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So it’s large scale but done in a distributed way?
Gross: Exactly. The ultimate distributed solar is to put (photovoltaic) solar panels on every rooftop. The ultimate centralized solar is get 2,000 acres of BLM land and then you have a transmission problem because you need to build a gigawatt of transmission. We’re in between–we’re large-scale utility but we’re still distributed–distributed in small enough pieces.

It’s interesting that you’ve come from the computer world into solar. Will there be other stories like eSolar to come?
Gross: I definitely think so. eSolar has been grown right in the same building as other Idealab companies with all the benefits of IT they had–it uses all the servers built for Internet companies with all the experience and hardening capabilities. And it even uses many of software developers from prior years that we’ve hired back from places like Yahoo.

In the last decade, there’s been a 1,000-fold increase in computational power, so now we can put a $2 microprocessor in every mirror and it costs almost nothing–almost one and half percent of the (material) cost. So every mirror that is tracking the sun during the day has its own computer. And the computational power of a microprocessor today is mind-boggling. It’s a 16-bit microprocessor with eight I/O ports. It’s like an IBM AT (PC) in every mirror–that was a $5,000 computer in 1985. This completely wouldn’t be possible without Moore’s Law.

The second thing is everybody has to wait for build transmission lines. That could be 10 years or never. You could build a power plant and people could block you from building transmission lines to the main distribution point, so buying land specifically adjacent to transmission helps.

Among the Internet cognoscenti, Bill Gross is best known as the head of tech incubator Idealab. Now, as the CEO of solar start-up eSolar, he’s working in renewable energy, but he’s still putting his digital economy chops to work.

If anything, we’re more a software company than a solar company. Of course we’re a solar company, but software is 50 people out of the whole company. There are 135 people–100 are in engineering, 35 are out running power plants, so half the (engineering people) are in the software group, which is an amazing percentage for a solar company.

(Credit:
eSolar)

On the technology side, how much more productive or efficient is this solar tower than existing solar trough technology?
Gross: It is a little more productive than solar troughs. Solar troughs run at between 27 percent and 30 percent efficiency, and we are at 34 percent efficiency. But the real thing is we’re half the cost. It’s not the efficiency that we’re much better at, it’s the price–that’s really the breakthrough. The reason we’re so much less cost is that we use hundreds of thousands of small flat mirrors, instead of long, long rows of huge curved mirrors. The troughs use a mirror that is 5 meters wide by 100 meters long. They pay the same price as we do for the mirror–it’s the same high-quality Belgian or German suppliers–but that’s only 10 percent of the cost.

The main cost of the solar thermal plant besides the mirror is the steel and the actuator (for controlling mirrors)–that’s 90 percent of the cost…The steel (is needed) to hold the mirror in shape without distorting, to stay in a perfect parabola. Because we use a one-square-meter mirror, we use half the steel. Imagine if you take a piece of flat glass and put a tripod behind it, it’ll stay flat. But you need far more steel to bend glass against its will.

The biggest one, though, is the finance. Most people’s projects are billion-dollar projects–they have to be billion-dollar scale before the economics work, and nobody is going to raise a billion dollars in this climate. Our projects work economically at $100 million scale. And we can pay for this plant with cash because we raised $170 million. Everybody else will be held up for years and years until banks will lend on the riskiness of a new project. For us, banks can lend against our project (for new projects) because they can see it works.

Precision tracking for each mirror allows eSolar to write the company's name at its Lancaster, Calif., plant.

In an interview, Gross predicts that the “more software, less steel” trend will continue in solar, which will help get the cost of solar electricity down. And he says that because banks “are acting like mattresses” rather than lending, other concentrating solar companies will struggle to get utility-scale solar projects off the ground.

(Project development companies like) NRG will buy the project from us (for a planned installation in New Mexico) and own and operate the plant for 20 years.

Two-year-old eSolar is having an opening ceremony for its pilot solar power plant in Lancaster, Calif., on Wednesday. There’s a veritable glut of solar start-ups, but eSolar has already gotten further than most: it’s actually producing electricity at below the price consumers pay in California.

How did you start getting into energy after working in the Internet?

Gross: I have been interested in energy all my life, ever since I was a teenager. I worked on energy projects back in 1973 during the first energy crisis, called Solar Devices, a mail-order business I ran as a teenager. I think I got into Caltech because of that business–I wrote about it in my application. But then OPEC came along, formed, and colluded to drive down the price of oil so that at end of the ’70s, nobody was interested in renewable energy anymore. So I had a 20-year hiatus in software and Internet companies and had a string of successes that enabled me to have the capital to come back to my true love in 2000. And of course, by 2000 people were talking about energy issues, maybe running out of energy. That’s when we did the research that led to this crop of solar companies (covering different solar markets such as rooftop solar and off-grid solar) over the last nine years.

Now environmental groups of all things are protesting people using BLM land, and they have a point. Solar is great but you don’t want to destroy the pristine desert…Our land is already being used for something (such as farming).

A view of the mirrors on eSolar's Lancaster, California plant.

The reason that this going to happen more is that, of course, every commodity in the world is going up over time. There will be blips like we’re having now, but in general, the cost of things that require natural resources will go up. The only thing going down is computation power. Everything else behaves on a different law–one of scarcity.

So why haven’t other solar companies broken up their mirrored troughs into smaller bits?
Gross: The problem is historically it’s been a software control problem to track hundreds of thousands of small things. The benefit of one big row is you only need 20 motors to turn troughs–all pointing at the sun–and software control is trivial. We have 24,000 individual mirrors, all pointing in slightly different directions to point at one spot. We’re basically making a dynamic parabola in software where they are making a static parabola in steel.

Computing costs are going down. If you want to crack a problem where cost is the issue, you gotta bet on the thing going down in price and include more of that. Less steel, more software–that is the right trade you want to make. I think that’s going to be used more and more.

Updated at 6:30 a.m. PT with corrected figures for the number of mirrors.

Two years ago we didn’t know how prescient it would be, but we looked at the entire transmission grid of California and where there was 46 megawatts of available capacity, we would go and buy a patch of land right next to that. We inverted the problem. Others said, “Let’s build where the sun is best because I need to buy 2,000 acres at once to get economies of scale. And then I’ll try to lobby for 10 years to get 100 miles of million-dollars-per-mile transmission built.”

The plant is also the first concentrating solar “power tower” in the U.S., capable of producing five megawatts, or enough power to supply about 1,500 homes or up to 4,000 during peak hours. This emerging utility-scale solar technology uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto a tower to make steam, which is then pushed through a turbine to make electricity. The company also has signed deals to build much larger plants in California, New Mexico, and India.

(Credit:
eSolar)

Q: Why have you been able to build a demonstration plant in a year while so many others haven’t?
Gross: A few reasons. A big one is the land. By using these smaller-piece parcels of land, we don’t have to wait for government permission (to use Bureau of Land Management land). We can just use private land. Not to mention we don’t have to do environmental impact studies because we’re not using pristine desert land, which a lot of people worried about impacting.

Are you optimistic on solar and green tech in general?
Gross: I’m wildly optimistic about it, and we only have this momentary setback due to the recession and the banking industry. But this is going to be a 100-year-long build-out to replicate what we built out with coal and natural gas in the last century. The only way it’s going to happen is if you actually lower the price–it’s not going to happen through altruism. If you can beat natural gas and coal, then you’ll have access to huge, huge markets. If you don’t, then you’ll be limited to the subsidized market. (eSolar’s projects benefit from a 30 percent federal tax credit).

(Credit:
BillGross.com)

In the scheme of things, this plant is just five megawatts (about enough to power 1,500 homes). How do you scale?
Gross: A 46-megawatt plant takes one quarter mile, so to build a gigawatt in California would take 20 of those–or 5 square miles. We purchased that land for $30 million in cash, all in small quarter-mile plots, all adjacent to transmission, so we’ve completely eliminated the owning and permitting issue.

There’s been a catch-22 on new solar technology–projects can’t go forward because they only have a PowerPoint.

related story
Grand opening At a ceremony in Southern California, eSolar will bring its five-megawatt concentrating solar plant online.

One of the tricks to getting this far, says Gross, is replacing steel with software. In one 46-megawatt eSolar plant, there are 200,000 flat mirrors, each individually controlled by a microprocessor for the optimal angle.

For years, however, that debt went largely unpaid. The PC platform finally started giving back in 2006, when the first Intel-based Macs shipped and the Mac essentially became a PC–and a really good one at that. Intel’s mammoth investments in chips are sustainable only because its processors end up in most of the world’s Windows PCs. Mac users reap the same technological windfall even though it’s the Windows majority that provides the economies of scale.

PC users…have long benefited hugely from the existence of Macs. Microsoft and PC manufacturers have cribbed so many of Apple’s good ideas that it’s tough to imagine what Windows machines would look like today if the Mac had never existed.

Microsoft, in turn, owes a growing debt to open source, and is increasingly getting involved with open source, most recently releasing an open-source software development kit for Bing to help developers write Mac OS X and Cocoa Touch (iPhone) applications. Linux is pushing Microsoft to innovate again in the server and mobile markets, while a host of open-source applications, databases, and middleware challenge it on the Web, “desktop,” and mobile.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

But in reality, Microsoft needs Apple needs open source needs Google needs….You get the picture.

Not that these two companies are alone in their curious symbiosis. For example, where would open source be without Microsoft? After all, it is Microsoft that helped to create a standardized hardware platform (Intel) for both “desktops” and servers, which paved the way for Linux, but it is also Microsoft that consistently sets the bar, at least on the “desktop,” that open-source projects strive to meet and exceed.

For all the rancor between opposing technology camps–Microsoft vs. the open-source community, Apple vs. Microsoft, etc.–there’s a lot more symbiosis going on than meets the eye. In fact, it’s hard to imagine Apple without Microsoft, open source without Microsoft, and so on, as Harry McCracken suggests in MacWorld (not online at time of writing).

Of course, Microsoft also propped up Apple’s waning fortunes back in 1997 with a $150 million investment and, more importantly, a commitment to build Mac versions of Office and Internet Explorer. Without Microsoft’s software on Apple’s machines, they arguably would have been much less palatable to the general public.

Strange world, technology. On the ground, there are ideological skirmishes between rival camps of customers. In the boardroom, plots are hatched to ridicule the competition.

Open source, whether in Mozilla’s (Firefox) hands or Google’s (Chrome), is also challenging Apple and Microsoft to innovate again in browser technology, which, in turn, Apple is enabling, at least, in Google’s case, through its own open-source WebKit technology.

The company, which is playing catch-up to Apple with its applications store, kicked off its App Catalog beta program on Tuesday.

• The company will review every application and developers will pay a fee of $50 for each app.

• A $99 annual fee. That fee is waived if you submit an open-source WebOS app.

• A 70/30 revenue split. (Palm gets 30 percent.)

Among the key details of Palm’s developer program:

Palm said Tuesday its WebOS developer program will open in December with an “unparalleled level of transparency” in a not-so-subtle dig at Apple.

Read more of Palm developer program set for December lift-off at ZDNet.

If a top-notch customer support program is high on your list of features when buying a new computer, you should be looking at a Mac, according to a new ranking.

“Virtually no computer vendor–or retailer, for that matter–is immune from the wrath of users who have become intimately familiar with the ‘Blue Screen of Death,’ and other PC foibles,” the magazine said in its introduction to the tests. “But, it’s how manufacturers handle their customers’ hardware and software problems that ultimately determine their true reliability, and, you would think, future sales.”

Apple’s support performance over the last few years, coupled with the popularity of the iPhone and iPod, have propelled Apple’s Mac sales. In its 2009 fiscal third quarter, Apple reported selling 2.6 million Macs, up 4 percent from the year ago quarter.

Apple also received “A” ratings in 2007 and 2008 from the magazine for its tech support.

“Apple has consistently offered some of the best Web and phone support of any computer vendor, and this year was no different,” the magazine said in evaluating Apple. “Its Web site is brimming with well-ordered FAQs, query-based search, and PDF manuals, the latter of which quickly answered our external monitor question.”

Laptop magazine’s Tech Support Showdown 2009 rates 10 computer companies’ tech support, with Apple coming out the overall winner. Apple’s overall grade for 2009 was an “A,” scoring an “A” for both phone and Web support.

Comparing it to the other companies involved in the showdown, Acer received a C-; ASUS (B-); Dell (C-); Fujitsu (B-); Gateway (B-); HP (C-); Lenovo (B+); Sony (B+); and Toshiba got a “B.”

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)

Project managers, architects, NASA officials, and Lt. Governor John Garamendi break ground Tuesday on Sustainability Base, a new building at NASA Ames Research Center, which will showcase sustainable technologies.

After decades of developing technology to explore space, NASA is bringing its expertise in self-sustaining systems back to Earth.

Three of the people who spoke at Tuesday's event: June Grant, architect at AECOM Design, left; Simon P. "Pete" Worden, NASA Ames Center director, center; and Lt. Governor John Garamendi, right.

There will be solar hot water collectors and a network of sensors to react to changing conditions, such as sunlight, temperature, wind, and energy usage. Data on the building’s mechanical systems can be monitored via a Web-based console.

The project aims to be a proof-of-concept for sustainable design and a number of green technologies developed at NASA.

The building will be powered by ground-source heat pumps from 72 geothermal wells, considered the most efficient way to heat and cool buildings.

The NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., hosted a groundbreaking ceremony for Sustainability Base, a research center that will be a net zero energy building.

NASA expects that the “high-performance building” will cut water usage by 90 percent compared to an equivalent-size building. NASA also hopes to significantly reduce maintenance costs. The structure itself will be built on top of steel frames and use natural daylighting extensively.

A dedication plaque, written on a solar panel, at the site of Tuesday's Sustainability Base groundbreaking.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)

NASA had contracted the architecture firms of famed “cradle to cradle” William McDonough and Swinerton Builders was hired to complete construction on the project.

The $20.6 million building is expected to be completed by the end of 2011. NASA expects to get the Platinum level LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, the highest level.

Updated at 4:00 a.m. PT to clarify roles of architecture firms.

Nomee doesn’t just force you to create your own cards. The site allows you to create as many cards as you’d like on any topic you like. So if you’re a fan of Robert DeNiro, you can add an image to his card, input links to some of his content (including YouTube videos, which can be viewed right in the app), and share that card with Nomee users.

The Nomee Newstream in action.

But it’s the ability to decide what to share that makes Nomee so valuable.

Adobe AIR applications are typically well designed. They feature a sleek look and relatively fast response times. TweetDeck (Windows | Mac), a popular Adobe AIR app, has put the platform on the map. It has caused some developers to view AIR as a viable alternative platform to building a Web site.

The basics
Nomee is based on “cards.” When you first sign up for the site (you can use OpenID if you don’t want to create unique Nomee credentials), you’ll be presented with celebrities and prominent figures who currently have cards on the site. But before you start thinking that there are scores of celebs on Nomee, think again: for the most part, those cards were created by Nomee users, not the celebrities themselves.

Let’s say you’re a 19-year-old college student who wants to share your card with your parents, but you don’t want them to know about your Facebook profile. Nomee lets you decide which links in your card they can see. So when you’re ready to share it, you need only to check the boxes next to the links you want to send to them, and you’re all set. All other links won’t be displayed. It’s a great feature. It makes it quite easy share certain content with different groups of people.

When you view a card, it displays an image of the person, followed by several sites or services that are related to them. When you click on one of those services, you’ll be brought to its respective Web page. For example, if you click on the Twitter logo on my card, you can view my Twitter page.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

If you like what you see, you can “add” the card to your Nomee Dashboard. From there, Nomee will track all the card updates. It will alert you when there’s something new for you to check out.

Nomee’s Newstream lets you view all the updates from every card you follow. Thanks to such a nice design and some filtering options, you shouldn’t have any trouble finding exactly what you’re looking for. It’s arguably Nomee’s best feature.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

I brought this up in my meeting with Nomee on Wednesday. The company’s spokesperson told me that the company believes that being offline helps it. He was also quick to point out that the ability to filter targeted content to others is a step up over FriendFeed or other similar competitors. Not being able to message other users wasn’t considered a negative.

That's me on Nomee, even though I didn't create the page.

Nomee makes it easy to input profiles.

But perhaps the most compelling reason why Nomee thinks it has staying power in the crowded space is the upcoming release of an “Issues” feature. According to the company, users will soon be able to take on issues like health care and provide relevant links for others to learn more about them. It’s the same premise as cards for people. Nomee believes that it will help it differentiate the product from sites like FriendFeed, since it can also be used as a learning platform. I tend to agree.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

If you want to take Nomee for a spin, you can download it here (Windows|Mac).

Nomee also lets you update your Twitter feed. To do so, you’ll need to view a tweet by someone you’re following. Under his or her tweet, Nomee gives you the option to reply or retweet it. Similar to TweetDeck, Twitter displays Nomee as the source of your tweet on the site. You can’t currently update your Facebook status from Nomee, but the company did tell me that that feature will be coming in the next version of the app. It didn’t provide a release date.

It’s about the sharing
If you really like some of the cards you’re following and you think a friend would like them as well, you can share those cards with them. Once you do so, those cards will show up on their Nomee Dashboard.

According to Nomee, you can add profiles to your cards from more than 120 sites. They include Twitter, Facebook, Google News, Mahalo, StumbleUpon, Picasa, and more. The selection is quite nice. You can also add RSS feeds or links to your blogs.

Card creation
Of course, Nomee isn’t just a place where you can see what your favorite celebrities are up to. You can also create your own card to share with friends. Those same friends can create cards and share their social profiles and links with you.

Viability
One of the biggest issues with Nomee has nothing to do with the app itself. It’s designed beautifully, it works well, and it might appeal to some who want a quick place to find all their friends’ social profiles. But it’s that third element that might hurt Nomee.

Bottom Line
Nomee is a well-designed social-aggregation app that does a fine job of keeping you updated about what your friends are doing. But until it adds that issues feature, it’s debatable just how useful the app is. I really don’t see myself using it all that often. I don’t even see myself moving from FriendFeed to Nomee. It’s a neat idea, but since it’s tied to the desktop, it provides limited value to me.

When I used Nomee, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to sites like FriendFeed, which already help you monitor what your friends are up to across the Internet. Like Nomee, FriendFeed allows you to input all your profiles. It also updates you when friends change their status or update a profile. There’s just two big differences between those services: FriendFeed is online and you can communicate with friends through the service. Nomee lacks both those key elements.

Nomee provides a cover view to help you sift through all the sites you might belong to. Once you find the site you want, simply input the user name and you’re all set. It will be added to your individual card. The process takes just seconds. And thanks to a nice design, it’s quite intuitive.

Nomee (Windows|Mac), a company that helps users see what celebrities, prominent figures, or their friends are up to online, is one such app.

Apple still has to approve the “Local Concerts” app, according to a release, but iLike is excited about its potential impact regardless.

“We found that there really were a few key capabilities that the iPhone OS didn’t support at the time,” he explained, referring specifically to push notifications and some software tweaks that enable better personalization. So the revamped iLike concerts app, thanks to iPhone software upgrades, will scan the music selection on an iPhone or iPod Touch, and send pop-up alerts when a band or artist that the user listens to will be in town.

iLike already has had a concert app in the iTunes Store. The company didn’t promote it much, Partovi said, because the iPhone 3.0 software was what really made the app worthwhile, and so iLike was waiting until that came out.

Music service iLike, best known for third-party applications on platforms like Facebook, made its big iPhone app launch today. The company has rolled out an app for alerts about local concerts, and also launched its previously announced program for bands and artists to create custom fan applications.

The custom artist apps, meanwhile, haven’t changed much from when iLike originally announced the program in May. Over 250 artists have signed on to the program, the company said, including Pete Yorn, Reba McIntire, and Enrique Iglesias. iLike takes half the revenues from sales of the apps, and charges a $99 fee with the right to serve ads if the artist in question decides to offer its custom app for free.

CNET News reported last month that iLike was also in talks with the major music labels to open a download store, after a deal to offer full-length songs through subscription service Rhapsody failed to materialize.

“It’s something that we really felt was a good idea on paper as we started developing it,” iLike CEO Ali Partovi told CNET News, “but as it reached completion and we started using it ourselves it really started seeming like a killer app.”

“It turns the iPod into much more of a live device to be connected to the world of live music,” Partovi said of the free app.

In the meantime, there are plenty of other ways to find clues. One is another Twitter account that was set up as a clearinghouse for information (@EvansVanished). Another is a Facebook account called The Search for Evan Ratliff, where fans are posting clues and working collaboratively to solve the puzzle.

Update (2:27 p.m.): The account is now back up. According to a Twitter spokesperson, it was “infected” for some reason.

But as of Friday morning, his Twitter account (@theatavist) had been suspended for “strange activity.”

When Wired recently launched its Vanish contest, a challenge to readers to locate reporter Evan Ratliff, who has gone on the “lam,” it suggested that a major source of clues would be Ratliff’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.

The challenge is an interesting way to draw attention to a recent article of Ratliff’s about the difficulties of disappearing from society. And in the original contest challenge, it was suggested that contest participants might draw some conclusions as to the methods the reporter would use–or wouldn’t, as the case may be–from that story.

(Credit:
Twitter)

Wired readers who want to try to win the $5,000 prize for finding reporter Evan Ratliff may not be able to use clues posted to his Twitter account, as the account has been suspended for ’strange activity.’

And as is often the case with ARGs, this game, too, is in the service of promoting something else, in this case, Ratliff’s larger article.

Still, I really want to know what “strange activity” caused the service to take down the account. I’ll update this article if I find out.

This game, then, has many of the makings of a traditional alternate-reality game: online and offline components, widespread community involvement, clues spread across a wide swath of the Internet and a prize that may, in the end, have to be shared by a number of people who worked together.

For now, those trying to find him and win the cash–and no doubt, bragging rights, as Ratliff said that to collect the prize, the winner has to agree to be interviewed on his or her methods–will have to do so without the assistance of his Twitter account. Then again, Twitter has been going through a rough time recently, with several periods of downtime.

Whoever finds Ratliff (and is the first to send his editor a photo of him) will win $5,000. And while there are a number of different ways to source up clues as to his whereabouts, one of them was supposed to be his Twitter account.

Of course, given that Ratliff is surely employing everything he can think of to stay below radar (theoretically not using credit cards or doing anything that might too easily give away his whereabouts) the Twitter account suspension might somehow be intentional. Then again, one would have to wonder what he would have had to do to get Twitter on board.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for information as to why the account was suspended.

As Intel readies its most potent chip yet for small devices, Apple may already be using competing technology.

(Credit:
iFixit)

But it’s really not even necessary to speculate about the future. The Apple chip has already arrived (see photo). Some analysts believe that the Apple-branded chip in the iPhone is a fairly unique design and that Apple is simply using Samsung as a chip “foundry” or manufacturer. That would mean Apple is already competing with Intel’s Atom, not to mention the host of ARM chip suppliers such as Texas Instruments and Qualcomm.

Enter Moorestown. A much more power efficient Atom chip, due by 2010, that should find its way into high-end LG smartphones, MIDs from Asian device makers, and tablets (from HP? Dell?).

Those are all markets where Intel’s Moorestown (and, later, Medfield) will compete.

And 2010 is just around the corner. It should be an interesting year for fresh new device designs and equally interesting competition between two computer industry Goliaths.

Apple iPhone 3GS processor

(See: CNET Reporters Roundtable discussion of IDF and other Intel topics.)

Note: Here’s the official Intel description of Moorestown: “Intel’s second-generation MID platform, which consists of a System on Chip (codenamed ‘Lincroft’) that integrates a 45nm Intel Atom processor core, graphics, video and memory controller. The platform also includes an input/output (I/O) hub, codenamed ‘Langwell,’ that includes a range of I/O blocks and supports wireless solutions.

One of the themes of the upcoming Intel Developer Forum (starting Tuesday) will be the chip giant’s foray into the smartphone and mobile Internet device (MID) markets. Intel’s current Atom chip is fine for Netbooks but has had little impact on MIDs and zero impact on smartphones, where it is simply too power hungry to be usable.

Just so happens that Apple is doing analogous chip development. When Apple acquired chip design firm P.A. Semi in March 2008 it got a team of very capable engineers that, almost certainly, are designing silicon for future iPhones, iPods, and tablets (or “media pads”–choose your nomenclature).

Apple has a current market capitalization of about $165 billion (Intel’s is about $110 billion). Two heavyweights with two competing visions of small devices. Will one of the big battlegrounds of the future be Apple tablets versus Intel-based tablets? Or–perish the thought–an Apple Netbook using an Apple chip instead of an Intel Atom? It’s tantalizing to speculate.

And where might Apple supply its own silicon in the future? Beyond the iPhone–where Intel clearly has nothing to offer currently–there’s the expected emerging tablet and MID markets. Make the iPod touch’s screen a few inches bigger diagonally, add a few more features and you theoretically have a MID. (Some, of course, will argue that the iPod is already a MID/media player.) Make the screen even bigger (8 to 10 inches), give it more compute and graphics horsepower, and add a few more software and hardware bells and whistles, and you theoretically have a next-generation Apple tablet and/or media pad.

The lawsuit, which was filed Monday in Delaware Chancery Court, seeks class action status and a permanent injunction against the deal. The suit, first reported by the New York Post, also seeks an accounting of all damages caused by the defendants Google and On2’s board of directors.

The lawsuit also alleges that On2’s board agreed to provisions that prohibit the company from entertaining other offers.

The deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year, still needs the approval of On2 shareholders, but the board has yet to announce a date for the vote.

Google’s acquisition of video-compression software company On2 Technologies is being challenged in court by On2 shareholders dissatisfied by Google’s $106.5 million offer.

On2’s video-compression technology is used in Adobe’s Flash software and the Hulu video site, among others. The company licenses various “codecs”–the software used to encode video so it’s compact enough to squeeze down a narrow Internet pipe, then to expand it at the other end.

On2 declined to comment, and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Under the terms of the stock swap, which was announced earlier this month, each share of On2 will be exchanged for 60 cents’ worth of Google common stock–a 57 percent premium over On2’s closing stock price on the last trading day before the announcement. The complaint notes that On2’s stock traded at 65 cents in May and reached as high as $1.16 in 2008.