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<title>Haaze.com / marelimcheffe / All</title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com</link>
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<pubDate>Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:11:15 +0000</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[ARPA-E a litmus test for energy R&D agenda]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=arpa-e-a-litmus-test-for-energy-rd-agenda</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=arpa-e-a-litmus-test-for-energy-rd-agenda</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:11:15 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>marelimcheffe</dc:creator>
<category>Eco</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=arpa-e-a-litmus-test-for-energy-rd-agenda</guid>
<description><![CDATA[NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.--The ARPA-E Summit opens this morning with seemingly dual purposes: toinspire scientists to invent and to convince Congress of the energy agency's own worth.The conference is a showcase for cutting-edge energy research and development and a magnet for investors and politicians eager to tout the benefits of investing in developing clean-energy technologies. Keynoters include Energy Secretary Steven Chu, former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Navy Secretary Raymond Mabus. Also speaking will be some Republican and Democrat members of Congress, leaders of big businesses, and representatives of several fledging technology companies.Secretary Steven Chu at last year&amp;39's ARPA-E Summit.(Credit:Martin LaMonica/CNET)After last year's inaugural event and nearly two years into the overall the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program at the Department of Energy, director Arun Majumdar and other DOE officials can point to progress in some potentially significant technologies and follow-up private sector investment. ARPA-E was created in 2007 to pursue high-risk, high-reward technologies but was not funded until April 2009 with $400 million for two years through the stimulus act. But in the debate over federal spending, there is concern that ARPA-E's funding may be cut. Congress is currently debating a budget to keep the federal government operating which, according to one report, would dramatically cut ARPA-E. The White House, meanwhile, has submitted a budget that seeks to more than double the ARPA-E budget, part of a strategy to invest in innovation to spur the economy and stimulate export of U.S.-made goods.Entrepreneurs at the ARPA-E Summit said yesterday that the program has largely functioned as it should, giving them the funding--usually in grants sized under $10 million--to pursue longer-term projects. They also said the program is generally well-administered in that it sets specific, market-based technical targets. If they are not met, the grant is cut off. Venture capitalists cannot invest in science that is too speculative or will take more than a few years to prove out, which his where research-oriented grants can fill a gap, said Anthony Atti, the CEO of Phononic Devices, which is making thermoelectric chips that can be used as better heat sinks for computers or generate electricity from low-grade waste heat. After using a $2 million grant from ARPA-E to reach technical milestones for that program, the company raised an additional $10 million from venture capitalists.&quot;I'm a free-market guy but the reality is if you want to be serious in the energy science and technology space--which we're still debating as a country--then you need research and development,&quot; Atti said. Venture capitalists are willing to take on the risk of the management team's ability to execute and whether a market will materialize for products. But they cannot handle those risks on top of science risk, Atti said. Federal funding can &quot;derisk the science.&quot;Enough blue-sky researchOne of the technologies that is a clear potential breakthrough originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where a professor developed a relatively cheap catalyst for getting hydrogen fuel from water. The company, Sun Catalytix, was funded by venture investors and then received a $4 million grant from ARPA-E to pursue a longer-range product that would convert hydrogen from a solar cell, which it is displaying here.Looking for a clean-energy home run (photos) That grant played an &quot;incredibly vital&quot; role in the company so far because it allowed the company to pursue a potential breakthrough without the commercial pressure of delivering a product within a year or two, said Mark Barnett, the vice president of business development and general counsel. &quot;We're tackling a huge problem with a huge potential impact and material development is always a multi-year process,&quot; he said.David Mather, the president of MTPV, which did not receive a grant, said the way ARPA-E is structured doesn't allow it to pursue &quot;blue sky&quot; research the way that DARPA did. The decades-old Defense Advanced Research Program Agency, the model for ARPA-E, yielded many technologies, including the Internet and GPS.ARPA-E grant solicitations are very &quot;descriptive&quot; in that they fall into well understood energy categories, such as wind, solar, and algae. But MTPV's technology, which converts waste heat to electricity, doesn't fall into any of those categories. Makani Power CEO Corwin Hardham also said that ARPA-E's grant allowed it to pursue science that venture capitalists would not feel comfortable funding because of their shorter time horizons. Employees give regular updates to program administrators on its self-driven, wind-harvesting &quot;wing,&quot; which is designed to gather wind energy at altitudes higher than traditional turbines.&quot;You can forget about our energy problems or our climate problems. But we should invest in energy technologies for economic reasons,&quot;he said. &quot;America's advantage has always been technology but we're losing it very quickly.&quot;<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Study: 'Building IT' to speed energy efficiency]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=study-building-it-to-speed-energy-efficiency</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=study-building-it-to-speed-energy-efficiency</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 13 Dec 2010 08:10:43 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>marelimcheffe</dc:creator>
<category>Eco</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=study-building-it-to-speed-energy-efficiency</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Buildings are the next frontier for computerized instrumentation, leading to a collision between building management incumbents and IT companies looking for new markets, according to a report.Lux Research tomorrow is expected to release a report that predicts a wave of acquisitions at the intersection of buildings and IT. One of the best examples of energy efficiency retrofits through green technology is the Empire State Building.(Credit:Empire State Building Company)Building control companies Siemens, Honeywell, Johnson Controls, and Schneider Electric are likely to purchase smaller companies, as they already have. Meanwhile, IT companies IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, and Google will continue to look for a foothold in building energy efficiency. In the past few years, several new and established companies have moved into building control in part because buildings, in general, perform very poorly when it comes to meeting their expected performance on energy efficiency.Adding modern controls to HVAC systems, such as sensors, and introducing energy monitoring systems and efficiency lighting could improve commercial building efficiency by 24 percent and 16 percent in residential homes, Lux said. These types of improvements could save hundreds of billions of dollars a year worldwide, it said.On the business side, building efficiency is ripe for innovation because it fits the venture capital investment model relatively well.In the beginning of the decade, entrepreneurs and investors who moved into green technology often focused on power generation, such as solar or biofuels. Increasingly, green-technology venture capitalists are moving into energy efficiency because it requires less money to develop and commercialize a product.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Windows Live Spaces Transition To WordPress Creates 1 Million New&nbsp'Blogs]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=windows-live-spaces-transition-to-wordpress-creates-1-million-newnbspblogs</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=windows-live-spaces-transition-to-wordpress-creates-1-million-newnbspblogs</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>marelimcheffe</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=windows-live-spaces-transition-to-wordpress-creates-1-million-newnbspblogs</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Last September at TechCrunch Disrupt, Microsoft announced that all 7 million Windows Live Spaces blogs would be transitioning to WordPress.com.  It turned out that number was inflated, and a subsequent internal email put the real number of transitioned blogs at 300,000.Well, the number of Windows Live Spaces blogs which have transitioned over to WordPress.com is now at &amp;''over half a million&amp;'' and another half a million new WordPress blogs have been created by Windows Live users.  So that brings the total new WordPress blogs created as a result of the partnership to one million.The total won&amp;'t get to 7 million by March, 2011 when Windows Live Spaces blogs will no longer be supported.  But many of those are dead blogs anyway.  A million new WordPress blogs is nothing to sneeze at.  Since the deal was announced, the number of new blog sign-ups at WordPress.com has more than doubled from 400,000 a month to 900,000 a month.CrunchBase InformationMicrosoftWordPress.comInformation provided by CrunchBase<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Pruning rotten apples from your company]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=pruning-rotten-apples-from-your-company</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=pruning-rotten-apples-from-your-company</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>marelimcheffe</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=pruning-rotten-apples-from-your-company</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The Osmond Brothers got it wrong. One bad apple CAN spoil the whole darn bunch. And thata4a4s especially true in the startup world. A negative and selfish employee can start a contagion throughout the company, causing other employees to act the same way and sucking up more of managementa4a4s time, says Stanford Professor and author Bob Sutton in this entrepreneur thought leader lecture given at Stanford University. Reforming those bad apples is possible, but there comes a point where you have to cut your losses.(Can&amp;'t see the video Click here)Next Story: Deals &amp;038' More: Novariant grabs $4.5M for hands-free farm equipment, Auditude raises $4M for video ads Previous Story: Merry Christmas, Zynga: CityVille eclipses FarmVille as the world&amp;'s biggest gamePrintEmailTwitterFacebookGoogle BuzzLinkedIn      DiggStumbleUponRedditDeliciousGoogleMore&amp;8230'          Tags: problem employees, Stanford University          Tags: problem employees, Stanford UniversityChris Morris is editor of the Entrepreneur Corner on VentureBeat, helping start-up business owners launch and grow their companies. He previously worked at Yahoo! Finance, where he was managing editor, and as director of content development at CNNMoney.com. He is also a widely respected journalist in the video game and technology fields, whose work has appeared in Variety, CNBC.com, AOL and Forbes.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MorrisatLargeVentureBeat has new weekly email newsletters.  Stay on top of the news, and don't miss a beat.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Hotmail introduces aliases to create temporary email addresses]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=hotmail-introduces-aliases-to-create-temporary-email-addresses</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=hotmail-introduces-aliases-to-create-temporary-email-addresses</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>marelimcheffe</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=hotmail-introduces-aliases-to-create-temporary-email-addresses</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Microsoft has enabled the use of aliases its widely-used Hotmail email service. The new feature enables Hotmail users to add temporary email addresses in situations when they do not wish to use their personal, or every-day email address.According to Windows Live director of product management Dharmesh Mehta, the move is really about pushing Microsofta4a4s email beyond the competition.And when he says a4Acompetitiona4, he means Google.Aliases are a nifty way of routing one-time email correspondence (such as when shopping online) to onea4a4s inbox without exposing the actual email address to possible spammers. Hotmail and other email services have so far incorporated the use of a special character in an address that will route the incoming messages accordingly.Gmail, for instance, allows the use of the a4+a4a4 sign, like a4Ajohndoe+cardeals@gmail.coma4 which will direct all messages to the actual email address, maybe flagged as spam, starred for later, or routed to a specific folder. However, according to Mehta, Hotmail aliases are integrated into the service&amp;8211'meaning ita4a4s easy to manage&amp;8211'and, more importantly, it can be easy to figure out a persona4a4s actual email address from the a4+ signa4a4 construction. For now, a Hotmail user can have five aliases, but the number will grow to fifteen later.The new feature may be very convenient for heavy-duty email users, but it doesna4a4t seem too likely to win over new email users just by itself. Microsoft is in the process of revamping its service and has been adding new features and technology, such as sandboxing and additional security technology. All of these are intended to keep Hotmail head and shoulders above the rest, says Mehta.a4AFor us, [the competition is] really versus GMail. So how do we start to beat Gmail in a couple of different key scenarios certain customers are just going to like morea4 Mehta asks in a CNET interview.Microsofta4a4s Hotmail is currently the worlda4a4s most popular web-based email service with around 360 million users. Yahoo Mail is second with roughly 280 million, and Googlea4a4s Gmail&amp;8211'the youngest by far&amp;8211'is at third place with 190 million. But Google is the one to look out for, especially now that Googlea4a4s Android operating system is gaining popularity and driving mobile users to sign up for Googlea4a4s integrated services, such as Gmail.Next Story: Verizon iPhone 4 breaks first-day sales records in two hours Previous Story: Analyst: Applea4a4s $3.9B investment means Apple television on the wayPrintEmailTwitterFacebookGoogle BuzzLinkedIn      DiggStumbleUponRedditDeliciousGoogleMore&amp;8230'          Tags: email, gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo MailCompanies: Google, Microsoft, YahooPeople: Dharmesh Mehta          Tags: email, gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo MailCompanies: Google, Microsoft, YahooPeople: Dharmesh Mehta Have news to share Launching a startup Email: tips@venturebeat.comVentureBeat has new weekly email newsletters.  Stay on top of the news, and don't miss a beat.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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