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SAN FRANCISCO--Jonathan Bari didn't seem too nervous until the $725,000 glitch.

A woman, taking commands from someone at the other end of her cell phone, had bid $750,000 on the patent portfolio he was selling at the Ocean Tomo IP Auction last week in San Francisco. The patents covered an online authentication system for consumers devised by his old company Catavault.

The panic came because auctioneer Charles Ross registered the bid at $725,000.

"She said $750,000," he said to me. (We were sitting next to each other.) He became absolutely still. His anxiety then began to climb--not because he was going to be shorted $25,000, but because the bidding accelerated.

A remote buyer placing bids through a representative of the auction house (the buyer was speaking to the rep on a phone) raised it to $800,000. The cell phone woman laughed, talked to her client on the phone, and after a pause bumped it to $810,000. The remote bidder bumped it to $815,000.

VIDEO: Click image to see scenes from the auction.

(Credit: CNET TV)

It continued on. When the bidding crossed $1 million, the 200 or so people in the room simultaneously went "Oooooohhh."

Not Bari. He started breathing audibly. "Go higher, higher," he whispered, to outer space.

The remote bidder kicked it to $1.1 million. The room paused. Cell phone lady quit. Bari shook my hand and left, happy that the winner bid far more than the $500,000 minimum he had set.

The devil's lair?
While Bari got one of the highest prices of the day, his experience reflected the overall tenor of the patent auction, in which intellectual property owners sell their goods to anonymous bidders. Internet patents--particularly the kind that could apply to vast numbers of transactions on the Net--drew a lot of attention.

Discovision Associates got $6 million for a large patent portfolio for improving bit streaming, a record for an intellectual patent portfolio at auction. Yoogli, which has a semantic search patent, received a $1.1 million bid, but withdrew the patents because it was below Yoogli's reserve.

For critics of software patents, this kind of event is the ultimate nightmare. They claim that Internet patents are dangerously broad and that auctions ultimately fuel lawsuits. It's like the Amazon one-click patent and an attack by wolves all rolled into one.

So far, Ocean Tomo says that only a few lawsuits have emerged around patents bought at its auctions. Still, some attendees represented "patent enforcement firms," which buy patents and then extract royalties from other companies. Intellectual Ventures, the large patent firm founded by former Microsoft chief scientist Nathan Myhrvold, was allegedly bidding by phone through one of the auction house reps, according to some attendees.

Or heaven's gate?
The patent holders, though, see it differently. Many are independent inventors who tried to license their products to large companies but got rebuffed. Without patents, large companies would steamroll over the little guy, many assert.

Realtor Martin Eldridge, for instance, got $1 million for a location-based application that combines GPS-like data with information services. If you walk by a painting rapidly in a museum, for example, you might just get the name of the painter sent to your cell phone. If you pause, it might forward you the date it was painted and other details.

He came up with the idea while driving down Highway 1 in California.

"I wanted to know what I was driving by," he said, elated and sipping champagne. He wrote Google, Garmin, Microsoft (all of whom have extensive patent portfolios that the rigorously defend) and several other companies about licensing. None responded. The auction gave him a way to make some money off of it.

Michael Voticky sold a voice-mail management program he came up with while on a flight from Europe, for $500,000. It was his minimum. "No complaints," he told me.

The list goes on: Videa got $700,000 for a patent for displaying video files as thumbnails. Another company got $975,000 and hearty applause from the audience for an application that ranked media files according to a user's personal profile. QSIndustries got $400,000 for a digital sound-effects app. A newsfeed aggregator patent went for $400,000.

Below that, a slew of patents that related to consumers sold in the $100,000 to $250,000 range. Under the unstated rule of auctions, the crowed applauded and ooohed only if the bidding went past the $900K mark.

Compare that with what happened with the patents for industrial users. Sun Microsystems offered a number of patent portfolios. The first three were withdrawn because bidders didn't hit the minimum or bid at all. Sun finally sold one for $325,000.

Other companies didn't see bids, or high enough bids to get past their minimums, on patents for improving cell phone antennas, engine management systems, conductive coatings for planes that make them easier to de-ice, or an application for tracking trucks in delivery fleets. Edward Hyman got $130,000 for a chip that can help control satellites, a little above his minimum expectation.

In all, Ocean Tomo CEO Jim Malackowski deemed the day a success. The patents sold generated $19.6 million in revenue. That's a record for an intellectual-property auction.

Four lots sold for more than $1 million and around 62 percent of the lots were sold overall. Ocean Tomo keeps 25 percent as a commission--10 percent from buyers and 15 percent from sellers.

Not bad for a day's work.

For mobile service Helio, it's a sure sign you're doing something wrong if the most popular app among your user community is a hack. For Opera Software, the fact that it's your app is a sure sign you're doing something right.

Since last August, users at the Helio community site Heliocity have been peddling a re-engineered version of the Opera Mini browser that was specially hacked with the Ocean smartphone in mind. Seven months later, Rod Hamlin, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Opera Software, got on the phone to confirm that starting Wednesday, Opera Mini will be officially available on Ocean phones.

"We've always been really impressed with the Ocean as a device and (with) Helio for really listening to their user community," Hamlin said of the partnership. "Opera Mini became a popular hack, so the Helio folks came to us and wanted to make it an official download."

While Norway-based Opera has benefited from deals with American manufacturers--Opera Mobile and Opera Mini have shipped with select Motorola phones since 2003--this agreement with Helio marks the first time that the company has inked a deal with a U.S. mobile service provider.

Opera Mini for Helio Ocean will be available on Wednesday via the Ocean's on-deck Web portal and will also ship on Helio Ocean phones. According to Hamlin, the two companies may soon discuss support for other Helio models.

A lot of wave and tidal power systems being proposed these days will be capable of generating megawatts of power.

Puget Sound Tidal Power is aiming for 10 to 15 kilowatts with its turbine--barely enough for five homes--but the lower power output also means a lower price tag, according to company President Burton Hamner. The total cost of a single turbine from Puget Sound in mass manufacturing will come to around $10,000 or so, he said. The budget on larger turbines often runs into the millions of dollars.

"We think you could get payback in five to eight years," he said during a meeting a the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations Conference taking place in Redwood City, Calif., this week. "We have devised a turbine that is small enough to be mass produced."

Micro power production is a growing theme among energy start-ups. Hawaii's Sopogy is promoting systems for producing electricity from solar thermal energy that would go on a house. Now, solar thermal systems are mostly huge engineering projects taking up hundreds of acres of desert land.

Similarly, Rentricity has come up with a hydroelectric turbine for generating electricity from municipal water plants. Now, hydro power comes from erecting massive dams on rivers.

Puget Sound has essentially created a scaled-down version of a tidal turbine. Overall, the unit stands about 15 feet high. In these systems, ocean tides or current from a river turn a turbine, which in turn generates electricity. Wind turbines do the same thing, but they aren't under water. Water is far denser than air, and tides are more predictable than the wind, so the potential to generate electricity from tides is enormous.

On the other hand, inserting mechanical equipment into the open ocean or a river comes with risks. Thus, most tidal and wave power devices are still in the testing or conceptual stages.

The smaller size has a few advantages, Hamner asserted. For one, Puget Sound's turbine can fit into more places than larger systems. He estimated that there are 500,000 sites worldwide and 10,000 in the U.S. that could be equipped with one of the company's turbines.

The turbines can also be lashed together to mimic the performance of a larger system. The company is currently analyzing the tidal power sites controlled by Tacoma Power, a local utility. One location could be equipped with 175 of the small turbines.

Environmental issues, of course, will have to be analyzed. Putting too many in a river could become a hazard. Puget Sound is also studying which type of turbine blade to use. Ideally, the company wants something that will turn in almost any conditions but also turn slowly enough not to harm fish.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy research lab, has come up with a new formula for hydrogen pellets that looks like it holds a lot of energy, per gram.

The PNNL pellet is made out of ammonia borane, or AB, compressed into small pellets. A milliliter of AB weighs about 0.75 grams and can hold up to 1.8 liters of hydrogen. Researchers speculated that a fuel system powered by AB pellets will occupy less space and be lighter in weight than systems using pressurized hydrogen gas. That's one of the pellets (and not a half-dissolved Jawbreaker) in the photo.

A number of companies are working on solid hydrogen storage. Storing hydrogen in pipelines and tanks is problematic. Because it's a tiny molecule, hydrogen in its gas form can leak out of containers. It also corrodes many materials. A solid material, however, can fix hydrogen with chemical bonds until it needs to be released. It also prevents explosions (although the Hindenburg zeppelin fire was caused by the aircraft's paint.)

Ecotality has created a system that stores hydrogen in magnesium oxide. Add water and you get hydrogen. SignaChem has one that revolves around sodium. Trulite is working on a portable hydrogen storage system that stores the gas in sodium borohydride.

Hydrogen, of course, has many critics. Hydrogen can be expensive to make and manufacturing it can release more pollutants in some circumstances than burning gasoline. But proponents note that it's plentiful in the universe. It can also come in handy in various applications. Some have theorized that hydrogen factories, powered by ocean-wave plants, could be built far out at sea. The hydrogen could then be brought to shore in ships stocked with solid-state storage.

In other words, hydrogen may not take over the world, but it could make sense in a lot of places. Toyota and others are still working on hydrogen cars. (See video of me driving a hydrogen car . That thing romped.)

Some of the difficulties involve devising ways to get the hydrogen to release from its carrier at a steady, predictable rate, the cost of the solid-state carriers, and their weight.

We have 10 years, folks. And then it's man the lifeboats, or head for the hills. That's the conclusion of James Hansen and five other scientists. They've just published a paper with the Royal Society in England. It says melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic could soon reach a point of no return. The team even says the recent reports from the United Nations' global warming conferences are too conservative in their projections of what could happen.

The paper urges quick and decisive action, including attempts to scrub greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Hansen is outspoken and a favorite target of global warming disbelievers. In all fairness, Hansen's been at this climate change thing a long time. Back in 1999 he co-wrote an article on changing temperature patterns around the world. At that time his map showed the U.S. seemed to be cooling temporarily. He didn't try to jiggle the data.

Believe Hansen and his cohort, or diss them, we will soon see who's right. Scientists are actively tracking the ice sheets in Antarctic and those on Greenland where changes will be closely measured.

Time to re-write one little section in my Webster's Dictionary. That's an old-time thing, ink on paper, you remember? It gives the fifth definition of "glacial" as "as slow as the movement of a glacier." Need to change that to read "fast" in the future.

British researchers have found the movement of Antarctic's glaciers is speeding up. During the decade ending in 2003, these southern glaciers speed up by 12 percent. That means these huge rivers of ice are speeding toward the ocean. There three things can happen: the ice melts, it merges into an ice shelf or sloughs off to become a free-floating iceberg.

Antarctic is an enormous storehouse of water. This data on glacial speed not only redefines a word, it'll bring adjustments in the projections about global warming and the rise of sea levels.

Global warming likely will shorten the length of the day by about 120 millionths of a second during the next 200 years, according to scientists Felix Landerer, Johann Jungclaus and Jochem Marotzke from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.

According to an article summary, warming water will transfer ocean mass from deep areas to shallower areas around continental shelves, a change that will mean more of the ocean's mass will be near the Earth's axis of rotation. And, because of the wonder that is conservation of angular momentum, that would speed up rotation--as in the case of the figure skater pulling arms and legs closer to the body, as the American Institute of Physics points out.

You may have missed this on your favorite blog site, and you definitely missed this if you looked at American TV news. Reunion Island got smashed on Saturday. Big waves. Lots of damage. It was not a tsunami this time. Certainly earthquakes can pack an enormous wallop, but the supporters of wind power surely have something going as well.

The European Space Agency (ESA) satellites were tracking the course of the big swells. Ocean swells, not rich guys with big heads. Big, really big waves. Some that slammed into Reunion without warning were over 35 feet high.

First, the satellite noted the very strong winds along the cape, just off South Africa. The map shows Reunion east of Madagascar. And that is the direction the ocean swells were pushed. It took the waves three days to go from Cape Town's coast to Reunion's flat beaches. You can see on the map where Reunion lies east of Africa. To be precise it is just over 100 miles from Mauritius. See. And, of course, they have their own active volcano according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The ESA used newly created tracking software to map the progress of the wind-created swells. This time it didn't help Reunion in advance. But the ESA says this is a first step toward coming up with effective means of real-time tracking and an alert system. The Reunionites will be pleased.

Why, you are sure to ask, is the ESA worried about little Reunion? Well, it's a tropical paradise, I'm told. And those Northern Europeans love any place where they can find sunshine. Second, little Reunion and its citizens are officially a department of France and members of the European Union.

Carbon dioxide is known to be one of the greenhouse gases that can cause the Earth's atmosphere to retain heat. Today, two new scientific studies have been released that offer more insight into carbon and its dispersal into the air as carbon dioxide.

First, from Australia's CSIRO, the national science agency, comes a study on carbon contained within tropical forests that is thus not available to be released as CO2. This study says the current deforestation rate in the tropics releases 1.5 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere annually--about one-fifth of all carbon emissions caused by human activity.

Another study describes the fate of CO2 trapped within the Pacific Ocean. This study, released by Kent State University, found that there had been massive prehistoric releases of carbon dioxide. Two of these occurred at the end of the last Ice Age, triggered by changes in ocean currents. Right now, the scientists say, carbon dioxide levels in the Earth's atmosphere are the highest they've been in 650,000 years. That's even before the invention of the radio and phonograph if you're following on a timeline.

Oceans have absorbed about half the carbon we humans have pumped into the air in the past 300 years. But if current climate change alters ocean currents enough, there could be another massive release of carbon dioxide now trapped within the ocean. That would only accelerate the warming of the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, one company is working on trying to increase the amount of carbon now trapped by the oceans. Their plan is to use some friendly plankton to capture carbon. I just hope we humans haven't totally alienated every other organism on the planet.