Google to invest $75m for solar panels installation

The search giant announced Tuesday that it will establish a fund that local solar installers will be able to tap so they can offer financing plans to prospective buyers.

The plans allow homeowners to install a $30,000 solar electricity system on their house for little or no money up front. Instead, customers pay a monthly fee that is the same or less than what they would otherwise be paying their local utility for power.

Google will own the panels, and get paid over time by customers who purchase the electricity the panels produce. This is the latest a string of investments Google has made in renewable energy, now totaling $850 million.

Samsung may try to block sale of Apple’s new iPhone

The South Korean company is seeking an injunction to ban the forthcoming launch of the iPhone 5 in Europe as well as Korea on the basis that the American company has poached its technology.

Although little is known about the latest version of Apple s iconic iPhone – which could be launched as early as next week – Samsung claims that it will rely on a technology that is protected by patents that it owns. The two companies have been locked in legal battles worldwide over the past few months.

Apple sued Samsung in the US in April, claiming that its products had been “slavishly” copied by its rivals. Samsung counter-sued almost immediately.

A Samsung spokesman said: “We are preparing aggressive legal suits against Apple, shifting away from our defensive strategy. We stand a good chance of winning the cases if we use our patents related to wireless communications standards.”

A successful injunction would be a big blow to Apple, which is now the largest company in the world by market capitalisation and is thought to draw around half its revenue from the iPhone.

NASA to hire space taxis

But NASA is well aware that American astronauts can’t keep hitching a ride on Russian spacecraft for the rest of the ISS s projected 9 year lifespan. In a draft solicitation issued by the government on Monday, NASA announced that the agency will be accepting bids from private companies to act as extraterrestrial taxis.

NASA is offering $1.6 billion in federal funding to help the company or companies develop a complete system, from mission control to launch structures to the vehicles themselves. Currently NASA funding helps support four privately-owned companies: Boeing, SpaceX, Sierra Nevada Corp, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos  company, Blue Origin.

At the moment, the Russian spaceflight program is a glaring single point of failure for the ISS, as highlighted last month when a cargo ship failed to reach orbit in a launch accident. Such incidents cause NASA s commercial spaceflight development director Phil McAlister to worry “Every year we do not have a commercial crew capability, the station is at risk.”

NASA expects satellite to crash to earth this week

A defunct NASA science satellite dispatched by a space shuttle crew in 1991 will come crashing back to Earth soon, with debris most likely landing in an ocean or unpopulated region, NASA officials said.

In a statement released on its website on Sunday (September 18) NASA said re-entry was expected on Friday (September 23), “plus or minus a day.”
The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS, was turned off in 2005, becoming another piece of space junk loitering in Earth orbit.

Most of UARS will burn up in the atmosphere, but up to 26 individual pieces, with a combined mass of about 1,100 pounds (500 kg), will survive the fall, NASA officials told Reuters.

The largest chunk, part of the spacecraft s structure, is expected to be about 331 pounds (150 kg).

The debris most likely will land in an ocean or in an uninhabited region of Earth.

The satellite s orbit takes it over most of the planet, from as far north as northern Canada to the southern part of South America.

The satellite is so big, its plunge through the atmosphere will be visible — if anyone is around to see it, NASA said.

Facebook builds tighter integration with music, TV

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook unveiled new ways for users to listen to music and watch TV, offering tie-ups with the likes of Spotify and Hulu, as it attempts to make media an integral part of its social networking service.

The features, which Facebook unveiled at its annual f8 developers’ conference in San Francisco on Thursday, will vastly expand the types of activities that users of the social networking service can notify their friends about, from the news articles they read to the title of each song they listen to throughout the day.

Facebook users will also be able to listen along to whatever song a friend is listening to, provided they both subscribe to the supported third-party streaming music services, such as Spotify.

The media push comes as Facebook faces fresh competition from Google, which in June launched a rival social networking service, Google+. In recent weeks, Facebook, which counts more than 750 million users, has rolled out a bevy of changes to its service.

“Facebook is positioning itself as not just your social graph online, but your life online,” said Forrester Research analyst Sean Corcoran.

“These changes not only help trump rival Google but will open up new opportunities,” he said. “But concerns around privacy and immaturity in how to do these things effectively will make it a slow go.”

Dressed in a gray T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, Zuckerberg said the music companies partnering with Facebook, including Rhapsody and Turntable.fm, were reinventing the music industry and the business models that underlie the industry.

“They believe that the key to making the music business work isn’t trying to block you from listening to songs you haven’t bought,” said Zuckerberg.

“It’s trying to help you discover so many songs that you end up buying even more content than you ever would have otherwise,” he said.

Joining Zuckerberg on stage was Netflix Chief Executive and Facebook board member Reed Hastings, who said he was excited to offer tighter integration with Facebook but did not give details.

The Washington Post Co. unveiled its Social Reader, which lets people read and share stories from the newspaper within Facebook.

For Facebook, a deeper integration of music, movies and other media into its service makes it more likely that users will spend more time on its site, enabling the company to generate more advertising dollars.

The company, which generated $1.6 billion in revenue in the first six months of 2011 according to a source familiar with the matter, is being closely watched by investors hoping for an initial public stock offering next year.

Facebook also introduced an overhaul of users’ personal profiles on Thursday which arranges past photos and other information into a rich, magazine-like layout. Dubbed “Timeline,” the new profile serves as a sort of diary of a person’s life, organized by each year they’ve been on Facebook.

With Thursday’s new features, Facebook users will have new ways to flag content beyond the now familiar “like” button which people click to endorse various items on the Web, from news articles to running shoes.

Software developers whose services connect with Facebook will be able to customize the types of notifications that are broadcast to a Facebook user’s friends, with terms like “watched” a video, “read” an article or even “ate” a certain dish.

All that extra information could be a boon for advertisers.

“With Facebook now able to collect more data in terms of what people are watching, reading, running, doing, that’s more metadata which is now going to feed into what brands and marketers target,” said Hussein Fazal, the CEO of AdParlor, a firm that runs Facebook advertising campaigns for companies including Groupon.

“You’re going to get more relevant advertising to the users, you’re going to get higher click-through rates,” said Fazal. “In the end that means more revenue and more ad dollars going to Facebook,” he said. AGENCIES

Nissan develops cheaper, smaller charger for EVs

The basic model of the revamped charger will cost about half the price of the current model. Nissan has developed a charger for electric vehicles that s smaller, about half the price, and easier to install.Nissan Motor Co., Japan s No. 2 automaker, said the new charger will go on sale in November

in Japan and is planned later for the U.S. and Europe, although dates are not set. The basic model of the revamped charger will cost about half the price of the current model, which is stockier and has more parts, and costs 1.47 million yen ($19,000). The higher-grade model for outdoors will also be cheaper and cost under 1 million yen ($13,000), according to Nissan.

Yokohama-based Nissan, which makes the Leaf electric vehicle, is targeting sales of 5,000 of the new chargers in Japan by the end of March 2016. Zero-emission electric vehicles are drawing attention amid concerns about global warming and the environment. The Leaf is among the pioneering models in the technology.

But electric vehicles still make up a niche market. They have to be recharged, and recharging stations aren t that plentiful. Owners generally have to go through the trouble of installing a recharger in their homes. Right now, Leafs are being sold to mostly local governments rather than regular consumers.

The difficulty of installing chargers, which look like the filling machines at gas stations, is another reason. Nissan is hoping to sell the new chargers to highways, airports, shopping centers, convenience stores and gas stations, it said. Nissan has sold more than 13,600 Leaf cars around the world since they went on sale in December 2010. There are now 619 chargers throughout Japan, 32 percent, or 196, in the Nissan group, while the rest are with local governments, highways and other companies that promote EVs.

Competition in electric vehicles is likely to intensify in coming years as others, such as Japanese rival Toyota Motor Corp., enter the sector.
Toyota already offers plug-in hybrid cars, which run partly as EVs but switch to become regular hybrids with gas engines when they run out of the electric charge.

Apple working on a TV set for 2012

The latest iteration of the longstanding rumor is that Apple will get in to the business of selling TVs by building a digital TV based on iOS. That s according to multiple Silicon Valley sources cited by Venture Beat. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster told Venture Beat that he predicted Apple would produce a TV set by the end of 2012 or early 2013. 

Munster, who has long been trumpeting the possibility of an Apple-made TV set, first floated the notion in 2009 that Apple would take a bite out of the TV market in 2011 by introducing its first television. Munster wrote in June that Apple s recently announced iCloud infrastructure makes it all the more plausible.

The rumor mill gathered steam again earlier this week when the concept garnered a brief note in a Wall Street Journal report on the challenges faced by Tim Cook, the man named to replace Steve Jobs as Apple s CEO: An immediate challenge for Mr. Cook will be to advance Apple s plans in what is expected to be a key market for growth: digital video. Apple is working on new technology to deliver video to televisions, and has been discussing whether to try to launch a subscription TV service, according to people familiar with the matter.

An Apple job listing in February added fuel to the fire by advertising for someone to work on “new power management designs and technologies” for use on various Apple products, including a “TV.” One of the critical aspects is the idea of Apple offering a subscription service for content. The device would presumably replace and offer more content that the $99 Apple TV set-top box, which already offers access to several third-party apps, such as NBA, MLB, and Netflix.

Recent reports have also claimed that Apple was on the verge of unveiling such a subscription service for video content. However, competitors like Amazon have already beaten Apple to the punch with their own streaming services, though they offer a smaller catalog of content than what Apple could potentially provide.

Apple rival Google entered the TV space late last year with combination of set-top boxes and TV sets that include its Google TV software. Google s strategy has been to blend in with TV content provided through a cable operator and let users execute Web searches while watching programming.

Google tries to reassure TV industry

 Google has moved to reassure a global television industry quaking at the prospect that the Internet search giant is about to move onto TV sets and into living rooms around the globe.

In a keynote speech to Europe s leading broadcasting industry conference, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt acknowledged the company s immense scale built on search advertising — a scale which almost everyone in the media industry fears as a threat to their existing businesses — but said the nature of technology and the internet also made Google vulnerable.

“Online, competition is only ever a click away … it s common for once-leading services to become out-innovated and overtaken,” Schmidt said in the annual MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival.

Many of the broadcasting executives, producers and advertising industry leaders in the audience fear Google s entry into their territory with its Google TV internet-connected device, threatening the kind of dislocation it has triggered in online and print media with search advertising and the mobile phone business with its now leading Android operating system.

Schmidt, whose company has been seen as arrogant and no respecter of copyright, struck a conciliatory tone, saying Google had moved to be more speedy in taking down content which breached copyright and would be more active in supporting the business models of content owners that wanted to charge for their content online.

It had no intention to move into content creation, believing its core skills remained in technology and in focusing on three trends: Mobile, local and social.

Google TV would be launched in Europe early in 2012, he said.

Google’s Schmidt attacks education system

LONDON: Google chairman Eric Schmidt has attacked the country’s education system, saying a failure to appreciate the importance of computer science was holding the country back in the digital age.

In a lecture at a broadcasting conference in Edinburgh on Friday, the chairman of the Internet giant accused Britons of “throwing away your great computing heritage” by promoting a separation of arts and sciences in education.

“If I may be so impolite, your track record isn’t great,” he said.

“The UK is home of so many media-related inventions. You invented photography. You invented TV. You invented computers in both concept and practice.

“Yet today, none of the world’s leading exponents in these fields are from the UK.”

He said he was shocked that computer science was not taught as standard in British schools, adding: “Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it’s made.”

Schmidt also laughed off criticisms that Google was trying to “take over the world” and planned to make television content on a large scale.

“Trust me, if you gave people at Google free rein to produce TV you’d end up with a lot of bad sci-fi,” he said.

Schmidt was the first non-broadcaster to give the landmark lecture at the Media Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, a major event in British broadcasters’ diary.

Prominent figures from the broadcasting world have delivered it in the past, including News Corporation chief Rupert Murdoch and his son James. AGENCIES

The death of the paid text message

The smartphone boom is a mixed blessing for wireless companies. While the devices have boosted data plan sales considerably, they are threatening to kill another revenue stream dead in its tracks: text messaging.

Dozens of smartphone applications offer “free” text messaging services, which allow wireless customers to send and receive texts by piggybacking on their existing data plans. That means people who download those apps — such as GroupMe, Google Voice, Disco, Beluga, Kik and WhatsApp — are able to bypass the expensive texting plans offered by wireless companies.

What s more, an increasing number of free text messaging services are being baked into the smartphones themselves. Research in Motion (RIMM) offers BlackBerry Messenger, which allows BlackBerry users to text one another over their data plans. Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) plans to introduce its similar iMessage app in the fall for the iPhone.

And Verizon Wireless embeds Skype onto every one of its smartphones. Skype bought GroupMe on Sunday, in a deal valued at around $80 million, according to several reports. Since Microsoft s (MSFT, Fortune 500) deal to buy Skype will likely close in the coming months, GroupMe could soon appear on every Windows Phone device.

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