Solar Installer SolarCity Raises $21M

from Earth2Tech by Katie Fehrenbacher

We’re already feeling a bit sunburned from all the solar funding over the past few weeks. But serious folks, there’s even more that we’ve learned about. On Monday SolarCity, which provides solar systems for homes and businesses, plans to announce they have closed $21 million in their third round of funding, led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, JP Morgan and Elon Musk. The Foster City, Calif.-based company has now raised over $31 million.

The cleantech industry might not want to talk about a clean tech bubble, but solar overindulgence? Seems so. Earlier this week solar concentrator company SolFocus raised $52 million, while solar financing company Tioga added $4 million. The week before solar photovoltaic company Solarcentury raised $27.2 million, solar cell developer Solexant raised $4.3 million, and Plextronics raised $20.6 million for its organic semiconductors, which can be used for thin film solar applications.

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Notepad toaster burns handwritten messages into bread

from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Designer Sasha Tseng (unlinkable Flash site here) has created this prototype toaster/notepad. Scribe your note on the tablet over the toaster, and it will burn the message into the bread. Link (via Cribcandy)

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Gadgets: Cradlepoint CTR-350 Spreads the Broadband from Cellphone to Wi-Fi

Augustine:  just what I wanted with my new iPod. My existing cell serves as WiFi hotspot for the iPod to connect to the internet and surf via Safari!

from Gizmodo by Charlie White

You never know when you might want to spread your connectivity love, and that's why this Cradlepoint CTR-350 travel router might be able to keep you and all your buddies online when nothing else will. If your broadband-enabled cellphone can connect, then this little black box can turn that connection into a Wi-Fi hotspot.

This baby lets your EV-DO cellphone turn into a modem for Wi-Fi, letting everybody tap into that signal. Plus, you can button that sucker down to be as secure as you want, using WEP and WPA encryption and its built-in firewall. And, if your phone supports charging-via-USB, it'll charge up that cellphone as you go. It's $149. [Cradlepoint]

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Jobs’ Mea Culpa is Apple’s Victory

from GigaOM by Kevin Kelleher

Steve Jobs is sorry. He wants to give you $100 back for what you paid when you bought your iPhone too early. Provided, of course, you spend that $100 in one of his stores.

I disagree with Om on this. I get this feeling that this is exactly what Steve Jobs had planned all along? The chances are high that that extra $100 you would have saved, had the iPhone been appropriately priced to begin with, would have been spent outside an Apple (AAPL) store. Now it's staying in Apple's coffers. And Steve Jobs looks like a caring, responsive CEO who didn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings.

So Apple wins again. Forget the news stories that say Apple cut its price because sales were sluggish. On Tuesday, iSuppli, a research firm, said nearly one in 50 mobile phones sold in the U.S. was an iPhone, and that Apple was on track to sell 4.5 million iPhones this year. Today, iSuppli reiterated that view:

The iPhone outsold all competing smart-phone and feature-phone models in the United States in July on an individual basis. iSuppli�s teardown research indicates that Apple was generating a robust hardware margin at its previous pricing, and will still be profitable at the new pricing.

I suspect the money Apple makes off the iPhone will be a wash: What it loses in the new discount it will easily make up in holiday-season volume. And it will end the year with an even higher market share in handsets.

But what about Apple's stock? It fell to $132.93 this morning from a high of $145.73 Tuesday, a drop of nearly 9%. Again, the press has been quick to assert that Wall Street was disappointed with Jobs' announcements yesterday, particularly the iPhone price cut. But look at the 5-day chart, and it's clear that Apple is actually up. It was a classic case of buying the pre-announcement hype and selling on the news. It may even offer a last-chance to buy in at this level.

Over at Barron's Tech Trader Daily, there is a nice summary of analyst's preliminary reactions to the iPhone news. Bottom line, analysts were taken aback by the timing and the degree of the iPhone discount, but overall they remained "fairly enthusiastic" and few dared to lower their ratings or price targets.

Apple does not take pride in disappointing investors, and it may be that this iPhone discount, coming sooner rather than later, is a way of signaling that iPhone sales have been strong enough that it can lower prices without missing targets.

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Simple hackery enables free iTunes ringtones

from Engadget by Sean Cooper

Well, this is a handy (and well-timed) find! User Cleverboy over at Macrumors has discovered a simple trick to get your own music onto your iPhone using the just-released iTunes 7.4, and it'll cost you precisely nothing. To get this to work, we hear you only need to rename an AAC track to .M4R, then double click it and iTunes will automagically load it into iTunes for you. Next time you plug in your iPhone to sync up, just check off the song in the Ringtones tab and voila, instant tone gratification. Thanks, Apple -- free ringtones for the songs we already own or ripped from our own CDs, this is how it should have been from the get-go. On a happy note, Macrumor's forum users are reporting the magic works via both Apple and Windows flavors of iTunes, but feel free let us know how you all get on.

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