Saturday, February 27, 2010

Here Is A Jaw-Dropping Piece Of Green Tech News: The Bloom Box

Lesley Stahl takes us inside Bloom Energy at CBS/60 Minutes. It's the most amazing thing, and CEO K.R. Sridhar is the most endeering energy entrepreneur you can imagine. But the Bloom Box is not just fantasy. It is installed and running at Google, Fedex, Wal-Mart, Staples and Ebay. It runs on fossil fuels, renewable fuels such as biogas, and on solar power. K.R. Sridhar, who is from India, tells Stahl that he want's to build home units that can run off the grid at $2,000 a pop. If that isn't enough to turn you on to this video, maybe nothing will...

Hans Sandberg


Watch CBS News Videos Online

Bloom Energy home page here.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Hot Off the Virtual Presses: The Future Of News ... AOL-Style

Business Week reports that "AOL Moves to Build Tech 'Newsroom of the Future'"

Here are three take-away messages for AOL's news of the future:

  • "AOL is using software to determine which articles to write and then give journalists up-to-the-minute data on how much traffic those articles generate."
  • "AOL is even considering sharing a portion of quarterly profits with staffers whose work fetches the most page views."
  • "To help get traffic flowing back to its site, AOL is letting user interest play a role in story assignments. Editors use internally developed software to figure out what topics are hot on the Web, based on activity on such sites as Google and Facebook. Frequently, stories are assigned to explore such popular topics as 'How to Open Champagne,' which was published in December on AOL food site Slashfood."
Let's see now, what should journalists aspire to write about?
Healthcare reform? Corruption in our political system? Long-term mass unemployment? The war in Afghanistan?

Well, maybe not....
How about Tiger Woods, Champagne-opening tricks and how to gett your hands on that new Gucci bag?

Any takers?

Hans Sandberg

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

56,318 pageviews later.... Are We There Yet?

Yes, and No! We have spread our words, but the purely monetary return on the investment is limited, or 103 dollars to be exact. However, it was not money that made me start blogging, but somewhere back in my head I was hoping that maybe money would one day start to trickle in even if it was just a tiny stream. Well, it was more like a drop in a bucket. And the drop hasn't really fallen yet, because Google needs some more time before having verified the clicks and views, so my first 100-dollar check from Google will probably not reach me until late February. What am I going to do with the money? Well, I don't think I'll go to Disneyworld, but I'll treat my lovely wife Lisa to dinner.

Hans