Telecommunications giant AT&T announced the results of its 2010 energy efficiency efforts today. According to the company’s own report, it saw $44 million in annualized energy savings as a result of implementing 4,200 energy efficiency projects at its facilities last year. These included familiar technologies that, pervasively applied, made a big difference, like:

Swapping incandescent light bulbs with light emitting diodes (LEDs) at 1,100 cell sites

Removing switches and upgrading networks at 11 offices, reducing the company’s network-related power consumption by some 300,000 kilowatt hours

Using desktop power management software on 169,000 computers

AT&T has done some form of environmental accounting (corporate social responsibility or CSR reports as they’re referred to now) since at least 1995, so they have some cred. The timing of this green news, however, seems part of a strategic effort to win the public, and institutional investors’ favor at a challenging time. The company has generated a mixed bag of headlines of late.

On the upside, AT&T rolled out new wireless internet billing options for tablet users, struck a deal that brings AT&T hotspot access to the Nintendo 3DS, and another deal with Placecast to offer location based shopping alerts.

On the downside, the company’s facing legal woes, reputation management issues and competition from Verizon. This week, the Supreme Court overturned a ruling that was keeping AT&T safe from some scrutiny by competitors.

As reported by James Vicini for Reuters, AT&T had to turn over files to the government in past investigations about the way it, perhaps inappropriately, billed schools for internet services while participating in a federal program to help schools and libraries get internet access. The FCC then disclosed some of the files to competitors who directly requested them.

Here’s what the court’s blog said of the new decision:

“The Court rule[d] unanimously that corporations, as artificial persons, are not given a right of "personal privacy" that shields from public disclosure records that they have had to turn over to government investigators…”

AT&T has also generated a bad mojo meme after one of the company’s billing agents, according to The Consumerist, told a family suffering from the loss of their patriarch that that they had to upgrade their service to the AT&T Uverse plan in order to change the bill holders’ name. (The bill had been under the father and husband’s name.)

Finally, AT&T is still navigating the waters of a market where it’s not the only provider of service for the iPhone and iPad.

Is sustainability enough to keep consumers and investors with AT&T? Environmentalists would like to make the case that at the very least, energy efficiency programs and other CSR efforts encourage brand loyalty.

A few weeks back, everyone lost their mind over Cubeduel, the social game that blended Hot or Not with LinkedIn. In fact it was so popular that it exceeded LinkedIn’s API limits and was briefly shut down.

Now another player is entering the Hot-or-Not-For-X arena, but this one is aiming to be the Hot or Not For… Basically Everything.

The idea behind GotoGuru is hardly rocket science. You login with your Facebook credentials and are shown pictures of two of your friends, along with a question – say, “Who would you rather spend the weekend in Vegas with” (GotoGuru shares Cubeduel’s love of dangling prepositions). You make your choice and then are shown two more friends, and two more, and two more – until you’ve completed enough “duels” to complete the “level”.

It’s the game element that makes it fun: with each level the questions change, and so does the friend pool from which the choices are drawn. By level two you’re not just limited to your own friends, but those of other users — and by level four you get to see how you’ve been rated by others. At level five you can create your own questions.

The site’s creator, Lunch.com‘s JR Johnson, admits that GotoGuru is mainly just a fun side project to give his team a break from their day to day work on Lunch. But Johnson has a healthy track record in developing communities into big businesses: in 2008 he sold his VirtualTourist travel community to TripAdvisor for a reported $85m.

Johnson says he already has plans to develop a blogging and social sharing platform for GotoGuru where users who have reached “guru” status can share information on their specialist subjects.

Whatever. Right now I’m just having fun judging my friends.

For the record – no offense Alexia – but in the choice above Mike wins by a mile.

We’ve written about Yobongo a couple of times now. It’s an interesting concept (location-centric realtime mobile chat) with great execution. But that execution has so far only had to withstand 140 or so beta testers. Starting today, the app goes live to everyone in three major cities: San Francisco, New York, and Austin, Texas.

The last one is key, as part of Yobongo’s launch strategy is clearly to capture the hearts of those attending this year’s SXSW conference in Austin. We’re now a week away from the beginning of that conference, so the Yobongo team will have seven days to make sure their system is up to the task of managing hundreds — and hopefully thousands — of simultaneous messages flowing in realtime.

Yobongo co-founder Caleb Elston says they’ve already learned quite a bit from the closed beta, noting that they’re very pleased with the usage patterns they’re seeing. For example, 80 percent of the people testing Yobongo sign in everyday. And they average about 10 sign-ins per day while sending about 30 messages each day. That’s some solid engagement.

They’ve learned too that people prefer to speak when someone else they know is in the room. That’s been an important lesson for the team as they’re finally going to turn on the location layer that will split up cities into different rooms available for chatting. Yobongo handles the room placement behind the scenes based on your social interactions within the app. Again, none of this has been publicly tested out yet, so these next seven days are going to be key.

While Yobongo is only going live in the three aforementioned cities, the app will be live in the App Store across the U.S. shortly. If you download the app and don’t live in one of the initial Yobongo cities, you can use the app to vote to bring the service to your city. Elston says this can definitely help determine their expansion pattern.

Elston also warns that they’ll be quick with the ban hammer if they see people abusing Yobongo. They only want people willing to use their real names and share a real picture of themselves as their profile picture. In fact, Elston even made me change mine, which had been a golden pig eating out of a trashcan.

“You don’t think of people by their Twitter name. You think of what they look like,” Elston says. Eventually, seeing a familiar face over and over again can help establish a connection, is his thinking. And the location element is key there too. “Friendship is almost always based on location. At the office, for example. People congregate around their location,” he says. “What separates you from being friends with someone is much smaller than what people think,” he concludes.

Aside from the three city roll-out, Yobongo will also be iPhone-only for now.

Sony has announced the development of Move.Me, which, if you were with us a few days ago for a certain Microsoft announcement, may sound familiar. It lets folks develop Move applications for noncommercial use: academia and research and the like. It’ll be available some time this spring.

Read more…

PressDoc, which enables companies to distribute press releases optimized for the social web, is today introducing a new feature dubbed ‘Premium PressRooms’ (example).

They are pretty much what they sound like: dedicated online environments companies can use to cater to media representatives looking to learn more about them.

The Amsterdam-based startup says they’ve been asked by many of its users, since launching the first version of the service in 2010, about ways to match their PressDocs and PressRooms with their company’s brand. Premium PressRooms lets them do exactly that; create PressRooms with custom branding, domain names and analytics.

Premium PressRooms can be branded to match your company’s style, and lets organizations customize the header image for each PressDoc to make it stand out (see an example).

In addition, companies can use a custom domain name (e.g. press.techcrunch.com) and also embed Google Analytics code to incorporate PressRoom stats into their current workflow.

Upgrading a regular PressDoc PressRoom to a Premium version costs 1 credit or €19 per month (a little over $26). Users will be able to test-drive PressRoom Premium for half a year at half the price (3 credits) as an introductory promotion.

Update: PressDoc says you can use the promo code ‘TECHCRUNCH’ during sign-up – it will knock off 20% of your first credit package. And if you’re looking for alternatives, check out Prezly.

Every year, Fortune magazine (where I started out as a reporter) comes out with its list of the Most Admired Companies in the world. In truth, it doesn’t really change much from year to year. Apple, once again for the fourth year in a row, is No. 1, as it should be. The company single-handedly created an entirely new class of touch computing with the iPad last year, and is on it’s way to becoming the most valuable company in the world.

Google is No. 2 (although, confusingly, it’s overall score of 8.22 is higher than Apple’s 8.16—it turns out that those are their industry scores not their separate Top 50 scores, a spokesperson explains, even though they are labeled “overall scores”). And Amazon comes in at No. 7. Microsoft hangs on at No. 9. So four of the top 10 companies are from the technology industry. And IBM is No. 12. After that, the list becomes a mixed bag, and even a little questionable. Cisco, Intel, Netflix, eBay, Sony, and Oracle also made the list. Netflix totally deserves to be there and maybe Cisco, but the others just seem to grandfathered in. Where’s Yahoo?

Actually, before you put too much credence into this list, however, Goldman Sachs also made the list at No. 25. Yes, that Goldman Sachs, the one that turned out to be too big to jail for its culpability in the financial crisis and is spending $3.4 billion in legal fees just to defend itself this year alone.

Here are the Top 10 Most Admired companies according to Fortune:

1 Apple
2 Google
3 Berkshire Hathaway
4 Southwest Airlines
5 Procter & Gamble
6 Coca-Cola
7 Amazon.com
8 FedEx
9 Microsoft
10 McDonald’s

Nielsen has just released new data on U.S. smartphone share. According to the report, smartphone powered by Android operating systems (29 percent) is pulling ahead of RIM’s Blackberry (27 percent) and Apple iOS (27 percent).

But Nielsen says that because RIM and Apple create and sell their own smartphones with their operating systems, these companies are actually in a better position in the three-way race (in terms of device manfuacturers). Because Google licenses its OS to device manufacturers, the Android ecosystem is more fragmented.

In terms of the break down of Android OS, 12 percent of Android smartphone owners have an HTC device, with Motorola following behind with ten percent share. Samsung comes in third with five percent.

Nielsen also says that a higher percentage Android users fall into a younger age group (8 percent) vs RIM (4 percent) and Apple (4 percent). Over the past few months, Nielsen has consistently reported Android’s growth as a smartphone operating system. And other research firms have released similar data as well. But as Nielsen says in this report, RIM, Apple and Android are still neck-in-neck, so it’s a close game where anyone can pull ahead.

Imation, a global developer and marketer of branded products that enable people to store and protect digital information, has acquired ENCRYPTX Corporation, which provides encryption and security solutions for removable storage devices and storage media. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but approximately 10 employees will transfer from ENCRYPTX to Imation.

On the heels of its entry to the public market, content farm Demand Media has just acquired CoverItLive, a liveblogging tool. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

CoverItLive provides an extensive tool one can use for liveblogging live events or other real-time stuff such as earnings calls, press conferences and more. In fact, this past weekend, CoverItLive powered liveblogs for the Oscar ceremonies on People, TMZ, Entertainment Weekly, Variety and the Daily Beast. Demand Media has originally made a strategic investment in CoveritLive back in 2009, acquiring a minority interest in the startup. With today’s acquisition, CoverItLive will become a platform within Demand Media's portfolio of social “solutions.”

Chairman and CEO of Demand Media Richard Rosenblatt said of the acquisition: "CoveritLive really reflects our mission as a company – publishing what the world wants to know and share. Consumers around the world are tuning in by the millions to participate in live events powered by CoveritLive, collectively spending over a billion minutes on the platform each month.”

My colleagues over at Crunchgear have used CoverItLive for liveblogging purposes but aren’t the biggest fan of the service as it has failed them a number of times during events and currently favor competitive tool ScribbleLive for live coverage.

Now that it is a public company, Demand Media just released its first earnings report, which showed an increase in revenue in its most recent financial quarter. But shares of the the company have been down, after Google announced changes to its search algorithm that could negatively impact the content farm. Demand Media is dependent on Google search traffic and a change in ranking could negatively effect the content farm's business. But Rosenblatt seems optimistic despite these changes, telling an audience at an advertising conference this week “Nothing changed materially for our business,” (as reported by Ad Week).

Demand also issued a public statement following Google’s announcement, "We cannot be commenting every time Google makes an algorithm change. It's just one component of our ecosystem. We're fine. We're just trying to create quality content."

In the old days, big data used to be called data warehousing. But that was when corporations stored all their own data on their own servers. Today, it’s just called big data and it generally refers to the vast reaches of data in the cloud. Old big data is buying new big data today, as data warehousing powerhouse Teradata just announced it will be acquiring Aster Data Systems for $263 million.

Teradat already owns an 11 percent stake in Aster Data, which it bought last September. The $263 million, which is “net of debt and other expenses,” will purchase the remaining 89 percent, giving Aster Data a final valuation of $295 million. ASter Data has raised $53 million from Sequoia, First Round Capital, and IVP. Ron Conway, David Cheriton, and Anand Rajaraman were angel investors.

Just last September, the company raised $30 million. As we described back then:

Aster Data makes products that help manage and analyze very large sets of data, solving problems that standard databases may not be able to cope with. One of Aster's core products is nCluster, which the company describes as a massively parallel (MPP) database with an analytics engine baked in. Aster Data's clients include comScore, LinkedIn, and MySpace

Aster Data also specializes in analyzing data that is unstructured (i.e., it is not stored neatly in a database, but maybe is just out in the open Web). It’s revenues have been doubling every year. Big data is big business.

Visibli, a startup that gives brands and companies a way to personalize links, has raised $500,000 in seed funding from Extreme Venture Partners and undisclosed angel investors.

Visibli solves a pain point for brands and companies that want to send outside links to fans and followers but want to personalize these links. Called the Engagement Bar, the StumbleUpon-like technology adds a bar on the top of any web page that allows brands to link to their own sites, videos, images and more. So when you link to a page, your customized Engagement Bar will appear at the top your linked page. Engagement Bars can incorporate a number of different types of content, including social widgets, online videos, links to Amazon, iTunes or Etsy stores.

In the past year, Visibli has signed a number of high-profile clients to use the service, including John Legend, Quincy Jones and Interscope Records. The company says that trials with these clients received a 5.35 percent engagement rate (in terms of click through rates), which is fifty times what these brands were seeing on non-Visibli enabled websites. And Visibli has launched a specific product for the music industry, that includes integration with iTunes, SoundCloud, FanBridge, and other interactive music sites.

Google and Microsoft, tech giants embroiled in a competitive battle that has spanned many years and will continue to rage for many years to come, have teamed up to take down a Texas-based patent troll’s geotagging patent that they claim has been used in lawsuits against more than 300 companies, many of which are their customers or partners.

The news was first reported yesterday by The Times Of India as far as I can tell.

The defendant in the case, geo-location technology provider GeoTag, is trying to make coin from its US Patent, No. 5,930,474, entitled “Internet organizer for accessing geographically and topically based information”.

The patent was originally applied for in 1996 and granted in 1999. Microsoft and Google, who fear for their respective online mapping services to get targeted as well, claim there was prior art at the time of filing that the USPTO did not care to take into account.

GeoTag reportedly paid a whopping $119 million to obtain the patent.

The patent has, however, “changed ownership at least five times,” with the current owner headed by one of the patent inventors, according to the complaint. GeoTag, meanwhile, is plotting an IPO and has filed documents with the SEC to sell shares at $6.25 each.

Microsoft and Google seek to invalidate the applicable patent, prove that the technology is not used in Google Maps or Bing Maps, but also pleaded for a judge to order GeoTag to stop suing so many of its customers and partners over their store locator services.

Let’s hope the patent troll loses, big time.

Patents should be used to protect companies that produce actual, innovative products and services, not to make greedy people behind non-practicing entities enormously wealthy without them ever producing anything, let alone selling a product or service to anyone.

Disney has acquired an HTML5 gaming engine startup called Rocket Pack, based out of Helsinki, Finalnd. A Disney spokesperson told us today, exclusively: "We can confirm that The Walt Disney Company has acquired Rocketpack, an integrated solution for plugin-free browser game development. Through a merger agreement, Rocketpack is now a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company reporting into Disney Interactive Media Group (DIMG)."

Disney has not released the purchase price and asked us not to “speculate”. But we will. One source told us it was between $10 million and $20 million. It’s a fast acquisition – as of Feb 1, Rocket Pack was still developing the engine. We’re also going to speculate as to why Disney wanted to own this IP. It’s obvious really: You can build awesome games outside App stores – straight onto the Web, no Flash required, as it uses HTML5.

Placekitten: Something every designer needs. “A quick and simple service for getting pictures of kittens for use as placeholders in your designs or code.”

“This is awesome,” says a developer/entrepreneur who stumbled on it today and is apparently using it. It certainly has a little more character than services like Dummy Image.

It’s two days old.

I love people who do stuff like this just because the thought enters their head.

Sometimes I think we suffer from Louis CK syndrome, as in we don’t fully understand how amazing it is to live in a time where technological advancements allow all the world’s information to be accessed at our fingertips, among other things.

A mashup of Html5 Canvas, processing.js, js, jQuery, and the Google Search API, the Sloppy Google project yawns as it completes erroneous searches, expressing its apathy for its work anthropomorphically. To further hammer it home, its “I Feel Lucky” button is perennially out of service.

In the same vein as CK’s “Everything’s Amazing And Nobody’s Happy” video, Sloppy Google serves as a reminder that for all its foibles, Google is still way better at its job then we are, never sleeping, making careless mistakes or being half-assed (unless you include Adsense).

Writes creator Yuin Chein, an MFA at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design (verbatim),

“What if searching – the everyday digital routine of our lives is somehow different? What if Google is represented by humanistic operators who type in keywords and submit search request for you? In contrary to auto correct your spelling, it messes up your search results by misspelling your keywords; it yawns at your face just like a careless customer service agent would have done to you. Having a lazy Google is surprisingly comforting to some! Machine isn't perfect, it makes mistakes, and it needs rest just like everyone of us.”

Exactly.

You can search on Sloppy Google here.

It’s no secret that Salesforce is aggressively pushing its social agenda with product developments. Chatter, the company's "Facebook for the Enterprise,” was recently updated with Facebook and Twitter-like features, including likes, @replies, trending topics and more. And today, Salesforce is injecting social into the new version of Service Cloud 3, the company’s customer service SaaS application.

As we’ve written in the past, the Service Cloud aims to capture crowdsourced pools of knowledge floating across the internet, combine this data with CRM functionality and provide a platform for commercial customer service, potentially replacing traditional on-premise contact center technologies which are disconnected from knowledge (i.e. social) that can be found in the cloud. To date, more than 15,000 customers have deployed the Service Cloud to power and deliver customer service.

While the previous version allowed agents to answer questions on a company’s Facebook page, Service Cloud 3 provides a deeper integration with the social network. Companies will now be able to convert Facebook wall posts and comments into cases within Service Cloud 3. Salesforce has also added the same functionality for Twitter and allows agents to create cases and share knowledge from Tweets and conversations. And a new Radian6 AppExchange app will let agents work entirely within Service Cloud 3 but still engage with customers via Twitter, Facebook and other social channels including blogs, video and photo sharing sites.

Service Cloud 3 will give companies the ability to implement live chat between agents and customers (courtesy of the company’s Activa Live acquisition last Fall). Companies can embed the Social Agent into their web site for chat functionality between representatives and customers.

Analytics have also been added to the new Service Cloud, with the ability to generate reports on social channel interactions, customer conversation analyses, and social dashboards to help identify trends. And teams can also collaborate in Chatter around how to answer questions and to get feedback on published knowledge articles for increased accuracy. Readers can access an article's history, contribute comments, and see input from internal experts.

The Service cloud console now allows agents to follow important cases in Chatter, to receive realtime updates on status and to collaborate around how to solve the customer service issue. resolve issues faster.

Put simply, Salesforce made the Service Cloud a whole lot more social in this release. While this is unsurprising considering the company’s recent emphasis on Chatter and its social agenda, it does make me wonder if this trend is a sign of things to come. I’m curious if we’ll see the Chatterification of Salesforce’s database offering and other products.

Mobile payments startup Square has reached a new milestone this week—the company is now processing $1 million in payments per day, co-founder Jack Dorsey just Tweeted.

Square was processing a few million in mobile transactions per week as of last fall, so the startup has seen a steady increase in transactions over the past four months. The startup just raised $27.5 million in new funding, and is gaining a lot of a lot of buzz, most recently debuting a fairly large billboard in Times Square. And last week, Square announced that it is dropping the $0.15 per transaction charge for businesses using the mobile payments service.

COO Keith Rabois told us in January that the startup is expected to process $40 million in transactions in Q1 of 2011 and is currently signing up 100,000 merchants per month. That’s compared to 30,000 monthly signups last Fall.

Square has no doubt created a foothold amongst small businesses, as the service is free to implement and now has cut out the transaction charge completely (a move that competitors VeriFone and Intuit have yet to make). But it should also be interesting to see if Square will announce large-scale implementations with retailers in 2011. This will no doubt help scale the company’s reach even further.

Fun fact—Square’s technology was also showcased by Apple at today’s iPad 2 event.

As you undoubtedly know by now, this morning Apple unveiled the iPad 2 — the successor to its massively successful tablet, and a product that’s sure to sell millions over the next year. You may even know the differences between this device and the last one: it’s thinner, lighter, and faster, with two cameras and a snazzy new magnetic case. But which of these things really matter when you actually pick up the device and start using it?

This afternoon I sat down with MobileCrunch editor Greg Kumparak, who got a chance to play around with the iPad 2 during Apple’s event. Check out the video above for Greg’s thoughts on how the iPad 2 will fare in the evolving tablet landscape, and whether or not the iPad’s sleek new size really makes a difference when you’re holding the device.

I just finished a week long trip to San Francisco. This time I didn’t rent a car, meaning I didn’t have to deal with the rental cost, gas cost, parking and the delays in shuttling back and forth to the airport car rental area – usually at least $500 for the week and sometimes much more. I just used Uber instead, a service that launched last summer that lets you call up a black car service from your mobile phone.

Here’s our overview of the service. You add a mobile app, create an account with your credit card, and when you want a car you hit a button. A black car comes to you via GPS in a couple of minutes, and you can see how far away they are on your phone. When your trip is done, your credit card is automatically billed.

I’m going to share all the data from the week with you here.

Here’s how things worked out. I used Uber six times during the week, and three of those uses were either to or from the airport (I got a ride from a friend the fourth time). That seems to be what I use taxis and rental cars in San Francisco for the most – going to and from the airport.

I went a total of 46.32 miles on those six trips and paid Uber a total of $273, and that includes tips (just under $6/mile). By my calculations the same trips in a normal taxi would have been about $120. Or with tips around $140. Uber is twice the cost of using cabs.

And worth every penny. My average wait time was just about 5 minutes. I’ve waited hours for taxis in San Francisco, and you never quite know if they’re actually going to show up or not. And Uber’s cars are Lincoln Towncars or similarly large and nice cars, not the nasty cramped things that you end up in with taxis.

Even if the cars were the same or worse it would be worth the extra fee just because I know I can get a car in a few minutes without any hassle or stress at all.

In the future I’ll definitely only be using Uber for trips where I don’t need to do a ton of driving. I hope I never have to get in a taxi again.

It won’t be easy for Uber, the taxi people are already starting to put their politicians to work trying to shut Uber down. But I do know one thing, as long as Uber is up and running, I’ll be a happy customer.

Way back in December 2007, Google began to roll out a new centralized Profile feature that allows users to establish their own public online profile, complete with a short bio and links to personal sites. They were mostly useless (you never really saw them), until 2009 when Google began incorporating them into search results (run a query for someone’s name, and their Google Profile has a good chance of popping up). Which is a nice feature, but there’s been one problem: Google profiles are just plain ugly.

Open up a profile with the existing design and you’ll see a poorly-organized smattering of links, a bio, and maybe a map — sort of like a personal homepage someone might have set up in 1998. They’re not difficult to read, but compared to the social networks profiles we’re all used to, they’ve never felt personal or social in the slightest. But now Google is looking to change that.

In a post on the Google Social Web blog, Google has announced that it’s giving Profiles a face lift. And, judging by the photos, it looks like it’s decided to adopt an interface that’s more in line with the social networks we’re all used to — like Facebook. User photos are now more prominently seen in the upper left hand side of the page, and content is presented in a larger right column, broken up by section (employer, education, and so on).

Granted, it’s not an exact clone of Facebook — and countless sites have adopted a similar layout — but the similarity helps make the profiles feel inherently more social. And the timing isn’t a coincidence: the profiles will likely play some role in Google’s +1 social initiative, whatever form that eventually takes.

Did you hear!? There’s a new iPad. It’s called the iPad 2. Clever, right?

It packs a faster CPU, more powerful graphics engine, a fancy magnetic cover, thinner casing, herp, derp and more. It’s a fair upgrade from the original although it’s erroneous to call it revolutionary; evolutionary is more like it. In fact, there is still a fair amount of major features missing from the platform. Some of them are big enough to be dealbreakers, too.
Read More

Today marked the last day of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) 2011 summit in Washington D.C. Here are some of the deals and agency decisions revealed or discussed at the summit, which are likely to impact green tech investors and startups in America for years to come.

Progress on seed investments…

The D.O.E. boasted that six, private companies that it seed-funded last year have raised a collective $100 million in additional private capital. Five of those companies are based in Massachusetts, and one in California, respectively:

1366 Technologies – manufacturing technology providers that help silicon photovoltaics manufacturers cut their costs and therefore the overall cost of installed solar power.

FloDesign – a company that uses aerospace technology to develop everything from wind turbines, and noise reducers to, yes, weapons and stealth aircraft.

SunCatalytix - an energy storage and renewable fuels company that’s working on a way of generating solar power from light and water.

General Compression – compressed air energy storage technology that makes intermittent renewable power, primarily from wind farms, more useful at a large-scale.

24M Technologies – a spin-out from A123 Systems that’s making lithium-ion electric car batteries that store more energy for a lower price compared to what’s available today.

Envia Systems – a developer of lithium-ion batteries made of a proprietary, composite cathode material that, ARPA-E reports, have the highest energy density in the world.

Climate changing attitudes…

Leaders in energy and clean tech — including from the private sector and Obama administration — spoke on a range of subjects at the summit, including ARPA-E budget cuts, spending what’s left and where, and changing attitudes about clean energy and climate change.

The list of speakers included Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the U.S. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger along with 85 others. [Ed's note: Why couldn't ARPA-E find any African-Americans to speak at this summit? Check out the not so diverse speaker list in full, and let us know who you would have recommended for a more equal opportunity event in the comments below.]

As Jenny Mandel reported for Greenwire’s Environment & Energy, the “Gov” said it was time to end debates over climate change, face the music of global warming, and stop acting defeatist about America’s chances to lead clean energy and green tech industries on the world economic stage.

Tightening the purse strings…

Secretary Chu remained optimistic about ARPA-E’s impact thus far and potential to drive further positive developments in clean energy at home, hedging questions about the agency’s budget for 2011.

As Eli Kintisch reported on the fate of the agency’s budget for Science Insider, earlier this week:

“The young agency [ARPA-E]… is living off $15 million it received in 2009 after having committed some $400 million in stimulus funding. Without more money, the program will have to start cutting staff members or other expenses this summer…

The White House request[ed] $550 million for ARPA-E in 2012, [but] Congress had authorized only $306 million for the agency in last year’s reauthorization of the America COMPETES Act. Even $50 million for the rest of the fiscal year would put a squeeze on the agency. ARPA-E might stay alive, but it would be a shell of the juggernaut that attracted 2000 people to the [summit event].”

Storing power, greening the military…

From what’s left to spend, U.S. Navy secretary Mabus revealed at the event, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy were striking a partnership to green the military’s energy use with more powerful, portable fuel cell, battery and smart grid technology. [Hat tip: Green Car Congress]

Through the agreement, the Navy would start to use grid, and power storage systems developed by ARPA-E in its operations. The DOD and DOE plan to spend some $25 million, starting next year (2012) to develop two particular projects, here.

One thing they will support is the development of a hybrid power storage system that’s got enough energy density to charge military equipment in the field, but is portable, and can therefore help reduce diesel consumption, as well as time spent refueling in the field.

Another thing they will support is research into power storage and grid systems that can help the Navy ensure power is always-available at all their buildings, regardless of high gas prices and decreasing budgets, political unrest in oil-producing nations, or the intermittent qualities of renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

Photos:

1. Arnold Schwarzenegger touring a solar photovoltaics plant, Nov. 2009 via Jumanji Solar

2. Energy secretary Steven Chu at ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit 2011, Washington, DC by Ken Shipp via via US.gov

The wait is finally over: TC Cribs is back.

This week’s episode features IGN — the web’s most popular gaming destination — which happens to have an office loaded with video game memorabilia, arcade machines, and students of comic book lore. I also get a chance to show off my innate video game-playing abilities.

Also make sure to watch our previous episodes if you haven’t seen them yet. And don’t worry, so long as I don’t get struck with another bout of pneumonia, the wait for the next episode will be much shorter than this one.

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Once again, credit to Ashley Pagán and John Murillo for the camera work, and to Mr. Murillo for the fantastic editing.

This morning’s Apple press event has come and gone, and as you likely have noticed, we covered just about every aspect of it. The iPad 2 itself, the new features and apps coming with iOS 4.3, the 100m and 15m iPhone and iPad sales numbers, even the new device’s funky magnetic case. That said, the announcement was conspicuous for its lack of truly major announcements. Rumors have been flying left and right about potential new features, but virtually none actually manifested.

Did our little online echo chamber make us expect too much, or did Apple, in the face of powerful alternative devices like the Xoom, deliver too little? Here are our opinions on the announcement and what’s yet to come.

Continue reading…

The PR stunt/blatant shakedown that so many tech journalists fell for is now apparently over. Just one business day after the conclusion of Jason Calacanis’ Launch Conference he’s filed a court document asking for the dismissal of the lawsuit he filed last summer. This wasn’t a settlement. In fact, we didn’t know anything about it until our lawyers got a copy in the mail.

What really disappoints me is how gullible our competitors are. For example, the otherwise respectable Atlantic wrote an entire story on our refusal to cover his event. And while I think that it would be more than appropriate for us to skip an event where the organizer is suing us, actively trashing us and “borrowing” the TechCrunch name, we never had any such policy. One TechCrunch editor attended, writers were attending via the free live video stream, and we covered the startups we thought were noteworthy. We certainly never told anyone they would never be covered on TechCrunch if they attended. The reporter just bought whatever Jason was feeding him.

There are dozens more stories I could bore you with, but I won’t. You can read my initial response to his threats here. Like I said then, his accusations were without merit, as was his lawsuit.

I’m glad that we are no longer on the receiving end of one of his ridiculous controversy-creating outbursts. Good luck to you, Jason. I sincerely mean that. If you finally find the success you’ve been looking for, perhaps you’ll no longer feel compelled to tear down everyone around you.