Which technological approach will win out isn’t clear yet, but the demand for centralized solar-power generation systems is there.

The latter, known as concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) systems, may make more sense in a broader set of geographies, compared with concentrating solar thermal. Both forms of concentrating solar power are meant to improve on sun-tracking flat panels.

Click on the image to view a photo gallery of different utility-scale solar technologies.

California and Spain are the biggest markets for these concentrating solar power systems. If renewable portfolio standards get passed in more states, we could see a much greater diversity of technologies beyond the solar trough and solar tower.

(Credit:
Schott)

Update on May 27: added that Greentech Media is publisher of concentrating solar power report.

The Prometheus Institute, in a report published by Greentech Media, forecasts that concentrating photovoltaic technologies will be used in midsize to large power plants that range from about 1 megawatt of production to about 100 megawatts.

When it comes to solar these days, it’s go big or go home.

(Credit:
Prometheus Institute/Greentech Media)

Prometheus Institute forecasts that 50 gigawatts of electricity could be generated this way by 2020. Currently, there 430 megawatts worth of concentrating solar power systems installed around the world, according to Emerging Energy Research.

There are competing designs for utility-scale solar farms. By concentrating light to make steam, some designs use heat to generate electricity. In parallel, other companies concentrate light onto photovoltaic cells to generate electricity.

Utilities are being pushed to use more renewable energy, heating up the business of large-scale solar power. (Click here for related photo gallery.)

Concentrating solar thermal systems, meanwhile, will dominate very large centralized power generation.

All I know is that ads are a thing of the past for me, on the TV and on the web. It’s nice that Yahoo! and Google are kind of, sort of recognizing this. But for the crowd that will be savvy enough to know how to turn off ads (and will read the press that reports on such things), they’re already using Adblock Plus.

I was scratching my head in wonder at the news that Yahoo! and Google are now making it easy for their users to opt out of advertisement targeting. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen an ad. I installed Adblock Plus a year or so ago and haven’t seen an ad since.

No, I haven’t figured out how Google and others can make money in the absence of ad. For that matter, who knows how CNET will?

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In other words, Yahoo! and Google, thank you but no thank you. We’ve already taken care of our ads.

Previously: As the URL burns: The short-link soap opera.

Bitly also announced on its blog that Google Reader and Typepad now generate Bitly links natively.

For users who want to create easy short links to images they upload from their computers, this will be a bit of a time-saver. Also, users will get the real-time click through data from their images on the Bitly site.

Imageshack CEO Jack Levin says that his 11-person company services 3 billion images a day. That’s the highest hit-per-employee ratio in Silicon Valley, he boasts. He also says that Imageshack has, due to its tenure, a larger and more stable infrastructure than competitors.

Levin agrees that deals like this are “Web politics” but is happy to have what is for now unique placement on the Bitly service. This post has been corrected from the original, in which it was stated that the Yfrog arrangement was an exclusive deal. Bitly CEO John Borthwick sent in this correction: “If users like it, other photo sites will be included.”

Short URL powerhouse Bitly is baking into its Web service the Yfrog picture-sharing service made by Imageshack. Yfrog competes with other Twitter-friendly image-sharing services such as Twitpic.

Disclosure: Bitly and CBS, CNET’s parent company, have partnered to create branded short links for CBS News. CNET itself has no partnership with Bitly.

I find it interesting that a service that I thought treated all sites equally–I’m talking about Bitly here–would make a deal clearly favoring a particular source. Of course, Twitter itself gave Bitly its big break when it baked the URL shortener into Twitter itself, replacing TinyURL. Benevolence, or favoritism, depending on how you look at it, flows downhill.

The image-upload feature should go live on the Bitly page at the end of the month.

This post has been corrected from the original. See fifth paragraph.

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

Sprint unveiled six QChat handsets at the CTIA show two months ago Four models, the Sanyo Pro 200, Sanyo Pro 700, the LG LX400, and the Samsung Z400, will go on sale Sunday with the remaining two phones, the Motorola V950 and the Samsung Z700, following later this year.

Starting June 15, Sprint’s new Chat will be off and running in more than 40 markets nationwide. For those not in the know, QChat offers push-to-talk (PTT) interoperability between CDMA and iDEN networks for the first time. That means that customers using the new QChat phones will be able to make PTT calls to both Sprint CDMA phones and Nextel iDEN handsets.

Sanyo Pro 200

Acquicor eventually did find its target–a chip foundry known as Jazz Semiconductor, a spinoff of Conexant Systems, itself the former Rockwell Semiconductor.

Amelio remains the CEO of Jazz, earning a salary of $600,000 per year, according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Investors in Acquicor have also been having tough times. Its stock, which was went public at $6 a share, closed on Tuesday at 70 cents.

Many start-ups don’t have profits when they go public. Some don’t even have any significant revenue to speak of. But Acquicor took things a step further. It didn’t even have a business.

In announcing her departure, Hancock said in a statement, “I am pleased to have achieved the goal we set when we formed Acquicor as a blank check company, which was to find a viable business to acquire that showed great promise and potential for success.”

Last month, the company, now known by the name Jazz Technologies, said it was seeking “strategic alternatives” and had hired UBS to figure out what those might be.

The company, launched by three former Apple executives, was what’s known as a blank-check company. Rather than have a business plan, such firms instead ask investors to bet on their management’s track record, in this case that of former Apple CEO Gil Amelio, company co-founder Steve Wozniak, and former CTO Ellen Hancock.

Still, that was enough to land the company more than $160 million in a stock offering. The prospectus for Acquicor noted that at the time Wozniak was the head of a start-up known as Wheels of Zeus. It made no mention, however, of any financial woes, though Wheels of Zeus closed its doors the same week Acquicor went public. I asked Acquicor at the time to comment on the omission, but never heard back.

The bet, however, has so far produced a dismal return, notes Fortune’s Adam Lashinksy. He notes that the company gets most of its money selling chips to wireless firms that have been having tough times.

So what of the three founders? Lashinsky notes that Hancock stepped down as president (and from the Jazz board) in June 2007 while Wozniak has also abdicated his unpaid role as “chief visionary officer.”

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

Long story short: I plugged it into the Centro and presto, instant power. So when I spied an iPod-compatible Cellboost at Buy.com for just $5.99 (shipped!), how could I resist passing it along? Granted, it’s an eco-unfriendly solution, but it’s compatible with all dockable iPods and promises eight hours of play time. Toss one in your travel bag; you never know when you might need it.

(Credit:
Cellboost)

Flash-forward to three weeks ago, when my phone (it’s a Centro now, but same difference) ran out of juice and I desperately needed to make a call. I pulled the Cellboost out of the glove compartment, where it had sat, untouched, for three years. No way will this thing have a drop of power left, I thought, not after three boiling summers and three harsh winters.

About three years ago, at a CES show in Las Vegas, a PR flack handed me a Cellboost disposable battery for my Treo smartphone. “You never know when you might need it,” she winked.

Ick! Did I actually just write a headline with the words “disposable” and “battery”?! Let’s see…yep, I did. But before you get your environmentalist dander up, consider: one, I recycle; two, I use compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and three, I have a relevant story to share.

When Netflix opted to eliminate profiles, the company said that the feature was only used by a small sliver of its member base. It was a vocal sliver, however, and a thread on customer service forum Get Satisfaction revealed a host of angry users, ranging from families who wanted to keep parental controls on separate queues for their children to spouses who didn’t want to bicker over disparate film tastes.

The people have spoken: Netflix will not be eliminating user profiles, the account feature that lets you split movie rentals among separate queues for a household. The company had announced the removal of profiles earlier this month, much to user dismay.

“As someone who enjoys helping his 4-year-old daughter manage her one-DVD-at-a-time, G-rated sub-account, I identified with these thoughtful pleas to maintain Profiles,” a Netflix product manager identified only as “Todd” wrote on the company’s blog. “Because of an ongoing desire to make our website easier to use, we believed taking a feature away that is only used by a very small minority would help us improve the site for everyone. Listening to our members, we realized that users of this feature often describe it as an essential part of their Netflix experience.”

With members threatening cancellation or–shudder!–a switch to troubled rival Blockbuster, it clearly wasn’t a great move on Netflix’s part. Response to it had been overwhelmingly negative, and the company clearly got clued in.

Welcome back, Barry. If your kids are like mine, you’ll never leave us for long.

…with relief!

Apparently, six weeks of that was all his family could stand, as he has joined Hyperic (on a part-time basis) to help with its JasperSoft integration. His kids are crying…

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Well, that didn’t take long. Barry Klawans, former CTO at JasperSoft, resigned from Jasper a month or so ago citing the need to unwind and spend time with his family.

“Defendant’s intentional spoliation of computer evidence significantly prejudices plaintiffs because it puts the most relevant evidence of their claim permanently beyond their reach,” the RIAA reportedly argued. “The deliberate destruction…by itself, compels the conclusion that such evidence supported plaintiffs’ case.”

He also argued that that he was not the one sharing the files, but that it was the computer that was sharing the files.

Wake reportedly agreed with the RIAA and is expected to inform Howell of his decision in a forthcoming written order.

The RIAA sued Pamela and Jeffrey Howell for copyright infringement in 2006, claiming that the husband and wife had used Kazaa to make copyrighted files available for download.

Judge Neil Wake ruled on Monday that Jeffery Howell, a defendant in Atlantic v. Howell, had willfully and intentionally destroyed evidence related to his peer-to-peer activities after being notified of pending legal action by the RIAA, according to a Tuesday report by Ars Technica. Furthermore, since it was done in bad faith, it “therefore warrants appropriate sanctions,” the site reported.

In a deposition, Jeffrey Howell admitted to loading the file-sharing software onto his computer. He said, however, that the songs listed in the complaint were for personal use and that he had not placed the files in the program’s shared folder. He said the recordings were copies made from CDs he owned placed on the computer for personal use, not copies downloaded from Kazaa.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation argued on behalf of the couple–which lacked legal representation–saying the RIAA’s “making available” position “amounts to suing someone for attempted distribution, something the Copyright Act has never recognized.” The argument–that merely the act of making music files available for download constituted copyright infringement–has been the basis for the Recording Industry Association of America’s legal battle against online music piracy.

Judge Wake apparently agreed with that position and in April denied the labels’ motion for summary judgment in a 17-page decision (PDF), allowing the suit to proceed to trial.

However, the RIAA accused Howell of destroying evidence on four occasions after being served with the lawsuit, the site reported. RIAA experts found that Howell uninstalled Kazaa and reformatted his hard drive, Ars Technica reported.

The recording industry appears to have won a closely watched copyright infringement case over charges of evidence tampering.

Weplay’s Series A round, announced earlier this year, was led by FirstMark and had participation from other current and former pro athletes like basketball player Tony Parker, soccer player Brandi Chastain, and swimmer Summer Sanders as well as Silicon Valley regular Ron Conway. The Creative Artists Agency and Major League Baseball Advanced Media have also invested.

The round was led by Deep Fork Capital, which has invested recently in mobile networking start-up Moblyng and visual search site SearchMe. In addition to the well-moneyed jocks, existing investor FirstMark Capital contributed.

Big-name professional athletes are known for throwing money around almost as much as they throw balls, but it’s not every day you hear about them investing in a social-networking site. Youth sports network Weplay, however, is an exception: Derek Jeter, Peyton Manning, and LeBron James have joined its $8.6 million Series B funding round, announced Tuesday.

The site itself is intended as a hub for youth athletes, their parents and coaches, and other enthusiasts where they can safely network, share photos, and keep track of their favorite teams as well as share their own on-the-field antics.