. I’m blanking on the March 2010 spike — any ideas?

Again with Utah, although the government seems less concerned with NoSQL than with other tech trends.

A few more interesting points

Utah ranks highly in interest for other programming trends, including Node.js.

The Salt Lake City metropolitan area actually shows up high in interest for Javascript and iOS.

If you’re wondering who’s interested in more-advanced techniques, look to advanced tech universities. I’m going to assume the presence of Carnegie Mellon University has something to do with Pittsburgh’s relative interest in machine learning.

And people apparently get interested in sharing photos via Instagram when they’re on vacation.

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Piazza founder and CEO Pooja Sankar

Piazza, the social network that lets college students and instructors discuss material online, has closed on $6 million in new funding.

The funding round, which serves as the Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup’s Series A, was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with the participation of previous investors Kapor Capital and Felicis Ventures. This brings Piazza’s total outside investment to approximately $7.5 million.

Growing beyond Q&A and STEM studies

Piazza will use the money to expand its service to more schools and add more features beyond its existing Q&A format, said founder and CEO Pooja Sankar in an interview this week. Such growth initiatives mean hiring more people: Piazza currently has around 10 full-time employees, and the company expects to double its staff by the end of 2012, Sankar said.

Another priority in the months ahead will be making Piazza friendlier to disciplines beyond science, technology, engineering and math (also referred to as STEM fields.) “There’s a different structure in [humanities] majors such as the arts, literature, and history. A lot of our focus going forward will be in understanding their needs,” Sankar said.

Taking on study group snobbery

Piazza aims to provide a single place where students can ask each other and their instructors questions about their studies and homework assignments. Students can opt to post to Piazza under their real names, or anonymously — which is meant to eliminate fears of asking “a stupid question.” Professors and teaching assistants, meanwhile, can help guide the Piazza discussions and access workflow and stats on the service.

Sankar says she was inspired to create Piazza after feeling excluded from study groups while she was earning degrees in computer science from IIT Kanpur and the University of Maryland, College Park. “I noticed all my classmates were in the computer lab working together, but I was too shy to ask to be included,” Sankar said. “They would all be done with an assignment by 2 a.m., and I would be working on it until 6 a.m…. Google and other search engines on the open Internet would have been too general for my purposes and the questions I had.”

Screenshot of Piazza questions and dashboard

Once Sankar joined the working world — before founding Piazza, she held developer positions at Kosmix, Oracle, and Facebook — she discovered that many other people had similar feelings of exclusion while studying engineering. “Sheryl Sandberg held an interesting event while I was at Facebook for women in technology, and I found that many of the people there said the exact same thing: They didn’t feel they had a support group in their studies.” In mid-2009, while pursuing her MBA at Stanford University, Sankar developed a working prototype of Piazza to help solve this problem.

Big growth, but no revenue yet

During its first few months, Piazza kept a low profile, operating only at Stanford in private beta. But in December 2010, the company opened its service to all universities, and 2011 brought fairly explosive growth: Piazza started the year with 4,000 student users and ended it with more than 100,000, Sankar said. Today, Piazza counts such schools as Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas and Virginia Tech among the hundreds of schools worldwide that utilize the service.

For all that growth, however, Piazza doesn’t make any money. It doesn’t charge universities or students for access to its service, nor does it serve advertisements. Sankar tells me revenue generation will probably not be on the agenda until mid-2013. “For the next 1.5 years, our focus will probably be to continue to grow our user base and expand the product,” she said.

Piazza is by no means the only company vying to be the social network of choice for college study services. Blackboard is hugely successful with its educational software; college textbooks now often come with their own social and online components; and many universities have their own white-label services to help students keep up on coursework. But Piazza’s growth over the past year shows there are still big needs that haven’t been fulfilled by these existing offerings, and instructors and students are willing to try out a free new service. Its challenge now is proving it has staying power as a truly must-have tool for professors and universities for many semesters ahead.

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