Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Craig Wortmann on Being an Entrepreneur

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

Virtually anyone can be an entrepreneur, although starting one’s own business is a giant leap.  Many people look at becoming an entrepreneur as a cause and effect – the academic term being “causal logic”.  That may not be the optimal way to view entrepreneurship, however.  Rather, the world’s most successful entrepreneurs use effectual logic.  According to Craig Wortmann, Clinical Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, “It goes like this:  I’m an entrepreneur, I’ve got this idea, I’ve got this limited set of resources and I’m just going to begin, and I’m not exactly sure what the effect will be.”  Wortmann has more than 20 years of experience in entrepreneurial sales and marketing strategy experience.

According to Wortmann, this is a powerful way to think about entrepreneurship because the concept has such an underlying vibe of optimism.  This notion of entrepreneurship is just start the business, anyone can do it.  They are all personality types; they don’t have to be deep in domain knowledge.  Anyone can start a business.  The research suggests that as long as people are not rigid about reaching a certain outcome, they will be successful.

Wortmann asks budding entrepreneurs to think about the idea they have and ask what is the relative value to the idea.  He believes that many people get stuck as entrepreneurs because they say “I can’t be an entrepreneur because I don’t have the next Google.  I’m not waking up in the middle of the night with the next idea for Facebook.”  Any idea that will change the focus of people or get them to do something better or a bit different – you have a potential business.

Would-be entrepreneurs need to begin taking action.  They need to talk to potential customers and partners, and start to formulate a product or service to offer to people.  Chances are the fledgling entrepreneur will be rejected; there is no question about that.  But if they keep embracing that chaos and making contact with the market, things will begin to take shape.  They need to get out there and realize that they are the structure and the process.

The challenge for entrepreneurs can be maintaining momentum.  If it’s the product, stay close to the product.  If it’s the people, get out into the market, meet people and maintain energy.  According to Wortmann, “One of the things I like to talk to students about:  is shutting down a business failure?  It is in a way, but we’re all on a journey and that’s just a chapter.  In a microcosm, it is a failure.  But is it really a failure if you take those lessons and start something new or go back to a big company and leverage all those things you learned?  That looks like success to me.”

To listen to Craig Wortmann’s full interview on entrepreneurship, click here.

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Is the Motorola Mobility-Google Marriage Made in Heaven?

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

Google’s recently announced $12.5 billion acquisition of Chicago-based mobile phone maker Motorola Mobility could be different if Google CEO Larry Page keeps his promise to run the acquisition as “an independent business.”  “If you believe what they say, they’re going to leave the company alone and let it do what it has been doing,” said Steven Kaplan, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.  “If anything, maybe they would move resources here because the tech talent is less expensive and our taxes are lower (than California’s).”

There remains the question of the economic impact of the sale on Chicago’s economy, especially in northwest suburban Libertyville, IL, where Motorola Mobility has its sprawling campus.  If Google retains Motorola Mobility’s Illinois workforce, the move will represent a win for the state, giving it the bragging rights that come with being part of one of the world’s wealthiest and most entrepreneurial companies.  If Google moves Motorola Mobility to California, it will be a blow to Chicago’s northwest suburbs, where many of Mobility’s employees live.

Motorola Mobility has deep roots in the Chicago area, which go back to the 1928 founding of Galvin Manufacturing Corp. in Chicago.  The company, which was rechristened Motorola, pioneered early televisions and two-way radios during the World War II years.  Motorola helped lay the foundation for the mobile-phone industry, and demonstrated its original handset in 1973.  “Motorola was a pioneer in this business,” said Will Strauss, an analyst at Tempe, AZ-based Forward Concepts Co.  “They certainly have a lot of intellectual property.  It will certainly level the playing ground quite a bit. It’s going to give them an awful lot to defend Android with.” 

One reason for the purchase is the patents that Google will acquire as part of the acquisition.  Google pointed to patent disputes as important in its agreement to buy Motorola Mobility.  Apple, the iPhone’s manufacturer, and Microsoft, which created Windows Phone software, have targeted phones that run on Google’s Android system.  Lacking its own trove of patents to vie with Apple, Microsoft and other companies, Google and its hardware partners were targeted by suits aimed at slowing the adoption of Android smart phones.  Adding Motorola Mobility, with 17,000 patents, which has been inventing mobile-phone technology since the industry began, may help Google stanch the onslaught.

“The analogy to a nuclear arms race and mutually assured destruction is compelling,” said Ron Laurie, managing director of Inflexion Point Strategy LLC, which counsels companies on purchasing intellectual property.  Google and its rivals “look pretty evenly matched at the moment.  Google may have become a patent superpower.”

Google plans to continue to license its Android system to other smart phone makers, such as HTC, Samsung and LG. ”Many hardware partners have contributed to Android’s success and we look forward to continuing to work with all of them,” according to Page.  According to analysts, the Motorola deal is likely to help Google expedite its innovation in smart phones and tablets.

Bernstein Research analyst Pierre Ferragu believes the acquisition was “solely driven by the ongoing patent war and is an unambiguous positive for the Android ecosystem.  It is in the interest of Google to continue to offer a fully open Android platform with equal access to all manufacturers.  For Google, there is much more value in securing a major market share for Android than favoring Motorola against HTC and Samsung,” Ferragu wrote.

 Writing in The Business Insider, Henry Blodget predicts that the deal will be a “colossal disaster.”  According to Blodget, there are multiple reasons why this venture will fail.  “Google is a massive global software company with huge profit margins, genius engineers, extraordinarily high pay scales, and a near-monopoly on the most amazing advertising business the world has ever seen.  Motorola is a has-been, low-margin, global hardware-manufacturing business that operates at break-even, has 19,000 employees — 19,000!  Motorola, in other words, is a VAST company, one that will increase the size of Google by a staggering 60+ percent.  Mergers of this size rarely work well (or smoothly), even when managed by companies that are very experienced at making huge acquisitions (which Google isn’t).  Motorola does not have dominant share of the key businesses Google is buying: smart phones, tablets, and TV gadgets.  This means it does not have the weight necessary to push anyone around.  For example, Motorola only has a small slice of market share (10 percent) in its key business (smart-phones).   It’s nowhere in tablets.  The only way to make decent money in the hardware business is to have real leverage, and Motorola doesn’t have it.  The only thing that Google and Motorola have in common is that they are loosely considered ‘technology’ businesses.  This is not enough commonality for a massive merger like this to be a success without heroic integration efforts.  (Think AOL-Time Warner).”

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Google+ Off to a Good Start – Will It Last?

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

Just one month into its launch, Google+ has seen extraordinary growth, netting some 20 million unique visitors.  Still, it faces several key challenges before it can become the dominant force in social media.  Online metrics company ComScore said that of the 20 million users, five million of those are from the United States.  “Google+ is on an unprecedented growth trajectory over its first three weeks, reaching 20 million visitors faster than any site in recent memory,” Comscore Vice President Andrew Lipsman said.  The estimate comes a week after Google CEO Larry Page said that the company already had accumulated 10 million registered users. While registered users and unique visitors are not necessarily the same thing, that growth has been nothing short of impressive.

While the rate of growth is unparalleled, the social network is still small when compared with its rivals such as Facebook and Twitter, which have 750 million and 200 million registered users, respectively.  Google+’s success will depend on how Google “converts this strong trial base into regular users,” Lipsman warned.  While competitors Facebook and Twitter have become online destinations in themselves; more than 50 percent of traffic coming to Google+ is initiated by visits to Google or Gmail, according to Experian HitWise.  YouTube is a significant referrer.

Writing on the DVice website, Raymond Wong says that “Google+, the new guy on the social networking scene isn’t doing too bad.  After Google CEO Larry Page announced last week that Google+ had 10 million users in a mere two weeks, it appears they’ve added another 10 million users.  Talk about being the hottest thing in town.  People said that Google couldn’t build a social network that anybody would give two cents about, but somehow they’ve managed to do just that.  According to an independent comScore report, the new Google+ social network has hit 20 million unique visitors in three weeks.  Some have called Google+ a Facebook rip-off.  Some have joined simply to see what the buzz is all about, much like how everybody started Google and for a brief moment in time and then disappeared into oblivion. For now, none of that matters.  Google+ is gaining more users everyday, and Google is sure to be super excited by all the signups.”

“So while we have a lot of work still to do, we are really excited about our progress with Google+,” Page said, noting that Google will re-focus on its core products and on new innovations.  “Google+ is also a great example of another focus of mine — beautiful products that are simple and intuitive to use and was actually was one of the first products to contain our new visual redesign.”  Google+ isn’t Google’s first expedition into the world of social media and its excitement over having 20 million Google+ users may be early.  Google introduced Google Buzz in February 2010 and immediately saw user numbers swell; it was later panned.

Reports are that Google will, unlike Facebook, host games on its own servers — this could make them faster and less prone to glitches.  The Google+ code mentions a gaming platform, and the company has reportedly invested as much as $200 million in the leading social gaming company Zynga.  There has been no official announcement about if and when the Google game platform will launch or how it will be designed.

Facebook is still beating Google+ in time spent on a social network.  HitWise research director Heather Dougherty said the average visit time for Google+ is five minutes and 50 seconds, compared with almost 22 minutes on Facebook.  Dougherty also examined how users arrived at Google+.  Google.com (at 34 percent) and Gmail (at 26 percent) account for 50 percent of all traffic to Google+; another six percent come from YouTube and Google Profiles.  Facebook ranked third among websites visited immediately prior to Google+, an indication that many social-network users have multiple accounts.  Google+ ranks as the 42nd most visited social networking site in the United States, and was the 638th most visited website.  Broken down by region, most of Google+ visitors are from Los Angeles, New York City and San Francisco (in descending order).

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Facebook Is Worth $50 Billion? Anyone Remember the Dotcom Bubble?

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

Could social media be the victim of the next dot.com bubble? Although Facebook has been valued at $50 billion – more than Yahoo!, eBay, and Time Warner and butting heads with such giants as Amazon and Google, there is some question about what the valuation is based on.  According to Newsweek, “Some media experts have compared Facebook with Disney, valued at about $70 billion.  But Disney has real, tangible assets – parks, hotels, cruise ships, iconic images to market on everything from T-shirts to tableware, and a massive library of classic animated films – to back its assessed value.  Facebook has a virtual network that, according to Time, links one-twelfth of the world’s population.  However, according to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook still has enormous infrastructure costs that include as much as $700 million for two data centers, and its profits have yet to be publicly disclosed.  When an investor buys a piece of Facebook, what exactly does that investor get?  The sudden, meteoric explosion in value of online social media sites like Facebook and Twitter is eerily reminiscent of the rise about 15 years ago of the online businesses that created the ‘dotcom bubble.’”

On the PBS Newshour,  Ray Suarez interviewed Josh Bernoff, a senior vice president of Forrester Research, who has written two books on social media.  According to Bernoff, “I certainly think that there’s no rational way to understand these valuations.  I want to be clear here.  Social is very exciting.  There’s a lot of business perspective, a lot of optimism that goes along with it.  But I think these valuations are based on where people think the next buyer will come from and not on where the actual revenues of these companies are going.”  Earlier this year, Microsoft bought Skype for $6.5 billion, although its revenues are less than $1 billion a year.  When LinkedIn went public, it was valued at $9 billion.  Its profits are just $12 million annually.

According to Experience:  The Blog “The dot-com crash of 2000 was devastating.  Even now, 11 years later, the NASDAQ Composite is just a hair over half of where it stood in March 2000.  The crash caused the loss of $5 trillion in market value, huge numbers of people lost their jobs, and the facade of most of those dot-com millionaires crumbled as their paper wealth evaporated.  (To me, the insanity of the dot-com craze is demonstrated by a single story told to me by a now-successful exec in a social enterprise company.  Back in 2000, he ran a tiny startup that got caught up in the dot-com hysteria; at one point it hit a market cap of $1 billion but was generating just $60,000 of revenue.)  I am taking you on this trip down Memory Lane for a reason:  It’s happening again.  Investors in social media startups are looking to cash in, and valuations are soaring despite modest to no profits.  Recently, Airbnb, a site that allows people to arrange short-term vacation rentals of rooms, homes and apartments, received a round of funding based on a $1 billion valuation.  While the company has not released financials, best guess estimates are that Airbnb only generates around $10 million of revenue.  To put this into perspective, Marriott has $12 billion in revenue and a market cap of $14 billion.”

The Next Web disagrees with predictions of a second dotcom bubble.  “Dotcom 2.0 is much stronger than its predecessor.  People are more technologically savvy and, crucially, broadband and smart phones are approaching ubiquity.  The world is switched-on, tuned-in and can’t get enough Internet.  Technological advances aside, the one thing that will ensure we don’t see another dotcom disaster is social media marketing.  The key to success this time lies in finding ways to monetize the many ventures – it’s understood that driving traffic isn’t enough, which is why Twitter is actively seeking ways to drive its revenue.  In fact, Twitter may make as much as $150 million this year, according to some reports.  There’s no question there are a lot of over-valued companies out there at the moment; some will undoubtedly crumble and some will flourish. But Dotcom 2.0 isn’t a bubble, and it won’t burst.”

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Google Goes Green

Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

Google and SolarCity,  a rooftop solar-panel company announced a $280 million investment deal,  the largest such deal for home-based solar power systems in the United States.  The investment gives San Mateo, CA-based SolarCity the funding to build and lease solar power systems to as many as 7,000 to 9,000 homeowners in the 10 states in which it operates.

Established in 2006, SolarCity currently has 15,000 solar projects around the nation completed or under way.  Customers who want to have the firm’s solar system installed at their homes can pay for it up front; however, the majority let SolarCity retain ownership of the equipment and rent back the use of it through monthly solar lease payments.  By financing SolarCity, Google will recoup its investment through those lease payments.  “We hope to be seen as a model,”said Rick Needham, Google’s director of green business operations.  Needham didn’t discuss the deal’s terms, but said “these investments are designed to earn us a good return on our capital.”

“It allows us to put our capital to work in a way that is very important to the founders and to Google, and we found a good business model to support,” said Google’s Joel Conkling.  Google CEO Larry Page wants the firm’s operations to eventually produce no-net greenhouse gas emissions.  To achieve this, Google has invested in wind farms in North Dakota, California and Oregon, solar projects in California and Germany, and the beginning stages of a transmission system off the East coast to encourage the construction of offshore wind farms.  The SolarCity deal is Google’s seventh green energy investment, totaling more than $680 million.

Typically, a rooftop solar system costs $25,000 to $30,000, which is beyond the means of many homeowners.  Instead, solar providers like SolarCity, SunRun and Sungevity pay for the system with money borrowed from a bank or a specially-designed fund similar to the one that Google has created.  The resident then pays a set rate for the power generated which is lower than or approximately the same as local electricity.  Typically, s 5-kilowatt system will generate 7,000 kilowatt-hours of power annually, or about 60 percent of the household’s annual use.  The homeowner buys remaining electric power from the local utility, typically enjoys lower overall power bills and has some protection against potentially higher traditional electricity prices.  Electricity prices have not risen in recent months, but are expected to rise in coming years as the cost of increasingly stringent clean-air regulations are passed on to customers.  If the solar company is to make money and the homeowner save money, there must be a combination of high local electric rates, state and local subsidies, as well as low installation costs.  Then there is the matter of sunshine.  A house with solar panels should have a roof that faces South that is not shaded by trees or other buildings.

“You have full flexibility in what you want to pay on a monthly basis,” said SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive, who pointed out that homeowners are charged only for the electricity the company’s solar panels generate at or below market rates.  If the panels produce more power than the home uses, the consumer gets a credit.  “It’s actually a win-win,” Rive said.  “This industry is going gangbusters despite the economy,” said Danny Kennedy, founder of Oakland-based Sungevity.  According to Kennedy, the lease option his company started offering in March 2010 has pushed sales “through the roof.”  He expects to complete 30,000 leases in 2011, up from 10,000 in 2010.

California and Colorado accounted for more than a third of the residential solar market leases in the 1st quarter of 2011, according to a report from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA).  The growth reflects that of the overall solar panel market, which expanded at an average annual rate of 69 percent since 2000, including 100 percent in 2010, according to SEIA, which expects the market to double this year.

Google has chosen to invest in clean energy projects because of the potential returns and the potential to impact the industry.   “We hope that Google’s leadership in the space will encourage other corporate investors,” Rive said.  There definitely is room for other investors to get involved: Fewer than 0.1 percent of American homes currently have rooftop solar panels, but that number is expected to grow to 2.4 percent by 2020, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. It’s highly likely that Google-financed companies like SolarCity will have a role in that growth.

The SolarCity project is not Google’s first venture into the clean energy market.  The firm has invested $168 million in California’s Ivanpah solar farm and another $100 million in the world’s biggest wind farm.  That is the $2 billion Shepherds Flat project,  near Arlington, OR, that will stretch over 77 square kilometers of north-central Oregon and generate enough energy for 235,000 homes.  The project, which will go into operation in 2012, is being developed by Caithness Energy.

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Is a Dot.Berlin Internet Domain In Our Future?

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

The dot.com era is moving on.  Websites will soon be able to end with anything from “.shop” to “.canon” after the group that manages Internet addresses approved the historic change.  The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which until previously allowed just 22 suffixes including “.com” and “.org,” will accept almost any word in any language.  The move could prevent cybersquatting, the practice of registering domain names and selling them to trademark owners, often for big bucks.  Big business may have to buy addresses to prevent their brands from being hijacked, which costs $500,000 per company, according to an estimate from the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse.

“Today’s decision will usher in a new Internet age,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of ICANN’s Board of Directors, said in the statement.  “We have provided a platform for the next generation of creativity and inspiration.”  Applications for custom suffixes, which will cost $185,000, are not inexpensive and the first of these “top level domain names” won’t go live until the end of next year, said Adrian Kinderis, a member of Icann’s advisory council.  Canon, Deloitte and Hitachi Ltd., are some of the companies that are interested in company domain names, while generic names will be auctioned to the highest bidders, Kinderis said.

“Icann has opened the internet’s addressing system to the limitless possibilities of the human imagination,” said Rod Beckstrom, president and chief executive officer for ICANN.  “No one can predict where this historic decision will take us.”  There is the possibility that several hundred new generic top-level domain names (gTLDs) will be created, which could include such addresses as .google, .coke, or even .BBC.  At present, there are just 22 gTLDs, as well as approximately 250 country-level domain names such as .uk or .de.  According to industry analysts, it’s a price that global giants might be willing to pay to maximize their internet presence.  The money will cover costs incurred by ICANN in developing the new gTLDs and using experts to scrutinize the thousands of expected applications.

Companies and organizations that want one of the new gTLDs will have to meet high technical standards, according to Bruce Tonkin, chief strategy officer at Melbourne IT, a domain registry service.  “You need IT robustness and you need intellectual property protections beyond what is available in the dot com space.  You have to have 24/7 abuse team.  You have to have mechanisms where a trademark holder has first right to get their name,” he said.  The higher standards, Tonkin said, translate to an extremely rigorous application process.  “Using a real estate analogy, it would be roughly the equivalent of getting approval to build a skyscraper.”

Japanese electronics giant, Canon, plans to apply for rights to use domain names ending with dot-canon.  Berlin, Germany, has expressed interest in a dot.berlin suffix.  Other suffixes could organize the Internet by language, geography or industry.  According to Brad White, ICANN’s director of global media affairs, opening the Internet address system will have far-reaching social and commercial impact.  “It will afford a possibility for innovation, creativity, branding and marketing.  We can’t fully predict the impact that this change will have, but we know it will have tremendous impact, in much the same way that nobody could predict social media.  Nobody could predict the popularity of Skype.  No one could predict the popularity of Facebook or Twitter. What we have done is removed a barrier to innovation,” White said.  “One of the biggest changes that this will mean to the Internet is an expansion of the use of non-Latin characters.  So, people who speak Cyrillic, or Arabic or Chinese can now use their own generic top-level domains at the end of an Internet address.  It will vastly, we believe, increase the number of Internet users.”

“Brands need to act now if they want to apply for one of these new domain names as it is not as simple as registering a .com address. ICANN’s application fee is $185,000 USD and the application process is complex, requiring a submission which will run into hundreds of pages. Many companies will engage with a specialist to help them apply and manage their new TLD,” said Theo Harakis, chief executive of Melbourne IT Digital Brand Services.  Sebastian Bachollet, an ICANN board member, expresses confidence with the decision.  “Some people feel that the new gTLDs will cause confusion…I trust we have the tools to ensure the phase of stress will be brief,” Bachollet said.

ICANN’s announcement that it is setting aside $2 million to help developing countries is little consolation for the pay-to-play nature of the process.  According to ICANN, it expects as many as a thousand applications, mostly from recognized companies and brands.  Eric Mack in PC World says that “It appears that the greatest expansion of the domain name system is a big win for big business, amounting to the digital codification of today’s corporate giants.  But won’t it seem a little silly if, in five years, Canon, is part of a merger or undergoes a name change, or disappears from our lexicon for some other reason — and one of the world’s newest domain endings becomes worthless overnight?”

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Facebook May Breach the Great Firewall of China

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

Social networking could gain 1.3 billion new users if a deal goes through that will introduce Facebook to China.  Facebook Inc. has signed an agreement with Baidu, Inc.  a search engine company, to create a social-networking website in China.  “We are currently studying and learning about China, as part of evaluating any possible approaches that could benefit our users, developers and advertisers,” Palo Alto, CA- based Facebook said.

The arrangement follows several recent meetings in China between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Baidu CEO Robin Li.  The Baidu website would not be incorporated with Facebook’s international service, and a potential launch date is “not confirmed.”  Facebook said it is “currently studying and learning about China, as part of evaluating any possible approaches that could benefit our users, developers and advertisers.”  By entering the Chinese market, where the world’s most popular social-networking service is currently banned, Facebook would gain access to the nation’s nearly 500 million Internet users.

According to Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry of MSNBC Business Insider, “The deal makes sense for both sides. On Facebook’s side, it needs a big local partner to break into the huge Chinese market. On Baidu’s side, it is threatened by social network juggernaut Tencent, and it might be a safer bet to build a social network with one of the most successful social companies in the world than to try to build its own.”

Baidu, which is China’s largest search engine, wants to provide more social networking opportunities in China.  The impediment has been the Chinese State, which owns the “Great Firewall of China” and has blocked sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.  Google removed its search engine last year.

Writing on the website Digital Trend, Molly McHugh is curious about how Facebook can compete if it enters the Chinese market.  “Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009, when riots in the country’s Xinjiang region led to severe crackdowns on Internet use.  Since then, statements from Chinese officials and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have hinted at the possibility of cooperation between the two, if a compromise between the nation’s overbearing censorship and Facebook’s ‘openness’ can be reached.  Now it looks as though something is going on.  What exactly that may be is still up in the air, but numerous reports say Facebook is working with China to come up with a solution.

“According to Marbridge Consulting, as well as a few blogs,” according to McHugh, “a post on Sina Weibo from Hu Yan Ping, the founder of a Chinese market research firm claims that Facebook will be collaborating with Baidu to build an entirely new social networking site.  Ping wrote, ‘Facebook really is about to enter China, the agreement is signed.  A domestic website will work with Facebook to create a new site.  This new site is not interlinked with Facebook.com.  The question is, will this live or die in China?’”

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Posted in General, Industrial | 1 Comment »

Google Partners to Create Mid-Atlantic Offshore Wind Farm Transmission Grid

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

Google is expanding into offshore wind farm transmission grid. Google is expanding its horizons by partnering with Good Energies, a New York-based investment firm that specializes in renewable energy, to create a $5 billion, 350-mile-long transmission grid to support offshore wind farms along the Atlantic Seaboard.

Each of the two firms has agreed to take 37.5 percent of the equity portion of the project – named the Atlantic Wind Connection — and are looking for additional investors.  Trans-Elect, a Maryland-based transmission-line company, hopes to begin grid construction as soon as 2013.

“Conceptually, it looks to me to be one of the most interesting transmission projects that I’ve ever seen walk through the door,” according to Jeff Wellinghoff, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which administers interstate electricity transmission.  “It provides a gathering point for offshore wind for multiple projects up and down the coast.”  The proposed grid will have a capacity of 6,000 megawatts, the equivalent of five large nuclear power plants.  The system will be located in shallow trenches on the seabed in federal waters just 15 to 20 miles offshore and stretch from northern New Jersey to Norfolk, VA.  It will harvest power from wind turbines situated where the winds are strong and the towers will be largely out of sight.  Richard L. Needham, director of Google’s green business operations group, described the plan as “innovative and audacious.  It’s an opportunity to kick-start this industry and, long term, provide a way for the mid-Atlantic states to meet their renewable energy goals.”

Trans-Elect says that the first phase – stretching from northern New Jersey, to Rehoboth Beach, DE – could be completed by 2016, with the rest of the system becoming operational in 2021.  Using offshore wind to generate electricity is more expensive than coal, natural gas or onshore wind, though experts predict offshore turbines will be used more frequently to meet state requirements for locally generated renewable energy.  James J. Hoecker, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, described the Atlantic transmission grid as “a necessary piece of what the Eastern governors have been talking about in terms of taking advantage of offshore wind.”

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Yahoo! Planning a New Corporate Home

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Yahoo wins approval for a new corporate campus in Santa Clara, CA. Advance planning has put the heavily trafficked Internet destination and online media company Yahoo! in a sound position to develop a planned 3,000,000 SF campus in a high-profile location in Santa Clara, CA.  Yahoo! purchased the 48-acre site in 2006 – well before the financial crisis and increased competition from Google and Facebook.  Although no construction start date has been announced, Yahoo!’s plans have won the approval of the Santa Clara City Council, which certified the environmental impact report and the development agreement.

Currently based in Sunnyvale, CA, Yahoo! plans to develop 13 six-story office and R&D buildings; three two-story common buildings; and two levels of underground parking at the site.  When completed, the campus will accommodate as many as 12,000 employees.  According to Yahoo!, the development would consolidate its employees and facilities in a Silicon Valley region with “high corporate visibility”.  The development agreement gives Yahoo! the authority to build at the site for as long as 20 years.

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Posted in Development, Office | No Comments »