VivaBusiness 2.0

Big news just came across my inbox, hence the big photo: US Airways is now serving pie to first class customers starting this month!

It never ceases to amaze me how big a deal travel companies make out of small perks that aren't all that likely to make a difference in the business traveler experience. Don't get me wrong - I'm into pie (and maybe that explains why I took so long picking out a Flickr photo of flaky pastry...The above photo is thanks to aricee) But a piece of pie lasts all of about five minutes. What I'd love to see from airlines is a real commitment to improving customer service, which includes handling delays and cancellations with more organization, and coming as close as possible to eliminating the problem of lost luggage. That's not so hard, is it?

Apparently it is. USA Today reported yesterday that yet another plane full of passengers was stranded for more than eight hours on April 24. The 200 passengers aboard American Airlines Flight 556 sat on the tarmac in Midland, TX, and shared about 70 slices of pizza that were delivered to the plane, 30 bags of chips and a small quantity of water. The airline has since apologized and sent the passengers $500 vouchers.

Forget about pie on a plane. How about some emergency food supplies?

If you don't yet know Farecast, now's a good time to check it out.

Farecast is an airfare prediction site that recommends whether you should buy a ticket or wait for the fare to decrease based on an analysis of historical price data. For $10 you can protect a fare from rising by purchasing a fare guard. If the price does go up, Farecast pays you the difference.



Early this morning Farecast emerged from beta with some tweaked search features that are sure to please its fans.  Flight searches now include one-way and multi-city routes, nearby airports and an option to choose your preferred class. You can also now weed out red-eye flights, long layovers, short connections or mixed cabins. Another small, but no less significant, addition is the ability to see how many seats are available on each flight.

Farecast's news today also came with a bit of fanfare - Navigant Consulting apparently looked at 44,000 predictions that the site made between January 1 and March 31, and decided that Farecast is accurate about 75 percent of the time.

Assuming Navigant's correct, I can't help but wonder if that vote of confidence will stay the same this summer with high fuel prices and and fierce competition among the airlines potentially making fares even more unpredictable. We shall see...

In another big boost for the economic viability of large-scale solar power plants, California utility PG&E said today it will buy an additional 1,000 megawatts of solar thermal power over the next five years. That’s on top of the gigawatt the utility already has committed to purchase.

"PG&E (PCG) has identified solar thermal technology as a reliable energy source that can provide millions of American electric customers with some of the cleanest and most cost-effective renewable energy," said PG&E CEO Peter Darbee in a statement. A 1,000 megawatts  of solar electricity would power about 750,000 homes, according to PG&E.

One likely beneficiary PG&E's pledge is Silicon Valley solar startup Ausra. The company, backed by green investor Vinod Khosla and venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, has been negotiating with PG&E to build solar power plants for the utility. Ausra executive vice president John O’Donnell declined to comment on the status of those negotiations.

So far PG&E has signed a deal for a 553-megawatt plant with Israeli solar company Solel and is continuing to negotiate a 500-megawatt deal with BrightSource Energy, the Oakland, California-based company founded by solar pioneer Arnold Goldman. Today’s commitment, made at the  Clinton Global Initiative summit in New York City, would make PG&E the nation’s largest solar utility, putting it ahead of California utilities Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE). The announcement comes as Florida utility FPL (FPL) said it will spend $1.5 billion over the next seven years to build solar thermal power plants, including a 300-megawatt power station using Ausra’s technology.

In a sign that Big Solar is moving beyond the California desert, Florida utility FPL says it will spend $1.5 billion over the next seven years to build solar power plants in the Sunshine State. That includes a 300-megawatt solar power station using technology developed by Ausra, the Silicon Valley startup backed by green energy investor Vinod Khosla and venture capital powerhouse Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.

“It has been widely believed that big solar power was economically viable in the U.S. only in the Southwest, and much of the institutionalized resistance to changing direction has come from the Southeast, an area thought to be renewables-poor,” Ausra executive vice president John O’Donnell told Green Wombat. “The FPL announcement lays down a marker that we can do renewables in the Southeast as well. Florida has perhaps the most at stake in climate change, with about 40 percent of its land mass due for submersion this century in the `business as usual case.’”

FPL (FPL) chairman Lewis Hayes echoed that sentiment. “Florida has much at stake with global warming,” he said in a statement. “FPL Group has evaluated Ausra’s new
solar thermal technology, and we view this breakthrough technology as a promising option to  make solar energy an economically sound addition to our power generation going forward.”

The utility will first build a 10-megawatt solar power plant with Ausra’s solar thermal technology, which uses long flat mirrors to focus the sun’s rays on tubes of water suspended over the arrays. The superheated water creates steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine. FPL is veteran solar power operator and currently runs seven solar power plants built in California’s Mojave Desert in the 1980s.

Ausra and FPL did not announce any specific contract today, a sign that a final agreement has not been signed. Such a deal would be a big boost to Ausra, which also has been negotiating with California utility PG&E (PCG). Ausra chairman David Mills told Green Wombat the company will soon file a development application with the California Energy Commission to build a 175-megawatt solar power station. To date, PG&E and California utilities Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric have signed deals to buy nearly 3 gigawatts of solar thermal electricity.

FPL also said it will spend $500 million to construct a smart metering network that will allow consumers to go online and monitor their electricity consumption in real time. The hope is that such a metering widget will encourage people to conserve electricity – and save money – by running energy-hogging appliances when demand is low.

Despite the confident predictions that Apple (AAPL) would announce something in Paris on Sept. 20 -- or Sept. 24, at the latest. Despite the 70,000 Parisians and other visitors expected this week at Apple's largest trade show in Europe. Despite the fact that France Télécom CEO Didier Lombard told a reporter in Hanoi last week that he and Apple had a deal (which led InformationWeek to run a headline that read Apple's iPhone is Launched In France, Via Vietnam.)

Despite all this, Steve Jobs is not at the 2007 Apple Expo in Paris and neither is the iPhone. And it now seems likely that the annual trade show, which opened on Tuesday and ends on Saturday, will come and go without a word from either Apple or Orange about their plans to roll out the iPhone in France. (Requests for comment from Apple have not yet been answered.)

"Could it be," writes Victoria Shannon in today's International Herald Tribune, "that there actually is no deal with Orange, which is owned by France Télécom?"

Shannon's piece explores several speculative theories -- including possible pique in Cupertino over passage last year of France's so-called iPod Law -- before settling on what is likely the real explanation:

It is probably that Apple and Orange simply have not yet come to terms on their business relationship over the iPhone. Maybe Orange is not willing to share as much revenue with Apple as O2 and T-Mobile are for the cachet of being the exclusive iPhone operator. (link)

Meanwhile, lacking an iPhone to pin it to, France's MacGeneration ended up bestowing its best-of-show award on the iPod Touch.

And although there were no iPhones on display at the big Apple booth that occupied center stage at the show, there were plenty to be seen on the floor of the Expo and on the boulevards of Paris, according to 9to5Mac:

If you come to Paris with an iPhone, don't expect anyone to be impressed.  Many have seen hundreds of them.  Every single one we've had the opportunity to inspect has been hacked. (link)

[Photo courtesy of 9to5Mac.]

Master Chief must fight alien invaders to save the planet, but Microsoft (MSFT) has a tougher opponent to contend with - Nintendo's cuddly, motion-controlled Wii.

Microsoft is banking that the hotly-anticipated Halo 3 will help Xbox 360 win the battle of the consoles war. The blockbuster game, which is exclusive to the Xbox 360 machine, generated an estimated $170 million in U.S. sales on its first day. The success of the first-person shooter hit will likely be enough for Xbox to outsell the immensely popular Wii for the first time this year.

"The 360 will hit at least 450,000 units this month. Xbox will outsell the Wii," says Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities. "Microsoft wants those bragging rights. They're very conscientious of the race."

• Using game design to build the next Digg or Flickr

Microsoft wasted no time in getting the smack down started. It paraded the fact that Halo 3 sales broke the record for most revenue earned in a day by an entertainment company, trumping both box office results for Spiderman 3 and book sales for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. At an average price of $70 per game, that translates to roughly 2.5 million copies sold or 12 times as many iPhones sold by Apple (APPL) in the first 24 hours. Total global sales for Halo's opening day will likely reach $250 million. (Update: Halo's worldwide sales reached more than $300 million for its first week.)
Halo 3 has been in development for three years, and its release comes at a critical time for the Redmond, Wash. company looking for a big platform driver. It took a hit this summer when it ordered a recall for hardware problems and set aside $1 billion to manage warranty extensions. Last month Microsoft dropped the price of the $399 Xbox by $50 to help boost stagnant sales.

"When Grand Theft Auto III came out in 2001, it was exclusive to PlayStation 2. It was immensely popular, and that gave the PS2 a lot of momentum. The thing that's missing on the PS3 today is that there's no really compelling software," says Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Lazard Capital Markets. "With a franchise like Halo, Microsoft has an opportunity to feed that virtual cycle."

Microsoft hopes the last chapter to the Halo trilogy will give gaming enthusiasts who haven't bought the 360 a reason to finally get off the couch and get one. Ten million own Xboxes, but can't join the 1 million who have already nerded away on XBox Live to play the multiplayer online version. Says Pachter, "There's a lot of guys who didn't want to spend $400 for the 360 when it launched, and now with the price cut and the new game, it's suddenly very appealing."

The Halo trilogy is a $1 billion franchise that Microsoft is positioning as the holiday season's hottest video game. Analysts estimate that Halo will sell over 10 million copies. However, H3 will soon get serious competition from Guitar Hero III, the multi-platform game that will be released Oct. 28.

Dell today said it will become the first computer maker to neutralize its greenhouse gas emissions. CEO Michael Dell announced a series of measures to shrink the company's carbon footprint and offset  its greenhouse gas emissions in 2008. Upping the ante, he challenged rivals like  Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) to follow Dell's (DELL) lead. Proclaiming a corporate commitment to carbon neutrality is all the rage these days and Dell joins tech giants like Google (GOOG), which has pledged to offset its greenhouse gas emissions by 2008. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley giants like Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Sun Microsystems (JAVA) have made public their carbon footprints.

Global warming talk, however, is cheap and Dell now needs to make good on its green words. The company reports its emissions to the Carbon Disclosure Project and data on its carbon footprint will be available Monday on the project's site, a Dell spokesperson told Green Wombat. Dell said it has already been taking action to reduce its electricity use, from automatically shutting down machinery at night to installing energy efficient lighting. Earlier this year it required its suppliers to determine their greenhouse gas emissions as a first step in taking carbon out of its supply chain - a strategy embraced by companies like Wal-Mart (WMT). It also issued a mandate that some suppliers switch to biodiesel to power part of their transportation fleets.

Dell said it will invest in renewable energy like wind power and offset its remaining C02 emissions by putting cash into projects that reduce the risk of global warming. "Dell is working with stakeholders to shape its offset strategy, which will help ensure that offsets are invested in projects that can be monitored and verified," the company said in a statement. "Projects will be evaluated for their long-term viability and assurance that the carbon savings are real."