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John Doerr may recently have lost the fight to get California voters to back a $4bn tax on Big Oil to fund green technologies, but he still has his eyes fixed on the bigger prize. This morning in Berkeley, the top venture capitalist was closeted with once (and possibly future) Presidential hopeful Al Gore.

Gore’s message to the small invited audience at a Kleiner Perkins conference on "greentech": venture capital and private equity investors still haven’t realised how much money there is to be made in this field (though the amount of cash heading into these technologies suggests that’s changing. Kleiner partner John Denniston reckons that more than 10 per cent of VC investment in the US this year will be in green technologies.)

Doerr and other Valley VCs have been learning to play state and national politics as they dive into an area where big policy issues hold such sway. Unfortunately, just as Doerr delicately broached the question with Gore about how he plans to advance his global warming agenda over the next nine months (by which time the next Presidential race will be looming,) a Kleiner heavy turned up to escort this correspondent from the room. Seems Doerr - the man who once famously called the internet "the greatest ever legal creation of wealth in the history of the world" - still prefers to pull the strings behind the scenes.

How much privacy would you be willing to sacrifice to save a few pounds a month on car insurance? Norwich Union, one of the UK’s biggest auto insurers, seems to think the answer is "quite a lot."

Norwich has recently launched a new "pay as you drive" insurance that relies on tracking the real-time movements of drivers using a GPS homing beacon. The amount drivers pay depends on when, where and how often they drive. According to the Norwich web site:

The in-car device, that is installed in your car, uses GPS technology to monitor and send your journey information securely to our central computer. Your premiums are then calculated based on your usage during Peak and Off-Peak times and different road types, and you’ll receive an itemised monthly bill (an extra £1.99 charge applies for this optional service). The data we collect from the in-car device enables your premium to reflect your unique driving pattern.

NCR’s Teradata, which helps Norwich manage the back end of its "pay as you drive" system, says other companies are rushing to capitalise on new technologies that can  track real-time customer actions. This has been going on for a while in the business-to-business realm, where companies take advantage of real-time monitoring to manage supply chains. It will be interesting to follow Norwich’s customer monitoring scheme, which will sink or swim based on customers’ willingness to submit to round-the-clock surveillance.

The countdown continues on the Tech Grinch’s Christmas List - all the technology you’d love to have this Christmas, but will have to wait and whistle for….

8. The $100 laptop – Just a year ago, One Laptop per Child announced their $100 notebook for the developing world would be available by Christmas, but so far only 1,000 prototypes have been made to test the concept.

Best estimates now are for a price of $150 and mass production in Summer 2007.

While canny US shoppers can pick up full-featured Toshiba laptops for as low as $399 these days, there are few options out there for the Third World.

AMD has a 50×15 mission to get half the world’s population connected to the internet and using computers by 2015. Yet it quietly dropped its Personal Internet Communicator solution in November.

Meanwhile, Intel is not a fan of the $100 laptop concept and is donating around 750 of its $400 Classmate PC notebooks to the Brazilian government in order to push its alternative.

Merry Christmas to the developing world then – if anyone out there has a computer to read this.

The Top Ten:

10. An Enzo Ferrari

9. Halo 3

Nice move by UBS. The Swiss bank installed a Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 side-by-side at its Global Media and Communications Conference in New York this week.

Interestingly, while the PS3s graphics wowed the Wall Street types attending the conference, Nintendo’s awkwardly named Wii ( pronounced Wheee) was undoubtedly the most popular, thanks principally to its motion sensitive controller.

On the basis of an entirely unscientific sampling, the Wii was attracting about twice as many players as either the PS3 or the Xbox 360 - despite its rather clunky graphics. The most popular games incidentally were tennis and golf simulations, both making excellent use of the Wii controller.

The evidence keeps building that Nintendo has an unexpected holiday hit on its hands with the cut price Wii, which costs half the price of the top-end PS3.

  Wikia, the eventually-for-profit version of Wikipedia, is to become less reference work in look and more magazine in feel.

The Silicon Valley company, which hopes to make money by featuring advertising on its community of special-interest wikis, has made its first significant acquisition – buying ArmchairGM, a sports site that uses the same wiki software, for $2m.

  It has also attracted an undisclosed amount in second-round funding from Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.

  Gil Penchina, Wikia’s chief executive, told us he loves the look of ArmchairGM with its Digg-like voting on the latest news.

“They have built something that looks more like a magazine and we think that technology can be applied to any topic in the world.”

On Amazon taking a stake, he said: “They have been doing user-generated content for 10 years. We sat down with Jeff Bezos and talked, and we realised we had content on every [product].”

He hopes Amazon will eventually link to relevant wikis. That would boost ad revenues and push Wikia towards profitability. Its sites have more than 1m unique users a month now and are enjoying double-digit growth, despite the CEO admitting he has spent a grand total of $5.74 with Google on marketing them.

Chris Nuttall, San Francisco

When it comes to solar power, there is no downside to getting too much sun.

The poor efficiency of today’s photovoltaic solar panels means only between 8 and 20 per cent of the sun’s energy is converted into electricity.

That’s what makes an announcement by the US Department of Energy so significant. A DoE-funded concentrator solar cell has broken the 40 per cent efficiency barrier for the first time.

Produced by Boeing-Spectrolab, the cell achieved a world-record 40.7 per cent conversion efficiency through a system of layers that capture more of the sun’s spectrum.

The DoE says this could cut installation costs to $3 per watt and produce electricity at a cost of 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour (a coal-fired power station produces at about 4 cents per kw-hour).

There is the usual lively discussion on Slashdot, and Applied Materials should take note. The Silicon Valley equipment maker recently announced a strategy aimed at reducing solar costs by two-thirds.

Chris Nuttall, San Francisco

At last an IT company is showing a bit of creativity in showing buyers how to use its products. Motorola, which launched its new China-market mobile smartphone in Hong Kong this week, has realised that nobody actually reads the manual – but people do watch TV.

So the new Motorokr E6, an entertainment-oriented reworking of Motorola’s popular Ming smartphone, comes with a pre-installed instruction video to teach buyers about its fancy functions. Watching the intro should also get smartphone neophytes used to the idea of watching video on a handset screen.

Starring Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou, the 20 minute video features jokey kung-fu fights mixed with simple demonstrations of how to use the Rmb3,700 handset. (See part of the video on YouTube here) “Phones are getting so complicated these days,” says Ian Chapman-Banks, general manager for Motorola mobile devices in north Asia. “It’s a great way to engage with people.”

Mure Dickie, Hong Kong

Terry Semel has made his move. Too soon to tell if this will be enough to stop the rot, but Wall Street will probably applaud him for acting decisively.

On the way out:

Dan Rosensweig, the COO whose fault was to preside over the spreading of too much peanut butter (he leaves in March.)

Lloyd Braun, the former ABC whizz who was a casualty of a failed bid to turn Yahoo into a creative powerhouse.

On the way up:

Sue Decker, the well-regarded CFO, who now gets to run Yahoo’s answer to AdSense.

Jeff Weiner, the head of search, may have been passed over for the top job in the new audiences division, but his broader responsibility for a number of the old product groups cements him as a player to watch.

On the way in:

This will be the real test of Semel’s mettle. Can he lure the top talent he needs to bring the excitement back to Yahoo?

Update: The underwhelming reaction in Yahoo’s stock price on Wedneseday suggests that while there is a general view that Semel is trying to move things in the right direction (this is Henry Blodget’s take), the reorganisation will be hard work and could distract the company at an important time.

That mighty rushing sound you just heard could well have been the global mobile phone industry letting out a collective sigh of relief. A Danish study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute today seems to show conclusively that cell phone use is not associated with a higher risk of cancer or any other disease.

The researchers studied the medical histories of  420,095 individuals  who had been using cell phones for at least 10 years and found no association between long or short term cell phone use with brain tumours, salivary gland tumours, eye tumours or leukaemia.

Continue reading "Cell phones cleared of cancer risk"

The Japanese movie and TV industries are not happy with YouTube’s feeble defences against copyright infringement (and the rather weak protections of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.) No word yet on when YouTube will have the "fingerprinting" technology it has promised will filter out copyrighted material as it is being uploaded. (John Paczkowski spotted this one.)