Technology changes quickly, and sometimes, so does my own mind. In January, I wrote a dismissive column about two e-book titles tailored for the Apple iPad, Alice for the iPad and Why the Net Matters. My main beef was that the apps, which had been lauded by the New York Times as “superbooks,” contained more glitz than substance. With its rich multimedia capabilities, the iPad has the potential to transform the experience of reading, but these titles fell so far short of the mark that I feared they’d permanently turn off the growing number of people who would like to read books on this powerful tablet.

In the past few months, however, publishers have introduced at least three new titles that bolster my confidence in the future of iPad e-books. Ironically, only one of the three is by a living author: Al Gore’s Our Choice, a book in which the former vice president urges people to take action to combat climate change. The other two are multimedia reworkings of literary classics from the 20th century: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Together, they provide a great survey of the interactive techniques publishers can use to make a book’s core textual content much more interesting and memorable. In fact, these three titles are so good that I think the publishing industry can look to them for an early set of best practices for building tablet-based books, which I’ll attempt to outline below.

And of course, they’re fun to read. With prices ranging from $4.99 for Our Choice to $13.99 for The Waste Land, these books might seem pricey compared to the typical 99-cent mobile game. But they deserve a place in any serious iPad aficionado’s app collection.

I’m thinking now that my January column was premature. It’s easy to forget that Apple’s remarkable tablet device is only 15 months old. It takes time for designers, developers, and publishers to figure out a new platform’s strengths—and when it comes to books, they’re competing with a medium that’s had half a millennium to mature. So I think it’s natural that we’re only now seeing some real innovation in the category of standalone, “appified” e-books (as distinct from the more conventional static texts that you can easily download and read using Apple’s iBooks app or Amazon’s Kindle app).

For sheer multimedia richness, Our Choice is the standout among these three e-book apps. The book is littered with “wow” moments right from the opening screen, which shows a spinning Earth, complete with the reader’s location as a pulsing blue dot. There are slick videos, arresting full-screen photographs, and extensive narration from Gore himself. One memorable information graphic shows 2,300 years of world population statistics; as you scroll forward through the years by swiping your finger from right to left, the chart’s y axis compresses to dramatize the exponential growth since 1800.

Nearly every image, chart, and graphic in the book includes similar interactive elements, and they’re all tied together by a long, scrolling ribbon of thumbnails along the bottom of the screen that functions in place of a table of contents. It’s a tour de force in interaction design the likes of which I haven’t seen since the golden era of CD-ROM edutainment titles in the mid-1990s.

It would be wrong, of course, to focus on the multimedia bells and whistles to the exclusion of the book’s message. The app’s main text is lifted directly from the print edition of Our Choice, which first appeared in late 2009. It’s a solution-oriented sequel to Gore’s alarming 2006 film/book/lecture An Inconvenient Truth. The main point is to survey the technology and policy steps governments and their citizens must take soon if we’re to have any hope of slowing greenhouse-gas emissions and heading off catastrophic changes in world climate. If the interactive elements actually got in the way of this critical story (as they do in Alice for the iPad and Why the Net Matters) I’d be worried. But in practice, … Next Page »

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Back in March, I wrote a column arguing that smartphones, tablet computers, Internet TVs and other personal technologies are delivering an unexpected bonus. Rather than depreciating, the way most equipment does, these gadgets actually get more valuable over time thanks to the hundreds of new apps that debut every week, plus free upgrades for existing apps. I argued that even though this kind of value isn’t captured in traditional economic measures like the gross domestic product (GDP), it definitely increases our gross satisfaction—and that we ought to be more thankful for these kinds of improvements, even as we struggle to see signs of real gains in other parts of the economy.

Today I want to look at the flip side of this phenomenon and explore some of its more troubling implications, especially for employment and economic growth. I think there’s room for optimism about the long-term economic future, but it’s important to acknowledge that in the short term, better gadgets and better software aren’t doing much to help the average consumer get or keep a job.

There’s a fancy word for the technological trend I was writing about in March: ephemeralization. Buckminster Fuller coined the term back in the 1930s to describe the general concept of “doing more with less” by building more human understanding into our machines and factories. Fuller had process innovations like Henry Ford’s assembly lines in mind; he wasn’t thinking about software, which didn’t really exist yet. But the idea still applies to devices like the Apple iPad and the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which replace dozens of other artifacts by recreating their functions on their stupendously versatile touchscreens. If you have a tablet computer and a broadband Internet connection, after all, you don’t really need a laptop, an alarm clock, a watch, a still or video camera, a television, a radio, a phone, an e-book reader, a digital picture frame, an MP3 player, a CD or DVD player, an external hard drive, a game console, a digital audio recorder, a music synthesizer, or a GPS navigation device, not to mention print books, newspapers, or magazines. And that’s just a partial list.

This kind of consolidation is exactly what Fuller was talking about when he predicted in his 1938 book Nine Chains to the Moon that you’ll be able to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.” The remarkable thing is that we’re only a few years into the era of the iPad and the iPhone (which is basically a mini-tablet)—which means we’re likely to see even more of the information-related tasks we carry out every day subsumed by apps. “The reason tablets are going to take over the world,” Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote in this December 2010 essay, “is not (just) that Steve Jobs and Co. are industrial design wizards, but because they have this force behind them. The iPhone and the iPad have effectively drilled a hole that will allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot of new areas.”

Even business IT is bending to the force of ephemeralization. Last week I talked with Adam Wiggins, one of the founders of Heroku, a Web application hosting company incubated by Y Combinator and now owned by Salesforce. You could argue that Wiggins’s whole business is about ephemeralization (he says exactly that in this April blog post). The company takes the burden of Web server setup and maintenance away from software developers, so that they can focus on writing great code, in a language—Ruby on Rails—designed specifically to save them from having to reinvent common business functions with every new app. Not so long ago, Wiggins notes, deploying business software meant physically walking into a data center to wire up servers. Today Heroku is “ephemeralizing IT to the point that I’ve seen tweets from people who have deployed their apps from Wi-Fi on an airplane.”

Now, while the benefits of ephemeralization for the end users of technology are obvious and powerful, there are some downsides. And here’s the big one: ephemeralization may be a net destroyer of jobs. Heroku has about 45 employees servicing its thousands of customers; balance that against the hordes of consultants, sysadmins, and other support staff every enterprise once needed to keep its IT systems afloat. The music industry is another classic example. The rise of the digital download has been a … Next Page »

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After giving my best attempt at an objective summary of Proposition 23 to a colleague, he asked rhetorically, “How can something like this even make it onto the ballot?” He was, of course, familiar with the process that allows any proposition that gathers enough signatures to make it to the ballot in, but the question was really addressing a more fundamental issue: how can something so transparently bad for California even make it to the ballot?

Proposition 23 is the legislative version of the flickering neon sign that reads “lower your standards for global environmental quality to protect state oil interests.”

To recap, Proposition 23 suspends AB 32, otherwise known as California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, until the state unemployment drops to 5.5% for four consecutive quarters (otherwise known as a year). AB 32 requires that California lower its overall greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020—an ambitious goal that may require certain sacrifices. However, the issue requires further investigation.

The author of this proposition is the linguistic equivalent of David Copperfield. First, the wording may lead one to believe that climate legislation and unemployment are somehow correlated. The proposition even seems to imply that climate legislation is causing unemployment and removal of the legislation may lower the unemployment rate.

This misdirects the conversation from the real issue, which is that the oil industry is attempting to self-regulate. The Yes side argues 23 would create a million and a half jobs. I argue that 23 would destroy an entire industry—the nascent clean technology business that so many courageous startups have begun to explore—and that any initial economic uptick would be short lived. Who is right? It doesn’t matter. The conversation has been moved to the only area where proposition 23 actually makes sense: the imaginary.

Proposition 23 will kill the Global Warming Solutions Act for a period of time. It is, literally, a proposition to suspend a solution. But the oil industry is not merely content to delay implementation of clean air standards in California. They would prefer to prevent it altogether, which is where Proposition 26 comes in.

Proposition 26 would cripple AB 32 with legislative bureaucracy, potentially rendering it ineffective. Proposition 26 is as damaging as 23 to the clean technology industry and air quality standards. Yet because of its subtle and often sleep-inducing wording, much of the fight has been focused on 23.

If Proposition 23 is all about flash, Proposition 26 will be the legislation to pull a quarter from behind your ear. Magicians often use sleight of hand techniques to misdirect the attention of audience participants in order to trick them. Proposition 23 may be the distraction, while 26 accomplishes the same goals right from behind our collective ear. Californians should ignore the oil industry illusionists and vote no on both.

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Yesterday we told you all about Recurve, a San Francisco home energy auditing and retrofitting startup whose founder argues that before energy-conscious homeowners put solar panels on the roof, they should focus on fixing what’s under it—poor insulation, leaky ducts and windows, inefficient HVAC systems, and the like. But let’s assume you’ve done all that. What’s next? Here in California, there’s an array of companies working to make it far easier and more affordable to install electricity-generating solar panels on your home.

One of the most innovative and fast-growing startups in this industry is Oakland, CA-based Sungevity, which is probably unlike any cleantech company you’ve heard of. The company doesn’t have its own installation workforce, and unlike competing firms such as SunRun, it doesn’t have “power purchase agreements” under which homeowners buy electricity from the company. What it does have is software. It’s got applications that allow technicians to peer down from the sky (via Google Earth-style satellite photos) and figure out exactly how many solar panels will fit on your roof, then generate a project estimate. It’s got applications to automate the sales process, and it’s got applications to cut through the red tape around permitting for solar installations.

In effect, Sungevity is a new low-overhead, high-efficiency middleman in a business that’s long been a cottage industry, dominated by small solar installers who have to roll a truck every time a potential customer requests an estimate. (In many of these respects, Sungevity is similar to Recurve, which, as I explained yesterday, is also using software to systematize and scale up a cottage industry—in its case, home energy retrofitting.)

Danny Kennedy, Sungevity’s founder, argues that simplifying and automating the solar installation process is the only way to bring this form of renewable power to the mass market. Together with co-founders Andrew Birch and Alec Guettel and chief financial officer Charles Ferer, he’s built a business that’s collected $9 million in venture backing and is set to grow from $3 million in revenue in 2009 to nearly $30 million this year, with no end in sight. The core of the business model is the 10-year “solar lease,” an idea Ferer brought with him from former employer Solar City. In return for assigning solar tax credits and rebates to the lender—Sungevity and its financial partner US Bank, in this case—homeowners get to install solar panels for only about half of the actual cost of equipment and labor, and they can pay for the project over the course of 120 months.

Sitting down with Kennedy to talk leases and rebates and software is an unusual experience, given that his background isn’t in the energy business at all, but in environmental activism. A native of Australia, Kennedy is a 12-year veteran of Greenpeace, where he started out in the 1990s working to block oil projects in Africa and went on to run the organization’s California Clean Energy campaign. That campaign helped to bring about Governor Schwarzenegger’s $2.8 billion California Solar Initiative, under which the state is providing cash rebates of $1 to $2 per watt for solar photovoltaic installations. (A typical home installation might amount to 3 to 10 kilowatts.)

Those rebates are a big part of what’s making programs like Sungevity’s solar leases affordable, and are one of the reasons Kennedy and co-founders decided to build their business in the Bay Area. Another is the population’s openness to new ways of doing business: “If there is anywhere that’s going to be comfortable adapting to Internet commerce models [for solar installation], it’s California,” Kennedy says.

Our look at Sungevity comes in the form of an extended Q&A. In Part 1, below, Kennedy talks about Sungevity’s business model and technology, and describes how the installation process works. In Part 2, coming tomorrow, he talks about how he made the leap from Greenpeace to energy entrepreneurship, how Sungevity plans to scale up, and how the company’s work fits into global efforts to reduce carbon emissions and blunt the effects of climate change.

Xconomy: What is the mission of Sungevity?

Danny Kennedy: The big picture mission is to take solar to scale. Which I’m sure every solar entrepreneur says they want to do, but our vision is to do it in the residential market, which is ultimately the highest value market for solar electricity. Finding a scalable way to deliver solar electricity to residential customers in middle America is the best chance to make large profitable ventures, which will in turn scale the production and consumption of solar itself.

If you can capture developed-country, grid-connected markets, such as the wealthy German, Japanese, or California markets, it will drive solar production in … Next Page »

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Each decade produces new insights into science, especially life sciences, where we are learning more about ourselves. As our society becomes increasingly dependent on its scientific legacy, it becomes more and more important that each new generation understands the role of science in our lives. However, the accumulation of facts can be daunting to students and educators alike. How do we meet the challenge of educating everyone to understand the role of science in our lives? Fortunately, the principles of science don’t change.

Our role in science education

The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has a long history of contributing to the science education of the community in a variety of ways, formal and informal. Our Science Education Partnership program, for example, has trained hundreds of middle and high school science teachers for 20 years. Our Hutch High science symposium has exposed more than 1,000 high school students to real-life laboratory science.

One might wonder why a cancer research institution like the Hutchinson Center should concern itself with K-12 education. I have been thinking increasingly about this as I transition out of the position of Center president and begin to devote more of my own time to education.

The future of humankind depends on science and technology

The answer is simply that the future of humankind depends upon implementing our science and technology in ways that can sustain a human population rapidly approaching 9 billion people on a planet that is already being exploited beyond its limits. As I become more informed about the challenges of providing clean water, adequate food, energy, health, biodiversity, education, employment and the other needs of people, I am actually hopeful that it is possible to support our population so that all people can have a rewarding life.

Science and technology do have the answers. However, we will need to make some dramatic changes in the way we utilize natural resources, and that means that people, businesses, countries and international organizations will need to reach consensus on appropriate sustainable and equitable policies. Lay people will need to understand the scientific and technical issues well enough to support appropriate policy, and lawmakers will need to think far beyond the next election.

Unfortunately, science does not come naturally to people. Our inability to generate societies that can make intelligent decisions is the biggest threat, in my mind, to our future. Unfortunately, even people who study science and teach science rarely understand science as a process. Only those of us who have spent a major part of lives doing science can really appreciate how it works. You might think I am talking about sophisticated and esoteric concepts involving complex mathematics. I am not. I am talking about humility.

But science is only part of the answer

What scientists understand, through innumerable failures and the rare success, is that science is a process that involves approaching the truth through trial and error, always realizing that you have only a part of the answer. Solving humanity’s problems will require that understanding. We must agree on goals, accept the best estimates and hypothetical solutions, work toward improvement, constantly monitor the outcomes and iteratively improve our performance.

Those of us who have learned this lesson through a lifetime of frustration studying how nature works must communicate this to the lay public. Our scientists have a critical role to play in that education and I hope that the Hutchinson Center will find a way to increase its commitment to educating the next generation.

This lesson begins in our elementary schools and in our homes. I was encouraged to pursue science by passionate teachers and I have been inspired by the science teachers that participate in our programs at the Hutchinson Center. Teachers throughout the country are striving to understand our rapidly changing world and the research community needs to come together to support that effort. Along with participating in science education programs in the community, teachers, students and parents can find links to additional resources the Hutchinson Center’s website.

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If we’re not careful…China’s going to eat our lunch in cleantech.

This was the overwhelming feeling I was left mulling over during my return flight from China last week. I had a great trip, visiting Beijing, Tianjin, Suzhou, and Shanghai over five days as I looked at some new investment opportunities. It was a lot of fun—and I was really impressed by the alignment of government policy and startup-driven innovation that have China poised to lead the world in a number of important cleantech markets.

At this point a Tom Friedman-esque rant on U.S. ineptitude comes naturally—but in this blog post I will instead focus on what China is doing really well right now:

Investment in infrastructure. Many of the big cleantech markets of the future—smart grid, vehicle electrification, distributed renewable generation—require big-time infrastructure investment, and the pace of investment in China right now is astounding. Whether it’s the “mag-lev” train to Pudong airport, the state-of-the-art regional technology centers, the Olympic Stadiums (Bird’s Nest, Water Cube), or just simply the hundreds of cranes and bulldozers you see during the course of a morning commute, the government’s capacity to invest in critical infrastructure is mind-boggling. In a world where the developed western world is debt-laden, this is a major advantage, and China’s government has proven its ability to swiftly make bold investment decisions.

Government’s strategic focus and resolve. China is determined to become the world’s leader in energy and clean technology. And unlike a western democracy, when China President Hu Jintao makes up his mind, action follows quickly. I was struck by examples of this routinely on my trip, but two examples really hit home for me:

• Vehicle electrification: China has announced its 20-city electric bus program, whereby 20 leading cities will have 1,000 EV buses on the road by 2012. It turns out this is a very shrewd initiative. The key to the EV market is gaining real-world experience—ie miles logged—with vehicles on the road. Buses average 16 hrs/day and maybe 100 miles/day, versus 20-40 miles/day for a car—and with a bus it is easy to collect the actual drive-cycle data from a single owner/transit authority. Therefore, going “buses first” makes a lot of sense. And it’s not like the China bus market is small: by 2012, buses sold in China could exceed 200-300 MWH of aggregate battery capacity, which is roughly the equivalent of the aggregate battery capacity of Toyota Priuses sold in the U.S. in 2009.

• Carbon trading: Though cap-and-trade legislation passed the U.S. House of Representatives in June 2009, and the Obama administration supports the initiative, just this week the U.S. Senate gave up climate legislation in favor of a narrower energy bill. Meanwhile, China moved swiftly into action following the talks at Copenhagen, and on Friday morning I read the announcement of China’s rollout of a cap-and-trade system. What is amazing is that China took this step even though, as a developing country, China will not be subject to the same stringent carbon emissions caps as developed countries, even if/when an agreement is finally reached at a successor event to the failed Copenhagen summit last December. China’s utilities and heavy industry will be poised to succeed in what will inevitably become a carbon-constrained world in the future.

Culture of entrepreneurship. I had expected to find a layer of bureaucracy and red tape in the way of entrepreneurs in China, whereby startups wait for earmarks and other subsidies to determine a market’s winners and losers. I found just the opposite. I found myself feeling very comfortable in meetings with Chinese entrepreneurs and industry executives, as the ways in which they communicated (even if at times in Mandarin!) were very familiar to me. People were direct and transparent, and there was an informality that any entrepreneur in the U.S. would instantly recognize as an important part of successful startup culture. One of my mentors in the venture business once told me, “I can’t list out all the necessary and sufficient attributes of a great entrepreneurs, but I know it when I see it.” I agree that great entrepreneurs share a certain je ne sais quoi—and I saw more of it in China this week than in any of my trips to Japan or Western Europe.

All in all, it was a fun week in China and I was deeply impressed by the pace and breadth of innovation. There is no doubt that the U.S. remains in a class by itself in terms of fundamental research and “ideation,” but the winners in cleantech will ultimately be those that ride aggressively down the experience curve and deliver the best value over the long-term. The experience curve in cleantech is influenced by government policy in ways to which U.S. entrepreneurs are not accustomed, and this is where China is determined to lead.

[Editor's note: This article also appears, in slightly different form, on Jon Karlen's blog, Venturing Forth.]

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All of the research in the world will be unable to mitigate the potentially devastating impact of climate change without a plan that brings measurements into a coordinated operational system. That system must enable accurate change forecasts, must monitor compliance with emission restrictions, and must verify that emission restrictions fulfill their purpose.

While the Unites States and other nations have taken initial steps towards taking Global Climate Monitoring (GCM) into the operational realm, much additional progress is needed to avoid the economic and social disruption that climate change could cause.

Potential effects include sea rise and more severe storms that would impact populated coastal areas and island nations, drought in areas that supply much of the Earth’s food, greater rainfall in flood-sensitive areas, as well as a spread in the habitat range of disease-carrying insects. More storm damages, increased cost of food, and mass, climate-induced population migrations might be some of the consequences.

Much scientific research is being done to better understand the following important effects: increases in the atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases; changes in sea temperature and acidity conditions; shifts in land hydrology and biota conditions; rates of loss of global ice mass. Space, air, sea, and land-based observational assets are applied to collect climate data to support the research. In parallel there are numerous efforts to development sophisticated climate models. The current goal is to provide a basis for better understanding climate change and to determine to what degree climate change is driven by human activity rather than natural cyclical phenomena.

Most of the climate change research efforts to date have been pursued as a scientific enterprise. Specific issues or paths of inquiry are identified by researchers, and resources to sponsor applicable investigations and sensor platforms are competed. The result is many one-of-a-kind studies, each of finite duration that each help to address scientific questions along a specific paths of inquiry. Furthermore, the collected data is often not made widely available, and is stored in a variety of formats that are not mutually compatible.

The challenge now is not just to understand the causes of climate change, but to track its primary drivers to enable prediction, adaptation, and possibly mitigation. This will require continuous measurement, over many decades, of a variety of specific parameters. It will require sharing and cross-comparison of resulting large databases to account for the integrated meaning of all the … Next Page »

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As I reflect on my time in the Northwest, I find myself gravitating toward the bigger picture: which areas of technology and business innovation is this region poised to really own over the next few years? After giving us the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing, McCaw Cellular, and Starbucks, surely Seattle is ready for an encore or two?

It’s a topic that comes up often in tech startup circles. For example, on Tuesday, TechFlash put together a provocative panel and town hall discussion on the future of startup financing—but it ended up being about much more than financing. I wish I could have been there, but I’ve been on the East Coast this week.

During the event, the founders of Avvo, BigOven, BuddyTV, Jackson Fish Market, Wetpaint, and other prominent Seattle Web startups talked about the various tradeoffs between bootstrapping, taking angel money, and venture capital. I reported on this topic back in late 2008, and things haven’t changed all that much since, although company valuations are lower and it seems like more entrepreneurs are bootstrapping out of necessity.

One point of discussion in particular caught my eye from the TechFlash writeup of the event: the need for entrepreneurs to think bigger, balanced against giving up equity to VCs. “I don’t see how the small-time thinking of ‘I want control, I want control, I want control’ is going to create the incredible successful outcomes that not only Seattle needs but our industry needs in a time of change,” said Ben Elowitz of Seattle-based Wetpaint.

Entrepreneur and investor Andy Sack, from TechStars, RevenueLoan, and Founder’s Co-op, had a bit of a conflicted take on the venture capital industry, according to the report. He called the business “a racket,” but also said VCs are misunderstood in the entrepreneur community. In the end, his main message was consistent with Elowitz’s. “I think as a community Seattle has fallen behind other cities, and as a community we need to stop whining and start kicking some ass,” Sack said.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch concurred, talking about the success of companies like Twitter, and the importance of dreaming big: “Where are the people here in Seattle saying, ‘We want to be the pulse of the planet’?” he asked.

Here’s where I stand: I think it’s mostly a cultural issue. Seattleites tend to be more reserved and laid-back than their counterparts in Silicon Valley or Boston. And they are a bit more isolated from the rest of the world than those other geographies. That doesn’t mean they don’t want their startup to rule the world (it might even be an advantage). And in fact, lately I’ve been thinking about the ways in which Seattle tech startups could rule the world. These are my five best guesses at the moment:

1. Alternative financing schemes

Seattle is quickly becoming an epicenter of new models and structures for financing … Next Page »

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Energy is a $6 trillion global industry, and will likely grow to more than $10 trillion by mid-century. As clean energy replaces carbon-based energy sources around the world, new markets employing millions of people will emerge.  Countries like China recognize this opportunity, and are racing decisively ahead. Meanwhile, the United States’ inaction is relegating our country to the back of the pack.

Passing a climate bill this session that establishes a price on carbon will send a critical price signal to the private sector. It will unleash a torrent of investment in new technologies, create countless new ventures, and catalyze the innovation required for the U.S. to gain a leadership position. Massachusetts is well positioned to be a “disproportionate beneficiary,” enjoying more job creation and economic prosperity from this revolution than any state save California. The Commonwealth received over $350 million in cleantech venture investment in 2009 (second only to California), and will receive a great deal more in the years to come if investors are provided with the market certainty that a price on carbon provides.

The benefits of passing strong energy & climate legislation this session are substantive:

• A climate & energy bill will create thousands of jobs in Massachusetts. Clean energy is already the state’s fastest growing industrial sector with nearly 2000 companies and over 26,000 jobs. Separate studies by UMass Amherst and UC Berkeley show that a federal low-carbon policy could create up to 40 thousand jobs in Massachusetts and increase the State’s real Gross Domestic Product by up to $2.8 billion between now and 2020.
• Clean energy investments create 16.7 jobs for every $1 million in spending. Fossil fuels, by contrast, generate only 5.3 jobs per $1 million in spending. Clean-energy investments create 2.6 times more jobs for people with college degrees or above, 3 times more jobs for people with some college, and 3.6 times more jobs for people with high school degrees or less.
• A climate & energy bill will give investors the market signals and long-term certainty they need to commit additional dollars to the sector. Under a federal low-carbon policy, Massachusetts could see a net increase of about $3.5 billion in investment revenue.
• Comprehensive climate and energy legislation will save money for consumers. Massachusetts’ experience under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) shows that Massachusetts electricity prices declined from 18¢/kWh at the start of the program in January 2009 to 16¢/kWh in November 2009.
• Strict limits on carbon emissions will improve our competitive standing with respect to the rest of the world.  A recent report from the Pew Charitable Trust finds that  China, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain—all with strong, national policies aimed at reducing global warming pollution and incentivizing the use of renewable energy—are establishing strong, defensible positions in the clean energy economy. Unless our country makes a significant, long-term commitment to this sector, we may find ourselves out of the running.

What’s at stake here is no less than America’s global competitiveness, and we are already being lapped. Today, the U.S. is home to only one of the top five wind turbine manufacturers, one of the ten largest solar panel producers, and two of the top ten advanced battery manufacturers. China is now the largest wind turbine manufacturer, the largest solar panel manufacturer, and a dominant market player in advanced vehicle and battery technology.

Each day we wait, we fall further behind, sacrificing economic growth and badly needed jobs here at home. And that will not change until Congress passes a strong energy/climate bill.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who is working with Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to craft compromise energy and climate legislation in the Senate, recently noted: “Six months ago my biggest worry was that an emissions deal would make American business less competitive compared to China. Now my concern is that every day that we delay trying to find a price for carbon is a day that China uses to dominate the green economy.”

The 1900s were labeled “The American Century.” Unless we act now to enter our bid for market leadership in the world’s largest industry, we run the very real risk that the twenty-first century will have China’s name written all over it.

It’s time for the Senate to get our country out of the starting blocks and into the clean energy race.

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There’s no better way to kick off a Seattle visit than to have a two-hour meeting with Bill Gates. That was Arun Majumdar’s morning yesterday.

The director of ARPA-E, the new $400 million research agency within the U.S. Department of Energy, was on tour to promote novel energy R&D programs and get feedback from innovators across the country. He and Gates had an in-depth discussion about energy and climate change—some of the greatest problems facing humanity, and what Majumdar called “the challenge of our lifetime.” Earlier this week, Gates addressed these same points in his talk at the TED conference in California, calling for very fast-paced “miracle” innovations to increase energy efficiency and production while reducing carbon emissions.

It sounds like Gates and Majumdar are very much on the same page. Before being appointed to lead ARPA-E, where he reports to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Majumdar was a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at UC Berkeley, and also led research programs at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His expertise includes energy conversion, transport, and storage, from the nano-scale level to large energy systems.

After his meeting with Gates yesterday, Majumdar convened a group of about a dozen local energy entrepreneurs and investors, including Lars Johansson and Byron McCann of Northwest Energy Angels, Rick LeFaivre of OVP Venture Partners and the UW Center for Commercialization, Alla Weinstein of Principle Power, Rick Luebbe of EnerG2, Christina Lomasney of Modumetal, Jill Watz of Vulcan Capital, Niki Parekh of Bio Architecture Lab, Dan Rosen from Alliance of Angels, Chris Tagge of LivinGreen Materials, David Kaplan from V2Green (GridPoint), and Daniel Malarkey of the Washington State Department of Commerce.

Those I talked to after the meeting were very positive. They said Majumdar stressed the importance of risk-taking in R&D, and sought feedback from local leaders on things like who the customer will be for ARPA-E projects. This is a critical issue. The whole effort is modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has the Department of Defense as its main customer, and falls under a centralized policy. In the case of ARPA-E, however, Majumdar is navigating a discontinuous set of customers—essentially the entire energy market.

One key takeaway from the entrepreneur meeting was that the U.S. government needs to create a technology “pull” as well as a push. Majumdar noted in the meeting—as he also did in a recent presentation to Congress—that government is one of the largest consumers of energy (think buildings, transportation, and so on). So ARPA-E needs to use that power to create adoption and purchasing standards, as local leaders discussed with Majumdar.

“The U.S. government can come back and say, ‘We’re going to create a buying policy,’ and only buy production processes that have [a higher] level of efficiency,” says Lomasney from Modumetal, a Seattle-based nanotech startup that hopes to reinvent the metals industry. “ARPA-E has to supply the technology, but it also has to be the first adopter.”

Majumdar also gave a public talk at the University of Washington yesterday, hosted by the Department of Computer Science & Engineering. The theme was to address the “three Sputniks of … Next Page »

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Lest Apple take all the headlines this week, a certain software powerhouse in Redmond, WA, is making waves in its own way. Analysts and stockholders are anxiously awaiting the results of Microsoft’s fourth-quarter earnings call today, with some predicting a boost in revenues thanks to Windows 7. But there are other things going on too.

—OK, he doesn’t technically work at Microsoft anymore, but chairman Bill Gates has certainly been in the news a lot lately. One item you might not have noticed, however, was a report this week from Science magazine reporter Eli Kintisch. He wrote that Gates has been funding academic research on geoengineering, climate change, and energy since 2007. According to the story, Gates has put up at least $4.5 million to explore things like altering the stratosphere to reflect some solar energy, filtering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and brightening ocean clouds. None of this is surprising, given Gates’s involvement with huge, Earth-scale projects at places like Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures. But the specific connections to the University of Calgary, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and Silicon Valley inventor Armand Neukermans are interesting.

—Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer went on the record yesterday about doing business in China. This is a topic I have some familiarity with, having documented Microsoft’s research and development efforts in the Middle Kingdom over the past decade. Ballmer’s post comes on the heels of the flap involving Google in China. He didn’t say anything earth-shattering, but his comments reinforced the notion that Microsoft has been in China far longer than Google has, and has built up deeper relationships with Chinese government officials and businesses.

He wrote, “We have done business in China for more than 20 years and we intend to stay engaged, which means our business must respect the laws of China. That’s true for every company doing business in countries around the world: we are all subject to local laws.” Ballmer continued: “At the same time, Microsoft is opposed to restrictions on peaceful political expression, and we have conversations with governments to make our views known. In every country in which we operate, including China, Microsoft requires proper legal authority before we remove any Internet content; and if we remove content, we give users notice.”

—On the healthcare-IT front, Ryan reported today that Microsoft’s HealthVault software platform for managing electronic health records has expanded to its third country (after the U.S. and Canada), via a licensing deal from German conglomerate Siemens. The partnership was created through Siemens’ IT services and solutions division. Financial terms weren’t given, but it could be an important step in getting Microsoft’s health-related products to be adopted much more widely.

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In the past, Microsoft has had a reputation for being slow moving in the areas of green technology and energy-saving innovation. However, in the last two years, the corporation seems to have turned the tide, stepping up to the sustainability plate and implementing a number of company-wide green initiatives.

First, it hired Rob Bernard as chief environmental strategist, a position created specifically for him. It began integrating power management capabilities into its products—the latest release of Windows 7 and Microsoft Hohm include new energy tracking and management features. Partnerships were formed with the Clinton Foundation, the Carbon Disclosure Project, and the European Environmental Agency. And, most recently, Microsoft sent a 12-person delegation, led by Bernard, to the COP15 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Microsoft’s director of environmental sustainability, Francois Ajenstat, has been with the company for nine years, working in various groups including Office and SQL Server. He moved to sustainability, a personal passion of his, 18 months ago. His job includes everything from working with product teams to reduce the harmful environmental impact of their customers to talking with governments and NGOs around the world about climate change, and working on Microsoft’s own commitment to going green.

On the last day of the conference, Friday, I spoke with Ajenstat about how the company was received in Copenhagen and what its current environmental strategy entails.

“A lot of people join Microsoft to change the world,” he said. “This is clearly an opportunity where I could go in and have a significant impact on the world by also helping change the company.”

Here are a few edited highlights from our conversation:

Xconomy: Microsoft has recently put much more emphasis on sustainable technology. Why now?

Francois Ajenstat: The way that I describe how things were originally is we had a lot of what I call “well intentioned chaos”—a lot different people within the company doing great work, but not necessarily a line to a broader vision or broader strategy. Sustainability has moved to the forefront of everybody’s minds, both in terms of our customers asking Microsoft how we can help, government talking to Microsoft, our employees looking for what the company was doing, shareholders. It was almost more of a whole mountain of requests coming from all directions. What we wanted to do was have a thoughtful approach that made sense based on what society needs and also based on the real capabilities that Microsoft can bring to the table.

X: What are the key components of Microsoft’s environmental strategy?

FA: There are really three parts to the strategy. The first one is to use IT to improve energy efficiency. The second is to accelerate research breakthroughs. And the third is about responsible environmental leadership. A number of different studies have shown that the IT industry represents about 2 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions that are emitted. And you might say that 2 percent is … Next Page »

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[Editor's Note: Erik Mellgren, a noted Swedish business and technology journalist who worked with Xconomy as an Innovation Fellow in 2008, sends this article from Stockholm, just as the United Nations climate change conference is winding down in nearby Copenhagen, Denmark.]

Massachusetts startup FloDesign Wind Turbine was singled out by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu as an example of a groundbreaking new energy technology company when he visited United Nations conference on climate change earlier this week.

Chu also challenged his Danish hosts and told the audience that today’s wind energy technology simply isn’t good enough, if wind power is to have any impact on CO2 emissions. Denmark may be the world leader in wind energy technology at present, but the United States will take over the leadership in the future, Chu said.

His presented his vision of the next generation of wind turbines and said that they needed to be highly efficient, ultra compact, and low in cost. He then pointed to the Wilbraham, MA, company FloDesign and its turbines, which differ radically from today’s ordinary propeller-like windmills. The company’s design looks a bit like a jet engine, with a multi-bladed turbine enclosed in a shroud.

FloDesign was one of 37 companies across the United States, and six in Massachusetts, to win R&D grants through the Energy Department’s ARPA-E competition in October; it will receive $8.3 million.

The Danish wind energy community has already reacted to Dr. Chu’s comment, according to an article in the engineering magazine Ingeniøren. The article quotes Flemming Rasmussen, researcher at the prestigious Risø Institute. He says that even though the FloDesign concept may give a higher efficiency, it will probably not be competitive against today’s traditional designs, the reason being that the new design requires far more material in its construction.

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The Copenhagen climate conference is in full swing, and if you wonder why it matters, we’ve got evidence of a changing world to share with you. On the following pages is a series of arresting photographs and captions contributed by Alun Anderson, an Xconomy board member and former editor-in-chief and publishing director at New Scientist. Anderson is the author of After the Ice: Life, Death and Politics in the New Arctic, which is being published this month by HarperCollins-Smithsonian in North America and Virgin Books in the United Kingdom.

CLICK HERE FOR SLIDE SHOW (13 images)

Anderson made several trips to the Arctic while researching the book. His photographs and personal stories provide a stark demonstration that greenhouse warming is changing the planet’s climate—and altering both human and animal communities—at a rate few could have imagined just a few years ago.

Whatever your opinion about the “Climategate” controversy sweeping the media this week, a trip to the Arctic in summer is all it would take to convince you of the urgent need for measures to control greenhouse gas emissions. “That is where Xconomy and its readers have their connection to the Arctic,” Anderson comments. “You are the people who can help develop the technology that will slash greenhouse gas emissions cost effectively.”

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NEXT IMAGE >> East Svalbard I met this bear out on the pack ice just 800 miles from the North Pole. She was full of confidence and tried to climb straight aboard our 300-foot long ship (thankfully the sides were too high). Self assured she may be, but her future doesn’t look good…

… Next Page »

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Quite a few clean energy companies around Boston have a stake in the outcome of the international climate change talks that start this week in Copenhagen, Denmark. If nations set more aggressive goals for greenhouse-gas emissions cuts, after all, they’ll have a greater need for technologies to reduce their carbon emissions.

But only one local cleantech executive, as far as Xconomy can determine, is actually going to Scandinavia to participate in the discussions. It’s Christina Lampe-Onnerud, founder and CEO of Boston-Power, which makes green, longer-lasting batteries for HP laptops and other devices.

As a member of a non-governmental initiative called The Road to Copenhagen, Lampe-Onnerud attended climate change discussions in Brussels, Belgium in two years ago and Oslo, Norway, last year. She’s now heading to her native Sweden to take part in the group’s final conference in Malmö, just across the Oresund Strait from Copenhagen, on December 8 and 9.

Boston-Power is one of 13 corporate sponsors of the Road to Copenhagen meeting, alongside much larger companies such as Cargill, Procter & Gamble, and Whirlpool. Lampe-Onnerud, who trained as a chemist, says her most important job at the Malmö meeting will be to “bring some honesty to the scientific debate” around different options for dealing with climate change. “I have made it one of my personal and professional commitments to be a citizen of the Earth, and this is something I know something about, so I think I should volunteer some time,” she says.

The Road to Copenhagen group—an initiative of the Club de Madrid, a group of former presidents and prime ministers—consists largely of politicians, business leaders, and scientists who are not part of the formal negotiations at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. (That meeting starts today in Copenhagen and continues through December 18.) The group plans to develop a communiqué that will be delivered to representatives at the UN meeting. Its last communiqué, issued just before the 2008 UN climate change meeting in Poznań, Poland, called for a halt to further increases in greenhouse gas emissions globally by 2020 and a 50 percent reduction below 1990 levels by 2050—goals that are far more ambitious than the emissions caps set out by the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

Developing a more aggressive, legally binding treaty to take the place of the Kyoto accord—which expires in 2012—was the original goal for the Copenhagen conference. But the U.S. Congress’s failure to pass energy legislation this fall committing the United States to emissions reductions means that President Obama is going to Copenhagen largely empty-handed. Many other nations have also been dragging their feet on climate legislation. In recent days, both the U.S. and China, the world’s leading emitters of greenhouse gases, have set informal reductions targets, but it’s too late for Copenhagen: UN negotiators have already scaled back their goals for the meeting to achieving an interim pact, with more negotiations over a binding agreement to follow in 2010.

Still, Lampe-Onnerud is upbeat (as always—she is perhaps Boston’s most cheerful technology CEO). “I know that there is disappointment in the setup [for Copenhagen], but I am going because I still think the time is now,” she says. “We have to take action, because the climate change threat is more severe than many want to depict. I will go in with a sense of urgency, and with the discipline of a measurable, milestone-driven agenda.”

One item on Lampe-Onnerud’s agenda will be to try to quash schemes for large-scale climate modification to dampen or … Next Page »

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Craig Mundie is a geek, and I mean that in the best possible way. Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, the 17-year veteran of Redmond, WA, still talks like an engineer, throwing out terms like “heterogeneous machine architectures,” “GUIs” (graphical user interfaces), and “clouds and clients” like there’s no tomorrow. It’s kind of refreshing, given that he is in charge of setting the long-term agenda for one of the most powerful companies on the planet.

Mundie is in the midst of a weeklong tour of some top universities around the country. He called me yesterday from Cambridge, MA, where he had just finished a presentation to Harvard University students, faculty, and guests. He visits the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (my alma mater) today, and comes to Kane Hall at the University of Washington tomorrow afternoon. It’s similar to the college tours Bill Gates used to do.

From what I can tell, the goal is to stir up interest in computer science, give audiences a glimpse of future computing systems as Microsoft sees them, and stimulate discussions about how these technologies can help solve some pressing global problems. (You can read more about Mundie’s tour and demos in this Seattle Times story.)

Besides hearing Mundie’s thoughts on computer science education and the future of computing, I wanted to drill down and ask him about the challenge of taking on Microsoft’s strategy development (after Gates stepped down last year) in the most difficult economic times in recent memory. I also wanted to ask him about the deeper culture of Microsoft, the renewed role of research in the company’s future, and the importance of nurturing relationships around the world—and his secret ally in that quest.

Here are some edited highlights from our conversation:

Xconomy: What are you trying to get across to university audiences on this tour?

Craig Mundie: In these presentations, I’m trying to get them to think not only about how computing evolves, but with that evolution, what kinds of problems will become approachable, and what are the new methods? Several things are evolving in parallel [and leading to more heterogeneous and complex machines]. That begets the requirement of how to do programming around parallel computing. With very high-scale computing facilities, the cloud and the client come together to form one system that people will program. They will use those things together with new display and sensing technologies.

Just as the GUI revolutionized computing, we could see a similar revolution with more natural interactions with machines, rather than just “type and point and click.” That will expand the number of people who can interact with computers. With the diversity, rooms can become computers [for instance]. You won’t think of them so much as a computer.

X: What are some of the global problems you think advanced computing will help solve?

CM: Beyond the computer science realm, I’ve talked about energy and the environment. I show one piece of research work we’re doing to compose computational models, a simplified climate model, at Princeton and Microsoft Research. It shows linkages between deforestation in the Amazon and atmospheric temperatures around the rest of the world. If you were a policy person, these kinds of things would give you tools to support your decision making.

In energy, we’re doing computer modeling and direct visualizations. I showed a model, loaned to us from TerraPower [the nuclear power firm spun off from Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures … Next Page »

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Microbiologist Larry Feinberg has dug into piles of waste from paper factories and explored hot springs in the West for microbes that he calls “tough bugs,” because of their ability to thrive in adverse conditions. The fierce bacteria are now shipped to the new labs and headquarters of Mascoma, a developer of cellulosic ethanol, in Lebanon, NH.

This week, Mascoma scientists gave me an inside look at the Lebanon labs where Feinberg and his colleagues are developing microorganisms to inexpensively turn materials such as wood chips, switch grass, and corn stalks into ethanol for fueling automobiles and machinery. Mascoma’s plans for streamlining the process of making cellulosic ethanol have been known since it launched with initial venture financing from Flagship Ventures and Khosla Ventures in 2006, but these are particularly exciting times at the company. In April, scientists at the firm were able to demonstrate their streamlined process in a lab experiment. The firm is now scaling up the process at a pilot production facility in Rome, NY, and plans call for completing one of the first commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plants in Kinross, MI, by 2012.

Mascoma’s process is novel, for starters, because it would not require the use of food crops such as corn or soybeans, which are typically used to make ethanol. Ethanol production has driven up corn prices in recent years, and the total costs of producing such ethanol is high in part because lots of water and land resources are required to grow those feedstocks. Yet cellulosic ethanol production, which is Mascoma’s bread and butter, has plenty of challenges too. With traditional biochemical methods, enzymes are needed to digest the plant materials into sugars, and then yeast or bacteria are required to ferment the sugar to make ethanol. Mascoma’s key innovations include microbes that are genetically engineered to perform both those chores in a single step, making the process potentially more affordable than first thought.

Nathan Margolis, a lab manager at Mascoma, walked me through the labs that the company moved into about two months ago to explain how the firm is trying to harness a process which has been happening for hundreds of millions of years in nature, where bacteria are eating and digesting wood and grass and other plants to survive. “There’s a battle going on out there between the trees and the microbes trying to eat them alive,” Margolis said. “We’ve entered that battle on the side of the microbes” to produce ethanol from renewable sources.

We toured a lab where incubators were shaking up test tubes and glass bottles of yellow liquids that contained microorganisms. Here, the organisms are scrutinized and the genes that make them effective ethanol makers are identified. In nature, bacteria are particularly adept at digesting wood and other materials into sugar, but yeast are typically better at fermenting the sugar to make ethanol, or alcohol. Mascoma is reconfiguring the genes of yeast and bacteria so that each can perform both of those tasks in a single step. One of the firm’s leading microorganisms that can do this is … Next Page »

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One of MIT’s leading business professors, Richard Locke, came to Seattle yesterday to talk about the “S” word. Yes, we’ve been hearing a lot about sustainability lately, in the context of technology and business. Big companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Boeing are talking seriously about the issue. Smaller Seattle-area companies like Verdiem, Powerit Solutions, and R.W. Beck have been making progress in important areas like energy efficiency and water management. To Locke, and many others, sustainability is much more than a corporate buzzword.

Locke is deputy dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a professor of entrepreneurship and political science at MIT, based in Cambridge, MA. His research specialties include labor standards and practices, global entrepreneurship, and sustainable businesses. I sat down with him at the Westin Hotel downtown to get his perspective on Northwest companies’ green initiatives, and their possible partnerships with MIT. Locke was coming from meetings with Intel in the Portland area the previous day (the Santa Clara, CA-based chipmaker has manufacturing and development facilities in Hillsboro, OR). His other meetings in Seattle included a stop at Amazon to speak to Sloan School alums about the changing face of MBA education, and about sustainability in the corporate realm.

Locke defines sustainability broadly as “using resources today in a way that permits future generations to use them as well.” By this he means not just natural resources—energy, materials, water—but also social resources like people, jobs, and standards. “Let’s redefine sustainability in such a way that we can show the opportunities available, not just the constraints,” he says. “Once you broaden the definition, you expand the scope for individuals and organizations to try to do something about it.” (As I understand it, this definition of sustainability could include managing employees so they don’t burn out, creating jobs that last, and establishing fair labor standards that endure.)

Take Intel, for instance. Locke says the company is pursuing a series of initiatives to reduce its carbon footprint, improve its supply chain efficiency, and reshape the way it uses energy, water, and people. “Are there ways they can make, for example, new chips that might require less energy? They’re having a very interesting internal discussion about chip speed versus energy consumption. I find it fascinating that a large company in an extremely competitive sector, that still does manufacturing in … Next Page »

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Forget renewable fuels for a minute. If the world is ever going to get serious about avoiding a global warming catastrophe, then we need to capture carbon dioxide being spewed from power plants into the atmosphere and bury it underground, at least according to one school of thought. The technology to make this practical on a grand scale doesn’t exist, but Ramgen Power Systems, a small company in Bellevue, WA, full of aerospace engineers, says it has learned some things from jet engines that could turn this vision into reality.

Ramgen arrived on my radar in May, when it secured $20 million in federal stimulus money for its carbon compression technology. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu cited the company as a leader in the effort to make coal-fired power plants cleaner for the environment. This technology is complicated stuff, and the implications are potentially profound, so I visited Ramgen CEO Doug Jewett at his office last week to learn about it in greater depth.

The problem Ramgen is facing is so big, it needs to first be placed in proper context. To avoid melting of polar ice caps that would flood many highly-populated coastal areas around the world, the U.S. and the world needs to cut its carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050, from baseline readings in 1990, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Where to cut? That’s hard to say. Most of the energy Americans use goes to four primary sectors—generating electricity, transportation, industry, and residential and commercial use. So to reduce carbon emissions, people could switch to electric cars, buses, trucks, and electric heating and cooling in homes and offices, Jewett says. That means there’s going to be a lot more demand for electricity. And where does that come from? More than half of the nation’s electricity, and the leading source of air pollution, comes from the same source—coal. That isn’t likely to change anytime soon, Jewett says, so the real question is how to continue burning coal and natural gas to meet demand for electricity, without causing an environmental disaster.

“Most of what people are talking about with renewable involves incremental decreases in carbon emissions,” Jewett says. “Carbon capture and storage is key if we’re going to be effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

“It’s very troubling,” he says.

OK, so how does Ramgen fit into this picture? The company was founded … Next Page »

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