The U.S. Department of Energy has finally made good on its threat to take its label off of certain refrigerators made by Korean giant LG Electronics. The move is indicative of the DOE’s new, tougher approach to energy efficiency standards and certification.

In the last few years, the Energy Star name seemed to mean less and less. Apparently after certifying certain products, the department failed to follow up with appliance makers to make sure that models bearing the label actually met efficiency specifications. A lot of unqualified products ended up being shipped with the Energy Star blessing — negating its ability to help consumers make eco-friendly choices.

The program, managed jointly by the DOE and the Environmental Protection Agency, finally audited its activities in October — probably leading to its decision to purge the LG refrigerators. As it turns out, makers of most household appliances, like fridges, washing machines, dishwashers and air conditioners, are able to present their results directly to the DOE to earn Energy Star certification. Whereas makers of eco-friendly windows and light emitting-diode systems have to have their data verified by independent bodies.

At this point, it wouldn’t be surprising if the DOE started giving every application this level of scrutiny.

On closer inspection, LG’s fridges fall short of the money and energy savings that they had promised when they first earned the Energy Star brand, the department says. By no small measure either. Apparently the fridges use about twice the power that the company said.

LG hasn’t exactly accepted fault. Quite the opposite, it has turned around and sued the DOE, claiming that the department switched up the test it uses to qualify appliances for Energy Star. Regardless of the outcome, it’s nice to see the DOE and EPA taking a stand and using the recognizable Energy Star brand to truly reinforce its energy efficiency goals.

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Eye-Fi. All opinions are 100% mine.

Technology is involving to fast in todays world and it appear camera with wireless function.That’s mean you can use your camera remotely.So why we care about wireless camera?Well there are some great point about this.It can be useful when you can’t find your USB cable or Card reader, getting around downloading photos and there are still old photos on your camera, getting asked by your friends about your vacations photo or maybe your family members always ask you to uploading photo for them.Sounds great right!

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This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of 123 Media Max. All opinions are 100% mine.

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Google is about to launch a Google-branded smartphone that won’t be tied to AT&T, Verizon or any other one wireless carrier. That’s true.

The company has trolled netbook manufacturers to see if they can get one to build a Google-branded netbook. Also true.

But is Google also going to launch a touchscreen tablet-and/or-slate computer anytime soon? My VentureBeat coworkers and I think the speculation is just plain wrong, for the following reasons.

No sources cited, not even anonymous sources. The most high-profile posts about a possible Google tablet have been those at GigaOm and jkOnTheRun. But go read those posts in full, and follow the links. Colin Gibbs at GigaOm links to James Kendrick at jkOnTheRun, which is owned by GigaOm. Kendrick clearly stated that the Google tablet he described at length was his own vision, not something he’d been told is in the works.

Neither author said, “I have word from a contact who has been right before about Google’s plans, and this is going to happen,” as has happened a lot for Apple’s rumored tablet.  Both writers said, “It would be really cool if Google + tablet = true.” By that standard, we could launch rumors all day. A Facebook tablet! A Tumblr-phone! Here’s why it would be awesome.

Google’s track record. So far, Google hasn’t leapt to the front of the parade on hardware. Their phone trails Apple by years, and their very-likely Chrome OS netbook will likewise be a late arrival to a fat market. For that matter, they were late on search engines and Web ads, too. Why would they suddenly risk trying to create a new market segment, rather than Googlefying a proven one?

Tablet-size touchscreens are hard. All TechCrunch readers know that Crunchpad tablet founder Mike Arrington was notified at the bottom of an email message that his business partners had cut him out of his role. But remember the top part of the message? It said the Crunchpad’s 12.1-inch touchscreens were still not working right and that there was “no good news” on when they might be ready.

This is what we think we know: Capacitive touchscreens are still hard to build at 11 inches or greater, the size of a tablet rather than a gadget. Resistive touchscreens are easier in theory, but in practice they’re probably too slow. So if Google were to sell a tablet, Google would need several million working, warranty-ready big capacitive touchscreens that weren’t already promised to Apple. When a Taiwanese supplier tells DigiTimes they’re fulfilling the order, then we’ll gladly believe it.

[Image: Geeky Gadgets]

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of LG Chocolate Touch. All opinions are 100% mine.

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“Government 2.0” has been a big buzzword of 2009, with thought-leaders like Tim O’Reilly and The Sunlight Foundation showing the way. It’s a movement that pushes public institutions to use technologies that have thrived in the last five years like social networking and blogging to foster closer relationships with citizens. This entails being more open with data, and encouraging regular people to transform it through mashups and apps for use by others.

A few city governments have made good on their pledges to be more transparent. San Francisco unveiled DataSF, a central clearinghouse for data collected by the city, and showcases some apps here. New York City went a step further, launching a full-on apps contest through Betaworks-backed startup ChallengePost.

It’s been almost three months since the contest launched, and several interesting applications have turned up. Here are a few, and you can check out the rest here. (To be clear, some of the data for these apps is collected through the government like with Bookzee and some of it is bootstrapped.)

Primospot: Hands down, the biggest pain of owning a car in a major metropolitan city is finding a place to park. Primospot is building a database of all parking regulations in Boston and New York, so you can figure out where you’re legally allowed to park now or in the near future. Primospot generates maps like the one above, showing what’s in the red zone and not. Primospot can also send you text messages for when your parking space is about to expire and you can search for parking in the near future (in case you’re working during the day and want to figure out where to park when you go out at night.) And, in case you don’t think it gets any better, you can also compare parking garage prices in real-time. The company just launched an iPhone app called iPark, so you can record where you’ve parked in case you forget it.

All in all, it seems like a very helpful app and one that’s sorely needed in a public transportation-asphyxiated city like San Francisco. The user interface could be a smidgen better. I’d rather see markers showing how much of the curb is available for parking rather than noting a single point along several blocks. It’s a helpful start and the team has been very aggressive in adding features every month.

Bookzee: This app helps you find available library books nearby. You can search for books either on the web site or through the iPhone app and it will show you which nearby libraries have it available. Again, it’s only available in New York. San Francisco’s library system has its own online search, through it could benefit from a facelift and some mobile availability.

Taxihack: Rude taxi drivers better watch out. This app lets people leave Twitter-style mini-reviews of drivers using their medallion number. The interface is barebones for now, but it’s a big step up from the old way of reporting poor taxi drivers. (That was to call 311 and testify before the Taxi & Limousine Commission.) Now if only there was a way to take photos of medallions and pull up reviews, Google Goggles-style. That’s for another day…

All over the social Web these days, there’s a race to get as many friends, followers, readers, or subscribers as possible—most of them people you don’t know. As location-based social applications like Foursquare and Gowalla grow, they’re broadcasting your location to all those people, connecting you in one more way to a lot of people you’ve never heard of. As our “circle of friends” grows out of control, we wind up more public than we mean to be, sharing information with everyone just to be able to share it with our real friends.

New location app Rally is different, though. There’s no way to add Rally friends from Twitter or Facebook or anywhere else, because as Rally sees it, those aren’t really your friends. The only way to find someone on Rally is to look for them, which seems to be an effective way of narrowing the scope down to people you know. By intentionally stripping down the friend graph, and making friends come only from Rally, real friends can keep up with each other and keep everyone else out.

Other than that, Rally works a lot like Foursquare or Gowalla, letting you check in at a given location (restaurant, movies, etc) so your friends know where you are—you can even include a picture with your check-in information.

If you see a friend is somewhere, you can click “I’m on the way,” and let them know you’re coming to hang out. There’s also a bit of the game aspect, with users able to earn badges and the like–even more badges than Foursquare, potentially.

While Foursquare and Gowalla could be used the same way as Rally (letting you select friends one at a time), they’re integrated with Twitter and Facebook and encourage you to push all your location data into your other networks. So Rally’s not the only application that can restrict who gets your information, it’s the only one that doesn’t give you another option. The intent of Rally, more than the uniqueness of the use case, is what makes Rally notable.

Forcing users to rebuild their friend graph is a risky maneuver, and it remains to be seen if Rally can work on a large scale and do well enough to convince people to seek out all their friends on the service. It’ll be interesting to watch the company over the next few months to see how it fares.

Rally’s business plan is simple, as co-founder Sol Lipman told TechCrunch: using location to serve advertising. The potential with location-based ads is huge—you could walk by a store and find its coupons for the day, or see the happy hour specials at every bar within a six-block radius of you. Foursquare and other companies are making these kinds of deals, and Foursquare has already raised $1.35 million to extend into 100 cities, while Gowalla’s already got $10.3 million in the bank.

For right now, Rally is iPhone-only (available in the App Store), and is only usable for those in Santa Cruz, Calif. But the company says it’s going to be expanding both platform and location availability.

Rally is based in Santa Cruz. Many members of the startup team were on the team that created 12seconds, a short-form, video-based social network.

Over the past couple of weeks, startup Dorthy.com quietly rolled out a major upgrade to the self-styled social search site, making the personal-goal site available just in time to capture your New Year’s resolutions.

The company behind Dorthy wants you to use the site to make — and keep — your personal resolutions for 2010, and more generally all of your long-terms goals.

Dorthy hosts what it calls dreampages. Members set up a sharable dreampage with an avowed personal goal, whether it’s “build wells in Africa” or “date a cougar.”

Afterwards, the site automatically adds articles, photos, videos, and status updates to your page, based on what it knows about you.  The page becomes a bookmarkable record of your progress toward the goal. For well-understood goals such as “run a half marathon,” it’s easy to understand how a page of collected articles on training and running specifically a half-marathon, not a full one, could quickly surpass those found on the first page of a Google search.

You also get a news feed of notes and plans posted by other members.

I spoke on the phone with COO Jordan English Gross and CTO Jim Anderson. Thanks to modern sputtery phone service, I had trouble tracking who said what. So I’ll paraphrase.

Dorthy’s own goal is to create a way for Internet users to “move beyond search.” Anderson spent years doing speech recognition research for IBM before moving to About.com, where he focused on search engine optimization and the creation of About’s topical niche pages.

If you think about it, he says, a large number of people search for the same things every day to see what’s new. Dorthy’s pages are designed to hopefully remove the need to re-Google a favorite topic every day. And by  finding people whose goals intersect with yours, you can quickly create a collaborative page of your collective, collected knowledge.

Search keywords are, despite their power, a limited way to find information. Human-curated pages like those at Mahalo let people use their own smarts to cluster like with like. The Dorthy team see their dreampages the same way: Because a human being associates each piece of information with a dreampage, that info needn’t match specific keywords to be added to the page’s collection of resources.

How do they make money? First, the company plans to sell market research culled from its members’ behavior and pages. Second, they plan to sell aspiration-targeted advertising onto the dreampages, which have clear potential as a place to bring people and brand advertisers together. Imagine the obvious sponsors for a page about wanting to run a half-marathon, or to do good in the Third World. Brand managers in particular like these sort of aspirational, topical pages, as opposed to trying to guess what keywords to match on Google.

Dorthy, founded in New York City in 2007, has received one round of $4 million in funding from the Coyne Group and various angel investors.

Jingle Networks, the startup that operates 1-800-FREE-411, a national telephone directory service, has raised $6.75 million in new venture funding, according to an SEC filing. Based in Menlo park, Calif., the company received this recent round from undisclosed investors.

It has now raised an impressive $88.7 million to date from a group including First Round Capital, Lead Dog Ventures, Liberty Associated Partners, Rose Tech Ventures, Goldman Sachs, the Hearst Corporation, Flybridge Capital, IDG Ventures and Comcast Interactive Capital.

As blog after blog comes out with end-of-year green IPO predictions, the same three companies have consistently been tapped: Solyndra (which filed for its $300 million public sale two weeks ago), Silver Spring Networks (the anointed Smart Grid leader) and Tesla Motors (because it makes the prettiest electric car of the bunch). But today, Codexis, maker of engineered microbes and catalysts for green fuel, chemical and pharmaceutical production has surprised us all, filing for a $100 million IPO.

The news is even more shocking considering that the company just withdrew its previous IPO filing in August, citing poor market conditions. It had originally filed in April 2008.

Codexis engineers the enzymes and microorganisms that turn feedstocks like wood chips, switchgrass, corn husk, sugar cane and others into ethanol. Miniscule changes in their DNA can speed conversion times and make processing more efficient. It’s a delicate science that has yet to be successfully scaled. But this could soon change.

Based in Redwood City (down the road from both Silver Spring and Tesla), Codexis is one ambitious company. Its CEO, Alan Shaw, has talked a big game for a while now, touting the merits of drop-in fuels (fuels that will work with existing automotive technology), especially those that are biomass-based, over electric charging infrastructure and other renewable sources of energy like solar and wind. And 2010 might just be the make-it-or-break it year for this claim.

Not only are many companies launching their plug-in vehicle models, testing the viability of electric transportation infrastructure, but several Codexis competitors are also heating up on the commercial scale, including LS9, Coskata and Synthetic Genomics. Codexis has an advantage because due to its well-developed industrial chemical and pharmaceutical products, but it may have to fight for market share when it comes to fuel.

The company, which plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol CDXS, says it will use the money brought in from the public sale for working capital, and perhaps to kick off an acquisition strategy to add to its output capacity.

While it saw an 84 percent increase in revenue this year, it still saw a loss. This shouldn’t hurt its chances too much, however. Battery-maker A123Systems, which broke the seal on IPOs in the cleantech sector in September, is still seeing heavy losses; and Solyndra, vying to be the first IPO in 2010 is no different.

On top of that, Codexis’ losses are obviously narrowing — falling from $38.8 million to $15.1 million in just a year. The company reported revenue of $13.4 million for the first three quarters of 2009, a small bump up from the $10.8 million it posted over the same period in 2008.

It already has an impressive roster of clients signed up, including Royal Dutch Shell, Pfizer and Merck & Co. And it appears to have more realistic plans to growing its business in new directions. Earlier this month, it announced a partnership with carbon capture provider CO2 Solution to work on enzymatic carbon capture technology. Basically, Codexis will try to engineer enzymes that can survive the inhospitable conditions of smokestacks to absorb carbon dioxide and converts it into a bicarbonate ion. This makes Codexis a contender in a whole new area of green.

The company has also been pretty fortunate in its funding. In March, Shell acquired a bigger stake in the Codexis for a reported $30 million. It has previously raised $133 million from Bio*One Capital, CMEA Capital, Pequot Capital, Chevron Technology Ventures, and Maxygen.

If Codexis successfully makes it to market next year, it will no doubt establish itself as the catalyst engineering firm to watch — potentially attracting even more attention from the big oil and gas interests like BP and Exxon.

Video game sales are hurting because of the recession, but gamers are still consuming an awful lot of news about video games.

Traffic at the top 50 gaming sites grew to 20.2 million unique visitors, up 23 percent year over year in November, according to Kantar Media’s Compete.com traffic measurement subsidiary. By comparision, the category including games, music and movies grew 9 percent to 40.2 million unique visitors in November. Overall, game news sites have been hurt by the recession during 2009, but November traffic could be an indicator that

The top site for game information, hints or cheats was IGN.com, with 6.1 million unique visitors, down 4.6 percent from a year ago. It was followed by Gamespot.com with5.7 million, Gamefaqs.com with 3.2 million. Big gainers among the top 25 were Gametrailers.com, Battle.net and Gameahead.com.

There are of course a lot more people visiting sites to play games than to read news about them. The online game sites that host games which visitors can play grew to 53 million unique visitors in November, up 16.5 percent compared to a year ago (second chart). Pogo.com, the casual game site owned by Electronic Arts, grew 9 percent from a year ago to 9.7 million unique visitors in November. Other top online game sites included games.yahoo.com (6.2 million UVs), addictinggames.com (5.2 million UVs) and popcap.com (5.2 million UVs). The numbers don’t include Facebook-related online game sites.

The game sites run by game publishers (mainly as promotional or shopping sites, third chart) also saw spikes, largely due to the release of big games. Activision Blizzard’s CallofDuty.com saw a 71 percent month-over-month traffic increase in November to 215,000 unique visitors, thanks to the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Other sites related to the game — ModernWarfare2.com and InfinityWard.com — more than doubled in size. EA.com led traffic with 1.99 million unique visitors, but Ubi.com moved to second place with 900,400 unique visitors due to the launch of the hit game Assassins Creed 2.

[Bernard Moon works for the Lunsford Group.]

When I made my tech trend predictions for 2009, we were in the middle of an economic meltdown. This year, I’m less focused on the recession and — thanks to my one-year old twin girls — am wading my way through a flood of information on baby products, toys and books. My mind has wandered between thoughts of Bugaboos and Ooyalas, Leapfrog and Playfish, or Seuss and Seesmic. Still, here are my tech trends for 2010.

Online Shopping Clubs Will Mature

Online shopping clubs aren’t anything new, but these post-bubble incarnations are. Leaders in this segment tend to hold “flash” sales (limited-time sales) and restrict sales to members only. Luxury goods lead this space with France’s Vente-Privee hitting $966 million in revenues this year and U.S’s Gilt Groupe earning almost $150 million in revenues in 2009. By 2010, within four years since launching in the U.S., the companies in this space will have achieved over $2 billion in worldwide sales. Talk about hockey stick growth!

This same model has transferred to other categories, with many luxury players launching travel offerings under their banners. There are also more narrowly focused sites launching, such as Totsy for moms and One Kings Lane for home décor. Woot in the U.S. and One A Day in Korea are flash sale sites that sell only one item everyday. One A Day hit $13 million this year and projects $28 million in sales for 2010 under this simplified model.

Much of this tremendous growth has been driven by the steep discounts all these sites have provided through access to excess inventory. There are concerns this category might see some trouble once the economy picks up and retailers begin rightsizing their inventory. But I believe it is here to stay because — similar to how Zynga and Playfish brought lazy interactivity to the online casual gaming space — these new e-tailers are pushing products and brand relationships to the lazy shopper. It won’t be just about discounted goods, since players like Gilt are already pushing exclusive, in-season goods. So I predict that 2010 will be a breakout year for this ecommerce category and it will move far beyond discounted luxury goods.

Gaming Will Advance Beyond PCs and Consoles

2009 was a great year for online gaming, with Zynga, Playfish, and others leading the charge and showing the power of Facebook and the social networking ecosystem’s distribution power. The next stage of online gaming will be led by more powerful gaming platforms and engines for mobile and the browser.

Epic’s recent showing of the Unreal Engine 3 on the iPhone opens a whole new world for mobile gaming. The possible game titles with such engines on mobile platforms just increased at least fivefold. Imagine billion-dollar franchises such as Grand Theft Auto, Halo, Rock Band and Guitar Hero on mobile devices. I believe this would not cannibalize game makers’ PC and console sales and gameplay time but would expand their consumer base and increase people’s playing time.

For browser-based games, existing engines, such as Unity, and new entrants in flash-based platforms and other browser engines will expand the leading online gaming genre of “lazy interactive” casual games (such as Farmville and Mobsters) to more robust casual games (Risk, Battle Tetris) and eventually hardcore games (such as MMO role-playing games and first-person shooters). This will allow more advanced gaming environments to move away from the traditional client-server architecture. I predict there will be some breakout titles by year end in mobile and browser based games to initiate a changing tide in the video game industry.

Real-Time Collaboration Coming to an Office Near You

I already covered this trend a couple of months ago on Mashable, but I really do believe 2010 will be a solid year of progress for real-time collaboration. SAP’s Gravity, a prototype of real-time collaborative business process modeling within Google Wave, is a good example of what’s coming ahead.

2010 Will Be Android’s Year

In the mobile space, 2010 will be a breakout year for Google’s Android platform (disclaimer: my wife works at Google but not on Android). Motorola’s Droid and glimpses of Google’s own Nexus One were just tasty appetizers this year. Next year there will be more than 50 Android phones shipping out to a market near you. Think about what this means. Android is spreading like the Borg from Star Trek.

Next year, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG, HTC, Huawei, and others will be spreading the concept of apps, touch screens, and smarter phones to an audience beyond the techno-elite and hipster gadget lovers. Slowly Google’s open platform strategy might win out versus Apple’s closed approach.

2010 Will Have A Netscape Moment

I was initially going to call this prediction the “Kozmo Moment” after the DVD and small goods online delivery service that raised $250 million in 1999 and then spectacularly shut down in 2001 after a failed IPO, but there really are no capex heavy startups today minus the cleantech industry. I mean Twitter doesn’t need to buy 500 cars and vans to deliver potato chips and Q-tips to suburban homes in Portland or San Diego.

I do predict at least one of the hot startups that have an incredibly high valuation and a ton of capital will not live up to the hype. It might even go public, but soon afterwards go down a similar path that Netscape did and fade into the background due to competition from a tech giant or rapidly changing tides of the market. None will shut down in 2010 since they have so much cash, but chinks in the armor will be revealed during the year. Who will it be? Twitter? Slide? Zynga? Ning?

What are some of your predictions or trends for 2010? Be sure to share them in the comments section.

Bernard Moon is Managing Director of the Lunsford Group, which is a private holding company consisting of entities in technology, media, research & consulting, health care, and real estate. He blogs at Silicon Moon.

Shoppers are doing more holiday gift-buying from their mobile phones, according to new numbers from eBay. The e-commerce giant says users purchased 1.5 million eBay items from either the eBay mobile website or the company’s iPhone application over the recent holiday season. That’s three times the amount sold during the same period last year.

Just as eye-catching as the overall numbers are some of the individual purchases that eBay describes. I’m used to thinking of my iPhone as a place where I might make cheap, impulse purchases, but eBay says there were some big deals made on mobile phones, including the purchase of a $75,000 1966 Chevrolet Corvette, a $19,000 boat, and a $10,000 Steinway grand piano. I imagine these are buyers who decide on an item while on their computer and just happened to make the final bid on their phone.

Overall, eBay says the site’s mobile transactions added up to half a billion dollars in 2009. The iPhone app has been downloaded nearly 6 million times, while the mobile site gets 750,000 unique visits per day.

In the madness leading up to and following the U.N. Climate Conference in Copenhagen two weeks ago, many have lost track of the climate change legislation working its way through Congress in the U.S. The last many heard of it, the controversial Kerry-Boxer bill was bound up in committee, poised for almost certain doom. Since then, two shiny, new proposals have been put on the table. But do they really have a better shot?

Before we take a closer look at the two fresh packages, called the Kerry-Lieberman-Graham bill (PDF) and Cantwell-Collins bill (PDF), respectively, let’s take a moment to ponder what all this activity will actually accomplish. When it comes to successfully pushing laws through Congress, strong backing, and cohesiveness are key. So these bills — pitched on consecutive days — are facing some steep odds. Not only has the urgency of emissions reductions been weakened by Copenhagen’s failure to produce a treaty, but now Senate’s attention is being divided between several different ideas.

Their saving grace?: Bipartisan and moderate Democrat sponsors that might make their approval more palatable to previously staunch opponents of climate change legislation. Then again, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) don’t necessarily have popularity and political capital on their side right now. So it will be interesting to watch.

First, let’s look at Kerry-Lieberman-Graham, since it debuted first. Like the Kerry-Boxer and Waxman-Markey bills before it, it would establish a fairly elaborate cap-and-trade system for carbon permits. It’s surprising that Kerry is still peddling this idea after its drawn such ire from his peers in the Senate. Republicans and moderate Democrats have done a good job arguing that cap-and-trade would further burden companies still struggling to rebound from the recession, and ultimately hurt consumers. Cap-and-trade also proved unpopular in Copenhagen, and the ranks of those against it continue to swell.

Kerry-Lieberman-Graham would also:

• Set a goal of a 17 percent reduction in carbon emissions (below 2005 levels) by 2020, and an 80 percent reduction by 2050.
• Create a global system for trading carbon offsets and carbon-based securities. (Offsets are tricky business because they are basically promises from organizations that they will prevent a certain amount of emissions from being released — there are no guarantees.)
• Distribute an initial round of carbon permits (85 percent of them at least) to utilities and other organizations, which could then sell them to bring in revenue. (Some are viewing this as an underhanded subsidy for utilities without many strings attached.)
• Earmark government support for nuclear energy, clean coal technology and more efficient oil and gas drilling. (This seems like a concession to opponents who say the bill will hurt the job market.)

The Cantwell-Collins bill, also proposed before the world got swept up in Copenhagen, slims the climate change issue down considerably (it’s about 50 pages instead of 1,500). Its sponsors, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), claim that, if implemented correctly, it could cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050 — actually exceeding the goals of Kerry-Lieberman-Graham.

Its real strength, however, is that it would refund 75 percent of all of the revenue it might bring in. Instead of using the typical language of cap-and-trade systems, the bill says it would sell “carbon shares” to fuel makers, and return the proceeds to American taxpayers in the form of a monthly rebate check. It’s estimated that this system could result in annual payments of $1,100 for an average family of four — amounting to $21,000 between 2012 (when it would go into effect) and 2030. Americans certainly do like to get paid — so this proposal is sounding easier to swallow already.

Here’s the rundown on Cantwell-Collins (also known as the CLEAR Act):

• It would cap fossil fuels both imported and produced domestically. They would have to buy emissions permits from the U.S. government at monthly auctions, that they could then trade on a secondary market.
• The regulations are targeted at the actual producers of fossil fuels — not anyone else along the supply chain. For example, the coal mining companies would be the ones to purchase the permits, not power plant operators or utilities.
• While 75 percent of the money generated by the government from the program would be distributed to regular citizens as rebate checks, the other 25 percent would be funneled into clean energy research.
• Early estimates say that the Cantwell-Collins program could raise between $10 to $32 billion every year to start, a figure that will go up as carbon prices inevitably rise.
• Just like Kerry-Lieberman-Graham builds in support for nuclear and clean coal interests, this bill also includes provisions to cut down on non-carbon greenhouse gases like sulfur dioxide and methane, and to encourage carbon sequestration.

The two proposals are impressively different (finally, options!), and Cantwell-Collins seems particularly progressive. Whether or not it will actually achieve reductions in emissions is up for debate. Many are arguing that it would take too long for its initiatives to make a difference in how fuel producers operate, and that the resulting investment in cleantech research would be minimal. But some money is better than nothing — and if not too many allowances to polluters dilute the permitting market, it seems like the bill should have some teeth.

Regardless of their various merits and drawbacks, one of these bills needs to win a majority on the Senate floor this year to make any difference at all. And the sooner the better. Former vice president Al Gore is calling for a deadline of Earth Day in April, and this seems like a fair timelines, considering how swiftly the health care measure moved once Obama gave it his full attention.

If had to make a prediction, I’d place my bets on Cantwell-Collins. Based on response to Kerry-Boxer and Waxman-Markey before that, the idea of carbon trading has about 40 solid supporters (all Democrats). What will push one of the bills over the top is how it communicates the nature of the trading system. Cantwell-Collins appears to be much simpler in its approach (making it easier to explain to constituents), and seems to give fewer perks to Wall Street and utility fat cats. It also distinguishes itself by emphasizing the importance of further research into sources of clean energy. At the same time, it takes the interests of the existing oil, gas and coal infrastructures into account with its auction-based pitch. And the clincher: it means money in regular people’s pockets. This will almost certainly sway the moderate Democrats and Republicans that have stymied earlier legislation.

While there’s a chance that neither bill will make it past the Senate, one thing is for certain: President Barack Obama will have to choose between them at some point. He was a big supporter of both Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer, and seems to be a proponent of cap-and-trade in general. That said, he needs to get something passed, and fast, to make it looking like he’s making good on his major campaign promises. He already missed his end of 2009 deadline. So if Cantwell-Collins seems to have a better shot, it’ll probably get his blessing.

When photography became commonplace in the late 19th century, it took several decades and pioneers like Alfred Stieglitz before it became accepted as fine art. Today, with ubiquitous cell phone cameras and now mobile live-video streaming, expect the divide between high and low art to become even narrower.

A San Francisco Bay Area gallery is testing that idea with a photo contest that asks people to submit their artiest iPhone-taken pictures. At between 2 and 3.2 megapixels, depending on the model, the iPhone has a weak camera compared to competitors. But Giorgi Gallery, which is running the competition, says, “The eye of the artist is always more important than the technology in the creation of beautiful art.” Two hundred winners will get prints of their photos shown at an exhibition in Berkeley next month.

Other galleries and institutions have also tried to hold up the iPhone as a more democratic tool for creating and distributing art. The New Yorker dabbled in iPhone-created covers created by the Brushes application earlier this year. Plus, there are several photo editing applications that give you basic tools to edit photos like Best Camera and Photogene. Adobe even created a version of Photoshop for the iPhone, but its features are very limited compared to what’s available in the PC version of the application.

Here are a few entrants to the competition below. What do you think? Is it art?

Gordon Fraser

Alex Racanelli

Will Reddy