Seattle travelers were pretty excited to learn last night that Alaska Airlines planned to bring free wifi to Sea-Tac airport for a three month promotion this Spring. Too bad it won’t be happening.

Alaska Airlines today said that a company representative misspoke when she announced at a panel discussion last night that the Seattle airline planned to sponsor free wifi at Washington state’s largest airport. The initial announcement — reported here on TechFlash — was applauded by travel writers and attendees at the Seattle Consortium of Online Travel.

"WiFi at the gate at SeaTac starting next week, courtesy of www.airalaska.com. Brilliant… guarantees I will fly Alaska," wrote Buzz Bruggeman on Twitter shortly after he heard the announcement. Readers of this blog were equally excited.

"Very excited to hear Sea-Tac is getting this," wrote one reader. After the panel and the remarks, I spoke to the Alaska marketing manager as well as a company spokeswoman in order to make sure that I had all of the details on what appeared to be an innovative service in Seattle.

Alaska does plan to begin offering free wifi at the Oakland airport next week as part of a larger promotion, but Sea-Tac is not part of the plan, said spokesman Paul McElroy.

"We just misspoke," said McElroy.

The airline is going ahead with its free wifi trial on a 737-700, but for now those stuck at the gate will still have to fork over $7.95 for a 24-hour pass.

READ MORE and COMMENT, more 
and Can Microsoft revive IE usage?  

One theory prior to Internet Explorer 8’s release was that the new browser would help Microsoft reverse its steadily declining market share by winning back people who had shifted to Mozilla Firefox. Consider it debunked. So far, at least, IE8 doesn’t appear to be helping.

Market share for all versions of Internet Explorer continued to fall in March, hitting 66.8 percent, according to data from the Net Applications research firm this week. As ComputerWorld noted, that’s the lowest figure for Microsoft’s browser since Net Applications began tracking the data. Meanwhile, Firefox continued to climb, rising to more than 22 percent for the month.

Some people are shifting to IE8, as this Net Applications chart shows. But most of that shift is coming from users of previous versions of the Microsoft browser, not from new converts or from people coming back from using Firefox or other browsers.

The new version of Internet Explorer introduced new features and received decent reviews from the Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg and others. But others have complained about IE8 being too sluggish. Microsoft had been hoping that IE8 would dispel that reputation, going so far as to release internal speed tests showing the new browser stacking up well against Firefox and Chrome.

The question now: If a full-blown overhaul didn’t do the trick for IE’s market share, what will?

(Data link via SeattlePI.com’s Andrea James.)

READ MORE and COMMENT, more 
and HydroSense wins Environmental Innovation Challenge at the UW  

What started as a small idea between colleagues culminated Wednesday with $22,500 in funding for clean-tech solutions to environmental problems. C

onnie Bourassa-Shaw, director of University of Washington’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Dr. Ellen Lettvin, formerly Assistant Director in the Applied Physics Laboratory, conceived the Environmental Innovation Challenge to focus on the intersection of practical solutions to environmental problems and entrepreneurship.

"Unless teams think through the market opportunity, all they’ve come up with is a cool idea. We’re looking for cool opportunities," said Bourassa-Shaw. Sixteen teams of undergraduates to PhD students across disciplines from UW, WSU, SU, Western Washington and the Bainbridge Graduate Institute competed in the challenge.

Initial judging of their business plans took place in early March, and rapid-fire pitching to a sea of clean-tech judges went down on Wednesday. Each team was alloted two minutes and one presentation slide to pitch, and later five minutes to demonstrate a proof-of-concept, prototype or simulation.

Bourassa-Shaw instructed the 75 judges to consider which team held the potential to make the greatest impact in the decision process.

In the end, $10,000 grand prize sponsored by UW TechTransfer went to HydroSense, a home-water monitoring system that calculates real-time water flow, infers the specific source of water activity and automatically detect leaks. The information is transmitted wirelessly to a home computer. HydroSense uses a suite of acoustic and vibration sensors without inline pipe installation to monitor water consumption.

"How can we expect people to conserve water if they’re unaware of their consumption?" asked Jon Froehlich, Project lead and doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering, during the pitch.

Seven students comprised the HydroSense team: Tim Campbell, undergraduate in mechanical engineering; Kate Everitt, doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering; Alex Horton, undergraduate in electrical engineering; Jianlei Shi, doctoral candidate in electrical engineering; Rahber Thariani, doctoral candidate in bioengeineering; and Conor Haggerty, undergraduate in environmental planning.

Second place and $5,000 sponsored by Davis Wright Tremaine was awarded to Nanocel, who proposed what they called "turbulent flow technology" to create a convective flow of fluid inside a plastic heat sink to reduce electronic heat.  The company saw void in the electronics cooling market. Reducing heat will reduce electronic failure, leading to less electronic waste. Dustin Miller, doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering and Daniel Rossi, MBA candidate founded Nanocel.

Honorable mentions and $2,500 were awarded to three teams. EcoWell, who proposed to deploy and manage a network of litter-free vending kiosks to reduce plastic bottle waste. The vending kiosks would feature RFID billing systems for prepaid customer accounts and an interactive display screen to derive additional revenue from targeted advertising.

InTheWorks developed a catalytic converter to eliminate more than 99 percent of emissions for gasoline marine engines. Wind2O created a desalination and purification wind-powered product to provide clean, drinkable water to remote communities.

"One judge told me at the end of the day that he was watching the other judges during the 2-minute pitches–and no one was checking their Blackberries," Bourassa-Shaw said, "An odd validation of the level of interest, but one we can relate to!"

Roni Ayalla — a student in the University of Washington’s Master of Communication in Digital Media program — is a contributor to TechFlash.

READ MORE and COMMENT, more