Posts Tagged ‘google’
The Week in Green is a new item from our friends at Inhabitat, recapping the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us.

The past week was also surging with developments from the field of renewable energy - first we were excited to see the unveiling of the Oyster 2, an offshore wave-harvesting energy plant that improves upon its predecessor with a simpler design, fewer moving parts, and a 250% increase in energy generation. Google, HP, and Microsoft are also getting into the green energy game with plans to tap an unexpected energy source to run their data centers - cow dung! Google also led the charge towards cleaner energy this week by funding a new type of jet engine-inspired geothermal drill that uses superheated streams of water to bore through previously impenetrable surfaces.
Speaking of jets, MIT has just unveiled several ultra-efficient airplane designs that are capable of cutting fuel use by a whopping 70%. The auto industry also received a jolt of energy as Toyota announced a partnership with Tesla that will boost California's flagging economy and likely lead to more affordable iconic electric vehicles.
The field of wearable technology saw several innovative advancements this week as well - safe cyclists rejoice, because a group of Indian students have designed a $22 Solar and Wind Powered Bike Helmet. Meanwhile, a group of Colorado State University seniors have designed a medical incubator backpack unit that they believe can reduce baby deaths in medical emergencies.
Finally, we shined light on several brilliant advancements from the field of solar technology, starting with China's plans to build the "biggest solar energy production base" in the world. We also looked at the HYDRA, a solar-powered hydrogen fuel cell system that can reportedly generate 20,000 gallons of pure water a day, and green energy got literal with the unveiling of the first leaf-shaped crystalline silicon solar panels.

Apple has acquired Siri, a company that makes a virtual assistant app. Siri was inspired by DARPA's CALO -- the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes -- project. Originally designed to help streamline military personnel's activities, the consumer app focuses on helping you find things like restaurants, making use of speech recognition to boot. Essentially a smart search, there's plenty of speculation of course as to what this means about the direction that Apple might be taking... and that direction seems to lead towards Google-y territory. Now we don't want to speculate too much, but we'll be watching to see how this plays out over the next few weeks. The terms of the acquisition aren't known, meaning we have no idea how much Apple paid for the small startup, but Business Insider guesses the deal could be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 to $200 million.
Google has never been too inclined to give the world the straight dope on total app counts in the Android Market, but other companies -- notably AndroLib -- have been happy to try to pick up the slack. The app tracking site now reports a grand total of 50,031 approved binaries as of this writing, marking a pretty magical milestone in light of the Market's humble beginnings as a free-only cache of a handful of apps for the G1. To be fair, AndroLib is aggregating across all of the Market's regional sites -- you won't find 50,000 apps in any one Market alone -- but it's undoubtedly a solid sign for the platform. Now we just need a little Froyo to go with that, right?

