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Aurora Biofuels on Wednesday said that it has completed a successful trial of growing algae for biofuels and named former Royal Dutch Shell executive Robert Walsh CEO.

“People will start putting a value on sequestering carbon dioxide and this will be a low-cost way to do that,” he said. “It’ll be cheaper and more environmentally friendly than compressing CO2 gas to 3,000 pounds (per square inch) and injecting it into old salt caverns.”

The company has been running a test at growing algae in two outdoor ponds–each about as big as an Olympic-size swimming pool–in Florida for the past year and a half.

The drop in oil prices–now below $50 a barrel–has also made it more difficult for biofuels. Walsh said that the company expects that it can produce a commercially viable product with the price of oil at $50 a barrel and some regulations that put a price on carbon dioxide pollution.

Aurora Biofuels is using a combination of biotechnology and engineering techniques to bring the cost down, said Walsh.

(Credit:
PetroAlgae)

The biofuels industry has been hit particularly hard by the financial markets meltdown and recession. Several new technology companies are developing techniques for turning algae into fuel because it isn’t food and can grow in a wide range of conditions.

The challenge, though, is making and harvesting algae at large scale at a price that’s competitive with other feedstocks, such as palm oil or soybeans.

Based on the results of that test, the company expects it can create a larger-scale demonstration facility that’s 50 acres in size late next year, said Walsh who joined Aurora Biofuels from biofuel company LS9. The company raised $20 million last July to build that planned plant.

Although it is not genetically modifying algae, it is breeding salt water algae strains optimized for yielding large amounts of oil. It has also developed a method, derived from the waste water treatment industry, for harvesting the algae without having to fully dry it out, a method that is more energy efficient, Walsh said.

The company expects to build and operate algae farms at the site of a large polluters, such as a utility or cement factory. The CO2 will be piped into the ponds to stimulate growth. Walsh projects that oil will be in the $60 to $100 per barrel range in the next five years once economies turn around.

Despite hoping that Firefox 3.5 would receive only one release candidate, Mozilla has now published Firefox 3.5 RC 3 for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Readers can also peruse older CNET Firefox 3.5 coverage, or check out the official Firefox 3.5 RC 3 release notes.

Details on what’s changed between RC 2 and RC 3 are light, with Mozilla saying only that the changes are based on user feedback. Given the history of Firefox updates, it’s likely that these were stability- and security-based improvements.

Updated June 26 at 3:45 p.m. PDT: Mozilla stated in an e-mail today that it expects
Firefox 3.5 to go public on the morning of Tuesday, June 30, almost missing its self-imposed deadline of “the end of June.”

This was originally published at ZDNet’s Between the Lines.

Under the terms of the stock swap, each share of On2 will be exchanged for 60 cents’ worth of Google common stock.

Google just made a few penny stock investors very happy. On2 shares closed at 38 cents a share on Tuesday.

In a statement, Google said that it will take On2’s technology and make it part of the Web platform. On2’s interim CEO Matt Frost said he was thrilled with the deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter.

Google on Wednesday said it will acquire On2 Technologies, a video compression company, for $106.5 million.

In addition, buying patterns are generally transitioning online, as broadband adoption increases, fulfillment capabilities of online retailers become more reliable, and consumers and businesses face continuing pressure to save money.

In its SEC filing, Newegg said it would use proceeds from the offering to expand international operations, including the building of its headquarters in Asia and a regional warehouse; pay off debt; and other improvements, such as IT infrastructure upgrades, branding and marketing campaigns, and acquisitions of or investments in “complementary businesses, products, Web sites, or technologies.”

This was originally posted at ZDNet’s Between the Lines.

The retailer has largely been focused on IT products such as hardware, software, and peripherals since its launch in 2001, but it recently has expanded into the consumer electronics business and products that are targeted at small to midsize businesses. It has also expanded beyond the United States, moving into Canada and China.

Last year, it reported net sales of $2.1 billion. In its SEC filing, the company summed up its outlook on the growth potential for online retail sales in its core target markets:

Online electronics retailer Newegg is launching an initial public offering estimated at $175 million, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday.

The company noted that it is not currently engaged in any discussions about such acquisitions or investments.

We believe that IT and CE products are well-suited for online sales because these products often require a potential customer to research, evaluate, and compare a large amount of technical information, product features, and consumer reviews, tasks which can be much more comprehensively and efficiently accomplished online.

Concentrating solar power has emerged as one of the most cost-effective solar technologies for utility-scale solar projects. Using mirrors or reflective troughs, sunlight from desert areas is concentrated onto a liquid that makes steam. In a power plant, that steam turns a turbine to make electricity.

Chevron on Friday disclosed plans to use solar thermal technology from BrightSource Energy to enhance oil recovery from an aging well in central California.

Production on the plant in Coalinga, Calif., is slated to begin by the end of 2010, Chevron executives told Reuters. Chevron Technology Ventures, the company’s venture arm, is an investor in BrightSource Energy.

BrightSource Energy's demonstration facility in Israel’s Negev Desert, where an array of heliostats, or moving mirrors, concentrate light onto a tower to make steam.

The system will use 7,000 mirrors on Chevron-owned land to reflect light onto a tower to make steam. The steam will be pumped underground to heat up heavy oils and make them easier to extract, according to a Reuters report. Right now, Chevron uses natural gas to make steam.

(Credit:
BrightSource Energy)

BrightSource Energy’s main business continues to be utility-scale solar. But another young solar company, Ausra, shifted its focus from building solar power plants to using its solar thermal technology to make a system for different industrial processes.

Solar power, it turns out, can mean more than just clean electrons and home hot water systems.

And much in the way services like Quicken encourage people to measure whether they are living within their means, Fitbit’s Web site analyzes all this data and allows users to input goals. The device costs $99 plus shipping.

Amount of steps you took today: 3,451. Miles traveled: 1.4. Calories burned: 348. Calories consumed: 625. Then you went to bed at 12:05 a.m. Time to fall asleep: 23 minutes. Times awakened: 25. You were in bed for 8 hours 2 minutes. Actual sleep time: 7 hours 42 minutes.

The math is easy, sure. But never before has a device tracked so many aspects of an individual’s physical movements to measure overall wellness. From caloric intake to activity levels (sedentary, lightly active, fairly active, and very active), Fitbit clips onto clothing or straps around one’s wrist and uses a 3D motion sensor similar to the one in Nintendo’s
Wii to measure multiple aspects of one’s physical self.

(Credit:
Fitbit)

Fitbit uses a 3D motion sensor like the one in Nintendo's Wii to track everything from calories burned to minutes slept.

Perhaps most exciting of all is that Fitbit will now help each of us understand objectively how vigorously we engage in such activities as laughing, having sex, popping open that bottle of champagne, etc. Will Fitbit users suddenly do these activities more vigorously to maximize caloric output? This little gadget could be a far more romantic gift than current marketing suggests.

New accounting rules could see boost Apple's reported iPhone revenue.

Though not yet a done deal, a tentative change in accounting rules could have a dramatic effect on the earnings reports of tech companies, and in particular, Apple.

If the rule were to be approved by the FASB–the next meeting isn’t until mid-November–it would mean a far less bewildering method of accounting for all tech companies that adhere to it, but especially Apple and investors who follow the company. And it also means we should be prepared for a bigger than usual jump in results whenever Apple does institute the practice.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)

As Apple showed for the first time in October last year, as successful as the company had been with sales of the iPhone, the current accounting practice was obscuring the true wealth the device is actually generating for the company. For the most recent quarter, adherence to GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) meant that Apple reported $8.34 billion in iPhone and Apple TV revenue (assume the iPhone is a large chunk of that number). In reality the company recorded $9.74 billion in revenue.

The reason Apple recognizes revenue from the iPhone over a two-year period stems from an uproar surrounding an upgrade to the MacBook Pro more than two years ago. Apple had secretly sold those laptops with an 802.11n chip but didn’t activate it right away. Because the famously secretive Apple kept the existence of a new 802.11n chip under wraps, and because it recognized all of the revenue from the sale of those notebooks at the time they were sold, accounting experts said Apple had to charge a fee to satisfy accounting regulations that require companies to establish a value for product upgrades.

Now, flash-forward to today, after a summer in which we saw the most successful iPhone launch of the three since 2007, and it’s clear that if the revenue from each device were accounted for all at once, the company’s overall earnings would be much higher. And, as Apple Vice President and Controller Betsy Rafael wrote while lobbying for the rule change, the company’s stock price would likely see significant gains if investors were able to see how much money the company was actually bringing in every quarter.

In a letter to the FASB last month, Rafael wrote that the current practice “often results in accounting that does not reflect the underlying economics of transactions and can result in financial reporting that lacks the transparency necessary to fully inform users making investment decisions.”

Apple stands to gain a lot from a new draft of rules that governs how companies recognize revenue from subscriptions, as Fortune noted. Though it still needs final approval from the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the change could mean that Apple will stop recognizing revenue for its highly successful
iPhone over a two-year period, the length of a standard wireless contract, and instead recognize it as soon as a phone is sold.

Apple only applies this practice to the iPhone and Apple TV, but not Macs or iPods, and it’s the reason why
iPod Touch owners have to pay a fee to upgrade to each new iPhone OS software update, whereas iPhone owners do not.

(Credit:
Dell )

An analyst challenged Dell on his contention that CIOs would refresh their PCs. Dell said the age of the PC installed base was old enough to be “onerous” in terms of costs because most rely on an eight-year operating system, Windows XP.

Here’s Dell’s read on the environment compared to what it outlined at its analyst meeting last month:

The company on Thursday reported earnings of $472 million, or 24 cents a share, on revenue of $12.76 billion, down 22 percent from a year ago. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 23 cents a share on revenue of $12.6 billion.

Dell said second-quarter enterprise revenue was $3.3 billion, down 32 percent from a year ago. Dell said it is facing aggressive pricing.

(Credit:
Dell )

(Credit:
Dell )

When you look at the product summary from Dell the picture is mixed. It appears that Dell has hit bottom, but sales are down a lot from a year ago.

As for the outlook, Dell generally said it expected “seasonal demand improvements from the consumer and U.S. federal government businesses,” but noted the fiscal third quarter is typically slow for enterprise customers. In a statement, Dell noted:

(Credit:
Dell)

This was originally posted at ZDNet’s Between the Lines.

On a conference call with analysts, Dell CFO Brian Gladden confirmed that the company is working with China Mobile “on a small-screen device.” However, Gladden noted that Dell will primarily be focused on the enterprise.

Dell’s public business (government and education) delivered second-quarter revenue of $3.8 billion, up 20 percent from the first quarter, but down 16 percent from a year ago.

Dell’s consumer business turned a small profit of $89 million in the second quarter. That tally was Dell’s best consumer profit since the third quarter a year ago. Revenue came in at $2.9 billion, down 9 percent from a year ago, but up 2 percent sequentially.

The SMB business delivered quarterly operating income of $246 million on revenue of $2.8 billion, down 29 percent from a year ago. Dell said demand was strongest in Asia.

CEO Michael Dell added that enterprise demand was improving in July and that trend continued into August. Dell reiterated that the company would remain focused on the next-generation data center. In addition, Dell noted that “we see a pretty powerful new product cycle” fueled by Intel’s Nehalem chip, Microsoft’s
Windows 7, and technologies like virtualization.

Dell believes a refresh cycle in commercial accounts is more likely to occur in 2010, with IT spending improving first in the U.S. The company continues to see pressure in the form of component costs and areas of aggressive pricing in the near term, and continues to take actions to offset these items.

Dell’s second-quarter earnings were down 23 percent from a year ago, but topped Wall Street estimates. The company continues to bet on an enterprise refresh cycle in 2010 and sees ongoing signs of stabilization.

And by the numbers:

Like Hewlett-Packard, Dell reported that sales stabilized sequentially from the first quarter, but the year-over-year comparisons were tough.

(Credit:
Dell )

The system worked very well for me, but it was slow going. I had to leave the program running overnight for it to finish processing my 3,700 or so photos for faces. It also had my processor humming, since it was doing all the work on my machine instead of Google’s giant server farm.

Picasa's software can now scan for faces, and offer up recommendations of people it thinks are your contacts.

Roughly a year after rolling out facial recognition on its Picasa Web Albums site, Google on Tuesday is introducing an updated version of its Picasa software (for Windows | Mac) that can recognize faces in photos stored on users’ computers.

Previously: Revamped Google Picasa site identifies photo faces

Users can now geotag their photos right in the Picasa, just like they can in Picasa Web Albums.

One big thing Google is bringing to the table with this release over something like Apple’s iPhoto (at least for
Mac users) is the capability to tag items that are spread out across your entire computer, as well as external drives. In that regard, it does a much better job than iPhoto when it comes to automatically importing and organizing photos–all without disturbing where they’re stored. Considering it now does much of what iPhoto is able to do with faces, with the added bonus of grabbing that contact information from your Google address book, it makes for a very seamless experience.

As with Picasa Web Albums, your reward for trudging through your photos to add tags is better organization, which for a massive library of old, archived shots can be hugely helpful. And unlike Picasa’s albums feature, name tags let you quickly sort all of your photos by who’s in them–not when they were taken or how you’ve personally organized them. It also continues to do this with any photos you add to your library in the future.

(Credit:
CNET)

That’s not to say Google hasn’t included a few things to help speed up the process. For one, if you’ve got photos that are both hosted online and on your hard drive–and that have already been scanned for faces, the Picasa software can grab that information and add it to your local library. This saves it from having to scan the same photos twice.

The new version of the software should appear as an update for users of Picasa v3.1 the next time they start the program. It can also be forced to update by clicking the “check for updates online” option in the help menu.

Along with facial recognition, the new version of the software integrates Google Maps–a much-wanted feature among geotagging fans. Just as you’re able to do in Picasa Web Albums, you can search for a location in Google Maps, then amend that geographic data to your photo. You can also view groups of photos by place by clicking on little red map markers that show where individual photos have been placed. Unlike the facial recognition feature though, this is still largely a manual process of doing a search for each location then adding it to a photo, or group of photos, at once. That is, unless you have a camera with GPS (which most people don’t).

And for photos it thinks contain people you’ve verified as contacts, it gives you quick “yes” and “no” buttons that can add or reject name tags. Oftentimes, clicking “yes” adds a few more suggestions for photos of that person that the program feels is safe enough to recommend. There’s also a way to group accept or group decline its suggestions, which saves time you would have otherwise spent clicking the buttons one at a time.

Just as it does on the Web, Picasa scans your photos for faces, then groups together photos of specific people. It’s then your job to tell it who they are as well as confirm its guesses. If someone you’re tagging is in your Google address book, you can also look them up very quickly with auto-complete. Otherwise, Google gives you the option to add them as someone new; this information then gets synced back up your Google address book.

(Credit:
CNET)

“If you extrapolate from the number of calls we received or simply from the millions of games that are sold around the world each year, you start to see how big the pool of potential addicts is,” he said.

Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.

Obviously addiction should be taken seriously, but to suggest that we risk a pandemic of strung-out child gamers is just ridiculous. As it turns out, parents can turn off or simply take the games out of the kids hands, thwarting the game-play demons.

“Sweden has long been at the forefront of efforts to battle addiction,” he said, adding that there are very few, if any, experts elsewhere in the world who have dedicated their work completely to the study and management of gaming addiction.

In an interview with Sweden’s English paper, The Local, Sven Rollenhagen of the Youth Care Foundation touts his position as one that helps young people in Sweden recognize and manage computer gaming addiction.

I’d write some more but I have to get through the WoW Burning Steppes before a Blood Elf steals my gold.

Already ahead of the curve by “daring” to view gaming addiction as something distinct from other common problems facing young people, Sweden’s Youth Care Foundation has put the country on the map as a leader in developing strategies for coping with the issue.

Extrapolating data is a tried and true tactic to conflate statistics, and in fact has provided plot-lines for both the Simpsons and Family Guy. It’s also part of the renewed FCC investigation into Janet Jackson’s 2004 Superbowl wardrobe malfunction wherein the number of complaints was extrapolated in order to prove a point, rather than provide a true statistical analysis.

A Swedish organization called the Youth Care Foundation claims that computer gaming addiction is reaching pandemic proportions around the world. This is the same group that called World of Warcraft “the cocaine of the computer games world” back in February.