Portland-based ThinkHost has announced that it is using renewable energy to power its servers. According to the company, 100 percent of the power needed for its IT infrastructure comes from a mix of wind and solar energy, which is used to power every Web hosting plan ThinkHost offers. Customers of ThinkHost's services can promote their earth-friendly stance on their Web sites or in other promotional materials. ThinkHost, in fact, encourages its clients to "flaunt" the green nature of their Web sites. The offering is sure to appeal to environmentally aware and socially conscious businesses in the market for a service to host their sites.

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Creative's getting creative with its attempts to dethrone the iPod. First, the company tried outright competition. Failure. Then, it tried strategic patent-filing. Takes too long. Now, it's going for a straight rip-off. At least the Zen Vision:M has one major difference from the 5G iPod. There's a green one.

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Stephen Lawler, Microsoft's general manager of MapPoint and MSN Virtual Earth, just gave me a tour of the new mapping service the software giant will be unveiling tomorrow. The new service is called Microsoft Live Local and will compete with existing mapping services, such as Google Local and MapQuest. At launch, the Microsoft Live Local service will offer imagery for about 25 percent of the nation by population, not by geographic area, which means that you're more likely to get mapping information for Los Angeles than for Kokomo, though Microsoft is constantly expanding its database. One of the more interesting features we saw was the ability of the service to pinpoint the wireless access point you're connected to, based on an SSID and MAC address database Microsoft has compiled, and tell you your location without the need for you to enter your coordinates. You could then create a custom pushpin to mark your location and plot driving directions to another location and share that information with others via e-mail. The service offers a nice, 45-degree angle bird's-eye view that is more revealing than the straight-down, rooftop-oriented satellite imagery available in most other mapping services.

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Just one year after it was rejected by the New Oxford American Dictionary of English, podcasting has made it into the tome and has been named the dictionary's Word of the Year. The move guarantees that by this time next year, it will be the world's most overused buzzword.

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A new worm targeting AOL Instant Messenger users tries to fool you into clicking an infected URL by chatting you up. Security experts say it's the first worm they know of that responds if you answer its chatty overtures. Plus, it's hard to tell it's a bot, since it ingeniously uses terrible spelling and grammar, just like a real person!

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Now we know why Yahoo dubbed version 7 of its popular IM tool Yahoo Messenger with Voice. Today the company revealed that Yahoo Messenger will offer Net phone plans at half the price of Skype's per-minute domestic fees. For a penny a minute, Yahoo's free IM client will let you call any U.S. landline or cell phone; international calls will cost 2 cents per minute. Skype, also a free download, charges 2 cents per minute for calls stateside and to Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Chile. Skype (now owned by eBay) just added video calling, which Yahoo Messenger already offers.

A bundle of companies are racing to corner the market on communications services in a "Voice 2.0" world that merges telecom and Net tools. Fellow CNET editor Felisa Yang picks these five VoIP plans, which stand out from the crowd. Many IM tools offer voice calling--but most let you ring only fellow buddies on the same IM client, not via telephone.

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Recent announcements from Toyota and Nissan indicate new competition in the small-car segment. Toyota leads with the Yaris, a small bubble of a car that will appear in the United States as a 2007 model in spring of 2006. Nissan isn't far behind, with the Versa, another small car that will be available in sedan or hatchback versions. The hatchback version looks particularly good and will probably meet with the most success. The Versa will also employ some tech we don't usually see in the shallow end of the pool, such as Bluetooth cell phone integration and satellite radio capability. Nissan also has a small concept roadster called Urge, which should debut at the Detroit Auto Show.

Although Honda hasn't announced anything yet, it sells the diminutive Jazz in Japan and should have an easy time introducing it in the United States. The driving factors for this market are certainly high gas prices and probably also the increasing urbanization of the United States, where most people live in areas where parking and traffic make smaller cars more practical. I would also expect interest in this segment to drive DaimlerChrysler to finally decide to release the smart car in the United States.

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Hallelujah. Someone has finally noticed what we all struggle with managing our time and sharing our time management with others. Seems minor? All right then, how can you keep track of appointments and everything else while letting others know what they need to know about your availability--but letting them know only what you want them to know--while leaving time to actually do your work? Put a little jokingly, but I'm serious.

If you've ever had to schedule or change a group meeting--let alone juggle your schedule with your spouse's for a midafternoon cup of coffee--you know what I'm talking about. (The situation is so desperate in my family, that a few months ago, we discussed hanging an Internet-connected tablet PC on our kitchen wall with a Yahoo calendar set as its home page. We would've done it, too, if the price were a tenth as much.)

It seems that Microsoft, in line with its plans to help business collaboration in general, and a host of other upstarts (or start-ups, at least) are going to try to develop products that help us better manage our time. Another benefit, promised from tech icon Mitch Kapor, will be calendars that are smart enough to know that when we fly to another time zone, we want our appointments to shift appropriately as well. Rafe and I, and many others, I'm sure, have missed meetings because of the current unhelpful (and really unintelligent) time-shift feature in Outlook.

Placeware, another company in the Gates's empire that was at the When 2.0 conference where all this was announced, is working on products "intended to let a group of coworkers more easily coordinate edits on Word documents, presentations, or project schedules."

Cross your fingers and hope.

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I help a small business that sends a lot of e-mail to its loyal subscribers; it is now going through the arduous process of making sure that the e-mail it sends via a big media company's e-mail list complies with that company's interpretation of government regulations.

It's eaten up tons of work hours, but if it's not done properly, the company would be liable for government action and maybe a lawsuit from someone complaining that their e-mail privacy was violated according to a 2003 federal law known as CAN-SPAM. The law was supposed to keep our in-boxes free of unwanted e-mail but has to my eye added a lot of costs to business without doing much to stop the flow of yuck.

The larger point is that with the flick of a pen, a government can radically change the way you do business and add lots of costs and hassle. Or, if you're lucky, it will do something that locks in your competitive advantage (can you say "cable TV monopoly"?) and keeps the cash coming in for years.

What can you do? It's hard to specify, because every industry is different. You may have to follow regulations on health, safety, privacy, or record-keeping or a bazillion other local, state or federal regs. You know your business best. But there are a few places to start researching, including Business.gov's regulations page, the Small Business Administration's regulatory alerts page (which doesn't seem to have an RSS feed--drat--but is segmented by topic area such as telecom, health and safety, and so on), and, if you're a public company, the SEC's regulatory page. You can check out this roundup of regulatory resources from FindLaw. There are also your industry's groups.

So, visit their Web sites, get on their e-mail lists, and go to their meetings once in a while. You'll find out a lot about the regulatory buzz--and probably what to do about it, too.

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