SoftBank Invests $7M In MIT-based Clean-Tech Startup Altaeros Energies

Another day, another funding from SoftBank. This time the corporation, one of Japan’s leading telecoms, has invested $7 million in Altaeros Energies, which is based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and makes airborne wind turbines.

SoftBank’s investment in Altaeros is tiny compared to its recent pouring of hundreds of millions of dollars into GrabTaxi, Snapdeal, and Ola, but it’s notable because it shows just how wide the company’s investment portfolio is. It also comes at a time when investments in clean-tech companies have fallen, due in part to the increasing availability of renewable energy sources.

SoftBank, however, has been keen to grow its clean energy business in Japan, where the Fukushima disaster in 2011 spurred interest in finding alternatives to nuclear energy.

For example, earlier this year the company announced that its clean energy business unit will start retail distribution of renewable energy sources including solar and wind power.

In statement, Masayoshi Son, the chairman and CEO of SoftBank, said Altaeros’ tech can potentially help SoftBank gain a stake in new verticals.

“Altaeros’ airborne wind turbine technology is a new and promising renewable energy solution for remote islands and locations in Japan and the Asia-Pacific region. We also believe in the BAT’s potential to create new businesses by combining it with communication and surveillance technologies,” Son said.

Altaeros’ wind turbines, called Buoyant Airborne Turbine (BATs) technology can fly higher than traditional wind towers and go up to 2,000 meters above ground. Since they don’t need to be installed on the ground, BATs can be used in more locations than wind towers. Altaeros claims that BATs can “significantly [reduce] the cost of electricity for remote sites,” as well as deliver equipment and telecommunications services to remote locations.

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a

Kiran Upadhyay

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