big

BrightSource Energy today disclosed plans to build a 750-megawatt solar power plant in California, which would be its third and largest utility-scale project.

The company said that the Rio Mesa Solar Electric Generating Facility will use its solar tower technology, where a field of mirrors reflects light onto a tower to create steam that drives a turbine to generate electricity. The project would generate enough electricity to power more than 300,000 homes, BrightSource said.

The plan calls for installing three towers able to generate 250 megawatts each (before accounting for the energy consumed by their operation).

BrightSource earlier this … Read more

If you want a network storage device that you can leave in the living room to wow your guests, the LaCie 5big Network 2 would be it. From the front it doesn't look much like a storage device; it looks more like a mysterious item pulled straight out of a sci-fi movie or a piece of art that you're not really supposed to understand.

From the back, however, it's a dead-serious storage device with five hard-drive bays, a bunch of peripheral ports, and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. The 5big Network 2 is LaCie's high-end NAS server that can house up to five SATA hard drives of any capacity. In fact, it's the first from the company that can host hard drives of different capacities, thanks to its new Auto RAID configuration that was introduced a while back via the NAS OS 2.0.… Read more

After five months at sea, British adventurer and environmental advocate Roz Savage made landfall this morning in Mauritius, completing her solo row across the Indian Ocean and becoming the first woman to row solo across the "big three": the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian.

Savage, 43, set off from Australia five months ago in her 23-foot rowboat. After rowing more than 4,000 miles, she arrived in Grand Baie, Mauritius, today.

In total, she has rowed about 15,000 miles and spent more than 500 days at sea. She completed the Atlantic row in 2005, and then went on … Read more

Meet AlphaDog--it's BigDog on steroids.

This is our first glimpse of the brother of Boston Dynamics' robotic beast of burden, BigDog.

The vid below shows a lab prototype of the quadruped war robot, aka the Legged Squad Support System, or LS3, funded by DARPA and the Marine Corps.

The donkey-sized machine is designed to carry up to 400 pounds of gear and follow troops over rough terrain on missions of 20 miles and up to 24 hours.

That's more than BigDog's payload of 340 pounds and 12 miles; as a general rule, horses can comfortably carry up to 240 pounds. AlphaDog will have some degree of autonomy like animals, using computer vision to follow a leader or automatically trotting to GPS way points. … Read more

Robots will play a greater role in fighting wars in the future, and BigDog wants a piece of that action.

BigDog is both the silliest and scariest military robot out there. The recent video below from creator Boston Dynamics provides a retrospective on the DARPA-funded quadruped, which is designed as a load-carrying mule for soldiers.

The vid shows six years of BigDog evolution from 2004 through 2010. The 240-pound, all-terrain cyber-canine can tackle slopes up to 35 degrees, rubble, snow, mud, and water, and can carry a 340-pound load. That's handy since the average soldier load has increased dramatically in recent years.

You can't hear it in the video, but it sounds like a go-kart because it runs on a one-cylinder Leopard go-kart engine.

Its sensors include stereo vision, GPS, a gyroscope, and LIDAR--you can kick it and it'll keep on trucking. The machine once set a record for traveling 12.8 miles without stopping or refueling. It can run at speeds up to 4 mph.

No doubt BigDog is impressive, even awesome in its relentlessness, but also ridiculous. Boston Dynamics once had fun "weaponizing" the brute, perhaps inspired by that jocular BigDog Beta video by a pair of spandex-clad parodists.

One serious follow-up to BigDog is the Legged Squad Support System (LS3), also designed to lighten the load for dismounted troops.

"That machine will carry 400 pounds of payload on 20-mile missions in rough terrain, where wheeled vehicles can't go," says Marc Raibert of Boston Dynamics. "We have a lab prototype that we will show soon, and expect the first field prototype ready in summer 2012."

And since Boston Dynamics is working on other animal robots for the military that could conceivably run as fast as 70 mph, it's hard not to wonder whether BigDog could have the last laugh and the joke will be on us. … Read more

If you think the Promise Pegasus is just a bit too big (and you're right!), LaCie has something for you. The company announced today that its first Thunderbolt device, the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt external drive, is now available for purchase.

This is the second Thunderbolt storage device on the market, besides the Pegasus, and the first that comes in a design that's small enough for you to carry on the go.

The new drive features a pair of 2.5-inch drives, set up in JBOD, RAID 1, or RAID 0 configurations. Measuring just 1.6 inches by … Read more

This week Opera Solutions, a provider of "big data" analytics tools, announced that the company has taken in an $84 million investment to expand its rapidly growing business. The investment round, the company's first, was led by Silver Lake Sumeru, with participation from Accel-KKR, Invus Financial Advisors, JGE Capital Management, and Tola Capital.

Founded in 2004, Opera has grown from 10 people to more than 600 staffers globally with development locations in New York, Shanghai, and New Delhi. The staff includes 180 scientists working to solve data-oriented challenges.

I spoke with CEO and founder Arnab Gupta today … Read more

The business intelligence company SizeUp looks like it could offer an extremely useful service for small businesses. It takes a city or business district's publicly-available data, and presents it in super-clear ways for small businesses that could use the intelligence.

The demo at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference was compelling. An imaginary shoe store business owner could see where his competitors were located, how his business metrics compared to other stores, demographics of neighborhoods for opening new stores, and other data. All the data comes from public records. SizeUp does a fantastic job of processing and presenting the data in … Read more

Typically I write about storage. Now, as part of my research, I'm writing about data--data about you. The hottest commodity on the Web right now is data that describes who you are, what you like, what you do, who you know, where you've gone, where you might be, and what you are likely to do.

There are potentially tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of buyers, sellers, and collectors of data about you. For example, retailers of all stripes--from online to bricks and mortar--believe that they can sell more to you when they know more about … Read more