Battery News and Information

Among consumers shopping for homes, 65 percent said the end of the tax credits will have little or no effect on their interest in purchasing a home, according to the survey, which was conducted by Prudential Real Estate and Relocation Services, part of Prudential Financial (PRU.N).

Consumers remain unsure about the direction of the housing market, but are optimistic about real estate values, with 46 percent expecting prices in their area to increase over the next year. Just 12 percent expect prices to decline, the survey found.

Over the next five years, 79 percent expect prices to increase, and 20 percent expect prices to increase substantially.The survey was of 1,000 Americans between the ages of 25-64 with household income of at least $35,000; it was conducted from April 15-20.

“While the tax credit expiration is a concern for many, the bigger issues now are the availability and cost of financing as well as if they will have a job,” he said.Rising mortgage interest rates and unemployment were cited as the most important factors affecting consumers’ decision to purchase a home, along with more stringent lending criteria and fewer mortgage-backed securities purchased by the Federal Reserve.

Of those who have recently purchased a home, 61 percent cited low mortgage interest rates as “very important” to their decisions, outstripping those who cited the tax credit or cheaper prices. But 66 percent expect interest rates to rise, underscoring potential headwinds for the market.

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For all the feel-good rhetoric about electric cars, the inconvenient truth is that drivers remain sceptical of battery technology that can carry them only 160 kilometres at a time.It envisages a global network of thousands of charging points for short trips and battery-switching stations for motorists making longer journeys.

The pilot program between the Silicon Valley company Better Place and Nihon Kotsu, Tokyo’s largest taxi company, is the first test of the technology before it is introduced in Israel and Denmark next year.

The founder of Better Place, the Israeli-American Shai Agassi, said the Tokyo trial was “the proof that you can build a network of [electric] cars that can go and go and go … That would not have been possible if you had to drive for one hour then charge [an electric battery] for six hours.”The 90-day trial is the ideal litmus test, said the president of Nihon Kotsu, Ichiro Kawanabe, because Tokyo’s 60,000-strong taxi fleet is the largest in the world.

“Even though it only makes up 2 per cent of Japan’s cars, it accounts for 20 per cent of emissions,” he said.The chief executive of Better Place Australia, Evan Thornley, a former Victorian Labor MP who quit politics for his latest post, said Australia’s urban environment made it ideal for electric cars: “We have a lot of large cars that do long distances driving around the outer suburbs.”

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In a research note Friday, Caris & Co. analyst Robert Cihra wrote that rising PC shipments and tight supply of hard disk drives helped Western Digital’s results. Desktop PCs were particularly strong, thanks to demand from emerging markets and businesses.

However, not all analysts were as positive. Wedbush analyst Kaushik Roy wrote that Hitachi, another competitor, grew margins in the quarter while margins fell at both Western Digital and Seagate.

“A more powerful Hitachi poses a bigger threat to Western Digital and Seagate going forward,” wrote Roy, who has a “Neutral” rating on Western Digital.

“The good news is that the demand from the commercial segment in the developed markets are starting to pick up, although we are unsure about the strength of the PC upgrade cycle that everyone is anticipating” in the second half of 2010, Roy wrote.

Western Digital said in a conference call that it expects to earn $1.40 to $1.50 per share on $2.58 billion in revenue in the current quarter. According to a Thomson Reuters survey, analysts had forecast net income of $1.36 per share and $2.45 billion in revenue.

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Two leading providers of in-car technology have joined forces to develop a
new range of electric vehicle technologies designed to provide motorists with
up-to-date information on their car’s electric Sony VGP-BPS8
battery.Hitachi next-generation telematics general manager Masamori Kashiyama
said the partnership would address a growing market for intelligent vehicle
technologies.

The companies plan to provide bespoke systems for electric car manufacturers
based around tools that are capable of advising drivers when to take their
vehicle to a charging station, the location of nearby stations and the current
condition of the battery.

The company added that the so-called “infotainment applications” would also
integrate electric car data with smart grid systems, potentially allowing energy
companies to monitor when electric cars are being charged and offer reduced
tariffs for motorists who charge their vehicles outside peak times.

“Being able to shape load to demand based on cost and availability is very
important for optimising the existing electricity distribution infrastructure,”
explained Leo A. McCloskey, vice president for marketing and product management
at Airbiquity. “So we are working to ensure that the power provider is also
incorporated into the communications environment.”

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battery

Lower Merion School District employees activated the Web cameras and Internet address tracking software on laptops they gave to high school students about 146 times during the last two school years, snapping nearly 56,000 images, district investigators have concluded.

Those computers - programmed to snap a photo and capture a screenshot every 15 minutes when the machine was on - fired nearly 13,000 images back to the school-district servers.Hockeimer declined to describe in detail any of the recovered Web-cam photos, or identify the people in them or their surroundings.

Hockeimer said that the district’s internal investigation was ongoing and that the numbers could change. He said the board authorized him to release the information in response to a court motion filed last week by Harriton High School sophomore Blake Robbins, whose lawsuit contends the program invaded his privacy.

In the motion, Robbins’ attorney, Mark Haltzman, argued that the now-disabled system surreptitiously collected more than 400 photos of his client - including shots of him when he was shirtless and while he slept in his bed last fall - as well as thousands of images from other students’ computers.

The system was designed to automatically purge all the images after the tracking was deactivated. The tracking system continued to store images from those computers for nearly six months, until police recovered them and charged a suspect with theft in March 2009.In a few other cases, Hockeimer said, the team has been unable to recover images or photos stored by the tracking system.

Only two employees - information systems coordinator Carol Cafiero and network technician Mike Perbix - could actually turn on and off the tracking. Hockeimer said the district investigators have no evidence to suggest either Perbix or Cafiero activated the system without being asked.

But the requests were loose and disorganized, he said, sometimes amounting to just a brief e-mail.He said none appeared to be “salacious or inappropriate” images but said that in no way justified the use of the program.

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