Harnessing the power of ammonia, Ductor hopes to revolutionize both garden farming and gas tanks by the end of this summer.

The company is developing what it claims to be the world’s first industrial scale ammonia and phosphate production technology based on a 100 percent biological process that actually reduces rather than contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. This allows it to create a low cost fertilizer that doesn’t pollute, as well as a commercially viable way to produce a crude oil alternative made from algae.

On the fertilizer side, Ductor’s technology replaces current industrial production of ammonia from natural gas and mining-based phosphates production. Ammonia and phosphate production are the basic components of fertilizer manufacturing that are also big contributors to pollution and carbon dioxide emissions. Under precise conditions as well as a specially patented brand population of bacteria, the company utilizes organic waste streams like slaughterhouse and food waste as feedstock materials to create ammonia through a natural process. Ammonia and phosphates are separated from the feedstock to make fertilizers, and the remaining biomass can be sold as black soil to optimize each resource. One hundred percent biologically produced, the fertilizers are equal in strength to chemically manufactured fertilizers, according to the company.

The company is also working on creating crude oil from algae in what it claims to be “the first commercially viable solution,” CEO Ari Ketola wrote in an email interview with Red Herring. Most R&D spent on creating crude oil from algae has focused on genetic manipulation of the algae, Ketola explained. Current approaches to crude oil also require intense energy to create it as well as an abundant supply of algae. Ductor’s bioprocess actually produces all the energy required, plus excess energy that it can then sell elsewhere. The company takes existing algae and optimizes growing conditions, using nutrients gathered through the Ductor bioprocess, as well as other undisclosed innovations. The resulting product has the needed mass to reach profitable production, according to Ketola.

The company is currently fine tuning its technology in a small scale bioprocess testing factory. Ketola estimates it is 1.5 years ahead of its original schedule. As a technology company, Ductor will license the technology to customers that will then manufacture the product.  Its technology will be ready for licensing by the end of the summer.

“Ductor’s innovation is a truly unique solution that will not only solve several key issues for our planet, but also creates a new, highly profitable business,” Ketola said. “The Ductor bioprocess is extremely economical as it produces its own energy for the process. Cost efficiency has been one of our leading bioprocess design principles, and we are absolutely confident that the overall business case is viable, also for developing countries.”

At the close of January, the company landed €1.1 million ($1.4 million) from TEKES (the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Research), which it will use to complete technology development and start commercialization. This brings Ductor funding to total €3.85 million ($5 million) for the past year as the company previously in 2012 raised another round of  €2.75 million ($3.58 million).  Naturally, the company targets the energy industry, but recycling industries like vendor rendering and food waste will also benefit from its technology as well as organic fertilizer manufacturers.

“This new Ductor technology will change several matters for our planet, secure food production, reduce CO2 emissions, reduce fertilizer-based pollution, free farming land from energy crops to food production,” Ketola said.

If all goes well, Ductor’s technology should be contributing to gas stations and gardens by the next harvest.

The research firm predicted China will reach 20.7 percent of the world’s smartphone market this year, just ahead of the US’s 20.6 percent. While previous research had shown China taking the lead but then falling behind, IDC maintains this latest trend will only continue to snowball. By 2016, China is expected to leverage 20.2 percent of the global smartphone market, while the US will garner 15.3 percent.

“(China’s) smartphone shipments are expected to take a slim lead over the U.S. in 2012 before the gap widens in the coming years,” said Wong Tech Zhung, senior market analyst with IDC’s Asia/Pacific Client Devices team, in a statement. “There will be no turning back this leadership changeover.”

Meanwhile, India and Brazil are expected to be among the top 5 hottest smartphone markets by 2016, with India growing from its current position at seventh to become the third largest market, followed by Brazil, which currently ranks tenth.

The trends are clearly showing developing countries connecting to the Internet via the palm of your hand. The sheer size of these populations combined with a thirst for smarter technology creates a perfect storm of demand that will be close to rivaling the US.

“Demand for smartphones will also grow as urban and enterprise users mature in their handset preferences and usage,” says G. Rajeev, senior market analyst for mobile devices with IDC India. “Consumers are growing accustomed to higher data usage and using handsets for entertainment and other content, instead of just as a communication device.”

Yet costs will continue to be a challenge to these developing markets. The report notes that numerous industry heads at this year’s Mobile Conference in Barcelona stressed the need for affordable smartphones as low as $50 US to propel saturation. In Brazil, smartphones have dropped to below $300 with optional prepaid data plans, propelling the market with room to grow.

“Users in emerging markets seek more than simple voice telephony, and smartphones offer the ideal platform for mobile entertainment, social networking, and business usage as seen in developed markets,” said Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with IDC.

While the Wall St. Journal described the changes “among the biggest in the company’s history,” it’s worth noting that Google has already been providing some degree of semantic search, with synonym context as early as 2003 that better understands the associations and context of any given search. Search Engine Land characterized the Wall St. Journal as nothing but PR claptrap. “…Google’s pushing these technologies for some good PR, and they are in turn being blown out of proportion to what they really mean,” Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan wrote.

What at least seems to be the case is that Google will be rolling out more implementations of semantic search than ever before. In 2010, Google acquired Metaweb, a semantic search company, and has been working on new ways to include semantic search. Google isn’t replacing its current system of keyword search, but will improve its system of semantic search to run along side it. The search engine has compiled a database of millions of entities of people, places and things, and will list these facts and figures alongside every search.

Searching for San Francisco, for example, will bring up various facts about weather, tourism, altitude, and other demographics. Searches specifically related to a question will provide direct answers, as oppose to websites that happen to contain the wording of the question. While the company has already done this for simple search queries, it will soon provide answers to larger and more complex questions.

The move comes shortly after Google announced it would be implementing its search feature with suggestions from related contacts in a user’s Google+ account, with limited significance as few actually use Google+ as a social network beyond the first signup.

The changes will certainly have a big impact on SEO. A person familiar with the matter told the Wall St. Journal that its shift to semantic search could affect as many of 10 to 20 percent of all search queries. While Google won’t completely reinvent its search engine, this next evolution shows the search engine’s continual change, and it’s big enough for Google’s PR to ring the tech community’s bell.

Semantic search has been part of Microsoft’s Bing search engine for some time now.

Remember, there was a decent amount of buzz when T-Mobile sold 1 million iPhones to US subscribers. China’s blowing that out of the water, despite the fact that its 3G network can’t even support the iPhone’s infrastructure, which has been the primary reason China Mobile has given for not selling the iPhone.

Its 15 million iPhone users jailbreaked their phones to use the service, despite the downgrade to 2G due to incompatibility.

China Mobile claims the incompatibility will be remedied following completion of LTE network testing this June, the Next Web reported.

Despite the popularity of jailbroken iPhones, Apple has dropped to fifth place in the Chinese mobile market share, according to a Gartner study.

Apple is set to end its exclusive deal to sell the iPhone with China Unicom, with China Telecom opening sales of the iPhone 4S later this week.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley predict that China Mobile could sell 60 million more iPhones by the end of 2013. With the largest number of subscribers of any teleco in the world at 655 million, the number of China Mobile iPhone fans will likely become exponential, once the country has a network in place that can fully take advantage of the phone’s potential.

At the recent Apple event at which the new iPad was the main attraction, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook announced the company had sold 172 million “post-PC” devices, which include the iPhone, iPad, and iPod, and accounted for 76 percent of the its revenues in the fourth quarter of 2011. In fact, Apple sold more iPads alone in the fourth quarter of 2011 than any individual PC manufacturer sold of PC devices in the fourth quarter.

“Apple has its strengths in the post-PC future,” Cook said. “It plays to our strengths. It’s what we love to do.

“We’ve taken it to a whole new level and are redefining the category that Apple created with the original iPad,” Cook added.

The iPad’s new display was referred to as a Retina display because the eye cannot make out the pixels when the iPad is held away at a normal distance, Cook claimed.

To handle the quadruple sizing in pixels, the new iPad carries Apple’s newest chip, the A5X processor, that provides double the graphics as the predecessor, along with a quad-core graphics system. The iPad 2 carried an A5 chip.

The new iPad supports wireless data standards of data speeds up to 73 Mbps. It supports networks HSPA+ and DC-HSDPA, as did its predecessor, but it also supports CDMA and GSM, and has an easier ability to roam internationally. Apple claims this will enable faster download and upload speeds.

The Personal Hotspot feature on the new iPad enables connection with up to five other devices using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or USB.

The new iPad also includes a 5 megapixel iSight camera on the back that features auto face detection, auto exposure lock, and auto focus lock. It records video at full HD resolution. The camera can also stabilize images and reduce recording noise. The device also supports a microphone on the bottom that enables dictation in English, French, German, and Japanese.

Despite the increased power of its display and improved processing power, the new device also has the same battery life of its predecessor, about 10 hours on WiFi, and nine hours on LTE.

The new iPad did gain a little weight, up to 1.4 lbs vs. 1.33 lbs, but whose going to notice? It’s also slightly thicker at 9.4 mm vs. 8.8 mm.

Storage space remains the same, as does pricing. WiFi only versions can be had at $499 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB, and 699 for 64GB. Ipads that have both 4G and WiFi support will cost $629 for a 16GB model, $729 for 32GB, and $829 for 64GB, available March 16 with preorders today.

Meanwhile, Apple will sell its iPad 2 at a bargain starting at $399 for its 16GB model, which puts it close to Android tablets like the Asus Transformer and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus. Selling outmoded models for a bargain is an interesting strategy by Apple to compete against knockoffs. Even their old hand-me downs are better than the competition.

Apple also released the latest version of Apple TV, which supports 1080 pixels of full HD resolution, up from the previous 720. The device will integrate into Apple’s iCloud, which now has 100 million subscribers, and features TV shows from Apple’s partners the day after they air, similar to competitor Hulu, The new Apple TV will be available next week for $99.

Forget capture the flag. Startup campers at IBM’s SmartCamp play nab the investment dollar. Designed to encourage global innovation, SmartCamp connects the hottest startups around the world with not only resources and advice, but personal handshakes and a listening ear from some of the top venture capitalists in the business.

Last year, those handshakes amounted to more than $50 million in VC and angel funding awarded to finalists.

In addition, the winning IBM Global Entrepreneur of the Year receives a year of mentorship from IBM, free software, collaboration possibilities in IBM’s Innovation Centers, and a year of mentorship from last year’s winner, in order to speed marketing and connect to IBM’s network of venture capitalists. SmartCamp is part of IBM’s Global Entrepreneur program, designed to give exposure, resources and connections to well deserving startups.

“These companies which have been very limited to local markets and not well known outside of their circles suddenly get worldwide exposure,” said Deborah Magid, IBM’s Director of Software Strategy. “IBM has had a venture group for a dozen years, and it’s not about cash but relationships and getting insight into what entrepreneurs are doing. We understand it’s very important to get to know these companies when they’re very young. The interdependencies of people in these communities are essential for us as well as the industry.”

Crowned the winner of this year’s IBM SmartCamp Global Finals and the new IBM Global Entrepreneur of the Year, Profitero likewise has a lot to gain from the connections of IBM’s shared interdependency. The Ireland startup helps companies monitor their competition and set global pricing through software that instantly researches and compares competitor pricing data for similar products and brands. Profitero collects data on over 30 million products from over 2,800 global retailers to provide real time insight for price optimization.

“We envision pricing to become similar to stock trading,” said Volodymyr Pigrukh, CEO and co-founder of Profitero. “Large retailers will change prices hourly if not more often to reflect the market situation. Amazon already does this. Essentially, we provide a service previously only available to Amazon to every retailer. The better visibility retailers have into their competitors, the better value they can provide.”

In addition to connections to help raise a new funding round in the next three to six months to speed the company’s expansion to the US, the win also enables the company to directly innovate with IBM, Pigrukh, said. The company will look to partner with IBM to better integrate IBM’s Smart Commerce Solutions, as well as expand its product offering.

“Partnering with IBM is a rare opportunity for startups, and the networking is really great,” Pigrukh said. “The connections we’ve gotten from SmartCamp will certainly be useful for fund raising.”

Likewise, investors get their own incentive to participate as IBM’s selection process filters the finalists to include only the very best.

“The companies that show up at SmartCamp have passed the diligence test of of an IBM as well as the market validation test, and have been honed in on their presentation that they can get their ideas across to us very succinctly,” said Promod Haque, Managing Partner with Norwest Venture Partners. “Product development does not happen in a vacuum. Innovation is always done with early adopters of technology. Who better to provide market validation than IBM who lives and breathes those ideas for customers?”

Zia Yusuf, the CEO of last year’s winner, Streetline, will serve as a mentor to Profitero. Yusuf also served to judge the finalists of this year’s competition. The company works with cities to deploy sensor-enabled Smart Parking systems and produces a mobile app Parker™,  an app telling drivers where those empty spaces are. The system pays for itself through a better enforcement of parking violations, as the meters also tip off the meter maids to vehicles whose time has expired or are parked illegally. Virtually unknown before winning last year’s SmartCamp, the company’s smartphones are ringing off the hook from cities looking to cash in on the smart meters. Over the last year, the company has expanded to Washington DC, New York City, Boston, Indianapolis, LA, Ashville, Dallas/Fort Worth and New Brunswick, New Jersey. Earlier this year, the company announced expanding to selective markets in Europe. It also now serves commercial parking lots and garages. Thanks to SmartCamp, the company secured a $15 million financing round in April and June of 2011. Through collaborations with IBM, the company has fully integrated its systems into IBM’s Cognos analytics platform to empower cities with greater visibility.

“Our win certainly put Streetline on the map very quickly at exactly the right time for us,” Yusuf said. “The partnership with IBM in introducing VCs, and also taking reference calls and discussing their views of the space and company was extremely helpful. IBM’s sales force actively went out and sold our solution as an integral piece of their Smart City offering. Obviously, as a small company, we simply can’t match that on our own.”

More important is the level of innovation that takes place by having so many cutting edge startups, VCs, and executives in one room, Yusuf said.

“It provides an unbelievable shot of insight, advice and information in a very compressed period of time,” Yusuf stated. “IBM is one of the few who can pull off attracting such high profiled VCs and CEOs to an event. These are not your typical gaming or web based startups. IBM is gleaning and finding those nuggets of gold and bringing them to the attention of the world, and it’s great.”

In addition to the global winner Profitero, other SmartCamp finalists from around the world include SkinScan, the creators of a mobile app that can detect skin cancer using fractals; SecureWaters, which uses patented technology to monitor toxins in surface water; and Palmap, a provider of GPS mapping solutions for malls and airports.

Aside from introducing promising startups to VCs and other insider connections, SmartCamp is also designed to propel innovation through collaboration with an accelerated sharing of ideas, IBM’s Magid said.

“It used to take a chess master decades to become a grand master because he had to fly around the world and play games with the best to see how things work.” Magid said. “Now you can get the same experience on the Internet, and the grandmasters you see today are in their 20s.

“The same thing is happening in technology,” Magid continued. “The speed at which you can innovate and the accessibility of other ideas and technology has really transformed the rate at which things happen. SmartCamp has been a very successful program that further propels this level of collaboration.”

A recently exposed loophole in the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch reveals that app developers can easily download a device’s entire photo collections by asking the user to disclose her location, the New York Times reported. Once a user allows an application to access their location, the app can download the entire photo library, without any further notification.

The news comes shortly after reports that some apps had accessed users address books without their knowledge.

It remains unclear if any apps are illicitly using users photos, and photo copying is not specifically forbidden by Apple, though downloading a user’s address book is. Apple is supposed to screen all apps submitted to its store, but had approved numerous apps that collected address book information despite it being against the rules.

Apple’s devices ask the user for permission to access location upon first use, with a pop up message stating approval “allows access to location information in photos and videos.” Saved photos and videos typically include the coordinates of the location they’ve been taken, which could potentially put users at risk if app developers trend towards the dark side. The data could be used to piece together where the user has been based on this location.

Apple devices first allowed full access to the photo library in 2010 with the release of the fourth version of iOS in order to make photo apps more efficient.

The New York Times even worked with a developer to create a test app, PhotoSpy, which could siphon photos and location to a remote server once permission had been given to access location data. Don’t expect to see it in Apple’s app store anytime soon.

As for the rest of the apps in the store, however, who knows? One would think Apple would have guarded against this, but that’s the trouble with thinking. It assumes common sense is common. Apple’s vulnerabilities reveal much more beneath surface. If address books and honeymoon photos can be accessed by any developing geek, what’s next up for grabs?

Nevada’s DMV is currently developing licensing procedures for car manufacturers to test self-driving cars in Nevada, Bruce Breslow, director of Nevada’s DMV, told Physorg. The state’s Governor Brian Sandoval even tried out one of Google’s self-driving Toyota Prius in July.

Back in late 2010, Google dropped the bombshell that its self-driving robot cars had clocked in over 140,000 miles of driving in California with only occasional human control, and seven cars drove over 1,000 miles with no human assistance. The cars have driven from Google’s Mountain View campus to its Santa Monica office, and right on down to Hollywood Boulevard to trade parking spaces with the stars. The cars even managed to drive San Francisco’s Lombard Street, one of the steepest and curviest streets in the nation that’s also a continual tourist traffic jam.

Only one accident was reported during the testing, and a human behind the wheel of another car was entirely at fault.

The cars use radar, sensors and computers to navigate and avoid obstructions, with a human driver always ready to take over the wheel if the self-driving computer happened to recently stream “The Terminator” on Netflix. Google received a patent for its self-driving cars in December.

The technology was developed by a team of engineers from the DARPA Challenges, a line of robot vehicle races organized by the US government.

The cars are designed to prevent traffic accidents. Google argues that computer driven cars can drastically reduce the more than 1.2 million lives lost every year in highway accidents by as much as half.

“This technology has been a passion of mine for years because it will help save lives, help lots of people who have difficulty driving, and reduce congestion on our roads,” Google’s Larry Page blogged about the project. “…Using technology to improve safety on our roads will make the world a better place.”

As robots make the roadways safer, cars can also weigh less, reducing fuel consumption.

“While this project is very much in the experimental stage, it provides a glimpse of what transportation might look like in the future thanks to advanced computer science,” Sebastian Thrun, a Google software engineer, explained on Google’s blog. “And that future is very exciting.”

Google had suggested automated taxis or self-driving delivery services as possible initial uses.

Self-driving cars being tested will have red plates, Physorg reported. The cars will likely have green plates when the service is available to the general public.

Don’t expect designated driving robots tomorrow, however. Even the most optimistic predictions place the technology’s at least eight years away from hitting the mainstream. A lot more needs to be tested, including the legal system. If a robot does get in a crash, for instance, who’s responsible, the driver optimizing technology or the company that programmed the faulty R2D2?

ACTA is designed to cut trademark theft, but much like the similar US bill SOPA, it flared protests across Europe by those who contended the measure threatened free speech and privacy concerns. In addition to other provisions, the measure asks Internet providers to cooperate with national authorities regarding privacy issues.

ACTA has been signed by 22 EU member states, including the UK, United States, Japan and Canada. However, Germany, Slovakia, Estonia, Cyprus and the Netherlands have refused to sign it, and Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Latvia have voiced concerns over ACTA’s effect on free speech and privacy issues.

Internet lobbies and health campaigners have also rallied against the measure, arguing that its controls would not only deny people access to the web but make it difficult for developing countries to access generic medications and other medical information.

“We are planning to ask Europe’s highest court to assess ACTA’s compatibility with the EU’s fundamental rights and freedoms, such as freedom of expression and information or that of protection,” EU trade chief Karel De Gucht said.

De Gucht maintained that the EU continues to stand by its decision to ratify ACTA, but decided to refer the measure to the courts because of the range of protests against the bill.

“Intellectual property is Europe’s main raw material, but the problem is that we currently struggle to protect it outside the European Union. This hurts our companies, destroys jobs and harms our economies,” De Gucht said. “ACTA will not censor websites or shut them down.”