California lowers taxes for electric car

California lowers taxes for maker of electric car

SACRAMENTO - The company that built the first mass-produced, all-electric car will keep its manufacturing plant in California thanks to a new state-tax break.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state Treasurer Bill Lockyer worked out the deal for Tesla Motors Inc. after learning that the Silicon Valley-based company intended to build its second-generation vehicle in New Mexico.

The financial break, announced Monday, allows Tesla to avoid paying state sales tax on equipment it buys to build its Model S. That will save the company 7 percent to 9 percent on each purchase.

The five-passenger sedan is expected to cost about $60,000 and will be able to travel 225 miles between charges to its electric engine.

Adobe software will aid Flash-site online search

NEW YORK - Internet users now will have an easier time finding sites that rely heavily on the popular Flash video format.

Adobe Systems Inc., the format's developer, has released a customized version of its Flash Player software that allows Google Inc.'s search engine and others to see the elements of Web pages embedded with Flash content the same way a human would.

Search crawlers, the programs that find and index content for search engines, currently have a difficult time "seeing" non-text formats.

Adobe's new tools help search crawlers navigate dynamic Flash pages more easily. Google's crawlers, for instance, will be able to click buttons along the way and remember the information for the index.

Google already is using the new tools and Yahoo Inc. plans to soon. Adobe plans to extend support to other search engines.

Limits exist, though.

Google is indexing only actual text within Flash files, not text presented as images such as the words on a street sign. So Google's YouTube video clips still aren't covered because they don't contain embedded text.

Fiber-optic Web service tops cable across world

NEW YORK - For the first time, more people around the world are signing up for fiber-optic broadband service than for cable Internet service, according to a British research firm.

Fiber providers added 4.2 million customers in the first quarter, while 2.5 million customers signed up for cable modems, according to a report released Wednesday by Point Topic.

The bulk of the new fiber subscribers are in China, where 2.5 million signed up, for a total of 16.7 million. The United States is in fourth place after Japan and Korea. Point Topic counted 303,000 new U.S. fiber customers, for a total of 2.6 million.

Fiber-optic Internet connections provide faster speeds, but the cost of the build-out is daunting.

In deregulated telecommunications markets like those of the United States and Western Europe, carriers are unsure if fiber is worth the investment because they are competing there with cheaper technologies like cable and DSL, and it's unclear how much regulators will let them profit.

Verizon Communications Inc. is the only major U.S. telecommunications company to pull fiber all the way to subscriber homes.

Verizon accounts for slightly more than two-thirds of total U.S. fiber hookups. The rest of the fiber-to-the-home, or FTTH, deployments are by small phone companies and by municipalities.

- Associated Press