Source: VentureBeat

Hayward, Calif.-based Optisolar will build what it calls the largest solar power farm in North America, using solar cells manufactured in Silicon Valley. The Ontario, Canada-based farm will draw "on a monstrous 40-megawatt capacity" to produce enough energy to power 10-15,000 homes. "If all goes according to plan, the farm will be up and running by 2010." Currently the world’s largest solar farm is the 12-megawatt Erlasee solar park in Germany.

Related:
Smells like green spirit
Google plants solar trees
Blueberry solar
Nano-solar energy
Solar coffee
Solar powered trackable clothes

Gorilla, chimp or monkey?
Illustration: James F. Kraus

$10-a-seat airline
Your backup plan
Virtual conferencing
Reverse rings
Jott it down
MySpace? Meet Gaia

Source: CNET

Iowa and New Hampshire will have the first official presidential primaries, but MySpace plans to test public sentiment first. On January 1 and 2 MySpace will hold a mock presidential election that "will be open to all MySpace users who reside in the United States, regardless of voting eligibility in the government-run election in November 2008." The result of the mock election as well as ongoing polls will be published on the new MySpace Impact channel. Go there now and you can learn about the candidates and add your favorite candidate as a friend.

Barack Obama is leading the pack today with 152,140 friends. Next is Hillary Clinton with 29,088 friends, then it's John Edwards with 26,184. John McCain with 20,253. How well this tracks with reality remains to be seen.

Another indicator? Google Trends has been successful at predicting American Idol. Will it work for the presidency?

Source: Blogging Times

Increasingly people search Google and LinkedIn to get information on potential employees, new people they've met or people they are about to meet. But here's another angle. New search engine YoName "allows you to search across social networking sites like MySpace and Friendster." Type in a name and it links you right to any pages they might have. It's good to remember that what's said online, definitely stays online.

Related:
Say Everything
LinkedIn or left out
Entrepreneurs rate VCs

Source: Fresh Inc.

This morning a new airline called Skybus launched. It's offering $10 seats. By noon it had sold 97,000 tickets. It only has flights to and from Columbus, OH for a limited number of cities, including Portsmouth, NH, Oakland, Burbank and Bellingham WA. But still, you can get from Portsmouth to Columbus to Oakland and back for about 60 bucks. It goes without saying that you have to pay a la carte for everything, like checking luggage. Skybus is the first US answer to European airlines like Ryanair which are hugely popular overseas. Can it avoid the typical US union problems, logistical hassles and fuel costs and thrive?

Related:
Free is the new discount
The mileage economy
The economics of airline boarding
More fun, more success
JetBlue gets it except for that big problem

Source: Web Worker Daily

Recently a friend dropped his laptop down a flight of stairs. Worse yet, he had no backup. But let's be honest. Many of us don't. I didn't at the time. But my friend's experience scared me into getting a backup plan. Web Worker Daily runs down some of the best remote backup solutions. One of them is Carbonite, a Boston-based company, which is the one I went with. Why not do yourself a favor and develop a backup plan today. Need further incentive? Imagine re-entering all of the info in your Outlook contact. Ugh.

Source: The Common Craft Show via Bryper.com

"There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start."

Reading the web with RSS still isn't easy enough. But following these fairly simple instructions will dramatically improve your online experience.

Source: Don Dodge on the Next Big Thing

Don Dodge blogs that while we all play to win, in business "second place is great" and "even third place can be incredibly profitable." Dodge references Geoffrey Moore who says that competition can be broken into three classes - Gorillas, Chimps, and Monkeys - and that all markets shake out this way. "A Gorilla always emerges...and they make the rules. A Chimp (2nd place) and Monkey (3rd place) can do really well too but must play by different rules." The problem? If you're not in the top 3, you "get the crumbs left behind by the leaders." Sometimes you can solve it by refocusing your service or technology on a new problem in a different market. But however you do it, aim to be a gorilla, chimp or monkey or suffer from being irrelevant.

Videoblogger and friend of Dah Filtah, Ravi Jain, has been nominated for a Webby Award for his videoblog DriveTime. DriveTime is a weekly video blog produced during Ravi's daily commute. Yep, that would mean he's driving during it. It's a must-see videoblog. And, yeah, I'm biased. So I'll go right ahead and ask you to vote for Ravi.

Related:
Videoblogging how-to
Notes from the fieldtrip
New favorite Boston videoblog

Source: Nantucket Conference

May 3-5 will be the eighth year for the invite-only Nantucket Conference. It's an elite, intimate gathering for New England entrepreneurs, techies and investors. Plus it's in Nantucket, which surely has something to do with why it thrives. With VC funding at it's highest since 2001, optimism is in the salty air. Silicon Valley and Boston rank first and second for VC funding nationally and the theme for Nantucket is shaping up to be "East meets West." West coast speakers include co-founder of Adobe, Chuck Geschke (who has a home on Nantucket), Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, and Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone.

Source: CNET

Ever been on Second Life? It's pretty random. But one time I went there for a meeting where someone presented something to a group. It wasn't very efficient, but it was intriguing. Now a new development from Second Life moves the site one step closer to being an alternative to video or teleconferences. Second Life has announced that avatars will soon be able to speak with their owner's voice. CEO Philip Rosedale says, "There are a lot of problems with telephony when doing conference calls. You can't tell who's talking if there's more than one person. But in the virtual world, voice solves it." We shall see.

Source: Ringtonia

Speaking of ringtones...it's only April and already 72 million ringtones have been purchased in the United States alone. The number comes from Nielsen RingScan, which compiles sales information from the majority of ringtone retailers in the U.S. market. Billboard uses Nielsen RingScan to chart the top ringtones every week.

Source: PSFK

In a reverse of the current ringtone model, Emotive's new "Push Ringer" let's you push a ringtone of your choice to the receiving phone, so the caller, not the called person, sets the tone. "The chosen ring is transmitted to the recipient's handset and temporarily overrides the phone's pre-set ringer. The ringers can comprise audio, video, animations, avatars or flash files. Closing the loop, if the called person likes the ringtone, the service also enables him or her to instantly buy a copy of the ringtone for his or her own phone." Now this should be fun.

Source: Springwise

While Blackberry's are great for getting messages, you don't really want to take the time to type messages into them. What you really need is Jott. Sign up with Jott and do voice to text dictation from any mobile phone. Here's how it works. Call Jott's toll free number and simply speak a message to yourself, a group or a person. Jott transcribes your message into text in a few minutes and delivers it by email or text message. It's free, but look for ad-supported or premium ad-free versions to come. As another one of those little ironies in a connected world, Jott doesn't rely only on voice recognition software. Real humans from overseas, um, oversee the transcribing.

Source: GigaOm

Gaia Online calls itself "the world's fastest growing online world hangout for teens.” Last year they had half a million unique visitors monthly. This month? They claim it's two million. What do teens do on Gaia? Create avatars, play games, chat, share artwork. Along the way they earn virtual gold coins that they can use to buy items, clothing, and accessories. Gaia also offers limited edition items. Get lucky enough to acquire one, and later you can auction it off on the Gaian version of eBay. Advertisers are starting to notice. The company claims 300,000 teens log in daily and the length of the average visit? Two hours.

Email is life
Illustration: James F. Kraus
**New all time favorite illustration!**

Mostly voyeurs
Scary math
Where on MySpace?
MySpace Marshal
Business model?
Geni genius

Source: Ars Technica

With all the chatter about Web 2.0 and social media, you'd think everyone was creating things. Not so. Bill Tancer, an analyst with HitWise says only 0.16 percent of visits to YouTube are by users uploading video for others to watch. And only 0.20 percent of visits to Flickr are to upload new photos. This is even smaller than the 1 percent rule which says that for every 100 people online, one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it. But with so many people on the Internet, even slim percentages yield a lot of content.

Related:
The 1% Rule

Source: B2Beta

Owen Thomas blogs that while offline, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is "as self-promoting as always," but when it comes to MySpace, Murdoch "can't even seem to promote its own services." MySpace News got a lot of press but it turns out it's nearly impossible to find on MySpace itself. The same can be said for MySpace IM, which isn't widely used on the site. It seems MySpace site designers can't find a way to integrate new services. "If MySpace can't extend its brand beyond online profile pages, other, more feature-filled websites will race past it." Maybe even actual newspaper sites?

Source: CNET News blog

Ken Elefant of Opus Capital doesn't invest in Web 2.0 companies. Why? Because when he does the math it doesn't equal IPO. "A Web 2.0 company needs to be pulling in around $5 million in revenue a month to become an independent, viable publishing house. The average CPM is around $10. About half of the inventory on a given site remains unsold so the real CPM is closer to $5. Thus, you need 1,000 CPMs a month. A thousand impressions go into CPM." That's a million page views per month. What's it take to do an IPO? 1 billion page views per month or more.

Source: BusinessWeek

Hemanshu Nigam is the guy tapped with cleaning up MySpace. His goal? "Keep the site's 'friends' safe from predators and bullies," and making sure MySpace is an attractive place for advertisers. In the past year he's implemented automatic privacy settings that "block everyone but acknowledged friends from visiting the profiles of underage users." Adults can't contact minors unless they provide the e-mail address and the full name of the kid they're trying to reach. Search terms are monitored for those commonly used by online pedophiles. And each week, MySpace deletes 8,000 profiles of people who misrepresent their ages. Nigam's team works closely with law enforcement officials. MySpace will likely set the bar and the standards for online community monitoring.

Source: Silicon Valley Watcher

Reporting from Web 2.0, Tom Foremski quotes a guy from an unnamed East Coast music startup who says that hedge funds and private equity funds on the East Coast are moving into early stage funding for startups. "The hedge funds have so much money. They're doing deals such as giving $5m for 10 percent of the company," he said. "And they couldn't care less about board seats." Contrast that with VCs who can take up to 60 percent of a company in return for investment. Private equity funds have potentially billions to invest. Sounds like a recipe for the next bubble.

Source: Online Spin

Hello again from the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

Joe Marchese puts his finger on a stunning aspect of the conference. While Web 2.0 Expo is decidedly technical, Marchese is "shocked" by how few advertisers [that recently attended another online marketing conference] have a significant presence at Web 2.0." If "understanding the technical issues of building online communities can help create improved business and monetization models," then why is there so little focus on ads at the show? Advertising will need to be approached in different ways in social networks, but it's probably the single most important thing to figure out to make Web 2.0 sustainable. As Marchese blogs, "Where's the business model?"

Source: Information Week

A new survey of 10,000 email users shows that 73.8 percent of people now say email is "essential" to their lives. So essential, in fact, that 40-50 percent of people rate access to email as more important than chocolate, coffee or television. 59.8 percent of those surveyed say they spend more time with email than they do on the phone. For some, email is so integral that 14.9 percent said they would "rather live without their spouse or significant other than go without e-mail, and 6 percent said they would rather lose their home."

Related:
Cure your email addiction
Death of email?
Ditch your email

Source: TechCrunch

Have you tried Geni yet? I started using Geni a month ago and now multiple generations of my family have added nearly 200 names to our family tree. It's one of the few instant hits I've experienced that crosses generations. The company is seven weeks old, has 18 employees and they just closed a $10 million round led by Charles River Ventures. The valuation of the company is now $100 million, that’s a 10 times increase from it's first round of $1.5 million.

Hello from Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Along with my coffee I'm sipping the latest vision of Media 2.0. Gabe Rivera who publishes TechMeme says that blogs are star-makers. While before newspapers were the kingmakers, now blogging makes it possible for stars to come out of nowhere.

Rich Skrenta from Topix says that media is dying and in 10 years all of the journalists will be laid off.

Ted Shelton of Technorati says that when big media companies acquire Web 2.0 companies, it can be a bit like when your two year-old gets a hamster. They love it so much and squeeze it so much, they kill it.

A nice cheery way to start the day.

The Decoy Effect and more...

I'm off the next few days and will be blogging next week from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. See you on Monday.

Source: ContentSutra

Both Yahoo and Google are targeting Internet and mobile users in rural India. Yahoo plans to "provide information like local rain pattern, weather, availability of warehouses and rates, as well as basic health information." Google has announced similar plans and that they will work with "local vendors to develop simpler search engines" and introduce services like Google Maps, AdWords and even a social networking site. ContentSutra wonders, "But do any of them know what rural India wants?"

Source: GigaOm

Photobucket has 38 million users who use it to host pictures and video on their MySpace pages for free. Recently it was rumored to be valued at $300-400 million. Except that today MySpace just blocked Photobucket images on MySpace. Why? Because Photobucket started selling ads on videos that get shown on MySpace. Om Malik says some optimists thought the old rules for media wouldn't apply online. But they do. Namely, "don't depend on one partner" and if you do, "don't make waves." Even Google had to pay MySpace, so "pay to play and ensure longevity" And above all? "Free is a tactic, not a business model."

Related:
Photobuckets of cash?

Source: Knowledge@Wharton

Who reaps the rewards in the airline mileage economy, spawned 26 years ago by American Airlines? Certainly airlines and consumers do. Buy a ticket with miles and you're using a seat that probably would have been empty anyway. The airline spends a bit more on fuel, tosses in a bag of pretzels spending maybe $20, tops. Savvy consumers use mileage in droves.

Retailers don't fare as well. American Airlines brings in an estimated $1 billion a year selling miles to retailers so they can award them to their customers. It does target high-income consumers, but it's a straight marketing cost for retailers; the customer loyalty goes to the airline, not the retailer. Wharton is researching ways to make loyalty work better for retailers.

Related:
Free is the new discount

Source: BBC

Dennis Hope lives in Nevada, but he's exploiting a loophole in the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty to build an empire on the moon. Like our forefathers did when they conquered the New World, Hope has claimed "ownership" of the Earth's Moon for more than 20 years, and he says it's a multi-million dollar business. 1,500 lunar properties are sold per day for $20 per acre. Buyers are said to include Hilton, Marriott, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush.

The only problem? NASA, who is planning a lunar outpost, says "Property rights on the moon are governed by the United Nations." Claims such as Hope's "are all just frauds." Makes a nice gag gift, though.

Source: Seth Godin's blog

Seth Godin talks about the power of the decoy effect. That's when "there are two wines for sale at dinner: $9 a bottle or $16 a bottle. Which one do you order? Now, imagine that there are three, and the third is $34. Are you more likely to buy the $16 bottle now? Most people are." When marketing products or services, this kind of triangulation is used to drive people toward particular choices. It doesn't just work for consumers. Godin points to this Washington Post article that describes how the decoy effect can sway voters. That article gives some good advice: "be wary if a difficult choice suddenly feels simple."

Source: PSFK

Junk mail destroys 100 million trees per year and disposal costs us millions. 40 percent of the solid waste in landfills is paper and paper board. That's the inspiration for a Michigan non-profit called 41 Pounds. Give them your contact info and they "contact 20 to 30 direct mail companies on your behalf to stop the bulk of junk coming your way." They will also send you the paperwork for companies that require a signature from you. It costs $41 for a five year membership.

Source: Guy Kawasaki's blog

Guy Kawasaki blogs another great list, this time it's 6 ways to get the attention of a venture capitalist. His best advice? Get a good referral. Some of the best nuggets though, are what NOT to do. Don't attach a PowerPoint presentation (save it for face-to-face). Don't brag about your MBA. "Most VCs want to invest in hardcore engineers at the start. The MBAs can come later." Don't make lofty financial projections or claim you're in a multi-billion dollar market. Follow Kawasaki's guidelines and you just might get "across the moat."

Source: Hitwise - Bill Tancer's blog

Last year Bill Tancer from Hitwise used search data to track American Idol and predict the winner. And it worked. This year he's at it again. And the data is showing a clear Sanjaya effect.

Tancer reported last week that "Sanjaya searches outnumbered the nearest contestant, Blake Lewis by more than 2-1."

Do your own search term analysis using Google Trends.

Related:
The $2.5 billion Idol juggernaut
The American Idol media model
Like Idol on Web 2.0

Source: Wired

It's still being tested, but a new cancer-fighting technology could use light to kill cancer. Called "photodynamic therapy" the key is a combination of light and special "supramolecules" that react with cancer cells. "Imagine taking a pill, then directing a laser light toward the location of the tumor. The growth would dissolve with no chemotherapy, and no harm to healthy tissue." Bring on the lasers.

Related:
Cancer that kills itself
Cancer breathalyzer
Cancer, meet nanotechnology
Cancer sniffing dogs
Cancer-free designer baby

Lifecasting
Illustration: James F. Kraus

Has blogging peaked?
Google My Maps
The Wizard of iPod
Leaving Microsoft
Big CEO mansion? Sell
ScanScout

Source: Ars Technica

According to blog-tracker Technorati, the growth of blogs shows signs of leveling off. Blogs rocketed from 8 million in 2005 to 72 million today, but the rate at which new blogs are being created has slowed and so has the volume of daily postings. Gartner predicted this slow down last year saying that "the majority of those who were interested in creating a blog already have, and everyone else has already moved on."

Well, I've been blogging here since 2005. Why not click this link to "favorite" Da Filtah on Technorati? It's a nice thing to do for us hard-working bloggers.

Source: GigaOm

Google's newest service, My Maps, allows anyone to create their own personalized, annotated, customized Google maps. That means that anyone can go in and plot all the great Irish pubs in Boston, for example, and save it as "Boston Irish Pub Map." Google claims it's so simple "even a caveman can do it." Google's focus on location-based services highlights the fact that as "digital content explodes exponentially, context will become more important." Look for the new maps you create to show up in local search results soon.

Source: AdAge

The newest entry in the fast-growing $18 billion coffee-to-go market? 7-Eleven's "Fusion Energy" coffee which includes an herbal boost of ginseng, guarana and yerba mate. They think this is a safe bet, given that 7-Eleven energy drink sales are up 20 percent from last year, and that 18 to 24-year olds are increasingly drinking energy drinks in the morning. Add that to the fact that 57 percent of that age group now consumes coffee every day and you could have a winning combination. Will this tempt you to go to 7-Eleven for coffee?

Related:
Phood and bepherages
Drink and lose weight?
Pop goes the soda
Soda going flat
The tea counterculture
The American pie thing

Source: FC Now blog

Alex Pasquariello at Fast Company blogs, "Pay no attention to that man in the mock turtleneck behind the curtain." Apple's Steve Jobs and British music giant EMI Group may have graciously announced that for an extra $.30 they will sell songs on iTunes without copy protection But "Jobs and EMI are simply selling you the rights they took from you in the first place." Instead of protecting musicians, DRM has been the device Apple used to "put the strangle hold on the digital download and music player industry." He's right. But against all reason, I'm still addicted to my iPod.

Source: Working for Change blog

John Wood was a rising Microsoft executive who went on a backpacking vacation to the Himalayas. While there he was invited to visit a local school where found that the kids literally had two books, and one of them was by Danielle Steele. The experience led him to found Room to Read, a non-profit that builds libraries and schools worldwide. He's just published a book recounting the business lessons he learned at Microsoft that have helped him to make Room to Read a success. You might have seen him on Oprah yesterday.

Related:
The business of philanthropy
Technology makes resolutions easier
Google.org vs. Gates Foundation
Do-it-yourself microfinancing

Source: Slate

Bill Gates' house via Zillow

A new study by two finance professors uses property records, public databases, and search engines to explore the relationship between CEO home-buying behavior and stock performance. After identifying the primary residences of 488 of the 500 CEOs of the S&P 500, they found that "the bigger the home, the worse the stock performed." It was worse for CEOs who bought new homes after being made CEO. They found "a significantly negative stock performance following the acquisition of very large homes by company CEOs." Slate says maybe you should skip Edgar when judging a company, and go right to Zillow.

Source: PaidContent

ScanScout, a Cambridge, MA-based startup has just landed $2 million in angel funding from Ron Conway (one of Google's early investors) and Chris Dixon (founder of Boston’s SiteAdvisor) among others. MIT alums and founders Waikit Lau and Steven Lee developed the technology which monitors video content including spoken text, audio and images and then selects related ads that run just below the video. ScanScout launches next month.

Source: CNN

When I was a nice young Catholic girl, I would give up arguing with my brothers for Lent, or chocolate. But today, that's just sooooo 70s. The big item to give up for Lent today? MySpace or Facebook.

Source: Groundswell

Most companies don't know what the heck they're doing in relation to social networks, blogs and consumer generated media. Josh Bernoff of Forrester outlines 5 basic objectives for getting involved. Listen: What are your customers saying? Speak: Connect with your customers. Energize: Get your customers to evangelize your products. Support: Help your customers solve their own and each other's problems. Embrace: Work with your customers to make your products better. Pick two, choose your tools accordingly and dive in.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

When Justin Kan founded Justin.tv his job literally became his life. Using technology his team developed and following in the footsteps of MTV's Real World and Jennicam, Kan has strapped a camera to his head and now captures every second of his life and streams it as live video on the Internet. Log on now and you'll see exactly what he's seeing. Kan calls it "lifecasting." Advertisers are lining up and the show is a hit.

Source: Online Media Daily

Data shows that 78 percent of male U.S. Internet users watch online video, but only 66 percent of female Internet users do, even though there are slightly more women online than men. Apparently they're not finding content that's interesting to them...except for this Tyra Banks video. Seen more than 2 million times on YouTube alone, this one certainly lit up the net for women.

Source: Picturephoning.com

The Web took off by making it easy to link to each other's sites. Now it looks like cellphones will act as a remote control for the real world, linking everyday objects with the Web. Snap a pic of one of these next-generation mosaic codes on a billboard or a product package...

Try this demo at the New York Times
...and get information sent to your cell phone immediately - videos, music, text, expiration dates, pricing, info, etc. This technology is already being used in Japan and is still slowly emerging in the U.S. The New York Times has a great piece on this emerging trend.

Full disclosure: I worked with one of the U.S. pioneers in this field, Mobot.

Related:
Activating the physical world
The mobilization of ads

Source: Chitika

Marlborough-based Chitika helps bloggers monetize their blogs through ads and merchandising and this month they're holding a BlogBash. Log on to Chitika's blog each day in April and get pearls of blogging wisdom from expert bloggers including Gizmodo, Problogger and Gadgeteer. Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome kicked it off on April 1st with Ten Secrets of an Earlier Adopter Tech Entrepreneur.

Phood and bepherages
Illustration: James F. Kraus

The talent gap
Photobuckets of cash?
Chevy minicars
Limits of multitasking
Treated like adults
Bonuses or a raise?