Some of that capital will go outside the U.S. Because of policies, the first three U.S.-based solar companies to go public used that money to build manufacturing facilities elsewhere to serve those markets, noted Floyd.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

“We are already having a tightening of capital right now with the credit crunch. Add on to that the uncertainty in policy and you’re scaring capital away,” Walsh said.

"We're not happy." From left to right: Nancy Floyd, Nth Power; Dan Reicher, Google.org; former California Energy Commissioner John Geesman; Kevin Walsh, GE renewable energy; Credit Suisse Vice Chairman John Cavalier.

“We believe we are at the dawn of a green energy revolution potentially as powerful as the Internet revolution,” said Reicher who was former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. “Policy makers can make or break this revolution.”

The incentives, which provide a federal tax credit for renewable-energy investment, are set to expire at the end of 2008. But the impact is already being felt, said Kevin Walsh, the head of GE’s renewable-energy financing division.

Dan Reicher, director of climate change and energy initiatives at Google.org, said that there are long-term effects of a continued on again-off again renewable-energy policy.

But that technique, which has failed to pass the Senate twice before, is unlikely to work, said Marchant Wentworth, Washington representative for clean energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group.

Solar power plant projects have already been postponed for months, said Christopher Huntington, vice president of business development at solar company SkyFuel.

The House last week passed a bill which would extend the renewable-energy tax credit, which would be paid for by rescinding a tax break extended to oil and gas companies.

Wind, one of the fastest growing energy businesses, will be hardest hit, said John Cavalier, vice chairman at Credit Suisse who heads up the bank’s renewable-energy business.

Floyd, now the managing director of energy technology venture capital firm Nth Power, was one of a group of businesspeople who held a press conference here to lobby for the renewal of federal tax incentives set to expire this year.

The other problem is that some senators are focused on increasing fuel production of all sorts, but do not recognize the economic development of the renewable-energy industry, including job creation, Wentworth said.

“We’ll see an exit from wind deals as early as May of this year,” Cavalier said. “We’ll probably see a complete moratorium of the great promise of renewable energy.”

The issue has become a political contest between Democrats and Republicans, which has made the tax credit a “political hostage.”

While you’re out buying goods for your Memorial Day barbecue, why not swing by Best Buy and pick up a HTC Touch Dual? Yes, the Touch Dual will be available in stores and online starting this weekend for a nice chunk of change–$549 to be exact. First announced at CTIA 2008, the Touch Dual alleviates some of the text entry pains of the original HTC Touch by providing a slide-out SureType-like keypad. It will also be the first Windows Mobile 6.1 device available in the United States, and also features support for U.S. 3G bands (HSDPA 850/1900), Bluetooth, and a 2-megapixel camera. The HTC Touch Dual will be sold as an unlocked phone, so you can use with an AT&T and T-Mobile SIM cards.

(Credit:
HTC)

The following product is available:

On Sale Now: $154.99 – $211.25
View the latest prices for HTC Touch Dual (Unlocked)

The skivvies, developed by textile specialists at Japan Women’s University in Tokyo, are meant to absorb moisture, kill bacteria, and generally be comfortable in situations where there are no laundry facilities and you really can’t be as freshly dressed as you’d like.

Koichi Wakata looks comfortable enough to me.

According to Reuters, the clothing called J-ware is currently being tested aboard the International Space Station, perhaps to the dismay of Koichi Wakata’s fellow astronauts.

For some reason, every time high-tech underwear news hits the Internet, my editors think it’s something I need to cover (pun intended). This time, though, it’s underwear from space. And it’s Japanese underwear from space that lasts up to a week before you have to change it–for better or worse.

Thankfully, so far the tests have been successful. Wakata has been quoted as saying, “Nobody has complained, so I think it’s so far, so good.” The question is, if the tests are fully successful, will the general, non-space-going world buy into the idea? There are plans for Earth-bound mass marketing of the week-long underwear. I for one am not into the idea, even if it works fine.

"You see, there are these tubes out there…"

You can look this one up on the “tubes.”

(Credit:
Ted Stevens Web site)

Alaska Senator Ted Stevens was indicted today for making false statements to federal investigators.

The seven count indictment charges Stevens, a Republican, with lying on his Senate financial forms.

He made the comment during a debate on Net neutrality when he was still the chairman of the Senate Commerce committee. Stevens had been a critic of extensive Net neutrality mandates. At the time, he accused proponents of a Congressional bill of “imposing a heavy-handed regulation before there’s a demonstrated need.”

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have been in the press a lot recently for being “those guys who sued Facebook.” As two of the three founders of ConnectU, they had accused Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of intellectual property theft long before he was Silicon Valley’s youngest billionaire. Unfortunately, courts didn’t tend to side with the brothers Winklevoss, largely because the dorm-room start-up didn’t have formal paperwork to prove a breach of contract.

Want to see these guys row? You can watch it online starting very, very early on Saturday morning. The NBC Olympics site will be streaming the first set of rowing heats starting at 1:50 p.m. Saturday, Beijing time, and the Winklevosses will be in the first heat of the men’s pair event, which goes off at 4:10 p.m. That’s 4:10 a.m. Eastern time, or 1:10 a.m. Pacific time. They’ll be up against teams from Italy, France, Canada, and Poland; if they place first, second, or third, the U.S. pair will go straight to the semifinal on Wednesday. If not, they’ll have another shot at it during a repechage event on Sunday.

Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.

• Stop saving your pennies, gamers. Word’s finally out that Microsoft’s
Xbox 360 will dip below $200.

• The world gets ready for Spore–and so does the iPhone.

• Dell made a decision: Asus’ Eee PC shouldn’t have all the fun. And speaking of Netbooks, the nostalgia-laden Commodore name is having a decidedly 2008 moment in connection with that nascent but red-hot market.

• The next-generation
iPod Touch and iPod Nano could look like this.

• A Crave reader stopped by his local Fry’s Electronics store, and all he got was this lousy 120GB Zune.

EA is bringing its new creature feature to the iPhone and iPod Touch.

• Fighting with your significant other? Try getting a DVR.

• Everywhere we turned, we saw Blu-ray, but for how much longer, we’re not so sure.

(Credit:
CNET)

CNET gets its hands on Dell's Inspiron Mini 9.

See anything awesome we missed? Send it our way at crave at cnet dot com.

If you have a short memory or didn’t have time to catch up on Crave this week (editor’s note: for shame!), no worries, we’ve got you covered. Here’s a look back at some of the truly interesting, strange, and wonderfully silly stories we Craved.

(Credit:
EA Mobile)

(Credit:
Sinobyte)

From my connection in Beijing, Blogspot has again gone offline. The transmission stops on a Chinese ISP server.

Blogspot inaccessible at 1:30 a.m. on April 14, 2008. (My IP hidden.)

Joshua Porter

Leverage reciprocity: This is Porter’s fancy way of saying that you want to appeal to people’s narcissism. People contribute to social sites in large part because they want to see what other people say about their contributions. Make it easy for people to interact on that level–by leaving feedback, compliments, awards, and so for each other.

I’m here at the SNAP Summit in San Francisco. Most of the people in the overflow crowd are trying to figure out how to make their sites more social–how to tap into the viral effect that’s busted companies such as RockYou and Slide into the big leagues.

Show causation: If you’re going to ask people to participate, make it clear what participating does for them. Netflix, for example, gives users better recommendations when they rate DVDs.

Joshua Porter, who runs Bokardo Design, launched the day by offering up five principles for effective social design. The undercurrent of his talk: Serve your users and they’ll keep coming back. That’s a simple thing to say, of course. Here are Porter’s five tips to making it real:

(Credit:
Rafe Needleman / CNET)

Tie behavior to identity: In other words, what you do on the site should describe you more than what you say about yourself in your profile. Amazon and eBay aren’t Web 2.0-era social sites, but users’ identity on these sites is very strong, based on feedback they leave on products and sales.

Give recognition:
Digg leveraged its users’ competitiveness to get on the front page of the site. Its top users eventually formed cliques to get and hold these positions. It was a good strategy to get the community going, but eventually Digg turned off the recognition feature since it was reinforcing the influence of the grandfathers of its network, and making it too hard for new people to rise up in the rankings. The challenge with recognition programs, Porter implies, is that you have to make them meaningful and desirable, but also temporary. Once a user is recognized as a top contributor, let them fall off the map if they don’t stay active.

Swurl is a service for people who want to create a blog made from their activity on various social-media services. Like FriendFeed, SocialThing, or any other aggregator, you start building your Swurl blog by plugging in your usernames on each service. There are currently 19 to choose from, with all the usual suspects like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, and Yelp.

[via Lifehacker]

Besides aggregating your news feed, Swurl has a social component that lets you do the same with others. You can follow other users just like you would with Twitter or Tumblr, and their streams of information will show up in chronological order in the friends tab. You’re also able to see their friends list, and dig into their timelines to view their past activity.

One thing missing is a way to create entirely new posts through Swurl, so it’s definitely not attempting to take over standard blogging platforms. FriendFeed, which essentially does the same thing as Swurl, will aggregate your business from all these networks and also manages to add its own publishing tool to boot. There is no such system on Swurl at the moment, but there should be.

Swurl turns your social activity stream into both a blog and this handy timeline. Here you can see shared pictures on Twitter, links on Delicious, and Twitter tweets–all on the same page.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

There’s already an active community of Swurlers using the service. Advanced users should also not shy away from what seems like a very simple tool; you can drop in custom CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), tweak the colors, and look and feel of your page to a very high degree.

Let’s ignore the fact that Apple’s sold more iPhones and iPods touch (”iPod touches” just sounds wrong) than Apple TVs so Super Monkey Ball already reaches a wider audience. And let’s also ignore the fact that this doesn’t completely describe a transition to a lower-margin product. Instead, let’s run with the remote controller idea. Because the remote controller is already in your hand.

It’s the
iPhone and the
iPod touch. Both have the accelerometer and already act as a menu remote with Apple’s Remote app. Rolling out the App Store to the Apple TV is a fabulous idea that could really add legs to an otherwise average device. Upscale the graphics and you’re good to go. Game makers can create their own remote applications, allowing them to configure the buttons any way they like. Sure, there are some problems with that. Games may be a very good example of an instance where a physical button can be the difference between virtual life or death (”I thought I was pressing ‘fire’ and instead I was pressing ‘night vision goggles’.”), but the screen real estate on the iPhone and iPod touch is expansive enough that large virtual buttons could make up for this.

This is all pie-in-the-sky at this point. Maybe the product transition is an Apple TV/iPod touch bundle. Maybe it’s lowering the cost of the iPod touch to where it’s viably priced as a remote control.

More likely it’s none of these things, but if Apple isn’t going in this direction, maybe it should be.

In a review of Apple’s quarterly post-conference call beating on the market (yawn, SEEN IT), ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes hits upon a gem of an idea while musing on the much-discussed upcoming “product transition”.