Roundup: CARB’s new electric car requirements, Loopt on Verizon, and more

Venture Beat — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:07:46 -0700

Here’s the latest action:

California Air Resources Board waters down pro-electric car requirements — The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has voted once again to dilute the state’s requirements for major auto manufacturers to sell electric vehicles. Instead of eliminating the requirement for zero-emission vehicles, like the state did seven years ago (see a movie trailer below about that), the board this time cut it by 70 percent. More on the specifics at Reuters.

Location-based mobile service Loopt adds Verizon support — Starting next month, Verizon customers will be able to use Loopt’ services to share location information, messages, and location-tagged photos from their phones. While most mobile startups struggle to cut deals with carriers, Loopt has had more success; its other announced partners include Sprint and Sprints subsidiary MVNO, Boost Mobile. The Verizon service will cost $4 a month, and can be purchased through the company’s mobile store. More on how Loopt works, here.

Security experts tracing another IFRAME vulnerability — IFRAME code, an element of HTML web code that lets web sites run independently updating parts of a page, is proving vulnerable once again. Over the past several weeks, IFRAME attacks have been happening on popular sites, where the internal search engine of a site gets hacked. When a user clicks on the search result, the program open an invisible IFRAME window in the user’s browser that redirects the user to a malicious web site that tries to install malware that exposes the user’s computer to further infiltration. Major news sites like USAToday.com and News.com, as well as retailer sites like Target.com have been affected. More here.

Thin-film solar cells getting cheaper — The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is working on thin-film solar cells with record efficiency of 19.9 percent in energy production, almost reaching top efficiencies for multi-crystalline cells. The top cells ever made are more than 40 percent, but are quite expensive. Because thin film is cheaper than silicon-based, making a thin-film cell with efficiency this high could seriously dent the market for silicon.

DIY political ads, that let you get around political campaign rules (and fight dirty) — Votervoter.com is a new site offered by WideOrbit, an advertising conglomerate that is letting users buy and run their own national political ads on television. ReadWriteWeb has a good review, and notes it both lets individuals finance campaigns without being limited by campaign finance rules and it lets supporters run ads that may be aren’t up to the ethical standards of the campaigns themselves. Votervoter is not the only political-ads-for-the-people effort. Spotrunner recently introduced a way to buy local political ads.

Internet Archive, a nonprofit, beginning to offer free, fast internet in low-income SF housing — More here. Now, how about some more low-incoming housing in San Francisco?

Google wants to bring more advertisers to TV — Google TV Ads director Michael Steib told a room full of broadcasters in New York that there are 6,000 to 7,000 national advertisers that use direct mail — and online advertising offered by companies like Google — that aren’t advertising on TV. Google, Steib said, wants to help connect these advertisers with the broadcasters.