stimutran-sme.com

In addition, SunEthanol is in the process of raising a second round of funding to ramp up its operations. It currently has under 20 employees.

Sharp, who I met up with at the CSI Clean Technology conference in Boston, said that he is wary of over-hyping SunEthanol’s technology, but he thinks the one-step microbial process will prove to be cost-effective than existing alternatives.

It’s one of dozens of large and small companies working on technologies to make liquid fuels from nonfood feedstocks. There are different approaches that include thermochemical processes or enzymes to convert plant matter into sugars which are then fermented to make ethanol.

But the company is still a long way from manufacturing ethanol and delivering it to filling station pumps.

SunEthanol has a one-step process that uses a naturally occurring microbe that essentially eats the cellulose in plants and then ferments it into alcohol, explained Sharp.

SunEthanol, a development-stage cellulosic ethanol company, is looking to raise $20 million in venture funding and is bringing in a new CEO.

SunEthanol, which was launched last year, is developing a process for converting cellulose in woodchips or grasses into ethanol.

General Motors, for example, has invested in two cellulosic ethanol start-ups, Mascoma and Coskata.

“This is a better solution over enzymes because it’s one step and because it’s cheap,” he said.

The University of Massachusetts spin-off is planning on announcing a CEO who will join the company from DuPont on Tuesday, said Jef Sharp, the current president and CEO who will stay on with the company. Sharp said he will likely be chief marketing officer and has brought on a new CEO to speed up product development.

SunEthanol’s hiring of a CEO from DuPont is another sign of people from larger companies going to technology-oriented energy start-ups, or established energy companies investing in start-ups.

It intends to make a pilot plant later this year and it received a Department of Energy grant to build a larger, 2.5 million gallon per year demonstration facility.

In its labs, it has improved the output of its process from 4 grams per liter less than a year ago to 25 grams per liter, which is faster than anticipated, he said.

Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo's Network Division

The departure rumor was reinforced by discussions with venture capitalists who said Weiner could be joining a firm such as Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Benchmark Capital, or Sequoia Capital, she said.

Yahoo wouldn’t shed any light on the subject. “We don’t comment on rumors or speculation,” the company said in a statement.

An internal Yahoo announcement could come Wednesday, Swisher said on her blog, but it may not address Weiner’s fate. People Swisher has spoken to “do not expect him to stay long, even leaving within the next few weeks, pointing to the continued uncertainty at the company and also, I would imagine, sheer weariness,” she said.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch also weighed in with a report citing unnamed sources that “Yahoo and Weiner are still negotiating his separation agreement, and will make an announcement ‘imminently’ about his departure.”

Update 4:26 p.m. PDT: I added a link to TechCrunch coverage. Update 12:39 p.m. PDT: I added the Yahoo response.

Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo’s Network Division, could be leaving the company, All Things D blogger Kara Swisher suggested late Tuesday.

Weiner has been on paternity leave for the last four weeks, she added.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

The iPhone is expected to make a dent in Motorola’s dominance of the U.S. handset market. Motorola will hold onto the top spot in 2008, but the company’s market share is rapidly declining, according to a report from market research firm MultiMedia Intelligence. Motorola is expected to provide 21 percent of all handsets bought in the consumer market in the U.S. in 2008.

And while Yahoo is in the workforce reduction mode, one start-up sees it as an opportunity to snap up a few talented folks. TokBox, an online video calling company, sent out a taco truck to Yahoo’s headquarters Wednesday afternoon, handing out free tacos to recently terminated employees, as well as conducting job interviews, a company spokeswoman said.

Pink slips at Yahoo
The mood wasn’t so joyous over at Yahoo, which began issuing pink slips to the majority of the employees affected by its previously announced 10 percent job cut. Most of the 1,520 layoffs affect employees at Yahoo’s U.S.-based locations and come from a number of areas within the company, Yahoo said.

Dialed in
The iPhone is coming to Wal-Mart Stores, though when and for how much is still unclear. Four electronics department managers at Wal-Mart stores in Delaware, New Jersey, and New York say they were already training employees to sell Apple iPhones. Two department managers said the phones are expected to go on sale on December 28. Department managers on the East Coast also said they expect to be selling both the 8GB and 16GB versions of the phone. But they said they hadn’t been informed of pricing yet.

Also of note
The Bush administration voiced its opposition to a Federal Communications Commission plan for free, nationwide wireless Internet access…In response to a customer revolt on the Internet, Intuit has decided to eliminate fees it introduced with TurboTax 2008 that would charge users for preparing multiple returns…Wikipedia functionality has returned for Brits after the country’s Internet watchdog group reversed its decision to prevent users in that country from visiting a Wikipedia page containing an image of a naked child…Mozilla’s second beta of Firefox 3.1 offers support for video and audio built into Web pages, a built-in service for telling Web sites a user’s location if permitted, and private browsing.

Google delivered some shiny presents to good little users a bit before the holidays this year.

Google also brought Gmail users a to-do list to help them be more productive. When the new Tasks feature is enabled, a box shows up on top of the Gmail window. In it, users can add, reorder, and delete tasks. It’s also possible to assign a due date to each action and even convert e-mails into tasks.

In a surprise move, the search giant took its Chrome Web browser out of beta this week, in the hopes that business partners, such as computer makers, will bundle Chrome on their systems. Google launched the first beta version of Chrome in September.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s search for a new CEO is narrowing, with former Vodafone Group chief Arun Sarin reportedly high on the list. Yahoo has authorized reference checks for a few candidates in order to narrow the field even further so the informal search committee can make a recommendation to the board of directors.

One of the new CEO’s first tasks may be to pay a visit to Redmond with hat in hand. Major Yahoo investor Ivory Investment Management is calling on Yahoo’s board to restart talks with Microsoft and offered up a search buyout proposal that it claims could yield investors a value of $24 to $29 per share. Ivory, which holds a 1.5 percent stake in Yahoo, is proposing that Yahoo sell its search business to Microsoft for an upfront payment of approximately $15 billion, in which Microsoft then becomes the search provider for all of Yahoo’s properties and its existing affiliates.

This means that users won’t be tied to the confines of a Wi-Fi hot spot. But users should be wary of how they use the application, so as not to incur unexpected costs from their carrier. U.S. customers, especially, should be cautious, because AT&T charges roaming fees when calls are made from AT&T phones outside the country.

Also, Street View is continuing its seemingly inexorable spread across Google Maps, with Google announcing that it’s doubled the feature’s coverage of the United States. States that now have some coverage are Maine, West Virginia, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

Yahoo, which had annualized expenses of $3.9 billion before the cuts, also plans to achieve its $400 million goal by consolidating facilities and moving some of its business to areas where it costs less to operate, as well as shutting down parts of its business and putting others in a maintenance-only mode.

But without any new hit products coming on the market, Samsung and LG are poised to surpass Motorola in terms of market share in 2009. BlackBerry maker Research In Motion and Apple’s iPhone are also expected to gain market share in 2009.

However, Chrome is still rough around the edges to be a version 1.0 product. Also, although Chrome has been in development internally at Google for years, it’s curious that the company would take Chrome out of beta when it’s resisted the impulse to do the same with Gmail and several other high-profile projects.

iPhone users who had been using a Truphone app to make cheap international phone calls via a Wi-Fi connection now can make cheap calls from anywhere. The latest iteration of the application will allow iPhone users to make cheaper-than-usual international calls additionally via their carrier’s cellular voice networks.

The company hopes the second time will be the charm for a Gmail Labs feature that lets people send text messages to people’s mobile phones with the company’s Web-based e-mail service. After the feature’s fleeting debut in October, Google removed it to fix a problem in which turning the feature on didn’t actually fully turn it on. The feature returned this week, but is available only in the United States for now.

Maffei left Oracle in November 2005 to take a CEO post at Liberty Media. He had earlier replaced Oracle CFO Harry You, who resigned after a nine-month stint to join BearingPoint as its CEO.

Epstein will report to Catz and assume responsibility for finance, the controller’s office, finance operations, tax, treasury, real estate, investor relations, audit, and customer leasing.

Oracle named Jeffrey Epstein as its new chief financial officer on Wednesday, marking its fourth CFO since its long-time bean counter Jeff Henley retired from that post four years ago.

Epstein, the former CFO of Oberon Media, will join the database and enterprise software applications vendor on September 8. Epstein will replace Safra Catz, who will remain an Oracle co-president and board director.

Catz is returning to the co-president’s role full-time, after a nearly three-year run as Oracle’s CFO and co-president. She assumed the CFO role after former Microsoft executive Greg Maffei abruptly resigned from the post after a brief four months.

In naming Epstein as its new CFO, the company’s founder, Larry Ellison, said in a statement: “Jeff’s expertise in global operations and finance will further strengthen Oracle’s senior management team…We look forward to having him join us as our new CFO.”

A new
Firefox extension aptly named “Flash Game Maximizer” is a must-have for any Flash game enthusiast. It does one thing, and does it well: letting you toggle between standard- and full-screen modes on any game–regardless of whether it has been coded with such an option.

Once the extension has been installed, you’ll get a new button on the bottom-right corner of your browser that turns yellow when it detects Flash. Clicking it resizes the game to fit your browser window. A slight caveat here is that it completely restarts whatever Flash module is on the page, which on most games means losing any progress.

If you’re a Flash game enthusiast, I wholeheartedly recommend giving this a go. It works on my personal favorite, Totem Destroyer, as well as on Desktop Tower Defense.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Considering that Flash games are hosted all over the place, and rarely with a ubiquitous user interface, you’re likely to run into a good number of them that must be played in whatever space they’ve been given on a Web page. With Flash Game Maximizer, however, you don’t have to worry about this at all.

Because Flash Game Maximizer is an “experimental” extension, you will need to log in to Mozilla’s add-on site to download it.

Flash Game Maximizer turns almost any Flash game window into a full-screen affair, regardless of whether the developer made it an option. (click to enlarge)

Like Elance, oDesk, and other piecework job sites, Task Market is a marketplace for people with skills and time–and those that need them.

Of course, Webware recommends Web-based productivity suites (like Google Docs) for team editing and collaboration, but there’s as yet no marketplace service for Google like Task Market. Anybody want to build one?

Task Market’s big benefit right now is that it is very simple to get into. It’s easy to post a job, and it’s easy to scan the available tasks. More mature services, such as oDesk, provide better job-tracking services, as well as more options for users to promote themselves and set up teams.

Each job in Task Market has its own discussion thread, in which bidders for the job can communicate with the person who wants it done. There doesn’t appear to be a way to contact individuals privately, though, which is odd. Users (both contractors and customers) get ratings–just like on eBay–once a task is complete.

Task Market is focused on very specific, and nontechnical jobs. At the moment, the only job categories allowed on the site are writing, editing, translation, and basic design. Why not programming or scripting or multimedia editing? Because, as the FAQ says, “By focusing on tasks accomplished using applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access, Task Market makes it quicker and easier for small businesses to get their job done.”

Task Market lets employers specify the fee they’re willing to pay for a job, and all payments go through eBay’s PayPal.

The site, still in “tech preview,” and has few jobs on it.

Two Microsoft research groups, Microsoft Research Asia and
Microsoft Office Labs, have launched Task Market, an online marketplace for jobs that can be done on Office applications.

Task Market is a simple and clear service for finding document-based tasks for hire.

…[S]uccess seems to stem as much from context as from personal attributes. Intrinsic ability appears to be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for exceptional achievement. It also helps to be born at the right time–the 1830s for titans of industry, the 1950s for computer whizzes–and in the right home environment, with the right cultural heritage. But the elements of success are not all matters of happenstance and talent: Hard work (practicing a skill for at least 10,000 hours) is essential, too, as even Mozart discovered….

Consider…the success stories of technology entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy. While most biographies of these men focus on their exceptional individual qualities–their innate intelligence, their fierce determination–Mr. Gladwell presents a more nuanced analysis, emphasizing the range of opportunities to which each man was exposed. Mr. Gates, for example, attended an elite Seattle private school that, thanks to the proceeds of a parents’ group rummage sale, installed a computer terminal in 1968–almost unheard of at the time. And this was not just any computer: It was a state-of-the-art time-sharing terminal directly linked to a mainframe in downtown Seattle. “It was an amazing thing,” Mr. Gates tells the author. Mr. Gates says that he and his friends were drawn to the computer, which was kept “in a funny little room that we subsequently took control of.”

When I apply this to start-ups and, specifically, to open source, it seems to ring true. Red Hat wasn’t the best Linux distribution when it first achieved prominence: it happened to be in the right place at the right time (and a tremendous amount of work was put into it). Ditto for MySQL, which early on, displaced PostgreSQL despite not managing transactions, as just one example, as well as PostgreSQL.

Gladwell’s new book, Outliers, is no different, but I find it more interesting, perhaps in part because it helps to explain a complex subject in pithy prose. As The Wall Street Journal details in an engaging book review, Outliers identifies the necessary traits of successful people, only two of which do people have any control over. The last? Well, it’s a matter of happenstance:

I’m not a fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s earlier books, Blink and Tipping Point. His “insights” tend to be obvious and provide little predictive power (i.e., knowing his theory does nothing to help you plot your way to success). Indeed, the most they provide is rear-view mirror insight into why something might have happened.

Such is life, and such is success. It’s a strange cocktail of hard work, intelligent people, and the right circumstances. The problem is that it’s hard to impossible to predict where success will “strike.” The good news is that this randomizes dramatic success, such that breakthroughs are somewhat democratic.

To illustrate this, Gladwell uses the example of Robert Oppenheimer, “father” of the atomic bomb, and Christopher Langan, a brilliant scientist who had much the same innate talent and work ethic but lacked the same domestic comforts, which enabled Oppenheimer to reach acclaim and Langan…not so much.

commentary

If Bill Gates’ parents had lacked the financial wherewithal to send him to that school, or even if he had been born a decade later, it’s unlikely that he would have managed to accomplish what he did.