solo

Solar panel maker SoloPower has secured financing to build a manufacturing plant in Oregon, a step toward ramping up production of its thin-film solar technology.

As part of a deal carved out with the state of Oregon, SoloPower said yesterday, it will receive a $20 million loan toward the initial construction phase, which will consist of a 75-megawatt manufacturing line employing 170 people. SoloPower, which is seeking a loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, intends to eventually expand the plant to turn out 300 megawatts worth of panels per year.

San Jose, Calif.-based SoloPower makes thin-film flexible solar … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Soon you'll be able to make your BlackArmor NAS server even tougher.

Seagate today showed off at CES 2011 a new storage package that the company says offers the ultimate in data security. It combines the flagship BlackArmor 440 NAS server, which offers RAID 5 and up to 12GB of storage space, with an IoSafe SoloPro disaster-proof external hard drive, which is used as a backup drive for the BlackArmor server.

The external hard drive is branded with the Seagate logo and called a fireproof/waterproof BlackArmor external hard drive. This is similar to how the company has … Read more

More U.S. solar start-ups are finding that the route to the global solar panel market passes through government offices.

The meltdown of the financial markets over the past two years means that state, local, and federal incentives are increasingly part of the financial package solar start-ups need to assemble when looking to start manufacturing at large scale.

Silicon Valley-based SoloPower expects to hear next month whether its application to the Department of Energy's loan guarantee program will come through. Without the loan, private money, and incentives from its home town of San Jose, Calif., SoloPower would be looking … Read more

Believe it or not, a couple months after its launch, companies are only now just starting to roll out cases for the iPod Touch 4G. iSkin is showing off a couple of nice ones, the Touch Duo and the Pebble for iPod Touch 4G, while announcing two new cases for the iPhone 4G, the Solo FX and the Solo Vu. All of them retail for $35 to $40 and come in a variety of colors.

You can see all the new iSkin iPod Touch cases here and the new iPhone cases here. What do you think--hot or not?

MadMaks is a promising robot-combat arcade game with chunky old-school graphics, fun controls, and a short solo campaign.

You start the game controlling a maneuverable but relatively wimpy tank--a "Frogamo Mak"--and you can opt for good accelerometer controls (tilting left and right to steer, and forward and back to move) or a somewhat clunkier virtual directional-pad. You change weapons and shoot using touch-screen buttons, as you travel across a 3D sandbox terrain, destroying and defending various targets (all as cute as your Mak, with similar cartoony eyes) to accomplish varying objectives over 10 unlockable levels. As you … Read more

Fox News is sometimes criticized for floating wayward ideas.

This criticism is unfair and unbalanced. The station understands its viewers better than any other and offers them a fine and subtle mixture of both fear and reassurance.

However, perhaps Fox News' "Fox and Friends" allowed its enthusiasm this week to fly a little too high. For the station reported that the city of LA had invested $1 billion in a jetpack called the Martin. The suggestion was that LA's police, paramedics, and fire department were in grave need of such a flying gizmo. This is entirely understandable, given LA's quite hopeless traffic situation.

Though "Fox and Friends" co-host Brian Kilmeade did offer words of caution: "You gotta make up some rules because you're going to have jetpacks flying into choppers," I have to report that the Fox report is rather untrue.

For LAPD chief Charlie Beck told the Los Angeles Times: "We certainly haven't bought any jetpacks. We haven't bought [squad] cars for two years."

While trying to muzzle my disappointment with the LAPD for such obvious technological myopia, I am grateful to Gawker for attempting to discover where Fox News might have done its flying sourcing.… Read more

SoloPower said Tuesday that it has received UL certification for its flexible solar modules, helping the thin-film solar products compete against the incumbent solar technology.

San Jose, Calif.-based SoloPower said that the certification from Underwriters Laboratories is the first for a company making flexible modules from a combination of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium (CIGS).

The flexible solar modules are designed for commercial rooftops where they can be rolled out and attached to roofs without racking systems. Thin-film solar cells are generally less efficient than traditional polycrystalline silicon material, but SoloPower and other thin-film companies say that their installation … Read more

IoSafe released on Wednesday a new member of its family of disaster-proof external hard drives, the IoSafe SoloPro.

Measuring 5 inches by 7.1 inches by 11 inches and weighing 15 pounds, the IoSafe SoloPro is about as serious as a single-volume external hard drive can be when it comes to physical size and ruggedness. For comparison, the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk, one of the biggest conventional desktop single-volume external hard drives, weighs about 2 pounds.

All the extra weight in the SoloPro comes from layers of protective materials, which are designed to keep it safe from potential fire and … Read more

We've been waiting for iSkin to release a version of its popular Solo case for the iPhone 4 and now it has along with a Revo4 case. Both these cases come in multiple colors and iSkin is offering a "special introductory" price on the Solo (pictured on right), which it will sell for $14.99 until August 31, 2010.

ISkin's news release says the company is offering that special price--the Solo normally lists for $29.99--to support Apple's iPhone 4 case program. We're not sure what that means, because, after all, Apple's is … Read more