A sampling of green-tech news with quick commentary.
Note to readers: I’ll be on vacation the week of June 30, returning to the CNET
Green Tech blog on July 7.
(Credit:
GE)
Duke Energy buys wind developer for $240 million - Cleantech.comDuke appears to be serious about boosting its renewable-energy business, while still building new coal power plants.
California [...]
This is the point that Hyperic’s Stacey Schneider makes while analyzing the comments of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Stallman, relating how Ellison’s critiques of SaaS sound eerily similar to early complaints about open source, all of which have been disproved over time:
Not that Canonical is alone. Red Hat, Hyperic, MySQL, and other open-source companies [...]
Gmail engineers announced on the Webmail client’s official blog Wednesday that a new Gmail Labs feature called Title Tweaks is now available. The hack changes the order of the elements in the browser title bar so “Inbox” followed by the number of unread messages will be placed in front of “Gmail.”
Uncrunch’s focus is social [...]
According to the company, GiftCardRescue will reimburse a customer’s gift card if the retailer goes bankrupt within a year of the gift card purchase, as long as the retailer is no longer honoring gift cards. Kuadey said his company will cover the cost of the insurance with its own cash reserves and will not pass [...]
I’m sure you remember the fuss about the original iPhone and those who sought to unlock it from the four carriers that were Apple’s launch partners for the first iPhone. The iPhone 3G has proven a tougher nut to crack, because Apple apparently changed the baseband to make it more difficult to exploit than [...]
There would seem to be two main scenarios–the rumored ZunePhone, or just making Zune software for Windows Mobile or other phone operating systems. A magazine interview with CEO Steve Ballmer suggests that Microsoft at least plans the latter approach.
“We’ve always said that software and services is a key focal point for Zune and it does [...]
The funding round was led by Accel Partners, best known these days for having been an early investor in Facebook; partner Jim Breyer holds a minority stake in the Boston Celtics. Also contributing were Ted Leonsis, former AOL vice chairman and owner of the Washington Capitals; former Yahoo executives Dan Rosensweig and Jeff Weiner; football-player-turned-private-equity [...]
