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I got an e-mail Friday morning from my contact at Boeing alerting me to the fact that the aerospace giant delivered its 1,400th 747 Thursday.

Actually, according to the release, 747s over the years have flown enough miles–42 billion nautical miles–to have made 203,000 trips to the moon.

(Credit:
Boeing)

Of course, that’s an exaggeration, but for a world famous airplane that first launched in 1969 and that is flown by airlines all over the globe, the number just seemed small.

A big question then might be, will Boeing ever get to a second 1,400 747s? My first instinct would be to say yes, and faster than the first time. But with airlines being able to buy A380s or Boeing’s own 787 Dreamliners, I start to wonder if in fact the 747 will be a less common plane over time.

What really struck me about the news is that there are only 1,400 747s. It seems to me that every time I fly through Los Angeles, I see something like a couple hundred of the big planes on the tarmac, half of them owned by Qantas.

Boeing delivered its 1,400th 747 Thursday to GE Commecial Aviation Services.

Then again, you try picturing 1,400 747s lined up, and I think we’re halfway to the moon.

The lucky recipient of the 747-400 freighter was GE Commercial Aviation Services, which plans to lease the jet to AirBridgeCargo Airlines, a Boeing press release says.

In 2010, Boeing will unveil its next-generation of 747, the 747-8 Intercontinental. A modern, more sleek version of the familiar plane, it is expected to be more fuel-efficient and more comfortable.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

That’ll be an important move for Boeing as it takes on archrival Airbus and its A380 super plane.

The planes had also been used for 17 million flights through 2007 and been in the air for 89 million hours.

But Falcao is totally new to making films specifically for the Web, as she did with Lacos (Ties), the six-minute short that not only made her the winner of YouTube’s Project Direct contest, it landed her a nine-day stay here at the Sundance Film Festival. Her expenses are being paid by Hewlett-Packard, which sponsored the contest. In addition to the trip, she’ll get the opportunity to meet with Fox Searchlight Pictures production executives.

“This moved me and affected me so much,” Falcao said through Braga, adding that she’s now working on a film that relates to the way people use the Internet and is also planning other Web-based projects.

What excites Falcao about the Internet medium is that it allows anyone–her maid included–to access to film. Many residents of the poor country can not afford to go to the cinema, she said.

“The whole thing cost $500 and took three days.” And it was quite a family effort. Falcao’s 15-year-old daughter handled the very modest wardrobe.

And it helps residents of Brazil, one of Latin America’s leaders in Internet use, feel less isolated from the rest of the world, she said. As for YouTube, it started off only popular among youth in Brazil. Now, however, Falcao’s husband, a film director who is almost 50 years old, is hooked. So is her 90-year-old uncle. “His life is YouTube,” she said, adding that every day her uncle sends her a link to view.

Adriana Falcao readies for a night on the town on Friday night on Main Street in Park City, Utah, amid the Sundance Film Festival mania.

(Credit:
Michelle Meyers/CNET News.com)

Never in her life did she think she’d end up at the Sundance Film Festival, said Falcao, who spoke through interpreter and friend Joana Braga, who’s also involved in the Brazilian film industry. Unlike other film festivals, Sundance, she said, is considered more on the cutting edge of new media.

It was Falcao’s 18-year-old daughter, Clarice, an actress, songwriter, singer, and YouTube aficionado, who first learned about contest. Project Direct is a followup to YouTube’s similar competitions in the music and comedy realms, said YouTube spokeswoman Jennifer Nielsen.

Missing from Sundance, sadly, is Clarice, who couldn’t get a visa in the month or so between when the contest results were announced and when Sundance began on Thursday.

Clarice, who was interested in putting together a high-caliber entry for the contest, solicited her mother’s help. Falcao said she was willing, so long as her daughter and the other cast member–a friend and former boyfriend of Clarice’s–participated in the creative process. After getting feedback from the young actors on their visions for the piece, Falcao wrote a script in a day, while Clarice wrote and recorded an English language song to go with it.

Project Direct was limited to filmmakers in Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S., for legal and other reasons, and entries had to be films created specifically for the contest. Judges included Juno director Jason Reitman and others from Fox Searchlight.

A professional author and screenwriter in her native Brazil, she’s contributed to some 15 scripts, including A Maquina (The Machine), which screened at film festivals internationally, and Ano em Que Meus Pais Sa?ram de F?rias, O (The Year My Parents Went on Vacation), which Brazil’s Ministry of Culture submitted for the 2007 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.

PARK CITY, Utah–Adriana Falcao, the winner of a recent YouTube film competition, is no stranger to the film industry.

Collegue Flavia Lacerda filmed the picture in one day, and they spent one day editing.

Are you one of those people who always holds up the security line at the airport, struggling to get your laptop out of its case? (Or like us, do you cast dirty looks at those people, while cooling your heels in line behind them?)

The LapStrap is available now, in adult and children’s sizes, for $24.95.

The bottom part of the strap sits along the inside hinge between the keyboard and monitor, letting you carry the laptop as if it were in a shoulder bag. We’re not fond of exposing our delicate laptop to the harsh conditions of New York without a nicely padded case, but if you’re an aesthetic minimalist, or need to access your laptop frequently and/or quickly, it might be worth a look. On the other hand–since the TSA has a hard time recognizing the MacBook Air as a legit laptop, we can only imagine how they’d react to this contraption.

The LapStrap is an idea that’s either pure genius or the most ridiculous thing we’ve ever seen. It’s a padded nylon shoulder strap, like the kind found on most laptop cases, that attaches directly to your laptop. The company’s pitch is, “Security lines…made easy!”

(Credit:
thelapstrap.com)

(Credit:
thelapstrap.com)

Listening to him, unless proprietary vendors can find ways to keep up with the pace and flexibility of open-source development, I suspect they will go the way of the once formidable dinosaurs. Extinction never looked so good.

So, our strategy is to let the dinosaurs die. As new projects come online, we’re going with open source or more agile proprietary products. We aren’t overtly dumping the proprietary products: We’re just letting them go extinct.

In this he is not alone. Alfresco sees rip-and-replace opportunities, but far more common is “hold-and-embrace” opportunities, where a customer holds on to dinosaur/legacy technology while embracing open-source solutions (or proprietary solutions that are more modern than decaying technology already in-house) for net new projects.

I met with an executive at a Fortune 50 financial services customer of Alfresco’s yesterday. As we talked about his plans to replace various (proprietary) software products with open source and SaaS products, he made the following interesting comment:

In this way, there is no immediate sell-off of the proprietary solutions. Just a gradual (but persistent) fading away….

We’re going with open source and Web 2.0-type products for a variety of reasons: Cost, flexibility, and speed of development. My users don’t want to have to wait five years for the next iteration of a product. They don’t want to be on the old version while competing products race ahead.

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An audience member in the back called Morin out on preaching openness despite the fact Facebook is one of the largest social networks not a part of OpenSocial, an initiative that was designed to compete with Facebook’s system by letting user data cross-pollinate between sites and services using a single API.

There was a strange moment this afternoon at the Snap Summit 2.0 in San Francisco. Dave Morin, Facebook’s Senior Platform Manager was fielding some audience questions after spending the better part of an hour giving a very broad overview of Facebook’s development efforts to a room full of mostly developers. For many, the event was the highlight of the day in a conference whose very promotional materials were made to emulate the look of a Facebook profile page.

Coming back to what Morin said about OpenSocial, I honestly don’t expect Facebook to join the newly created OpenSocial Foundation or movement anytime soon. The company has a very powerful upcoming strategy of letting people spend money quickly and easily with micropayments (a la iTunes), and spreading the Facebook’s presence internationally with the help of users who are willing to do the work for them when it comes to translation.

So what’s next for the platform? Commerce. More specifically, integrating a payment system into the developer tools so application developers would be able to get cash from users instead of just advertisers. Morin says the tools will be in the hands of developers within the next two quarters. Facebook users have already been christened into the idea of giving Facebook money with its first-party gifts service, which lets users spend real world money on virtual gifts friends can display on their walls. The service represents a very early play on what developers would be able to do with their applications using upcoming commerce tools.

Opening up Facebook user to data, or giving up the system that’s clearly been working very well isn’t in the company’s interest at the moment. In the meantime it’s worth watching developers of both platforms closely, as they’ve got two big platforms to launch applications, and the opportunity to attract users and make money is only getting bigger.

Also in the works is application localization for different countries. Facebook’s grand scheme is to use specialized markup tags to let users localize applications by language without having to do any of the translation themselves. The result would be making one application work in every country Facebook can be found. The company has already been using a similar system on its own international sites by having users do the heavy lifting when it comes to translation. Morin didn’t give a time frame on this feature, but noted that it would come later on.

As it stands Morin and company seem to be quite happy with Facebook’s open yet closed platform that’s has more than 300,000 applications. Morin nostalgically noted that when he was first brainstorming the platform project with others on the Facebook team, he had hoped they’d get 5,000 applications in the first year, and had no idea it would grow to be what it is today.

Morin shrugged the question off saying simply “It’s pretty interesting. We’ve made some pretty interesting commitments to openness as well.” Not to cut off the chances of Facebook joining the project in the future, Morin followed by saying that Facebook would continue to “evaluate OpenSocial and Facebook’s potential place in it.” Audience members let out a few sighs and Morin ended the Q&A session immediately.

I was fortunate to spend some time with Jon Williams, Chief Technology Officer at Kaplan Test Prep & Admissions, the multi-billion dollar test preparation company. Jon is keynoting this year’s Open Source Business Conference and gave me a sneak preview of what he’ll be discussing at OSBC. I’ve worked with Jon over the past year and find him to be one of the industry’s most interesting visionaries in enterprise software.

It’s one thing to listen to vendors talk about the rise and importance of open source. It’s quite another - and much more interesting - to hear customers talking about it.

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That comes through loud and clear in this podcast in which Jon talks about how to introduce open source into an organization, where it fits, how to integrate it with proprietary software (and proprietary mindsets), and other things. Well worth a listen for anyone who wants to see where open source is going next.

Hansell goes on to give a reasonable explanation of the basic issues involved, and mentions the likely future of cable TV: digital video distributed over Internet-like network switches. Instead of always sending every TV channel to every house, a switched system sends only the data for the channels that are being watched. (While it’s fair to say that the capacity of such a system has no arbitrary limits, it isn’t “infinite” as Hansell said.)

I wrote about switched-video technology back in 2001 in my column for Electronic Business magazine, and honestly I thought this technology would be in use by now, at least in test markets.

Verizon’s Fios service has most of the necessary characteristics, but even Fios carries video in pretty much the same way copper-based cable systems do, except using an optical carrier over fiber. (Wikipedia has a decent explanation here.)

There’s a good piece by Saul Hansell over on The New York Times’ “Bits” blog.

But there is a big practical difference between a system with hundreds of channels and one with, at least potentially, millions. With switched video, every channel is “on demand”–and anything that customers demand can be made available. Imagine YouTube in true HD, for example. That’s impossible today, but with switched video, it’s merely expensive.

Well, there’s no hurry. We’ll get there eventually.

Hansell describes how Comcast is being criticized for low picture quality on certain broadcasts. That’s interesting, especially in light of the contention between Comcast and DirecTV on this very issue, but it isn’t the most important point in Hansell’s post.

A second dissident plaintiff, Guo Quan, claims he lost business when his name and that of his garment company were blocked by the Yahoo search results.

Yahoo representatives were not immediately available for comment.

The claims against Yahoo include violation of international law including torture and prolonged detention, as well as unfair business practices, intentional infliction of emotional distress, false imprisonment and assault.

Plaintiff Zheng Cunzhu alleges that when the arrest came to light in 2006, he was living in the U.S. at the time and lost his property in China when he did not return for fear of getting arrested for his pro-democracy activities, the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit filed last week in federal court in Oakland, Calif., alleges that Yahoo provided information to the Chinese authorities that led to the 2003 arrest of Li Zhi, who has served about half of an eight-year sentence. However, Li is not named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Yahoo faces another lawsuit over its actions in China. Several Chinese men are suing the company and its Hong Kong subsidiary claiming they were harmed because of Yahoo’s cooperation with the Chinese government.

Yahoo settled a lawsuit in November filed by family members of two other dissidents serving 10-year sentences after Yahoo handed their account information over to the Chinese government.

And just last week Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang sent U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice a letter asking the government to secure the release of dissidents jailed in China for their pro-democracy sentiments.

SAN DIEGO–With so many large organizations putting solar panels on their roofs, you would think that it’s because solar power is cheaper than the grid. But a closer look shows that it’s not that simple.

Rather than a strictly financial decision, renewable energy purchases are part of bigger sustainability initiative, said David Weil, who works with the university’s facilities management division.

Solar panels are a visible way of saying that a company is doing something about environmental protection and lowering a business’ carbon footprint–all of which can lead to good public relations.

Meeting the city’s renewable energy goals and hedging against rising electricity prices was so important that the city considered big solar installations even when it was unclear that a sizable renewable energy tax credit would be renewed. (It was).

An installation of this size costs about $6.5 million–beyond what most municipalities can afford. So they arrange what is called a power purchase agreement (PPA), where another company called a systems integrator finances, installs, and then owns the facility.

The solar array at the New Children's Museum in San Diego which produces about half of the building's electricity.

A part of the one megawatt at the Alvarado Water Treatment Plant in San Diego.

The New Children’s Museum in downtown San Diego, which is a certified green building, was able to purchase its 90-kilowatt solar panel outright, rather than go with a power purchase agreement.

“We anticipate that with the systems in the future that we’ll get better pricing because the price of solar panels is going down all the time,” said John Helminski, a systems engineer for San Diego’s energy program in its environmental services department.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

But organizations that invest in solar are putting a value on things other than purchase price–some of which benefit their bottom line, others that benefit society as a whole.

“What’s driving the corporate model? For nonprofits, it’s budgetary relief and trying to fix their costs,” he said. “A corporation is going to do it for myriad of reasons–being good to the environment, freezing costs–again for budget effects–and they may have a tax liability.”

The price of solar electric gear and installations continues to go down and many experts expect that solar power within a few years will be at “grid parity,” or the same cost per watt as fossil fuel-generated electricity.

The first to go online is the Alvarado Water Treatment Plant, a one-megawatt installation that produces about 20 percent of the power the plant uses. The second planned array, also for a water treatment facility, could be finalized in weeks.

And they know that the source of fuel for their power generator–the sun–will always be free. (Panels are typically guaranteed to work for 20 years and then they start to degrade in performance.)

Although the purchase price before rebates and tax credits was steep–on the order of $700,000–the system will pay for itself in 12 to 15 years and make their energy costs more predictable, said Troy Strand, executive vice president of Independent Energy Solutions, a solar integrator.

The Alvarado solar array is spread across three different locations at the plant where rows and rows of solar panels are placed on top of concrete water storage tanks.

Cash is better

For organizations that actually have the cash on hand to purchase a solar installation, the financial benefits are a lot more direct.

The city and university’s attitudes are similar to many corporate solar installation decisions, said Dave Thompson, a senior energy consultant at Borrego Solar’s Commercial Projects Group.

The California Center for Sustainable Energy organized a corporate solar tour on Monday, as part of the Solar Power International conference taking place here this week.

Solar trees sprout in San Diego

The University of California at San Diego had similar motivations when it embarked on a series of solar installations on campus.

“I cannot say I ever sold a solar system on finance alone,” said Thompson. “You get a lot of nonmonetary benefits. So if a project will break even, they’ll do it.”

Perhaps more importantly, the city’s contract with its systems integrator, SunEdison, stipulates the the price it will pay for the solar panels’ electricity will go up slower than the retail price of electricity. So while other customers are exposed to the vagaries of price increases, the plant will know how much its electricity will cost for the 20 years of the contract.

The solar parking lot will allow them to purchase electricity at just under the market rate as well. But its primary reasons were to demonstrate its commitment to sustainability and make progress on its goals to be “climate neutral,” Weil said.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

Corporations can get a federal tax credit of 30 percent of purchase price as well as state-level rebates. They can also amortize the equipment as a capital expenditure.

The tour made clear that there are a lot of good reasons to go solar, namely hedging against fossil fuels prices or good community relations. But it’s not just about lowering the electricity bill. In fact, in some cases, customers pay nearly as much as they did before they went through all the trouble of installing the panels.

Within about two weeks, it will connect a 164-kilowatt installation of “solar trees,” or solar-powered canopies in one of its parking lots.

A "solar tree," or solar powered canopy at the University of California at San Diego.

The water treatment plant just buys the electricity, at only half a cent less than the retail rate of 12.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. A half-cent discount doesn’t sound like much but the plant estimates that it will save $177,300 a year by installing the panels.

Strand predicted that corporate purchases of solar power will continue to go up for a number of reasons.

Consider the city of San Diego which is in the process of procuring as much as five megawatts of solar electricity in municipal sites over the next five years.

Sprint Nextel and Clearwire are combining network assets to build a new nationwide 4G wireless network that the companies say has huge benefits for each of them.

Dan Hesse, Sprint’s CEO and Ben Wolff, Clearwire’s CEO and the CEO of the new joint venture, hosted a conference call Wednesday morning to provide details of the transaction and explain why combining the companies is a good idea.

But in exchange for getting access to a 4G network on the cheap, Sprint will have to give up its coveted 2.5G wireless spectrum asset for a 51 percent stake in the new company. Still, Hesse said it is worth it.

“Because we are an early investor, the economics are favorable,” he said. “And it brings us 4G without having to spend the (capital expenditure) we’d have to spend if we built it on our own. We looked at it holistically and decided it makes sense to shareholders.”

Comcast and Time Warner Cable had already developed a joint venture with Sprint to develop a wireless service they could bundle with their existing broadband, home phone, and TV offerings. But the so-called Pivot venture fell apart when it became evident that it was too difficult to integrate services. The cable operators also realized that simply reselling wireless service added little value to their strategy.

(Credit:
Sprint Nextel)

As for the cost of the new service, Wolff wouldn’t talk specifics, but he said the efficiencies already inherent in the WiMax technology would provide four times the performance at one time the cost, which means that on a per-bit basis, the service will cost less to deliver than 3G. What that means in terms of pricing for consumers is still unknown. Today’s 3G PC-card wireless broadband services for laptops are priced around $60 a month and are believed to be too high for most consumers.

Initially, the company will focus its network build on thoroughly covering the top 100 markets, he added. But Wolff said Sprint’s 3G footprint, which will augment the 4G network, will have a wider footprint for some time.

“We are focused on the value proposition of WiMax,” he said. “And we have the ability to compress pricing if we need to in order to attract customers. We will have to see how it goes. But the economics are attractive.”

Cable operators Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks, as well as tech giants Intel and Google have invested a combined $3.2 billion in the new company, which is valued at $14.5 billion.

As for the build out, the companies are each continuing as previously planned. Eventually, the companies expect the network to include some 120 million to 140 million points of presence or POPs. Wolff said that Clearwire has about 30 million POPs in development right now. And Sprint expects to have 15 million POPs built by the end of the year.

According to the executives, the companies believe the deal is a win-win for them both. And in many ways, that appears to be the case. Sprint, which has steadily been losing customers after its failed 2005 merger with Nextel, is in no position to spend the capital it would take to build a new 4G network. And Clearwire, which hasn’t been profitable since it went public a year ago, doesn’t have the spectrum assets or resources to build a competitive 4G network on its own that will rival networks being planned by bigger wireless operators, such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

Together with the help of the cable companies, Google, and Intel–Sprint and Clearwire can build the network and still get their new service up and running at least two years before rivals AT&T and Verizon Wireless are able to build similar networks using a technology called LTE.

Wolff added that he expects the network construction to accelerate in 2009 and 2010, with much of the build-out happening in 2010.

Until now, Sprint and Clearwire have been on separate paths to build nationwide broadband wireless networks using WiMax, an IP technology that can blanket entire cities and provides more than five times the speed of 3G wireless networks. Now they are joining forces and creating a new company that will have access to more wireless spectrum than any other company in the entire country.

“This is one of the largest and fastest network build out plans ever done,” Wolff said. “It is a massive undertaking. Our current capital will get us to a 110 million POPs by mid-2010.”

As part of the deal, Sprint plans to lease capacity on the new 4G network and offer the service under its own brand as an MVNO or a mobile virtual network operator. This will allow it to sell both its 3G wireless service as well as a faster 4G service.

Also as part of the deal, Clearwire will be able to resell Sprint’s 3G service along with the new 4G service. And the cable companies, Comcast, Time Warner, and Bright House, will be able to resell Sprint’s 3G service as well as Clearwire’s 4G service under their own brands as an MVNO.

Dan Hesse, Sprint Nextel president and CEO

“As we looked forward it became evident that our assets along with our business priorities lined up with Clearwire’s,” Dan Hesse, Sprint’s CEO said on the call.

“The economics and structure of this deal are completely different than the Pivot joint venture,” Tom Nagel, executive vice president of Comcast’s wireless division said in an interview. “We will be the provider of the new service and own that customer relationship, which means we can integrate the wireless service into our existing service. And we will also be able to integrate the 4G piece of the network into our services.”

He said the company could either slow or accelerate the construction plan depending on whether it raises more capital.

Operational efficiencies
Sprint’s Hesse and Clearwire’s Wolff said that the deal also offered operational efficiencies for each company. For example, Clearwire will lease space on Sprint’s existing cell towers to build the network below market rates. It will also be able to use Sprint’s long distance fiber network to transport the 4G wireless traffic throughout the country. In exchange for that, Sprint will have access to Clearwire’s wireless backhaul network. This high-speed wireless network can be used to more efficiently aggregate Sprint’s existing cellular traffic onto its own long distance fiber network for transport around the country.