What Solar Needs: Its Own Karl Rove

What Solar Needs: Its Own Karl RoveThe solar industry has risen in popularity, in part as a result of its good intentions — but soon it will have to start to play ugly.

Public opinion data from Gotham Research group provide numbers for what many of you already suspect. Solar enjoys overwhelming approval from the public, who see it as a way to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and stimulate local economies.

Eighty percent of Americans rated solar power favorably, compared to 39 percent for nuclear and 32 percent for oil. Seventy-four percent believe that solar is a “long-term solution for the country’s energy needs.” Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have renewable portfolio standards.

The renewable industry is getting beaten in the nasty department by fossil fuels. Here’s how to fight back.

The Solar Energy Industries Association, meanwhile, says that 94 percent of Americans see solar as important and 80 percent want to see subsidies transferred from fossil fuel to solar.

Unfortunately, the public also said solar is too expensive, will remain an intermittent source of power, and can’t really directly compete with coal or natural gas. Only 41 percent thought solar was affordable, and only 34 percent thought it was reliable.

Seventeen percent said solar would “never” be the largest source of new electricity for whole cities.  Most of those polled were largely in the dark about the subsidies provided to oil and gas. Just 19 percent correctly estimated that the fossil fuel industry gets more than $10 billion in subsidies.

And chances are it will get worse as fossil fuel providers pour on the money for ads and lobbyists to turn back the gains of the renewable industry. Valero, Tesero and Koch Industries have poured millions into the campaign for Prop 23 that could put California’s greenhouse gas regulations on hold for years. Natural gas has been flogging the airwaves with ads starring the Flonase woman informing us how wonderfully patriotic methane is.

The open question is whether the industry has the stomach to fight back — which is where Karl Rove comes in. The industry needs to outline in clear, sound-bite-like blurbs how solar will become the affordable best option in the future. More importantly, the spokesman needs to dig up dirt on the fossil industry.

Things like:

All of these statements are true. Exaggerated for effect, but true.

Continue reading …

Tags:
Back to top

Half Off! France ‘Fights Piracy’ By Subsidizing Digital Music

France has decided to try something… novel. The country will attempt to prop up the digital music industry by subsidizing legal music consumption by young people.

Under the initiative, citizens between 12 and 25 years old will be able to purchase a “carte musique”—a prepaid card  usable on subscription-based music websites. The card will come with €50 worth of credit, but customers only have to pay €25. The rest will be paid by the French government.

The purpose of the program is to get the young’uns into the habit of paying for content instead of pirating it. The program will last for two years, and France expects to sell about one million cards per year. That translates to an expected €50 million total expenditure by the French government to help young people learn the value of paying for the content that they consume.

The European Commission gave the program a round of applause by saying that it is ‘well designed’ to fight illegal downloads

The European Commission even gave the program a round of applause by saying that it was “well designed” to fight illegal downloads, and that there were safeguards in place to help prevent “distortions of competition.”

Those safeguards include a €5 million cap on the monetary benefits any one music service can rake in, the idea being that independent and niche services can also get in on the action. The participating sites must also slash the price of music, and they must either extend the duration of their subscriptions or help advertise the carte musique.

This is not just about fighting piracy, though. The French government is all about preserving certain aspects of the country’s culture, and French music is definitely one of those aspects that matters to France as it fends off the barbarian “Anglo-Saxon” imperialists. Earlier this year, the French government made waves by considering a tax on companies that advertise online as a way to prop up (French) creative industries that have trouble keeping up with the digital world, such as musicians and publishers.

On top of this, France has been known to be unfriendly to e-books in favor of traditional printed books (and the mom and pop bookstores, protected by price controls on books, that sell them). The state has also promised free newspaper subscriptions to all citizens when they turn 18 in order to help the print media compete with online and broadcast journalism.

From that angle, France’s decision to help out digital music downloads (and not, say, good old fashioned live performances, or mom and pop record stores) seems a little inconsistent, but it’s all of a piece with the idea of “saving French culture.”

Still, the European Commission seems to agree that the carte musique could be a positive measure, noting that it will “contribute to preserving pluralism and cultural diversity in the online music industry.”

Back to top

The Web Isn’t Dead (So Says Its Inventor) and Other ‘Do Lecture’ Notes

Holed up in yurts in a field in Cardigan Bay, Wales, a couple of week ago was an impressive collection of some of the most intensely motivated, high-achieving individuals ever assembled — oh, and me!

Beyond the insights you perhaps expect from him is a man who is a bewildering mix of humility, staggering intellect and unfettered ambition.

I was attending The Do Lectures — a series of talks, by turns inspiring, funny, jaw-dropping, but mostly humbling. The speakers come from diverse walks of life brought together by a common thread — a great story. There is a very special atmosphere in this field — a suspension of cynicism helps and any negativity is drowned out by the spirit of can-do that hums throughout.

And I got to find out what Sir Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web and, I was delighted to discover, a Wired reader, thought of Wired’s “The Web is Dead” article.

“Not so,” he told me, “rumors of the demise of the Web are very much exaggerated” (or words to that effect).

A fascinating encounter. And his talk the following morning was equally fascinating. Beyond the insights you perhaps expect from him — “Stop thinking of the internet as another place; it is just part of the Information Society” — emerged a man who is a bewildering mix of humility, staggering intellect and unfettered ambition.

Most of us mortals would be satisfied to have achieved what he has in 10 lifetimes and yet he feels that the job has only just begun, because 80 percent of the world is still not connected and he will not be satisfied until they are.

So it struck me on my drive home, as I listened to coverage of the pope beatifying a cardinal, that he should have made a detour down the M4 — because we had some prospective saints of our own. Take Maggie Doyne — 23 years old and running an orphanage and school in the Nepalese Himalayas — both of which she built from scratch.

And this was not a story about daddy’s money paying for her to be altruistic — this was a heartfelt story about courage, resilience and youthful belligerence.

Maggie, wide-eyed, diminutive with a Joan-of-Arc zeal, had us transfixed. Stifled sobbing all around. And when she announced that her ambition was to feed, house and clothe all the other 80 million orphans worldwide — nobody blinked. Having said that, she could do with a hand, so check out blinknow.org.

The one thing Maggie does not need is a lecture in improving your motivational mindset — she got one anyway! Preceding her was Phil Parker, an osteopath, NLP master and hypnotherapist, who argued convincingly that a simple change in the language we use can resolve inertia and unlock ambition. He encouraged us to switch from negative or “passive” language to active language to gain control of a situation.

Looks like our parents were on to something with their incessant cry of “There’s no such thing as can’t”.

Another practical life lesson was provided by David Allen. He quite literally wrote the book on “Getting Things Done” and he shared with us his tips, after a lifetime of study, on how to download the unnecessary information clogging up our minds to free up what he calls “psychic space”. David seems to be one of the happiest and laid-back of men — clearly practicing his preaching. He also provided my favorite insight of the weekend on the subject of procrastination: “There is no reason to have a thought more than once — unless you like the thought”.

Other speakers of note include Jay Rogers, who has set out to change the way cars are made and disposed of; Paula Le Dieu, who is determined to recover our lost cultural heritage hidden beneath an ocean of copyright; Alasdair Harris, who will not rest until fish stocks get back to sustainable levels and Ed Stafford, who walked the length of the Amazon for two-and-a-half years to highlight the plight of the rain forest.

Yes, I know it sounds worthy — but I cannot help but be in awe of this brilliant group of people — their enthusiasm is infectious.

Having said that, it is hard to keep up this heady level of world-changing ambition, so a change of pace and some balance was needed. Thankfully this was provided by Steve Edge who galloped through his life story. Severe dyslexia, home education, living with a chimpanzee, commuting to work on horseback down the Old Kent Road at the age of 15, working with Jim Henson on The Muppets and George Lucas on Star Wars and Indiana Jones shortly after.

Steve Edge is a great showman — if you do nothing else today watch his video. In this extraordinary circus in a field in Wales, Steve Edge was the ringmaster.

Rupert Turnbull is the publisher of Wired UK Magazine

Follow Epicenter on Twitter for disruptive tech news

See Also:

Tags:
Back to top

E-Books Sales Nearly Double In a Year, Trounce Hardcovers In August

E-book sales have almost doubled year-over-year, according to figures released by the Association of American Publishers, and August showed a particularly huge migration from print to digital reading.

Through August the total for non-acedemic e-books was $263 million, versus just under $90 million for the first eight months of last year. So far this year e-books represent 9.03 per cent of total consumer book sales, compared to 3.31 percent by the end of 2009.

Hardcovers tanked in August, down nearly 25 per cent year-over-year. There must have been a lot of Kindles at the beach: e-book sales for the same month were up 172 percent.

The full report is embedded below

AAP Reports Publisher Book Sales for August

Tags:
Back to top

Size Does Matter When It Comes To Tablets, Newspapers Fear

The iPad has been a hit with newspaper and magazine publishers because its 9.7-inch screen gives apps room to play with layout. At a recent industry conference, a digital strategist for the Gannett newspaper chain worried that the coming wave of 7-inch tablets might hurt that investment by shrinking one key component that makes those apps profitable: ads.

“People will pay for content on mobile platforms,” Gannett Digital Ventures’ Craig McKennis told gathered newspaper and e-reading professionals at the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers 3rd International E-Reading & Tablet Conference in Hamburg.

Gannett has had great success selling newspaper subscriptions to small-screen Kindle e-readers, according to McKennis, making up for the dearth of ad opportunities on that platform. But app stores on tablets so far generally haven’t allowed for subscription purchases, leading publishers to offer either individual issues at print newsstand  for sale as stand-alone apps or inexpensive apps backed by advertising. This is due to a sort of stand-off between publishers and Apple over access to subscriber details and, to a lesser extent, the subscription fee split, for periodicals and dailies that would be sold through the iTunes store.

On the iPad, Gannett’s leading and most profitable app is USA Today, a launch-day partner with Apple which has attracted strong advertising sales based on more than 900,000 free downloads. USA Today’s success in fact prompted Gannet to reverse its decision to go to a pay model July 4 and is still free to readers.

Smaller screens diminish ad visibility by definition and therefore the appeal of in-app advertising. To preserve ad visibility, new form factors would require either an entirely new app design or a retreat to apps designed for mobile phones or a version of the subscription delivery used for Kindles. (USA Today currently offers an app for iPhones, iPads and Android smartphones, but not Android tablets.)

Concerns by newspaper publishers that smaller tablets might not be good for their digital business model are probably not enough to influence tablet-makers’ designs — after all, these devices are supposed to be much more than e-readers, and portability is arguably as important as function.

But if “smaller” ads could also be a tougher sell for a wider variety of applications — not just media apps — and this could influence market leader Apple’s decision on a 7-inch iPad or Google’s thinking on whether or not to fully support tablet access to the Android Marketplace.

Conference Looked to Make E-Reading, Tablets Work for News Media [Editor & Publisher]

Image via USAToday.com

See Also:

Tags: , , , , ,
Back to top

NYT for iPad Now Offers Full Content, Still Free (For Now)

The full-content version of the New York Times is now available on the iPad, and it’s free.

Previously, get the full Times experience, iPad owners had to go to the website. The Times has an iPhone app which already has the same extended functionality the iPad is getting, but the layout is completely different on the tablet, maxmized for the larger screen. It has a similar look-and-feel to the Times Reader, the Adobe Air-powered desktop client that is available only to paying subscribers of the print edition.

The Times Editor’s Choice iPad app had offered a limited subset of the full day’s news, but did it with a very pretty and intuitive interface. V2.0, renamed NYTimes for iPad, keeps the fancy, newspaper-like layout but lets you read everything. And that’s not all that’s new.

To get the whole shebang, you’ll need to sign up, otherwise you can only browse content from a few sections: Top News, Most E-Mailed, Business Day and Video. If you have ever logged in to New York Times site, you can use your existing ID. If not, you can sign up, for free, from the app itself. Once in, you can browse sections with a popover menu and, once in a section, you just swipe to move between pages and tap on a headline and summary to read the full article. In article view, you can navigate directly to other articles with a scrolling strip across the bottom of the screen.

In addition to the full content of the newspaper, you can also read “a selection of blogs” and view slideshows within the articles themselves. The app can also deliver breaking news alerts via push notification. I have this switched on, but I doubt I’ll see any alerts until New York wakes up in a couple hours.

Finally, the navigation has been improved, with all controls along the bottom of the screen in both horizontal and vertical orientations, making them easy to reach with a thumb. Only the sharing option (Facebook, Twitter, email and copy link) and the text-size adjustment are up top.

Why is it free? Well, free until 2011, at least. Because it’s ad-supported, with occasional full-screen ads that you can watch or dismiss, and other ads inserted into the pages, just like they would be in the print version. They’re pretty unobtrusive.

If you have an iPad, go grab this app now. It shows exactly how a newspaper should be done on a tablet.

NYTimes for iPad [iTunes]

Follow us for disruptive tech news: John C. Abell and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

Tags:
Back to top

Leave The Calls. Take The Texts.

No one texts more than teens (age 13-17), especially teen females, who send and receive an average of 4,050 texts per month.

Any doubt that voice is just an app?

Nielsen reports that the average teen sends or receives 3,339 texts a month — that’s six per every waking hour. For teenage females, the average is 4,050. Even though teenage boys bring down that average with a paltry 2,539 texts per months, they are the largest user demographic among males.

At the same time teens using their phones to make phone calls has decreased since last year, by 14 percent. Again, girls have the boys beat: roughly 753 minutes a month versus 525. Interestingly, “voice consumption rises and peaks at age 24, only adults over 55 talk less than teens,” Nielsen found.

So, for young adults a mobile phone is little more than a texting appliance. Neils says “43 percent claim it is their primary reason for getting a cellphone, which explains why QWERTY input is the first thing they look for choosing their devices.”

As voice declines “The undeniable area of growth is in data usage,” Nielsen says. “94 percent of teen subscribers self-identify as advanced data users, turning to their cellphones for messaging, Internet, multimedia, gaming, and other activities like downloads. While teen usage does not reach levels of activity seen by young adults, it has increased substantially versus Q2 last year, from 14 MB to 62 MB. This fourfold increase is the largest jump among all age groups.”

Still, “perfect” texting devices with large, quickly-accessed hardware keyboards — like the Motorola Sidekick — didn’t exactly influence the next generation of handsets. The “perfect” texting phones remain feature phones. Among smartphones, the prevalent feature is a touch screen with a virtual keyboard.

Nielsen drew its data from monthly cell phone bills of more than 60,000 mobile subscribers and survey data from over 3,000 teens, during from April through June.

[U.S. Teen Mobile Report: Calling Yesterday, Texting Today, Using Apps Tomorrow: Nielsen Wire]

Back to top

The 411 On Google 411

Do I use it much? No. But Google-411 is on my iPhone speed dial, and when it works it works very well and also saves me a buck that would otherwise have extravagantly gone to AT&T.

Google announced late last week that its experiment in allowing you verbalize your directory assistance needs would end on Nov. 12. Turns out Google-411 was more of a test bed for the company’s larger voice recognition aspirations, though since it has been around for three years it seemed very much part of the smartphone landscape. Think about that — Google-411 was introduced only three months before the original iPhone, which seems like it’s been with us forever.

The big plus with with Google-411 is that it’s free. It gives the customer of any wireless company the power to avoid a relatively large surcharge for the eminently automatable service of looking up a number, and then placing the call.

There are two big weaknesses with Google-411: The voice recognition is too iffy (by my own anecdotal experience) to be a go-to service — wireless company 411 services have a human backstop when your request is unintelligible — and it only lists business numbers. On the latter, no big deal since various social media makes numbers you should have access to easily available, and even e-mailing someone to ask for a number doesn’t seem absurd from a smartphone.

The secret to a truly resonant disruptive technology is that it comes from nowhere to unseat an obvious, intuitive approach.

On the former, I may be a bit of a Luddite. Voice control has never seemed very appealing to me as a primary interface. Early implementations on desktop computers forced us to say such things as ‘page down’ where a touchpad is faster and more efficient. It is awkward or embarrassing when people are within earshot to be shouting or slowly articulating instructions to a bot. The process is often slower, and almost always less accurate.

The iPhone has no voice control, which is to some critics one of many demerits for but for me is affirmation from a brilliant design team that this technology is not ready for prime time, and may never have more than a very few important applications. In your car, yes. In your cubicle, no.

The secret to a truly resonant disruptive technology is that it comes from nowhere to unseat an obvious, intuitive approach. The touchscreen may not have killed voice control, but from where I sit it will win far and wide while talking instructions will be a niche approach far more at home on the bridge of the USS Enterprise than at home, in the office or on your daily commute.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: John C. Abell and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

Tags: ,
Back to top

Opera’s Next Act: Add-ons, Hardware Acceleration, Android

Opera Software has announced that the next version of its desktop web browser, Opera 11, will include support for hardware acceleration and browser extensions. The company also has plans to port its popular Opera Mobile browser to Android phones.

It’s the next version of Opera for the desktop that will see the most enhancements. The first Opera 11 alpha will be available soon, but the company already showcased the new extensions framework in a demo at its Up North Web event in Oslo, Norway. Opera’s new extensions framework is much like those pioneered by Chrome and Firefox, and later by Safari — using HTML, CSS and JavaScript to create lightweight add-ons.

When Safari jumped on the bandwagon and offered extensions earlier this year, Opera was the last browser that did not have a system in place for third-party add-ons. While Opera has long been a major source of browser innovation — it was the first browser to offer tabbed browsing, visual tab navigation, mouse gestures, SVG graphics and page zooming, all since copied by other browsers — add-ons were one place Opera trailed the browser pack. But not any more.

Opera’s extensions will be based on the W3C Widget specification (which defines a “widget” as a downloadable and locally stored web application) and, according to the company, it should be relatively easy to port existing Chrome and Safari extensions to Opera’s platform.

Also coming in Opera 11 is hardware acceleration. Hardware acceleration allows the browser to offload intensive tasks like image scaling, rendering complex text or displaying scripted animations to your PC’s graphics card. It has the benefit of freeing up the PC’s main processor and speeding up page load times.

Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome will all add varying degrees of hardware acceleration to their next versions, and with Opera joining in, that means only Apple’s Safari will be missing GPU capabilities.

Opera’s hardware acceleration won’t be limited to the desktop version of Opera either. The company has announced plans to build Opera Mobile for Android. The mobile version of Opera is a full-fledged web browser (unlike Opera Mini, which is available for the iPhone and countless other mobile devices) and will feature hardware acceleration and pinch-to-zoom support for Android.

Opera hasn’t set a date for the release of either Opera 11 or Opera Mobile for Android, though the company did say the latter will available within a month.

This article originally appeared on Webmonkey.com, Wired’s site for all things web development, browsers, and web apps. Follow Webmonkey on Twitter.

More from Webmonkey:

Tags: , , ,
Back to top

AOL + Yahoo = Really?

AOL chairman/CEO Steve Case, left, and Time Warner chairman/CEO Gerald Levin at a Jan. 10, 2000 news conference announcing that the world's largest media and entertainment company was being acquired by America Online for about $166 billion in stock -- the biggest corporate merger ever. (AP file photo/Kathy Willens)

AOL swallowed up the much larger Time Warner back before the boom went bust — we all know how that went. Now there is talk of a reprise of sorts: That the now-again independent AOL will acquire the much-larger Yahoo.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that AOL and a handful of private equity firms are cooking up — something. Nobody’s talked to Yahoo yet, the Journal reports, but there’s been a lot of chatter among the interested parties to combine AOL with Yahoo in some way, or take Yahoo private. By all means read the Journal article for the detail on various and sundry possibilities, which are too numerous and arcane to re-word.

Neither company commented for the article, of course, and the Journal says anything, including nothing, is possible at this early stage of the plotting.

But Yahoo shares are up 9 percent in early trading. AOL is up as well, as is Alibaba, the Chinese internet firm in which Yahoo has a 40 percent stake.

Yahoo’s market cap is about 7 times that of AOL, but with additional backing and some kind of plan it wouldn’t be impossible to alter Yahoo’s financial future, in theory. Sometimes two smaller entities can combine to make both stronger — Thomson + Reuters equaled Bloomberg’s market share — or to make survival possible — Sirius + XM radio reinvigorated the nascent satellite radio business.

But the one-time mightiest internet titan has been battling shareholder ennui and anger ever since former CEO Jerry Yang shunned what even then seemed like a substantially fair offer from Microsoft in a bid to remain independent. Yang’s successor, the tart-tongued Carol Bartz, has added spice to the company’s public posture but hasn’t turned things around, and top executives are now leaving.

Despite its collection of many of the most visited sites on the internet — and the continued ability to drive significant traffic to other sites — the parade seems to have moved on. Yahoo ceded search supremacy to Google ages ago and, whatever else you have, search remains the dominant entry point to the web.

As for AOL? We asked what Tim Armstrong was thinking when he jumped from Google to run the once dominant internet on-ramp. Even a decade after the AOL/Time Warner debacle we’re wondering about the wisdom of the whole media giant thing that still seems to appeal to some C-level types. But combining forces on ads, especially as mobile takes off, wouldn’t be a bad way to stay in the game — even if together they’d still be running second to Google.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: John C. Abell and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

Tags: ,
Back to top
« OLDER POSTS
See more Epicenter