San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom today announced the first municipal policy for open source software in the U.S.

As part of the city’s “Open SF” project, San Francisco municipal agencies will consider open source software equally alongside proprietary software when making any purchasing decisions over $100,000.

The Software Evaluation Policy will require departments to consider open source alternatives, when available, on an equal basis to commercial software, as these may reduce cost and speed the time needed to bring software applications to production.

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Update on 01.12.10 4:01pm: Video demo of Parrot’s ARDrone after the fold.

The big news at this year’s CES last week in Las Vegas were tablets and 3D TV.

Tablets have been one of the main topics of dialogue for the last few months, as Apple’s tablet has been gossiped about incessantly, really heating up around September and doing its best to outlive the Energizer Bunny.

At CES that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer . . . talked about tablets. As if there hadn’t been enough ‘just talk’ already. The consensus in the tech press is that Ballmer wasted an opportunity here, especially since the next big show is MacWorld 2010 in San Francisco next month.

3D TV is the technology that seems to only come out at CES. Last year this technology was the big story coming out the event — along with the Palm Pre, which has generally disappointed since. But this year we are ready for adoption — even if our wallets aren’t — especially after the mainstream success of Avatar and Up.

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One in four Americans has a diagnosed mental disorder, but only 25 percent get treatment. BreakThrough fights the stigma of mental illness by keeping treatment anonymous, connecting patients with medical professionals.

Some members of the review panel showed awkward hesitation when addressing the site’s potential, mirroring society’s general reticence to understand mental illness and any non-Freudian structures required to treat it.

I suspect that BreatkThrough’s main funding problems will come through misunderstandings like this, met with jokes about the mentally ill instead of any real attempt to understand the issues BreakThrough is trying to address.

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Google announced today the launch of a new public data search, part of the Mountain View, CA, company’s attempts to make government data easily accessible.

“Public statistical data, such as unemployment rates or population numbers, doesn’t need to be hard to find or, more importantly, hard to understand. Google is making it easier to find and use important public statistical data from governments and other sources,” according to the company’s site.

Anyone who’s looked for this kind of data online knows that it can be a time consuming process. If Google’s public data makes it easy to find any sort of data, it will definitely make research much easier.

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Huddle.net announced last week the launch of huddle v2, a new version of its online collaboration, project management, document sharing and social networking service.

Huddle allows unlimited users to manage projects, create, edit, share and store files online and have group discussions. Its co-founders describe it as a “viral team collaboration app.”

Huddle v2 features phone and web conferencing, desktop sharing and new customization options.

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Steve Perlman founded Rearden with the purpose of taking risks on wildly disruptive new business ideas. His newest may change the destinies of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

This idea is called OnLive, and was unveiled at the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. Perlman (picture right) plans to whip up the technology necessary for recent video games to be accessed through a conventional broadband connection. The results: the latest title on any television, PC or Mac.

This includes old and otherwise limited-purpose computers, while a television requires only a palm-sized “microprocessor” to access the service. Gaming systems, whether tricked-out CPU/GPU multi-processor madness or a five hundred dollar proprietary console are rendered obsolete.

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The Earth2Tech Green:Net 09 Conference was kicked off by San Francisco’s mayor Gavin Newsom. Introduced as the “future governor of the state of California,” he described as “easy” the breakthrough achieved by the City of San Francisco in reducing its CO2 emissions since 2002. However, the road is still long to reaching the goal of reducing them to below 20% of 1990’s levels by 2012 (6% so far).

Most of the keynotes highlighted the main obstacles: everyone wants to enjoy “cold beer and hot showers,” meaning that individuals are ready to adopt the behavior changes that don’t threaten their lifestyle and that companies are trying to reduce CO2 emissions by attempting to optimize processes and the use of existing technologies rather than expend more money.

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Certainly not in any case at the Web 2.0 Summit, held at this very moment in San Francisco. Surprising, since it is with this same conference that it all began in November 2004. We expected Tim O’Reilly, and the speakers of the summit, to discuss the future of this great movement, the participatory and collaborative Web. And we came in great numbers to hear the good word: more than a thousand. It’s packed!

Well, no. The only Web 2.0 is in the name of the “summit.” They talk about energy, notably John Doerr, head of Kleiner Perkins (the investment fund behind Google), with Al Gore or Elon Musk (the head of Tesla, who makes electric sports cars for millionaires….). There’s a lot of talk of politics, and Obama’s election of course, with just about everyone, in fact. Even the mayor of San Francisco made the trip. And they talk mostly about the appointment of the US CTO and the new administration’s technological program. There’s even bicycle talk with Lance Armstrong … for example.

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Developed by San Francisco’s Radar Networks, Twine is being billed as “the first mainstream semantic application.” Those are big words, and a lot is resting on them. Semantic capabilities have long been seen as the underpinnings of Web 3.0, but, to date, the technologies have been their developmental phase, and the semantic web has remained largely theoretical.

Twine is a social bookmarking site that uses statistical analysis, natural language search, and semantic search; the three complement each other well. Twine was running a bit slow when I used it, but once I had created my profile and entered my interests, the results were impressive.

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This month NBC will be reconfiguring the Web sites of its city-specific stations to focus more on local entertainment and younger demographics. Sites such as wmaq.com and wnbc.com will be transformed into nbcchicago.com and ncbnewyork.com, respectively.  The old sites are more network television-centric, with most of the page’s real estate taken up by news headlines. The redesign, “Locals Only,” includes local news and weather in widget formats with traffic and other feeds built in. There is also more of an emphasis on community and user-generated content, with polls and calls for image and video submissions.

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