The only thing more challenging than deciphering the names of all the social-minded Web sites battling for attention at the South by Southwest technology conference here — Brizzly, Vicarious.ly, Stalqer, Quora and so forth — would be the chore of signing up for each one individually.

But a growing number of start-up companies are getting around this problem by, in essence, outsourcing the sign-up process. They are making use of a Facebook service that lets users log into new sites using their Facebook credentials. The free service, Facebook Connect, can help nascent Web services recruit a healthy crowd of users in a hurry, and help the users find their friends on those sites.

At the same time, the service reinforces Facebook’s role as the central hub of the social networking world.

“There is always a chicken-and-egg problem with any social service,” said Mark Hendrickson, co-founder of a service called Plancast, which lets members share their social or business plans with their online circle of friends. “You have to have friends there already to make it valuable.”

Relying on another company for such an important function can be risky. For example, an unexpected technical problem at Facebook could affect a start-up’s site. More broadly, any big change in the way Facebook works could have ripple effects.

Mr. Hendrickson acknowledged those challenges, saying, “These platforms are essential for next-generation technologies, but they are also still minefields for those same new technologies.”

Most sites hedge their bets by also creating ways for people to sign up directly, or to use their log-in information from Twitter, in addition to Facebook, as Plancast has elected to do.

Of course, coming up with a clever idea and synching it to Facebook Connect does not guarantee a home run. Gelato, a matchmaking service that finds other lovelorn people in your social circle, failed to gain much traction after it was introduced last fall.

On the other hand, Aardvark, which lets users seek answers to questions from people in their extended online network, was bought by Google for a reported $50 million last month.

Facebook Connect has helped give rise to a new wave of social Web services that benefit from piggybacking on Facebook and its 400 million users.

Read more . . .

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Newly economic, widely distributed sources are shifting the balance of power in the world’s gas markets

SOME time in 2014 natural gas will be condensed into liquid and loaded onto a tanker docked in Kitimat, on Canada’s Pacific coast, about 650km (400 miles) north-west of Vancouver. The ship will probably take its cargo to Asia. This proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant, to be built by Apache Corporation, an American energy company, will not be North America’s first. Gas has been shipped from Alaska to Japan since 1969. But if it makes it past the planning stages, Kitimat LNG will be one of the continent’s most significant energy developments in decades.

Five years ago Kitimat was intended to be a point of import, not export, one of many terminals that would dot the coast of North America. There was good economic sense behind the rush. Local production of natural gas was waning, prices were surging and an energy-hungry America was worried about the lights going out.

Now North America has an unforeseen surfeit of natural gas. The United States’ purchases of LNG have dwindled. It has enough gas under its soil to inspire dreams of self-sufficiency. Other parts of the world may also be sitting on lots of gas. Those in the vanguard of this global gas revolution say it will transform the battle against carbon, threaten coal’s domination of electricity generation and, by dramatically reducing the power of exporters of oil and conventional gas, turn the geopolitics of energy on its head.

Deep in the heart of Texas

The source of America’s transformation lies in the Barnett Shale, an underground geological structure near Fort Worth, Texas. It was there that a small firm of wildcat drillers, Mitchell Energy, pioneered the application of two oilfield techniques, hydraulic fracturing (“fracing”, pronounced “fracking”) and horizontal drilling, to release natural gas trapped in hardy shale-rock formations. Fracing involves blasting a cocktail of chemicals and other materials into the rock to shatter it into thousands of pieces, creating cracks that allow the gas to seep to the well for extraction. A “proppant”, such as sand, stops the gas from escaping. Horizontal drilling allows the drill bit to penetrate the earth vertically before moving sideways for hundreds or thousands of metres.

Read more . . .

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This changes everything

Natural gas is becoming less like oil and more like coal, which is a good thing

WOODY ALLEN, in earlier, funnier days, told a joke about two women in a resort in the Catskills bemoaning the cuisine: “The food at this place is really terrible,” says one. “Yeah, and such small portions,” replies her friend. Thus the current thinking about fossil fuels. They are dangerous things, their production and transport often unpalatable, the less visible environmental consequences of their use worse still. And there is not enough of them. The current boom in “unconventional” gas (see article) seems likely to provide good news on both fronts.

The three conventional forms of fossil carbon—oil, coal and gas—differ both in the way the Earth stores them and the way its people use them. Oil is found in relatively few places, and its energy density, pumpability and ease of use in internal-combustion engines makes it particularly well suited as a transportation fuel. Coal is found in many more places—a whole geological era’s worth of rocks, those of the Carboniferous, are named in its honour—and it cannot be pumped around, but can be crushed and burned and so produces baseload power. Gas, typically found and exploited in the same sort of places as oil, is easily moved around through plumbing but is not, usually, seen as a transportation fuel. It has filled niches in between: Europeans warm their homes with it and many developed countries generate some of their electricity with it.

Now new drilling technologies pioneered in America are allowing gas to be extracted from more types of rock—most notably shales, but also so-called “tight” sands and some coal formations—and thus from much more widespread sources. Other innovations, such as producing liquefied natural gas from offshore sources and shipping it to its destinations directly, and technologies that might allow exploitation of the natural gas that is frozen into some permafrosts, further increase the scope for new production. All told, this transition to more plentiful, diverse and widespread reserves in effect makes gas a bit more like coal, and a bit less like oil.

Coal, unlike oil, is hard to embargo: and an obvious consequence of the changes in gas production is that they make gas supply a less potent political tool. In Europe, where Russia has used supply cut-offs to put pressure on neighbouring Ukraine, discoveries of shale gas in eastern Europe could diversify supply in a useful way. But countries can benefit from unconventional reserves without actually having any. More producers and a larger capacity to ship the fuel in its liquefied form—a capacity developed when no one foresaw that America would be supplying its own gas demand, thanks to its shales— will make gas a more fungible commodity. That continuing trend will mean that very few countries will ever be locked into a single source. In this more open market, existing gas producers reliant on conventional reserves that are hard to get at (which includes many Russian reserves) will have their prospects damaged, especially since the gas price will be increasingly decoupled from that of oil.

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Researchers at IBM

have made important progress toward creating silicon circuits that communicate using pulses of light rather than electrical signals. This is thanks to a device called nanophotonic avalanche photodetector (NAP), which, as detailed on the journal Nature, is the fastest of its kind and is a major step toward achieving energy-efficient computing that will have significant implications for the future of electronics.

Working on the so-called avalanche effect, which occurs when a photon starts a chain reaction that involves more and more electrons to build up a significant electrical current, the device is part of an ongoing effort by IBM to develop photon-based computing and communication.

“This invention brings the vision of on-chip optical interconnections much closer to reality,” T.C. Chen, vice president of science and technology at IBM Research, commented. “With optical communications embedded into the processor chips, the prospect of building power-efficient computer systems with performance at the exaflop [billions of billions of floating point operations per second] level might not be very distant.”

The component engineered by IBM is not only by far the fastest of its kind, but also the most efficient on the energy front. It can receive optical information signals at 40 Gb/sec and multiply them tenfold using a mere 1.5V voltage supply — which can be provided by a regular AA-size battery — compared to the 20-30V supplies required by standard photodetectors.

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JakPak, an all-in-one waterproof jacket, sleeping bag and tent could be a very useful piece of clothing for Man vs Wild-type adventurers or anyone unexpectedly caught in the outdoors. Or, if you’ve ever had to queue overnight for those impossibly hard to get concert or sports tickets, this little gem could make you the envy of everyone else in the line.

The JakPak incorporates a waterproof sleeping bag, one-man swag-style tent and mosquito netting into a waterproof, breathable jacket. It could be one of the first items you pack when heading off to backpack around the globe.

JakPak says its goal is to perfect the alternative personal shelter for anyone who needs a reliable solution to exposure from the elements.

It has three seasonal designs (spring, summer and fall) so don’t expect it to work miracles in 6ft of snow. It’s made from urethane-coated ripstop nylon polyester, making it a breathable/waterproof combination.

It meets CPAI-84 flame retardant standards for tents (important when sleeping near campfires and only weighs 2lbs/13oz (small), 2lbs/15oz (medium), 3lbs/1oz (large) or 3lbs/3oz (extra large).

The jacket has three pockets (two exterior, one interior) and has a reversible center front zipper with integrated hood and collar with drawcord and visor. The elastic integrated suspenders help distribute shelter and sleeping bag weight evenly, and storm flaps over the pockets and zippers keep water out.

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While politicians grapple and stop-start over the growing concern for the welfare of our planet, more of us are wondering what we can do to reduce the size of our carbon footprint at home. This sort of thinking has given rise to the Greener Gadgets 2010 Conference recently hosted in New York City by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). The event celebrated a wide range of exciting prospects in household innovation and design from a variety of leaders at the forefront of green technology and sustainability.

Fuseproject founder, Yves Behar’s challenge to designers to “put the sexy back into green,” is as appealing to the consumer as it is to the industry. CEA Senior Vice President Jason Oxman’s stated that, “three out of four US consumers expressed concern for the rising cost of home energy usage,” a statistic which will continue to influence innovation and design in the electronics industry.

Jeff Omelchuck, founder of the Green Electronics Council and EPEAT, spoke of the power that consumers have to change the electronics design process by speaking to manufacturers with one voice: “ What can we do to increase the greenness of electronics products? Buy them…Manufacturers are good at listening to the market.”

Themes

The conference’s key themes centered on sustainable product design, green technology in the home and environmental issues affecting the industry. In a discussion on “Green Living Begins at Home,” panelists agreed that challenges and opportunities to create a sustainable lifestyle within the home require responsible energy consumption by the consumer as well as access to the right information.

Jay MacLellan, president and CEO of Home Automation Inc., explained the benefits of home automation systems as using, “something that knows what you are doing and provides information to help you react to it.” Other issues for designers in this discussion included the challenge to make alternative energies such as wind power economically viable options for sustainable living in the long-term.

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The internet is among a record 237 individuals and organisations nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

The number of nominations surpasses last year’s record of 205 nominations.

The internet’s nomination has been championed by the Italian version of Wired magazine for helping advance “dialogue, debate and consensus”.

The director of the Nobel Institute, Geir Lundestad, told BBC News that the organisation had received “thousands of nominations” for the coveted prize.

“Some were nominated by one person, others by 10, others by 100,” he said.

The secretive organisation does not release the list of nominees, but nominators sometimes announce their choices.

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Think that this spring’s “Robin Hood” movie will be a blockbuster at the box office? Next week you will be able to put your money on it.

Cantor Futures Exchange, a subsidiary of Cantor Fitzgerald, expects to open an online futures market next month that will allow studios, institutions and moviegoers to place bets on the box-office revenue of Hollywood’s biggest releases. Last week, the company learned from regulators that customers could start putting money into their accounts on March 15.

“I’ve worked in the futures industry for a long time,” said Richard Jaycobs, the president of Cantor Exchange, who has worked with derivative markets and the cotton exchange. “And none of the products has the overall appeal that this does. This just has a tremendous potential audience.”

Betting on the success of Hollywood releases has long been a parlor game for moviegoers. In 2001, Cantor Fitzgerald bought the Web site HSX.com (for “Hollywood Stock Exchange”), where users can place bets with play money on a film’s box-office success; smart traders win little more than satisfaction. Mr. Jaycobs said that he hoped to lure a sizable portion of that site’s 200,000 active users to the real futures exchange.

But buyers beware: if “Avatar” is any indication, the public isn’t always so wise about Hollywood fortunes. Most users of HSX.com predicted a flop, and if those users had placed real money on the Cantor exchange, they would have taken a serious hit.

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The all-electric Tesla Roadster is indeed a fine-looking, high-performance automobile,

but its projected $US109,000 price tag will likely put it out of reach of the much sought-after Generation Y demographic. Tesla’s less-pricey Model S four-door sedan is more of a refined, subtly-classy car – again, not something the fun-loving twenty-somethings will be flocking to. So, how does an electric car company come up a vehicle that the young folks will like? Easy, they get some of those kids to design the car for them. In Tesla’s case, the result is a stunning concept vehicle called the Eye.

The Eye was created by 11 students in the Transportation Design masters program at Turin’s Instituto Europeo di Design (IED). Tesla Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen was their mentor for the semester, and supervised the entire process. The intent was to design a C-segment (compact) affordable car for young, cosmopolitan buyers.

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After all the hype prompted by the success of Avatar in cinemas and the flood of 3D technology unveiled at trade shows like CES 2010, 3D TV is finally becoming a reality in living rooms.

All the major players are well and truly on the 3D bandwagon and they’re set to make a lot of noise to try and entice consumers on board too. To help you navigate the 3D waters as various companies spruik their particular brand of 3D technology we’ve taken a look at what’s on offer, when it will hit shelves and how much it will cost.

Panasonic

Panasonic debuted the world’s first 3D Full HD Plasma Home Theater System at CEATAC Japan in 2008 and is aiming to sell the world’s first Full HD 3D (FHD3D) home theater system through a partnership with US retailer Best Buy. The system will consist of a 50-inch Panasonic VT25 plasma 3D TV, 3D capable DMP-BDT350 Blu-ray player and one pair of active shutter glasses. The retailer will be selling the system at a launch event at the Union Square Best Buy in Manhattan on March 10 with plans for several hundred Best Buy stores to have VT25 displays in the near future.

Panasonic’s VT25 series are FHD3D sets that provide full 1080p resolution to both the left and right eye and will be available in four screen sizes ranging from 50- to 65-inches.

The system is expected to sell for around US$3,000, while a 50-inch VT25 on its own is expected to cost around US$2,500. These prices represent a discount of close to 50 percent compared to Japanese prices recently announced by Panasonic and is designed to help the company achieve its target of selling one million 3DTVs worldwide this year.

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