Webware

If you can't decide where to move but want to live close to where you travel every day, Optimal Home Location ( via EcoGeek) suggests a spot. If you hope to shrink your carbon footprint, reducing your commute time can be a key factor.

First, Optimal Home Location found a spot smack in the center of my job and daily pit stops.

This Google Maps-based tool integrates with real estate site Zillow to display a given area's home prices, taxes, and the percentage of households with children. I plugged in six addresses for the places I visit most around San Francisco, including work, where friends live, and my favorite restaurants and grocery store. The site computed the location most central to those places, where I neither desire nor can afford to rent or buy a place.

Optimal Home Location then asked for details about the order in which I frequent specific locations. It also requested the commute of someone else in my household, which happens to be virtually identical to my own.

The site wound up telling me to live on the same street as my office. I took this as a perhaps depressing hint that my life centers around work, and promptly decided to take a class--mosaic making, hang gliding, welding, anything--in a far-flung neighborhood.

This service is fun to play with, but it's no more than a nice start for plotting a potential move. If you're familiar with a city, chances are you already have a sense of where you'd like to hang your hat versus what's realistic for your budget or other lifestyle limitations. As Optimal Home Location explains, its geometric calculations "do not take into account the feasibility of the area for living." Maybe something more sophisticated in the future could blend more data with community suggestions.

This Web site ultimately told me to live at work.

Still, you can also describe alternative driving commutes among various spots on a map for estimates of the traveling time and gas expenses you'd face over a year. One big flaw, if you're trying to "green" your life, is the lack of information about bus and subway stops, walkability, and bike lanes. At least you can add pinpoints to the map to mark personal points of interest.

This service would be most helpful paired with other online maps and ratings tools. For example, you could type an address from Optimal Home Location's suggestions into WalkScore (more here), which rates an area's friendliness for trekking around on two feet. Google Transit (more here) would also be helpful for public transit routes.

Also see our Moving 2.0 roundup of services including maps of housing prices, fair rent calculators, and more tools to find data about a neighborhood's demographics and lousy neighbors.

Web sites that promise to pay for your old gadgets look bright around the holidays, when every extra dollar can count toward new gifts or even utility bills. But are the services worthwhile? How much can you earn?

We examined nine services that pay for your unwanted digital wares. These are among the newest options to help keep electronics waste out of landfills, while uncluttering your closets.

Click on this image to see what seven services quoted to pay for 11 used electronics.

(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CBS Interactive)

We looked up what each service said it would pay for working iPods, PDAs, laptops, gaming consoles, and more, with cables but lacking their original boxes. For dead devices, some offer a pittance, or will connect you with willing recyclers and charity recipients. Our chart (at right) shows what each site claims it pays for specific equipment. Keep reading for highlights of the trade-in services.

We can't yet vouch for the start-to-finish experience of mailing in products to these companies. Those that find your equipment in worse shape than you estimated will downgrade the trade-in value.

If you only need to offload an old phone, look out for our upcoming comparison of sites that specialize in refurbishing and recycling handsets, including Cell for Cash, Simply Sellular, and ReCellular.

Homeowners who dream of their electric meter spinning backward may seek solar panels to slash bills and carbon emissions. But where to start?

Before you call a contractor, these sites can assist with the early steps, like summing up what you could spend or save in your neighborhood.

The pioneering San Francisco Solar Map offers personalized evaluations.

San Francisco Solar Map

The San Francisco Solar Map helps locals lay their solar plans. A Google map pegs projects already up and running. Type in your address for estimates of installation fees and long-term utility bill savings and to find installers listed by the California Energy Commission.

Fog City's municipal rebates, added to state and federal incentives, probably make it the least expensive place for homeowners and businesses to add photovoltaics. Residents taking advantage of all discounts might drop the hardware and construction costs from, say, $25,000 to $7,000. The Web site supports Mayor Gavin Newsom's goal of 10,000 solar rooftops by 2012. It's the work of the San Francisco Department of the Environment and CH2M Hill, a consulting firm.

Solar Boston's map displays the solar potential for an address or even a city block.

Solar Boston

Mayor Thomas Menino's Solar Boston project aims to ramp up installations from half a megawatt to 25 megawatts by 2015. Its Flash-based map tracks solar, wind, biomass, and hydropower sources around town. You can enter an address, select a building, or even highlight an area on the map, to view the potential in dollars and kilowatts for topping roofs with photovoltaics.

Both San Francisco and Boston belong to the Department of Energy's Solar America Cities initiative to fast-track the spread of solar power. The two cities' maps are early, model tools. I'd also like to see peer comments and Yelp-like ratings of services and products. And I'd expect such services to help consumers share tips and report about the longest-lasting equipment as the solar sector matures. For instance, I found more than three dozen installers within 30 miles of my San Francisco apartment, but I'd have to do research elsewhere to decide whom to trust.

How do solar panels affect a home's resale value? Somebody should integrate solar maps with real estate listings, in the style of Trulia or Zillow.

Cooler Planet's maps include regional incentives around the country to estimate solar costs and savings.

Cooler Planet

Cooler Planet's solar maps cover territory from coast to coast. Google Maps mashups from the Seattle environmental marketing firm chart solar rebates, existing installations, costs and savings, and installers around the country. We learned that photovoltaic panels atop a three-flat in Chicago, where only federal incentives are available, could halve the $300 monthly electric bill and pay for themselves after 28 years.

Cooler Planet also rates solar incentives by state, painting Louisiana and Oregon as surprisingly bright. Another map tracks the growth of solar in California since 1999.

Choose your building, and Sungevity will create an estimate of its solar potential.

Sungevity

Sungevity asks you to pick your San Francisco Bay-area building on a map and describe the roofing material in exchange for an e-mail quote of solar costs. Technology from Microsoft Virtual Earth enables the company to take into account the angle of a roof, which affects the light available to solar panels throughout the day. That could lead to fewer measurements in person, saving time and money.

RoofRay relies on your rooftop drawing to figure a slanted roof into its cost estimates.

RoofRay

RoofRay also looks at the slant of a roof, although with less precision than Sungevity. Locate your building on a Google Map, draw an outline of the roof, and estimate the pitch. RoofRay asks for your average monthly electric bill, then spells out a detailed financial analysis. The site requires registration and asks for snail mail and e-mail addresses with a phone number. To put an interactive RoofRay widget on a blog, code is available for a quick cut-and-paste.

This rapidly-growing grassroots effort aims to get more than One Block off the Grid.

1BOG

San Franciscans Sylvia Ventura and Dan Barahona launched One Block Off the Grid in June to help bring cheaper solar power to the people. The effort organizes homeowners to bargain together with businesses to drive down the costs of installation. Several dozen people who joined the first campaign enjoyed savings of up to 40 percent, according to 1BOG.

Last week, the couple sold their nonprofit to Virgance, a social media and activism start-up. The 1,153-member solar effort has spread to 20 cities. It's even taking a stab at solar agreements between tenants and landlords. Neighborhood Solar is a similar grassroots purchasing program in Denver, where 1BOG is establishing a toehold.

Wattbot's recommendations of cleaner energy technologies are set to launch in January.

Wattbot

Wattbot, which remains in preview testing, promises custom evaluations in January to help households save money and carbon emissions. Share your address, and it will detail potential energy-efficiency and renewable technologies for your address. More than a solar-referral tool, it will also evaluate the financial impact of modest tweaks, like swapping old lightbulbs with compact fluorescents. You'll be able to contact service providers, take notes on projects, and connect with fellow users.

For now, there's just a simple U.S. heat map of renewable energy adoption. Wattbot is also building a service for clean-tech companies to track sales leads and get market research. The planned features, if realized, could make this site a unique hub in the clean-energy, green-building marketplace.

This post was updated to add a more detailed image of a quote from Sungevity.

People use Twitter to warn of natural dangers including earthquakes and hurricanes. Other environmentally related uses for the micro-blogging tool include measuring energy use at home and rigging up plants to "tell" Twitter when they're thirsty.

For a green-news junkie overwhelmed by dozens or even hundreds of RSS feeds, Twitter can be an entertaining and mobile filter. Writers at blogs and traditional publications increasingly use it to broadcast 140-character alerts of stories and observations, which can provide an early and more casual take on their blog posts and formal articles.

Plus, you can interact with the authors via replies and direct messages that can be more immediate than an e-mail or comment on a full-length story.

Here are some of the "green" feeds we keep up with on Twitter. Some simply provide instant links to freshly published stories, while others mix in commentary and personality. Check out who they're following to find even more feeds.

• To start, find CNET's Green Tech posts here.
• Think of the never-dull Grist as The Onion for green news, only with more truth than truthiness.
• Preston Koerner of Jetson Green focuses on green building, and compiled this exhaustive list of green Twitter feeds.
• The EcoGeek team tracks green tech.
• Green Options is a network of a variety of green-themed blogs.
• GreenBiz.com is a hub for green business news.

• Inhabitat's bloggers share a fine eye for ecologically appropriate design.
• Sustainablog from Jeff McIntire-Strasburg is one of the longest-running green blogs.
• The Greenwash Brigade from American Public Media's Public Insight Network investigates sketchy-sounding green corporate claims.
• Green Wombat is the work of Fortune writer Todd Woody.
• DotEarth comes from Andy Revkin of The New York Times.
• TheOilDrum covers energy and "peak oil" issues.
• Global Warming and ScienceNews mention related stories around the Web every week or so.
• Ecorazzi: Think Us Weekly meets An Inconvenient Truth, launched by Michael Destries.
• Worldchanging's writers keep up with cutting-edge trends in sustainability.


Green lifestyle pointers and DIY tips come in more than a few flavors:

• Siel, aka GreenLAGirl, writes the Emerald City blog for the Los Angeles Times and still keeps up her original blog of her tips and adventures around town.
• Surveys show that people become more concerned about greening their lives when they become parents. Eco Child's Play speaks to them.
• Beth Terry's well-researched Fake Plastic Fish blog chronicles her quest to reduce her use of plastic.
• Green Map guides, in hundreds of cities, chart local green resources.
• Pointers for crafts enthusiasts come via Craft and Make magazines and Crafting a Greener World.
• The Green Guide from National Geographic offers household-greening tips. So do LighterFootstep and GreenTweet. Earth911 is a go-to guide for recycling and more.


Micro-bloggers from green nonprofit groups and businesses share their inside perspective:

• AIDG "tweets" often from Haiti, where the Boston nonprofit helps communities with renewable energy and more. The abbreviation stands for a mouthful: Appropriate Infrastructure Design Group.

• Enviroblog from the Environmental Working Group details toxic ingredients in everyday products.

• NRDCSwitchboard comes from the Natural Resources Defense Council, which prints the excellent On Earth magazine. The National Wildlife Federation and Sierra Magazine use Twitter, too. Greenpeace activists are ever-active.
• The World Resources Institute think tank is based in Washington, D.C.
• Can you build a green home for $100,000? Philadelphia developer Chad Ludeman takes up the challenge with the 100kHouse.
• Max Gladwell, whose blog blends social media with green living, describes on Treehugger how to add your "tweets" to a GreenStream channel to make them easier to find.
• Strategist and GreenBiz founder Joel Makower just began using Twitter in September.
• Social entrepreneur and GreenSkeptic Scott Edward Anderson challenges conventional assumptions about green tech.
• CleanTech.org says it's "where entrepreneurs and investors meet to commercialize clean technologies.
• CleanTech is updated by Denis DuBois, an expert on marketing for sustainable energy.
• Marc Alt, a sustainability consultant, also develops environmental conferences.
• Sopogy is among the solar start-ups with a Twitter presence.

• The Greensearch search engine donates part of ad profits to environmental groups.
• The GreenCollarGuy, from Green Collar Media, and GreenJobs specialize in sustainable employment.

Of course, you'll find some of the same voices on rival services to Twitter, but it happens to be the most popular. Feel free to chime in with more suggestions in the comments.

See also: The greening of social networking, Wikipedia's Wales launches Wikia Green, Growing green friends, Will social networking stop greenwashers?

Intuit shared details of bookkeeping app QuickBooks 2009 on Monday. With this release, the company aims to broaden the focus beyond the ledger book, providing a management center for small businesses that includes expanded online banking, support for transactions in more than 100 currencies, and 12 months of free Web hosting.

The applications are set to arrive in stores October 8.

(Credit: Intuit)

The 2009 release targets businesses that do work globally, whether that means say, shipping vintage Disney toys to eBay buyers in Japan or employing basket weavers in Uganda. At least 30 percent of QuickBooks users handle international transactions, according to Intuit.

Multi-currency support enables invoices, bill payments, and wire transfers in most of the world's currencies, with online updates and historical tracking of exchange rates. Wire transfers can be made in 100 currencies through QuickBooks Merchant Service, while the other features support 158 currencies. Users can add custom currencies, such as Ithaca Hours in upstate New York or Linden dollars for Second Life.

Intuit is also offering users a free Web site for 12 months at an Intuit domain name. Drag-and-drop page designs come from Homestead, a 2007 acquisition. Once the free period expires, monthly hosting costs are $4.99.

QuickBooks offers banking center capabilities, so users won't need to hop to banks' separate Web sites to check on the status of accounts.

Intuit says its Live Community peer-to-peer tech support, with 2.6 million users since its introduction in 2007, increasingly is being used for general business advice. The context-sensitive question-and-answer interface is docked along the right edge of the QuickBooks interface.

The built-in QuickBooks Messenger enables users of multi-user editions of the applications to chat with each other while logged in.

A new Company Insights view provides quick access to balances, money owed, reminders, and reports.

Expanded tools for accountants include Client Data Review to scan for client errors.

For $99, QuickBooks Simple Start Edition targets users with the most basic bookkeeping needs. The full-featured Pro Edition costs $100 more for one user, or a total of $379 for two people and $549 for three people. QuickBooks Premier, which offers industry-specific flavors, costs $399, or $749 for a pair of users and $1,099 for three-person access.

Adobe released details Monday about Creative Suite 4, its first update to more than a dozen design and editing tools since Adobe CS3 some 17 months ago.

The costs of the applications, set to reach consumers in October, haven't changed since CS3, but remain hefty. Should longtime users upgrade?

Click on this image for more details about the Adobe CS4 suites.

(Credit: Adobe)

Of course that depends on the specific tools you need. However, we suspect that only the most well-heeled will jump at the chance, as CS4 shares the majority of tools with its predecessor. Perhaps more dramatic, life-changing alterations will come with the next Creative Suite. That said, time-saving tweaks to Illustrator and Flash in particular could lure professionals immersed in them to upgrade.

With CS4, Adobe aimed to unify the interfaces of more than a dozen applications, including Flash and other former properties of Macromedia. You'll see similar pull down menus for toggling among workspaces that you can customize, as well as Flash-based panels that nicely snap open and shut. Corporate design departments will find plenty of enhancements for their teams to share work more quickly.

Adobe continues to improve integration among the applications. After Effects, as only one example, can import Photoshop 3D layers and export content directly into Flash.

Options for working with high-definition video and mobile content expand too, with support for the latest formats as well as for making Adobe AIR applications. Among other highlights:

Photoshop CS4 will use your computer's graphics chip for the first time, while offering support for 64-bit Windows.

At long last, you can handle more than one project at a time in Illustrator, thanks to the new multiple Artboards feature.

Flash CS4 has a rebuilt animation model, so you can make objects move on the stage in two quick steps. And Flash introduces a new, XML-based file format.

Dreamweaver provides plenty of shortcuts to CSS coding, including within the Properties panel.

We've been toying with the beta code of CS4 for several weeks. Check out our first take reviews and videos of the six suites and their individual applications for more details. We'll report back with rated reviews after working with the final code.

Apple's MobileMe service promises features which, like the release of Mac OS X Leopard, made me regret the recent purchase of another Windows Vista laptop, at least for a moment.

Having lost two laptops and five years of life history to theft several weeks ago, the allure of having precious data pushed automatically from a laptop to the "cloud," coupled with Time Machine backup, feeds my desire for security as well as my laziness (yes, I review software, and I didn't have a third backup). It seemed MobileMe could serve me better than the new iPhone would.

It's all about Me.com not working this week.

(Credit: Donald Bell/CNET Networks)

The replacement for .Mac subscriptions can synchronize mail, calendars, contacts, photos, Safari bookmarks, Dashboard widgets, and more among Macs, the iPhone, and iPod Touch. It lets you stash 20GB of files on Apple's servers, and it even cooperates with Outlook on Windows computers. Plus, MobileMe's online applications would let you check in on all that from any Web browser.

I tried to find .Mac users to share their cheers and jeers about that $100 annual service, but many colleagues at CNET said they couldn't afford it. However, MobileMe sounds like a better value, with expanded tools that aren't available elsewhere in a cohesive package.

I finally was able to use the calendar at Me.com once. But online e-mail still hasn't worked for me.

(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CNET Networks)

In advance of the release, I wrote a first-take CNET preview of MobileMe, hoping to follow up with a rated review, after exploring the nooks and crannies. However, I've barely been able to skim the surface of the product, and many other subscribers share the frustration.

If Apple's servers are overwhelmed this week, you might blame me a bit for refreshing Me.com for what has felt like every five minutes. Despite wearing out my trigger finger, I was only able to access my MobileMe account twice yesterday, for a total of two minutes. What a tease. I figured things would improve once the company finished .Mac migration.

MobileMe was due to be complete on Friday, with the full "push" synchronization intact. Around noon, I was able to synchronize mail, contacts, calendars, and upload some photos from a MacBook to Me.com. Hooray! Oops, I cheered too soon.

Yet another error message spoiled playing with Me.com, just when it was working for 10 minutes.

(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CNET Networks)

Today I've been logged in and out of Me.com countless times. The service kicks me out against my will, just when I feel that a new feature I hadn't tested must surely be within reach. I haven't been able to stay logged on to Me.com for more than 20 minutes at a time. Attempting to verify my account on an iPhone also failed.

So far, there are more than five dozen comments, most from similarly thwarted .Mac users, on a CNET News story about MobileMe's failed launch. You'll find the same frustrations repeated in this and other publications chronicling the marred release of both Me.com and the iPhone 3G.

I agree with some users who mused that those at Apple must have had their heads in a cloud by scheduling the .Mac migration for a weekday. Between 20 and 25 percent of .Mac subscribers use the service for business purposes, according to Apple. At least I'm not relying on a former .Mac account for a job. A few hours of downtime could kill a potential gig for, say, a freelance photographer.

Nevertheless, I'm withholding judgment of a rated review of MobileMe today until I can give the features more than a cursory glance. If it stops working like an alpha release from a cash-strapped start-up, the service might yet live up to its promise as Microsoft "Exchange for the rest of us." Who knows?

For now, this botched launch highlights both some pitfalls and promises of relying increasingly upon Web 2.0 services for work and play.

Before my computers were stolen, I could have at least uploaded my personal writings to Google Docs, or synchronized my photos with SugarSync, or entrusted everything to online storage, such as Box.net. But I felt wrong in my gut about sending those things to unseen servers, no matter how secure. I never got around to buying a backup drive. Instead, my stuff went out the window, literally, with a thief.

If your own computer crashes or disappears, you might have only yourself to blame. But providers of online applications and remote storage services bear a greater responsibility than makers of desktop software, when they hold the keys to our data. For .Mac users whose pictures and Web galleries were held hostage on remote servers, the epic failure of MobileMe may simply dull Apple's polish. The rocky start drives home the very need for a service that does what MobileMe is supposed to do: keep our data safe and accessible in more than one place.

Microsoft detailed on Tuesday its road map and pricing for Web-based software suites built for big companies and growing businesses.

Enabling telecommuting, which many employers and workers increasingly favor, is likely to be a selling point for the productivity and "deskless worker" tools within the Microsoft Online Services lineup.

The move is part of Redmond's push to integrate online and desktop software, shifting much of the heavy lifting to the "cloud."

"Microsoft Online Services is a key component of the software plus services initiative, and we're seeing customers, partners and even competitors embrace this flexible approach to the cloud," Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division, said in a statement.

Details were unveiled Tuesday in Houston at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.

Microsoft's per-user monthly fees for its online business services.

(Credit: Microsoft)

For $15 per month per person, the business productivity suite offers an Outlook-integrated Exchange Online for e-mail and calendars, Office SharePoint Online collaboration, messaging via Office Communications Online, and Office Live Meeting video-enabled Web conferencing.

The software giant will charge another $3 per month per user for the Deskless Worker Suite, which combines flavors of SharePoint Online and Exchange Online. The SharePoint portal offers access to internal company sites and search. E-mail, calendars, security filters, and Outlook Web Access Light are included with Exchange Online Deskless Worker.

Microsoft aims to simplify otherwise complex corporate tasks managed by engineers or IT technicians. For instance, a WYSIWYG interface would enable an IT worker to give a new employee access to the company tools in a series of steps that could be shorter than setting up, say, a free Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail account.

One can sign up online to try the beta services.

Exchange Online and Office SharePoint Online remain in beta, with final availability set for sometime in the second half of 2008, when Office Communications Online beta is also due. Microsoft plans for international availability in 2009.

The company offers to pay resellers of its Online Services 12 percent of the price of each contract secured during the first year, and 6 percent per subscription year thereafter. Interested companies can learn more at Microsoft's QuickStart Web site.

Microsoft partners and resellers of Online Services include Accenture, CDW, and Unisys. Nokia is among the companies using the online tools for messaging and collaboration.

Microsoft Online Services includes these tools.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Adobe released on Tuesday the first Reader application to bake movies and animation into the Portable Document Format.

With Adobe Reader 9, users can play Flash movies, Shockwave animation, and other rich media content without needing to open a third-party player.

With Reader 9, one click would play a Flash movie embedded in the PDF shown here.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

PDFs are reaching new levels of interactivity with this release. Past versions of the nearly ubiquitous and free application, by contrast, have enabled dynamic forms but served largely to open print-ready PDFs.

The update is supposed to load more quickly than version 8, addressing the gripes of many users who felt that Reader slowed down Web surfing.

Adobe has described this release as potentially leading to a one-size-fits-all media player. Acrobat 9, released in June at between $299 to $699, will embed video and animation within PDFs.

Acrobat 9 document-creation software can embed videos and animation as well as custom-developed applications alongside maps that preserve geospatial data, 3D models, images, word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in common formats. The priciest, Pro Extended flavor of Acrobat can convert multiple video formats into Flash.

Security enhancements to the refresh of Acrobat and Reader include support for digital signatures and 256-bit AES encryption.

Adobe's launch of an online word processor and conferencing tool via Acrobat.com in June enables users to comment and collaborate simultaneously on documents, and to convert documents to PDFs.

The Adobe Reader 9 download for Windows and Macs requires at least 128MB of RAM on either a Windows 2000 SP4 or newer system, or an Apple Mac G4 or newer running OS 10.4.11 or higher, respectively.