bloom

There's a lot of ways to visualize your Twitter and Facebook feeds, but no one's ever gone down to the cellular level to do so.

Until now, that is. This morning, San Francisco startup Bloom released its latest iPad app, Biologic, which aims to bring an all-new metaphor to looking at the flow of information coming in from leading social networks.

Last year, Bloom--which was funded by Betaworks, SV Angel, and Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, and which was founded by veterans of Stamen Design and frogdesign--released its first app, Planetary. That app brought a galactic approach to users' … Read more

NTT America soon will be able to claim a data center that runs on biogas.

The Japanese telecommunications company today said it will install five Bloom Energy fuel cells in its California data center that will use biogas as a fuel. It's a sign of the growing interest in cleaner fuel cell technology, which proponents say will increasingly be adapted for residential customers.

The fuel cells will be able to generate 500 kilowatts of power, which is enough for about 500 U.S. homes. At the data center, they will generate 4.2 million kilowatt-hours per year and reduce … Read more

Bloom Energy and telecom giant AT&T said today that the clean-tech start-up would install its fuel cell-powered Energy Servers--known colloquially as "Bloom boxes"--at 11 facilities in California.

The AT&T facilities include sites in Corona, Fontana, Hayward, Pasadena, Redwood City, Rialto, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Jose, and San Ramon.

The units are expected to provide 7.5 megawatts of energy for AT&T, reducing its carbon emissions footprint for the facilities involved by half, or about 250 million pounds of CO2 per year.

For AT&T, it's a chance to use a buzzworthy clean-tech company in its overall corporate sustainability initiative to use more renewable energy as part of its portfolio. (The company also has 19 solar deployments slated for 2011.)

For Bloom, it's the latest in a series of high-profile partners, including software maker Adobe.

The key to Bloom's success lies in its business model, in which it pays for installation and hardware upfront in exchange for profits from a fixed rate on power produced.

(If you're interested, our sister site SmartPlanet did a deeper dive last year into the tech that's inside the Bloom box; our corporate siblings at 60 Minutes also profiled the company in February 2010.)

For the AT&T deal, the Bloom boxes are expected to produce more than 62 million kilowatt-hours of electricity each year, enough to power some 5,600 homes.

Installation of the boxes is scheduled to begin later this year; the plan is to have them fully operational by mid-2012.

This story originally appeared on SmartPlanet.com… Read more

As a new kind of device, the iPad has forced developers and users alike to toss out their traditional notions of what data is and how it is presented. While smartphones like the iPhone and those using Google Android kicked off that transformation, the iPad, with its 9.7-inch screen and almost infinite number of ways to present data and information, has kicked things into a higher gear.

Already, people are using the iPad to change how we interact with games, magazines, productivity tools, and other software. But now, a start-up called Bloom is hoping to radically alter people's normal approach to data. As Bloom quotes tech publishing pioneer Tim O'Reilly on its Web site, "People think of data visualization as output, and the insight that I think [Bloom has had] is that data visualization will become a means of input and control...Being able to manipulate data in real-time is an important shift. Data visualizations would then become interfaces rather than reports."

Today, Bloom--which recently scored funding from Betaworks, SV Angel, and Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield--launched its first iPad app, Planetary. Designed to radically change the way users approach their music collections, is it also the company's first serve in what could be some very interesting potential partnerships with services like iTunes and any other that has plenty of data but no visually interesting way to present it.

The company was founded by four people with many years spent in leading design and user experience businesses. Among them is the company's president, Ben Cerveny, one of Flickr's earliest employees, who also has worked for companies like Stamen Design, frogdesign, and others.

Last week, Cerveny sat down with CNET for a 45 Minutes on IM interview to talk about Planetary, and about how Bloom hopes to use its visualization "instruments" to change the way people experience and feel about data.

Q: Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I guess we should start with the name of the company, Bloom. Where does that come from? Ben Cerveny: My pleasure, thanks for having me. So, we deal with data every day in our daily lives. It flows around us but we don't always know it's there. But really, data is beautiful stuff: all sorts of mesmerizing structures and patterns. At Bloom, we'll make the invisible data visible. We'll make it Bloom.

You're launching with Planetary. Explain briefly what it does, for those who aren't already familiar with it? Cerveny: Planetary is a beautiful new way to explore your own music collection on your iPad. We present your collection of tunes as a galaxy, where artists are stars orbited by album planets, and each moon of the planet is a track that you can tap to play the song through a seamless connection with the native iPad music player. By using intuitive gestures, you can move between artists, create new constellations of music, and compose incredible scenes generated entirely by your own musical tastes. … Read more

Bloom Energy today launched a service designed to lower the hefty upfront cost of its fuel cells, allowing companies to purchase the power rather than the actual hardware.

With the service, called Bloom Electrons, companies sign on to buy the power generated by Bloom's fuel cells, which reside at customers' locations, for 10 years. Bloom will own and maintain the fuel cells, called Bloom Boxes.

Using this power purchase agreement can save business customers between 5 percent and 20 percent on their electricity costs, according to Bloom. Also, on-site fuel cells, which operate as long as there is fuel, … Read more

Silicon Valley start-up Bloom Energy, which makes fuel cell boxes that can power buildings, expects to be producing one of its boxes per day in the next few months, its chief executive and co-founder said.

The main limitation on the growth of the business, since it is based on a new technology, is building a supply chain to feed it, Chief Executive K.R. Sridhar said yesterday.

"As the supply chain is ramping up, then we can ramp up, and at no point will our internal capacity become the bottleneck," he told the Reuters Climate Change and Alternative … Read more

Adobe has hired Bloom Energy to install enough fuel cell servers to provide one-third of all electricity for Adobe's San Jose, Calif., headquarters, both companies announced today.

Specifically, Bloom will install 12 of its fuel cell servers on the fifth floor of Adobe's West Tower at the campus. Each Bloom box, as the company calls them, is roughly the size of a small van and contains thousands of ceramic fuel cells that can convert fuel and oxygen from the air into an electric current. For the Adobe installation, the units will use biogas for fuel.

One Bloom box … Read more

Boy, did I pick a lousy week to leave the country for a family vacation.

What did I miss? Well, a company seems to have come out of nowhere, raised loads of money, has retired Gen. Colin Powell on its board, and made some audacious claims about reinventing the energy business. As I dug through last week's news, I asked myself: Is Bloom Energy's public relations blitz to be believed?

The short answer, it appears, is "yes." But don't expect miracles.

For people in the green-tech industry, digging up information on Bloom Energy has been … Read more

One energy analyst is taking a pessimistic view of Bloom Energy's highly touted fuel cell, saying that there's "nothing that unique" about the technology.

On Wednesday, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based start-up introduced the Bloom Energy fuel cell, which is designed to be stacked into small blocks and housed in a unit about the size of a refrigerator and sold as an alternative to electricity from the grid. The company has begun selling 100kW units, costing between $700,000 and $800,000 each, and some of the "Bloom boxes" are already in use by companies … Read more