Author: Blancer

Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Scott Spence, Director, Raytheon Space Fence Program, Integrated Defense Systems.

Yesterday marked a momentous day in U.S. history as NASA launched its final space shuttle, ending a 30-year era. Four astronauts—commander Chris Ferguson, pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Rex Walheim and Sandy Magnus—are leading the 12-day Atlantis mission, the 135th and final flight of the storied space shuttle program. After Atlantis returns to Earth, NASA will officially retire the program and shift its focus to developing next-generation crew exploration vehicles (CEV) capable of carrying crew and cargoes to Earth’s orbit, the moon and Mars.

But just days before the Atlantis launch, something unexpected made headlines.

Rocketing past the International Space Station at 29,000 miles per hour, a piece of space debris came only 1,100 feet away from a collision, forcing crew members to take refuge in two space capsules reserved for an emergency escape.

Since the launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957, Earth’s low orbit has become increasingly filled with man-made space debris—objects ranging from a single fleck of paint to larger explosion and collision fragments to entire defunct satellites. Just two years ago, an Iridium satellite collided with an expired Russian Cosmos spacecraft, significantly contributing to the amount of debris already orbiting the Earth.

A piece of debris as small as one centimeter traveling at incredibly high speeds can completely destroy an operational satellite if the orbits of the two intersect. Leveraging existing technologies, more than 20,000 objects have been catalogued by Space Command, but it is estimated that more than half a million pieces exist. Though untracked, these pieces of “space junk” can be lethal to our space systems—from military space systems to commercial systems to civil space systems—no one is invulnerable to the threat.

Our Increasing Dependence on Space

Throughout the past ten years, space has become inextricably linked to all aspects of human life. Just try to imagine one day without essentials like ATM machines, GPS devices, DirectTV and Weather.com. Both private activity and global commerce largely depend on communication, remote sensing and navigation satellites from space. Just three years ago, world government space program expenditures reached historical highs of more than $62 billion dollars.

Similarly, space has become vital to military operations. Investments in satellite communications programs have been climbing rapidly, reaching $6.6 billion spent in 2008 for both non-classified defense and civil programs. But the increasing importance of space to daily life, global commerce and national security has given rise to a major concern about the vulnerability of American space systems to disruption in the event of international conflict.

Consequently, more than 128 satellites are planned for launch in the next decade driven largely by our nation’s defense sector.

But this growing number of satellites in orbit around the Earth has made space a much more hazardous place in recent years. Low orbits have now become so crowded that operators are regularly forced to make emergency maneuvers by firing thrusters to avoid disasters.

This coupled with the rapid proliferation of space debris highlights the imperative for more precise space tracking and surveillance improvements.

Emerging Opportunities

In the near future, enhanced “space situational awareness” capabilities will be paramount to detecting and reporting on the proliferation of space debris and ever-increasing numbers of space objects in Earth’s lower orbits.

As various organizations and individuals focus on developing the next disruptive technology to combat the space debris crisis, the U.S. Air Force is simultaneously working to improve its space surveillance capability. First it wants to replace its current Space Surveillance System, or VHF Fence, which has been in service since 1961. The replacement program, dubbed Space Fence, will be designed to provide enhanced space surveillance capabilities to detect, track and measure these smaller pieces of debris as well as commercial and military satellites. For example, Space Fence will be able to detect a piece of debris the size of a softball traveling at 17,000 miles per hour from more than 1,800 miles away. This enhanced capability will allow precise cataloging of up to 10 times the number of low earth orbiting objects than the current systems in place.

Most importantly, Space Fence’s enhanced situational awareness capabilities will provide more accurate positioning data, providing satellites and spacecraft with much longer lead times to assess potential collision dangers and make more timely and strategic maneuvering decisions. For example, had this technology been operational during last week’s close call for the International Space Station, Space Fence would have provided highly accurate tracking data long before the threatening piece of space debris even approached. Instead of having only 15 hours of lead time, NASA could have had much more time and information necessary to make an informed decision to maneuver—or not—eliminating the need to consider an emergency crew evacuation.

Space Fence will be designed to create a larger field of vision using sensors in both hemispheres to provide a more complete picture of orbiting objects. Delivery of the first radar system is expected by 2015.

Once we have better data about what kind of debris is out there, we can develop all sorts of products and businesses to take advantage of the data and build better systems to avoid it. That’s where entrepreneurs and computer programmers come in. Improved situational awareness will create a host of opportunities for those daring enough to solve one of the most challenging problems keeping us from fully realizing the commercial potential of space: debris.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Joseph Puopolo is an entrepreneur and start-up enthusiast, who blogs on a variety of topics including green initiatives, technology and marketing.

There has been a fair bit of concern in recent years about the ability of our power plants to supply adequate electricity during periods of peak demand. Hydrostor, a Toronto-based company, is taking a different approach in offering a solution that allows plants to store their power using compressed air in underwater storage tanks.

More specifically, Hydrostor takes the excess energy created during periods of off-peak consumption and converts that energy into compressed air via an air compressor, which in turn inflates accumulators placed under the surface of a body of water. The depth of the water keeps the air at a constant pressure, helping to store the energy potential.

When power is required, the air is released through an expander and electricity is produced. Through the heat-exchanger, modern compressors and expanders, the system approaches adiabatic operation, achieving efficiencies over 70 percent.

This technology has the potential to address the intermittent nature of renewable energy, help decongest transmission and distribution lines, and create better efficiencies of existing generation.

To date, Hydrostor has relied heavily on government and research grants to get started. They are now seeking further funding from both private sources and government groups to expand. They are currently in the pilot stage of a number of projects.

The benefits are obvious—tapping into a store of power when consumers demand it, rather than constantly maintaining a higher-than-normal supply would create a more efficient network. Hydrostor estimates that over 50 percent of the world’s biggest load centers are located by water and would therefore be candidates for their system. If this model proves true, it would save billions of dollars and the years it takes to build new generators. Hydrostor is not looking to replace new generation projects, but merely to make the existing grid more effective and reliable.

The company was founded by Cameron Lewis in 2010 when he identified the need for a more efficient way to store electricity. Cameron estimates that the cost of storing energy using his system is 50 percent cheaper than storing electricity via batteries.

He came upon the idea while working at a wind farm in Northern Ontario, and saw the potential of power storage. Alternative power sources, such as wind, require some sort of power storage mechanism to create an augmented base load. For the uninitiated, “base load” refers to the minimum amount of power that a utility or distribution company must make available to its customers at any time. A base load is traditionally created by running plants 24/7 to generate the required energy.

One of the traditional knocks against renewable energy comes over the question of what to do when wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining, since demand for power never stops. Cost effective storage of that power would make it possible to create a reliable base load and enable smart grid technologies.

The ripple effect from this application would be widespread as there becomes new opportunities for energy arbitrage and increased viability for renewable projects near large bodies of water. One of the potential limiting factors of the success of Hydrostor will be its adoption at a larger scale.

All current projects are 1 to 4 Megawatts (MW) in design, while larger plants start in the hundreds of Megawatts. Cameron insists not only that this system can scale, but as soon as they have a demonstration facility to prove out costs to the industry, there can be large scale adoption across the industry.

Hydrostor is based in Toronto, Ontario Canada and is part of the MARS Cleantech Portfolio of companies.

Speaking at a press event on Thursday at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, former Google CEO and now Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt gave a 70 minute talk to the relatively few reporters that are here about various topical Google issues, including the most topical of Google issues, the launch of Google+.

When asked by a reporter how he would gauge the success of Google+ Schmidt replied, validly, “Well it’s been out for a week!” before going on to say that the biggest marker of its success was the fact that “An infinite amount of people are unhappy because they don’t have their invitation.” He later went on to say that the amount of people who had invitations but weren’t let in because of high demand was the greatest problem the service was facing. “We’re reviewing it on Monday,” he said.

Schmidt also seemed pleased that people seemed to understand that Google+ was different than Facebook.

“Circles is particularly well suited to the contact list you have in your phone, we have a somewhat different view of privacy. We tried to build a system that you could use for the relationships over time. The people who built the Internet did not get a stable version of identity; You need identity, in the sense that you are a person, this is who you are these are your friends and so on … The issue on the Internet is not the lack of Facebook, the issue on the Internet is the lack of identity. “

When asked by reporters whether Google planned eventually to fill out Google+ with other products, Schmidt answered, “Yeah, and there’s a lot coming,” saying that business accounts and ads are expected, assuming Google+ continues to grow. ”We test stuff and when it works we put a lot more emphasis on it,” he said.

When pressed to reveal how many people were part of the Google+ beta currently Schmidt replied, “I don’t know but it’s millions, it’s a lot.”

Image: Esthr

Who says working for TechCrunch isn’t just about the best job ever, ever? Case in point: Bummed after losing to Causes’ Josh Persky in Zaarly’s ”Startup Haircut Contest” this week, our newly minted executive assistant Greg Barto was just going about his Friday business today, planning meetings and filing files, etc when he was surprised by Zaarly’s Shirley Hornstein with the haircut prize he thought he had lost.

Watch his priceless response here. “I love surprises … I thought I was going to win and when I lost I thought, ‘Now I need to find a place to go get a haircut.’”

The startup responsible for wacky contest, Zaarly, recently bagged $1 million in funding from Ashton Kutcher, Paul Bucheit, our own Michael Arrington and others.

Today, LinkedIn passed Myspace to become the second largest social network in the U.S. LinkedIn has seen a surge in traffic since it went public in May and reached an all-time high of 33.9 million unique visitors in June.

Taking advantage of the professional social network’s continuing growth, Roger Lee, the co-founder of PaperG, has built a cool little service called, aptly, Job Change Notifier. As you may have already guessed, Lee’s service enables you to track and receive notifications when one of your LinkedIn contacts changes jobs.

As such, the service allows users to keep tabs on “persons of interest”, be they startup founders, executives, to find out when they resign, get poached, or are acqui-hired. The service will also likely be useful to business-to-business startups and companies that sell their products to other businesses, as it allows them to discover when their allies are promoted or move into decision-making roles, for example. It’s also an easy way to stay up to date on your professional network and congratulate your friends and contacts for snatching up that job that you had your eyes on.

Lee used LinkedIn’s API to build the site, but is not affiliated with LinkedIn in any way, though he says that he has been contacted by LinkedIn employees, who have expressed interest in the site.

Of course, not everyone updates their LinkedIn profiles immediately following a job change, especially for those who have been let go, and there’s generally some lag time between a job change and its corresponding update on LinkedIn, but it’s still the fastest way to find out about your contacts’ career moves.

Using the site is easy, and set up is quick: Users simply enter their email addresses to receive alerts, choose which LinkedIn connections they want to track, and bada bing, bada boom, you’re ready to track.

Though Job Change Notifier only launched a few days ago, the site is already tracking over 300,000 profiles and continues to add swaths of profiles every day. Though Lee wasn’t able to give me a good breakdown of usage analytics quite yet, he did say that the site has already become popular among startups, sales and biz dev executives, recruiters, and, unsurprisingly, LinkedIn employees.

Lee said that he’s already been asked by LinkedIn if he would be interested in going to work for them, but he has no intention of leaving PaperG. (We covered PaperG back in August.) So far, notifications are only available via email, but depending on early user feedback and demand, Lee may add further notification channels as traffic increases.

It’s a great tool, and it gives TechCrunch writers another way to keep tabs on all you upwardly mobile professionals out there, so get back to work. Because we’ll be watching.

Update: It seems a similar service was also covered today on Boston.com that is like Job Change Notifier, but for recruiters. The company is called Bullhorn (as is the software they make), and the feature is called Radar, which “tries to identify talent before that talent is actively out looking for a new gig”. Interesting. Worth a look as well.

When Mixed Media Labs raised a $5 million round last November, it raised quite a few eyebrows. After all, the money came from Andreessen Horowitz, the VC firm which had backed Instagram. To be fair, they backed Instagram when it was still known as Burbn — before it became what is now a massively popular mobile photo-sharing app. Still, there’s no question that Mixed Media Labs’ PicPlz product was a direct competitor. And Andreessen Horowitz sided with them, while Instagram found other investors.

But as Sarah noted at the time, Andreessen’s bet wasn’t so much against Instagram, as it was a bet on Mixed Media Lab founder Dalton Caldwell. Caldwell, who had previously founded imeem, was said to have a broad vision for a company beyond photo-sharing. PicPlz was just the first product to leverage what they were creating. And while it has achieved moderate success, it has not seen the success Instagram has in terms of users. And now Mixed Media Labs has moved on to their next product, we’ve learned.

Specifically, PicPlz has been spun off as a separate company that will be run by Ali Aydar, a former executive at Napster, imeem, and yes, Mixed Media Labs. We had been hearing for weeks that PicPlz was being shopped around for potential cash deals as Mixed Media Labs sought to focus on what’s next. But ultimately, they decided to simply spin off PicPlz as a separate company while maintaining some ownership.

Reached for comment, Caldwell confirmed the PicPlz spin-off, but declined to discuss the deal further beyond expressing his excitement about what his team is working on next.

So what is Mixed Media Labs working on next? All we know for sure is that it’s inline with the initial goal of a broad idea in the app space. Specifically, we’ve also heard that there will be a strong focus on a business model from day one, unlike PicPlz.

Meanwhile, PicPlz will live on as a service, but Caldwell and the rest of the Mixed Media Labs team will not be involved any more.

The move away from PicPlz comes at an interesting time in the mobile photo sharing space. While Instagram continues to gain users rapidly, other players like Path and Color have been preparing other products as well. Path recently launched their first “joint” — hipster/Dr. Dre lingo for “side project” — With. Color Labs, meanwhile, is said to be preparing an entirely new app after Color failed to catch on in the way they had hoped.

Oh, I could just watch this all day. We’ve been writing about the growing rivalry between Facebook and Google, with its new Google+ social network. But here you have it in gif form, with the Facebook and Google+ favicons superimposed on the dwarf from Game of Thrones (Google+) slapping the child-king (Facebook) over and over again. I am not sure why Google+ is a dwarf, but it doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of watching.

It kind if sums up visually the whole fight between the two companies. Don’t you think?

And where did I find this? On Google+ of course. It was created by graphic designer Ala’a Assamawy . Well played, sir. A meme is born.

When we think of scientists, we often picture distinguished researchers in white coats, methodically conducting experiments in labs that run like well-oiled machines.

Unfortunately things are usually less glamorous. Science labs have a lot going on, and while they’re generally very focused on making sure safety protocols are followed and contamination is minimized, there are some things that are a little less organized. Like ordering supplies — oftentimes reagents are either ordered in excess (resulting in waste) or forgotten about until they’re needed (resulting in delays).

Quartzy, a startup that’s part of the most recent Y Combinator batch, is setting out to fix that problem. The company launched around 18 months ago and has 4,500 scientists worldwide using the service — and there are plenty more who could use help keeping their supplies in check, many of whom are spending thousands of dollars on supplies every year.

At first glance, the service seems a bit like a science social network. You sign in and create a profile, then link up with your coworkers and other colleagues. But founder Adam Regelmann explains that the site isn’t really about connecting with your colleagues in a social sense — rather, it’s about keeping track of which supplies your lab has in stock, and what needs to be ordered . He adds that it’s a problem he’s faced himself as a MD and PhD from Columbia, which is when he had the idea for the company.

Anyone in your lab can log in to see the current inventory status, which helps make sure that they don’t place order requests for things that they don’t need. The site also lists expiration dates, which is important for reagents that only last for a relatively brief amount of time (like some enzymes).

Inputting the inventory information into the system is something each lab will need to do themselves — there’s currently no direct integration with vendors, so your inventory won’t automatically be updated each time you order more supplies. Regelmann says this is partially because the industry is very fragmented, so labs are oftentimes ordering their supplies from many different vendors (some of which use arcane technology) which makes integrations difficult. Update: Regelmann adds that while the service doesn’t tie in directly with these vendors, Quartzy does allow labs to upload their existing inventory Excel spreadsheets to quickly get their labs up and running on the service. And Quartzy also includes online versions of each supplier catalog, so you can quickly add supplies to your database by keying in vendor names and catalog numbers — the system will automatically populate the rest of the information.

Quartzy does more than keep track of your lab supplies. It’s also building out a review database for supplies commonly used in laboratories (you can rate how effective a given enzyme was, for example). At this point the database is fairly small, with around 1,000 reviews, but it’s an idea that has potential.

Also very cool: Quartzy has a feature that’s the scientist equivalent of asking your neighbor for a cup of sugar. It’s quite common in scientific communities for researchers to ask friends and colleagues in other, nearby laboratories for a certain reagent that they only need a small amount of (Regelmann says he’d get five or so such requests per week during his research days).

Quartzy helps with this by letting users run a proximity-based query that lets them see if anyone in their city happens to have what they need. And it’s smart about doing this — any results you see will be anonymized. You can send a message to the anonymous researcher and ask if they can spare a dash of whatever you need (they’ll be able to see who you are), and if they’re interested they’ll respond.

So how does Quartzy make money? So far Regelmann says that the company is focused entirely on growth. Down the line it will let science supply vendors purchase advertising on the site, giving a very targeted channel directed toward a group of people who are typically hard to reach (he explains that many vendors often have time informing scientists about new products). And scientists will get exposed to new products they might not have otherwise known about, so it stands to be a win-win situation.

Quartzy’s team currently includes three programmers in addition to founders Regelmann and  Jayant Kulkarni.