Category: Tech news

Chrome OS draws near. Last night brought perhaps the more surefire sign yet: Google is openly talking to The New York Times about it. Perhaps that is in response to rumors that it was being delayed into next year. While details are still scant, NYT reports that before the end of the year, Google will release a lightweight netbook running Chrome OS. It will likely be branded as a Google product, but built by a third-party, similar to what the search giant did with their Nexus One phone, says the report.

This is in line with what we’ve heard and were told recently. While a full-scale roll out of Chrome OS has likely been pushed into 2011, Google is still saying that they will release something before the end of the year. Based on messages in the open source Chromium forums, it would seem that this will be a beta version of the OS. One that yes, will be running on their own device that they’re currently dogfood testing (testing within the company).

But what may be most interesting in the NYT report is what Linus Upson, Google’s Vice President of Engineering in charge of Chrome, had to say about the new OS:

But Mr. Upson said that Chrome OS would be a computing platform stretching to hand-held devices, tablets and TVs. “We are starting with laptops and we will expand in both directions,” he said.

This seems opposed to what Google CEO Eric Schmidt said last week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. When he was asked if Chrome OS and Android would compete with one another, he said that they current felt that Android was better geared towards touch surfaces, while Chrome OS was better for devices with keyboards.

Obviously, Android is currently Google’s OS for handheld devices, tablets, and TVs (it is what Google TV runs on top of). Upson’s comments suggest that the Chrome OS will eventually go head to head with Android in those areas. Further, mock-ups done on the Chromium website show Google’s current line of thinking for how the new OS could work on such devices.

And while Google says there is no conflict between the two teams building each product, it’s clearly a bit of a confusing situation for both consumers and for Google executives as well.

When Google co-founder Sergey Brin was asked about the co-existence of the two earlier this year, he stated another belief: that the two would eventually merge. Essentially, the line of thinking seems to be that apps are needed right now as pure web technologies like HTML5 aren’t quite where they need to be yet. As those technologies mature, it would seem as if the idea behind Chrome OS is more in line with Google’s mission than Android is. That is, all you need is the web.

This mentality comes across in Upson’s comments as well. “When people look at Chrome OS, they’re going to be like, ‘It’s just a browser, there’s nothing exciting here.’ Exactly. It’s just a browser, there’s nothing exciting here — that’s the point,” he told the NYT.

He goes on to say that 60 percent of businesses could immediately replace their Windows machines with Chrome OS machines. Yes, 60 percent!

He also apparently said that he hopes the new OS will put corporate sys admins out of their jobs because everything will just be updated automatically over the web. Something tells me Google may be wishing he phrased that differently.

Chrome OS: one giant pink slip for sys admins.

Obviously, Upson’s comments are likely an overly optimistic view of what could go down when Chrome OS is released. But I, for one, am extremely excited for it. I would estimate that 95 percent of everything I do on a computer in a given day is now in a web browser. And several of the things in the other 5 percent — like taking notes — I could do in the browser, I just don’t for whatever reason.

Media management remains a big issue, but Google is working on taking that online as well. (Though it may not be going so well.)

Anyway, my point is that I’m essentially already using Chrome OS, it just happens to reside inside of OS X right now. If Google can cut out that middle man in the name of making an even faster and more seamless computing experience, I’m in.

The Cleantech Open— a prestigious annual competition for U.S. tech startups that protect, restore, and reduce the negative impact of humans on the environment— announced its 2010 winners this week. Puralytics, a clean water startup from Beaverton, Oregon, took first prize.

The Puralytics team invented and sells a nanotechnology-based, photochemical water purification system that, in comparison to other available systems, can purify water more quickly, remove more impurities from it, and requires less electricity to do so. With 15 percent of the world’s total estimated 6.5 billion population lacking freshwater enough to live a healthy life today, companies with promising water technology are in demand, and could help abate a global water and humanitarian crisis.

The executive director of the Cleantech Open Rex Northen said, “Puralytics stood out because they have developed something that will have a tremendous environmental and social impact. Their technology lets you use LED light or sunlight as a mechanism to clean water, and it lacks the toxic output many others have. The team was also very strong.”

Puralytics’ chief executive and founder, Mark Owen, is a serial entrepreneur and inventor whose thirty-some successful patents (according to his own calculations) have generated over one billion dollars in revenue for companies he has worked for and founded.

Owen spoke with TechCrunch about winning the Cleantech Open 2010 National Business Competition, and how his latest innovation cleans water with light. An edited transcript of the conversation follows below.

TC: What environmental problem does your company solve?

MO: Purifying water has been a dirty process using filters, membranes, cleaning chemicals and mercurcy lamps. The systems in use today waste most of the water they’re trying to purify, and require a lot of electricity. With reverse osmosis systems, for example, about 80% of the water that could be purified goes out into the sewer.

We have a different way to purify drinking water or water for light-industrial and commercial use. Our system processes all the water, using half as much electricity, and doesn’t require you to produce anything toxic. It also removes things from the water that others cannot, like pesticides and pharmaceuticals.

The EPA just released a list of 169 endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) that they will track from now on in domestic drinking water. These are things that even in small quantities can cause health problems for some people [and animals] including caffeine. Our system removes them from the water.

TC: How does Puralytics’ technology work?

MO: If I was explaining Puralytics to a classroom full of kids, I’d say, “There are little things in your water that may not be good for you. We use a special light to make those go away.”

We use LEDs to illuminate a nanotechnology coating we’ve developed, that’s on a mesh where the water flows through a main system. This technology is not filtering at all. What it is doing instead, is creating a chemical reaction that causes molecules to break apart and break down in the water.

The right wavelengths of light and this nanotechnology coating cause five photochemical processes that work to pull contaminants out of the water onto the surface of the mesh, then dump the energy of what’s been absorbed into the molecules to break them apart.

Most organic molecules are lots of carbons, hydrogens, and oxygen and a few other things. Essentially we break a long molecule apart, all the way down, and reform it as CO2 and water and minerals. We actively destroy contaminants in the water, but leave the minerals that are good for you in it. Other treatments take out minerals that are good for you. But ours does not.

TC: Can you see the process?

MO: It isn’t really visible. You see a kind of purplish light. If you could, you might see something that looks like water turning into steam and dissipating in the air. Something is changing form in there.

TC: Where did you get the idea for this?

MO: My previous company was Phoseon Technology. I’m still a director. We actually make light emitting diode (LED) drying equipment that can dry inks, coatings and adhesives very quickly using little energy. If you have any Ikea furniture, they spray on the coatings to make it look good, and make it durable, and Phoseon lamps dry it in about three seconds.

I got to thinking about what else I could do with LEDs. The original idea was to replace mercury lamps that are used to kill germs in hospitals and in water with an LED array. It didn’t turn out to be efficient. There are other good solutions to killing germs, I learned. But there weren’t efficient solutions to take out chemicals and heavy metals and other things of concern from water.

Another thing that inspired me was a building I saw in Japan, within Tokyo’s Expo City. It had been sprayed with a coating that kept it from getting dirty. Sun activates the coating to break up dirt and chemicals on the surface, so it mostly stays clean. I asked myself if instead of making the building clean, you could make the water clean.

I brought together a team— experts in chemistry, optics and physics— and we started figuring out which wavelengths of light were optimum, what kind of nanotechnology we could use, what kind of coating was optimum, and all the other things that could commence this idea around 2007.

TC: Do you have customers already? Who are they?

MO: We began shipping to customers in 2009. The majority have been industrial process customers. They need water that’s ultra pure for use in the lab, or in processes they use to make their products. Tap water isn’t clean enough. We are useful to pharmaceuticals, biotech and semiconductor manufacturers, and coffee franchises alike. We have several Fortune 500 clients.

TC: What’s next for Puralytics?

MO: I told you about our primary product, the Puralytics Shield, which uses LEDs to purify water for light industrial and commercial use. We have another one called the Solar Bag. It uses the same technology but without the LEDs. So, you have a nanotech coated mesh inside of a bag. You fill the bag with water, stick it in the sun, and the nanotech purifies the water over the course of several hours instead of a few minutes. This is going to be important for getting clean drinking water to people without access in the developing world.

One of our partners, Hydration Technologies humanitarian water division, is helping us sell the Solar Bag to nonprofits that can distribute it. We also work with different aid organizations around the world— including one in Kenya, and another one in Bangladesh— to supply our technology in developing world applications. We’ll be figuring out how to do more of this.

We’ve been funded by four government grants, a seed round, and now some prize money. We’ll be using that develop a next generation product and expand our market presence. But we’ll also be looking to raise growth capital, soon.

[Editor’s note: The national competition prize included $150,000 worth of business services, and $100,000 in the form of a seed investment from a consortium of investors: Wilson Sonsini Investment Company, Stiefel Family Foundation, and the Cleantech Open.]

Images courtesy Douglas Schwartz Photography

More information about the 2010 Cleantech Open National Business Competition winners is available via the competition’s winners site and competition’s Youtube Channel.

I’ve come across quite a few Santa Claus imposters in my time. Most of them were easy to spot: there’s the funky smell that has more in common with aftershave than cookies; the squeaky voice that would make any reindeer snicker; or, most often, the fake beard that looks like a giant cotton ball and droops in all the wrong places.

But last Tuesday, I met the real Santa. Big as a house. Able to list off a dozen varieties of cookies in one breath. Six foot, eleventy-three inches tall. Smelled like candy canes. And a voice that was somehow both jolly and booming at the same time. So, of course, we grabbed a camera and asked him what makes St. Nick tick. Be sure to stay tuned until he discusses the tension between real and ‘designer’-bearded Santas.

The visit was made possible by the goofy folks at Microsoft, who have partnered with Southwest Airlines to place Santa Clauses in over 20 airports across the US this holiday seasons. Kids will be invited to snap a photo with him, which they can then upload using Microsoft’s photo and email services. Pretty neat.

You social media fiends should be happy too: this awesome Santa, who goes by ‘Walter’ during the off-season, maintains a presence on both Twitter and Facebook. You can book him for parties at Santa4events.com, and he’s also part of the Santas of Northern California Club. Watch the video for more on these clubs — there’s apparently quite a large community.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Santa said that while I’ve had a few blips on the ‘naughty’ meter this year, my needle is currently pointing toward ‘nice’. Let’s hope I can keep it together for another month.

And Happy Holidays from the TechCrunch Team!

As everyone is getting their turkeys into the oven and putting the finishing touches on Thanksgiving Day meals, a lot of questions come up. What should the internal temperature of a turkey be to know it is done? How many mashed sweet potatoes would make 3 cups? How do I soften hardened brown sugar? The answers (165 degrees, 3, and microwave it) can be found on Foodpickle, a crowdsourced Q&A section of the foodie site Food52.

You can ask a question on Foodpickle itself, or tweet it to @foodpickle. Answers are tweeted back at you. Foodpickle also accepts text messages to 803-380-FOOD (3663).

And if you are lucky, your question might even be answered by food writer Amanda Hesser. Food52 is her site which she is using to crowdsource her next cookbook with Merrill Stubbs. It attracts a very active community of cooks. Anyone can answer a question on Foodpickle, and the best answers are voted up. If you stil have any last-minute cooking questions this Thanksgiving, give it a try.

So. Facebook. $35 billion valuation; 600 million users; 25% of all US Web traffic — and all that with fewer employees than Google has job openings. The inventor of the World Wide Web recently warned that the web may be endangered by Facebook’s colossal walled garden. A Google engineer was recently paid $3.5 million to not jump ship to work there. Facebook seems an unstoppable juggernaut. And I kind of want them to die.

Not because of their policies. They’ve been reasonably sensitive to their users’ wants, and willing to admit when they were wrong (remember Facebook Beacon?) There have been worrying signs of late, for example, their two-faced attitude towards data portability and their trademarking of the word “Face”, but I don’t (yet) object to what they do.

I dislike Facebook because they’re mediocre. They have a platform and opportunity unlike anyone else, ever—and what have they done with it? Nothing. None of their so-called innovations are actually even remotely so. Copying Twitter was smart, but hardly new; ditto Foursquare. They called Facebook Groups an innovation; it’s a basic feature they should have implemented years ago. Now they’re laughably trying to claim that integrating email into their messaging system is a world-shaking revolution.

As usual, William Gibson put it best: “Facebook feels like a mall. Twitter feels like the street.” (Which I suppose makes Zynga the mall’s arcade.) It’s one thing to shop there occasionally, but quite another to be a full-fledged mallrat—and according to the stats, that’s what we have collectively become. I want to believe that eventually we’ll wake up, and grow up, and realize that new and interesting things mostly happen elsewhere.

And so, I speculate hopefully: what if Facebook is the new LiveJournal?

You might not remember LiveJournal, a now-moribund social-blogging site, but Mark Zuckerberg does: the second scene in The Social Network depicts him liveblogging a hacking jag on his LiveJournal. (Unlike much of the movie, that scene is mostly true-to-life.) I was on LJ too, back then, mostly to keep track of my California friends while I was bouncing around the planet. Now their accounts add up to a ghost town—and while most have moved to Facebook, they’re far less active there. They’re not alone: LJ’s own stats indicate that while their userbase has grown, total user activity has actually declined.

What if LJ’s decline is a warning bell for Facebook? What if the natural human tendency is for people to initially get all excited and obsessed about social networking—but eventually, after a few years, they grow increasingly bored with it, and begin to slowly drift away?

This is a testable hypothesis. The key stat is the relationship between how long one has been a Facebook user and how much time one spends on the site. Only Facebook knows those numbers, though, and they aren’t talking. Until they do, I could cling to that hope . . .

—but here’s the kicker; it doesn’t even matter. Facebook still can’t be stopped.

Even if my apocalyptic prophecies of a global surge in enlightened self-actualization come to pass, and our collective Facebook obsession begins to fade, it will remain a mighty titan. For Mark Zuckerberg remembers LiveJournal too, and he and his braintrust have already ensured that Facebook will remain indispensable even if their users begin to lose interest.

It isn’t just a site any more: like Amazon or Google, Facebook has become a utility. That’s not a metaphor. The number of apps and sites that rely on Facebook Connect and its Graph API is skyrocketing, according to all the startups/developers I know (and, heck, here’s some actual data too.) Even once-mighty MySpace surrendered to Facebook Connect last week. Google’s half-hearted attempts to forestall them are too little, too late.

Facebook has become to the social web what Microsoft is to the desktop: mindbogglingly gargantuan, relentlessly mediocre, and almost inescapable. Like Microsoft twenty years ago, they will succeed because a bad standard is better than none: and like Microsoft ten years ago, they “innovate” by clumsily copying—and then trying to squash—the real innovators.

So let the backlash boom! Maybe it will finally spur Zuckerberg & Co. into doing something genuinely interesting and innovative with their invincible machine.

The Gillmor Gang almost didn’t happen today, as technical problems tormented the hastily assembled pre-holiday hoedown. Will Kinect save Microsoft? No, says Robert Scoble. Will Facebook and Apple destroy our freedom as they capture our identities and lock us behind a pay wall of our own choosing? Yes, says identity leader Dick Hardt. Gillmor had other ideas, but spent much of his time below decks trying to wrangle Kevin Marks’ up and down Skype connection. This is a long show, about as long as it takes to set up Apple TV and the new iOS version 4.2 on a chain of iDevices, but in the end something about it works. Enjoy while you’re waiting for the turkey to cook, and a Happy Thanksgiving from the Gang.

Bizness Apps CEO Andrew Gazdecki checked in to tell us that they’ve joined the admittedly very crowded market of DIY iPhone app development platforms, but says they can do it from start to finish for just $39 a month, obviously a highly competitive price.

The fledgling company has just scored an undisclosed round of seed funding from two angel investors, namely Build.com CEO Chris Friedland (see his reasons for investing here) and founder and CEO of Collegescheduler.com Robert Strazzarino.

I’m not entirely convinced every small or medium-sized business should have its own iPhone application, but hey, your mileage may vary. At a rate of $39 a month, it sure becomes affordable for a lot of companies that wouldn’t otherwise spend money on native iOS applications.

Obviously, the applications that one can build with Bizness Apps won’t exactly become the most sophisticated ones available, but it’s not that they come completely void of useful features, either. The company doesn’t charge a setup fee, and gives business owners control over the creation, editing and management of their very own iPhone app.

Every iPhone app is custom-made for businesses, submitted to the App Store and regularly updated with new features and improvements by the Bizness Apps team.

Available features include turn-by-turn GPS directions, sharing capabilities that play nice with Facebook, Twitter and email clients, in-app messaging and push notifications, check-in and couponing capabilities, calendering options and more.

The company makes money from monthly support and maintenance fees, but also offer custom iPhone app development and design services.

Photos of candy sculptures: Massimo Gammacurta

Photos of candy sculptures: Massimo Gammacurta

Photos of candy sculptures: Massimo Gammacurta

Photos of candy sculptures: Massimo Gammacurta

Photos of candy sculptures: Massimo Gammacurta

The greatest gift you can give yourself is a new beginning. What if you could start again, with nothing from the past to bind you? Where would you go? What would you need? More important: What could you live without? Instead of cluttering our drawers or locking us into upgrades, gadgets should make our lives easier, more productive, and even happier. They should be powerful yet utterly simple. So we put together the ultimate gadget bag as if we were starting from scratch, with no technology legacy around our necks. From productivity to recreation to style, this kit covers it all. This is the rig we’d throw over our shoulder on the way out the door, never to look back again. Happy holidays; happy new year. Start fresh.

*NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. To enter and for full rules, go to wired.com/magazine/bagsweepstakes. Starts 12:00 NOON ET 11/20/2010 and ends 11:59 PM ET 2/4/2011. Open to legal residents of the 50 United States/D.C. 18 or older, except employees of Sponsor, their immediate families, and those living in the same household. Odds of winning depend on the number of entries received. Void outside the 50 United States/D.C. and where prohibited. A.R.V. of grand prize: $2,679. Sponsor: Condé Nast.

Photos of candy sculptures: Massimo Gammacurta

Photos of candy sculptures: Massimo Gammacurta