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Aquion Energy, a developer of nontoxic batteries, announced today it has raised $30 million in venture capital funding.

Investors in this round of funding include Foundation Capital, TriplePoint Capital, Advanced Technology Ventures, and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.

The company previously was operating on venture funding from Kleiner, as well as a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Pittsburgh, Penn. start-up, which grew from a Carnegie Mellon University research project, has been developing grid-scale energy storage without the use of "hazardous materials, corrosive acids, or noxious fumes," according to Aquion.

Specifically, Aquion Energy has developed … Read more

Intel will put its large spotlight on Ultrabook laptops and Windows 8, among other technologies, at its annual developer conference next week.

In a keynote on September 14, Mooly Eden, general manager of the PC client group at Intel, will describe the "transformation of the PC" being driven by Ultrabooks at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), according to an overview of the forum CNET received from Intel today. IDF begins next Tuesday.

Ultrabooks are very light, very thin Windows laptops that compete with the MacBook Air. The core hardware includes Intel second-generation "Sandy Bridge" processors and … Read more

It seems that many people on the Internet have no qualms about "borrowing" other people's work and either failing to attribute it properly or outright claiming it as their own. Photographers and other artists who wish to share their work online are well advised to use watermarks to ensure that their name is never separated from their creations. Scaling Watermark is a simple program that can brand your images with watermarks that can be read at both full size and thumbnail size. It's not as fancy as some other watermark programs we've seen, but we … Read more

Kitchens are filled with appliances and gadgets often designed to do very specific tasks. Whether you want to weigh, measure, chop, store, dice, mince, or grind, chances are there is an appliance for that. But sometimes just because something is designed to do what you need it to do, it doesn't necessarily mean it can do what you need it to do. How does this seemingly paradoxical statement measure up when held up to the cool stainless steel gleam of the kitchen? Easy. When working in quantity, everything looks different.

Home kitchen gear isn't usually tailored for large … Read more

The design of appliances and gadgets in the kitchen tend to play a bit of follow the leader; most things look alike. When comparing a food processor with another food processor, chances are they share similar attributes. Practitioners of industrial design try to overcome these commonalities, but more often than not the end product doesn't reflect these goals. It's not easy to turn a piece of kitchen gear into a new work featuring striking design. Which is probably for the best, as it is kind of helpful to know what the gadget is before you grab it. But … Read more

It is not uncommon for kitchen appliances that do one thing well to do another, similar thing just as well. Often that secondary functionality becomes your primary use for the product (think grinding spices in a coffee grinder).

You may not think it makes any sense to use a blender as a scale, but that's exactly what DeLonghi has done--incorporate a scale into a food processor. The DFP950 12-Cup Food Processor combines two similar kitchen gadgets with a third--not altogether unlikely--kitchen essential. Featuring a tare function, you can add exactly the amount of ingredients you need directly in your … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Childhood obesity is a concern throughout most of the U.S., and yet most scales are not child-specific, nor do they take body fat measurements.

So Tanita's BF-2000 IronKids Wireless Body Fat Monitor, for children ages 5 to 17, is an intriguing concept. Just unveiled at CES this week, the monitor is set to be released in March for $150.

Company reps tell me the monitor uses alternating current signals to measure body impedance (a process known as biometric impedance) for body fat calculations. The whole process takes about three seconds for a reading.

Tanita is actually releasing … Read more

The billions of dollars being plowed into electric vehicle battery manufacturing around the world is helping jump-start another clean-energy industry: storage on the electric grid.

Earlier this week, A123 Systems opened a plant in Livonia, Mich., to make lithium ion battery components and packs for hybrid and electric vehicles. Among the government officials at the event were state governor Jennifer Granholm and Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who called it a key step to restarting manufacturing in the U.S..

Ramping up lithium ion battery manufacturing by A123 Systems and other companies is projected to drive down the cost of batteries … Read more

Chances are, if you've had your computer for any amount of time, you've burned a CD or DVD and needed a cover for it. UnderCoverXP makes it easy to create covers for a variety of types of digital media. It's not a design program, exactly; it's more of a utility for scaling images to the right size and printing them so that they'll fit in whatever type of case you're using. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of making covers; UnderCoverXP gets the dimensions right every time.

The program's interface is … Read more