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As electronic gadgets get more connected, consumers can connect different devices to the same screen. For example, multiple PCs or set-top boxes could share one screen, while future in-home displays could be both energy monitors and alarm system controls.

(Credit:
Good Magazine)

Good for You, Good For the Planet says that its technology can detect when a device has gone into stand-by mode and then cut the current entirely. To reawaken a device, a consumer presses a button, according to the product description.

“With our technology you can have different configurations, as a power supply or a power strip, (and) you can launch a range of products to fix all the needs around stand-by for all kind of appliances, and in a pretty cheap way,” García Alonso said.

“So, zero-power has a place in our array of goals and approaches, but it is just one of many, and we need to be sure that attention to it doesn’t detract from other approaches that may save more energy, more cost-effectively,” he said.

Improving energy efficiency by cutting standby power on individual devices makes sense, but there’s also a need to address networked devices, said Bruce Nordman, a researcher at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Stand-by power levels have gone down significantly in past years yet energy efficiency for networked devices poses a different problem because they typically require continuous power.

Test products are being used at customers, including at a hotel and office building in Spain, according to a report. Commercially available products could be made more broadly available in a matter of months if the company successfully licenses its patent, García Alonso said.

Taking a bite out of electronic vampires could significantly reduce wasted energy. Good for You, Good for Planet says that a TV consumes more electricity per year when it’s off than when it’s on because the stand-by mode consumes electricity.

Good for You, Good for the Planet received a patent for a microprocessor-based design that cuts an electronic machine’s electricity use to zero. It is now negotiating with several large manufacturers to incorporate the technology into power strips or into appliances, according to President Jorge Juan García Alonso.

There are already products designed to stop the so-called phantom load of stand-by power. Smart power strips, for example, can tell when a TV peripheral is not being used and shut off.

In the U.S., “vampire energy” is about 5 percent of the energy consumed in the country and costs consumers $3 billion each year, according to the Department of Energy. Researchers at the University of California estimate that reducing stand-by power loss could save the U.S. $10 billion.

A Spanish company says it has developed a way to kill the vampires lurking in your living room–the numerous appliances that suck electricity even when they are not in use.

On Wednesday, the Brazilian Senate ordered Google to share information on 3,261 suspected pedophiles, information Google had refused to share earlier. No more.

“Google Brazil is legally obligated to comply with this order, and it is Google’s policy to comply with valid judicial process,” spokeswoman Sara Jew-lim said in a statement Friday.

Google already had tools in place to allow users to flag potentially illegal content, and it’s now adding a filter “with the goal of blocking pornographic pictures when someone tries to upload them, so that these pictures will not be posted,” she said.

It wasn’t immediately clear from Thursday’s reports, but Google will indeed share information from its Orkut social-networking site with Brazilian authorities trying to deal with suspected pedophiles.

But by late morning trading, the stock rebounded and was up roughly 1.5 percent to $420.66 a share.

Google’s shares have been sustaining a beating since mid-August, falling even further Thursday in early-morning trading to as low as $406.38 a share.

That price pushes its shares back to a level where the stock was trading in October 2006.

Google’s share price hit a new 52-week low Wednesday and continued its downward trek in early-morning trading Thursday.

Updated at 9:44 a.m. PDT, with Google’s stock price recovering.

The search giant’s stock fell as low as $409.68 a share on Wednesday, breaking past its previous 52-week low of $412.11 in mid-March.

Flickr has made a big design effort to highlight activities you’ll actually use and to make controls readily available. For instance, Flickr for iPhone puts your mobile e-mail-upload address front and center, so you don’t have to dig around to find it. Your comments, contacts, and activities are also given a share of the limelight with clear top-screen navigation, to much the same effect.

A great deal of Web companies have long since converted their
iPhone-optimized sites into native iPhone apps, but not Yahoo’s Flickr. Instead, Flickr is just getting around to tweaking its mobile site, m.flickr.com–in beta–specifically for iPhones. It may be behind the curve on iPhone-optimized viewing, but the results are crisp, streamlined, and satisfying nevertheless.

You’ll also notice that photos are automatically scaled to fit the screen, though you won’t be able to explore multiple photos sizes as you can from Flickr.com. We like that pages load without needing a complete
Safari refresh, and that photo sets are more efficient to browse, thanks to the arrow-topped thumbnails of the next and previous photos that sit right next to the image and serve as back and forth controls.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Quickly scrolling through photo sets is as close as you’ll get to slideshows and videos, however. Since iPhone 3G still doesn’t support Flash, it is predictable (but nonetheless regrettable) that these features are missing. Despite that, Flickr’s good-looking mobile site is one every Flickr user should bookmark.

The industry does well because most vendors have done a lifecycle analysis of their carbon emissions, examining energy and consumption of its supply chain partners, and the impact of waste from their products.

Correction at 8:10 a.m. PDT: Nike’s score has been fixed.

The electronics and IT industry had the best industry ranking with a score of 56 on average out of a possible 100 points, led by a score of 77 from IBM, which edged out consistently high performer Canon.

IBM, Google, and Microsoft apparently are model citizens when it comes to reducing their carbon footprint, while Apple has a long way to go.

In the area of Internet/software, Google has become the new standard-bearer. Google got the top spot because it has a program to measure its carbon emissions and because of its program through Google.org to invest in clean-energy ventures.

The overall leader across all industries was Nike, which scored 82. Click here for PDFs of the results and the press release.

(Credit:
Climate Counts)

Apple, which has come under fire for the use of toxic materials, scored at the bottom of the electronics sector list with an 11.

According to its individual scorecard, Apple’s ranking was hurt by incomplete reporting and because it hasn’t set goals to reduce its own or its partners’ greenhouse gases.

(Credit:
Climate Counts)

Climate Counts, a nonprofit funded by yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm, released on Wednesday its annual assessment of corporations’ actions related to addressing climate change and whether they live up to their “green” marketing claims.

Climate Counts uses public information to rank companies in all industries.

Many familiar names dot the list of founding members, including chip companies such as AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, mobile industry representatives such as ARM, Motorola, Samsung, and TI, and Apple.

GPUs are very good at taking specific tasks, breaking them down into pieces, and solving them at an extremely high rate of speed using multiple processor cores. But they aren’t good at handling the random assortment of software that we all have on our PCs or Macs, which in turn hasn’t been programmed to take advantage of multiple processor cores, for the most part.

To that end, companies like Nvidia, AMD, and Intel have all been working on ways to make it easier for software developers outside of the scientific computing industry to take advantage of the unique characteristics of the GPU.

The Khronos Group, an industry consortium that already administers well-known standards like OpenGL, announced the creation of a Compute Working Group on Monday to develop an industry standard for allowing software developers to tap into the performance offered by graphics processors, or GPUs.

GPUs are perhaps best-known for rendering realistic mayhem in the never-ending sequence of PC shooter games, but they are taking on new roles. Newer operating systems like Vista are placing more graphical demands on the PC, and programmers in the scientific community are also interested in using the power of GPUs to process certain types of applications.

That’s because there’s a notable company missing from the founding members of this group: Microsoft. If Microsoft chooses to go down a different path with the next implementations of Windows and Windows Mobile, it will be hard for the chip companies to resist following suit.

When Apple unveiled Mac OS X Snow Leopard last week during its Worldwide Developers Conference, the company noted that the operating system would feature a technology called OpenCL to make it easier for software developers to access graphics processors. The Khronos Group will evaluate OpenCL as a proposed standard, but there’s no guarantee that all companies will eventually head down that path.

In typical fashion, however, they all came up with different implementations. Nvidia has CUDA, AMD has Stream Computing, and Intel has its Larrabee project, which actually hasn’t been released.

The PC and mobile-computing industries are getting together to propose a standard for computing on graphics processors, and they are going to start their evaluation with Apple’s OpenCL technology.

Other sections include a YouTube video listed as the “Temple of Obama” that shows the makings of Obama’s stage tonight at the Invesco stadium here, where he’s scheduled to accept the Democratic nomination on Thursday. Another features press conferences from Republicans–held, intentionally, right in the middle of the Democratic convention.

Notready08.com features a video board of clips of former candidates criticizing Barack Obama.

For his part, Obama has replied to Republican attacks with his “Fight the Smears” Web page. And you can probably expect clips to surface of John McCain’s rivals attacking him in the primaries in the not-so-distant future.

That’s what the Republicans, at least, are hoping to demonstrate with their notready08.com site, which features clips of Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and John Edwards slamming Barack Obama last year and earlier this year for being inexperienced or over his voting record in Illinois.

DENVER–If you’re a candidate for president during the 2012 primaries, you may want to watch how sharply you criticize your rivals. Your critiques may come back to haunt you on the Web.

(Credit:
Notready08.com)

Despite Intel’s upbeat assessment of the economy on Tuesday, AMD saw “a challenging global environment for consumers” during the first quarter, said Bob Rivet, AMD’s chief financial officer.

The first quarter of 2008 marks the fifth straight quarter in which AMD has lost at least $350 million. It’s mind-boggling to understand how it’s sustained such losses for such a long period of time. In total, that’s $3.7 billion in losses racked up between the beginning of 2007 through the end of March 2008.

And while I had expected to hear about the fabled “asset-light” strategy on the one-year anniversary of Ruiz uttering that phrase, we’re still in the dark as to AMD’s plans for cutting costs in its manufacturing operation. “I know you would like (more information) and I feel terrible I can’t provide you details on that,” Ruiz said, sounding almost chagrined.

Updated 3:35 p.m. PDT with additional details and comments from conference call.

For the quarter, which ended March 29, AMD lost $358 million based on generally accepted accounting principles, but that number includes $50 million in charges related to the acquisition of ATI Technologies in 2006. Excluding that one-time charge, the company lost $308 million, or 51 cents a share, also in line with Wall Street expectations.

AMD’s processor business had a decent quarter, despite not having its two latest server and desktop processors on hand until late in the period. Revenue in the chip business was up 30 percent compared with last year’s first quarter, as unit sales increased. But the business took a step backward in profitability, losing $160 million in the first quarter after eking out a $21 million profit in the fourth quarter.

However, despite the new products, AMD still expects revenue to decline in line with normal seasonal patterns looking forward into the second quarter. The current quarter is always the slowest period of the year for the PC and server industries, absent any catalysts such as the back-to-school season or the holidays.

Ruiz promised to have AMD profitable by the third quarter of the year. It’s going to take strong sales in the face of an uncertain economic environment, substantial cost cutting, and a bit of luck to get there.

That sounds very much like additional layoffs beyond the 10 percent cuts and the possible jettisoning of AMD’s consumer electronics business, which lost $8 million on a 31 percent decline in revenue. The company needs to get its costs down from around $1.7 billion this quarter to about $1.5 billion a quarter by the end of the year, Rivet said.

It sounds like AMD is getting ready to do a top-to-bottom look at its operation to find places to cut costs beyond the 10 percent workforce reductions it has already announced. Chairman and CEO Hector Ruiz spoke of “revisiting” noncore businesses, such as AMD’s cell phone and consumer electronics businesses, if the company can’t find a way to make them profitable.

The company reported its first-quarter financial results Thursday after the close of the market, and it continues to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. AMD had already warned investors that revenue would fall short of early expectations, and the official number, at $1.5 billion, was in line with the revised expectations.

The good news is that AMD will have fresh new products in place, at long last, by the time the second quarter ends. Barcelona and Phenom, quad-core chips for servers and desktops, should provide a lift to AMD’s performance in those areas, said Dirk Meyer, president and COO. And AMD also expects to launch its first processor designed specifically for notebooks in the second quarter.

As we already knew, times are still tough for Advanced Micro Devices.

The image quality is stunning, however, producing the best–or close to the best–of all of the following: color, contrast, viewing angles, and refresh rates.

The most cutting of cutting-edge technology is always a sticker shocker. Sony currently sells an 11-inch EL TV (960?540) for a staggering 190,000 yen, or just under $2,000. That’s right, an 11-inch display. Even smaller than the displays on subnotebooks, which typically come with 12-inch LCDs.

(Credit:
Sony)

Sony also exhibited an 11-inch panel.

Sony has been making smaller, 3.8-inch OLED displays for gadgets since 2004.

Sony XEL-1 EL TV currently sells in Japan for just under $2,000

The panel shown this week at Diplay2008 is about 0.3mm thick, besting Sony’s current 1.4mm-thick EL TV (photo). Epson lists its Premium Glossy Photo Paper as 0.3mm thick. So by this standard the panel is literally paper thin.

There’s thin. Then there’s paper thin. Sony showed an electroluminescent (EL) display that’s print-paper thin at the Display2008 conference in Tokyo.

Another thing: the organic matter used can by ruined by the elements, so special sealing technology is necessary for the displays.

The Sony EL display is based on organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology that uses electroluminescent organic materials. OLED panels are extremely thin because they don’t need backlights. The electroluminescent layer contains a polymer substance that directly converts electricity to light.

“It has a superhigh contrast ratio (allegedly, 1 million to one), it boasts faster response times than LCD or plasma, it looks incredibly sharp with colors that really pop–and because OLED screens don’t require a backlight, they’re more energy efficient than plasma or LCD,” according to this CNET review.

It may sound counterintuitive, but if Google has shown us anything, getting rid of you in the search space works extremely well.

Surely, some will attribute Google’s success to its better search results or Yahoo’s management troubles or Microsoft’s poor offering, but it goes far beyond that. Search isn’t simply about relevant results or the competition. Instead, search is all about getting you to your destination as quickly as possible.

And so far, it’s quite apparent that only Google understands that basic premise.

Google was the first company to embrace the idea that letting users go can actually turn into a business model. And so far, it’s really the only company that still believes it. But maybe site owners can learn something from Google. Instead of worrying about where you go and making sure you don’t stray too far, site owners need to be willing to let you go and be confident enough to stand on the quality of their content to keep you coming back.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.

And although countless tech pundits will chime in and discuss exactly why Google has been able to run roughshod over its competition, few will point out one basic fact that is too often overlooked: Google search is designed to get rid of you as quickly as possible.

Google wants you to leave and feels like it has done its job when you do. Now, part of that equation revolves around the quality of search results and the service’s usability, but we can’t downplay the fact that letting you go is a key to the company’s success.

Think about that for a second. Doesn’t that run directly against everything we know about the Web? Practically every site is designed to keep you there. How many times have you tried to click links in a blog post, only to find that it links you back to another section of the same site? It happens all the time.

But Google, unlike Yahoo and Microsoft, has made it a key point in its business model to ensure that you get off the Google search result pages as soon as possible. Its competitors, on the other hand, fail to fully understand that premise.

Basically, more Web sites try to keep you from going elsewhere for fear that you will never come back. But Google doesn’t worry about that.

Nielsen yesterday released a study it conducted on the popularity of the top 10 search engines for July. As expected, Google sat atop the list, commanding more than 60 percent of the market after enjoying 16 percent year-over-year growth. Trailing behind, Yahoo and Microsoft captured 17.4 percent and 11.9 percent of the market, respectively. More importantly, both companies lost ground to Google–Yahoo witnessed an 11 percent decline, while Microsoft suffered through a 10 percent decline.

A quick jaunt to Yahoo’s search page tells you everything you need to know about the company’s ideas about search: it wants you to stay on Yahoo’s pages and look around. But Google doesn’t feel that way. It’s of the opinion that the less time you spend using Google search results, the more often you’ll go back instead of using a competitor’s service.

Search engines are nothing more than middlemen that are designed to get your thought to your destination. In other words, if you’re looking for places to live in Naples, Fla., you get to Google, ask it for places to live in Naples, and hope that one of the results will give you what you want. But if you don’t, you’re forced to keep searching until you find what you’re looking for. And as anyone who queries search engines on a daily basis knows, nothing is more frustrating.