After it pays off a $452.4 million federal loan, Tesla says in a filing today, it will have $678.8 million in cash and cash equivalents, and long term debt of $600 million.

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Tesla said it plans to sell up to 3.1 million new common shares, and offer $450 million worth of notes in public offerings. The company said one use for the new capital will be to pay off, with interest, the balance of a $465 million federal loan from the U.S. Department of Energy.

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The electric-auto maker’s stock is at $66.81, or up about 20 percent, after opening up even higher.

Yesterday, Tesla posted its first quarterly profit: $11 million on revenue of $562 million. That was earnings per share of 12 cents, when analysts had expected 4 cents per share.

Today, Consumer Reports gave the car a 99 out of 100 rating, equalling its highest score ever.

The trusted reviewer wrote:

“There, we said it. The Tesla Model S outscores every other car in our test Ratings. It does so even though it’s an electric car. In fact, it does so because it is electric …

“So is the Tesla Model S the best car ever? We wrestled with that question long and hard. It comes close. And if your needs are confined to the Tesla’s driving range, it just may be.”

Tesla is also heading in the right direction to hit promised margins by the end of the year. Yesterday’s earnings showed total gross margins of 17 percent, up from 8 percent. The company said it was aiming for 25 percent by the end of the year.

However, the company recently reformulated a promised resale guarantee for its Model S car that had used some funny math.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk will be speaking at our D11 conference later this month.

After market close on Wednesday, the luxury electric automaker reported its first-ever profit: $11 million on revenue of $562 million. Excluding one-time items, adjusted quarterly earnings were $15 million, or 12 cents a share. Analysts had expected Tesla to post a profit of 4 cents a share on revenue of $500.2 million, according to a consensus estimate from Thomson Reuters.

The company said it built more than 5,000 Model S cars during the quarter, and recognized 4,900 of them as revenue — 400 more than expected. Better still, from the fourth quarter to the first, Tesla’s total gross margin rose from 8 percent to 17 percent. The company has projected that its gross margin will hit 25 percent by the end of the year. And, as of right now, it’s clearly on track to do so. (Caveat: The company’s margins do depend on emissions credits, which some observers worry might be fleeting.)

In a letter to Tesla shareholders, company founder Elon Musk, who’ll be appearing onstage at our 11th D: All Things Digital conference later this month, said he sees significant potential for the Tesla overseas.

“We are pleased with the strong global demand for Model S and are currently receiving orders at a rate greater than 20,000 per year worldwide,” he said. “Importantly, we are seeing orders in a particular region increase proportionate to the number of deliveries, which means that customers are selling other customers on the car. Given that we have not yet delivered any customer cars outside of North America, there would appear to be significant upside potential in Europe and Asia.”

Encouraging news. Tesla shares — which have been on a tear for a few months now, gaining about 67 percent this year — are spiking in after-hours trading. At $61.65, they’re up well over 10 percent as I write this.

While the tale of a print magazine embedded in a troubled media company makes for much better reading, everyone loves a listicle. So, Time has once again put out its annual countdown of the 100 “most influential people in the world, from artists and leaders to pioneers, titans and icons.”

And, as usual, global techies represent big-time on the list, including:

* Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk — about whom Virgin Group’s Richard Branson wrote, “It’s a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he’s building spacecraft to help us leave it.”

* Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom, who gets inexplicably feted by entertainment bon vivant Ryan Seacrest (we are down with this anyway).

* Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos (yay for Ted, who is Mr. Nice Guy, especially for Hollywood).

* Ren Zhengfei, CEO of China’s telecom giant Huawei.

* Oh-Hyun Kwon, Samsung CEO, about whom former Apple CEO John Sculley wrote, “As Samsung builds a campus in Silicon Valley, all eyes will be on Kwon to see if the CEO with a PhD from Stanford can be as successful with software as he has been with hardware.”

* Music manager and Internet talent discoverer Scooter Braun.

* Minecraft developers, Markus Persson and Jens Bergensten, whom my sons revere (and therefore are deserving of kudos!).

* OkCupid founder Sam Yagan, who is now CEO of Match.com.

* Microsoft and Apple irritant David Einhorn, who is the only hedge fund investor dude I like.

* Deservedly ubiquitous Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whose “Lean In” is a bestseller.

* Apple design guru Jony Ive, about whom Bono noted, “Jony Ive is himself classic Apple. Brushed steel, polished glass hardware, complicated software honed to simplicity.”

* Coursera co-founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, who are among many in tech trying to change education.

* Chinese tech investor Kai-Fu Lee.

* Google Ideas guy Jared Cohen.

* Afghanistan entrepreneur Roya Mahboob, who gets praise from Sandberg.

* Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen, about whom “Veronica Mars” star (and user of the fundraising tool) Kristen Bell said, “There’s something so smart and magical about that idea — connecting consumers with creators and letting them vote with their own money.”

* And listicle Olympian and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, garnering a major feting from Google’s Eric Schmidt, who wrote: “Google was lucky to have her help us grow into what we became, and Yahoo is lucky to have her taking them someplace new.”

(Cover photo by Mark Seliger for Time)

A company called MuleSoft specializes in helping companies do exactly that. It started out as an on-premise platform, but has since shifted to one based in the cloud. A textbook case: Getting data from one cloud-based application — say, Salesforce.com — working with another — say, Workday. You might want information about your sales team’s performance integrated with your human-resources information so you can keep track of who’s performing well and who isn’t.

Typically, you’d do that yourself, taking advantage of APIs provided by both companies. You’d assign a team of developers to create a custom process and workflow. It would take more time than you’d want it to, and would probably cost more than you’d like.

“All those problems about integrating data become exponentially greater in the cloud,” mainly because there are more applications and there’s also just more data, said MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott. There are, he said, something like 2,100 different companies offering software-as-a-service applications, plus a whole bunch of older legacy on-premise enterprise software products. And every company has its own mix-and-match combination.

The good news is that most, if not all, of these applications have their APIs, meaning that, in theory, a programmer can take advantage of them. And that’s where MuleSoft steps in. One API doesn’t natively talk to another API. At a high level, MuleSoft sits as the middleman between them all. It has a repository of 13,000 or more APIs, and has an SaaS platform that connects them all together. The time required to integrate data in two or more applications is cut from weeks or months to hours or days.

The problem isn’t getting smaller. The number of open APIs available is multiplying, and in a few more years will reach into the hundreds of thousands.

Founded in 2003, its timing couldn’t have been better. Companies like Salesforce, NetSuite, Workday, SuccessFactors and others all sought to shift important business applications out of the office and into the cloud. And now running things in the cloud is more often than not preferred, because in the long run it’s cheaper — cloud companies tend to charge on a subscription basis — and easier.

So MuleSoft has been on fire. Its customers run the gamut from banks to automakers to media companies: Barclays, J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo are all customers, as are BMW and Tesla. Facebook and Box and Intuit are customers, too. More than 150,000 developers at more than 3,200 companies are using MuleSoft’s platform.

Today, the company announced that it has raised $37 million in a Series E round of venture capital funding, led by NEA. Salesforce.com is also investing in this round. Prior investors participating include Hummer Winblad, Morgenthaler Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAP Ventures (the venture capital arm of software giant SAP) and Bay Partners. The round brings MuleSoft’s total capital raised to $81 million. An IPO is probably not far off.

Here’s one reason for Salesforce’s interest: One of MuleSoft’s newer products is an app called Dataloader.io, that is available on the Salesforce App Exchange. It’s designed to move data from pretty much any application into Salesforce.com. Within weeks, it shot to No. 1 on the App Exchange, and remains the most popular app there today, Schott told me.

Another new product was announced today. It’s called Anypoint, and it’s described as the only complete integration platform to cover applications across the entire spectrum of cloud or on-premise, and to get the data in them working together.

The Palo Alto, Calif., maker of $70,000 vehicles, lifted its forecast for the quarter after delivering more Model S electric vehicles than it previously forecast. Tesla has a backlog of 15,000 orders and books revenue for the vehicles as soon as they are shipped to customers.

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Last week, the fight between Apple and pugnacious hedge fund investor David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital went all flat when he withdrew a lawsuit after the company yanked a proxy proposal that would have allowed shareholders to vote on eliminating preferred stock from the company charter.

But the real issue at the core of the fight — the massive mountain of $137 billion in a cash hoard that Apple holds and that Einhorn wants it to distribute in some fashion to shareholders — still remains.

It’s not clear what Apple will do now, especially since a lot of it is overseas. But execs have indicated that they are evaluating what to do to best serve nervous investors, who have bidded the stock down 40 percent since the fall. While it’s not clear what that will be, it’s also pretty likely Apple will do something.

Until the company decides, though, I have some good ideas for CEO Tim Cook to consider:

* Apple could purchase 1,567,506 Tesla Model S Performance vehicles with 85 kWh battery and a carbon fiber spoiler at $87,400 each, which would effectively allow CEO Elon Musk to buy the New York Times (a bargain at $1.42 billion!) and use it as his own personal blog.

* It could buy 17.9 houses for each Yahoo employee located near its Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ, so they could be super-close to work, per CEO Marissa Mayer’s wishes. That breaks down to 206,015 overall homes for 11,500 workers, at a median sales price of $665,000 for the area.

* Apple could acquire a big chunk of the Internet all at once, including Groupon ($3.36 billion), Yahoo ($25.95 billion), Facebook ($61.7 billion), Twitter ($10 billion), LinkedIn ($18.32 billion), Yelp ($1.47 billion), AOL ($2.81 billion), Pandora ($2.09 billion), Zynga ($2.69 billion), OpenTable ($1.32 billion) and, finally, Pinterest ($2.5 billion). Phew.

* It could pay Andrew Mason’s $378.36 severance after getting jacked as CEO of Groupon 364,013,179 times over.

* Apple could pay for 97,857 parties for Yammer’s David Sacks’s 40th birthday (at $1.4 million each). Snoop Dogg included.

* It could foot the bill for the budget cuts to save the U.S. government $85 billion this year, so Americans could stop having to say “sequester.”

* Apple could buy $329 16 gigabyte Wi-Fi iPad minis for 416,413,374 people — everyone in the U.S. (315,429,318), plus France and Spain.

* Or it could just give the 7,069,909,686 people on the planet $19.38 each, and call it a day.

* Apple could use $1 bills to carpet an area of 560 square miles, which would more than cover Silicon Valley.

* Finally — and I think this would be a nice gesture to make up for calling his efforts a “silly sideshow” — Apple could give Einhorn 15.56 times the value of his $8.8 billion fund.

Or, of course, not.

1.) This Is the Site Likely Responsible for the Recent Major Tech Company Hacks

2.) Yahoo CEO Mayer Now Requiring Remote Employees to Not Be (Remote)

3.) Microsoft Could Make Billions From Office for iPad

4.) Confirmed: Pinterest Completes $200 Million Funding at $2.5 Billion Valuation

5.) NFC: What You Need to Know

6.) I Love You, Man: Gates Lashes Himself to Ballmer Over Microsoft’s Mobile “Mistake” (Video)

7.) For $19, an Unlimited Phone Plan, Some Flaws

8.) Tesla Owners Hit the Road to Prove Long-Distance Can Be Done

9.) Why Google Made Its Own High-End Laptop, the Chromebook Pixel

10.) When Mayer Called Yahoo’s Mobile Revenue “Nascent,” She Wasn’t Kidding (And Here’s the Actual Number She Left Out)

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Nope.

The to-and-fro didn’t come up a single time. Not a word during his nine-minute segment, which focused almost entirely on Musk’s SpaceX exploits. Tesla itself barely merited a mention, though Kimmel did note that the company had won a Motor Trend award.

The Palo Alto, Calif., auto maker said higher expenses for manufacturing and sales operations contributed to a loss of $89.9 million, or 79 cents a share, compared with a loss of $81.5 million, or 78 cents a share, a year earlier. It also missed its target for fourth quarter production.

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One of the Tesla S Road Trip cars, at a charging station in Milford, Conn.

The group, which started out with nine cars, drove the 353 miles from Rockville, Md. to Groton, Conn., live-tweeting telemetry updates and color commentary throughout the trip.

But not all of the starting nine completed the entire drive, for varying reasons.

I happened to cross paths with them today at a highway rest stop in Milford, Conn., where I saw the Teslas charging and found the owners sitting inside at a Dunkin’ Donuts. They were on their way back home.

At the rest stop, Tesla owner Aaron Schildkraut told me they had followed the same route the Times’ John Broder did, making pit stops in Newark, Del., and again in Milford, to super-charge their electric vehicles.

In case you haven’t been following the saga and are curious as to why these people would want to spend President’s Day weekend hanging out at rest stops: On Feb. 8, the New York Times ran a column titled “Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway”, that recounted a less-than-positive experience with the Tesla Model S, an award-winning electric vehicle that claims a 256-mile-per-charge estimated range. Broder’s car battery died during the test drive.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to call the Times piece a “fake,”  and followed up with a blog post that his supporters said backed up his assertion. Then Broder responded with a blog post of his own. Short version: If you’re a big Tesla fan, you don’t believe the Times. Lots of other people do.

The “Tesla Road Trip” folks aren’t the first to jump at the opportunity to mimic Broder’s drive. Last week, a reporter from CNN made the drive from Washington, D.C., to Boston without needing the help of a flatbed truck, although, as the reporter wrote, the trip was not anxiety-free.

The Tesla Road Trip drivers, hanging out inside the rest stop while they wait for their cars to finish charging.

None of the Tesla Road Trip cars have run out of juice, the group said. But the trip was not without incident: One driver’s Tesla S stopped working at the Delaware charging station, due to what they believe was faulty circuitry. The owner called Tesla support, the group said, and a software update was pushed to his car remotely, allowing him to drive it to Milford.

Tesla has not yet responded to a request for comment about that vehicle’s troubles.

In total, only four of the original nine Tesla S drivers stuck it out for the whole trip, from Rockville to Groton and back south. Some opted out early on, in Delaware. Another driver, during the first leg of the trip, chose to stay in New York City and see a Broadway play.

“We were going 65 [miles per hour] pretty much the whole trip,” Schildkraut said, noting that they slowed down when they drove through New York City and when they encountered snowy weather.

“I think Broder’s biggest problem was that he didn’t charge his car fully,” one of the drivers, Dante Richardson, opined. “You wouldn’t fill up your car with gas for 50 miles if you were taking a 100-mile road trip.”

The group said their trip was not commissioned or sponsored by Tesla, although they said Tesla vice president of sales George Blankenship contacted them after hearing about the mission.

“We FaceTimed with him during the drive,” said driver Lanny Hartmann, who spearheaded most of the group’s social media efforts.

Stopping by the Detroit Auto Show earlier this week, Tesla founder Elon Musk said one of the company’s big goals for the year is to reach profitability.

“Now, the tough thing for Tesla is to actually make a profit for the first time,” Musk said, adding that such a milestone is far more likely at the end of the year than it is now. “I’m hoping we’ll have a profitable quarter this year. Shame on us if we can’t achieve that.”

With that goal in mind, Tesla is moving forward with some agressive plans for retail expansion. The automaker intends to open 25 new stores this year. Half are to be in the United States, the other half overseas, including a Beijing store that’s expected to open its doors in the spring. Also on Tesla’s plate for the year ahead: Increasing the number of Supercharger charging stations in the U.S. to the point where Tesla owners can actually take a reasonable road trip.

Then American systems made a comeback. An IBM-made system called Sequoia, at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, took the No. 1 spot. That machine is now No. 2 in the world. Six months later — for that is how often the list is updated — another American system has taken the crown.

This one is called Titan, and it is installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. It was built by Cray, and is bolstered significantly with GPU chips from Nvidia. It is powerful enough to conduct 17.59 quadrillion calculations per second. Let me express that numerically: 17,590,000,000,000,000. Titan has 560,640 processors, of which 261,632 are Nvidia-made accelerators. The rest are Opteron chips made by Advanced Micro Devices.

The headline on this system and what makes it indicative of certain wider trends in computing is that most of the computing horsepower in Titan comes not from the traditional CPUs — in this case the AMD Opterons — but from the Nvida GPUs. Getting to the top of the supercomputing world was part of a plan that Oak Ridge announced about a year ago, and from the the start, Nvidia GPU chips were a key piece of the strategy.

A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a chip that’s really good at doing a certain kind of math known as a floating point operation, and it does it much faster than a typical CPU chip from Intel or AMD that you’d find inside a PC or server. They also do these math problems using less power — electrical power — than CPUs.

GPUs were originally designed for gaming and to make professional graphics applications like editing movies and visualizing complex problems for engineers and scientists — all of those are big floating point operations. Basically, a GPU chip is designed to render what happens to every pixel on a computer screen 50 times a second or even faster, which is lots of small computational jobs carried out at once. It’s called parallel computing, and CPU chips aren’t as good at the parallel stuff as GPU chips. CPUs are better at doing one job at a time, getting it done really fast, and then moving on to the next one.

American computers now constitute five of the top 10 on the Top 500 list, as well as slightly more than half — 251, to be exact — of the entire list. Systems in Asia number 122, and systems in Europe number 105.

Here’s a screen grab of the top 10 systems on the list. You can go through the full list here.

Yahoo turned in a meh third quarter, which came as no surprise to anyone. But none of it matters, since all eyes were on what new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer would say on the investor call today.

Here we go! It is Mayer’s first outing as a public company CEO. She’s been an exec at Google her whole career and, while she has been a prominent public figure in Silicon Valley, she has never run the whole show herself.

Until today, that is!

2:01 pm: Finally, we are hearing from Mayer, who arrived from Google in July.

She is “thrilled to be at Yahoo” and the first 100 days at the company have been a lot of fun.

She’s apparently been a fan since her undergraduate days at Stanford University.

Finally, she tries to answer the big question: “Why did I in particular come to Yahoo?”

Why, indeed, given she and others at Google have spent those years since college putting Yahoo directly into the ground. (Did you know Yahoo gave Google its first big search break, a deal engineered by Mayer and others?)

But, says Mayer, Yahoo is “tailor-made for me,” ticking off arenas such as “search, mail, advertising, home page.”

It’s what she built her career on, apparently — yes, in kicking Yahoo’s behind — but now she wants to help the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant “grow and help redefine” itself.

Still, she stresses, trying to buy as much time as possible from investors: “It will take multiple years to get to where I want the company to be.”

2:08 pm: Mayer, of course, touts her Apple iPhone-and-free-food spending to make the life of Yahoos better (and on parity with the rest of the digital sector).

To be fair, given the past two CEOs, anyone who did not come in and kick the employees where it counts was going to get some claps.

Mayer’s goals are “simple,” she says, “to execute fast, attract the best talent and make Yahoo the best place to work.”

She says she has assembled a stellar world class exec team to accomplish that.

2:11 pm: Now we get to meet one of that team and a Yahoo newbie — CFO Ken Goldman (pictured here). It’s his first day.

He repeats the results that Yahoo has already put in its press release, which is why I usually zone out here and focus on superficial stuff.

Like how much he sounds like former and ousted Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson. Eek!

Goldman touts Yahoo’s recent Alibaba Group deal in China (done not by Goldman, but by outgoing — jacked by Mayer, really — CFO Tim Morse) and notes a $765 million credit facility that Yahoo apparently got this month.

That’s more dough to add to Mayer’s ever-growing pile to spend on fixing Yahoo.

2:23 pm: Mayer is back — Goldman is nice enough, but everyone wants to hear from the former Google wunderkind.

She makes an obvious statement: Yahoo has to “grow at the same pace as the market we are in.” Yep. Yahoo’s growth has been practically non-existent, while the industry has seen robust increases for years.

Mayer is now hitting all the high points on what needs to be fixed.

Search, communications, a desperate need to invest in mobile. “Our top priority is a focused, coherent” mobile strategy, she says. It’s everybody and their mother’s top priority in the Internet space, but it’s gotta be said.

So Mayer says it again: “Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company.”

She also name-checks “delighting users,” improving advertising and personalization.

2:27 pm: She also underscores that Yahoo will now hold onto its ad tech business.

“No one wants Yahoo to grow more than the people who work here,” says Mayer, who says she is going back to Yahoo’s roots. “We believe Yahoo’s best days lie ahead … and we intend to win.”

It sounds very good, but Mayer has been relatively unspecific overall.

Now to Q&A to see if she will drill down more.

2:30 pm: The first question is about Mayer’s vision as compared to others.

Apparently, it does not mean a “pivot” into different and new businesses. It does mean improving what Yahoo has done well.

“I don’t think this is a situation where there’s a giant pivot and we go into a completely different business,” Mayer says flatly. In other words, no string of Yahoo diners in the offing.

In addition, Mayer says that Yahoo occupies a unique spot that does not put it into “channel conflict” with other rivals and, presumably, can be a better partners.

Also asked about search versus display, she’ll take both, but found display “more compelling.”

The next question is about international markets and the local ones.

Growth, says Mayer, although Yahoo will be narrowing the offerings to be more compelling.

She refers to the recent closing of Yahoo operations in Korea. “We had a very hard time finding a growth story moving forward,” says Mayer.

As to local, which Mayer worked on at Google right before she left, Yahoo’s efforts are merely “good” and it’s not slated for investment going forward.

The next question is about metrics to judge progress. Yahoo left out user numbers it has usually provided in the past and Mayer is not giving up any data now either.

Instead, she is going to rely on internal data and not use third-party data any longer. (It makes some sense since the numbers have been not so pretty over time.)

2:37 pm: Mayer did not want to go into acquisition strategy, which came in a question about its giant pile of dough.

No billion-dollar buys for her, she claims, so cancel that Tesla order for Foursquare, Dennis Crowley!

Mayer noted that most acquisitions will be smaller scale and under $100 million. She noted she had done about 20 of those in her career at Google.

A question about Microsoft.

While there has been “disappointment,” Mayer says the goal is to work with the software giant. In other words, she’s not calling her old pals at Google quite yet (she hasn’t yet, in fact).

The next question is about mobile, with Mayer noting once again that the company has to be primarily mobile-focused going forward.

She’s going to hire as many mobile peeps as possible, especially via smaller-scale acquisitions.

2:44 pm: Goldman gets a little awkward in noting that his young-adult kids think Yahoo is all happening. Hmm, I suppose since he comes from the deservedly defunct Excite@Home and the successful but security-dull Fortinet, that makes sense.

In fact, getting back the young folks is one of Mayer’s top challenges.

A very good question — these are all good ones on the call — is how Yahoo can compete without a mobile operating system, such as Google Android and Amazon Kindle and Apple iOS.

Mayer notes that Yahoo has compelling content that others do not.

Another question on search and, specifically, on mobile search.

Mayer is unspecific, except to note that Yahoo has the ability to be pertinent and competitive.

She is a little more clear on the issues with the Microsoft Bing search relationship. Mayer does know this stuff well, and it is clear there is some serious low-hanging fruit to be plucked by someone who knows what they are doing.

Mayer knows search, to be sure, so I am thinking she will make some bank here.

A question about “overmonetizing” the Yahoo site — i.e. cluttering it up with icky ad units that drive consumers nuts.

Mayer notes that cutbacks in ads to improve user experience will only be done to increase traffic, which is a dicey proposition as it can also kill revenue.

A question about content and where that us going.

Mayer touts the Olympics programming — hat tip to former interim CEO Ross Levinsohn — as something unique to Yahoo. Interestingly, the media folks at Yahoo are still wary of pro-engineering Mayer.

2:55 pm: Another question about her interest in content and investment focus in ad tech.

“I am very product focused,” says Mayer, who uses the term “low latency,” a term that no media person ever would use as a hallmark of success.

She is much more comfy talking tech and that’s an area she knows better. Still, she says little about possible investments.

Mayer is then asked about goals for growth at Yahoo. She does not just want to grow at industry rate, but beyond that! But she’ll take industry rate for now (actually, that would be a huge accomplishment).

Goldman says little on the stock buyback, using the Alibaba dough, except they are buying.

3:01 pm: There are a lot of questions today for Mayer — which is no surprise — but now they are beginning to repeat.

(Plus, I have LOLcat’s Ben Huh waiting for me in the ATD Global HQ lobby — and you all know how I feel about them cats!)

Ah, the last question: It’s about data and personalization and what’s been lacking at Yahoo in not taking advantage about the pile of data it has about .

Yes, that should happen and it will under the regime of Marissa Mayer.

Mayer ends by noting, “It’s time for Yahoo to execute and bring our results back to growth.”

So it is written, so it shall be done.

The California Energy Commission on Wednesday approved a $10 million grant that Tesla is to use to expand manufacturing capacity for its forthcoming Model X SUV. Under the terms of the company’s agreement with the commission, Tesla will match the grant with $50 million of its own money and use the entire sum to keep Model X production rates high when it finally hits manufacturing in 2014. That will involve the hiring of 700 additional workers when the time comes — hopefully enough to avoid the slower-than-expected ramp-up that troubled the Model S sedan. And if all goes as planned, Tesla will take another step toward its goal of producing a truly mainstream electric vehicle. Not that the X is that car. Tesla says it will fall in the same price range as the Model S, which runs $50,000 to $70,000.

“Too often we’re portrayed in the press as only producing an electric sports car,” Mike Taylor, Tesla’s VP of finance, said today, according to Forbes. “I think that misses the point of what Tesla Motors is trying to do and why it’s important for California. Our mission has always been to aggressively promote electric vehicles for the masses.”

While political pundits will be chewing over the first Presidential debate last night, techies are more likely to be pondering Gov. Mitt Romney’s dismissal of Tesla.

The company is the maker of high-end electric cars, many of which have been bought by rich geeks in Silicon Valley. But the Republican candidate dubbed Tesla a “loser” in an attack on tax breaks President Barack Obama gave to green energy companies.

“You put $90 billion — like 50 years’ worth of breaks — into solar and wind, to Solyndra and Fisker and Tesla and Ener1,” said Romney. “I mean, I had a friend who said, you don’t just pick the winners and losers; you pick the losers.”

Solyndra went bankrupt, while Ener1 and Fisker suffered definite financial distress.

And while Tesla has also seen its share of start-up troubles and had to cut 2012 forecasts, it seems to be recovering. In a blog post earlier yesterday, in fact, CEO Elon Musk said Tesla would start paying back hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from the Department of Energy early.

Not soon enough for Romney, it seems.

The Palo Alto, Calif., car maker disclosed in a federal filing that it has received a waiver from required financial reserves of the $465 million in loans it received under a 2009 U.S. Department of Energy program.

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What was your favorite TV show as a kid?
Barbapapa as a child, The Avengers and The Persuaders as a teen.

What qualities do you like in a person?
Engaging and passionate, original thinking, genuine.

What qualities do you dislike?
Boastfulness, lack of caring, disconnectedness.

Name one thing you will regret never having done (if you never do it)
Surfing Jaws in Maui.

What’s the single most important issue in the world today?
We do not have a vision for the future of ALL of humanity.

Do you still buy CDs or rent DVDs?
No.

What would you be doing if you were not in your current job?
Can’t imagine.

What is your greatest achievement to date?
Believing in a few crazy ideas, like Jawbone and One Laptop Per Child. Having a great family and being happy.

iPhone, Android or BlackBerry?
iPhone, but I’m always hungry.

If you could meet any historical or fictional person, who would it be?
Living: Charles Eames, Fictional: Papillon.

What site/app do you check first when you wake up?
UP by Jawbone to see how long I have slept.

What was the last thing you fixed?
The training wheels on my son’s bicycle.

What was your first computer?
Some kind of Mac.

What was your biggest mistake?
I make many, my biggest mistake is not to acknowledge them fast enough.

Do you have a dog or cat or other pet?
No pets, I like animals and plants to live in the wild.

What’s your favorite mode of transportation?
Skateboard or any kind of board (surfboard, snowboard, kite-board).

What was the last book you read?
Pierre: A Cautionary Tale in Five Chapters and a Prologue by Maurice Sendak.

If you could have any superpower, what would you choose?
To make people happy with a magic touch.

Name your favorite guilty pleasure.
A straight-up high-end tequila.

What was your biggest most recent purchase?
A Tesla Model S.

Whom do you idolize?
Charles Eames, Paul Rand.

What do you drive/ride?
Soon that Tesla Model S.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
Inner peace and passionate creativity bundled into one person. I seem to achieve each of these things at separate times.

Who was your biggest influence growing up?
My dad said “you can be good at anything you put your mind to if you work hard” and “imagination is what makes you most happy.”

Describe an ideal day.
An ideal day for me is a combination of a fun-exciting creative moment with work partners, some laughs and games with my kids, a good surf session, and great conversation with friends around a meal. This actually happens sometimes.

Oak Ridge National Lab's "Jaguar" computer

Despite the fact that the Chinese system was built largely with American-made or American-designed components, the news came as a bit of a blow to American pride, and even caught the attention of President Obama, who kvetched about it in January’s State of the Union address.

By June (the list is updated twice a year) the Chinese machine had fallen to second place, its crown seized by a supercomputer in Japan, relegating the top supercomputer in the U.S. to third place.

Today, the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, part of the U.S. Department of Energy, will announce plans to build a system that has a good shot at reclaiming the top spot. The machine will be named “Titan,” and its primary computing engine will be the Tesla chip from Nvidia, the company best known for turning out chips that enhance the graphics of games on personal computers.

Nvidia has been making inroads in high-performance computing for some time. Earlier this year I wrote about how the Tesla chips were helping Lucasfilm make movies faster.

I talked with Steve Scott, the CTO of Nvidia’s Tesla business unit, who told me that the Titan machine will be 10 times more powerful than the current Jaguar machine, and that 85 percent of its computing power will come from Nvidia chips, while the remaining portion will come from conventional CPU chips from Advanced Micro Devices.

Why GPUs and not CPUs? It turns out that graphics chips are really good at doing a certain kind of math known as a floating point operation, much faster than a typical CPU chip from Intel or AMD found inside a PC or server.

It’s also an issue of power. For years, as chips and the transistors on them have shrunk, the amount of power required to send pulsing through them has dropped as well. Scott says that is no longer the case. “We’ve reached the point where processors have become power constrained. If you pack all the transistors that you can onto a chip and run it as fast as you can, the chip will melt. We’ve entered a time where performance is constrained by power, and its only going to get worse, so you need processors that are power efficient,” he says. “It’s a fundamental sea change in the underlying technology of high performance computing.”

GPUs, originally designed for gaming and professional graphics applications like editing movies and visualizing complex problems for engineers and scientists, are inherently designed to perform several repetitive tasks at once. In explaining this, I always think back to the old saying “many hands make light work,” though here it’s applied to computing. Two people who divide up the task of folding a pile of laundry get it done faster than one. And four people will get it done faster than two.

Basically, a GPU chip is designed to render what happens to every pixel of a computer screen 50 times a second or even faster. Essentially, lots of small computational jobs are carried out at once. It’s called parallel computing, and, fundamentally, CPUs chips aren’t as good at it as GPU chips. CPUs are better at doing one job at a time, getting it done really fast, and then moving on to the next one. Generally speaking, Scott says, GPUs are about eight times faster at floating point operations than CPUs.

For Nvidia it will be a return trip to the top spot. China’s supercomputing champ, the Tianhe-1A at National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, which is now ranked No. 2 in the world, uses Nvidia GPUs. This certainly got the world’s attention concerning the potential for GPUs in high performance computing.

The plan at Oak Ridge calls for Titan to have 18,000 nodes, each with an AMD CPU chip coupled with an Nvidia Tesla GPU. Most of the heavy lifting will be done by the GPUs, Scott says. Its total computing capacity will top out at 20 petaflops. FLOPS are floating point operations per second. “Peta” refers to how many the system can do every second: In this case, the answer is 20 quadrillion. Just because I can — and because it’s one of the rare cases where I get to use a number that’s larger than the national debt — I’m going to write that number out: 20,000,000,000,000,000.

And what will it be used for? While many of the Department of Energy’s computers are used to simulate nuclear explosions that are no longer allowed thanks to the Test Ban Treaty, this one won’t be. The mission at Oak Ridge, Scott says, is to advance the boundaries of science. Scientists will use it to model climate change, and to predict the results of different methods of mitigating it. They’ll also use it to design engines, study biology and genetics, and explore the possibilities of using nuclear fusion for energy. If you have interesting scientific work to do that requires this kind of computing oomph, you can even write a proposal explaining how you’d use it.

In the first phase of Titan’s deployment, which is already under way, Oak Ridge will upgrade its existing Jaguar supercomputer with 960 new Tesla chips. In a second phase, expected to start next year, Oak Ridge plans to deploy the 18,000-node Tesla-based system.

Down the road, the hope within supercomputing circles is that performance improves to the point where we’re no longer talking petaflops, but exaflops, or quintillions of floating point operations every second. The government is already working on that, and earlier this year President Obama asked Congress for $126 million in the federal budget to begin research to work on ways to get there by 2018. The biggest problem: How to supply enough electrical power while delivering the computing muscle. Today’s announcement by Oak Ridge is a big step in that direction, but there are still 981 more petaflops to conquer.

Palo Alto-based Xatori is making available an app for the iPhone that aims to link electric vehicle owners with those willing to share their outlets. The app, PlugShare, also points to a listing of public charging stations and to view the profiles of various members of the PlugShare network.

The project is the brainchild of Forrest North, the founder and former CEO of Mission Motors and a former Tesla Motors engineer. North hopes that creating a network such as PlugShare will help reduce a common fear of electronic car ownership–the fear of not being able to find a suitable charging location on longer-range trips.

“Many people won’t have EV’s right away, but everyone has an electrical outlet,” North said in a statement.

One need not have an electric vehicle to take part, nor have any kind of special outlet. Of course, offering up one’s electricity also means picking up the tab for someone else’s car, but North contends that’s not such a big deal. “Sharing electricity from a standard outlet only costs about $0.15 an hour, a small price to lessen our dependence on oil,” North said. Besides, sharing a plug is nothing compared to RelayRides, which would have people offering up their actual vehicles for a car-share service..

In addition to North, the company is led by CTO Armen Petrosian, a former engineer at Amprius and member of the Stanford Solar Car effort. Among PlugShare’s advisors is PayPal and Slide co-founder Max Levchin.

The company has posted a YouTube video with more details on how the app works.

In 2010, the region enjoyed one of its strongest slates of initial public offerings for years. A total of 15 local companies backed by venture capital went public last year, up from two Bay Area companies in 2009 and only one in 2008, according to new data from research firm VentureSource. It was the strongest year of local IPOs since 2007, when 21 Bay Area venture-backed companies went public, according to VentureSource.

Among the Bay Area companies that went public last year were biomedical company Pacific Biosciences of California Inc. in Menlo Park and electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc. in Palo Alto. In total, all of the local companies raised nearly $1.3 billion in IPO proceeds, up from just $103.7 million in 2009 and $54 million in 2008, according to VentureSource.

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Sorry, joining slightly late. Jen-Hsun Huang is walking through Nvidia’s recent announcements.

And also some history. 1995 was important because the personal computer really became personal back then. (I assume this relates to a Windows release but not clear why.)

At the time, we thought we’d be a $300 million company in five years. But we got a lot bigger.