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If the economy gets better and job prospects improve, you may need to offer more incentives to keep your best employees. I recently hosted SurePayroll’s version of the People's Choice Awards, the SureChoice Awards.

How do you get people to pay more for clean power?

ASIMO Dances Honda's child-sized android may be the world's best-known real-world robot, even though his practical white paint job isn't as snazzy as C3PO's gold-plated goodness. Over the years, ASIMO's skills have gotten ever more spohisticated as Honda's research scientists look at improving his software, drive units, and sensors to give him better control over his body, and more artificial intelligence to let him manuever under his own control and navigate around unexpected objects (the kind of task androids will need to master if they're to help us in our homes or hospitals). But now the Automaton blog has seen a demonstration that ASIMO is now smart enough to copy your dance moves

Since performing research for my book, Climate Capitalism (written with Hunter Lovins) a few years ago, I have become increasingly convinced that the smart grid has the potential to be one of the "holy grails" in the clean tech revolution. I believe that the smart grid can be the enabling technology that enable all kinds of other low-carbon innovations to flourish

The solar leasing company has inked a deal to put solar panels on the housing in military bases in 33 states. SolarCity has had a big year, first with news that Google is creating a $280 million fund to finance its residential solar projects, and now with the announcement that it will double the amount of residential solar photovoltaic installations in the U.S. As part of Project SolarStrong , SolarCity will team up with the biggest military housing-privatization developers--the housing companies that manage homes on military bases--in the U.S.

The general public has no idea how much they pay for electricity or how to use less, undermining the central premise of smart meters and hindering their adoption. Smart power meters are, in theory, supposed to help with everything from electric vehicle adoption (low electricity rates encourage people to charge up at specific times) to bringing more renewable energy on the grid (pricing will vary based on when it is available). But smart meter implementation hinges on the idea that consumers actually understand their electricity use.

Businesses in the sharing economy have drawn public scrutiny, if not ire, of late.

SHANGHAI -- For Jin Liang, a typical Chinese who watches his utility bills carefully, each scorching hot summer day posed a dilemma: Should he switch on his air conditioner, or keep it off to cool the impact on his wallet? But his dilemma faded away this year after Jin moved into a new apartment. It features magical materials that allow him to comfortably turn off the air conditioner and yet stop sweating

Qbo Open-Source Bot Par Excellence Qbo is a kind of smaller, cheaper PR2 --he's an open-source robot platform (using the ROS operating system developed for PR2), which could aid robot research as well as educating students in robotics and computer programming.

In cities where the water coming from pipes is anything but reliable, a new service alerts people so they don't have to sit at home all day waiting for the tap to turn on. In many cities in developing countries, residents have piped water supplies. But there's a catch: the water is only available through the pipes for a few hours at a time, and people have no way of knowing when that will be

* Power lines connect Tucson to coal-fired power plants * Utility has plans to maintain power if lines go down [More]

Uploading your music to the cloud isn't as simple as you might think. As more data is stored online, the cloud takes more and more energy to maintain, forcing companies to get into the business of getting power as cheaply as possible

A German activist who helped found Germany's first community-owned utility thinks citizens shouldn't leave big decisions to power companies and elected officials.

When a frigid cold wave knocked out 50 power plants in Texas during February's Super Bowl week, utilities had to impose rolling blackouts across entire communities with a "blunt ax," said Robert Shapard, CEO of Dallas-based Oncor, the state's largest transmission company.

Dish has the brand on life-support. Fast Company offers a few ideas for what to do with the struggling retailer.