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.

123 Media Max is a complete DVD Burner for Blue Ray Movies.123 Media Max lets users create backup copies of any Blu-ray movie to standard DVD RW with amazing HD quality with just buring it into a Blu-ray Disk.It can burn or back up everything like PS3 games,Music,Ringtones,Youtube files,Audio files and almost everything!In shorts, 123 Media Max Backups Everything!

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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.

The LG Chocolate Touch has lead the mobile phone world to another evolution.Try to imagine if you have a complete special funcion in your phone such as making calls,send amusing texts,sufting the web,using some Social Media like facebook,twitter,taking picture which in great mega pixels and a Dolby Mobile Technology cystal clear sound quality.Try to imagine with a simple LG chocholate that can take off your heavy notebook and camera and easily make your life much easier.Facebook with friends while  traffic jam,twit with your friend with instant news and chat with your friends while feel like to!

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LG Chocolate Touch

“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.