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“I’m from Silicon Valley and I’ve worked with some very talented entrepreneurs in my lifetime,” explained Quinn, whose previous start-up Gyration was responsible for a patent in Nintendo’s “Wiimote” controller. “A couple years ago, I sensed this paradigm shift that we’re all feeling today.” He was referring to fossil fuel shortages and the rising cost of gasoline. With gas prices well over $3 per gallon, and no real middle ground in the market between industrial biofuels (there are still only 1,200 ethanol stations in the U.S., and only three in the entire state of New York) and “moonshining” operations that can be difficult and dangerous, he saw the opportunity to create the EFuel100.

“It’s almost third-grade science to make ethanol,” Quinn said. Anyone in the U.S. can obtain a license to produce alcohol, ethanol included.

Throughout the press conference on Thursday, Quinn reiterated that there’s nothing unusual about making car fuel in your backyard.

Now, he hopes ethanol can have a real revival.

What is it, exactly? It’s a home ethanol refinery. Connect it to a power source and a water source, add sugar “feedstock” and yeast or discarded alcohol (yes, that could mean last week’s tequila) and in a week it can produce 35 gallons of ethanol that Quinn said any
car can run on.

The E-Fuel Micro-Fueler, on display in New York. Click for photo gallery.

NEW YORK–”Henry Ford had it right all along,” E-Fuel founder and CEO Thomas Quinn declared, referring to the fact that many original Model T Ford automobiles ran on the ethanol, not gasoline. But that was before the era of Prohibition, which banned production of the biofuel along with other forms of alcohol.

“We’re already in the ethanol business,” he explained, gesturing to the bar at the back of the restaurant, “but we’re using it as a beverage drink.”

In a press event at Revel, a Meatpacking District restaurant that features a greenhouse-like roof and trees growing inside, Quinn and his fellow executives unveiled the EFuel100 MicroFueler. It looks like a cross between a gas pump and an old-fashioned refrigerator, it’ll cost $9,995, and it’ll be available for customers in the fourth quarter of 2008 (if all goes well).

E-Fuel’s executives have attempted to counter this rumor by saying that its sugar-based ethanol won’t hurt food prices because sugar is a surplus crop, and that sugar ethanol is inherently more efficient than corn. And it’s safe to make at home, because no combustion is involved.

But ethanol, for better or for worse, has gotten a bad rap. Some have connected rising food prices to the fact that corn-based ethanol means crops are going toward fuel rather than human consumption, and some reports have claimed that ethanol’s carbon footprint isn’t as “green” as it appears.

Jason posits that a Y!Phone priced at less than $300 with carrier incentives “could be the device that everyone truly wants.” However, he also points out that a winning product would need more “sex appeal” than the current 3G Windows Mobile phones. Most importantly, the Windows Mobile interface needs to be completely revamped to take on the iPhone and whatever the Google/open-source Android sect develops.

It’s a grand idea, but it’s hard to see Microsoft or Yahoo or the combined companies pulling it off in the near term. All the mobile device companies are learning from the iPhone, and will eventually come up with similar functionality. But duplicating the fit and finish of a Steve Jobs device will take way more than combining a reinvented Windows Mobile-Silverlight software, a redefined
Zune, and Yahoo and Microsoft services.

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ZDNet)

Read Jason’s post

Jason Perlow has come up with a suggestion for Microhoo–a Windows Mobile-based “Y!Phone” mated with a Wi-Fi-enabled Zune and some combination of Yahoo and MSN online services. Of course, it would also include a camera, a 3G wireless service and, as a differentiator from the
iPhone, an integrated slide-out keyboard and support for Microsoft applications.

Google is calling in its chips in its $1 billion investment in Time Warner’s AOL.

And last week, things apparently between the two companies seemed to get worse when Time Warner Chief Financial Officer John Martin said 28 minutes and 13 seconds into the company’s fourth-quarter Webcast conference call:

Last summer, Google announced it was considering writing down some of the value it had previously placed on its AOL investment. And when Google reported its fourth-quarter results late last month, the write-down figure came in at $726 million.

With the markets in the doldrums and AOL’s business continuing to take a beating, as evidenced in Time Warner’s fourth-quarter earnings report Wednesday, Google is looking for payback time.

The 2005 arrangement, not only included collaboration on advertising, instant messaging and video, but also gave Google “certain customary minority shareholder rights,” such as those related to any future sale or public offering of AOL.

We’re reviewing what we received and we’re evaluating our options. Those options include: preceding with the request, delaying the decision for sometime, or we can move ahead to potentially buy back Google’s stake at an appraised value, which would obviously be well below the value that was placed on at the time of the original investment.

The search giant, which struck the hefty deal back in 2005, gave it a 5 percent stake in AOL.

In other words, stay tuned for more to come…

At the end of last week, Google sent us a request to exercise their demand registration rights that it has for its 5 percent ownership stake in AOL.

My advice to the OtherInbox guys is to practice what you preach and set that notification service to “off” from the start.

One of the downfalls of conferences where you’re scrambling to cover things live is that you don’t actually get to test out the products you’re writing about. Between the spotty Internet connection and end of day fatigue, one company that I think deserved a little more of a look was OtherInbox, the service that helps you fight both bacn and spam from services you’ve sign up for.

Update: Good news on two fronts: the setting has now been set as opt-in when you sign up instead of automatically setting you up to get messages every day. Also, we’ve got 100 more invites to give out, so to get yours visit this page.

That small quibble aside, I’m loving the service. The same general thing can be had with Gmail and some smart filtering management, but it’s not nearly as sexy or easy to set up for someone like my mom, who could just keep her special OtherInbox address in a text file on her desktop and use it when needed.

Upon sign-up, OtherInbox automatically opts you in to get daily e-mail updates to the address you gave them, which is a problem the service was designed to stop.

A day later I’ve already run into one somewhat serious problem: upon sign-up, it automatically sets you up to receive daily notifications of your in-box status, even if there are no new messages. These go to the e-mail address you gave them when you registered. This means it’s actively continuing a problem it set out to solve.

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CNET Networks)

The good news is that you can tweak these notifications to only send you something when you get new messages. There’s also a slew of RSS feeds you can subscribe to that will deliver the new messages to your favorite reader for managing there.

Ever since Microsoft first stated its intention to purchase Yahoo in February, and Yahoo said no, it’s been a roller coaster as the deal goes through its on-again, off-again phases. On Monday’s edition of the Daily Debrief, I sat down with reporter Dawn Kawamoto to get the scoop on the latest news that Microsoft might again be interested in acquiring the company, or perhaps just the search portion.

In a one-two punch type of delivery system, investor Carl Icahn and Microsoft appear to have teamed up to oust Yahoo’s board. Kawamoto explains why this technique may be the most effective of all and why it could have broad appeal to shareholders. While Icahn has unveiled this portion of his plan, he has yet to name the members of the dissident slate. I hope everyone is still hanging on tight as our coaster has yet another hill to climb with the end of the ride nowhere in sight.

Co-founders Robert Hohman and Tim Besse, along with Barton, provided the seed funding for Sausalito, Calif.-based Glassdoor, and they received an additional $3 million from venture capital firm Benchmark Capital. Hohman (who is chief executive; Besse is marketing vice president) hopes the information will be unique enough to get by on advertising revenue.

Founded by veterans of Microsoft and Expedia (Rich Barton, the CEO of real estate site Zillow, is non-executive chairman) Glassdoor has a fairly simple goal: Make salary and workplace-quality information (the kind of stuff you’d love to have when you’re interviewing for a new job) as public as possible.

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Glassdoor.com)

I know this because of a start-up called Glassdoor.com. While Glassdoor’s service, scheduled to go into a public beta at 9:01 PDT Tuesday, is certainly helpful for nosy reporters who want a read on what employees think of their bosses, that’s not the 12-person company’s only intention. Glassdoor executives say they want to be the TripAdvisor of the workplace.

Glassdoor's data shows Yahoo’s Jerry Yang became very unpopular May 14.

Public beta users will be able to see data from four sample employers–Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and Cisco Systems–without providing their own information. To get information on more than those four, they’ll have to “give to get,” as the company calls it. So far, more than 3,300 people have filed dossiers on more than 250 companies (not all of them in tech), according to Glassdoor.

For a prospective employee, of course, the bigger question is: Should I work at this place?

Employees provide Glassdoor's data and provide that information anonymously.

Soon after May 14, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s approval rating among an admittedly small group of Yahoo employees tanked. Not surprisingly, that was the day word spread that corporate raider Carl Icahn was launching his proxy fight against Yang and Yahoo’s embattled board of directors.

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Glassdoor.com)

Glassdoor may have a unique method for gathering its data, but it’s hardly the only company trying to tackle salary information. Other outfits, such as Salary.com, which claims more than 4 million visitors per month and also sells a business service, are also in the salary info business. Indeed, human resources departments have for years been gathering data on competitors to decide if their salaries are competitive.

Which brings me back to Yahoo: While the 49 people who’ve filled out information about Yahoo is in no way a scientific sampling, the lousy CEO approval rating is certainly illustrative of nervousness inside the company. When a corporate raider like Icahn comes calling (particularly after a potential suitor like Microsoft takes a hike), there’s always reason to worry. Will executives cut costs to placate shareholders? Even worse: If the raider wins, will he gut payroll?

It’s an ambitious plan. The solution: The service is free, but in order to get information users have to provide information. If a user wants to find out how much, say, a midlevel engineer at Microsoft makes, he or she has to provide information about his or her current job and company. It’s anonymous, and Glassdoor screens information that seems bogus or plain-old axe-grinding. (It will be interesting to see how that labor-intensive work scales with new users. That and maintaining the quality of salary and company information are the biggest questions that will have to be answered in the not-too-distant future for Glassdoor.)

Employee reviews include “pros” and “cons” of each company, leadership ratings, salaries by position, and bonus details. The site will also send out alerts for a company when reviews are added.

“Young people need to know how to make smart money management decisions before heading off to college and entering the workforce,” Carter said in a press release.

Developed in 2004, the computer-based game gives players points for answering financial management questions correctly, while wrong answers cost a team yardage. Like a regular football game, the team with the highest point total after four quarters wins the game. The game comes with a classroom curriculum that Visa has freely provided to public schools in 16 states. Financial Football can also be downloaded for free to cell phones–players start a game by texting the word VISA to 24421.

Visa also held a Financial Football event at last week’s Democratic National Convention in Denver with former Denver Broncos wide receiver Rod Smith.

College certainly gives young people an opportunity to learn about fiscal responsibility: credit card companies often make deals to pay colleges and alumni associations millions of dollars for access to students’ personal contact information in order to target their marketing efforts at young people. A U.S. Public Interest Research Groups survey conducted this year found that two-thirds of college students have at least one card, and the average student surveyed will graduate with more than $2,600 in credit card debt.

(Credit: Visa)

ST. PAUL, Minn.–Republicans like to call Democrats a party of “celebrities,” but the GOP sometimes finds value in star power as well.

Cris Carter, the former NFL wide receiver who played for the Minnesota Vikings, was in town for the Republican convention to promote a video game called Financial Football that Visa designed with the NFL as part of a national initiative to educate young adults about money management. The Young Republican National Federation and the College Republican National Committee were also promoting the game.

The service will be available initially for the iPhone but will also be coming to the BlackBerry, Nokia phones, and potentially Google’s Android down the line, Brown said.

In the early going, the company is focusing on restaurants and restaurant chains with online menus. This means that some of the early restaurants in the system include fast-food chains like McDonald’s.

The company’s new iPhone app has two major elements.

And as it grows, WebDiet is hoping to bring in revenue through commissions on orders placed at restaurants through a “buy now” system that lets people place advance orders. WebDiet will also collect revenue from some location-based ads that appear on people’s devices when they’re using the software.

The company, founded by Wendell Brown and Craig Gold, veterans of previous ventures like Teleo and eVoice, is expected to launch an iPhone app Monday at the DemoFall conference in San Diego. The app is designed to give people the information they need to eat better when they eat out.

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So far, WebDiet has added a quarter-million UPC codes into its system and expects to add more over time.

And that’s precisely one of the points of the software: It aggregates and suggests off-the-menu options so that people can find food that meets their needs even at places they wouldn’t expect.

Finally, the software lets people enter UPC bar codes of foods to build a database of things they like to eat and to learn about the nutritional value of what they’re consuming.

It is designed to keep track of what people eat–so long as they are committed to entering that information on an ongoing basis–and will make meal suggestions based on what people have already eaten on a given day.

And while it might be counter-intuitive to include fast-food, Gold, himself a vegan, said the idea is that even such restaurants have some items that are healthier than, say, a Big
Mac.

The second major part of the service, which works in combination with Mealsearch, is a meal-by-meal guidance system, Brown said.

WebDiet’s new iPhone app searches for restaurants that meet certain dietary criteria. The service is expected to be available on additional mobile devices later this year.

If you’ve got an
iPhone and a desire to maintain a healthier diet, the folks at a start-up called WebDiet may have your order.

For example, Gold said, McDonald’s will wrap a hamburger in lettuce instead of a bun for those looking for lower carb diets.

The first, called Mealsearch, is built to help people find healthy restaurant food no matter where they are.

According to Brown, it works by having people enter various dietary criteria that are important to them–such as being vegetarian, vegan, kosher, or wanting low- calorie or low-carb meals–and then combines that information with location-based data.

So, Brown said, if a person has a large lunch, the system will (politely) suggest a dinner lighter on calories.

The program has succeeded in the U.K. and Australia, and is gaining some traction in the U.S., Brotchie says. He was at the TechCrunc50 event this week pushing the ICE program’s evolution: An online “waiting room” at 911ICE.org, where people who care about a sick or injured person can gather, communicate, and possibly learn how to help.

Brotchie is hoping that rather than programming in just one emergency contact, people will program in multiple emergency contacts into an online service. The ICE number that each phone has could be used to call up a service that does several things, starting with reading back medical alerts to the caller (or sending them as SMS). Then it will be able to contact the people on the emergency list, and connect at least one of the them to the caregiver. The ICE service could also, Brotchie envisions, contact all the people on the list, tell them what’s going on, and invite them into a “virtual waiting room” where they can keep up to date on what’s going on with the phone’s owner.

In 2005, British paramedic Bob Brotchie launched an initiative to encourage people to put emergency contact information in their mobile phone address books, under the name “ICE,” which stands for “In Case of Emergency.” He hoped that when emergency workers reached a person who had become incapacitated, they would learn to look up the ICE number on the phone to connect to a person who could speak for the one in need.

The business model is “still under development,” Brotchie told me, but this is still a good idea, from a person who has a bead on how families communicate in personal disasters, and on how the functionality of a mobile phone can be used as a form of electronic life buoy. Very clever.

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Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Bob Brotchie, a paramedic with a mobile phone mission

Beta users should act fast to download the 0.6 upgrade from Skyfire’s site. According to a statement, both 0.5 and 0.55 releases time out on May 7th and users will lose any bookmarks and cookies created after April 30. Skyfire is still technically accepting beta testers, though newly signed-up users may be months away from access.

Finally, folks with 12-key and half QWERTY Windows Mobile phones will now also be able to surf on Skyfire with or without a virtual keyboard. The former feature in particular readies the browser for mass-market Symbian phones, which Skyfire has told me will debut when the beta opens. The combined changes in this 0.6 update give Skyfire a much better footing as the clean-looking application develops, though it has miles to go before being pit against Opera Mini in any meaningful way. Perfecting flash video playback would be one key victory.

The youngest
mobile browser to hit the scene can do quite a few more tricks after this week’s feature-enhancement and bug-fixing release.

In addition to the zooming and maintenance work, Skyfire has paid attention to text. Instead of a single line of entry with a maximum of 256 characters, users can now type in up to 2,000 characters on multiple lines of text for any text field, making lengthier blog authoring or form-filling possible. Newly added support for predictive text will make inputting text faster and less nerve-wracking, too.

The zooming features, so crucial to reading in full-Internet mode, have also been enhanced. Double-tapping and -clicking will now zoom the screen in and out (in addition to using the Back key.) Additionally, Skyfire has relaxed a stringent return to default settings across Web pages and settings. Now, persistent sound, zoom, and SmartFit settings will carry from one URL and session to another. Touch-screen users can also achieve variable levels of granularity by clicking and dragging to resize the zoom box. On both touch screen and non-touch handsets, using the 1 and 3 keys moves you through four levels of magnification.

Article updated 5/2/08 at 8:00am with additional information.

At the request of testers enrolled in Skyfire’s closed beta program, version 0.6 has included several housekeeping functions. There are the basics of pasting a URL or search term, deleting bookmarks, and beefing up the soft-key menu with a shortcut to search the current Web page. There’s also the highly demanded security nod that disguises passwords as you type. Though this hasn’t caught on to the text field on the T-Mobile Dash I was using, Skyfire’s CEO and co-founder Nitin Bhandari has assured me that experience is atypical and the feature is expected to work on most Windows Mobile phones, including other T-Mobile Dash handsets. (There may be an issue with my phone’s configuration that Skyfire’s tech team and I are in the process of working out.)