evergreen

Evergreen Solar will close its Massachusetts factory, saying that the U.S. is at a disadvantage in the face of low-cost Chinese solar suppliers.

The company yesterday said that its Devens, Mass., plant, a converted military facility, will be shut down by the end of the first quarter of this year. The move will result in 800 lost jobs, leaving about 100 in its Marlborough, Mass.-based headquarters.

Evergreen Solar said it needs to close the facility to preserve its cash and remain in line with global solar panel prices. It will continue to make silicon cells in Michigan and … Read more

AT&T is getting a new quick texting phone on November 7, one that Samsung is pushing hard as an eco phone. The Samsung Evergreen is built from 70 percent recycled post-consumer materials, and its packaging is made from 80 percent recycled post-consumer paper. The packaging uses soy ink, and in lieu of a paper manual, the Evergreen comes with a CD. Eco ringtones and wallpaper round out the theme.

As for the specs, the Evergreen is a 3G-capable phone that features a 2.4-inch display and a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard. There's also a 2-megapixel camera with … Read more

Some e-mails are not suitable for opening in the workplace, and then there are e-mails not suitable for sending from the workplace.

This must be the difficult lesson for Steven Payne, a vice president (at last word) of Evergreen Entertainment. Payne's company operates a chain of movie theaters, including the St. Croix Falls Cinema 8, in St. Croix Falls, Wis. Recently, a patron of the movie theater wrote a letter to the company complaining about the experience she and her husband and another couple had during a showing of "Shutter Island."

Sarah Kohl-Leaf of Taylors Falls, Minn., … Read more

The dubiously named Genius brand occasionally hits upon a good idea like its Bluetooth headphones with touch-sensitive controls, but it always seems to lapse back into its penchant for uselessness with something like a hybrid speaker-camera. Its latest entry, unfortunately, comes closer to the latter category.

Evergreen is distributing the "Genius Navigator 365" mouse, which is really a clamshell that opens up to reveal a tiny game controller, according to Engadget. It almost looks as if Genius had a few spare VoIP phone-mouse cases lying around and didn't want them going to waste.

The computer fashion runway is getting crowded, but the models may not be what you'd expect: Some of the more recent stuff-strutting entrants are portable hard drives.

Manufacturers of mundane hardware are doing whatever they can to attract new consumers, whether it be Western Digital's flamboyant colors or LaCie's modern art. Now Japan's Evergreen is appealing to the tactile senses, Akihabara News reports, with a storage box covered in leather.

Regardless (or irregardless) of your feelings about tanned cowhide, you've got to give these guys credit for trying. Evergreen, after all, has even attempted to … Read more

Newsvine, an increasingly popular news aggregation and community content publishing site, re-launched yesterday, re-branding its front page as a single page aggregator. Users can now add and re-order content modules such as weather, sports tickers, and photo slide shows. They can also add RSS feeds from external Web sites (like ours). According to the team's blog post, the addition of modules was the most commonly requested feature by users.

The change has put Newsvine in the running as a single-page aggregator, a crowded area we took a look at last month. While Newsvine doesn't seem to pose an … Read more