Google Invests $102 Million More Into California’s Alta Wind Energy Center

According to an official company blog post today, Google is increasing its investment into California’s Alta Wind Energy Center (AWEC) by $102 million, bringing its total investment in the renewable energy facility to $157 million.

The AWEC is being developed by Terra-Gen Power, primarily. The first development within the massive facility is the Alta-Oak Creek Mojave Project. Google’s latest funding commitment would go to build an extension at the facility. The AWEC has a transmission line, the Tehachapi Renewable Transmission Project, dedicated to it which makes it distinct from many, large-scale renewable energy projects that have been proposed in the U.S.

Over the years, Cape Wind faced challenges winning public opinion and regulatory approvals due to a lack of a transmission line that can send power generated offshore back to Nantucket or Boston, two large markets nearby. In 2010, as reported by Reuters then, Google, along with cleantech investment firm Good Energies and Japans’ Marubeni Corp., agreed to take an equity position in Cape Wind’s transmission line.

This year, Google has invested about $700 million into renewable energy projects, according to press statements by Rick Needham, the company’s director of green business operations.

Google also recently dedicated funds to financing SolarCity residential solar development, and to other large-scale solar and wind projects including at Ivanpah a solar power tower project in Nevada, and Shepherd’s Flat, the wind farm in Oregon.

A hearty tax appetite is partly responsible for Google’s move to become a clean energy financier of this magnitude. Google will reap the benefits of many tax credits currently available to investors in clean energy in the U.S.

Supporting clean energy and new additions to the grid could also help Google maintain a stronghold in search and big data; users will inevitably search for and process bulk amounts of information about energy production and use via Google, its APIs and apps as new sources of energy get plugged into the grid, and as utilities are forced by regulators to report more carefully on their environmental impact.

Google Shuts Down Medical Records And Health Data Platform

Google is shutting down Google Health, which enables you to store and manage all your health information in one place on the Web. Google says the platform simply wasn’t having the ‘broad impact’ necessary to sustain the product.

From Google’s blog post: There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people. That’s why we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue the Google Health service.

Google says that it will continue to operate Google Health until January 1, 2012, will allow people to export their health data for an additional year beyond that. Any data that remains in Google Health after that point (January 2013) will be permanently deleted.

Google Health launched in 2008 as a central repository for all of your health information, including prescriptions, medical history, medical records, and more.

One of the key contributors to the overall success of Google Health were partnerships with insurance companies, hospitals and other medical institutions to make data more available to consumers. As last year, Google Health still needed to sign up hundreds of insurers in the U.S. Google announced some key deals (i.e. a partnership with CVS to import prescription data into the platform), but couldn’t gain traction elsewhere.

Google also started transitioning Health into an overall wellness platform, allowing users integrate data from FitBit and CardioTrainer, but clearly this didn’t get enough traction amongst users.

Microsoft’s competing product HealthVault looks to be still alive and kicking.

Opera Founder Jon S. von Tetzchner Resigns Over Differences With Board

Opera founder Jon S. von Tetzchner has resigned from the company.

In an email to Opera employees, von Tetzchner said that “It has become clear that The Board, Management and I do not share the same values and we do not have the same opinions on how to keep evolving Opera. As a result I have come to an agreement with the Board to end my time at Opera. I feel the Board and Management is more quarterly focused than me.” You can read the full email below.

Von Tetzchner co-founded Opera Software in 1995, and led the company up to 2010, when he resigned as CEO. He then became a full-time strategic advisor to the company.

As for what’s next, Opera says that von Tetzchner has “ideas about new projects, but is not ready to reveal any of his ideas as of right now.”

It’s unclear what values Opera’s founder and the board disagreed upon. The independent mobile and web browser tens of millions of users, and seems to be growing at a fast clip.

Dear All,

It is with a heavy heart that I send this message. Next week will be my
last at Opera. It has become clear that The Board, Management and I do not
share the same values and we do not have the same opinions on how to keep
evolving Opera. As a result I have come to an agreement with the Board to
end my time at Opera. I feel the Board and Management is more quarterly
focused than me. I have always worked to build the company for the future.
I believe the foundation we have is very solid to build further upon.

I do believe strongly in Opera as a company, and in all of you working
here. Our products actually make a difference for a lot of people in the
world, and I wish you all the best of luck moving forward. I will be
following the company closely and rooting for you all.

Yours truly,
Jon.

Angry Yahoo Shareholder Confronts Bartz And Asks For Her Head (Audio Clip)

ahoo CEO Carol Bartz got an earful yesterday at the tail end of the company’s annual shareholder meeting. An angry shareholder, who identified himself as Steve Landry—an advisor to institutional investors with “millions of Yahoo shares”—stood up at the end of what was up until then a surprisingly feel-good affair, given the total underperformance of the stock for the past three years, and asked for her head. We’ve uploaded the audio clip below.

He goes through a list of issue and concerns, calling Yahoo a “debacle” and a “circus.” He starts out by addressing “the elephant in the room”: the search for Bartz’ successor.

“It came out earlier this week in a blog that the board is secretly talking to other CEO candidates,” he said. “I have heard similar details. I believe it is true. The last thing Yahoo needs right now is a lame duck CEO. The buyout talks over your contract need to start today.”

Hmm, I wonder which blog he’s talking about

Landry also brings up the Hulu acquisition rumor (which was wrong) and suggests Jason Kilar could be a good CEO candidate for Yahoo. But he thinks buying Hulu would be a bad idea.

He finishes by calling on the board to break up or sell the company. “The status quo is no longer working,” he says.

To all of which, Bartz responds: “You’re welcome, and thanks for your opinion, the bloggers’ opinions and the rumors. What else? Wonderful. That was certainly a downer.”

Listen to Landry’s entire diatribe below.

Inspired By Wikipedia, Quora Aims For Relevancy With Topic Groups And Reorganized Topic Pages

Quora has just announced a redesign of its Topic Pages and the introduction of Topic Groups, aiming to make information discovery and navigation on the site a little bit easier. The motivation behind these changes is a thrust towards ease of search and content relevancy on Quora, as there is currently a ton of content on the site that people need to figure out how to navigate.

Now, instead of a chronological stream on Topics Pages (which you can get to via the tags in questions), users will see Best Questions, Open Questions as well as Featured Questions and Frequently Asked Questions depending on the topic.

A Topic Page can also correspond to a Topic Group which will be focused on all the activity on the Topic Page and can roll up multiple topics into one, giving users a way to self-organize and share info. For example this Movies Group corresponds to this Movies Page.

Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo likens the difference between and Topic Page and a Topic Group to the difference between a Wikipedia article and a Wikipedia Talk page, where the Talk page features the activity of a group behind the page that is committed to the topic, moderates questions and features content. The page is just an outpost of the total sum of the group’s knowledge.

“If you’re someone who doesn’t know about a topic, now you can get a general overview of what the topic is about on a Topic Page,” D’Angelo tells me, saying that the Topic Groups will be the space for people who want to delve deeper.

Some Topic Groups will be official (you can see a list here) i.e. moderated by a group of admins with topical expertise, while others will simply consist of all incoming activity to a Topic Page.

D’Angelo writes, “We’ve had a lot of activity on Quora recently with screenwriters and other people in Hollywood. Now there’s a well-defined space for them to focus on movies without being distracted or interrupted with everything else that they’re interested in on Quora. In general, this structure will let us have deeper communities and topic areas.”

Says power Quora user Semil Shah, “[On Wikipedia] you have topics and you move from page to page, like nodes. Here, in Quora, the topics are organized in a way one can eventually drill down and explore, investigate. It’s genius.”

Despite having no user numbers to announce, D’Angelo tells me that the design and organizational changes were the result of having to look closely at what worked and what didn’t after Quora grew faster than expected last winter. The service’s eventual goal is to get more knowledge on to the Internet, get more questions and get more answers, D’Angelo said.

Also in the information discovery and relevancy vein but on the opposite end of the spectrum is the delightful newly launched Quora Shuffle Button, which lets users view random content on Quora a la StumbleUpon. You can find the unassuming Shuffle button at the bottom of each Quora page. Baby steps.