Daily Technology News

The REAL Porsche Panamera is unveiled, 2008 going down as the worst car year in a generation, another nav device gets an internet connection, and we pass on the Lexus RX400h.

Listen now:

Download today’s podcast

---

SHOW NOTES

? Porsche Panamera photos

? TeleNav Shotgun connected GPS

? Tiger calls it quits with GM

? Honda CR-Z: Hybrid only, right?

? A look at the upcoming 2010 Lexus RX450h

IBM has won two deals to supply IT gear and services for utilities’ smart-grid energy-efficiency programs.

Ohio-based American Electric Power on Tuesday said that it has chosen IBM to be the systems integrator for its gridSmart initiative, which is designed to upgrade the distribution grid to better handle distributed power generation, storage, and efficiency programs.

Michigan gas and electric utility Consumers Energy on Tuesday said that it will work with IBM to test out advanced metering infrastructure in a pilot project slated to start early next year.

In smart-grid projects, utilities upgrade the electricity distribution network with communications and data-gathering tools. By getting current information on electricity demand, operators should be able run the grid more efficiently and better spot problems.

In some smart-grid pilots, consumers can get an in-home display of their energy usage and participate in energy-efficiency programs. A household could agree to let utilities dial down appliances, such as clothes dryer, for a short time or take advantage of lower rates by running the dishwasher at off-peak times.

Smart-grid technology has been available for many years, but smart-grid suppliers report that utilities are showing more willingness today to invest in these energy-efficiency programs.

For its part, IBM is investing heavily in smart-grid technology–the intersection of energy and IT–and is involved in several utility smart-grid upgrades around the world.

Last week, IBM and France-based utility EDF announced a research program to study efficiency and “sustainable energy” technologies. This week, it published a video on YouTube explaining the basic concepts of a smart grid.

A Dutch software dealer has filed a complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission, arguing that the company’s pricing policy in Europe violates antitrust laws.

Company owner Samir Abdalla’s complaint is that Microsoft charges at least a third more for its software in Europe than it does in the U.S. Abdalla’s lawyer, Gerard van der Wal of the Houthoff Buruma practice, said his client had begun a legal proceeding “this week” and was seeking clarification from the commission.

“At this stage, we are asking the court to accept that there has been a violation of the relevant European law,” he told ZDNet UK on Friday. “Clearly, the commission does not enter into a discussion at this point.”

According to Abdalla’s lawyers, the price difference between Europe and the U.S. is between 30 percent and 50 percent. “The evidence is fairly clear,” van der Wal said. “There is a huge price difference, and Microsoft uses its intellectual property to control that.”

Abdalla is already engaged in legal proceedings with Microsoft. In May, Microsoft sued Abdalla as principal of the Dutch company HW Trading, alleging he had received more than $3.7 million (2.4 million pounds) from the illegal sale of unlicensed Microsoft software in the U.S.

The lawsuit, filed in California Central District Court, claims Abdalla took advantage of an Egyptian government program that provides low-cost software to citizens. Abdalla allegedly exported the software in that scheme to U.S. dealers and replaced it with counterfeit software in Egypt.

In response to that complaint, Abdalla has accused Microsoft of stifling trade in the so-called “gray market,” which he argues is legal under European law. The gray market usually describes a market where goods, such as software, can be bought and traded freely even though a supplier has tried to ensure that the goods are only used in the country for which they are intended.

As for the current legal proceedings, van der Wal said he hopes the evidence will be put before the commission, “and we will go from there.” He said he expects it will take “a few weeks” before the case can move any further.

Colin Barker of ZDNet UK reported from London.

KYOTO, Japan–Masked workers in an airtight clean room carefully weld the tops shut on lithium ion battery cells, one-by-one. Colleagues slowly fill them, by hand, with electrolyte. It’s tedious, labor intensive work yielding just 90 cells a day, barely enough for one car.

But GS Yuasa Corp. promises it will all be a sight of the past in April, when the company opens what it bills as the world’s first mass-production line for automotive lithium ion batteries.

In other words, GS Yuasa thinks it can join other Japanese battery makers, such as Toyota’s partner Panasonic, in the quest to create a practical alternative to internal combustion.

The power packs will go into the i MiEV electric vehicle that Mitsubishi Motors will start selling in Japan next summer. GS Yuasa’s new factory will have initial capacity of 200,000 cells, or enough for 2,000 i MiEVs. But that will rise quickly to 100,000, or enough for 10,000 vehicles, and the company is planning plant No. 2.

Issue is cost, not safety

There is no better sign that lithium ion technology has cleared concerns about safety and is now facing the challenge of cost, says Katsuyuki Ono, a managing director at the battery maker.

“Mass production is necessary,” Ono said in an interview at headquarters Nov. 13. “If you make enough for 50,000 cars, you can start to cut the cost. But even that is only by a little.”

GS Yuasa is one of several Japanese companies, including Sanyo and Panasonic, vying to pioneer lithium ion batteries in the race for environmentally friendly cars. It manufactures the batteries through a joint venture with Mitsubishi Motors called Lithium Energy Japan.

Lithium ion batteries are seen as a breakthrough technology because they are lighter and more powerful than the nickel-metal hydride batteries used in today’s hybrid vehicles. But they are prohibitively expensive–partly because of materials, partly because of manufacturing costs.

On the small line at GS Yuasa’s main battery plant in Kyoto, manual processes still prevail. But the factory opening next April in the city of Kusatsu will be fully automated.

Customers wanted

Meanwhile, the company is trolling for more customers in Japan, Europe, and North America to boost volume and cut costs. It also has chosen a manganese-based chemistry that is cheaper and more stable than cobalt-based varieties, though it has lower energy capacity.

Rivals Sanyo and Panasonic are moving into lithium ion after years of mass producing nickel-metal hydride batteries for such cars as the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic Hybrid.

GS Yuasa has yet to see its batteries in any production vehicle. But it remains undaunted. The company started manufacturing lithium ion batteries in 1993 for cell phones and now makes them for a wide variety of uses including satellites, rocket ships, submarines, and trains.

“We are the rechargeable battery department store,” says Masanori Kitamura, general manager of strategic planning. “We can apply our fundamental technology to any application.”

(Source: Automotive News)

Retailers anticipate a bleak Black Friday. Yet, despite the economic downturn, many Americans are still cramming into malls in hopes of snagging the best and earliest holiday buys.

Some consumers, on the other hand, will shun shopping and observe “Buy Nothing Day,” a loosely organized protest against conspicuous consumption. The idea comes from Adbusters, an artsy glossy that counts a circulation of 100,000, plus 80,000 online members of its “culture-jamming” network of social pranksters.

Participants in a wiki for the event have planned demonstrations at shopping centers around the country, including the mammoth Mall of America in Minnesota. Some San Franciscans are opting to swap used stuff at the Really Really Free Market outside in Dolores Park. Wikipedia entries track activities in 65 countries.

The Adbusters Web site suggests repeating pranks performed by tens of thousands of people at malls in recent years, like wandering around in zombie gear. Some might stage a “Whirl Mart,” roaming in packs at Wal-Mart stores with packed shopping carts, yet declining to buy anything. Armed with scissors, other participants may offer strangers the free “service” of a credit card cut-up.

Millions of people have heard of Buy Nothing Day by now and it grows each year, although there’s no official count of the faithful, according to Kalle Lasn, Adbusters editor in chief and co-founder.

As lists of corporate collapses and layoffs lengthen, the notion of buying less or nothing is becoming less an option and more of a necessity for many people. That’s an “I told you so” moment for activists such as those at Adbusters.

“If people had heeded the buy-nothing message, then we wouldn’t be in this mess,” Lasn said. “This glorified spending and borrowing of the past 10 years is really the root cause of this financial and economic meltdown we’re in now.”

The event launched in 1992 in Adbusters‘ pages and sparked a small following in the Pacific Northwest. It started attracting attention internationally in 1995–long before Twitter and other viral, Internet-enabled phenomena like flash mobs took hold–after the magazine touted Buy Nothing Day on a Web site.

“It was stunning for us at the time, that we just put up some information and a few photos and all of sudden without us even knowing it, we heard about some prank that people pulled off in Melbourne, Australia, and then people in the U.K. decided to call it “No Shop Day,”" Lasn said. “It was like what I call a ‘metameme’ that started spreading on its own power.”

We’re entering a “post-materialist” era in which people are weaning off an addiction to consumption, he says. “That era has got to do with buying more green and greening your life, having a lighter footprint, buying ethically and above all buying locally, not from big malls and stores with stuff that comes from China.”

He seems to have company among an emerging crop of consumers. Recent polls show that younger adults are willing to pay a premium for green products, for example. Marketers are painting consumers as “bright green” or “dark green” according to the lengths they’ll go to lighten their environmental impact.

Among the latter group are Compactors, 10 San Franciscans who pledged to buy nothing new for a year, then found themselves joined by thousands around the world, and overwhelmed by media requests.

Green blogs and Twitter feeds abound that chronicle individuals’ efforts to lessen their economic and ecological debts, or to live off the grid entirely, rediscovering forgotten frugality. There’s the well-publicized blog of Colin Beavan, aka “No Impact Man,” a New Yorker who rejected toilet paper and electricity for a year. In California, bloggers Beth Terry, Dave Chameides, and Ari Derfel turned their lives inside out saving their garbage and struggling to cut out certain types of waste, like toxic plastic packaging.

Such bloggers have lauded “The Story of Stuff,” a short, animated online film about the material waste of consumerism, which has been viewed more than 4.5 million times in the past year, according to its star Annie Leonard. She aims to turn the message into a sustainable-consumerism movement.

Technophiles appear to be increasingly concerned with energy efficiency and keeping old hardware from landfills; the growth of blogs like EcoGeek are one indication. Corporate and municipal e-waste collection programs have expanded, and entrepreneurs run sites like BuyMyTronics and Second Rotation that pay people to mail in their tired gadgets for recycling.

As disposable income shrinks and people must save goods and energy to trim necessary expenses, is conservation becoming cool?

You might see it in the big grin President-elect Barack Obama flashed Barbara Walters this week as he talked about greening the White House, and admitted flicking off the lights in each room at home in Chicago to shave electricity use. It’s a far cry from President Carter’s dorky, cardigan sweater-clad plea for people to dial down the household thermostat.

LOS ANGELES–BMW AG is considering U.S. sales of a diesel version of its redesigned 7 series, the company’s top U.S. executive says.

“It wasn’t in our plans, but we’ll look at it,” Jim O’Donnell, president of BMW of North America LLC, said last week. Two weeks ago, U.S. dealers were in Munich to drive the redesigned 7 series, which goes on sale in the United States in March. About half the group drove a diesel.

“They all told me they wanted it,” says O’Donnell. “One or two didn’t even know they were driving a diesel, and they were honest enough to admit it.”

Dealers also drove the 730d with a turbocharged six-cylinder engine. “This isn’t even a diesel engine that we’re bringing into the States,” O’Donnell says.

But Friedrich Eichiner, BMW board member in charge of corporate and brand development, says bringing a 7-series diesel to the United States is “a possibility.”

The 7-series diesel, with highway mileage of about 45 mpg, would help BMW address not only future corporate average fuel economy regulations but also a growing demand for more fuel-efficient cars in the United States, Eichiner says.

BMW’s new clean diesels, the 335d sedan and X5 xDrive35d crossover, go on sale in the United States next month with engines that use urea systems to meet emissions standards in all 50 states.

(Source: Automotive News)

Big-box retailers are increasingly adding solar panels and wind turbines to sprawling stores to offset rising electricity costs and groom a “green” image.

Last week, Wal-Mart Stores announced it will add wind power to 360 Texas outlets. The company aims to power all stores with renewables eventually. So far, the retailer counting the largest amount of photovoltaics is Wisconsin-based Kohl’s. Whole Foods is likely the first big name to add solar panels, starting in 2002 in Berkeley, Calif.

In the latest sign of government support for such efforts, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick called last week for all new malls and massive retailers to install solar panels. That state’s rebates of up to 40 percent for photovoltaic installations are among the most attractive in the country for retailers eyeing regional and federal discounts for installing cleaner forms of energy.

This chart tracks some of the most noteworthy developments.