GreenPower: Environmentally Responsible Storage

For several years, I have continued to struggle with the fact that I work in an industry which failed to address broader social concerns beyond data storage capacity (I work in the HDD industry). A couple of years back, I switched to WD (another HDD manufacturer) -- and yesterday, I saw that our company announced the release of a new hard disk drive with more capacity (of course! A whopping 2TB, in fact), but this one is different as it claims to reduce power consumption by almost 38%. While it may not change the world, it is refreshing to feel a part of some effort to help a broader cause -- a rare feeling while working in this highly-competitive, high technology, commodity manufacturing, corporate environment. You can read more about the WD GreenPower Hard Drives on PC World Blog or on the WD website.

Dilemma: A new wave of industry or TV on my iPhone?

Another bay area CIGS-based solar start-up company got $79m in funding recently. The near future looks quite interesting in the Bay Area with companies like Nanosolar, Miasole, Solyndra & Solaicx (not CIGS based) among others compete to carve out their piece of the new emerging industry.

While it is great to see small start-ups emerge in the field with the help of venture capitalists, it would be great to see increased investment and subsidy from the government to catalyze the growth of The New Alternative Energy Industry (not just solar). It wouldn't be so bad after all to see large-scale engineering & manufacturing jobs re-emerging in the United States.

Read the article on Solyndra on CNET.

Dotcoms and Financial Services are great for some, but doesn't help much with opportunities for the majority of the population - the shrinking middle class and poor.

A new wave of industry collaboration between the public and the private sector is what I'd like to see. I love Technology and it would be gratifying to watch it applied to a broader scope benefiting the entire society (their is a lot of opportunity here) and reach beyond serving primarily the prodigal lifestyle of the MTV Generation and the Yuppie Dilettante. Again, technology advances in consumer products have been great in recent years, but we might want to put our TV shows on our "Camera-PDA-MP3-Video-YouTube Enabled-Mad Ringtone-Widescreen" fancy phones on pause for a bit and look at a bigger picture.

There is a lot of opportunity for advances in societal application of new technologies out there.

First Impressions from Bogota

A dear friend of mine is in Bogota, Colombia for the summer as part of her graduate program. She posted a brief glimpse into her first days here.

AKIVA Music

Just found a music video of an old friend of mine on his way to "rock-star" stardom. Check out his video featured on myspace.com. You can also check him out on www.akivamusic.com.

RED HERRING Top 100 Private Companies

For all the technology lovers, this is a fun list of companies to browse through to see what's going on in the new technology frontiers. RED HERRING Spring Top 100 Private Companies

You've Gotta Love Google!

Google recently started an experimental service to make local-business search accessible over the phone. To try this service, just dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone. Google Voice Local Search is awesome. Beats paying $1.40 for my Verizon 411. For those know me personally, are well that I'm notorious for easily getting lost while driving places. Now with Google Voice Local service and my Garmin GPS, all that's history! You've got to love google's free gifts to the world.

New photos added to flickr

see more at on Flickr

Big Blue and Nanotechnology

Interesting read: IBM applies self-assembling nanotech to chip manufacturing

Visual Shopping

Just got back from playing tennis with a guy who works in the peninsula at a startup named Like.com. Turns out the company allows users to shop via a new kind of visual search engine (called Riya). The search is personalized based on metadata as well as an actual vector-based image matching of an item (picture of an item, obviously) you like. Then, you click on that item (or you can even select a certain portion of the item you like), it finds all that look similar, and links to you to online shop to purchase the item. It's always quite interesting to see how the 'dotcoms' continue to manage to innovate on such simple concepts -- fashion magazines should love this!