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Some have called it the car that will save General Motors: the Chevy Volt, a plug-in electric sedan set to launch in three test markets (in California, Michigan, and the Washington, D.C., area) by the end of 2010. GM's Chevy brand was one of the charter sponsors of this week's South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, and it brought a Volt along for the ride. Why, exactly? The 12,000 SXSWi attendees, most of whom are all about the latest high-tech craze, are exactly the people Chevy thinks will want a Volt.

"Charles Babbage is cited as the father of modern computing - although perhaps "uncle" would be more accurate, since his designs never actually saw completion and computing is based on totally different principles. But his idea of a "difference engine," a hand-cranked device that could solve mathematical problems, is essentially the first instance of a computer in human history. numbersUnfortunately, the device, designed to tackle the huge amount of calculation involved in tracking the British navy, was never completed. After 10 years of tinkering, the project was aborted and the prototype melted down. But Babbage's plans and a few pieces of the Difference Engine remained, and just recently someone decided they'd finish what he started. Now there is a complete and working Difference Engine at the Computer History Museum down in Mountain View. It was put together by Doron Swade, a former curator at London's Science Museum, and a team he assembled over the last two decades. There is another working Difference Engine being kept at that museum, and this one will only remain in Mountain View for a year before it heads out to Seattle to enter a "private collection." I'm guessing Ballmer's (actually, Nathan Myhrvold, former MS CTO. Close, though). So go see it while you can, startup guys! There's more info at NPR, where you can, as always, have it narrated to you. I love that. I'm going to make some coffee and listen to it again. Update: A commenter at NPR notes that the Harvard Mark I was a functioning difference engine, but relied on electricity rather than clockwork. It was completed in 1944."

A Welsh company developing the technology, which uses an electrical current to stimulate chemicals to produce light, has been awarded a £454,000 grant from the Carbon Trust to help get it into homes, business and on the roads. The organic light emitting diodes (OLED) technology, which can be coated onto a thin flexible film to cover walls like wallpaper, can also be used for flat screen televisions, computers and mobile phone displays.

"Here is an innovation borne of the need to make solar modules that are more able to capture more sunlight in regions like New York (or Germany) that have relatively low level insolation. Normally that means that it takes more panels to make the same power, which means it simply costs more to make the same electricity in upstate New York than in the Southern California desert. Prism Solar Technologies in Highland, NY has innovated a breakthrough holographic thin-film (Holographic Planar Concentrator™) that makes possible a very parsimonious use of crystalline PV cells to counteract that problem for Northern region"