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Those claims now appear to be validated.

On Tuesday, Innovalight announced that an independent study of its method by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Germany confirmed that its silicon ink-based cells “demonstrated a record 18 percent conversion of efficiency.”

This is Innovalight's crystalline silicon solar cell.

(Credit:
Innovalight)

Innovalight first got noticed in 2007 for perfecting a process in which it could essentially ink-jet-manufacture solar cells using a proprietary silicon ink it had developed. The solar cells are created by pouring an ink solution incorporated with silicon nanoparticles and then decanting the excess liquid to leave behind a crystalline silicon structure.

At the time of the 2007 announcement, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Innovalight claimed its method not only resulted in solar cells that were cheaper to produce by as much as half, but that the crystalline structure resulting from the process made its cells more efficient at converting electricity.

JA Solar, one of the big players in the solar industry, is working with Innovalight to commercialize the latter’s method for making silicon-ink-based, high-efficiency solar cells, the companies said this week.

JA Solar plans to further develop the process at its research and development plant in Yangzhou, a city on China’s coast about 630 miles south of Beijing.

Shanghai, China-based JA Solar said the process will lower its production cost for this type of solar cell.

“Innovalight’s silicon ink in conjunction with JA Solar’s leadership in high-volume solar cell manufacturing with demonstrated yield, conversion efficiency, and low production costs, provides a very promising solution to enhance the conversion efficiency of solar cells utilizing our existing solar cell manufacturing lines,” Qingtang Jiang, JA Solar’s chief technology officer, said in a statement Tuesday.

Kolmisoppi has said in the past that the founders transferred ownership in 2006.

Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, a Pirate Bay co-founder who has long been the service’s spokesman, reacted to the latest lawsuit filed by the movie industry in his typically defiant way.

As for Global Gaming, Kolmisoppi said: “If (Pandeya) doesn’t have the funding, it won’t go through.”

“Please ask (the MPAA) how they can know that since it’s not true,” Kolmisoppi said. “They’re just saying it because they’re upset that they have a faulty claim. They have essentially no idea on the ownership of the Bay.”

(Credit:
Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi)

Rosso said Pandeya may not have all the funding he needs. Pandeya denied there was any hold-up and said his company’s investors and board will vote on whether to acquire The Pirate Bay sometime in August.

Hans Pandeya, Global Gaming’s CEO, has said he wants to turn The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracker most often used to locate unauthorized film copies, into a legal music operation.

Also in the filing, the MPAA asserts that Reservella is just a front. Reservella is the company based in Seychelles, an island nation northeast of Madagascar, that The Pirate Bay founders say owns the site. The studios maintain Reservella is controlled by Neij, but Kolmisoppi denied this.

Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi says if Global Gaming can't find the funding, it just won't get The Pirate Bay.

But those plans appear to be on rocky ground. Two weeks ago, Pandeya hired Wayne Rosso, Grokster’s former president, to help acquire content legally. On Tuesday, Rosso told CNET News that he had quit and that he had strong doubts about Pandeya’s ability to raise enough money to acquire The Pirate Bay after talking to the CEO’s investors.

He called it “bull****.”

The question of The Pirate Bay’s ownership has come up often in the past few weeks. The music industry’s trade group has said that if a Pirate Bay sale is completed, it will try to seize any money that falls into the hands of the site’s founders. And then there’s Global Gaming Factory, a Swedish software firm, which announced plans last month to buy the service.

On Tuesday, the Motion Picture Association of America filed legal papers in a Swedish court that alleged the three operators: Kolmisoppi, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg continue to help millions of people commit copyright infringement, even after being sentenced to jail and ordered to pay $3.6 million in damages. In their legal filing, the studios have asked authorities to stop the trio.

Antivirus provider AVG Technologies said users of its LinkScanner service detected numerous profiles that were identical except with different names and each included a link to what was represented as a home video but which instead displayed a fake antivirus alert when clicked. The scams are designed to trick people into paying for software they don’t need, to get credit card information from victims for identity fraud purposes, and often to install spyware on the computer.

When the link in the fake Facebook profiles is clicked a fake alert pops up that tries to convince the user that the computer is infected.

Axten disagreed with the AVG speculation that the Captcha system had been broken.

“We’re looking into how these accounts were created, but it’s very likely that the sign-up process was manual, or that the person behind the attack farmed out the Captchas to be solved by humans for a price,” Axten wrote in an e-mail.

Facebook on Thursday fended off an attack in which multiple identical profiles were created to spread malware.

“Clearly, the Data Snatchers have found a way to automate the creation of Facebook accounts, which means they’ve found a way to bypass the Facebook Captcha,” Roger Thompson, chief of research at AVG, wrote in a blog post. Successfully translating a Captcha, a hard-to-read image of letters supposed to ensure that a human is involved, is required for a new account .

For its Captcha system Facebook uses ReCaptcha, “which was recently acquired by Google and is about as well-regarded a Captcha provider as there is,” he said.

(Credit: AVG)

The malicious link was blacklisted by the major Web browsers and Facebook was blocking the URL from being shared on its site, said Facebook spokesman Simon Axten. Meanwhile, the company was working to identify all the fake accounts and disable them, he added.

Perhaps it has already happened.

You can see this in the most recent IDC numbers on Linux deployments. While Red Hat, Novell, and other Linux vendors are growing comfortably, nonpaid Linux adoption is outpacing paid deployments. A sign that enterprise IT is going it alone?

Ultimately, it could be the studiously “un-cool” companies like IBM that make the most money from open source, principally because they are best positioned to monetize it with additional layers of proprietary hardware, software, and services. This breaks the open-source oath of absolute transparency, but it’s a price many CIOs seem willing to pay.

In fact, open source has become such an essential ingredient to software success that Gartner’s Brian Prentice is now predicting that “we are rapidly moving to the point where all software companies will, to some extent, be an open source company.”

It’s not a race that open source always wins. Notice, for example, that in Linux’s easiest market–the market for Unix-to-Linux replacements–it’s proprietary Unix vendor IBM that arguably is cleaning up the most.

More importantly, as Augustin calls out, open source puts CIOs, not vendors, in control of their destiny:

It’s this lack of religious devotion to open source, with an emphasis on its tangible cost benefits over its freedom benefits, that continues to make open source palatable to the enterprise but also less distinctive. The reason that enterprises buy from Red Hat in droves has precious little to do with source code access and everything to do with the superior value (read: cost and performance) Red Hat offers, as Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst recently noted.

Open source is becoming more like the market that gave it birth.

Today these are almost entirely those enterprises with savvy development teams, but it could prove to be an unhealthy trend for commercial open source. It’s one reason that Red Hat’s foray into cloud computing may prove a tough slog: the kinds of companies running clouds are precisely the sort that don’t need much vendor hand-holding. The Googles of the world don’t buy much software: they build it, and they use a lot of open source in the process.

The one hitch to this enterprise open-source love-in is that the more open-source vendors enable enterprise IT, the less enterprise IT may need vendors.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in enterprise IT, a market famously expensive to target due to the inflated cost of acquiring customers. Open source turns this cost equation on its head by making the acquisition of new customers relatively cheap, as SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin tells NetworkWorld.

That’s because however much we may enjoy Facebooking, Twittering, etc., ultimately we pay for what helps us get our jobs done.

Now people understand software and they understand that many applications have matured. I think we’ll see over time the software industry reach a point where it is not proprietary vs. open source, but the shade of how much control you want, how much do you want to do yourself, and how much do you want the vendor to do.

Even so, just a few years ago, if you were a start-up focused on enterprise IT, VCs treated you like a leper, preferring to invest in something with a name like Bungabooboo.com over something that could shave 10 percent from a CIO’s operating costs. The one way to get funding for enterprise software was to approach the market in a decidedly Web 2.0 way: open source. With the recession still in full bloom, open-source companies like Red Hat are cleaning up.

Despite all the nifty, gee-whiz technology that the Web 2.0 craze brought the software industry, it’s still stodgy enterprise software that continues to command a significant price tag.

Still, open-source vendors like Red Hat will win often enough to ensure that open source remains big business, and big for business, for many years to come. The risk is that while open source has transformed enterprise IT, enterprise IT is in turn putting its stamp on open source, making it more attractive to adopt and far less compelling as a competitive differentiator.

Given its subscription model, open source forces vendors to innovate in order to earn renewals. And because open source comes with a built-in “recipe” (read: source code), it provides the “ultimate insurance policy,” as Glyn Moody writes, for enterprises that want to rely on a vendor but not become dependent upon it.

If you’re looking for funding from customers rather than from VCs, you might want to consider that boring, old technology that keeps the lights on but doesn’t light up the sky.

Even when people, usually consumers, do quickly adopt technology, this is often a sign that it will be dropped quickly, too. Consider MySpace. Once on top of the world, it’s now hemorrhaging market share to Facebook, which in turn will likely evaporate in the face of The Next Big Thing.

This is why the hot jobs in the cold economy center on “old” programming languages like Java and .Net. They’re not cool. They’re essential.

I’ve grown to love Twitter, but I’m not waiting for it to change the world. My demographic (25- to 45-year-olds working in technology) believes it’s changing the world, starting with the ushering in of a new age of Iranian democracy. But as Foreign Policy points out, Twitter does as much to help crush dissidents and spread misinformation as it helps to remedy things.

I suspect that the longer the adoption period for technology, the longer it tends to stick around. If I invest a lot of time and money in an IT purchase, I’m less likely to drop it quickly.

This is why, for example, companies pay Red Hat to make Linux move more slowly with an 18-month release schedule. Innovation is great, but many enterprises prefer to get innovation on the drip.

In other words, it’s really no different from the old technology, except that it does a better job getting into the news.

Linux is now old hat and safe, which is precisely why the value of Linux skills has risen 50 percent in the job market. The same holds true for open source, generally: now that it’s old hat, enterprises can’t adopt it fast enough.

I’m not suggesting that Web scripting languages like PHP aren’t big, or that Twitter is irrelevant. I’m just saying that the reality of what sells today is often very different from what gets funded today in Silicon Valley.

Yes, really. COBOL keeps chugging because, as John Willis suggests, it continues to power the boring (but essential) software like CICS (Customer Information Control System). Not very sexy, but when you think about life for more than a nanosecond, most of what makes life work is the transportation, finance, health care, etc. systems that don’t make waves but do make our lives more efficient.

COBOL? Really?

All the hipsters in Silicon Valley talk about PHP, Twitter, and Web 2.0. But recent surveys show that kids can’t be bothered to use Twitter.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

In sum, forget the hype. While we think technology runs at breakneck speed, the reality is that technology adoption does not. It’s simply impossible, especially for enterprises, to adopt new technology at the pace at which it is developed and released.

Meanwhile, COBOL, one of the industry’s oldest programming languages, still “equates to 80 percent of the world’s actively used code,” according to Stephen Kelley of Micro Focus.

“These vulnerabilities are the most likely to be exploited by malicious code and are two of the best worm candidates that we’ve seen since Conficker,” Marcus said in a statement. “That said, all of today’s security bulletins address vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to take complete control of a vulnerable PC.”

The five bulletins address eight vulnerabilities. According to Symantec Security Response research manager Ben Greenbaum, the two vulnerabilities most likely to be used by attackers involve the way Windows handles ASF and MP3 media files. “We’ve seen similar exploits in the past and all a user would have to do is visit a compromised Web site hosting one of these malicious files, which could be an MP3, WMA or WMV file, and they could become infected.”

As for the patches Microsoft did release on Tuesday, Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek noted that some of the bulletins are interesting in that they either affect only newer operating systems or are more critical on later versions–the reverse of what is normally the case. Overall, he said, five Windows patches should keep IT workers busy.

McAfee Avert Labs director Dave Marcus said that two of the flaws, in particular, relate to serious security vulnerabilities in the networking components of Window Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 that could allow for malicious software to spread from one PC to another.

Greenbaum noted that Microsoft has yet to issue a patch for a zero-day flaw in Internet Information Services that was made public last week. “Until a patch for this is issued, as a temporary workaround we suggest IT administrators using IIS 5.0 and 6.0 turn off anonymous write access immediately,” Greenbaum said. “We also recommend using a firewall and restricting access to creating directories. Those using IIS 7.0 with FTP Service version 6.0 installed should upgrade to FTP Service version 7.5.”

“Due to the criticality of the patches and wide coverage of the operating system, this will be a busy day for IT administrators,” Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek said in an e-mail.

There are already some attacks being seen based on that flaw.

“While the company will not release an update this month, it will do so once it has reached an appropriate level of quality for broad distribution,” Microsoft said.

In addition, Microsoft said it is re-releasing a bulletin from last month to address an additional control found to be vulnerable to an issue with the Microsoft Active Template Library.

Meanwhile, Microsoft said Tuesday that it is investigating another zero-day issue, this one a reported flaw in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

While the issues affect different versions of Windows differently, Microsoft said none of the issues apply to the final version of Windows 7, which Microsoft wrapped up in July.

Microsoft on Tuesday issued five critical Windows-related updates as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday release.

Facebook certainly stands to gain something by keeping people inside of its application, despite the fact that there are currently no ads or paid-for features. Considering that it can never get the latter as part of Apple’s rules, in-application apps that could present more ad space certainly seem like the next best thing when it comes time for Facebook to flip on that advertising switch.

How great would this be on the iPhone, considering that you’re unable to access many of the device’s own files or view unsupported attachments? The same goes for accessing other applications within the confines of the Facebook app; ones that let you update your Twitter status, see where your friends have traveled, or play a quick round of Scrabble.

Facebook's new look sports specific Facebook app icons that can be rearranged.

Message attachments in Facebook's mail service let you expand upon the base features using third-party services.

In case you missed Thursday’s news, Apple finally got around to approving the third version of Facebook’s iPhone app. It’s a big step up from previous iterations, bringing in a number of features for which users had been clamoring.

We still get a pitch about a new Facebook app now and again, but truth is, that ship sailed long ago. Most Facebook apps just don’t have the wow factor they once did when the platform was new. With the company’s latest iPhone app update, however, the wow could be coming back on a smaller scale.

(Credit:
CNET)

These saved items go up on 3×3 grid that can be rearranged and expanded, depending on how many pages and contacts users decide to add. This makes it much simpler to hop back and forth between certain parts of the site–that is, as long as you’ve planned ahead.

To a certain degree, Facebook already put its foot in the door with a version of its Facebook Connect service for iPhone applications. Applications that have implemented it can have their users log in with their Facebook credentials. It also can give the app access to their profile and friends list to pipe information back out. Simply making this information more readily available within the app would make inroads toward standalone apps within it.

What I’m talking about is quite different, though. These are applications within the Facebook app that would have access to other in-app Facebook apps. Would Apple be OK with this kind of functionality? Almost assuredly no. In fact, Apple has basically done the same thing with its own device and APIs–simply letting developers build specialized tools that work within its confines.

To go with those items are standard Facebook features, including a handful of its own first-party applications, such as events, photos, mail, and the all-important live text chat.

But Facebook could make available new application-programming interfaces, or APIs, that would let developers pipe some of that data to a mobile version too. Third-party applications could then be programmed to work within the confines of the Facebook application itself, meaning that each one could access other official features as they do on the standard site.

One of the best examples of how this works is the inter-network message system found on Facebook proper. Here you can take advantage of some of the applications you’ve added to expand what you can send in a message as a virtual attachment.

(Credit:
CNET)

So is there room for third-party apps in this new ecosystem? Definitely, and much more so than would have been possible in previous versions.

One of the most interesting changes is how the app has been designed to feel very familiar to the iPhone user interface. For instance, no matter what you’re doing on the app, you can touch anywhere on the top of the screen to go back “home.” You can also save shortcuts to a friend’s profile or to one of the social network’s public-facing pages.

Imagine, if you will, a way to sync up with applications you have installed in Facebook, then use them right inside this new iPhone app. This seems like a logical next step, though Facebook’s current system for third-party developers has them build one version of their application–one that works on Facebook’s site.

What can be safely assumed is that Facebook would stand to run into the most trouble with Apple’s approval process. Having apps that are installed inside an in-app marketplace means emulating what the iPhone does with its own native application store, which is a big no-no. But again, this is something Facebook could get around by limiting what applications are able to do, be it running in a Web canvas page or simply piping their data through Facebook as an intermediary.

But Facebook does have a few things going for it–it’s big, popular, and helps Apple sell more iPhones and iPods by being a must-have application. It has also maintained its own directory of applications for the last two years. And like Apple, what applications are able to do within the confines of the service is limited; for mobile versions of apps, those limitations could be even tighter.

If you’ve been following the Apple Netbook gossip along with us the last few months, here’s the latest tidbit, courtesy of Barron’s:

Via Engadget via 9to5Mac via Barron’s (subscription required to view full article)

Now there’s a shocker. (I don’t think you’d have to be a veteran analyst to predict that).

(Credit:
Gizmodo)

However, as far as we know, unlike the veteran analyst, he has not seen or touched the device.

“Gaming will be a big part of what this [the new device] is about,” Peddie said.

Comments?

Interestingly, while there’s been a lot of talk about this being a media-centric device with a little Apple TV mixed in (what you’d expect from a giant iPod Touch), Barron’s quotes Jon Peddie, head of Jon Peddie Research in Tiburon, Calif., as saying it will be a gaming machine as well.

The article also goes on to say that the PC industry is basically on pins and needles as it waits to see what Apple puts out. According to the phantom analyst, PC makers have paused production on next-generation Netbooks until they see what Apple’s come up with.

A “veteran analyst,” albeit a very anonymous one, has allegedly seen and touched Apple’s rumored “slate-style” PC, which we like to call the jumbo iPod Touch. According to Barron’s source, the new product will be announced in September, released in November, and carry a price tag of between $699 and $799. As previously reported, the tablet (or whatever Apple plans on calling) is ready to go but has been awaiting final approval from Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Concept
art for an Apple touch-screen Netbook.

As for concrete details about the device itself, the veteran analyst had only one thing to say about his or her hands-on experience: “The machine impresses with its display of hi-def video content. It’s better than the average movie experience, when you hold this thing in your hands.”

But it was on the morning of the second day of the conference that the judges, audience, and organizers seemed thoroughly impressed by an app that they could actually use. Meet Citysourced, a new iPhone app that lets the residents of an individual city log complaints and inquiries–graffiti, potholes, neighbors who go streaking–and send them straight to City Hall.

You might be thinking that this sounds familiar. That’s because it’s not the only player in the space: Open311 has gotten some buzz for applying the open-standards model to building civic feedback systems. Also, earlier this year the city of Boston commissioned a mobile development company called Connected Bits to build a complaint-filing app called Citizen Connect.

It’s not that the smattering of fresh new companies presenting at the annual TechCrunch50 start-up launch conference was boring, per se. Most of them,chanel bags, in fact, had an extremely practical slant to them, like the array of job- and car-hunting sites that take something Craigslist does and make it way less sketchy. And therein lies the problem: Sometimes, those sorts of productivity and next-gen enterprise start-ups simply aren’t that cool and shiny when you stick them into a PowerPoint demo.

(Credit:
Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

They had two announcements accompanying the launch: first, that Palm had made a research-and-development investment in Citysourced to build an app for the Pre handset; and second, that the city of San Jose, Calif., had signed on board to use Citysourced as its official mobile 311 system.

SAN FRANCISCO–It’s about time people got excited over here.

The challenge,replica handbags, as panel judge Tim O’Reilly pointed out, is that Citysourced can only beat its competitors if it has the best approach to the market, namely its effectiveness in getting new cities on board. The start-ups’ executives said that they’re already in talks with some more of the 10 biggest cities in the country and should have more announcements soon.

In either case, the laptop-wielding masses at TechCrunch50 seemed to think that this new mobile start-up is one to watch.

But none of the existing civic-engagement apps have caught on yet, and Citysourced’s mix of no-brainer efficiency and easy-to-read maps seemed to impress both the judges and the audience. So did the back-end Web interface for mapping and tracking inquiries and complaints. Digg founder Kevin Rose,prada bags, one of the judges, called it “an amazing idea” and started offering suggestions: he wanted to be able to subscribe to a feed of updates from his neighborhood, for example, as well as see volunteer opportunities and vote on the priority of issues, Digg-style.

Citysourced “just seems that it’s one that’s sort of a no-brainer,” TechCrunch founder and conference organizer Michael Arrington said after the presentation, asking for a show of hands in the audience to see how many iPhone owners in the audience would want to download the app. Many arms were raised.

A screenshot of the back-end dashboard of Citysourced, as displayed at TechCrunch50.

The browser market, already competitive, just became even more so. Google is at the top of its game right now,chanel bags, but so is Mozilla. Microsoft, for its part, is reportedly holding meetings in D.C. that some Beltway insiders have dubbed as “screw Google” gatherings. But Microsoft probably should be spending more time developing innovative browser solutions to compete with Google and Mozilla.

However, Sony has now given Google’s Chrome browser something that Mozilla has struggled to obtain: a preinstall deal. As CNET reports, Google Chrome is being installed on Windows PCs alongside IE, with other distribution deals likely.

Intriguingly, this Chrome deal opens up the possibility that Sony, as well as other computer manufacturers, will eventually sign on to ship Google Chrome OS,prada bags, Google’s Netbook-optimized Linux operating system.

Back to Sony. Its open-source credentials have been called into question due to its rootkit debacle and decision to restrict Linux on the PlayStation 3, but this new decision to preinstall Chrome should redeem it with the open-source community and give Sony a ready-made marketing machine.

At the same time, this move may open the door for Mozilla to snag its own preinstall deal(s) with competitors to Sony, who will also likely want to buy into Google’s brand but may prefer the Firefox option, given its wider adoption. Firefox users have been pressuring major hardware vendors to preinstall Firefox for years, but the best Mozilla has done is to get Firefox preinstalled with Linux-based notebooks and Netbooks.

That’s hardly something to cheer about, given the small share of Linux in mobile personal computers.

Google Chrome still accounts for less than 3 percent of the global browser market, but it has something that even Firefox can’t match: a dominant, global consumer brand. Google Chrome isn’t interesting to Sony because of its market share in Web browsers, but rather because of its overall consumer brand coupled with steady innovation in browsers.

Finally,gucci bags, a clear choice for consumers.

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This Google Chrome preinstall leaves an opening for Mozilla, but to capitalize on it Mozilla must improve its message. It has recently been claiming that we’re hitting a “seat-belt moment” in which browser security could lead to consumers flocking to Firefox. But it’s hard to get excited about browser security, no matter how important it is.

Mozilla’s Firefox has maintained its steady ascent against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in the global browser market, hitting 22.98 percent vs. IE’s 66.97 percent.

Much more interesting are Mozilla’s plans to update its browser to 4.0 by the end of 2010 and to release Fennec, its mobile browser, before the end of 2009, according to TG Daily. Extending Firefox to my mobile device? That is something consumers can get excited about which, in turn, should stir up interest from hardware vendors that are looking to bridge their smartphone and laptop strategies.