Twitter was just the beginning. After dreaming up the innovative communication medium, Jack Dorsey is looking to revolutionize another core aspect of society — money.

On Tuesday, Dorsey announced his new start-up, Square, which will let anyone with a cellphone or iPod become a merchant and accept credit card payments.

Square is a small plastic device that plugs into a gadget’s headphone jack. Buyers swipe their credit cards through the machine, which then transmits the payment data to an application running on a connected iPhone or iPod Touch. (Android and Blackberry apps are in development, and computer software will be available later.)

You don’t have to have the Square gadget or app to pay. You just need a credit card and an e-mail address to receive a receipt.

A select few cafes and small vendors are among Square’s first beta testers. Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea in Venice will be one of the first in Southern California, starting as early as next week.

Beginning sometime early next year, Dorsey wants everyone to use Square.

“I think we’re going to give the Squares away for free,” Dorsey said on the phone from San Francisco on Tuesday, “because they’re pretty cheap for us to make.”

Once the company begins ramping up hardware production, you’ll be able to sign up for an account, enter a shipping address onto the site and receive a device in the mail. Like PayPal, profiles are tied to a bank account.

Dorsey envisions the service replacing virtually every cash transaction. Let’s say a friend owes you $30 for dinner last week, but there’s no ATM in sight. Grab the Square device from your keychain, plug it into your phone and tell him to pay up.

Then there’s the untapped market on Craigslist. The free and ubiquitous classified ad site “is doing more transactions than eBay today and has no inherent payment mechanism,” Dorsey said. “It’s a huge market for us.”

The payment system is secure, Dorsey said. Transactional data is safely encrypted, and the credit card info is never stored on the device, only passed along, he said. Signatures are drawn with a finger on the touch screen.

Buyers with a Square profile can set their photos to display on the vendor’s screen to thwart identity thieves or daughters with a penchant for “borrowing” plastic. (It won’t stop your twin sibling from charging things to your card, though.)

Even the e-mail address and phone number a customer is asked to put in during the sale is invisible to the seller. It’s only used to transmit the digital receipt, which can include a logo and links to the retailer’s website or Twitter page.

A cool, high-tech toy for free. What’s the catch? Well, Dorsey has a hidden agenda, albeit one shared by many — he’s sick of cash.

“I, for one, hate getting change,” Dorsey said. “I just can’t stand it.”

The current credit card system isn’t without its faults, either. “I get so annoyed when people give me a paper receipt for something that was like $5,” he said. “There’s nothing that I would do with that receipt.”

His solution is Silicon Valley’s hippest new start-up: Square. Its e-mail receipts save trees; its charitable donations save the poor; and, gasp, it even has a business model. “We may charge $1 for the app,” Dorsey said in an e-mail.

– Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/12/square.html

Following a press release from ComScore indicating that Microsoft has approached 10% market share with Bing, more comprehensive search statistics indicate that Bing’s growth and share of web search is being wildly overstated.

ComScore’s October “US Core Search” rankings made headlines in suggesting that Microsoft’s Bing, combined with the company’s other search properties, have incrementally amassed a significant share of US search, now at 9.9%.

However, ComScore’s press release points out in small type that “searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.”

Microsoft doesn’t have a big share of the mapping, local directory, and user generated search market. By removing this from its “core” rankings, ComScore greatly inflates Bing’s importance, because the vast majority search related to maps, local search, and “user generated video” (why not just say “YouTube”) are all owned by Google. Microsoft’s own “Soapbox” effort to match Google’s YouTube failed and was shut down in August after a three run.

When looking at more neutral statistics that don’t gerrymander figures to arrive at a desired conclusion, the facts are very different.

Net Application’s search engine market share figures have been tracking the industry since at least 2000. For October 2009, the latest full month recorded, it gave Microsoft Bing just a 3.49% share of all search globally, along with 0.08% share for MSN Search and 0.01% share for Microsoft Live Search. Yahoo Search took second place with 6.68%, leaving the lion’s share for Google at 84.53%.

This establishes the trend AppleInsider reported this summer that despite glowing press releases for Bing, Google keeps eating away more and more of the web search market globally, while Microsoft and Yahoo continue to remain stagnant.

As the chart below shows, in the four years between 2004 and 2008, Google incrementally shifted from having almost 60% share to having a dominating +75% share, while Yahoo fell from 18.5% to 12.7% and Microsoft fell from 14% to 6.3%.

Over the last two years since, Google has continued to gain share while Yahoo’s dropped to the current figure of 6.7% and Microsoft’s Bing, MSN and Live Search combined amounted to just 3.5% of the global web search market.

Google on Thursday revealed a bevy of noteworthy developments for its Chrome OS. The company released the Chrome OS to the open source community, laid out its security vision and promised to deliver a simple operating system. However, the success or failure of the Chrome OS will ride on whether users will give up desktop applications.

Sundar Pichai, Vice President of Product Management, outlined the Chrome OS, noted that “there’s a paradigm shift in computing” presumably to netbooks and noted:

“Every application is a Web application. There are no conventional desktop applications.”

And there’s the rub. The Chrome browser on Chrome OS will be “blazingly fast” with a demo boot time of 3 seconds or so. The security picture is solid. And since the Chrome OS is connected to the Web, silly things like updating and installation will go away.

Simply put, Google’s vision rides in the cloud. The devices that run the Chrome OS will have all data in the cloud and depend on wireless cards and Wi-Fi. Google said it would specify what wireless cards it will support. Google’s mission is to give the Web applications access to all of the hardware available to today’s operating systems.

So here’s the question: Are you ready to give up your desktop applications?

You have about a year to answer the question and there will probably be a big debate between now and the Google OS launch with hardware partners. Google executives walked a line between pitching Chrome OS devices as a secondary computing machine, but one where you may spend the majority of your time on it.

Pichai noted that if you’re a lawyer doing contracts all day Google’s Chrome OS powered netbooks “won’t be the machine for you.”

Nevertheless, Google’s moves today with the Chrome OS are notable and the company clearly thinks that its approach will be a hit. And it’s hard to argue for the simplicity of a browser-based operating system, quick boot times and the move to cut out a lot of startup processes. If successful, Google can push more folks to the cloud.

My hunch is it may a while to get consumers to believe that “every application is a Web application.”

There are a ton of moving parts here. Among the notable background links and ZDNet coverage:

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

For daily updates, follow Larry on Twitter.

Email Larry Dignan

Google Inc. said Thursday the Internet search company is “a year away” from making its anticipated Chrome computer operating system available to users.

Vice President Sundar Pichai, speaking to reporters at a briefing on the company’s Mountain View, Calif., campus, said rumors that Google was close to launching its new operating system were not true.

In July, the company said it was working to develop a new operating system that it hopes will drive Internet users to its Web services and applications.

The new operating system, which Google said would be available to consumers in the second-half of 2010, is a direct assault on software maker Microsoft Corp., which has long dominated the computer software market and is now trying to muscle in on Google’s core business: Internet search advertising.

The new OS also comes as Google looks for ways to diversify its business. Internet search advertising constitutes 97% of the company’s $22 billion in revenue and efforts to cash in on its software applications and video-sharing site YouTube have generated limited results.

Analysts said Google’s operating system push was an ambitious long-term strategic move to broaden the company’s reach and increase use of its search engine and other revenue-generating services. But any impact on the company’s financial performance would be years away.

Write to Scott Morrison at scott.morrison@dowjones.com

With the U.S. unemployment rate at 10.2 percent, Obama told Fox News his administration faces a delicate balance of trying to boost the economy and spur job creation while putting the economy on a path toward long-term deficit reduction.

His administration was considering ways to accelerate economic growth, with tax measures among the options to give companies incentives to hire, Obama said in the interview with Fox conducted in Beijing during his nine-day trip to Asia.

“It is important though to recognize if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession,” he said.

Fox News, which released a transcript of the interview, showed that comment by Obama on Wednesday morning and said the full discussion would be broadcast later in the day. (Reporting by Caren Bohan; Editing by John O’Callaghan)

NASA said last week that the world was not ending — at least anytime soon. Last year, CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, said the same thing, which I guess is good news for those of us who are habitually jittery. How often do you have a pair of such blue-ribbon scientific establishments assuring us that everything is fine?

On the other hand, it is kind of depressing if you were looking forward to taking a vacation from mortgage payments to finance one last blowout.

CERN’s pronouncements were intended to allay concerns that a black hole would be spit out of its new Large Hadron Collider and eat the Earth.

The announcements by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in the form of several Web site postings and a video posted on YouTube, were in response to worries that the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012, when a 5,125-year cycle known as the Long Count in the Mayan calendar supposedly comes to a close.

The doomsday buzz reached a high point with the release of the new movie “2012,” directed by Roland Emmerich, who previously inflicted misery on the Earth from aliens and glaciers in “Independence Day” and “The Day After Tomorrow.”

In the movie, an alignment between the Sun and the center of the galaxy on Dec. 21, 2012, causes the Sun to go berserk with mighty storms on its surface that pour out huge numbers of the elusive subatomic particles known as neutrinos. Somehow the neutrinos transmute into other particles and heat up the Earth’s core. The Earth’s crust loses its moorings and begins to weaken and slide around. Los Angeles falls into the ocean; Yellowstone blows up, showering the continent with black ash. Tidal waves wash over the Himalayas, where the governments of the planet have secretly built a fleet of arks in which a select 400,000 people can ride out the storm.

But this is only one version of apocalypse out there. In other variations, a planet named Nibiru crashes into us or the Earth’s magnetic field flips.

There are hundreds of books devoted to 2012, and millions of Web sites, depending on what combination of “2012” and “doomsday” you type into Google.

All of it, astronomers say, is bunk.

“Most of what’s claimed for 2012 relies on wishful thinking, wild pseudoscientific folly, ignorance of astronomy and a level of paranoia worthy of ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ ” Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory, in Los Angeles, and an expert on ancient astronomy, wrote in an article in the November issue of Sky & Telescope.

Personally, I have been in love with end-of-the-world stories since I started consuming science fiction as a disaffected child. Scaring the pants off the public has been pretty much the name of the game ever since Orson Welles broadcast “War of the Worlds,” a fake newscast about a Martian invasion of New Jersey, in 1938.

But the trend has gone too far, suggested David Morrison, an astronomer at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., who made the YouTube video and is one of the agency’s point people on the issue of Mayan prophecies of doom.

“I get angry at the way people are being manipulated and frightened to make money,” Dr. Morrison said. “There is no ethical right to frighten children to make a buck.”

Dr. Morrison said he had been getting about 20 letters and e-mail messages a day from people as far away as India scared out of their wits. In an e-mail message, he enclosed a sample that included one from a woman wondering if she should kill herself, her daughter and her unborn baby. Another came from a person pondering whether to put her dog to sleep to avoid suffering in 2012.

All of this reminded me of the kinds of letters I received last year about the putative black hole at CERN. That too was more science fiction than science fact, but apparently there is nothing like death to bring home the abstract realms of physics and astronomy. In such situations, when the Earth or the universe is trying to shrug you and your loved ones off this mortal plane, the cosmic does become personal.

Dr. Morrison said he did not blame the movie for all this, as much as the many other purveyors of the Mayan prediction, as well as the apparent failure of some people, reflected in so many arenas of our national life, to tell reality from fiction. But then, he said, “my doctorate is in astronomy, not psychology.”

In an e-mail exchange, Dr. Krupp said: “We are always uncertain about the future, and we always consume representations of it. We are always lured by the romance of the ancient past and by the exotic scale of the cosmos. When they combine, we are mesmerized.”

A NASA spokesman, Dwayne Brown, said the agency did not comment on movies, leaving that to movie critics. But when it comes to science, Mr. Brown said, “we felt it was prudent to provide a resource.”

If you want to worry, most scientists say, you should think about global climate change, rogue asteroids or nuclear war. But if speculation about ancient prophecies gets you going, here are some things Dr. Morrison and the others think you should know.

To begin with, astronomers agree, there is nothing special about the Sun and galactic center aligning in the sky. It happens every December with no physical consequences beyond the overconsumption of eggnog. And anyway, the Sun and the galactic center will not exactly coincide even in 2012.

If there were another planet out there heading our way, everybody could see it by now. As for those fierce solar storms, the next sunspot maximum will not happen until 2013, and will be on the mild side, astronomers now say.

Geological apocalypse is a better bet. There have been big earthquakes in California before and probably will be again. These quakes could destroy Los Angeles, as shown in the movie, and Yellowstone could erupt again with cataclysmic force sooner or later. We and our works are indeed fragile and temporary riders on the Earth. But in this case, “sooner or later” means hundreds of millions of years, and there would be plenty of warning.

The Mayans, who were good-enough astronomers and timekeepers to predict Venus’s position 500 years in the future, deserve better than this.

Mayan time was cyclic, and experts like Dr. Krupp and Anthony Aveni, an astronomer and anthropologist at Colgate University, say there is no evidence that the Mayans thought anything special would happen when the odometer rolled over on this Long Count in 2012. There are references in Mayan inscriptions to dates both before the beginning and the ending of the present Long Count, they say, just as your next birthday and April 15 loom beyond New Year’s Eve, on next year’s calendar.

So keep up those mortgage payments.

—

Credit Due: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/science/17essay.html

Green Construction at Live Work Home

Syracuse, NY — We caught up Wednesday with Bob Hotaling of Team Industries, the company that makes the structural insulated panels going up at the Live Work Home house at 317-319 Marcellus St.

The R-Control panels are a key feature that will make the house extremely energy efficient because very little heat will be able to leak out through the walls and roof.

The Marcellus Street house was one of three winners of a design competition to build sustainable and affordable homes on the city’s Near West Side. The From the Ground Up competition was sponsored by the Syracuse University School of Architecture, Home HeadQuarters and the Syracuse Center of Excellence.

Hotaling trained the construction crew whose members come from Land Shapes Construction, a Homer company, and Home HeadQuarters, which also is acting as general contractor for the project. Two apprentices from Home HeadQuarters also are on the job.

The R-Control structural insulated panels (SIPs for short) are made in Team Industries’ factory in Grand Rapids, Mich. Oriented strand board is bonded to 4 1/2 inches of expanded polystyrene insulation for an airtight seal. A mold- and termite-resistant coating is applied. That gives the SIPs their green color.

The panels get window and door openings according to the architect’s plan, and have chases drilled into them for electrical wiring. They are numbered and labeled “top” and “bottom.” Once delivered to the job site, they are installed in numerical order.

“It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle,” said architect Pam Cambpell, of Cook + Fox Architects, who was on site Wednesday to check on the construction.

To put them up, the construction workers run beads of sealant along the edges and bottom of the panels before fitting them together tongue-and-groove style. Insulated “splines” between panels insure an airtight connection so heat can’t leak out.

“That’s the big advantage of SIPs — no thermal break,” Campbell said “The insulation is essentially continuous.”

But because the house will be so tight, care must be taken to prevent mold and to bring in fresh air, Campbell said. This house will have a heat recovery ventilator that captures heat from the warm air going out to temper the cold air coming in. The air coming in also passes through a filter.

Next up: the roof.

The wall panels are small enough that the construction crew can move them around without machinery, Hotaling said. The roof panels are another matter — they are 4 feet wide, 22 feet long and 12 inches thick.

“The thickness of the roof panels makes the house structurally stronger,” Campbell said. That’s important because the house is fairly open inside, so there aren’t a lot of interior walls to hold up the roof, she said.

The crew had most of the wall panels up by 10:30 a.m. Wednesday. Hotaling said the roof will start going up later in the day. He plans to have the crew assemble sections of the roof on the ground and then use a Lull — a forklift on a boom — to hoist them onto the structure.

“We’ll be done in three days,” he said.

SIP installation began Tuesday, so assuming all goes according to plan, the house’s skeleton should be up by Thursday.

Team R-Control also is working on a considerably larger project nearby — the State University College at Oswego’s 300-bed, 12-building student housing project, Hotaling said.

Marie Morelli, mmorelli@syracuse.com, 315-470-2220.

November 17, 2009, 6:00AM

Stephen D. Cannerelli / The Post-StandardDuncan Cooper, director of sales at Renovus Energy in Ithaca, holds a tube used to heat water. Demonstration-sized tubes are to his left, and a solar electric panel is behind him.

Syracuse, NY — More New York homeowners than ever want to put solar panels on their houses.

That should be good news for the 174 contractors registered with the state to install solar photovoltaic systems. But the demand has put such a strain on subsidies for residential solar that the state has reduced the amount offered, hoping to make a dwindling pot of money last through the end of the year.

A new round of funding for 2010 and beyond has not yet been approved, and that leaves solar power installers hanging. They can’t sign up customers until they know what the subsidy will be. And without customers, an emerging industry employing between 800 and 1,000 people statewide can’t create more “green-collar” jobs.

“We could easily hire another person if the right incentives were in place,” said Duncan Cooper, director of sales for Renovus Energy Inc. in Ithaca, an installer of renewable energy systems that employs seven. “We just don’t know where we’re going to be in the next few months.”

So what do you tell customers?

“This is the way it is now and we have no way of predicting what it’s going to be like,” said Robert Halstead, owner of Eastern Mountain Solar Corp. in Syracuse. “As you can imagine, we’re not doing a whole lot of sales between now and then.”

Solar is popular for a couple of reasons. The price of solar panels is coming down due to increased production in China and falling prices for materials. It’s also easier for people with solar installations to sell their surplus electricity back to the grid.

The Post-Standard

Green Central New York magazine goes inside hospital’s ‘green’ expansion plan and more. Link to a summary of what’s in today’s issue.

And solar power is green. Energy from the sun is free and abundant, even in often-cloudy Central New York. The panels last for 20 to 30 years. They create electricity without carbon emissions. They work during the day, when demand for power is greatest. Unlike windmills, solar panels are relatively inconspicuous.

Solar also is expensive, at least to start. The average cost of installing a solar photovoltaic system for a 2,000-square-foot house is $35,000, according to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. Incentives and tax breaks, taken together, reduce the out-of-pocket cost by as much as 60 percent, according to a solar industry trade group.

So any change to the incentive structure has an immediate impact on the demand for solar installations.

On Oct. 13, to keep the money from running out, NYSERDA cut the incentives for residential solar photovoltaic installations from $3 per watt to $2.50 per watt, up to the first 4 kilowatts. Incentives for commercial and nonprofit solar power installations also were cut.

In one day, the agency was flooded with applications — several installers heard it was more than 100, though NYSERDA will only say it was “quite a few.” Some installers were left with the impression those applications would soak up whatever money was left in the solar incentive program.

“The money has not run out,” said Jeffrey Gordon, speaking for NYSERDA. “We’re continuing to process applications.” The reduced incentive “helps us to target the funds and allow more people to take advantage of it — albeit at a lower rate.”

Cooper, of Renovus, said he was shocked to hear that. “This is indicative of the level of communication we get from NYSERDA,” he said.

The money for renewable energy subsidies comes from the Renewable Portfolio Standard surcharge on utility bills. A typical residential electric customer pays about 75 cents per month to subsidize renewable technologies such as solar, wind, fuel cells and methane-producing anaerobic digesters.

The state’s goal is to have 25 percent of our electricity come from renewable sources by 2013. Two percent of that is supposed to come from “customer-sited” installations, such as solar panels on homes, business and nonprofits.

From 2006 to 2009, the state Public Service Commission set aside $103 million to subsidize customer-sited renewables. About $75 million of that has gone toward solar photovoltaic subsidies, the PSC said in a June report.

The state has cut its incentive twice this year. The first cut, in February, nearly sank the program.

In January, NYSERDA announced it was cutting the solar incentive by 25 percent on Feb. 1 to reflect more generous federal tax breaks. Within two weeks, the agency was flooded with 348 applications totaling $24 million.

To keep the program alive, NYSERDA shifted $15 million from other programs. The PSC authorized a $15 million cash infusion in June. That was supposed to last through the end of the year.

But when NYSERDA cut the incentive again in October, another stampede resulted. “It’s been a bit of a stop-start kind of funding, a little insecurity for the industry,” said John Siciliano, executive director of the New York Solar Energies Industry Association, a trade group based in Albany. “We’re looking for a longer-term vision from the Public Service Commission that will incentivize solar systems over the next five years.”

That’s the plan. The PSC is working on the next five years of the Renewable Portfolio Standard. It’s not certain if the commission will vote on it before the end of the year but that is the goal, said James Denn, speaking for the commission.

Going forward, a white paper written by commission staff has laid out two options for customer-sited solar photovoltaic subsidies: $24 million a year from 2010 to 2015 — roughly its current level — or $49 million a year from 2010 to 2015 — double the current level. The white paper points out that despite its advantages, solar power costs twice as much as other types of renewable energy.

“The PSC is taking a very focused look at its renewable energy programs,” Denn said. “We want to make sure the money we’re investing is being invested properly and gets the most bang for the buck.”

Contractors say solar gives you plenty of bang for the buck. “The only difference between this investment and any other is, it’s guaranteed,” said Justin Williams, owner of Central New York Solar LLC in Canastota. “I can guarantee the sun’s going to shine, you can produce energy and reduce your electric bill.”

You can contact Marie Morelli at mmorelli@syracuse.com or 315-470-2220.

—

Credit Due: http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2009/11/demand_for_solar_energy_subsid.html