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After a rocky start, Motorola has done relatively well with its Rokr music phones (pardon the pun). Indeed, the last model we reviewed, the Rokr E8, offered good performance and a nifty ModeShift keypad. Its model in the series is the Motorola Rokr EM35, which the company introduced Tuesday. The EM35 has a slider design with an eye-catching red-and-black color scheme. It offers all the standard music features including Windows Media Player 11, an FM radio, and what Moto is calling virtual stereo surround sound. You'll also have the chance to sample and purchase music over the air.

Other … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--It's fashionable these days to ponder whether there's an investment bubble in clean tech. But I believe this discussion obscures a bigger problem for the clean-tech crowd: not enough money.

A panel of venture capitalists at the Technology Review EmTech 2008 conference on Thursday took the bubble question head on. The response from investors tends to be nuanced: no, there isn't a bubble, but there are some silly company ideas getting funded.

Before I delve into the details of the bubble debate, let me say that focusing on venture capital deals is a myopic view of the market that could ultimately give the "clean-tech revolution" a bigger black eye than just a few failed start-ups.

Clean-, or green-tech, venture capitalists will tell you times have never been better if you judge by the number of business plan proposals crossing their desks and their ability to raise funds. Many an entrepreneur and investor sees energy and environment as a ripe area for technology innovation.

What worries me is whether the hundreds of newly formed energy tech companies will have enough capital to actually succeed--and change the world as they all set out to do.

Insiders have been fretting about the dreaded funding gap, or "Valley of Death," for years. It's the stage a company must cross to take its technology to commercial scale, such as building a manufacturing plant. In energy-related businesses, it usually take lots of money.

Now the financial crisis could actually make that gap tougher to bridge, given the difficulty in the public markets and the projected cost of an anticipated Wall Street bail-out plan.

Spending hundreds of millions of dollars for say, a solar manufacturing facility, is outside the range of most VC funds. To some extent, project finance can fill in the gap, said CMEA Ventures investor James Kim. … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Tesla Motors has received many accolades for producing an all-electric luxury sports car. But its long-term plans may hold its most challenging task: making a mass-market electric car.

The company intends to make a "family car" that it hopes will lead to the sale of millions of all-electric vehicles, JB Straubel, Tesla's chief technology officer, said Wednesday. He spoke earlier on a panel on "green transportation" at the EmTech 2008 conference here.

Code-named Bluestar, the car has been part of Tesla's plans for a few years. Tesla Chairman Elon Musk earlier this … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The route to a less polluting car looks more like a multipoint intersection than a single superhighway, a panel of experts said on Wednesday.

The auto and fuels industries are in the midst of dramatic technological change, but it's still not clear how quickly which new technologies will be adopted.

Also unknown is whether consumers are willing to switch from traditional car ownership to the "transportation as a service" model where people share a fleet of clean cars dispersed around a city.

The EmTech 2008 conference, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put together a panel to discuss green transportation with Tesla Motors Chief Technology Officer JB Straubel, BP chief scientist Steven Koonin, and Ryan Chin, a student at the MIT Media Lab involved in the City Car and RoboScooter projects.

All of them agreed that there's a need to shift from today's fossil fuel-based transportation industry because of concerns over energy security and climate change. But it's unlikely that one single technology will displace the gas-powered internal combustion engine.

"You have to ask whether change will be revolutionary or evolutionary. If I had to bet, I'd say it will be evolutionary," said BP chief scientist Steven Koonin. "The most likely scenario is a plug-in hybrid with a very efficient engine powered by biofuels--with plausible technologies." … Read more

This post was updated at 8:30 a.m. PDT with additional material from Khosla's speech on Wednesday and photo from the event.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Famed investor Vinod Khosla is one of the clean-tech industry's most vocal cheerleaders. But most of today's clean technologies fall short of his 1-billion-car test.

"If it doesn't scale, it doesn't matter," says Khosla. "Most of what we talk about today--hybrid, biodiesel, ethanol, solar photovoltaics, geothermal--I believe are irrelevant to the scale of the problem" of climate change.

Khosla delivered the keynote speech at the EmTech08 conference (formerly called the Emerging Technology Conference) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday, where he talked about energy, policy, and investment.

On Monday, he spoke to MIT student energy fellows covering many of the same topics.

On the whole, Khosla is highly optimistic about the potential for technology to address climate change and other environmental problems. He challenges people to imagine cars and cement factories that actually remove, rather than add, carbon dioxide from the air.

But he views climate change as a global problem that requires an overhaul to today's energy infrastructure. That means displacing oil and coal in a world where consumers from Asia and other fast-growing regions will be adopting a more energy-intensive lifestyle similar to that in the West.

"We will ship a billion cars on this planet in the next 15 years or so. Unless a low-carbon technology gets into 80 percent of those 1 billion cars and over time causes an 80 percent reduction of carbon per mile driven, it's not going to be a solution. Everything else is just a toy," he said Monday.

He places wind and solar photovoltaics in the "toy" category because, without storage, they will remain a small fraction of electricity production, only 5 percent to 15 percent.

That's because, without a breakthrough in storage technology, solar and wind power cannot replace "baseload" electricity during peak times because of their intermittent nature. … Read more

Early last month, Motorola released three new Rokr phones, but it wasn't until a CTIA Fall 2008 media event when we had the chance to examine them for ourselves. They include the Rokr EM30, the Rokr EM28, and the Rokr EM25.

At the top of the food chain is the Rokr EM30. Like the Motorola Rokr E8 it offers a candy bar design and a ModeShift keypad. Features include a music player (of course), an FM radio, text-to-speech technology, Moto's CrystalTalk, a micorSD card slot, a 2-megapixel camera, an FM radio, a 3.5mm headset jack, and stereo … Read more

With a continuous stream of cable TV Poker events, online Poker sites, and endless videos, books, and Web sites devoted to Poker strategy, it is no secret that Poker is incredibly popular all over the world. This week, I'm taking a look at Poker games for the iPhone. But instead of covering three similar games, I decided to give you some options for getting your poker fix, with three very different styles of Poker.

I should warn you in advance, only one of these games is free (with an optional paid version), but the other two are pretty affordable … Read more

Motorola expanded its music phone lineup Tuesday with three new Rokr cell phones. The handsets offer a wide range of designs and features, though all put music squarely at the center.

The EM30 is the most high-end model of the trio. It offers a traditional candy bar design in an appealing black and red color scheme. The keypad offers the same ModeShift keypad that we saw on the Motorola Rokr E8. As you move between different functions, the backlighting on the keypad changes to illuminate only the relevant buttons.

In addition to the Rokr music player, the EM30 offers an … Read more

If inventors of high-tech gaming tables would only apply their formidable skills in other areas, the world would surely be a better place. Recently there have been some ingenious creations to automate parlor games, whether they deal cards or shuffle mahjong tiles.

Now there's a fully digital poker table that makes the deck of cards (as well as their dealers) obsolete. The "X10 Ten Player Automated Table" can accommodate up to 10 players in the tournament staple of Texas Hold 'Em, each with his or her own 12-inch touch screen and a 27-inch LCD in the center … Read more