When it comes to green stimulus, the world is halfway done — and China and Japan lead in the race, according to a Tuesday report. But the United States is catching up, though not without some hiccups along the way. Read more »
According to Vice President Joe Biden, the tens of billions of dollars from the stimulus package invested in research and innovation for clean power, the smart grid, and advanced automobiles are working. Read more »
Smith Electric Vehicles U.S., an electric truck and van maker based in Kansas City, Mo. and backed by $32 million in stimulus grants, has become the great green hope for its loss-making parent company, the United Kingdom’s Tanfield Group. Read more »
Sonic Solutions has signed up another retailer to use its RoxioNow streaming video service to deliver Hollywood content to a wide range of consumer electronics devices. Sears has agreed to a licensing deal through which it will offer movies and TV shows for rental or purchase. Read more »
What the Government Accountability Office describes as “palpable excitement” and an unprecedented gush of federal investment won’t be enough to establish intercity high-speed passenger rail service in the U.S. Read more »
The iPhone 4 has been officially outed, its specs shared. Having just purchased the Sprint EVO 4G, however, I am happier about my purchase than before the latest device from Apple was announced. Here’s how the two phones stack up against one another. Read more »
Coulomb Technologies, a startup working on charging infrastructure for electric vehicles, has garnered a $15 million federa; grant to support deployment of 4,600 networked charging stations in nine regions around the country — a $37 million endeavor in all. Read more »
Navistar today fired up the assembly line for its eStar electric truck at a plant in Indiana’s Elkhart County today, and said it’s delivering the first electric vehicle to be built and deployed with funding from the stimulus-funded battery grant program. Read more »
Doling out awards ASAP under the Department of Energy’s Loan Guarantee Program has been an ongoing theme for the agency under the Obama administration. One of the next steps to speed up the process will be bringing more of it online. Read more »
Spring Design is now shipping the Alex reader, an e-book reader with both a six inch e-Ink screen and a 3.5 inch color touchscreen. The Alex runs Android, and it shows to be a solid reader after initial testing. Here’s the first look at the Alex. Read more »
Cheaper, longer-lasting, safer and smaller — those are the kinds of rechargeable batteries that could become available for electric cars if some of the research projects funded under the Department of Energy’s latest round of grants for high-risk, early-stage energy technologies deliver on their moonshot ambitions. Read more »
“Like gangbusters.” That’s how Joe Fisher, chief executive for Azusa, Calif.-based startup CFX Battery envisions the company growing in 2010. Of course the lithium-ion battery cell developer will need funds to do that, and Wednesday announced that it has raised $14.2 million in a second round […] Read more »
Yesterday, the New York Times published an article examining what it refers to as the upcoming “war” between computer chip manufacturers. It’s an interesting read if you’re desperately into that sort of thing, but what’s most compelling is the assertion that Apple probably invested at least a […] Read more »
The Department of Energy faces a dilemma. It aims to fund projects that will help reduce power consumption, boost energy efficiency, put Americans back to work and build up what the Obama administration likes to call the clean energy economy. And it wants to do so […] Read more »
Nnow that U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) stimulus funding has practically dried up, venture capitalists can’t count on more government-induced tailwinds to propel their cleantech ambitions. So, how are they coping? I’d say pretty well, if you factor in an encouraging string of early 2010 ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Battery maker EnerDel has big plans for Mount Comfort, Indiana. That’s where the company, a subsidiary of Ener1 said today it plans to invest $237 million leasing and equipping a new manufacturing plant for lithium-ion battery cells and packs. Federal, state and local governments have stepped […] Read more »
The two federal agencies responsible for allocating $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus spending today released information about the next round of funding, which total $4.6 million. They also revealed how they would handle the missing $2.3 billion from the last round of grants. Read more »
Looks like Netflix CEO Reed Hastings had a change of heart about everyone’s favorite casual video gaming console, as he told Peter Kafka on Friday during an All Things D panel at CES that the chances of launching Netflix on the Wii are “excellent,” according to […] Read more »
I’ll say this for being a Time Warner Cable subscriber — for the second year in a row, it’s brought a little extra drama to the holiday season. Last New Year’s Eve, I was prepared to cut the cord on my cable because Time Warner nearly […] Read more »
Ah, Bakersfield, California. A lot has happened since the city’s new smart meters delivered jaw-droppingly high energy bills to residents. Fast-forward a couple of months and the technology is being called into question, a lawsuit has been filed and PG&E is tapping the brakes on ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The issue of green jobs has risen once again to the top of the pile in Washington, D.C. in recent days: Most recently, the White House announced a plan on Wednesday to create “tens of thousands of jobs,” the Wall Street Journal reports, by providing $5 billion […] Read more »
It’s hard to know where to begin. The weekend has seen a series of events unfold that manage to combine — beautifully, perfectly — into a single glorious mutually-annihilating maelstrom of silliness. On Friday the Wall Street Journal published an inflammatory piece by Randall Stross which […] Read more »
Arguably, Zoho is a competitor of Google’s, since both include web-based document creation and editing tools among their product offerings. That hasn’t stopped Zoho from offering integration with Google products in the past, and today it introduces full Google Docs compatibility, a move which shows it […] Read more »
Best Parts of the New Smart Grid Stimulus Awards: Smart grid analyst Jesse Berst sees three high points in the latest round of stimulus funding awards for smart grid projects: roughly 30 percent of the money went to long-overlooked utility-scale energy storage, much of the money […] Read more »
The award of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and loans for electric vehicles, batteries and charging infrastructure in the last few months has provided a major boost for companies working in the space. That’s true for Scottsdale, Ariz.-based ECOtality, whose subsidiary eTec (with several […] Read more »
We’re big fans of the way the Microsoft Xbox LIVE game show 1 vs. 100 blurs the lines between TV and gaming. As the second season of 1 vs. 100 starts today (at 5 p.m. PT! Rush home and get in the mob!), it will have […] Read more »
I’ve long been looking for a Windows-based Twitter client that can delight me as much as its native Mac counterparts. Too many clients for Windows depend on Adobe AIR, something which isn’t an ideal arrangement, in my opinion. TweetDeck and Seesmic are both powerful tools, but […] Read more »
[qi:101] The two government agencies responsible for distributing the $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus grants said today that they’ve consolidated the two remaining funding rounds into one, and have asked for more input to improve the application process. The stimulus program, which closed the first round […] Read more »
AppleGazette’s Kevin Whipps addresses the quandary over how to choose between a MacBook and a MacBook Pro, noting that it used to be that if you wanted a 13-inch Mac laptop (excluding the MacBook Air), the only option was the original MacBook. Now with a 13-inch […] Read more »
Energy baron T. Boone Pickens wants to see delivery trucks and just about any other vehicle that “returns to the ‘barn’ each night” running on natural gas. A relative newcomer to the U.S. market, Electric Vehicles International, has just moved to Stockton, Calif., from its former […] Read more »
Jordan Hoffner will leave his position as head of content partnerships at YouTube to join Ben Silverman’s new content endeavor at IAC. The announcement was made yesterday at YouTube, and paidContent was the first to report it. Coming from NBC, Hoffner was an injection of big […] Read more »
