URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT

1030 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 11, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

A New Battery Takes Off In a Race to Electric Cars
BYLINE: By JASON PONTIN.

Jason Pontin is the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, a magazine and Web site owned by M.I.T. E-mail: pontin@nytimes.com.

SECTION: Section 3; Column 1; Money and Business/Financial Desk; SLIPSTREAM; Pg. 3
LENGTH: 1347 words
VROOOOM! Or, rather, much more softly: brmmm.

A123Systems, a start-up in Watertown, Mass., says it has created a powerful, safe, long-lived battery. If the cell fulfills the ambitions of its maker, that softer sound will be the future of automobiles.

To date, all-electric vehicles have failed because their batteries were inadequate. General Motors' futuristic EV1 car of the late 1990s was doted upon by environmentally conscious drivers who admired its innovative engineering, but because the car used large, primitive nickel metal hydride batteries, its range was limited, its acceleration degraded as the batteries weakened with age, and its two-seat layout was not very comfortable for big, corn-fed North Americans.

''The problem came down to usability,'' said Nick Zelenski, G.M.'s chief vehicle engineer. ''You had to plan your life around when you were going to charge the EV1.'' G.M. built only 1,117 of the experimental cars because it believed that American drivers would not buy such an affront to the national ideal of the open road.

Now, G.M. is planning two plug-in hybrid vehicles. Like the Toyota Prius and other available hybrids, the G.M. models will supplement their electric motors with power from internal combustion engines. What's different is that most of the power for daily commuting will come from battery packs that can be recharged from ordinary household sockets. The new models are expected to have a range of at least 40 miles without using their gas engines. While that is less than the range of the all-electric EV1, the hybrid nature of the new models will give them far greater total range.

G.M. says that the extra cost for the battery packs mean that plug-in hybrids will sell for thousands of dollars more than comparable, non-electric vehicles. But the average driver, going 40 miles a day, would also save $450 a year if gasoline were $2 a gallon. Because the median daily travel of the average American car is 33 miles (well within the new model's electric range), the cars would achieve 155 miles to the gallon, and many drivers would fill up with gasoline only every few months.

G.M. hopes to begin selling the first car, a plug-in hybrid version of the Saturn Vue sport utility, as soon as 2009. The second, the Chevrolet Volt, which exists only as a concept-model prototype, is a startling departure from traditional automotive design. The Volt's internal combustion engine is not attached to the drive train as current hybrids are. In the case of the Volt, it is used only to recharge the vehicle's batteries. In short, the Volt would function as a true electric car, with the insurance of an internal combustion engine -- and not coincidentally it is also designed as a recognizably conventional American compact, seating five, which could drive hundreds of miles to Mother's at Thanksgiving.

''The real breakthrough is with the new batteries, which offered us energy density -- which in turn provided us with a reliable, high-powered package in a relatively small space,'' Mr. Zelenski said.

G.M. selected A123Systems (along with its partner Cobasys) to develop batteries that might be used for the Saturn Vue, he said, and it is considering awarding A123Systems a similar contract for the Volt concept car, to take advantage of the company's remarkable new rechargeable lithium batteries.

Rechargeable lithium batteries have been used in laptop computers and mobile phones since the early 1990s. (Their common name, ''lithium ion batteries,'' is a tautology, since all batteries conduct electric current by allowing the passage of ions between two electrodes.) But despite their lightness, rechargeable lithium batteries -- which often use a compound of highly reactive cobalt oxide -- have hitherto been thought impractical for transportation because they are insufficiently powerful and might, if pierced, jarred or overheated, explode or burst into flames.

A123Systems batteries are different. Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science and engineering at M.I.T. and a co-founder of A123Systems, described their advantages: ''Used in a hybrid vehicle, our batteries deliver faster acceleration than any other batteries of the same size,'' Professor Chiang said. ''And the chemical stability of the cathode material greatly improves safety as well as extending battery life.''

The history of A123Systems offers a lesson in entrepreneurial adaptability. When Professor Chiang and two others founded the company in 2002, it was devoted to a radical business proposition: it hoped to develop a technique where component materials would ''self assemble'' into a practical lithium battery. ''Imagine sprayable batteries, conforming to the shape of a device or an appliance,'' Professor Chiang said. ''They could also be deposited in very small volumes to power micro and nano devices.''

But self-assembling batteries, despite their intriguing potential, proved intractably hard to develop -- or, at least, more expensive and less sure than the immediate commercial possibilities of a rechargeable lithium battery with novel applications. ''It just wasn't working,'' said Bart Riley, another of the co-founders, and A123's vice president for research and development. (The third co-founder is Ric Fulop, now vice president for business development, who has also participated in the start-up of five other companies.)

By late 2003, the company had abandoned self-assembly for another, less alchemical but still dramatic technology. In place of cobalt oxide, it used a commonplace substance, iron phosphate, but assembled it in a novel, nano-structure -- the particles used were 100 times smaller than conventional oxides and eight orders of magnitude more conductive than conventional phosphates. The new combination offers high power, stability and longevity.

Shifting to the new technology seems to have been a wise, if hard, decision. Today, A123Systems, a privately held venture, has raised more than $102 million in funding from a variety of investors including Sequoia Capital, Motorola and General Electric. It has 250 employees in China, Taiwan, South Korea and the United States. Apart from its developmental work with G.M., it manufactures the batteries that drive Black & Decker and DeWalt professional power tools.

According to David Vieau, A123Systems' chief executive, the company enjoys ''hundreds of millions of dollars'' in contracts.

The former commitment to self-assembly is preserved only in the company's nerdy name, derived from an equation called the ''Hamaker force constant,'' which is used to calculate attractive and repulsive forces at nano-dimensions, and which begins ''A123''

While A123Systems still hopes to return to self-assembling batteries one day, it remains focused for now on the future of transportation. In this, the company's founders and senior officers mix business acumen with a kind of millennial fervor: they sincerely believe that their rechargeable lithium batteries could reduce the carbon emissions that contribute to global warming.

These plug-in hybrids ''will cut gasoline demand over 70 percent for most drivers, and carbon emissions by 50 percent, which will have a significant effect on the environment,'' Mr. Vieau said. Driving a plug-in hybrid powered by batteries from A123, most drivers would seldom use their gasoline engines. And while the electricity that charged the batteries would derive mostly from carbon dioxide-producing power plants, burning gasoline is the most polluting transportation energy of all, according to a 2005 study by the Argonne National Laboratory.

A123Systems' ambition is to apply a new technology, born from original science, to solve a difficult problem. The company's chairman is Gururaj Deshpande, the entrepreneur who also is a co-founder and chairman of Sycamore Networks. As he explained: ''This company can play a role in reducing our dependence on oil and in cleaning up the environment. Any company that gets to contribute to those efforts in whatever measure would have done good in the world.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: AUTOMOTIVE TECHNOLOGY (92%); ENGINEERING (90%); MOTOR VEHICLES (90%); ELECTRIC VEHICLES (91%); NEW PRODUCTS (89%); NEW CAR MODELS (89%); SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES (78%); AUTOMAKERS (90%); CONCEPT CARS (77%); AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY & ENVIRONMENT (77%); HYBRID VEHICLES (90%); AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING (76%) Automobiles; Batteries; Electric and Hybrid Vehicles; Prices (Fares, Fees and Rates); Commuting; Engines; Automobiles
COMPANY: GENERAL MOTORS CORP (58%)
ORGANIZATION: General Motors Corp; A123systems (Co); Saturn Division of General Motors Corp
TICKER: GMR (LSE) (57%); GMP (PAR) (58%); GM (NYSE) (58%); GMB (BRU) (58%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS336112 LIGHT TRUCK & UTILITY VEHICLE MANUFACTURING (58%); NAICS336111 AUTOMOBILE MANUFACTURING (58%); SIC3714 MOTOR VEHICLE PARTS & ACCESSORIES (57%); SIC3711 MOTOR VEHICLES & PASSENGER CAR BODIES (57%)
PERSON: Jason Pontin
GEOGRAPHIC: MASSACHUSETTS, USA (93%) UNITED STATES (93%); NORTH AMERICA (79%)
LOAD-DATE: March 11, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photos: From left, Yet-Ming Chiang, Bart Riley, Ric Fulop and David Vieau of A123Systems, with rechargeable lithium batteries at the company's headquarters in Watertown, Mass. The Chevy Volt prototype, below, was conceived to use such batteries. (Photo by Rick Friedman for The New York Times)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1031 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 11, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Now Ticking Big Ben For Men
BYLINE: By JULIE EARLE-LEVINE
SECTION: Section 6; 'T'; Column 3; T: Men's Fashion Magazine; THE REMIX; Pg. 74
LENGTH: 110 words
Time for a new watch? Dent -- the British clockmaker famous for creating the Big Ben tower in London as well as timepieces for luminaries like King Edward VI and Charles Darwin -- has a new line of watches for the common man. Frank Spurrell, the founder of Watch Magazine, and Twysden Moore, a London nightclub entrepreneur and watch fetishist, acquired the label after assuring the original owner that they were not going to make tacky plastic alarm clocks. Expect instead a classic square-face ticker inspired by Big Ben and a round homage to an 1848 ship chronometer used by the Royal Navy in the world wars. Go to www.dentwatches.com. JULIE EARLE-LEVINE
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: CLOCK & WATCH MFG (90%); NAVIES (85%); BRITISH MONARCHS (90%) Watches and Clocks
ORGANIZATION: Dent (British Co)
PERSON: Julie Earle-Levine
GEOGRAPHIC: LONDON, ENGLAND (91%) UNITED KINGDOM (73%); ENGLAND (91%)
LOAD-DATE: March 11, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photo (Photograph by Don Ashby (3)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1032 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 11, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

If Life Imitates Art, He's in Big Trouble
BYLINE: By KATE STONE LOMBARDI
SECTION: Section 14WC; Column 1; Westchester Weekly Desk; BOOK BUSINESS; Pg. 6
LENGTH: 750 words
DATELINE: RYE BROOK
WHEN Matthew Klein sat down to write his thriller ''Con Ed,'' he had little taste for the standard heroes of the genre. Grizzled cops, feisty pathologists and clever lawyers left him cold. So he took a flier and made his lead character a con man -- albeit a likable one.

His protagonist, Kip Largo, has just been released from prison and is trying to go straight. But when his grown son shows up in deep debt, Kip decides to bail him out by pulling off one last scam. He pretends to be a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who starts a high-tech software company that predicts the stock market. Throw some nasty members of the Russian mob, a wealthy Las Vegas developer and a few sexy women into this $20 million stock-manipulation scheme, and you've got Mr. Klein's new novel, to be released by Warner Books on Tuesday. (A book party will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. on Saturday at the Rye Free Reading Room, 1061 Boston Post Road.)

Mr. Klein, who grew up in Westchester and lives in Rye Brook, is certainly qualified to write about the huge amounts of money that flowed through Silicon Valley at the height of the Internet bubble. The 38-year-old author was one of those archetypal whiz kids who started several technology companies during the boom. He is quick to point out, however, that his familiarity with scams is only a product of ''armchair research.''

Self-described as ''freakishly tall'' -- he is 6 foot 7 -- Mr. Klein projects an air of both deep ambition and self-effacement. He shares with his more rough-hewn protagonist a somewhat forlorn sense of humor and a penchant for big ideas.

Even during his college days at Yale, Mr. Klein revealed an entrepreneurial bent. He began a business delivering local restaurant food to students in their dorm rooms, and arranged with the university bursar for students to bill food directly to their parents' accounts. After graduating in 1990, he went on to Stanford Business School.

''I always thought I wanted to run a business,'' Mr. Klein said. ''I know myself, and I'm really unemployable in the classical sense. I don't listen to people, and I think I know the answers, so that makes me think I should do stuff on my own.''

He dropped out of business school just one quarter shy of graduating. He had been running a small software company in his apartment in Palo Alto, Calif., and venture capitalists approached him to run the business full time. The company, Release Software, was a personal information manager that could be opened and downloaded remotely, a new concept in 1994.

That business didn't pan out, but Mr. Klein soon moved to a second venture, TechPlanet. His idea was to create a national brand of quality-controlled computer service technicians. At one point Mr. Klein had raised $40 million in venture capital, had 400 employees and was spending $1 million a day. So confident was he that he personally guaranteed the company debt. But problems arose. It turned out that few computer system installations were standard. Jobs were complicated, and the company had to hire talented technicians and pay them accordingly. The business kept expanding, with no eye toward profitability. Investors pulled out, and ultimately the venture became what Mr. Klein described as ''a very public, spectacular failure.''

Lawyers and creditors hounded him. It took him years to dig out. But he is nothing if not resilient, and Mr. Klein came up with yet another idea. His new company, Collective2, audits various algorithmic stock-trading services, tracking their results, and offers a marketplace for those who want to trade using them. Once the company was up and running, he turned his attention to writing ''Con Ed.''

Writing a novel and writing computer software, he said, aren't as different as one might think. ''There's a lot of aesthetics involved in both, but the elegance of a piece of computer software is sort of private; only the coders know,'' he said. ''The talent lies in the judgment, and I think you need that in writing software and writing novels.''

So Mr. Klein is running a business with software that aims to predict the stock market at the same time that he has written a book about a con artist who runs a company that claims to predict the stock market? Might that make customers a little nervous?

''I hadn't really thought of it that way,'' Mr. Klein said, laughing. ''I think companies pretty much stand on their own, and if you can make money for someone, they're willing to overlook pretty much anything.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: LITERATURE GENRES (90%); BOOK REVIEWS (90%); STUDENTS & STUDENT LIFE (89%); SOFTWARE MAKERS (89%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (89%); EDUCATION (85%); NOVELS & SHORT STORIES (78%); VENTURE CAPITAL (75%); RESTAURANTS (61%); WRITERS & WRITING (78%); LITERATURE (78%); BUSINESS EDUCATION (85%); COMPUTER SOFTWARE (89%) Books and Literature; Biographical Information
COMPANY: CONSOLIDATED EDISON INC (58%); GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING (56%)
TICKER: ED (NYSE) (58%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS221210 NATURAL GAS DISTRIBUTION (58%); NAICS221122 ELECTRIC POWER DISTRIBUTION (58%); SIC4924 NATURAL GAS DISTRIBUTION (58%); SIC4911 ELECTRIC SERVICES (58%)
PERSON: Matthew Klein; Kate Stone Lombardi
GEOGRAPHIC: SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CA, USA (91%) CALIFORNIA, USA (91%) UNITED STATES (91%)
LOAD-DATE: March 11, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photo: DOUBLE THREAT -- Matthew Klein, author and serial tech entrepreneur. (Photo by Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1033 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 11, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

He Asks You to Just Make More Room for Yourself
BYLINE: By MARCELLE S. FISCHLER.

E-mail: lijournal@nytimes.com

SECTION: Section 14LI; Column 1; Long Island Weekly Desk; AUTHOR; Pg. 5
LENGTH: 766 words
DATELINE: BROOKVILLE
IF Stuart R. Levine is obsessed with productivity, it's not just about business; one of his goals is ''to take back the weekend,'' he says.

Keeping conversations on track, shutting out distractions and not letting others waste his time are lessons that Mr. Levine, the chairman and chief executive of Stuart Levine & Associates, a consulting and leadership development firm in Jericho, learned from decades of working with managers and executives.

The payoff for thinking clearly and making the best use of his time at work, he said, is having more time to spend at home here with Harriet, his wife of 24 years, and his children, Jesse, 23, and Elizabeth, 21, when they are off from work and college.

Not that Mr. Levine is necessarily lounging around the house. An ultraorganized, no-nonsense sort, he spent his Sundays for nearly a year writing his third book, ''Cut to the Chase and 99 Other Rules to Liberate Yourself and Gain Back the Gift of Time,'' published in December (Currency/Doubleday). It is a straight-to-the-punch-line collection of 100 rules to help people gain financial security and find more balance between their work and personal lives.

''If you think clearly, then you are able to ensure your financial stability and success, and if you act effectively, then you are able to achieve balance,'' Mr. Levine said on a recent weekday morning, dressed in a suit and sitting in front of his living-room fireplace as flames licked the logs that he had cut from a fallen tree on his three-acre property.

In his case, balance includes his other passions: arranging cut flowers in vases all over the house, puttering in his garden, taking a guitar lesson or enjoying a glass of merlot from his wine cellar.

Mr. Levine, who grew up in Bethpage, was making $12,000 a year teaching ecology at a junior high school in Plainview when, at age 24, he decided to run for the New York State Assembly. He was elected in 1972. When he was defeated two years later, he went into business, eventually joining Dale Carnegie & Associates, and rising through the ranks to chief executive.

Ten years ago, tired of endless globe-trotting and wanting to be home with his children at night, he started his own company.

A silver-haired 59, Mr. Levine starts each day by having a bowl of Cheerios, reading the newspapers and doing some stretching exercises.

After that, he is raring to go. ''I explode out of the blocks every morning,'' he said. He advocates getting in to the office early and getting home on time.

''Organizing your life applies professionally and personally,'' he said.

If the workday is supposed to start at 8:30, he said, most people ''drift in around 9:30 a.m.,'' have a cup of coffee, schmooze about the politics of the day, ''and before you know it they are an hour behind the curve, an hour and a half behind the curve.''

Meetings shouldn't last more than 10 minutes, he said. He turns off his Blackberry during dinner and keeps it out of the bedroom after 11 p.m.

The new book had its origins in his appearance three years ago on the ''Today'' show on NBC for a previous book, ''The Six Fundamentals of Success: The Rules for Getting It Right for Yourself and Your Organization'' (Currency/Doubleday, 2004). Just before he went on the air, Mr. Levine recalled, Matt Lauer confided: ''You know what makes me crazy? People that ask for a five-minute meeting and an hour later they are still in my office.''

Mr. Levine had often heard clients expressing a similar frustration. ''What became very clear to me was that people are working very hard and they were struggling with how to get results and become more productive,'' he said.

He said he created the book as a road map to help others.

''Every conversation, every meeting has to have a clearly defined purpose,'' Mr. Levine said. Activity should not be confused with accomplishment.

His rules are bluntly worded. One, advocating honesty, is, ''Tell them if the baby is ugly.''

Another is, ''Avoid toxic people.''

''I want to enjoy my life and I want to be productive,'' he said. ''I can't do it if I have people that are distracting me and whining all day long, if they spend too much time talking about the small-pea politics about what is going on in the office.''

His organizational skills are applied at home as well as in the office. During family discussions when his children were teenagers, he would take a flip chart into the family room to illustrate the cost of living, for example.

''I told them, 'You have to listen, because people pay Dad a lot of money for this,' '' he said.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: CHILDREN (89%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (78%); BOOK REVIEWS (74%); LITERATURE (73%) Biographical Information; Books and Literature
COMPANY: DALE CARNEGIE & ASSOCIATES INC (52%)

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