Environmental awareness has come to the race for patent bragging rights.

IBM on Monday will announce the creation of an Eco-Patents Commons–shared innovations geared at environmental sustainability–with the participation of Sony, Nokia, and Pitney Bowes.

The launch of the Eco-Patent Commons is timed with the yearly ranking of U.S. patent awards, which gives IBM the top spot for the 15th year in a row, with 3,148 patents in 2007.

The Eco-Patent Commons will start with the donation into the public domain of 31 patents that cover everything from a manufacturing process that reduces volatile compounds to a natural coagulant used to purify industrial waste water.

On Monday, a Web site that hosts the patents is scheduled to launch. The patent commons will be administered by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, a Geneva-based organization devoted to promoting sustainability in business.

Co-founder IBM, which has a program called Big Green Innovations, hopes to encourage innovation in areas of ecology and benefit commercially through the venture, said Dave Kappos, IBM’s lead patent attorney.

“There’s no reason that environmentally sustainable activity cannot be commercially advantageous,” he said. “The patents come out of the IT industry–at least ours do–but there is cross-industry applicability.”

For example, communications company Nokia submitted a patent covering recycling cell phones into new electronic devices such as clocks, calculators, and remote controls.

Participants who submit patents into the Eco-Patents Commons pledge not to enforce these patents against others who use them.

They benefit from the commons by being able to use other companies’ patents. They also benefit from further innovations or cost reductions on their donations, Kappos said. The company hopes others will join and expand the patent pool.

Kappos said part of the motivation for the creation of the patents-sharing organization is the difficulty in establishing intellectual property licensing agreements across industries.

In the IT industry, cross-licensing agreements are commonplace, but in other fields, such as chemicals or energy, intellectual property tends to be hoarded, he said.

The electronics and IT industries are seeing an upswell of environmental awareness. Vendors are offering more energy-efficient products and other green technologies.

But the manufacture of electronics remains energy-intensive and involves harmful chemicals. Although there are efforts to boost recycling, electronic waste is a growing problem.

IBM and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development said they hope to attract innovations and address energy conservation, pollution prevention, better materials, recycling, and more efficient use of water.

The European Commission moved to simplify the nascent mobile phone TV sector by adopting a standard backed by Finland’s Nokia, but mobile operators said Brussels was acting too quickly.

The Commission said setting the Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld (DVB-H) as the preferred European Union standard would give the industry a boost.

“For mobile TV to take off in Europe, there must first be certainty about the technology,” European Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding said in a statement on Monday.

DVB-H is the only standard with a global presence although South Korea, Japan, the United States and China are embracing local rivals, such as one set by U.S. company Qualcomm.

The European Union executive said its decision sent “an important signal” to other countries preparing to decide whether to opt for DVB-H or other standards.

EU countries will now be required to encourage the use of DVB-H, the Commission said.

Some EU member states, such as Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, had been opposed to setting DVB-H as the single standard in the bloc.

But the EU executive said on Monday it was the one most widely used in Europe and is between trials and commercial launch in 16 countries.

The GSM Association, representing mobile operators in Europe, said it was staying neutral on mobile TV technology as it should be the market that decides on the standard.

“An official endorsement does carry weight but it’s not clear if DVB-H is necessarily the best standard,” a GSM Association spokesman said.

Broadcasters said the question of which standard is being endorsed was almost irrelevant as the fundamental issue was whether mobile television packages would pay their way.

“How do you design a compelling service that people will want? Even if it’s free and financed by advertising, how many ads do people want to see on a small screen?” said Ross Biggam, director general of the Association of Commercial Television in Europe.

Most countries have seen trials of mobile TV, such as sports, news and music videos although Italy is one of the rare EU states with a commercial-type service running, Biggam said.

The Commission hopes this year’s soccer European Championship and the Olympic Games will boost consumer take-up of television services over mobile phones, a potential new money-spinner for telecoms operators and broadcasters.

Brocade Communications Systems’ former personnel director was sentenced to four months in prison on Wednesday for backdating stock-options awards for employees.

Stephanie Jensen, 50, was also sentenced to one year of supervised release after serving her prison term and fined the maximum of $1.25 million. She must spend the first three months after her release in a halfway house.

Judge Charles Breyer of U.S. District Court in San Francisco allowed Jensen to remain free pending an appeal. Jensen and her lawyers declined to comment after sentencing.

Jensen is the second person found guilty of criminal charges related to manipulation of stock option grants in a widespread scandal that has led to billions of dollars in financial restatements and ensnared more than 200 U.S. companies in the past two years.

A jury convicted Jensen in December of one count of falsifying company books and one count of conspiracy. Brocade’s former chief executive, Gregory Reyes, was sentenced in January to 21 months in prison and fined $15 million after a jury convicted him in August of 10 counts related to backdating. He is free pending an appeal.

Breyer said Jensen’s sentence should deter others and encourage them to report corporate misconduct.

He told the former vice president of human resources that her sentence should send “a message to individuals who may be confronted with a situation very similar to the one you were confronted with, and that if they don’t say ‘no,’ they are going to spend a lifetime regretting the decision they have made.”

Jensen told Breyer she regretted her conduct and its consequences for her family and Brocade, the leading maker of switches for corporate data storage networks and a high-flying start-up in the technology boom of the late 1990s.

“We were trying to build a great company,” Jensen told the judge. “I was proud to share in that effort. I accept responsibility for my actions and their impact on others.

“At least five other former executives at U.S. companies including Take-Two Interactive Software and Comverse Technology have pleaded guilty to backdating charges and been sentenced.

Jensen’s lawyer, Jan Nielsen Little, had sought probation, community service, and a fine for her client, while prosecutors Timothy Crudo and Adam Reeves had sought a prison sentence of six months.

Jensen “had hundreds of thousands of her own Brocade options at stake, and Reyes had made her a multimillionaire several times over,” Crudo and Reeves wrote in a court filing before the sentencing.

“The facts, and her own admissions, demonstrate that she was selfish and knowledgeable, not naive and inexperienced” as the defense contended, Reyes and Crudo wrote.

Backdating of option grants is legal as long as it is disclosed and accounted for in company books. U.S. authorities said Reyes and Jensen illegally inflated Brocade’s earnings from 2000 to 2004 by hiding its backdating practice from investors and regulators.

Software companies that provide alternatives to Microsoft Exchange, cautiously welcomed at CeBIT last week the recent publication of application programming interfaces for Microsoft volume server products, but have found gaps already in what has been released.

Zarafa Chief Executive Brian Joseph–having ported, as he put it, “all the Exchange features to the Linux platform with full MAPI (messaging application programming interface) implementation”– said there are significant gaps in the Microsoft documentation released to date. Zarafa makes an e-mail server that is compatible with Outlook

Speaking to ZDNet UK at the CeBIT conference, Joseph said Microsoft’s start is not promising: “This could definitely make life easier for developers, but we have spotted over 200 undocumented exceptions, including one that allows you to create recurring calendar appointments in Exchange. It was in the documentation for Exchange 2000, but they forgot to document it for Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007.”

Zarafa produces the eponymous e-mail server that runs on Linux and is used by enterprises such as car-rental company Sixt, which recently migrated its entire e-mail server infrastructure to Zarafa. Zarafa uses the MAPI open standard to communicate to e-mail clients such as Outlook. While Microsoft Exchange uses MAPI too, it also uses a large number of proprietary APIs that let the Outlook client perform actions such as creating recurring calendar appointments on the Exchange server.

“I am very positive about unconditional publication of APIs,” said Joseph, “but only time will tell if this is justified, given Microsoft’s history. I think hundreds of thousands of developers around the world are very interested in full publication with regular updates, but the devil is in the detail; for policy makers, these gaps in the Exchange documentation should put another light on the value of Microsoft’s announcement.”

Zimbra Vice President John Robb agreed that Microsoft’s announcement is a good move, but again expressed reservations. His company produces the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, which also runs on Linux platforms and servers. The Zimbra Collaboration suite runs 11 million mailboxes through the commercial version of its product and many more through the open-source version.

“The MAPI protocol is open anyway, so that doesn’t affect us directly,” Robb said, “but we are concerned that Microsoft has not announced which APIs have patent conditions, nor what those conditions are. We’re anxiously awaiting details.”

General Motors is investing in biofuels start-up Coskata in a bid to speed the flow of ethanol for GM’s flex-fuel vehicles.

At the North American International Auto Show in Detroit on Sunday, GM is scheduled to announce a partnership with Coskata, a year-and-a-half-old company with technology for turning wood chips, grasses, or municipal waste into ethanol.

It’s one of several biofuels partnerships GM plans to forge to promote E85, a blend of ethanol and gasoline that powers flex-fuel cars.

GM said it invested in Coskata, initially backed by high-profile venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, because its technology promises to deliver ethanol from non-food sources faster than others.

Coskata claims it can deliver ethanol at under $1 per gallon–cheaper than current prices. It intends to construct a 40,000-gallon-per-year facility near a GM test track by the end of the year and to have a full-scale 100 million-gallon-per-year plant by 2011.

“We are not going into the fuel business,” said Mary Beth Stanek, GM’s director of environment, energy policy, and commercialization. “But let’s be clear: we want consumers to have access to biofuels that are affordable and (that) lower greenhouse gases. That is in our interest.” GM did not disclose the amount of the investment.

The auto giant has committed to doubling its flex-fuel vehicle output to 80,000 cars by 2010, and to making half of its new cars flex-fuel-capable by 2012.

But the limited availability of E85 poses a problem. There are only about 1,400 ethanol filling stations in the U.S., mainly in the Midwest, which is far too few for GM’s flex-fuel ambitions.

During a press briefing at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, GM CEO Rick Wagoner called for a tenfold increase in the number of ethanol pumps.

“It has been remarkably difficult” to get E85 pumps installed, he said, adding that GM is “doing more work than I thought we would need to.”

“Greener” forms of transportation are expected to be one of the main themes of the auto show, a response to higher gas prices and growing environmental concerns.

Ford plans to show off a concept car with the EcoBoost, an energy-efficient turbo-charged engine that the company will start putting into sedans in 2009. Global Electric Motorcars, a Chrysler company, will showcase its latest low-speed electric vehicles.

Meanwhile, Fisker Automotive has chosen the conference to officially launch its high-end plug-in hybrid sports sedan, which will be able to go 50 miles on its battery and 620 miles on fuel. It hopes to bring its $80,000 sedan out in 2009.

GM is investing in several technologies. At the show, it is expected to show the hybrid Saturn Vue and its hybrid Cadillac concept, Provoq, which can run on hydrogen.

But flex-fuel cars are one area where GM, along with Ford and Chrysler, has staked out an early lead, even though the technical barriers are relatively low.

“GM has a competitive advantage in this sector. They’ve been pushing harder, faster, and longer internally,” said Nathanael Greene, a biofuels policy analyst at environmental advocacy group National Resources Defense Council.

Greene said the investment in Coskata appears to be a stepped-up commitment to biofuels, whereas the company’s previous efforts, publicized in its “Live Green, Go Yellow” advertising campaign, had an air of greenwashing.

Nearly all ethanol today is made from corn or sugar cane. Ethanol advocates say that cellulosic ethanol, made from wood chips, grasses, agricultural residue, and other wastes, is more environmentally sound and doesn’t compete with food sources. The Department of Energy is funding about 20 cellulosic ethanol trials, and the recently passed energy bill mandates that by 2022, 20 billion out of 36 billion gallons a year of biofuels come from non-corn feedstocks.

Rather than use specially designed enzymes for fermentation, Coskata uses naturally occurring micro-organisms it licensed from the University of Oklahoma to make ethanol.

GM’s investment is part of a second round of funding, which was originally backed by venture firms Khosla Ventures, Advanced Technology Ventures, and GreatPoint Ventures.

Its process starts by putting carbon-based materials into a gasification chamber where heat and pressure turn feedstock into syngas, a combination of carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide.

That gas combination is then scrubbed to remove particulates and then moved into a bio-fermentation vessel where micro-organisms metabolize the syngas and turn it into ethanol.

Its process is flexible enough to work with a range of renewable sources, including grasses, wood chips, and even old tires. The company says its bioreactor uses plastic tubes, rather than dropping the entire mixture into a single tank, to maximize exposure to the microbes, a design which keeps overall costs down.

“Our calculations indicate that for virtually any carbon-containing feedstock handled in large bulk, we will be able to convert it without subsidies at under a dollar a gallon,” said Coskata President and CEO Bill Roe, who added that current processes are about twice as expensive. “We believe that’s what’s going to drive consumer interest.”

Coskata has a water-recovery step that allows it to use less than 1 gallon of water for each gallon of ethanol produced. That compares to 3 to 5 gallons of water per gallon of corn-based ethanol.

Roe said that Argonne National Laboratories measured the “energy balance” of its process and found that it can produce 7.7 times as much energy in the end product as it takes to make it. Its fuel produces 84 percent less carbon dioxide than gasoline, when measured from production to use.

Those numbers compare favorably to switchgrass, an experimental ethanol source. A recent multi-year study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that switchgrass contains five times the energy required to grow it and produces 94 percent less greenhouse gases.

Coskata, named after a nature preserve near Nantucket, Mass., is one of several racing to bring cellulosic ethanol to market cost-effectively.

“It really points to the potential for this family of technology to be large-scale and really environmentally beneficial,” said the NRDC’s Greene. “There’s a much higher probability of success through this shot gun approach.”

Google has seen an acceleration of Internet activity among mobile phone users in recent months since the company introduced faster Web services on selected phone models, fueling confidence the mobile Internet era is at hand, the company said on Tuesday.

Early evidence showing sharp increases in Internet usage on phones, not just computers, has emerged from services Google has begun offering in recent months on Blackberry e-mail phones, Nokia devices for multimedia picture and video creators and business professionals and the Apple iPhone, the world’s top Web search company said.

“We have very much hit a watershed moment in terms of mobile Internet usage,” Matt Waddell, a product manager for Google Mobile, said in an interview. “We are seeing that mobile Internet use is in fact accelerating.

The growing availability of flat-rate data plans from phone carriers instead of per-minute charges that previously discouraged Internet use, along with improved Web browsers on mobile phones as well as better-designed services from companies like Google are fueling the growth, Waddell argued.

Google made the pronouncement as it introduced a new software download for mobile phones running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software that conveniently positions a Google Web search window on the home screen of such phones.

Similar versions of the search software which Google introduced for BlackBerry users in December and certain Nokia phones in February have sped up the time users take to perform Web searches by 40 percent and, in turn, driven usage.

The software shortcuts the time it takes for people to perform Web searches on Google by eliminating initial search steps of finding a Web browser on the phone, opening the browser, waiting for network access, and getting to Google.com. By making a Google search box more convenient, mobile phone users have begun using the Internet more, the company said.

“We are actually seeing a 20 percent increase in the number of searches by people,” Waddell said.

Google’s mobile plug-in software lets users customize their phones to feature Google mobile services instead of relying solely on software features network carriers have pre-installed on the devices.

“Faster is better than slow, especially on a mobile device, where fast is much better than slow,” Waddell said. “Not only are we are seeing increased user satisfaction but also greater usage.”

Microsoft expects to have sold 20 million Windows Mobile devices by the end of its fiscal year in June, which together with Blackberry and Symbian-based phones represent upward of 85 percent of the Internet-ready smartphones sold in the world.

Users of phones based on software from Research in Motion, Nokia’s Symbian-based phones and now Microsoft Windows Mobile can download the software at mobile.google.com .

Google officials said in August that they had seen a similar surge in usage of Google.com via mobile devices following the launch of the Apple iPhone last year. The iPhone offers a full-featured Internet browser unlike many phones.

Waddell said Google had seen iPhone users perform as many as 50 times more Web searches on these computer-phone devices as users of standard mobile feature phones typically do.