Renewable technologies, including solar, wind, tidal/wave and geothermal, seeks to capture the plentiful forms of energy that are currently being frittered away by Mother Nature. A few technologies, though, are seeking to turn lead to gold, figuratively speaking; they’re finding ways to capture the energy in the stuff we discard and transform it into fuel that we can use.

A friend of a friend who worked at Changing World Technologies first exposed me to this idea a few years ago. Using a process called thermo depolymerization (TDP), primarily organic feedstocks (like turkey offal) can be processed to yield fuel oil. Its first plant converts 250 tons of turkey waste into 20,000 gallons of oil and fertilizer (the nitrogen-based by-products of the process), at a cost of $80 per barrel. Keep in mind that crude petroleum is currently selling at over $120 per barrel.

Innovation in the world of waste has continued. Here are a few other companies I was able to find that are innovating in this space:

• Enertech Environmental: Converts sewage into a solid energy form (called SlurryCarb) that can be used in a manner similar to coal. The process removes the bulk of the water through a more efficient mechanical process, rather than boiling/evaportation. A plant coming online later this year in southern California will convert solid waste from 5 municipalities around Rialto into 145 tons of SlurryCarb daily. An existing company facility has been operating successfully in Japan for years.
• Solena Group: Uses sodium bicarbonate, a waste by-product from coal plants, to grow algae, which is gasified to create a feedstock for electric power plants. The company is in discussion to put up a 40 MW plant in Kansas using its technology.
• GreenFuel Technologies: Also grows algae for biofuel, although using CO2 from flue gases. Companies that would otherwise have to pay for the sequestration of CO2 can, according to the company, create a profit by growing algae and selling it to biofuel reformers. The algae can be converted to biodiesel through transesterification and ethanol through fermentation of the remaining biomass.
• Blue Marble Energy: Uses algae cultivated in polluted water to create biodiesel and ethanol. Should be a boon for China, which has no shortage of the stuff.
• BlueFire Ethanol: Converts biowaste to ethanol using concentrated acid hydrolysis. A $30 million plant due to be installed in southern California by the end of 2009 should yield 3.2 million gallons of ethanol annually.
• Poet Energy: Uses primarily corn cobs to produce ethanol in a low-temperature process. Its 65 million gallon per year plant inaugurated in Indiana last year is the largest ethanol production plant in the world.
• Coskata: This company’s process converts organic feedstocks into syngas via gasification technologies, and then proprietary microbes convert the syngas into ethanol. After proving the viability of its technology through a 40,000 gallon/yr plant early next year, it plans on scaling to a 100 million gallon/year plant elsewhere by 2011.
• DuPont Danisco: Uses corn stover and sugarcane bagasse, agricultural wasteproducts, to create ethanol. A joint venture between DuPont and Genencor, its 250,000 gallon/year demonstration facility will be built in 2009.
• Mascoma: Uses wood chips as the source of cellulose to produce ethanol. It has recently decided to build its first facility in Michigan, in part funded by the state.

Are flue gas, corn stover, sugarcane bagasse, wood chips, turkey offal, and municipal waste the only feedstocks with which to produce biofuels? Not even close. In fact, a recent study suggests cow manure processed anaerobically could supplant 3% of the US’s electricity production and erase 4% of the carbon dioxide which would have otherwise been created by coal-fired production.

I think all of this innovation is fascinating, and deserves the tax incentives they need to get past the very high bar set by the low price of coal (provided there aren’t any taxes/penalties assessed on high-CO2 coal use). The products produced recently from solar energy—food scraps, wood chips, algae, sewage, and municipal waste—ought to be recaptured so we can allow coal and petroleum to continue to sequester CO2 underground.

FriendFeed is a terrific “lifestreaming” service. It might be one that has limited adoption, but it will perform an exceptionally important role in online discussion, in the way influencers in the blogosphere and world of Web technology synthesize and disseminate ideas.

FriendFeed, for those who don’t know about it, is a site where you can import (from your blog, Twitter account, Flickr account, etc) or post items for discussion among those who “follow” you (monitor your activity). Items can be “liked” (giving an instant rating of the item’s approval), similar to Diggs, reddit votes, etc, and can be commented upon.

The site has enjoyed a boost of activity as a similar (but less interactive) service, Twitter, has been beset with infrastructural issues. Robert Scoble has been an early and prominent fan; Michael Arrington has come around and enjoys the service as well, admiring the depth of interaction.

However, the service might not have tremendous reach beyond those bleeding edge distillers of the information avalanche, at least on a participatory level (which is what makes the service unique). Why? It takes tremendous time to keep up with more than a handful of feeds. And if you follow someone like Louis Gray or Loic Le Meur, prepare to spend a substantial portion of your workday keeping up. And FriendFeed is a difficult service to enjoy the occasional sip from; it tends to function best as a firehose. Larry Dignan asks if this is truly something we all really need to fit into our lives.

Is this a criticism? Not at all. Power users of FriendFeed are being exposed to a tremendous amount of data and commentary, all of which is used to extract insights from the bewildering storm of information that the Internet provides us. But, frankly, I tend to enjoy these insights in a slower, more reflective medium - these power users’ blogs. Participating in FriendFeed gives the Robert Scobles and Louis Grays access to the fodder which makes their blogs such a pleasure to read (and kind of a necessity for those of us who can’t follow everything, all the time)

So, is FriendFeed a Twitter-killer? Possibly. Even despite all the good press it’s been enjoyed at the expense of beleaguered Twitter, it is still pretty small in comparison [Compare.com]. But it’s safe to say that it is a great tool for the thought leaders who use it, and for those brave enough (and who have enough time on their hands) to use it as it’s been intended.

I think its biggest promise is to move beyond just the Web tech conversations that the founders themselves would want to follow. If you have clusters of power users and larger groups of followers for sports, celebrity gossip, even fruit fly genetics, then you might see FriendFeed catch on beyond Silicon Valley. Every topical niche has its thought leaders.

It’s the end of June, and I find myself mulling my next phone choices with a certain sense of anxious excitement. I currently have a Blackberry Pearl which I like pretty well (it’s certainly a lot lighter and smaller than my previous Treo 650, but I miss the touchscreen sometimes). Besides the rumors of an upcoming touchscreen-enabled Blackberry, there are two choices on the horizon: the Apple iPhone 3G and a Google Android-enabled smartphone.

The iPhone 3G is sure to have the same incredibly intuitive UI and clever tricks I’ve come to love in my MacBook Air. Apple has a way of wrapping sophisticated features in an instinctive user interface to which it owes a great deal of its success. And its new development platform will bring the same sort of cool innovation we’ve come to expect on Facebook, not from the site providing the platform itself, but to the thousands of clever minds that finally have a way to distribute their ideas. The iPhone’s biggest drawbacks - the lack of video recording, Flash support, cut-and-paste, and MMS - could conceivably be supported by third-party apps. Native support would be nice, but this might be a signal from Apple that they’re going to focus on hardware and OS over functions, and it might be an incentive for app developers to migrate away from Android.

The gPhone is really nothing more than an OS and applications platform. We have no idea what forms the gPhone will take, or from what manufacturers first, but we do know these for sure: there will be easy Google Apps integration, there will probably be an apps platform, and, yes, there were most certainly be ads. Lots of them. In Google’s neverending quest to secure more ad inventory, accessing the burgeoning mobile ad market would be a whole lot tougher without a ready default delivery platform. Like Apple, Google will be sure to dangle carrots in front of app developers in order to encourage them to create for the Android platform.

I have about a couple of weeks to make a decision if I want to participate in the first-day euphoric rush at the Apple Store. If I decide to pass, I’ll consign myself to searching the news every day for announcements about the HTC Dream and enviously watching friends play with the iPhone 3G in the meantime.

I just noticed this past week that Google Docs (word processor, spreadsheet and now presentations, or, to use file extensions almost everyone knows now: doc, xls and ppt) now allows you to work on your docs offline - like if you’re on a plane or in the BART tube - and then synch up later when a connection becomes available (unfortunately, it hasn’t been rolled out to any of my accounts yet). Although Google Docs are still a bit clumsy, this is yet another step towards a serious step on Microsoft’s turf.

Price? Either free, or $50 per user per year for more advanced features and more storage. A bargain compared to Microsoft’s Office bundle, which, by the way, added very little except for confusion in their most recent update. (Kevin notes, though, that in the new version of Excel, you have more than 1 million rows at your disposal, instead of less than 66,000).

At the same time, Google Docs still has a way to go on the way to completely supplanting Excel, Word and PowerPoint. Sophisticated graphs with trend lines, pivot tables, advanced sorting - these are missing in Google Spreadsheets, for example (and I use them fairly often, personally). However, what they lack in functionality, they make up for in shareability and easy collaboration. Kevin and I share Google docs with each other all the time; it certainly is easier than emailing updated versions of the same document back and forth. And most of the time, the limited functionality of a Google doc is all we need.

So what’s Microsoft to do? The same thing it did with Netscape - copy the competition, fast. TechCrunch reported over a month ago that Microsoft’s going to be moving many of its applications online, using a Salesforce.com-like subscription model for usage.

Is it too late? Probably not. The fact is that the majority of business and home users are still comfortable and familiar with Microsoft’s UI (although they kind of shot themselves in the foot with the most recent scrambling of their menus). Provided it’s priced right and that it retains most of the useful functionality of the pure-offline product (something that might be possible with Silverlight, which will probably add more power than Flash and Ajax), Microsoft can probably retain its dominant position. There’s a lot to be said for inertia as well; corporate customers are the least likely to try to rock the boat and switch away from a software library that their users know.

But Google moves fast, and Microsoft is ponderously slow. It’s time for the behemoth from Redmond to pick up its game.

The Economist had a feature recently on how mobile technology is enabling a nomad-like work culture. Blackberries, Wi-Fi availability in Starbucks and other cafes, and lightweight laptops are allowing people to conduct work while being on the move, even to the point of obviating the need for an office. Coburn Ventures completely lacks a formal office; team members typically meet in an coffee shop to touch base before heading out to meet with clients.

I personally consider myself a member of this group - I have long blurred the line between work and home, never really striking that fabled “work and life balance”, but, importantly, I have never really minded. This article was reassuring; there are lots of people like me.

Here are a couple of blogs that chronicle this trend:

• Digital Nomads
• Life Nomadic

Over the past couple of months, I’ve suddenly enjoyed some of the features available on my Blackberry Pearl, including apps for Twitter, Facebook, and Google Chat and Gmail. I’ve taken pictures and posted them immediately to Facebook, and updated my moves around town via Twitter (which updates my Facebook status), and carried on work-related chats as I’ve sat in doctors’ waiting rooms.

One consequences of this hyperconnectivity, though, is its tendency to enhance isolation. With such a huge amount of information available, you have to limit the sphere you’re exposed to, to a small number of friends you already know. You couldn’t possibly follow hundreds of people via Twitter & Facebook and get work done.

Like blogs and recommendations on iTunes and Netflix, the ability to channel your life’s information feed to exactly what you like and preferences, it is very easy to avoid any sort of exposure to something truly novel (even if that’s because you’re completely unlikely to like it).

Think of it in terms of Chrismas presents, too - 20 years ago, we got ugly sweaters we would never wear. Now we get gift cards, which almost never go to waste. But we miss out on those rare gems of gifts that we would have never known about because it wouldn’t have ever nomally crossed our personal attention horizon.

From the Economist article:

Sociologists in particular are trying to figure out how mobile communications are changing interactions between people. Nomadism, most believe, tends to bring people who are already close, such as family members, even closer. But it may do so at the expense of their attentiveness towards strangers encountered physically (rather than virtually) in daily life. That has implications for society at large.

So does technology’s ability to personalize one’s experience and liberate us from the confines of a cubicle and commute also limit the sort of exposure to true novelty that’s necessary for the creative impulse?