Alaska: The New Alternative Energy Frontier

I don’t normally think of Alaska in terms of a pioneer in alternative energy research and deployment, but it is. Governor Palin is doing “something” right in this area, according to an article in yesterday’s NY Times here. Seems several villages are augmenting their electric power needs with wind and tidal -generated power, with much more to come. “According to Roger Bedard of the Electric Power Research Institute, Alaska has more than half the country’s ocean wave energy resources and more than 90 percent of its river current and tidal resources.”

And not only is Alaska getting skin in the game. “Northern Power Systems, a small turbine manufacturer in Barre, Vt., has capitalized on Alaska’s new interest in wind. The company initially designed its 100-kilowatt turbine for operation at the South Pole, not a huge market. “We said, ‘Hey, there’s a market in Alaska — let’s go after it,’ ” said Brett Pingree, the company’s vice president for sales.Northern Power now has turbines in eight Alaska villages, including Toksook Bay, and is working on projects in 45 others.” The article is worth your time. Hank

Aptera

While Detroit struggles and Washington talks, a couple of guys in California have designed a disruptive means of transportation named “aptera.” Their electric vehicle, technically a motorcycle, is due to hit California roads later this year starting in the $20K range. How the company got started is an interesting study in entrepreneurship. Scan the wikipedia article here for more about their second generation vehicle. There are several videos on YouTube about the car, its place of manufacturer, and more. One is below. Hank

Your Input: Best Deal GPS

I’m in the market for a portable GPS unit for my M3. While BMW sells M3s with a built-in navigation system, that’s one add-on my M3 doesn’t have. In GPS mobile units, bigger is better and Pioneer seems to have the market covered in this area, with a 5.8″ portable unit in the AVIC-FxxxBT product line. Amazon is selling the F500BT for a reasonable $199+.

My question to readers of this blog is: What do you recommend? Experiences good bad and terrible with mobile GPS units? A short PR kind of video for the F500BT is below. Hank

Who Is Todd Sharp

Todd Sharp is the only individual behind a slideshow, flashbased, embeddable app that I use in ENTR200’s Moodle quite often. Based out of all places Media, Ohio (north of Columbus), www.slidesix.com is a very easy to use app that supports embedding in a web page of PPTX, PPT/PPS, PDF, ODP/SXI, and MOV file formats.So the next time you wonder “How did Hank do that,” it’s probably due to the work of Todd. Yes, there are other competing  slideshow embedding platforms out there, but Todd’s app competes very nicely. It just works and simply solves a problem for me. Try it out. Hank

Ping: How Google Decides to Pull the Plug

There is a short but great read here on today’s NY Times on the criteria Google employs to keep or trash new projects. Hank

Hank Has A Cold – No blog today

I’ve got a terrible cold and won’t be posting anything  today, Saturday. Hank

Have A Happy Friday: Trick Shot

Coupious

In my ENTR200 classes @ Purdue University today, Arthur Nisnevich (Purdue CS 08) and Michael (Purdue CGT 07) are going to present their new product line, the first of which is Coupious. Their web site states “Coupious is a mobile phone app that gives you on-demand, location-based mobile coupons. No need to search
for offers with a browser, no need to find zip codes, no reason to memorize text message
short codes. Simply run the application on your cell phone, watch it automatically retrieve
coupons via GPS, and click “Redeem” to save money!”

The purpose of this blog is to provide you, blog readers, a chance to give them feedback after you hear and see their presentation in class. Hank

Did you know – Over 35ers fastest growing Facebook demographic

And this from the 2/9/09 issue of siliconvalley.com: “A new Stanford class called “Facebook for Parents” aims to give grown-ups a grounding in the social network. Adults older than 35 accounted for 3.6 million — or 9 percent — of Facebook’s 2007 demographics, and are the fast-growing segment of users.” BTW, the class quickly filled up! The same BJ Fogg last year had a very successful class in development of apps for the iPhone. Hello Purdue?? Hank

How Netflix got its groove

Mike Cassidy, who teaches another section of ENTR200 recently sent me a link to a Fortune article “How Netflix got started.” It is a relatively short article that states the Problem: Late Charges, the Idea – mail DVDs, the Feasibility Study – mailing DVDs to himself, challenging existing Business Models (next week’s ENTR200 topic), and lessons learned. But there’s much more to the story….

The founder, Reed Hastings, liked math and earned a BS from Bowdin College in Brunswick, Maine, joined the Peace Corp after deciding the Marine Corp was not for him, and earned a Masters from Stanford in Computer Science well before the Netflix idea. Netflix, BTW, is located in Los Gatos, CA (the cat) where I attended Jerry Woods’ Porsche engine building school. Reed is also on the board of Microsoft. The wiki about him is also an interesting read. Hank