eckersteins.com

Coleman’s video could be seen as one more example of how, after getting trounced by the Democrats’ strong online campaigning in 2008, the Republican party is trying to appropriate some of President Obama’s methods of using the Internet as a place to gather grassroots support and promote good governance.

“If Democratic leaders plan to schedule a vote on the half-trillion dollar omnibus spending bill next week, they should post the legislation online immediately so the American people have adequate time to read the measure and understand what is in it,” Boehner said.

The video was posted one day before a three-judge panel in Minnesota denied Coleman’s request to reconsider an earlier ruling to discard several different categories of rejected absentee ballots. With those rejected absentee ballots no longer in play, Coleman has less of a chance of overturning Franken’s 225-vote lead in the race. The case could be appealed to a higher court.

The RNC hosted a Tech Summit earlier this month to gather ideas on how the party can better utilize the Internet in its campaigning. Also, House Minority Leader Boehner on Thursday released his second statement calling for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to post online the omnibus appropriations bill, which the House may soon vote on.

The Coleman campaign posted the video to its YouTube page on Tuesday. It features calls for financial help from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, and eight other mostly high-profile senators.

Keeping up these disputes costs money, and with a tough fight ahead for Coleman, the Republican incumbent has recruited as many GOP senators as one could fit into a two-minute video to solicit money for him on YouTube.

“We need 42 Republicans,” says Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.). “We need Norm Coleman to win his fight in Minnesota.”

“This fight that he’s taking on to make sure that every ballot is counted represents the best in democracy, so anything you can do to help Norm financially to make sure that he can tell his story before the court is much appreciated,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) says in the video. “This is the time to step up and help Norm because he’s been there for us.”

More than 100 days after Election Day 2008, the battle between Norm Coleman and Al Franken for a chance to represent Minnesota in the Senate rages on.

Citysearch is still ahead, butupstart rival Yelp is catching up. Good thing Citysearch has brought in some much-needed new social features.

First of all, instead of focusing on a select number of metro areas, Citysearch has expanded to a whopping 75,000 towns and neighborhoods, meaning that you can narrow down your focus to New York’s East Village or Los Angeles’ Culver City. Additionally, there’s Facebook Connect integration, meaning that you can see what your Facebook friends have recommended or reviewed on Citysearch. Also on the social side of things, reviewing businesses on Citysearch is easier and more up-front. Previously, there had been more attention on editorial reviews as opposed to user reviews.

And Facebook approves, apparently. “At Facebook, we’ve found that remarkable things happen when you get trust, user control and identity right–people share more information, and become more open and connected,” Facebook communications czar Elliot Schrage said in a joint release. “Citysearch’s innovative new site shows how Facebook Connect can help information flow faster through a site while creating a filter for users to engage with localized content through the lens of their friends, family and colleagues.”

Finally, Citysearch has launched a mobile site compatible with a number of different browsers and handsets–yes, including Apple’s
iPhone.

(Credit:
Compete.com)

Citysearch, the online business directory owned by Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, has gotten a full makeover. It’s available now at beta.citysearch.com–there’s a more streamlined and Ajax-y interface, but a few important features have been tweaked as well. According to company representatives, this is about a year and a half in the making.

That’s a big deal for Citysearch: fast-growing start-up Yelp has started to gain some market share in the “user-generated reviews” department. According to traffic firm Compete.com, Yelp is still smaller but catching up. (Citysearch, for that matter, syndicates some of its content to big portals like AOL.)

You can find the various characters from the show on this page. If this ends up being a hit, expect it to leech out into other social networks and shows.

This is a novel move in a time when content is getting its own community-made fan characters. Some of the first signs of this were on Facebook with fake user accounts, then later fan pages administrated by fans once Facebook began to clamp down. Most recently, the trend has ended up on Twitter with characters from AMC’s Mad Men and Marvel comics getting taken down by the parent companies who own that intellectual property.

Location-based social network Whrrl has forged a rather odd partnership with content provider HBO to place various fictional characters from the show Entourage as real users on its network.

Events from the television show will end up as annotated items on Whrrl’s user-generated map. You can subscribe to whichever of the characters you want, and each of their items go into your central friends feed along with regular users who are providing “real” ratings and locational bookmarks. As the series progresses, locations seen on the show will continue to be placed on the map.

(Credit:
CBS Interactive)

Whrrl now lets you follow characters from the TV show ‘Entourage’. The characters will continue to update with events from the show as the season progresses.

In the video accompanying the PickensPlan.com Web site, Pickens said that getting 20 percent of the U.S.’ electricity from wind and diverting natural gas to transportation could be done in 10 years “if there is the right leadership.”

“I am calling on the next President and Congress to take immediate action in the first 100 days of the new Administration to do whatever is necessary to make this plan a reality. We are asking the American public to get behind this plan and to help us reduce our dangerous dependency on foreign oil. This has to be the number one priority in the country starting today and that’s what this campaign is all about. I am also calling for a monthly report on the reduction in foreign oil imports and a monthly report on progress in the development of natural gas vehicles in this country.

Transmission lines would be built to transport the power to places in the U.S. where the demand is. The natural gas, now used to fuel power plants, would instead be used as a transportation fuel, which burns cleaner than gasoline and is domestic.

Pickens has already invested heavily in wind, notably a planned 4,000-megawatt wind farm in his native Texas.

Oil mogul and corporate raider T. Boone Pickens launched an energy plan and social-networking campaign on Tuesday that calls for replacing Middle Eastern oil with Midwestern wind.

But the conversion of a famed and politically conservative oil prospector to a proponent of wind power will no doubt be eye-opening to people who still associate renewable energy with fringe environmentalists.

And to further solidify his social-networking cred, Pickens has a Facebook page for his plan.

He’s also adding some social-networking savvy. The Pickens Plan site has a way for groups and individuals to join the group or to carry the Pickens Plan badge on their site.

In his public statement, he said that any large-scale conversion off of oil would need a dramatic change in policy.

The so-called Pickens Plan would exploit the country’s “wind corridor” from the Canadian border to West Texas to produce 20 percent of the country’s electricity.

The U.S. Department of Energy earlier this year said that the U.S. could get 20 percent of its electricity from wind in roughly the same time period and has called for the creation of a transmission network to the coasts.

On the face of it, the Pickens Plan is not at all radical.

He proposed that the private sector finance the investment, which would result in a one-third reduction, equal to $230 billion, in the U.S.’ yearly payments to foreign countries.

Most of the time, poking fun at a poorly thought-out Microsoft initiative is good-natured ribbing. But this comes at a time when the company has just announced its worst earnings miss ever and is looking to cut 5,000 jobs over the next 18 months. That makes this kind of incompetence sad, not funny.

That’s what Microsoft has done with Thursday’s launch of MSN Mobile Music, a new part of the U.K. version of its MSN Mobile portal. The MSN brand is old news–most of Microsoft’s popular consumer online services (e-mail, instant messaging) got the Windows Live brand four years ago, and Microsoft abandoned its MSN Music download service in the United States when the
Zune launched.

We know that the Zune team is working on some sort of strategy for mobile phones. Digital rights management? Nobody’s using it anymore, except for subscription-based services. And we know how DRM worked out for the original MSN Music–Microsoft said it was turning off the DRM servers, rendering songs nontransferable to new computers, then it reneged under public pressure.

On the same day Microsoft announces its first-ever major layoff, the company relaunches an MSN-branded download site for mobile phones in the United Kingdom. Huh?

Now here’s a recipe for success: Take a brand that your parent company’s been on the verge of abandoning for the last four years. Slap it on a new music download store for mobile phones. Encrust all the tracks with DRM, even though the rest of the music download industry is finally moving away from DRM. Make sure that the downloads are tethered to the user’s handset, so they can’t keep them when they upgrade phones in a year or two. Charge more than the competition. Then, when questioned what the heck you could possibly have been thinking, blame a business partner who’s actually running the store for you!

But the kicker has to be the price: 1.5 pounds (a little more than two bucks), while Apple’s iTunes, Amazon.com, and most other music stores start at .79 of a pound. Did anyone happen to notice that we are in a recession?

Microsoft plans to build on its previous projects in Europe, where it has been working on enterprise search via its $1.2 billion acquisition this year of Fast Search & Transfer SA.

Microsoft on Tuesday announced plans to open a search technology center in Europe as it seeks to bolster its Live Search efforts.

The center is slated to open sometime during Microsoft’s next fiscal year, which begins on July 1, and a review of potential sites is under way. The site will be modeled after Microsoft’s Search Technology Center in Beijing, China, which opened in 2005.

With these international search centers, Microsoft is looking to dive deep into understanding the consumer search habits, methods, preferences of local residents.

“Searchers have different expectations and experiences in every geography in the world, so we believe it is critical to make deep investments in physical locations in multiple markets to ensure that we’re applying the best local expertise to our research and development efforts,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s senior vice president of the Search, Portal and Advertising Group, said in a statement.

The software giant currently reaches 68 percent of Internet users in Europe via its online assets and display advertising, said Kevin Johnson, Microsoft’s Platforms and Services Division president.

Wind and solar energy are also variable, meaning they can’t deliver electricity as reliably as a fossil fuel power plant. Energy storage, through batteries or compressed air storage, is one way to deal with that variability.

“Our business was being threatened by something that everybody loves–renewable power,” he said, noting that the amount of solar power from its customers grew from kilowatts to megawatts over the past five years. “We love it, too, but we have no control over it. (Customers with solar) could turn off megawatts of power or not maintain it.”

Although this has proved to be a viable application, speakers on the energy storage panel said that the high cost of batteries and other storage technologies makes it difficult for utilities to justify investments in the technology.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–Utility company American Electric Power (AEP) plans this year to place equipment in residential areas capable of storing a few hours of electricity, one of the first tests of distributed storage on the power grid.

For its distributed storage plans, AEP said that just four hours of back-up power could address 90 percent of the outages the utility has to deal with. “When (storage) is closer to the customer, it’s more reliable,” Nourai said.

The storage units would be the size of a relatively small “backyard transformer,” each wired to provide enough electricity for four to six houses, he said. Together, those storage units could provide back-up power to neighborhoods during outages and potentially for other applications, Nourai said.

Wind, solar forcing the issue

The growing interest in renewable energy, in fact, is what prompted AEP to explore energy storage in the first place, said Nourai.

In these cases, AEP can do “peak shaving” in which it draws on the stored electricity during peak times, such as the middle of hot summer day when air conditioning loads are high. Because the stored energy supplies electricity to the grid, the utility doesn’t need to pay for electricity at high peak-time rates.

AEP is one of the few electric utilities in the U.S. that has already deployed storage on the electricity grid, which is very expensive. The utility, which operates in Midwestern and Southern states, started three years ago with a one megawatt sodium sulfur battery. It now has six megawatts worth of storage in three locations using this technology, Nourai said.

Although the basic technology for energy storage hasn’t changed in decades, interest has peaked substantially in the last few years. Nourai said that five years ago, only engineers went to energy storage conferences; now half of the attendees are venture capitalists and politicians. The energy storage session at the MIT Energy Conference was standing-room only.

Another problem is that current utility regulations are structured around utilities making investments in power generation. “Without a fairly radical rethink of utility regulations, to get the mass movement of energy storage beyond a handful of utilities–it’s not going to happen,” said Matthew Nordan, the president of consulting firm Lux Research.

AEP’s Nourai said the regulators need to be educated on the different values that energy storage can provide. Some of those are economic, like providing back-up power, whereas others are societal benefits because they help the environment. For example, storage makes bringing renewable energy sources onto the grid more feasible.

(Credit:
AEP)

To deal with the projected increase of renewable energy, utilities need a “buffer” in the form of storage so that it can control the flow of electricity onto the grid in a managed way, Nourai said.

Because of the high cost, energy storage devices need to be used for a number of applications to generate sufficient revenue, the speakers said. For example, a large battery could provide back-up power, do peak shaving, and be used to stabilize dips in grid signal frequency.

This is a large megawatt storage device already on AEP’s grid. Click on the image to see a photo gallery of power grid storage technologies.

Ali Nourai, AEP’s manager of distributed energy resources, calls the storage program a potential “game changer” for the utility industry. Nourai spoke during a panel on grid energy storage at the MIT Energy Conference here Saturday.

“At the end of the day, it’s going to be cost that drives acceptance of storage on the grid,” said Gary Colello, CEO of Premium Power, which makes a zinc bromide fuel cell that provides short-term storage to utilities in the U.S. and Canada.

“Aggregated, hundreds of these units controlled (by AEP)…effectively do the same as one big storage unit,” he said. “It’s closer to the load, and it has the potential to (create) competition on price.”

“The key for distributed energy is not because it’s cheaper. The key is national security–we don’t have a huge storage (device) that can be blown up,” Nourai said.