| Bezos Invests in Fusion and BP Funds Biofuels and GE and EADS to Print Parts for Airplanes |
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Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos is lending his support to fusion, the power source of the sun, H-bombs, and, starting 30 to 50 years from now, local utilities. His personal investment company, Bezos Expeditions, contributed an unspecified fraction of a $19.5 million venture capital fund raised by General Fusion, a company that is developing an approach to fusion that combines two leading fusion designs, magnetic confinement of plasma and inertial confinement. The company had previously raised $13.75 million.BP and DSM have also invested in Verdezyne, a biotech startup that is engineering yeast to make ethanol and adipic adic, a basic chemical used to make polyester, and that companies have been trying for decades to make from sugar rather than oil. Several other biofuels companies are trying to break into chemicals markets, since their biofuels are too expensive to compete with conventional fuels. [Read the full article] Algorithms distinguish casual website visitors from people who truly are potential customers, so the likeliest buyers can be shown ads while they surf.Remember this?: Someone who browses listings for bike trailers on a site run by CSN Stores (upper left) might later see a related ad on a separate website, such as Weather Underground. Credit: TellApartFor every 100 people who visit a retailer's website, only about two will buy something; the other 98 will just leave. But with enough reminders, some of these 98 people might become customers someday. The trick is to figure out which ones they are, and then to nudge them by means of targeted ads. The practice is known as retargeting, and it's growing on the Web.When you see an online ad for a product you previously looked at on a different website, you've been retargeted. Making that happen is the business of companies like TellApart, which was founded in 2009 by Mark Ayzenshtat and Josh McFarland. [Read the full article] Lollapalooza's open API will let developers build apps faster and more easily than they could with unofficial methods. "Usually, festivals don't fully embrace the unofficial apps and the unofficial events," McKnight says. "I really like making something new with existing data instead of reinventing the wheel."Feferman hopes to see developers create apps that are useful before, during, and after the festival. He hopes they'll help people make new friends or introduce them to new bands. "We want to enhance the experience across that full spectrum," he says.Facebook has emerged from a privacy scandal to become online advertising's next great hope. Its goal: turning us all into marketers.Putting a computer on Jeopardy! warps the public understanding of what artificial intelligence is and how science is done.Decisions about future energy sources will need to factor in water consumption as well as greenhouse-gas emissions. [Read the full article] 
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