Water as Fuel : The Coming Hydrogen Revolution?

Florida company Hydrogen Technologies seems to have perfected electrolysis as a means to fuel cars.

Spokesman Danny Klein says his Ford Escort powered on the new fuel called Aquagen halves his gasoline costs.

The machine that makes Aquagen runs voltage through water creating gas that is then cooled and dried in another compartment and then burned as fuel. Apparently, the hydrogen and oxygen stay connected in the process harnessing the atomic power of hydrogen with the chemical stability of water.

Klein says the water molecule is "restructured" when a tremendous amount of energy is mixed with a catalyst.

He adds the technology isn't new. Others have tried it, but they used so much electricity that their inventions never took off. But managers at Klein's company think they have improved, maybe even perfected the process.

"We estimate it costs around $0.70 per hour to generate, and it produces 1,500 liters of aquagen per hour."

Steve Lusko works for the company, and says since this story first aired they have received calls from technology officers of General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and "the biggest industrial companies in the country."

Aquagen actually started out as project to create a water-based welding torch. As seen in the CNN clip, the Aquagen-fueled torch heats to a melting point of whatever it touches. It can burn a hole through charcoal, slice steel, and turn a brass ball to liquid. It also reacts to gasoline, helping run an engine before turning back to water.

Seems far-fetched? Too good to be true? Will this finally end our reliance on oil? Is this the dawning of the age of Aquarius?

Read more here.

Geeks' take-down of greedy execs

Geeks fixing prob view CFO's emails and discover company about to hawked to highest bidder and all staff to be laid off without compensation.

From Security Investigator blog:

"Dear Chief,

Love the case files that you publish. While I am not much of a writer, I wanted to share the following experience I had at a tech startup.

We were a small tech startup with approximately 50 employees. We were all handpicked for our special skills and we bonded together quite nicely. When it became apparent that external and much larger companies were interested in our technology, we started taking venture capital money to grow and we became a 'grow and sell' company. I and every other employee had no ownership in the company, so we were less than elated at this news.

Our CFO was your typical suit a$$hole. He treated everyone around him like they were beneath him, dressed in thousand dollar suits and drove a Porsche (and resembled a certain boss on 'Office Space' - no kidding!).

I had no idea though just how much of an a$$hole this guy was until I had to assist our mail server administrator one night at the office.

Our mail server was a really fast linux box running Postfix. For whatever reason, our mail storage partition had completely filled to capacity and Postfix was returning errors to every incoming mail message.

The mail server administrator thought he had been DOS'd, so he wanted me nearby in the event that an investigation was warranted. He had no idea what we were about to find.

We quickly determined that the mail partition was full. A quick 'du' command revealed that one particular user was at fault for the missing disk space: the CFO.

He had tried several times to send out a very large joke video file that was becoming trapped by our anti-virus solution...."

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Newstagging 2.0

Adrian Holovaty points to how tagging news stories on the web can lead us closer to the Semantic Web.

"...one thing that's always bothered me is that the bread-and-butter of my chosen field, journalism, is relentlessly unstructured. The primary product of journalists -- the news story -- is just a giant blob of text.

"A news story cannot be broken down into easily defined, consistent pieces. It doesn't have facts in predictable places."

He suggests several tags:
1.: for different levels of profanity for different websites or let the user decide his/her level of tolerance.
2. : Saying something happened Tuesday or today doesn't make sense on the web unless you put a date to it.
3. : for standard GMT times
4. : to set an expiry on stories.
5. : to make currency relevant on date of story.
6.: for geographically accurate tagging.
7. Automatic conversion
8. Isolating people and quotes: for marking up each quote, and associating it with the person who said it, so it would be possible to automatically retrieve all quotes by a given person.
9. Isolating individual facts: giving unique IDs for each and every fact. This would let journalists and readers create elaborate "fact trees," which could display the relationship between information. Ref: Microformats.

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Giants awaken to Internet

Summer Redstone, executive chairman of split entities Viacom and CBS, sees growth in Internet ventures. Ho hum.

From Reuters:

"We see great opportunities with the Internet. We may have been slow to begin with for reasons I don't want to go into right now, but we are moving very fast now, as you know. Viacom recently bought NeoPets.com, it's bought iFilm and of course (video game chat service) Xfire, which I think will be explosive in its growth," Redstone said. "So we're on the case. Each company is on the case."

MTV and Microsoft Corp are j oining forces to compete against Apple Computer Inc's market-dominating iTunes music download service, Redstone said.

"It's not (compatible with Apple) and I see some significant advantages (to that)... the fact that this (music download service) appears on every Microsoft Windows makes it so powerful that it will be a very, very strong competitor," he said.

Viacom, owner of MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, split with CBS at the end of last year, separating its faster growing cable networks and newly purchased DreamWorks movie studio from the slower growing television broadcasting and radio operations.

Redstone admitted that its movie unit Paramount had some "rough times recently" but a resurgence was taking place with the injection of DreamWorks. He claimed CBS's outdoor business, such as billboards, was going very strongly and that TV was doing extremely well.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp had paid more for teen Web site myspace.com than Viacom would have been willing, he said.

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Wrong Guy on BBC

Guy Gomo, a cab driver business studies graduate, from the Congo, waiting to be interviewed for a job at the BBC, suddenly finds himself in front of the camera to discuss the Apple-versus-Apple court decision.

Turns out they mistook him for Newswireless.net editor Guy Kewney. Watch the video on Youtube or the Mail on Sunday.
[via Boing Boing and Itjournoasia.com]

Update.

Holovaty's Missouri J-school speech

Adrian Holovaty tells it like it is:

Graduates, the fire should be burning under each and every one of you. You should be yearning -- aching -- to bring this industry into a new age. Your generation -- our generation -- is going to be the one to do it.

You're going to be the people breaking the rules. You're going to be the people inventing new ones. You'll be the person who says, "Hey, let's try this new way of getting our journalism out to the public." You'll be the PR person who says, "Let's try this new way of public relations that takes advantage of the Internet." You'll be the photographer who says, "Wow, quite a few amateur photographers are posting their photos online. Let's try to incorporate that into our journalism somehow."

You'll be the person who asks, "Why are we doing things the way they are?", and when the top editor says, "Because that's the way they've always been done," you'll openly question that. "Because we've always done it that way" doesn't cut it. "Because we've always done it that way" is blatantly unacceptable, blatantly lazy, and you need to call that out.

The pressure's on. :)

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What readers want

In The Perfect News Site, 2016 Dave Pettit suggests readers want more context, new ways to filter news, fewer ads and more telegenic reporters.

WSJ.com asked its readers to describe their perfect site in 2016.

Here's a sampling:

1. "I would like to receive only news that is news to me, not news that I have already read or heard."

2. "Some days I think we were all blessed when we had [just] an evening newspaper and the 6:30 network news."

3. As site that is able "to filter, prioritize and effectively size the amount of news to my needs. I may want to know that a shooting has occurred in Lower Phoenix, but not want the 20 different eyewitness statements."

4. The perfect news site "...will literally be in the palm of our hand" The next generation would have a hard drive, a bigger screen and a better "input device."

5. News sites will morph into directories of information: "Instead of clicking on pages, there will be a hierarchy of news by section (world, national, regional, business, sports, lifestyle)"

6. "Instead of having to duplicate my holdings all over the Web so I can get customized news from various sources, I would login to my secure [brokerage] account and there I would find, alongside my portfolio, links to WSJ news and articles."

7. The perfect site would be "completely voice-activated" site.

8. "Ads take up screen real estate and are distracting and annoying." Sites should offer subscriptions to special advertising-free versions of their coverage – or versions with just tiny ads at the bottom of each page.

9. Another reader made the point that sites should choose one revenue stream and stick to it. His point: The perfect news site wouldn't sell ads, require subscription fees and charge for extra features, such as archived articles.

10."Editors will be a thing of the past. Instead, users will vote content to the front page. Fact checkers will be the only staff left as they verify and comment on the information posted be the community of readers. In the next decade the broadcaster and the reader will merge into one."

11."Instead of traditional news bureaus, a sophisticated network of freelancers, some with no journalistic experience, will act as correspondents, filing stories from computers inside their homes from around the world. The news will be more in depth, and news will be covered much faster."

12. "When you report quarterly profits for a corporation (Exxon, for example) that are unusually large, allow me to see a 'popup' of the profits for the last eight quarters so I can understand what is large."

13. "Your reporters...find out all sorts of things when writing an article or cover a business, but these don't always fit into the form of a news article. They should be dumped into an encyclopedia."

14. "I see a large selection of live streaming video, for example, being offered to you once you log in based on your interests. Codes embedded in the video will allow search engines to find video on warehouse fires, for example, and push them to you."

15."The perfect Web site will be a mix of print news, video and audio news. News Web sites will also compete with 24-hour cable news and major networks by offering prime-time news programming on the Web."

16."By 2016 we will doubtless see more 'pretty faces' in the pressroom than we do today. I predict that Dow Jones & Co. will be adding cosmetic surgery to the roster of employee benefits."

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The second wave reaching tsunami proportions

The numbers are in. According to this sketchy and seemingly dated piece on FT.com:

In the first quarter of the year, US venture capitalists invested US$396m in the media and entertainment sector, 80 per cent more than in the previous quarter and the biggest amount for four years, industry data shows.

Analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association showed about half the media investments were in companies focused on delivery content via the internet.

US venture capital firms raised US$4.26bn in the first quarter of 2006, 69 per cent more than was raised last year, according to Dow Jones VentureOne.

“We get three or four calls per week from people looking to invest,” said Thomas McInerney, founder and chief executive of Guba, a site for viewing user-generated content set up in 1998. “These investors are going through the top 2,000 companies in the Alexa rankings [of web site usage] and all of these seem to be getting a steady stream of phone calls.”

Bolt, also a site aimed at user-generated content, is in the process of raising another round of venture capital, and executives there have found it easier than in previous years. "There has been a great deal of interest," said Aaron Cohen, Bolt’s chief executive. "It’s a popular category."

The realisation that the internet is changing the media business has prompted traditional media companies to develop digital strategies. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has been the most aggressive, spending $1.5bn on acquisitions, including $580m to acquire MySpace.com last year.

Just last week, two small start-ups were bought, including Ksolo, which allows karaoke fans to create and share songs.

Networking events and conferences in Silicon Valley are now swamped with scouts. “From the media companies, News Corp is the one that is everywhere,” said a Silicon Valley executive. "At even the smallest gathering, Fox Interactive people are there checking companies out."

MORE.

Note that venture caps are all in denial about the eventual bubble.

Microsoft unveils Google-killer

It was too lucrative a market to pass up. Yahoo and Google, among other pureplay Internet players made US$9 billion last year(WAN)from online advertising, taking 53 percent of the pie. So why shouldn't the biggest, greediest software company in the world get some of that action.

Microsoft launched adCenter earlier in Singapore and France, and is now bringing it home.

Asked about Google, Gates replies he aims to "keep them honest". Which begs the question: What is Google lying about?



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Chinese blogger tops Technorati

The blog of Xu Jinglei, a popular Chinese actress/director has come out tops in blogging directory Technorati's most popular ranking, after some changes in the indice accommodated Asian blogs.

Xu's blog has displaced Boing Boing as its top ranking blog.

Bloggers get their own wire service, but no moolah

An all-blogger newswire service BlogBurst has signed on The San Francisco Chronicle, The Houston Chronicle, The San Antonio Express-News and the Austin American-Statesman, to display high-quality blog content on their web sites.

The BlogBurst syndication network allows their readers direct access to over 1,200 available blog sources.

Some blogs on Pluck Corp's BlogBurst roll include TechCrunch.com, Web 2.0 Blog, etc.

"Publishers have been looking for ways to expand the content they offer," said Eric Newman, general manager of portal solutions for Pluck. "They’ve been sort of enclosed and encapsulated just within the people they’ve hired."

Bloggers give them the "ability to expand their audience dramatically," he added.

The incentive for the nearly 1,200 bloggers signed up with the service is exposure. Newman said the company would be open to sharing advertising revenue with bloggers who pull in large amounts of traffic in the future, but warned "nobody is going to get rich off of BlogBurst at the blogger level."

Despite an often bitter rivalry between the blogosphere and mainstream news outlets -with blogs frequently accusing the press of bias and the traditional media disparaging bloggers as amateurish - both sides might be ready to reconcile as they ponder their future in a changing media landscape.

So far, blogs' dedicated feature-style content has drawn the most interest from mainstream publishers, said Newman. And at a time when the newspaper industry is making cuts, a blog dedicated to travel can seem like a cheaper alternative to running an in-house travel section.

Blogging is an attractive asset to the mainstream press as it tries to figure out how to leverage content online, said Sreenath Sreenivasan, dean of students at the Columbia School of Journalism.

But as the popularity of blogs grows, traditional media outlets need to stay focused on local content both online and off, said Angie Kucharski, vice president and station manager CBS4. "You’re silly if you don’t explore what content is out there," she said. "But as we prioritize we want to make sure we have the best local content."

Update: Dave Panos, Pluck's chief executive and co-founder, told AP the company is reviewing all blogs ahead of time to make sure they are topical and aren't apt to use offensive language. However, Pluck won't vet every post.

Newspapers concerned about quality control can opt instead for prescreened feeds - five to 10 a day in a given topic instead of dozens or hundreds.

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Telecom NZ stops quibbling, opens last-mile

Finally! Can anything good this way come?

New Zealand Will Open Telecom
To Fixed-Line, Web Competition

By PAULA OLIVER
May 4, 2006

WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- The government plans to grant competitors access to Telecom Corp. of New Zealand Ltd.'s national fixed-line network, nearly two years after rejecting rivals' pleas to unbundle the network.

The regulatory changes announced yesterday are also designed to increase high-speed Internet services. Communications Minister David Cunliffe said the move will allow other Internet-service providers to "compete fully" with Telecom to provide faster, less-expensive broadband services. Critics have said Telecom's services are too slow and too expensive compared with other countries.

The government aims to have legislation ready for introduction to Parliament around the middle of this year. Mr. Cunliffe said the effects of the changes are likely to hit the telecommunications market in 2007...

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WSJ.com Open House. Free for 10 days

Looks like Wall Street Journal wants to try something new. Online Open House!

For ten days, the website is free. Check it out today at wsj.com

Earlier Jonathan Dube blogged about The Wall Street Journal's deputy Washington bureau chief David Wessel's speech entitled 'Can Newspaper Journalism Survive Blogs, Fox News, and Karl Rove?' at Yale.

Some quotes:

Barney Kilgore was the founding editor of the Wall Street Journal, the man who took it from being basically stock tables to a real newspaper. In a 1965 speech he said, "The fish market wraps fish in paper. We wrap news in paper. The content is what counts, not the wrapper.

"The content is what counts. Whether you get it on newspaper or not is not really relevant, and somebody -- maybe not Dow Jones -- but somebody's going to figure out how to make money delivering your daily newspaper online and getting you to pay for it and getting advertisers to subscribe."

###

"What is it that has threatened that model of newspaper journalism? As I mentioned in my title, I think there are three elements. There's technology, there is the polarization of the society, and then there's the use that politicians make of the press.

"The technology one is actually pretty easy to understand. Today there are 1.75 million subscribers to the print Wall Street Journal, a number we maintain only by persistently discounting our subscription rates.

"There is no growth in our print subscription. We have three-quarters of a million paid subscribers to the online Wall Street Journal. That's up 8 percent over the past year. Less than half those people get the print paper. So that's our growth market.

And we know that a lot of college kids only get the news, if they get any at all, by looking at it online, and we know that that's the future.

But the problem is that we cannot charge as much for advertising to a reader online as we can to a print reader. So the unit of Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, that includes The Wall Street Journal print edition, the online edition (WSJ.com), Barron's (a print and online weekly we have for investors), and Market Watch (a free website that we bought that serves people interested in business) that unit of the company had revenues of over a billion dollars last year -- and lost money. Lost $2.5 million.

"Another way to look at it is: We were very smart. We went early to a paid subscription model for our online part of the Wall Street Journal, WSJ.com, and we figured that the advertisers would move with our readers from print to online. And we were about half-right.

"The advertisers did move from print to online, but unfortunately they skipped right over WSJ.com and went right to Google. That's no joke. Google, which is a relatively new company, today has revenues in a single quarter equal to what Dow Jones has in a whole year. So we are struggling with a business model that isn't working for us, and we're trying to find a new way to do it."

***

"(During the 2004 elections)rumors came into the newsroom of the Wall Street Journal. We checked them out, found them wanting, and didn't publish them. But someone else did. So that creates a situation where, while we're trying to convey information as honestly as we can, as we're trying not to confirm our existing prejudices or your existing prejudices, as we practice the kind of journalism which is harder and less comfortable, other people are able to practice another kind of journalism that confirms prejudices, reports rumors as fact, and gets a lot of attention. So you have the Right watching Fox News and the Left reading the New York Times, and both of them convinced they're getting the right story."

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