A new Google Labs project merges two breakthroughs into one. Public Data Explorer brings together a set of databases — health statistics, crime stats, oil prices, economic metrics — with a browser-based technology that lets researchers and presenters create charts that move
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Google sexes up stats with Public Data Explorer
Let’s face it: anything that a human can do a robot can do better.
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M3 robots used to research human development, melt hearts (video)
We’ve been dying to know more about Microsoft’s Courier tablet / e-book device ever since we first caught wind of it last September, and while our entreaties to Mr. Ballmer went unanswered, we just learned some very interesting information from an extremely trusted source
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Microsoft’s Courier ‘digital journal’: exclusive pictures and details
Mobile travel startup WorldMate just announced the appointment of a new chief executive, one who’s supposed to help the company expand its partnerships with big brands in the travel industry. The Palo Alto, Calif. company’s new CEO is Jean Tripier, who previously worked as the chief strategy officer and chief operating officer from Good Technology , an enterprise mobile company that was acquired by, then spun off from, Motorola.
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Travel startup WorldMate gets a new CEO
An attorney and a group of early-stage investors published a set of documents last night called the “series seed” documents , a set of contracts for raising a small, seed round of funding. Ted Wang of law firm Fenwick & West first called for a streamlined early funding process in 2007, with an editorial for VentureBeat titled, “ Reinventing the Series A .” The problem, he said, is that the legal hassles and costs don’t change much between a large, institutional venture round and a much smaller seed investment — but it doesn’t really make sense to spend tens of thousands of dollars on legal fees if you’re only raising $500,000. “Start up company lawyers are under an intense pressure to keep our fees low on these deals and we find ourselves struggling meet our clients’ expectations around pricing,” Wang wrote back in 2007.
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Ted Wang and Andreessen Horowitz try to reinvent the seed round
Solar cells are cute and all , but let’s be real — these things are far too inefficient for mainstream use. Scientists at the California Institute of Technology are working hard to remedy that very issue, and they’ve recently concocted a “new type of flexible solar cell that enhances the absorption of sunlight and efficiently converts its photons into electrons.” The solution relies on arrays of long, thin silicon wires embedded onto a polymer substrate, which uses just a fraction of the expensive semiconductor materials required by conventional solar cells. According to professor Harry Atwater, these cells have “surpassed the conventional light-trapping limit for absorbing materials” for the first time, and we’re told that the arrays can convert between 90 and 100 percent of the photons they absorb into electrons, and yes, that does mean that they have a near-perfect internal quantum efficiency.
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Caltech gurus whip up highly efficient, low cost flexible solar cell
At the start of the year, when everyone was throwing out predictions for the rapidly growing cleantech sector, Tesla Motors and Smart Grid networking provider Silver Spring Networks were pegged as the companies most likely to go public in 2010. Less than a month later, Tesla filed for a $100 million public sale . Now, unsurprisingly, Silver Spring has tapped bankers for its own IPO
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As predicted, Silver Spring preps for IPO
Facebook earned a patent for its core news feed and published one for prioritizing communication from apps based on how closely users interact with them.
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Facebook earns patent for news feed, publishes one on application affinity
