SAN FRANCISCO – A certain feeling is back in San Francisco. Murmurings of stock market riches. Twenty-something entrepreneurs as celebrities. Lamborghinis parked next to taco trucks.

Driven by social media and mobile startups, the money is flowing in the city's tech industry again, a decade after the dot-com boom minted overnight millionaires and its crash fueled a local recession worse than anything San Francisco has seen in the latest downturn.

A recent tax break for Twitter and other proposals show city officials are hopeful that this latest tech industry prosperity does not portend another bubble and another bust.

"It seems to be the industry that's leading us out of the recession at the moment," said Ted Egan, the city's chief economist. Even so, he said, "it's certainly not yet another dot-com boom."

At present, the signs do not point clearly to the same excess of optimism that led to the high perch from which the city had so far to fall. But some of the numbers swirling around the tech startup scene could stir a sense of deja vu.

Along with Twitter, the San Francisco startup causing the most excitement is Zynga, maker of popular Facebook games like "FarmVille" and "CityVille." Estimates based on recent investments put the valuations of both companies at $7 billion or more.

Yet unlike the first dot-com era, when companies with neither customers nor a clear way to make money raised millions in public stock offerings, both Twitter and Zynga have become major participants in the online economy.

While Twitter is still tweaking its business model and keeps its revenue figures closely held, the company happily claims 175 million users on its way to becoming a global phenomenon.

Zynga's popularity and approach to money-making are even clearer: It sells virtual goods that players use in the company's online games. Last year, the company made about $400 million doing just that, according to published reports.

"It seems like they're doing things that people want rather than what they think they want," said market researcher Colin Yasukochi of today's startups versus those a decade ago.

In a study for his employer, commercial real estate firm Jones Lange LaSalle, Yasukochi found that the number of tech jobs in San Francisco is nearing the peak set in 2000, the height of the dot-com boom.

Yet the 32,000 tech workers today are occupying about half the commercial real estate space as their 34,000 counterparts before the crash — a possible sign that the estimated 500 tech companies in the city are taking a more conservative approach.

During the first dot-com boom, technology companies were committing to large spaces with the intent of filling them with employees well ahead of their needs, Yasukochi said.

"Obviously that growth never materialized," he said. "That had dire consequences."

Those consequences included an office vacancy rate that shot from less than 5 percent to 25 percent in two years.

Accompanied by the crushing blow of the 9/11 attacks on the city's tourism economy and housing prices that kept rising despite major job losses, the dot-com crash hit San Francisco harder overall than the recent recession, Egan said.

As a result, San Franciscans have reason to fear the bursting of another bubble even as they enjoy the fruits of the tech industry's current good fortune.

The hope is that companies, investors and the city itself have learned enough from past mistakes to avoid irrational exuberance.

The possible signs of a different attitude include a much lower rate of venture capital investment. The greater Silicon Valley saw more than $8.5 billion poured into the software industry during the year 2000 alone, according to Thomson Reuters data. In 2010, the amount was less than $2 billion. Startups are still raising money, but running lean has become fashionable.

Last year, Kevin Systrom, 27, co-founded a company that follows the typical lean San Francisco startup model, though with atypical success. The mobile photo sharing service Instagram launched in October. Since then, he says the service has grown to about 3 million registered users, or an average of a half-million new users each month.

Right now the company has four workers — as Systrom puts it, one non-technical person and one engineer for every million users. Despite raising $7 million from investors, he says the company has no plans to go on a hiring spree or seek to cash in on a quick public stock offering, the stereotypical scenario during the first Internet boom.

"It's about going after the best people in the world who want to build a world-class company," Systrom said. "We are pretty sold at staying lean for quite a while."

Instagram got its start at Dogpatch Labs, a San Francisco workspace where as many as 25 small startups at a time occupy desks for a few months while they try to get consumers and investors interested in their ideas.

Ryan Spoon, 30, oversees Dogpatch Labs for Polaris Venture Partners, a venture capital investment firm. During the first dot-com wave, he founded a company in his dorm room at Duke University to connect high school athletes with college coaches. The website, berecruited.com, is still around today, unlike many others that started at the time.

Spoon says that a big difference between those early days and now is the speed with which social networks can give startups feedback on whether they have a good idea or not. Investors see that feedback, too, meaning they'll have a better sense before they pour money into a company whether it has a chance.

"It's easier faster and cheaper to start and pursue an idea than it's ever been," Spoon said. "It's a fun time."

WASHINGTON – Google Inc. won government clearance with restrictions Friday for its $700 million purchase of airline fare tracker ITA Software in a deal that will give the Internet search giant a key role in online travel.

Google promises to give consumers more choices and better ways to search for plane tickets as it incorporates ITA technology, which powers the reservation systems of most major U.S. airlines and many popular online fare-comparison services, including Kayak, TripAdvisor and Hotwire.

The company had to accept significant conditions, though, in a sign that federal antitrust officials are becoming more concerned about whether Google's enormous clout as a major gateway to the Internet has the potential to stifle competition broadly online.

As Google expands far beyond its core search business into specialized markets such as travel, companies operating in all corners of the Web — and government regulators as far away as Europe — are taking notice.

Rivals and regulators alike are worried that Google could use its control over the Internet's dominant search engine to extend its monopoly into travel and other markets by steering users to its own sites and services and burying links to rivals far down in its search results. Indeed, Google's search results already highlight some of its own specialized services, including mapping, video and finance.

Although Justice Department officials did not tackle that danger outright Friday, they laid the groundwork for a potential government investigation into manipulation of Internet search results. Google agreed to ongoing federal monitoring of its behavior to win government approval.

"They clearly decided that they want to keep an eye on Google," said Thomas Barnett, an attorney who represents Expedia Inc., which opposed the ITA deal in a coalition with other online travel services including Microsoft Corp.'s Bing, Travelocity, Kayak Software Corp. and Farelogix Inc. Expedia owns TripAdvisor and Hotwire services.

"The ability to use search dominance to exclude competitors is not unique to travel," added Barnett, who was head of the Justice Department's antitrust division when it threatened a lawsuit to block Google from entering into a search partnership with Yahoo Inc. in 2008.

The agreement with the Justice Department comes at a time of mounting government scrutiny of Google's behavior in Washington and beyond.

The European Commission and the Texas attorney general are looking into whether Google manipulates search results to extend its monopoly into other online businesses. The European investigation started after competitors — U.K.-based price comparison site Foundem, French legal search engine ejustice.fr and Microsoft-owned shopping site Ciao — complained that their services were being buried in Google searches. The Senate Judiciary Committee's antitrust subcommittee also is investigating whether Google gives its services favorable treatment in search results.

In addition, a federal judge last month rejected a proposed legal settlement that would have given Google the digital rights to millions of out-of-print books after determining that the agreement would have violated U.S. copyright laws and given Google's already-dominant search engine an unfair advantage over its rivals.

And just last week, the Federal Trade Commission announced a landmark agreement with Google to settle charges that it deceived users and violated its own privacy policy when it launched a social networking service called Buzz last year. The settlement requires Google to adopt a comprehensive privacy program and submit to independent audits of that program every other year for the next 20 years.

Eric Goldman, academic director of the High Tech Law Institute at the Santa Clara University School of Law in Silicon Valley, said the agreements with Justice and the FTC "collectively indicate that the U.S. government has more and more hooks into Google and is subjecting Google to greater oversight and reduced operational freedom."

Nonetheless, Friday's approval by the Justice Department makes ITA the latest major deal that Google has managed to clear with Washington. Other big purchases include the 2007 acquisition of Internet advertising network DoubleClick and last year's purchase of mobile ad service AdMob, both of which were approved by the FTC without any conditions.

Google has said it wants to use ITA to improve its search results for travel and doesn't plan to sell airline tickets or book other travel arrangements on its own site. Rather, ITA would enable the company to command higher ad rates from airlines, hotels, rental car agencies and other leisure services trying to reach travelers.

Google offered a hint about what could be coming in a blog post Friday. It suggested that by simply typing in "flights to somewhere sunny for under $500 in May" into Google, a user would get not just a set of links but also flight times, fares and a link to sites for buying the trip.

To win Justice Department clearance, Google agreed to license ITA's software to other companies on fair terms through 2016. And it would continue to invest in research and development of new products, which it would also have to license. Google had previously promised only to honor all of ITA's current contracts, which expire over the next few years, leaving ITA customers to worry that Google would keep its innovations for itself. Under the terms of the approval, any disputes would be subject to binding arbitration.

Google also agreed to establish a separation between ITA and other Google operations to ensure that it cannot misuse proprietary customer data or technology that resides on or runs through ITA servers.

But most significant, the government will monitor Google to ensure it does not engage in anticompetitive behavior, which could include manipulation of search results. The company will be subject to broad requirements to report to government officials on its online travel operations, including travel search and advertising. In addition, the government will establish a forum for complaints about Google's behavior. This could eventually pave the way for a broader investigation of Google by either Justice or the FTC.

The coalition of online travel services that had expressed concerns about the ITA acquisition praised the government conditions, calling them a "significant step in the right direction." Still, the group added in a statement that although "consumers won this round, but we must remain vigilant" to ensure that Google does not abuse its search monopoly.

Google says it understands that it will face more government scrutiny as it grows bigger. But the company argues that most of the accusations of anticompetitive behavior come not from users, who like its services, but from competitors that are not pleased with their search rankings. And that, the company, is not necessarily an antitrust problem.

"We built Google for users, not websites," the company said in a statement.

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AP Airlines Writer Samantha Bomkamp in New York and Technology Writer Jordan Robertson in San Francisco contributed to this story.

CHICHELEY, England – To the quiet green solitude of an English country estate they retreated, to think the unthinkable.

Scientists of earth, sea and sky, scholars of law, politics and philosophy: In three intense days cloistered behind Chicheley Hall's old brick walls, where British saboteurs once secretly trained, four dozen international thinkers pondered the planet's fate as it grows warmer, weighed the idea of reflecting the sun to cool the atmosphere, debated the question of who would make the decision.

The unknown risks of "geoengineering" — in this case, tweaking Earth's climate by dimming the skies — left many uneasy.

"If we could experiment with the atmosphere and literally play God, it's very tempting to a scientist," said senior Kenyan earth scientist Richard Odingo. "But I worry."

Arrayed against that worry is the worry that global warming at some point — in 20 years? 50 years? — may abruptly upend the world we know, by melting much of Greenland into the sea, by shifting India's life-giving monsoon, by killing off marine life.

If climate engineering research isn't done now, climatologists say, the world will face grim choices in an emergency. "If we don't understand the implications and we reach a crisis point and deploy geoengineering with only a modicum of information, we really will be playing Russian roulette," said Steven Hamburg, a U.S. Environmental Defense Fund scientist.

The question's urgency has grown as nations have failed, in years of talks, to agree on a binding long-term deal to rein in their carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N.-sponsored science network, foresees temperatures rising as much as 6.4 degrees Celsius (11.5 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, swelling the seas and disrupting the climate patterns that nurtured human civilization.

Science committees of the British Parliament and the U.S. Congress urged their governments last year to look at immediately undertaking climate engineering research — to have a "Plan B" ready, as the British panel put it, in case the diplomatic logjam persists.

Britain's national science academy, the Royal Society, subsequently organized the Chicheley Hall conference with Hamburg's EDF and the association of developing-world science academies. From six continents, they invited a blue-ribbon cross-section of atmospheric physicists, oceanographers, geochemists, environmentalists, international lawyers, psychologists, policy experts and others, to discuss how the world should oversee such unprecedented — and unsettling — research.

An Associated Press reporter was invited to sit in on their discussions, generally off the record, as they met in large and small groups in plush wood-paneled rooms, in conference halls, or outdoors among the manicured trees and formal gardens of this 300-year-old Royal Society property 40 miles northwest of London, a secluded spot where Britain's Special Operations Executive trained for secret missions in World War II.

Provoking and parrying each other over questions never before raised in human history, the conferees were sensitive to how the outside world might react.

"There's the `slippery slope' view that as soon as you start to do this research, you say it's OK to think about things you shouldn't be thinking about," said Steve Rayner, co-director of Oxford University's geoengineering program. Many geoengineering techniques they have thought about look either impractical or ineffective.

Painting rooftops white to reflect the sun's heat is a feeble gesture. Blanketing deserts with a reflective material is logistically challenging and a likely environmental threat. Launching giant mirrors into space orbit is exorbitantly expensive.

On the other hand, fertilizing the ocean with iron to grow CO2-eating plankton has shown some workability. Massachusetts' prestigious Woods Hole research center is planning the biggest such experiment. Marine clouds are another route: Scientists at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado are designing a test of brightening ocean clouds with sea-salt particles to reflect the sun.

Those techniques are necessarily limited in scale, however, and unable to alter planet-wide warming. Only one idea has emerged with that potential.

"By most accounts, the leading contender is stratospheric aerosol particles," said climatologist John Shepherd of Britain's Southampton University, briefing the Chicheley Hall assemblage on the climate engineer's toolkit.

The particles would be sun-reflecting sulfates spewed into the lower stratosphere from aircraft, balloons or other devices — much like the sulfur dioxide emitted by the eruption of the Philippines' Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, estimated to have cooled the world by 0.5 degrees C (0.9 degrees F) for a year or so.

Engineers from the University of Bristol, England, plan to test the feasibility of feeding sulfates into the atmosphere via a kilometers-long (miles-long) hose attached to a tethered balloon.

Shepherd and others stressed that any sun-blocking "SRM" technique — for solar radiation management — would have to be accompanied by sharp reductions in carbon dioxide emissions on the ground and some form of carbon dioxide removal, preferably via a chemical-mechanical process, not yet perfected, to suck the gas out of the air and neutralize it.

Otherwise, they point out, the stratospheric sulfate layer would have to be built up indefinitely, to counter the growing greenhouse effect of accumulating carbon dioxide. And if that SRM operation shut down for any reason, temperatures on Earth would shoot upward.

The technique has other downsides: The sulfates would likely damage the ozone layer shielding Earth from damaging ultraviolet rays; they don't stop atmospheric carbon dioxide from acidifying the oceans; and sudden cooling of the Earth would itself alter climate patterns in unknown ways over parts of the planet.

"These scenarios create winners and losers," said Shepherd, lead author of a pivotal 2009 Royal Society study of geoengineering. "Who is going to decide?"

Many here worried that someone, some group, some government would decide on its own to conduct large-scale atmospheric experiments, raising global concerns — and resentment if it's the U.S. that acts, since it has done the least among industrial nations to cut greenhouse emissions. They fear some in America might push for going straight to "Plan B," rather than doing the hard work of emissions reductions.

In addition, "one of the challenges is identifying intentions, one of which could be offensive military use," said Indian development specialist Arunabha Ghosh.

Experts point out, for example, that cloud experimentation or localized solar "dimming" could — intentionally or unintentionally — cause droughts or floods in neighboring areas, arousing suspicions and international disputes.

"In some plausible but unfortunate future you could have shooting wars between your country and mine over proposals on what to do on climate change,' said the University of Michigan's Ted Parson, an environmental policy expert.

The conferees worried, too, that a "geoengineering industrial complex" might emerge, pushing to profit from deployment of its technology. And Australian economist-ethicist Clive Hamilton saw other go-it-alone threats — "cowboys" and "scientific heroes."

"I'm queasy about some billionaire with a messiah complex having a major role in geoengineering research," Hamilton said.

All discussions led to the central theme of how to oversee research.

Many environmentalists categorically oppose intentional fiddling with Earth's atmosphere, or at least insist that such important decisions rest in the hands of the U.N., since every nation on Earth has a stake in the skies above.

But at the meeting in March, Chicheley Hall experts largely assumed that a coalition of scientifically capable nations, led by the U.S. and Britain, would arise to organize "sunshade" or other engineering research, perhaps inviting China, India, Brazil and others to join in a G20-style "club" of major powers.

Then, the conferees said, an independent panel of experts would have to be formed to review the risks of proposed experiments, and give go-aheads — for research, not deployment, which would be a step awaiting fateful debates down the road.

Like Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, John Shepherd is a fellow of the venerable Royal Society, but one facing a world those scientific pioneers could not have imagined.

"I am not enthusiastic about these ideas," Shepherd told his Chicheley Hall colleagues. But like many here he felt the world has no choice but to investigate. "You would have a risk-risk calculation to make."

Some are also making a political calculation.

If research shows the stratospheric pollutants would reverse global warming, unhappy people "would realize the alternative to reducing emissions is blocking out the sun," Hamilton observed. "We might never see blue sky again."

If, on the other hand, the results are negative, or the risks too high, and global warming's impact becomes increasingly obvious, people will see "you have no Plan B," said EDF's Hamburg — no alternative to slashing use of fossil fuels.

Either way, popular support should grow for cutting emissions.

At least that's the hope. But hope wasn't the order of the day in Chicheley Hall as Shepherd wrapped up his briefing and a troubled Odingo silenced the room.

"We have a lot of thinking to do," the Kenyan told the others. "I don't know how many of us can sleep well tonight."

By Diane Bartz

WASHINGTON |
Fri Mar 25, 2011 7:36pm EDT

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WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama wants nearly all Americans to have access to speedy wireless services. He's promoting that plan in a small city in Michigan that's becoming a model for how the Internet can bring prosperity to far-flung places.

Obama on Thursday heads to Marquette, Mich., a university and tourism town of 20,000 overlooking Lake Superior that cherishes both its geographical remoteness and technological savvy. He'll see high-tech wireless initiatives in action at Northern Michigan University, where students telecommute, and talk about the plan in his State of the Union address to expand access to high-speed wireless to 98 percent of the population within five years.

It's a lofty goal considering such technology is only now being built in major cities by AT&T, Verizon and others. And it costs billions of dollars that Republicans probably will be unwilling to spend. But it's all part of Obama's new focus on innovation, technology and competitiveness as a pathway to jobs and "winning the future" — the new White House mantra.

Thursday's visit also takes Obama to a largely conservative area of a state that will be important in the 2012 presidential campaign.

Obama's wireless plan involves nearly doubling the space available on the airwaves for wireless high-speed Internet traffic to keep up with ever-growing demand. This would be accomplished in part by auctioning off space on the radio spectrum to commercial wireless carriers. The White House says this would raise nearly $30 billion over 10 years, and the money could be spent on initiatives that include $10 billion to develop a national broadband network for public safety agencies and $5 billion for infrastructure to help rural areas access high-speed wireless. Additional money could be used to reduce the deficit, the White House says.

It's all conditioned on congressional approval, and the proposals may get cold-shouldered by the Republicans who now control the House and have made clear they want to decrease spending in most areas, not go along with the targeted increases in areas like infrastructure and education that the president is pursuing.

Portions of the plan will be included in the 2012 budget proposal Obama comes out with next week.

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Associated Press writers Joelle Tessler in Washington and John Flesher in Marquette, Mich., contributed to this report.