Mirrors reflect the sun, concentrating its energy into a transom of pipes, at the Ausra Kimberlina Solar Thermal Energy Plant in Bakersfield. Credit: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles TimesFrench nuclear energy giant Areva has jumped into the U.S. renewable energy market with the acquisition of Ausra, a Silicon Valley solar power plant startup backed by high-profile venture capitalists. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but in an interview on Monday, Areva executive Anil Srivastava said that the price the company paid for Ausra was in line with the $418 million that rival Siemens spent last year to acquire Solel, an Israel solar power plant builder. That would be a decent payday for Ausra’s investors, which include marquee Silicon Valley venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Khosla Ventures. “The current shareholders are very well-reputed venture capitalists and I can assure you they negotiated very well,” said Srivastava, the chief executive of Areva’s renewable energy division. Ausra burst onto the green tech scene in 2007 after relocating to Silicon Valley from Australia and announcing plans to build a gigawatt's worth of solar thermal power plants. Though the startup raised about $130 million from investors, early last year ...

Los Angeles - An Italian court has ruled that ISPs in the country must block access to file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay, reinstating a ban that had been previously overruled, then reaffirmed by Italy's Supreme Court, TorrentFreak reported.read more

Google may be adding status-update profiles similar to Twitter to Gmail, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing "people familiar with the matter." Google already facilitates status messages that display under user names in the instant-message chat area of its webmail client. As the rumor goes, the change would archive status messages and display them on a profile page rather than replace previous ones. The new feature could go live as early as this week, the Journal writes. Silicon Alley Insider is already calling the feature Google's "Twitter-killer." A case of blogger's hyperbole. Yahoo Mail -- the biggest webmail client according to Hitwise -- added a Twitter clone recently that has been mostly ignored. Sure, it makes sense to integrate social networking features into Google's most popular social product. In June, a Google spokeswoman said the e-mail service had "tens of millions of users." But the search giant has already tried its hand unsuccessfully at social networking a few times before. Orkut, a Facebook competitor, is ignored by Americans. Then there's Dodgeball, a location-based social network that Google bought in 2005 and shuttered last year to be replaced by Google Latitude -- another service that hasn't really taken hold. Google Reader, too, has a mess of social ...

Google is planning to break the language barrier and deliver a phone within the next few years that will translate languages on-the-fly, a company representative told the U.K.'s Times Online in a recent interview. "We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time," Franz Och, Google's head of translation services told the outlet. The idea behind Google's plan is simple: when a user speaking one language says something into a phone, Google's translator software, which would be running on the recipient's phone, would interpret what the person said, translate it into the recipient's language, and recite it back in that second language. In order to limit conversational pauses, the company apparently plans to translate as phrases are spoken, rather that waiting until each sentence is completed. Google hopes to make the application available "in a couple years." Difficulty awaits In practice, achieving real-time digital translation will be no easy feat. Voice-recognition technology has traditionally struggled to work quickly and accurately. Many services built in to current mobile devices require rigid commands to function. For example, in order to initiate a call using my Bluetooth headset, I'm required to clearly say "call" followed by the person's name. I've ...

Tyler Perry has found himself in a bit of copyright trouble lately for allegedly incorporating portions of copyrighted gospel music in his many successful shows. © 2010 The Hollywood Reporter (full story)