Today in Globe Business
Nearly 130 years ago, Thomas Alva Edison received patent No. 223,898 for the invention of “an Improvement in Electric Lamps.’’ That spawned the incandescent bulbs we all know today - and which in 2012 will begin to fade under federal regulations designed to increase energy efficiency.
The incandescent phaseout, as many are calling it, means consumers need to start switching to energy-saving lighting options. Currently, their choices include halogen bulbs, which are 30 percent more efficient than incandescents; squiggly shaped compact fluorescent lights, or CFLs; and bulbs made with light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. Both CFLs and LEDs are about 80 percent more efficient than incandescents.
But getting consumers to drop a technology they have used for more than a century is challenging, those in the lighting industry say. Many are put off by the odd shapes of some of the newer bulbs, like CFLs, and the color of light that some of the bulbs emit.
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Pressure builds to end Web users’ free ride
NEW YORK - Over more than a decade, consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news, pictures, videos, and music on the Internet. Paying was for suckers and old fogeys. Content, like wild horses, wanted to be free.
Now, however, there are growing signs that this free ride is drawing to a close.
Newspapers are weighing whether to ask online readers to pay for at least some of what they offer, as a handful of papers, including The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, already do. Indeed, in the next several weeks, industry executives and analysts expect some publications to take the plunge.
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Innovation Economy: West Coast culture nurtures new ideas
The lure of the West Coast.
When I met Bill Clerico and Rich Aberman in 2008, the two recent Boston College graduates were just starting to talk to local investors about WePay, their online payment start-up. They had an idea - help groups of people make payment easier for collective projects like renting a ski house or throwing a bachelorette party - and they were working to build a prototype. I wrote about them as part of a column about how hard it is to change the way we pay for things, using new technologies like mobile phones.
Fourteen months later, Clerico and Aberman are living in San Jose, Calif., and they’ve just raised $1.65 million from Menlo Park-based August Capital and a group of angel investors including Eric Dunn, a former chief technology officer at Intuit Inc., the maker of Quicken personal finance software. Earlier this month, they moved into their first office space on University Avenue, the main drag in Palo Alto.
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User Friendly: A puffball speaker from the culture of cute
Nothing sucks the joy from a morning jog like earbuds that will not stay in, or whose materials creak and groan with your movements.
Earbuds are also dangerous to cyclists. Sensory deprivation is never a good thing when you are subject to the whims of road-raging “death monsters’’ (cars, that is) and jaywalkers.
Leave it to Japanese industrial designers, then, to come up with a portable speaker as safe as it is cute.
To read the full story, please click here.
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