Smartphones powered by the Light---Tomado de TechRepublic

Solar-powered smartphones are coming closer, with tests in China

Summary: Smartphones should soon be able to charge themselves using transparent Wysips Crystal photovoltaic panels bonded into their screens. And if the idea takes off, tablets and eventually whole buildings could follow....

By Jack Schofield for Jack's Blog | August 6, 2013 -- 16:30 GMT (09:30 PDT)

Wysips integration. Photo credit: Sunpartner

TCL Communication, a Chinese mobile phone manufacturer, is developing smartphones that recharge themselves using solar power. A phone is rather small for a solar panel, but it's using transparent Wysips Crystal technology that is bonded to the smartphone screen.

 

Wysips Crystal -- which stands for What You See Is Photovoltaic Surface -- has been developed by Sunpartner, which is based in the south of France. Sunpartner says: "The goal of this partnership is to develop smartphone prototypes powered by solar and artificial light. This project will enable TCL Communication to evaluate the technology in both technical and marketing terms."

 

TCL also has a French connection, in that it supplies Alcatel with its OneTouch mobile phone. It markets phones in more than 120 countries.

 

The companies expect that putting an ultra-thin layer of Wysips Crystal under the screen will enable a smartphone to generate enough power to maintain a charge. It hopes an hour of sunlight will provide enough power for 30minutes of conversation.

Duke Kills Florida Nuclear Project, Keeps Customers' Money(from Bloomberg BusinessWeek)

Politics & Policy

Georgia Power's Vogtle 3 and 4 plant construction site

Nuke Fallout

By Justin Bachman

The decision by Duke Energy (DUK) to scuttle a proposed nuclear reactor project in central Florida leaves utility customers in the state with a tab of more than $1 billion—most of it already paid to Duke—for unbuilt plants that may never produce a single kilowatt of energy. That’s proved a powerful irritant for customers in the Sunshine State, where air conditioning is a necessity for much of the year.

 

The company said Thursday that it will halt construction on two reactors planned for Levy County, north of Tampa, after their estimated date of completion had stretched into 2024 at a projected cost of some $24 billion. Duke inherited the project as part of its purchase of Progress Energy last year, which made it the nation’s largest power utility. Duke’s decision also calls into question whether another large utility in the state, Florida Power and Light (NEE), will proceed with two new reactors it plans near Homestead, south of Miami.

 

“Consumers should rejoice that the fleecing will end by one of the companies in this long and unfortunate chapter in Florida energy history, where utilities have conspired with legislators and the Public Service Commission to take advantage of Florida consumers,” said Stephen Smith, executive director of Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, an organization that has criticized plans for nuclear power plants in several states. The group held a conference call Friday to discuss the project’s end. “The bad news about all of this is clearly that consumers have paid literally billions of dollars for a facility that they are going to get no value from.”

 

The primary reason for those huge sums? Lawmakers in at least three states have allowed utilities to recoup their engineering and planning costs from customers years before any construction begins on new plants. Florida legislators passed the first such law in 2006, followed by Georgia and South Carolina. A lawsuit over the Florida measure went to the state Supreme Court, which ruled it constitutional. Multiple efforts to repeal the law have failed.

 

Duke has collected $819.5 million in Florida since 2009 for the Levy County project and work at a separate planned nuclear site, according to the Florida Public Service Commission. Under a settlement with the state, Duke plans to collect another $350 million in costs from Florida customers over 20 years starting in 2017. Cindy Muir, a spokeswoman for the Florida Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities operating in the state, said commissioners “followed the laws as directed by the Legislature” when approving funds for the Duke projects.

 

Southern Co.’s (SO) Georgia Power unit is building two new reactors in eastern Georgia, while Scana (SCG) is building two reactors at a site in Fairfield County, north of Columbia, S.C. Both projects have been funded with so-called advance cost recovery money charged to utility customers.

 

“The insanity of advance cost recovery has been revealed in Florida—it’s the ‘emperor has no clothes’ time,” says Mark Cooper, a senior fellow for economic analysis at Vermont Law School, who works with the Southern Alliance. “The notion that utilities are going to try to go forward without having a great deal of risk [on shareholders] has suffered a major blow here.” The alliance, based in Knoxville, Tenn., also argued that Florida’s Legislature, the PSC, and the Florida Office of Public Counsel, which advocates for consumers before the PSC, had failed state residents when it comes to nuclear plants.

 

“Whether I think it’s a good law or a bad law is irrelevant, I don’t have any say-so in that,” responded J.R. Kelly, an attorney who serves as Florida’s Public Counsel. His office is not empowered to lobby state legislators, he said.

 

In canceling the Levy County reactors, Charlotte-based Duke said its decision was prudent given that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Agency would be unable to approve a construction and operating license for the project before January, which would mean the plant would not begin operating before 2024. Duke plans to pursue the license and expects to receive it in 2016, spokesman Rick Rhodes said today. The company considers the project to be merely delayed, he added, with future construction there remaining likely. “Our philosophy at Duke is that you need a diversity of different types of fuel,” Rhodes said. “I think as a utility, and as a country, we have to have nuclear in our future.”

 

Some observers remain skeptical of the company. “I can’t believe there’s not a good law firm somewhere in these great United States looking at this and saying is there a possibility of a class-action lawsuit” for consumers, said Florida Representative Mike Fasano, a Republican from New Port Richey who has testified against advance cost recovery laws in other states. He alleged that Duke never intended to build nuclear plants in Florida and lied to lawmakers about its plans.

 

The Duke project’s demise—for the near future, at least—is a further nail in the coffin of the U.S.’s so-called nuclear renaissance, an effort begun during the George W. Bush administration to revive the nation’s nuclear power industry through streamlined regulatory approvals and federal loan guarantees and subsidies. Rival utilities NRG Energy (NRG) and Exelon (EXC) have also shelved plans for nuclear reactors over the past four years.

 

Most of that reversal can be traced to the plummeting price of natural gas, which now trades around $3.35 per million British thermal units. Utilities, which account for about one-third of all U.S. natural gas use, have migrated to the cheap gas to fuel electricity production. Five years ago, when development on several of the Southeastern nuclear projects commenced, gas traded above $13. Its plunge has helped to wreck the feasibility of many planned nuclear plants.

 

Bachman is an associate editor for Businessweek.com.

 

Number of college grads with IT degrees downm(Tomado de TechRepublic)

Number of college grads with IT degrees down

By Toni2 Bowers2 in Career Management, August 1, 2013, 1:55 PM

 

A CareerBuillder study shows that colleges are issuing fewer IT degrees than ten years ago. Here are the stats and a possible reason why.  

                   

I’ve been writing about IT careers for a long time. I’ve gotten thousands of PR releases about new studies. Many of these “studies” make me scratch my head and wonder why they were conducted and why anyone thought the results were newsworthy.  

 

But I got one the other day from CareerBuilder and Economic Modeling Specialists (EMSI) that got  my attention. According to this study, the U.S. is producing fewer college graduates with computer and Information Technology degrees than they were ten years ago. (The study uses EMSI’s labor market and education database, which pulls from over 90 national and state employment resources and includes detailed information on employees and self-employed workers. Higher education completion data includes associate’s degrees and above and comes from the National Center for Education Statistics.)

 

Ironically, the number of computer and IT jobs grew 13 percent nationally from 2003 to 2012, while the number of computer and IT degrees completed in the U.S. declined 11 percent during that same period. Here are the IT stats from the survey:

• 13,576 fewer degrees in 2012 than 2003, an 11 percent decrease
• Related jobs in the U.S. have increased 13.1 percent from 2003-2012, an addition of 311,068 jobs.
• Of the 15 metros with the most computer and IT degrees in 2012, 10 saw decreases from their 2003 totals.
• The biggest decreases in computer and IT graduates among the largest metros included New York City (a 52 percent drop), San Francisco (55 percent), Atlanta (33 percent), Miami (32 percent), and Los Angeles (31 percent).
• Notable metros to increase their computer and IT higher education output were Washington, D.C. (a 31 percent rise), Minneapolis-St. Paul (14 percent), and Salt Lake City (117 percent).

So what’s going on? Part of this sea change is that people are starting to see that, with technology’s speed of change, the curriculum for a computer science degree gets obsolete about a month after it’s created.

Also, people are finding that it’s faster, and more cutting-edge, to pursue tech certifications after you’ve gotten your degree in any other discipline. There are no college prerequisites for getting a tech cert, and you can pursue them at any points in your career.

The stat that made my eyes pop out of my head was that there’s been a 47 percent increase (from 2003 to 2012) in Liberal Arts and Humanities degrees. Back when I was considering a degree (me and Fred Flintstone), a Liberal Arts degree was pretty much a guarantee that you would never get meaningful employment. And, of course, Humanities was where my heart was.

I forged on with my English degree, despite all the warnings of unemployment and inevitable starvation. When in school, I worked part-time at the law school and one of the professors told me I should attend law school because my ability to write would serve me better than a pre-law degree. I thought he was full of it.

Now that I’ve been in working world for several centuries, I can see his point. I think the most valuable employees are not those who come in with a deep knowledge of a specific area, but those who can learn almost anything once they’re in and can quickly adapt to change. And now that IT is more closely tied to the business, the ability to communicate effectively and see the big picture is more important than ever.

I think people are seeing that the more important takeaway from college is learning to think more strategically. I’d like to hear from those of you from both sides of the equation? If you have a computer science degree, do you think it’s given you a leg up in your career? And for those who come into IT with out-of-the-norm degrees, do you feel that your lack of an IT degree has hindered you?

American Automobile Glut? Unsold Cars Are Piling Up...from Bloomberg BusinessWeek

 Autos

  The Stewart Chevrolet Cadillac dealership in Colma, Calif.
 By Kyle Stock


Even with U.S. car sales zooming along, there are some signs automakers might be stepping on the gas a little too hard.

 

Some 3.27 million new cars are now sitting on lots across the U.S., more than there have been in almost five years, according to Automotive News. That’s a lot of cars—just enough to equip every man, woman, and child in the state of Iowa with a new vehicle, and just slightly less than the number of iPhones added to Verizon’s network last quarter. A year ago at this time, by contrast, there were 2.7 million vehicles lying in wait across the country; summer 2011 saw an inventory of about 1 million fewer cars.

 

Inventory is a dirty word to most supply-chain managers. After all, it was a “just-in-time” factory system that helped Toyota (TM) muscle its way to the top of the industry, and there’s nothing timely about 3 million unsold cars. But there are a few, very real reasons for car executives to be confident. For one, interest rates are still relatively low and car loans are easy to come by, even for those with poor credit. There is pent-up demand because the 2008 recession spooked so many drivers into holding on to an aging ride for a little while longer.

 

Roughly 100 million cars in the U.S. are between seven and 12 years old, the “sweet spot” for high-maintenance repairs, according to Bloomberg analyst Kevin Tynan. At the pace Americans were buying cars last month, dealers can sell the current backlog in 61 days, which Tynan calls a “manageable” number. In January, supply was at 75 days.

 

But August isn’t the best time for dealerships to be full, as most 2014 models will be rolled out in September. Some carmakers are flirting with a potential glut. General Motors (GM), for example, has enough Cadillacs finished to meet demand for more than four months. It also has 85 days’ worth of Buicks ready to roll. (At the other end of the spectrum, Toyota and Subaru (9778:JP) are running lean—current U.S. inventories for both companies should be gone in less than 60 days.)

 

Looking for a deal on a vehicle in the next month or two? Dealership lots that stock American automakers appear to be ripe for bargain seekers.

 

 
 

 

Technology Insider from Bloomberg BusinessWeek :Tesla

Musk: Photograph by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg; Car: Courtesy of Tesla The Tesla Model S

Features

Why Everybody Loves Tesla

By Ashlee Vance

The Tesla Motors (TSLA) design studio in Los Angeles is a huge open space that usually has a couple of prototype cars on the floor and parts scattered along the walls. Tonight, it’s a lounge, with red lighting, white leather couches dotting tiered plateaus of AstroTurf, Daft Punk on the sound system, and women in little black dresses serving cocktails. A few hundred guests mingle and snap photos. Most are local owners of the Model S, the luxury sedan Tesla introduced last year to near-universal acclaim.

 

The crowd parts for the star of the evening, Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive officer, and closes behind him as he works the room. After about an hour, Musk, wearing a black velvet jacket, hops onto a stage outfitted with the kind of wheel guides and drive-over repair pit you’d see at a Jiffy Lube. He tells them they’re about to witness history: a refueling contest between gasoline and electricity. “You’re here for the title fight!” he says.

 

A $70,000 Model S rolls onstage and stops over the pit. Simultaneously a live video feed of an Audi (NSU:GR) entering a gas station appears on a big screen. An on-screen timer starts, and the Audi driver begins pumping gas while robot arms beneath the stage replace the battery pack on the Model S. After 93 seconds, the Tesla rolls off the stage; the Audi is still refueling. A second Model S stops over the pit and finishes its battery swap after 91 seconds—just as the Audi tops off at 20 gallons. “There are people that take a lot of convincing,” Musk tells the adoring audience. “Hopefully, this is what will finally convince people that electric cars are the future.”

 

Wall Street needed assurances, too. In Tesla’s 10 years of existence, the company has suffered through embarrassing delays and leadership overhauls, verged on bankruptcy at least once, and been a favorite target of short sellers. In May it posted its first profitable quarter, with earnings of $11.2 million; sales for the first quarter rose 83 percent, to $562 million. Musk raised the 2013 sales

 

estimate by a thousand vehicles to 21,000, an eightfold increase over 2012. A few weeks later, Tesla paid off a $465 million government loan early and then raised $1 billion from investors. The stock price has soared in the past six months, from $32 a share to $129.90 on July 15, before falling $18.21 in one day after Goldman Sachs (GS) published a skeptical report about the carmaker’s margins.

Tesla has a market cap of about $13 billion, or about the size of Mazda Motor, which, according to a Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAC) estimate, will sell about 1.3 million vehicles globally in 2013.

A 17-inch touchscreen instead of knobs and buttons

Some of the stock’s rise may have come from short sellers covering their bets, but you don’t get revenue increases like that without a decent product. The Model S does zero to 60 miles per hour in 4.2 seconds, has plenty of room (including a “frunk,” a second trunk under the hood), and gets the energy usage equivalent of 95 miles per gallon. Last November it became the first electric to win the Motor Trend Car of the Year award; in May, Consumer Reports gave the Model S its highest car rating ever—99 out of 100. “It’s what Marty McFly might have brought back in place of his DeLorean in Back to the Future,” the magazine said.

 

After the battery-pack demonstration, Tesla’s chief designer, Franz von Holzhausen, can barely contain himself as he talks about the design of the Model S. “It’s like the leap of faith Apple (AAPL) took with the iPhone,” he says, explaining why the car has a touchscreen instead of the usual physical buttons. “There’s a cleanliness to the interior. The screen is the hero. We are in the midst of that transition toward a new way of thinking. For me, it’s that iPhone moment

 

Courtesy of TeslaThe extra trunk up front is called a “frunk”
 

That the company has come this far is no small achievement. But the next phase of Tesla’s growth is going to be exponentially more challenging. Tesla’s ambition isn’t merely to win the title of hottest car in Silicon Valley, it’s to simultaneously become the next Ford Motor (F) and ExxonMobil (XOM)—to be a profitable, mass-scale manufacturer and fuel distribution network. Not even Henry Ford tried to pull all that off.

To continue goto: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-18/the-tesla-electric-cars-creators-chase-their-iphone-moment#p2

 

STORY:  

Beyond Tesla: Rival Electric Car Makers Shred Sticker Prices

STORY:

Gone in 90 Seconds: Tesla's Battery-Swapping Magic

VIDEO:

Inside Tesla: A Massive Factory Pumping Out Model S
Vance is a technology writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in Palo Alto, Calif. Follow him on Twitter @valleyhack.

  

 

 



  

Yahoo Inches Forward After Year One of Marissa Mayer: from Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer at the announcement of the company's acquisition of Tumblr on May 20 in New York

Earnings

By Brad Stone

There’s even more interest than usual in the perennially embattled Yahoo!’s (YHOO) second-quarter earnings, released just a half-day ahead of the one-year mark since former Google (GOOG) executive Marissa Mayer took over as chief executive officer of the pioneering Web portal.

 

Mayer, as Yahoo’s fifth boss in four years, has proven herself a steady steward so far. Shares are up more than 70 percent during her tenure, buoyed for the most part by an ongoing stock buyback and by the rising value of the company’s 23 percent stake in Chinese powerhouse Alibaba Group, which could stage an IPO this year. Still, as Bloomberg News notes in its one-year-later assessment, advertisers remain unsold on the Yahoo turnaround and analysts are nervous about Mayer’s acquisition spree of 17 startups, including the pricey $1.1 billion purchase of blog network Tumblr.

 

Other outlets have weighed in today with similar report cards that emphasize less what Mayer has accomplished than what she has yet to prove. Of particular concern is the lack of growth in Yahoo’s core advertising business. Research firm EMarketer predicts that Yahoo’s share of global digital ad spending is set to decline from 3.37 percent to 3.1 percent this year, with rivals Google and Facebook (FB) eating into Yahoo’s primary domain of display ads.

 

Today’s tepid earnings report raises more of the same questions. The company reported revenue (minus traffic-acquisition costs) of $1.07 billion, slightly missing analyst estimates of $1.08 billion and coming in at the low end of its own guidance. That amounts to a decline of 1 percent from the same quarter last year–not the arrow any company wants to put up on the board.

 

Digging a little deeper into the revenue numbers only emphasizes that challenges abound: The $423 million from display ads is off 11 percent from a year earlier, while the $418 million from search fell 9 percent from the same quarter last year. Yahoo stock slipped 0.7 percent in after-hours trading, after a runup in recent weeks.

 

Mayer put a positive spin on the numbers in a conference call with analysts. In an unusual move, the call was also made available as a live webcast that featured Mayer sitting alongside Chief Financial Officer Ken Goldman at a desk—as if they were television newscasters. Mayer called the quarter “one of the most productive in the history of Yahoo. We basically reached a phase of releasing a new product every week.” Among the dozens of new products were mobile apps for Yahoo’s Mail, Weather, Sports, News, and Flickr properties. Mayer said the company now had hundreds of engineers working solely on mobile, up from only dozens when she joined.

 

Mayer also said she was on the second part of her turnaround plan, centered around improving products, and she claimed that renewed traffic growth for Yahoo properties after years of decline was “unprecedented.” Acknowledging that none of this has increased revenue, Mayer predicted a “chain reaction” that would further increase traffic and spark growth.

 

Some analysts appear comfortable waiting. Mark Mahaney, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, called it a “lengthy turnaround process” in an interview with Bloomberg and said that if Mayer is successful, “it will show up in the company’s fundamentals two to three years from now.”

 

A wait-and-see approach makes sense for now. Mayer inherited a famously leaky ship, and it’s difficult to argue that Yahoo isn’t in a better position today than it was a year ago. Job satisfaction among employees is up, according to a recent survey by Glassdoor, and Mayer continues to improve Yahoo’s standing as a coveted place to work for engineers. The company is even trying to energize employees by giving away Jawbone Up fitness wristbands and challenging staffers to walk or jog 100 miles in a month, as Businessweek reported earlier today.

 

Of course, if Mayer doesn’t get Yahoo’s revenue up soon, she may not be able to outrun her own critics.

 

Stone is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter @BradStone.

Technology Insider, from Bloomberg BusinessWeek

E-Commerce

Instacart: Crowdsourcing Your Grocery Shopping

By Brad Stone

 

Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz has a favorite disaster. Its name was Webvan, and it operated for less than two years during the dot-com bust and burned through $375 million from its initial public offering before going out of business in 2001. So Sequoia’s July 10 announcement that it’s investing $8 million in a San Francisco-based online grocery upstart, Instacart, rekindled some dormant traumas. “We had still been receiving outpatient therapy for our Webvan fiasco,” says Moritz, who’s joining the year-old company’s board. Still, with Instacart, he says, “There’s little danger of a relapse.”

 

In contrast to the high overhead of Webvan, which had its own refrigerated warehouses and a fleet of trucks, Instacart is built on a crowdsourcing model. Its 10 full-time employees, mostly engineers, work from a small office in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood. Its app sends customer orders to about 200 independent Bay Area personal shoppers, who receive commissions based on the number of items and orders they deliver in their own vehicles. The app features detailed maps of local supermarkets and can direct the personal shoppers to specific aisles. Founder Apoorva Mehta says Instacart’s “secret sauce” is its fulfillment software, which allows the online retailer to combine orders placed at different times and fill them from different stores—supplementing frozen food from Trader Joe’s with fresh fruit from Whole Foods (WFM) and cereal from Costco (COST). Customers assemble their orders with lengthy drop-down menus on Instacart’s website or app.

 

That’s an advantage Instacart will need as it tries to use its new funding to expand to 10 U.S. cities by the end of next year. Peapod, FreshDirect, and supermarket chain Safeway (SWY) are well established in what could be a big part of the $600 billion U.S. grocery business, and the field is about to get crowded. Amazon.com (AMZN) is expanding its AmazonFresh service to Los Angeles and San Francisco and is crafting a national rollout, say three people familiar with its plans who aren’t authorized to discuss them publicly. Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) is testing a delivery service in the San Jose and San Francisco metro areas.

 

Instacart’s Mehta says he can expand quickly to other cities because he doesn’t have to build infrastructure. The 26-year-old Toronto-born engineer spent two and a half years working in Amazon’s supply-chain division and witnessed the challenges of storing and shipping perishables. “How you keep tomatoes at the right temperature and prevent them from spoiling is actually a very difficult problem,” says Mehta. “The mechanics of perishable inventory are very different from delivering televisions.”

 

It’s difficult to find dependable shopping couriers who can master Instacart’s app and also reliably pick the ripest avocado or the milk carton least likely to spoil. Customers will pay a premium for that kind of service, says Linda Collins, who complements her day job as a cashier at Trader Joe’s by working about 30 hours a week for Instacart, stuffing grocery bags into the back of her red Mini Cooper. “People are very generous. They all seem to love the service,” says Collins, adding that Instacart delivers her more than $500 a week in commission and tips.

 

While some stores that Instacart shoppers frequent have competing online services, grocery operators should welcome the business, says Bill Bishop, an analyst at research firm Brick Meets Click. “Everybody is fighting tooth and nail to get sales today, so any source of incremental business to them is a plus, and they don’t have to pay markdown dollars or cut their prices to get it,” he says.

 

Instacart’s greatest challenge may be the very crowdsourcing model that limits its expenses and risk. The company will have to ensure quality customer service even though it can’t completely control factors such as the reliability of its contractors or the freshness of its food. Eventually it’ll also have to match prices with expert cost-cutters such as Amazon and Wal-Mart. Moritz says the business opportunity is big enough for more than a couple of players. “The one thing that we got extremely right about the Webvan investment was that there would be huge consumer demand for home delivery of groceries,” he says. “It’s just taken time for technology to finally catch up.”

The bottom line: An Amazon veteran is trying to take his online grocery startup national with $8 million from Sequoia Capital.

Stone is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter @BradStone.