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EV battery-swapper Better Place announced today it's partnering with General Electric to recharge its business model.

The GE partnership will augment Better Place stations by offering GE's WattStation charging service in addition to Better Place's existing battery-swapping service.

The WattStation is a Level 2 electric-vehicle charging station with 240-volt chargers compatible with any standard EV--similar to the Ecotality Blink station and Coulomb Technologies ChargePoint station.

A GE WattStation, depending on the car, can fully recharge an EV battery in as short as four hours, according to GE.

Better Place currently offers a subscription service in which members … Read more

One of the most talked about open-source projects is having its second annual Hadoop World Conference next month in New York. On the heels of a successful inaugural event , 2010 promises more than 25 presentations from the likes of Bank of America, eBay, HP, Orbitz, Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo (full agenda here). Also, for the second year running, here is a code for my readers to get a 20 percent registration discount: CNETHW2010.

To provide a small taste of what the event will offer, I corresponded with Hadoop World speaker Linden Hillenbrand, product manager of Hadoop Technologies at General Electric, … Read more

Have you been looking for a laptop with good gaming graphics, but haven't pulled the trigger yet? Well, it's a good thing you waited. Nvidia has released their next wave of laptop GPUs, and they're an across-the-board upgrade in the middle and upper range of their line.

The 400M series of GPUs are the first laptop processors designed with DirectX11-oriented Fermi architecture, and all the new GPUs are enabled with Nvidia Optimus automatically-switching graphics. This should ramp up the exposure of Optimus automatic-switching graphics considerably, and provide extra battery-conserving performance in faster laptops.

The new processors consist … Read more

A year ago, Samsung wasn't much of a player in the laptop space aside from a few Netbooks. This year, however, the equation changed. We've seen Samsung midrange laptops that have offered great value for their components, with designs that seem to be getting progressively better. With the company's newest batch of laptop announcements, that trend seems to be continuing.

The NF and SF series of Netbooks and laptops adopt a similar design, with curved, glossy lines and raised walls around the keyboard deck. The look feels particularly suited to living-room use, as if these laptops were … Read more

Idaho is building what will be the state's largest wind project to date near land once traversed by Lewis and Clark, and Sacagawea.

As part of the groundbreaking ceremony on Tuesday for the 183-megawatt Idaho Wind Partners project, Idaho Governor C.L. "Butch" Otter and others signed the giant blade of a wind turbine. Most of the land being used for the Idaho project consists of both active and idle farmland across Magic Valley, part of which is considered a piece of the iconic Oregon Trail.

"The renewable energy industry is breathing new life into the … Read more

General Electric will provide digital energy technology for a research project to test how energy-efficient homes can be with smart-grid products for consumers.

The $5 million Department of Energy program will equip homeowners in the western U.S. with GE's Nucleus home electricity management system, with LED lighting, and with connected appliances. Homes will also be equipped with solar panels.

The project will evaluate whether the combination of on-site power production through solar and energy management technology can reduce energy usage by 70 percent in both new and existing homes, according to GE.

Basing calculations on U.S. averages … Read more

Body scans may be controversial, but visitors to the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai seem to be having great fun stepping up to them--at least the ones being displayed by General Electric.

GE's "Visible You" installation offers digital simulations of the body's nerves, muscles, and cardiovascular systems--all while mimicking your every move in real time.

When a visitor steps up to the interactive booth in the USA Pavilion, the image on the life-size vertical display scales to his or her general height. It then mirrors participants' gestures (lifting arms and legs, jumping, running in place) in … Read more

NISKAYUNA, N.Y.--When you're listening to someone explain a new scientific method and just about the only thing that goes through your head is "This is going to win a Nobel Prize," you know you're in good company.

That was my experience recently while I was listening to Fiona Ginty, a project leader in computational biology in General Electric Global Research's biosciences group, explain her work. Ginty's project is all about finding new and better ways to spot cancer in a patient's body, ideally as early as possible. And as a member … Read more

Most off-the-shelf desktop systems come with pretty weak video cards. That's fine if all you're doing is checking e-mail and browsing the Web, but if you plan to get into gaming, photo editing, video production, and other graphics-intensive areas, you'll need a lot more video horsepower.

Thankfully, upgrades are fast, easy, effective, and affordable. For example, Newegg has the EVGA GeForce 9800 GT 512MB video card for $49.99 shipped. That's after a $35 mail-in rebate (PDF).

This isn't the fastest card on the planet by any stretch, but trust me--it's plenty fast. I … Read more