purchases

According to a recent report by Futuresource, a consulting company that did a survey on how many of us copy DVDs a while ago, the high-definition disc markets in both the U.S. and Europe continue to perform very well, thanks to the fact that the world shifted to one format--Blu-ray--at the beginning of the year.

Currently, taking only big titles into account, the share of total sales being taken by Blu-ray has already hit 5 percent to 6 percent. By the end of the year, this share is estimated to be more than 10 percent. With many hot title … Read more

If you are a San Francisco resident considering solar panels, now is the time for action, says Lyndon Rive, CEO of SolarCity, a start-up that leases panels to homeowners.

Since the city solar-incentive program came into effect in July, it has become financially viable for even small energy consumers to install solar-power systems.

The San Francisco incentive covers between $3,000 to $6,000 for homeowners to install solar panels, as well as $10,000 for businesses and nonprofits, and $30,000 for nonprofit affordable housing. The program runs for a decade.

This initiative, together with a state rebate program … Read more

Yeah, I know, it hit me as a surprise too. However, that's one of the findings found in a recent Consumer Home Piracy market research study carried out by Futuresource Consulting and sponsored by Macrovision.

The study was done in May 2008 in the U.S. and the U.K. with the sample size of more than 5,000 people. As it turns out, one-third of all the respondents in both countries admit to having made copies of prerecorded DVDs, on average about 13 titles each, in the last six months, up from just over a quarter of respondents … Read more

SunRun, a company that offers solar-electricity financing, announced Tuesday that it has raised $12 million from Foundation Capital.

The San Francisco-based start-up is one of handful of new companies looking to make solar panels an easier purchase for consumers through financing.

Solar electric panels have a hefty up-front cost--between $20,000 and $35,000-- depending on the size, before rebates.

Although buyers will generally recoup the initial outlay in lower electricity bills in about 15 years, the high cost has restricted solar electricity to a niche audience, say solar industry executives.

Rather than buy the panels, SunRun customers buy the … Read more

One of the things that we open sourcerors need to figure out - or which the market needs to figure out - is the convenience of purchasing proprietary software. By this I don't mean any particular vendor's policies: I'm talking about the basic act of buying something that masquerades as property.

For better or (in my view) for worse, the industry knows how to buy proprietary software. Increasingly, thanks to the pull of Red Hat and Salesforce.com, it's getting used to subscription-based pricing, too.

As I re-discovered today on a call with a prospective customer, however, we still have a long way to go, because as an industry we don't really do a good job of quantifying the value of support. In the case of this prospect, as well as others with whom I meet, support gets low-man-on-the-totem-pole status when it comes to purchasing. They know there's value in it, and they even know that they need it (at least, initially), but given a choice they'll often skip it.… Read more

If computer stores were like supermarkets and had a rack of impulse purchase items right by their checkout lanes, we could easily see the $399 Asus Eee PC sitting next to the candy bars and magazines. After all, for about the same price as a current-generation video game console, you get a smart, reasonably useful 7-inch laptop, for much less than the traditionally inflated prices of other ultraportables.

Of course, we always want a little more, so the Eee PC had to grow, adding a larger 9-inch screen and more SSD hard drive space. Now that we have got our … Read more

Casey Coleman, chief information officer for the U.S. General Services Administration, said in a speech this week that the GSA heavily relies on open source to drive down costs, increase flexibility of IT dollars, and reduce risk.

The GSA, by the way, is no small fry. It manages more than one-fourth of the federal government's total procurement dollars and influences the management of $500 billion in federal assets.

The agency uses a laundry list of great open-source software--initially for its information systems but also increasingly for transactional mission-critical systems--such as JBoss, Linux (Red Hat), Bugzilla (bug tracking), JUnit (… Read more

Solar installer SolarCity is doing, in a limited way, what many people contend is the key to wide-scale adoption of solar power: a leasing program.

The Foster City, Calif.-based start-up is offering customers in California, Arizona, and Oregon a financing option that allows them to get solar panels with a relatively small up-front down payment and monthly lease fee, SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive said on Monday.

Solar panels that generate electricity can cost between $20,000 and $35,000 before tax credits and other clean energy incentives. Those subsidies can bring the cost down significantly, depending on the state … Read more

Efforts to purchase eco-friendly and energy-efficient IT equipment have expanded notably since the spring, according to 130 companies surveyed by Forrester Research.

Some 38 percent of corporations said they take environmental concerns into account when making purchasing decisions, a jump from 25 percent surveyed in April.

The top reason for going green was slashing energy costs, cited by 55 percent of respondents. Doing the right thing for the environment was the next most popular motivation, noted by half of those surveyed. And 95 percent called environmental concerns either somewhat or very important to operations.

However, the study found that most … Read more