Solar companies presenting business plans to investors at a National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) conference this week devoted particular attention to how they hope to compete with Chinese manufacturers. The audience at the NREL Industry Growth Forum in Denver consisted largely of venture capitalists and partners from private equity firms.

Stellaris, a company that assembles solar modules in Lowell, MA, has already received $6.1 million in funding to develop techniques for packaging silicon and thin-film cells. The company, represented at the conference by CEO James Paull, is seeking further financing in 2010.

Paull said that while European companies' cell-to-module costs are 70 cents per watt, China's are half that. "Solar modules have become a commodity, and China is dominating," he said. Like most of the other presenters, Paull didn't reveal too much about his company's technology. But he said that Stellaris hopes to save costs by adding passive plastic concentrators to silicon and thin-film cells and by reducing cell sizes.

An executive from a large European solar company expressed skepticism, however, that the US will ever be able to catch up with Chinese solar manufacturers. The executive, who manages his company's operations in China, said his company had explored manufacturing in California and Texas but that the labor costs were much too high. That said, he was at the conference looking for new solar technologies to buy up--an area where the US does still have an edge.

Can you find Estonia on a world map? Do you sing in the shower? Criminals break the law; are they likely to follow gun laws? These are a few recent polls run on Ask500People, a Google Maps mashup that has a simple, satisfying purpose: to solicit people's answers to a series of questions. The questions come from logged-in users, who also vote on which of the submitted questions they're interested in answering. Anyone can vote, and the voting happens in real time, while the map collects the locations of responders. More details can be found here.

What strikes me about Ask500People is that, although every website these days touts its social features, I find few sites as purely, delightfully social as this one.

Waltham, MA, startup Everyscape launched today, posting 3-D photorealistic builds of Boston, New York City, Aspen, and Miami for users to explore. (See "A New Perspective on the Virtual World.") Still in early phases, Boston and New York contain only public spaces (New York doesn't yet include every street), while Aspen and Miami feature "miniscapes" of the insides of some privately owned buildings. Everyscape invites users to become "scape artists" by posting supplementary content to the virtual cityscapes. The company plans to continue adding cities to its virtual world. Laguna Beach, CA, and Cambridge, MA, are next on the schedule. To see a video created by Everyscape's CTO and founder, Mok Oh, that demonstrates the look and feel of the company's virtual cities, click the link below.