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One of our most popular stories in recent days has been about Displax, a Portugal company that plans to start selling a plastic film that turns any surface into a touchscreen.

By July, Displax said it is planning to begin commercial sales of its “multitouch skin” which can be thinner than paper. The ideal is to spread a nanowire-laced plastic film over any flat or curved surface — glass, plastic or wood — so that it becomes interactive.

The problem with our interview with Miguel Fonseca, chief business officer at Displax, was that he omitted a key detail. While Displax makes the controller that enables multitouch contact with the plastic film, it doesn’t make that plastic film itself.

The film is actually a product created in 2004 by Visual Planet, a London company. Mike Cole, commercial director at Visual Planet, contacted us and let us know that the company’s ViP Interactive Foil has been shipping for a while and Displax is one of its resellers.

“I think the core message is that what they are claiming about being the first to develop a flexible foil base touch sensor is incorrect and most of the press has focused on this fact,” Cole wrote in an email. “They have developed a controller only. They tied in our technology in the release so they could promote theirs and make more of a splash.”

Cole said that ViP would be happy to sell its foil to Displax to be part of its “multitouch skin” solution, but there is no agreement in place right now to do so. The two companies have been good partners for some time, but there is a point of contention. Displax is making its own controller to enable multitouch skins that use the plastic film. The controller is sort of the brains that takes the signals from the film and translates into input signals for a system. It’s not a trivial thing, but the plastic film seems like the more interesting invention.

Cole said that Visual Planet is planning on doing its own controller to go with the plastic film. Hence, these two companies are kind of on a collision course. After Cole brought this up to us, a spokesman for Displax emailed the following message in response.

“We would like to clarify Displax’ relationship with Visual Planet and its development of the multitouch technology launched at ISE. Displax Multitouch Technology is a technology solution. Displax is the developer of the unique multitouch controller that enables the detection and processing of multiple simultaneous signals from the foil and has several patents pending for this product. Visual Planet supplied the foil on which Displax built its prototype (unveiled at ISE) and is currently one of the foil suppliers that Displax is in discussions with to commercialize its technology. Displax has been happy with its professional dealings with Visual Planet and would be pleased to continue to work with this partner as one of its foil suppliers moving forwards. However, the company is continuing its discussions with other providers of this foil technology too. Displax still expects to ship its multitouch products in late second quarter/early third quarter 2010.”

There you have it. If these companies can cooperate, then I suppose we’ll see a very interesting technology hit the market by mid-year. But the picture is a little murkier than the facts that were related to me for the first story.

Virtual worlds aren’t exactly fashionable these days. They went through a hype cycle when everyone predicted that we’d all be living virtual lives in online worlds like Second Life.

Virtual worlds have come down to earth, but they’re still getting started.

MiniMonos is the latest example. The Christchurch, New Zealand-based company has raised $800,000 in New Zealand dollars ($550,000 U.S.) for a virtual world for children.

MiniMonos is a virtual island focused on fun and sustainability. Kids can create monkey avatars, explore, chat and play.

The investors include  the Venture Accelerator Nelson (VANL) and the government’s Seed Co-Investment Fund (SCIF, part of NZVIF). It is the first co-investment deal between the two groups.

Previously, MiniMonos raised money from an angel investor.MiniMonos is currently in “open alpha” testing, and it is targeting children (primarily boys) in the US. The company plans to launch its beta test in early April. The founder of MiniMonos is Melissa Clark-Reynolds, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and entrepreneur in residence at Wellington’s incubator, Creative HQ. She is also an amabassador for Al Gore’s The Climate Project. The company will seek more capital later this year.

Clark-Reynolds has been working on the business for two years. Her research showed there was a gap to fill for boys who want to play an online game. The world is a place to explore without the constant pressure to buy things. Children plan in treehouses that require care and nourishment. It embodies core values such as sustainability and generosity, but it doesn’t deliver those values via a boring lecture.

Share + Feb 6, 2010 4:15 pm US/Central CASPER, Wyo. 1 of 1 Police officials in Wyoming say a man posed as his ex-girlfriend and secretly orchestrated a "rape fantasy" for her using Craigslist, which lead to his arrest.

Share + Feb 6, 2010 4:15 pm US/Central CASPER, Wyo. 1 of 1 Police officials in Wyoming say a man posed as his ex-girlfriend and secretly orchestrated a "rape fantasy" for her using Craigslist, which lead to his arrest.

Twitter just recently launched a new Twitter Engineering blog, and to kick things off, one team member, Ben Sandofsky, decided to share a video he made representing Twitter’s development history. The video was made using Code Swarm, a software tool used to visualize data.

As Sandofsky notes, “it isn’t exactly scientific, but it still goes to show Twitter’s explosive growth mirrored in engineering.” More importantly, it looks awesome. You can see the shift in Twitter development from Jack Dorsey in the early days (2006) to Blaine Cook to Alex Payne to Twitter’s now large team of developers. Each team member is represented in the video by their Twitter avatar.

Watch it below. It’s mesmerizing.

Twitter Code Swarm from Ben Sandofsky on Vimeo.

The world’s worst manager, Jeff Zucker, who just so happens to be the president of NBC Universal, was on Capitol Hill today trying to persuade lawmakers to allow the proposed merger with Comcast go through. Interesting to note his take on Boxee’s relationship with Hulu, which, you’ll recall, has been something of a mess. Boxee adds Hulu compatibility, Hulu breaks said compatibility, Boxee re-works its code so that Hulu works again, Hulu breaks compatibility again, etc. And on and on and on.

Anyhow, here’s the relevant exchange, as carefully jotted down by Boxee’s point guards.

If you co-founded the company that became Google AdSense, as Gil Elbaz did with Applied Semantics, you don’t have any problem finding investors when you want to start a new venture. Elbaz sold Applied Semantics to Google for $100 million in 2003, and launched his latest startup, Factual, last October. He doesn’t really need the money, but so many all-star investors were clamoring to get in that he raised just over $1 million in an angel round.

His angel investors include Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz via their Andreessen Horowitz fund, Bill Gross via Idealab, Esther Dyson, Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos, as well as New York City seed fund the Founder Collective.

Factual is setting out to get people to create as many open databases as possible by providing tools for creating table son any topic, embedding them and sharing them. There are already hundreds fo thousands of tables on Factual, dome large some small. For instance, Creative Commons created a database filled with Websites using Creative Commons licenses that contains 4 million rows. All the data in Factual is editable in a wiki-like fashion and is available through Factual APIs.

Chris Dixon, founding partner of Founder Collective (and CEO of Hunch) says they invested because of Factual’s “huge ambition.” In order for the Web to become programmable, it needs data and lots of it. “I think of it as Wikipedia for structured database-like information,” says Dixon. It joins many other efforts pursuing similar ambitions, include Freebase, Wolfram Alpha, and even Google.

Recurrent Energy is celebrating a big victory today — landing a long-term power purchase contract for 50 megawatts with major utility Southern California Edison. All of this energy will be generated by the small-scale solar systems Recurrent has become known for.

The deal is important for two reasons. First, it furthers SoCal Edison’s goal of generating 33 percent of its power output from renewable sources, complying with the California state mandate. While no financial details have been released, it is likely the agreement rivals that recently made between Pacific Gas & Electric and small-scale solar installer SolarCity for $60 million in tax equity.

Second, it demonstrates exactly how distributed solar is moving up in the world. For a while now, the federal and state governments have been more in favor of utility-scale solar arrays in remote areas. But rooftop and smaller arrays are picking up momentum (San Francisco just worked with SunWheel Energy Partners on something similar). Not only have the biggest utilities in California endorsed distributed solar systems — they have the potential to save millions in energy transmission costs, something the state needs to do badly.

The new money will so go toward the construction of two smaller solar arrays in its coverage area. Now all eyes are turning to Recurrent to see which solar panel distributor it will select to make this major undertaking a reality. The goal is to have the solar facilities — one generating 22 megawatts and one generating 28 megawatts — up and running by 2012.

Recurrent is a venture-backed startup based in San Francisco. It raised $75 million in July 2008 from Hudson Clean Energy Partners. Before that, it brought in $10 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures in June 2007. It says it has more than 1 gigawatt-worth of projects in its pipeline.

JamLegend, the LaunchBox-backed ‘Guitar Hero For The Web’, has just reached a fairly major milestone: it’s now signed up over 1 million users. Co-founder Andrew Lee says that the site is up to around 60 million total song plays, of which 45 million have come from registered members. He says the site has seen especially good growth since it integrated Facebook Connect.

For those that haven’t used it before, JamLegend takes the music-as-a-game formula popularized by games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and brings it to your web browser. Gameplay is pretty simple: a series of colorful dots scroll down the screen, each representing a note or chord in a song, and you rhythmically tap the proper keys on your keyboard to “play” each note.

To play a song on JamLegend, it needs to have a note chart. The site offers 300 professionally crafted note charts (and their corresponding songs), and last summer it added support for an automated system that can generate a note chart for any song. In practice the system isn’t perfect, but it’s probably good enough for casual gamers. JamLegend monetizes these songs by restricting how many you can upload at a time — if you’d like to store more than a handful at once, you have to sign up for a premium subscription. Lee says that users have uploaded over 600,000 songs to their virtual lockers.

Lee says that JamLegend’s community is playing a strong role in helping it get traction. He says that indie musicians often come to the site and upload their own songs, and then members of JamLegend’s community task themselves with converting those songs into quality note charts. In effect, it’s giving these bands another outlet to get new fans, and Lee says that some of the bands have managed to get more fans on JamLegend than they have on MySpace.

One other thing worth noting: while Compete shows JamLegend’s traffic taking a dive over the winter, Lee says that their data is off. Instead, he says that traffic has largely been flat recently, but that it hasn’t dipped. Still, the company is going to have to come up with some innovative features to get to critical mass, especially as options like the Rock Band Network become increasingly enticing to indie bands.

JamLegend wil

The more, the better. That's the fashionable recipe for nurturing new ideas these days.