Cellulosic ethanol plant opens–Technology ReviewAn important milestone: Verenium will open an ethanol plant in Jennings, La., that will use agricultural waste from sugar cane farming.
Engineering update on Powertrain 1.5–Tesla Motors blog Tesla’s CTO offers the nitty-gritty on a one-speed, more durable drivetrain that’s expected to make it into
cars later this year.

RechargeIT goes to Washington, calls [...]

OpenSocial began at Google, but the company won allies for it. Web heavyweights including MySpace.com and Yahoo joined Google to manage the technology through the OpenSocial Foundation. OpenSocial is one theme getting heavy emphasis at the first Google I/O conference in San Francisco on Wednesday and Thursday.

One notable difference with OpenSocial 0.8 is the addition [...]

(Credit:
IBM)

Good news for
green tech: The fastest supercomputer in the world is also one of the most energy efficient. That’s according to the Top500 supercomputers list, to be released Wednesday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.

Supercomputing, which pits the highest-end machines against challenges such as forecasting the global climate in coming decades or finding [...]

Meanwhile, Trinity Convergence launched Gloop Digital Photo Sharing technology, which lets people create social networks using digital photo frames, set-top boxes, and pretty much any digital display.
UGA Digital launched a service that lets you send photos over the Internet to WiFi-enabled digital frames. The YouGotPhoto service lets you send one photo to one frame [...]

With systems that use paper trails combined with electronic ballots, research has found that it can be difficult to see the results on the paper through a plastic covering that they appear behind, and many voters don’t bother to try to verify their results.
A new report on the ES&S voting systems from [...]

It’s also got some pretty slick-looking themes you can simply click to reskin the look and feel of your site entirely. Users of WordPress, or any other Web-based blogging platforms, will be familiar with this, and advanced users who want to make the store simply match with their own sites can drop in the CSS [...]

To support Eyebeam’s mission while continuing to keep Newmark the center of the evening, the evening also featured an auction of several oddball packages that consisted exclusively of items mined from Craigslist. A “political package” featuring a talking Bill Clinton doll and a Palm Beach County voting machine from the 2000 election (among other things) [...]

Video: Toyota and EDF on the plug-in Prius–SmartPlanet.comToyota says plug-in hybrid can go up to 60 mph on electric mode and that lithium-ion batteries will be tested in next year’s fleet, giving more capacity.
T. Boone on TV–PickensPlanT. Boone Pickens and Jay Leno–that will be a doozy. It seems the primary activity of the Pickens Plan [...]

Ask a dozen people what “cloud computing” means and you’ll get a dozen different answers, all pointing to the network. Rob Boothby of Joyent interviewed more than a dozen technology wonks, including Steve Gillmor, Matt Mullenweg, Tim O’Reilly, Kevin Marks, Rafe Needleman, Stowe Boyd, Brian Solis and myself, at the Web 2.0 Expo, to answer [...]

A statement from Advanced Micro Devices was included in the announcement: “USB 3.0 is an answer to the future bandwidth need of the PC platform. AMD believes strongly in open industry standards, and therefore is supporting a common xHCI specification.”
Intel said the specification is “90 percent” complete at this point.
Intel said it plans [...]