Improving the Performance of Solar Thermal Electrical Power

The US Department of Energy granted a US$1.37 billion loan guarantee to Brightsource Energy last week which could help clear the way for over 15 gigawatts of solar thermal power projects in California. Brightsource built a pilot plant in Israel to prove their technology and has tested it over the past 18 months. Their flagship Ivanpah project in California got … Read More

Drumbeat: March 11, 2010

John Michael Greer: Barbarism and good brandy Think of it this way. The individual photons that heat the planet Mercury each contain, on average, the same quantity of energy as the individual photons that heat the planet Neptune. Is Neptune as warm as Mercury? Not hardly, and the reason is that by the time they get out to the orbit … Read More

A Cheat Sheet to Help You Conquer Social Media

Marketeers who are still a little unsure about charting their path through the choppy waters of Facebook , Twitter and LinkedIn could do worse than check out this handy little guide to making social media work for them. The CMO’s guide to the social landscape, created for CMO.com by client 97th Floor, takes all the major social media sites in … Read More

Sony Announces PlayStation Move, Its Wii-Baiting Motion Controller

Sony gave a brief tech demo of its motion controller at the E3 show last year ( and discussed it with us just a few weeks ago ), but a lot of the particulars were left unknown. Today, they demonstrated the newly-dubbed PlayStation Move, and released details about accessories, price, and release date. Sony’s hoping the Move will attract buyers … Read More

ChatRoulette Spin-Off Uses Google Maps to (Almost) Shed Anonymity

It only took a couple of months, but it seems the first spin-off of ChatRoulette is here. ChatRoulette Map does exactly what it sounds like, using Google Maps to plot the IP addresses of all the voyeurs and weirdies who are online and using the crazy site. You can choose whether to hoist up a picture of yourself–so far, FC … Read More

Tweet-Mapping Arrives, Along with the Twitter’s Battle Against Google

Twitter’s geotagging powers could transform the lifecasting service into something extremely powerful . And the company’s just taken the first steps to making this happen through its own Web page: It’s turned on Tweet mapping.

BP in $7bn deal with Devon Energy

Oil giant BP has announced a deal with US independent oil and gas producer Devon Energy Corp which will allow it to begin exploring off the coast of Brazil. The deal, worth $7 billion (£4.7 billion), includes almost a dozen exploration blocks in Brazil, which comprises some of the world’s biggest deepwater oil fields. It

Original Source of BP in … Read More

Life’s Lessons Are Not School Chemistry Chapters

A couple I know recently welcomed their first child. The husband, an engineer by profession, was the sole breadwinner. He lost his job in this economic downturn and has been unemployed for the last few months. So? There are probably hundreds of thousands of people in a similar situation i.e., single income families, with a baby to boot, searching for … Read More

Testing Your Own Business Idea

Entrepreneurs, in fact everyone, loves their own business ideas. Just watch a few episodes of Dragons’ Den you’ll see exactly what I mean as the would be entrepreneurs parade their business ideas in front of the Dragons. There’s always a few hopefuls looking for investment in their great business idea even though it’s nothing more than an idea. Worse still … Read More

What Does Advertising on Yelp Get You?

That was one of the topics of Luther Lowe’s presentation Tuesday at the annual SearchFest conference in Portland. Lowe — Yelp’s Manager of Business Outreach — gave a generally clear description of what the company says are the benefits of advertising on Yelp. I say “generally” because he said that advertising on Yelp gets a business owner “SEO,” but he … Read More