The servers use Sun’s Solaris Operating System and virtualization technologies to help maximize the system. Warren Mootrey, senior director of volume SPARC systems products, told us that for server managers who do not want to switch to Sun’s operating system, the company will still offer a line of servers powered by quad-core Intel (INTC) Xeon processors.

Sun has been making a major effort recently to work on energy savings initiatives for its products, offices and data centers. The company even created Openeco.org, a community site for business and energy efficiency. Check out the actually compelling blog, written by Sun’s VP of Eco Responsibility David Douglas.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• The next generation of battery technology

“We have great respect for Digg and Reddit, we like what they do, but this is for people who don’t have a place to turn right now,” McGill told us.

Set to launch its public beta sometime today, the Mixx site looks a lot like Digg, except the homepage is customizable. Think Google News meets Digg. When you sign up, there are a bunch of predefined topics they you can choose to follow on your homepage, but you’re able to make up your own categories, too. In addition to being grouped by a main category, submitted stories can be tagged with other topics, so they’re easier to find. The site also offers the option to track and vote on photos and videos.

Yesterday, Mixx said it has signed content partnerships with USA Today, Reuters (RTRSY), the LA Times, and other publishers, though the specific terms of those deals were not disclosed. The way the site is structured, content publishers can target users based on their chosen topics of interest.

McGill, who prior to his gig at Yahoo News worked as head of strategy at USA Today, told us he isn’t worried about making money yet, but eventually he plans to run advertising on the site.

One nifty feature is that users can create private groups, within which anyone can tag and discuss content. This would be useful, for instance, if employees of a startup want to keep tabs on the media coverage on their competition and discuss the news, but keep these discussions private.

I agree with Adam Ostrow over at Mashable that while Mixx looks like a Digg competitor, its competitors are really the traditional start pages à la My Yahoo or Netvibes. I doubt Digg users will abandon their community, but others who use Internet news sites to track the latest information in specific categories might find value in Mixx.

Based in McLean, Va., Mixx was launched in March. It has completed one round of funding led by Intersouth Partners of Durham, N.C.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Digg Relaunch Shows How Hard it is to Change Your Game
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics

The site has an ever-changing list of “free” and “premium” questions. The premium questions, sponsored by companies looking to poll the Predictify audience or advertise a product, pay accurate guessers a percentage of the total money offered by the sponsor for their participation.

Guessers offer up answers to non-paid questions as well, and in turn help to “build a reputation” based on the accuracy of their predictions. The more accurate the user is over time, the higher their payouts are on the premium questions.

In order to be eligible for a premium-question payout, users have to provide certain demographic information, such as age, income, political party, and religion. The question sponsor gets to chose which specific information they wish to gather from the user and is allowed to keep the data gathered through that question private. Free questions, meanwhile, poll 100 users at most and the data is made publicly available.

Predictify competes against other social prediction startups, like ZiiTrend (which doesn’t pay users to predict future events) and traditional online survey companies that pay users to answer a series of questions online.

Company founders Parker Barrile and Mike Agnich, currently students at Stanford’s graduate school of business, started their Menlo Park, Calif.-based company in March. CEO Barrile previously worked at Google (GOOG) in business strategy, while CTO Agnich used to work at Zazzle, where he was VP of product technology.

We predict that unless the team finds some popular partners to pay for premium questions, the site isn’t going to last. Paying people to answer questions is a promising method of convincing users to sign up for the site, but the site doesn’t make it clear exactly how much money users can earn. It does, however, note how much the premium questions will pay out overall. It looks as if, currently, most of the premium questions on the site pay out a total of $500 (the biggest payout is $2000). But so far, according to a list on the site, the top-earning users in the private beta have made a total of just $9 . So we’re not really clear how broad of a user demographic the prospect of earning a few bucks for providing predictions will draw.

It’s a challenge Predictify’s founders acknowledge. “It’s absolutely a concern. We believe the Internet population is getting more and more diverse,” Agnich told us. Their belief in the site’s premise, however, remains undeterred. “We’ve taken a lot of time looking at CNN.com,” Barrile added. “They allow users to post comments after the stories, and a lot of those comments are actually folks predicting the outcome. Prognostication is human nature.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How to stand out in the app development game
• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Are Web Apps Becoming Over-Reliant on One Another?

“The restructuring we are proposing, while very difficult due to the impact on employees, would be one of the most important things we’ve done in the 100-plus-year history of GE’s lighting business,” said Jim Campbell, president & CEO of GE’s consumer & industrial division, in a release.

Over the last four years, GE says it has invested more than $200 million in energy-efficient lighting. With the restructuring, the company will increase its focus on R&D in LED, organic LED and “high efficiency incandescent light bulbs.” The proposed restructuring would affect a number of GE facilities and positions globally, including some 1,400 employees, but the shift away from a business centered on inefficient incandescent lighting was inevitable.

Since lighting accounts for 22 percent of the energy usage in the U.S., according to the Department of Energy, energy-efficient lighting technology — from fluorescent to light-emitting diodes — is literally lighting the future.

“Fluorescents are so over,” Barnaby Feder of the New York Times recently declared. We agree. Advancements in the brightness and efficiency of LEDs over the past year signal that one day soon these semiconductor lights will make up a significant part of the general illumination market. Costs are still a major issue, but the whole cost equation for purchasing these lights is different because they last for years, instead of a few months like we’re used to with the typical incandescent bulb.

GE’s restructuring announcement follows ongoing rumors that GE is considering an acquisition of LED-maker Cree. As Forbes.com recently noted, GE is competing in the LED space against the world’s largest lighting company, Royal Philips Electronics (PHG). An acquisition of Cree, American Technology Research analyst Andrew Huang was quoted as saying, would enable GE “to quickly leapfrog Philips.”

Royal Philips looks to be ahead of GE when it comes to ownership of LED intellectual property for making the actual chips. Philips took full control of LED company Lumileds two years ago. Last month, they acquired Color Kinetics, the leader in LED lighting for computer-controlled advertising and entertainment displays. Right now, GE has to shop externally for its LEDs and currently buys the chips from a variety of sources, according to Cree CEO Chuck Swaboda, whom we chatted with earlier this week.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• The next generation of battery technology

Facebook has reportedly “been searching for a CEO to head up this new subdivision” and has “been pursuing agreements with a number of record labels.” O’Neill writes that his most recent unnamed informant actually knows one of the people being interviewed for the job. We put in a call to Facebook to inquire further into the matter, but haven’t heard back yet.

While “rumor” seems to have become Facebook’s second name lately, maybe this lead has some substance. Facebook’s roughly 40 million users are clearly music fans — iLike, the third-party music discovery app, is the eighth most popular application on the site with 705,943 daily active users, according to application tracker Appsaholic.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• The 2013 task management tools market

On Wednesday, as CREE CEO Chuck Swoboda met with us to discuss his company’s progress in LEDs for energy efficient lighting, Bloomberg reported that the company’s stock had dropped the most in 10 months (falling more than 11 percent to close at $28.97) after Canaccord Adams analyst Jed Dorsheimer cut the stock to “sell” and noted that Cree was unlikely to meet sales estimates for the current quarter. Prior to that, Cree shares had soared on speculation that General Electric (GE) would buy the company.

Here’s an excerpt from our chat with Swoboda:

Q: Energy-efficient lighting is taking off as a viable alternative to traditional incandescent lights, but fluorescent lighting is leading that competition. Wal-Mart (WMT) just reached its goal of selling 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs, and they did that three months ahead of schedule. How does LED technology fit into the equation?

A: The LED we sell today is 100 percent more efficient than the one we sold 17 months ago. In the past year, it’s gone up 70 percent. The technology is moving at an incredibly fast rate. If you look at electricity demand in the U.S., 22 percent is from lighting. It’s a huge piece of the energy pie. If you take what’s possible with LEDs, you could reduce the amount of this energy consumed in lighting by 62 percent.

Q: Aren’t LEDs too expensive to compete with the traditional incandescent light bulb?

A: If you look at the total amount of energy consumed by light, over 75 percent of it is not residential. It’s commercial and industrial. We’re targeting how you drive the biggest impact. As far as the bulb itself, that’s one of the last places we’ll see [LED technology.] If we convert everything else but the bulb, the vast majority of energy savings will have been realized.

Q: Last time I spoke with you, Cree was announcing a partnership with the city of Raleigh, North Carolina, to install LEDs in government offices, parking structures and other public buildings. Where else can the Cree technology be found?

A: There’s a Friendly’s restaurant in Massachusetts that used 5,100 watts of electricity with incandescent light. The same restaurant with LED fixtures uses 930 watts. They’ve got better light quality and use significantly lower power. This is not a subsidized program, this is Friendly’s deciding on making a straight-up business decision. It’s happening. These same fixtures come in a version you can buy for your home. One of these six-inch can lights cost $90, and under residential use will last more than 20 years.

Q: Who are your main competitors?

A: It’s basically the traditional bulb companies. Although some of them have investments in LEDs, none of them have the opportunity to pursue driving the adoption of LEDs. Even if I’m a bulb company with some LED activities, I make money every day I sell a bulb. I make a lot of money selling that bulb. So they have a business model challenge.

Q: As I’m sure you’re aware, there’s been a rumor that General Electric was considering buying Cree, but a recent analyst report said that’s not true. Can you tell us any more about this?

A: I can’t speculate on that specifically, but conceptually I think we take a different look at it. We see lighting as this giant industry that’s been around for a long time. We believe that because of what we’re able to do with the technology, we’re in a pretty neat position to drive adoption. I can tell you that we’re going to be pretty successful in lighting. What [GE] may or may not do is a better question for them.

Q: How do you think the rest of the traditional lighting industry will respond to the growing adoption of LED and other energy-efficient lighting?

A: Any time disruptive technology takes over an industry, something like 20 percent of the incumbents survive in the business. The people who drive the technology have the best opportunity here. What do the incumbents do? That’s a question for them, whether in lighting or anything thing else. Are they willing to adapt their business model to be successful?

Q: A lot of people say that LED lighting for general illumination purposes isn’t ready yet. What would you say to that statement?

A: This isn’t not ready. This is happening. We’re saving energy. I don’t know any technology available in the next five to 10 years that can do more to change the energy equation than LED lighting.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• The next generation of battery technology

Geezeo

Geezeo, based in Framingham, Mass., has also inked a partnership with the Motley Fool to integrate that group’s CAPS stock rating service.

These “social” personal finance sites are based around the idea that there’s a lot to learn about spending and saving money when a group of people share data and other information about their finances, anonymously or otherwise. Each startup in the space has its own idea of how that works. Geezeo and and similar startup Wesabe employ a bunch of ideas from social networking. Mint, for now, isn’t much of a social personal finance site, but it does offer a personal finance blog and forum where users can read posts and chat with each other about money issues.

Mint’s user interface is still a thousand times cleaner and easier to navigate than Geezeo, but right now Geezeo has a better offering when it comes to adding accounts. Both Mint and Geezeo let users add checking and savings accounts, but only Geezeo allows for the addition of student loans, mortgages, car loans and investment data.

Users can supposedly connect automatically to account data from over 10,000 financial institutions on Geezeo, but I’m still having trouble adding my Bank of America accounts. Meanwhile, when I tried to add in my Roth IRA info, I was told that Vanguard wasn’t supported yet and that I should try again tomorrow. So much for that.

Another free personal finance site, Yodlee, which is modeled more closely on traditional personal finance software and lacks the social aspect found in Geezeo and Wesabe, already offers the ability to add investment accounts. After giving up on Geezeo, I went over to Yodlee to add my accounts and had my full profile, investments and all, up and running in about 10 minutes. But after that, I was on my own. The site offered a detailed look into my spending habits, but didn’t provide any information on how I might go about saving money or advice on budgeting, features I’d expect on the “social” personal finance sites.

Of the aforementioned sites, Mint’s still got my vote, as long as it can add investment accounts in the near future (i.e. before Geezeo gets its act together). Yodlee is functional as a personal finance software alternative, but Mint has tools that fully take advantage of it being an online application. Mint, like Geezeo, adds value to the basic personal finance idea by suggestion specific ways to save money, like higher-interest savings accounts and high-yield CDs. Check out my full review of Mint here.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• The 2013 task management tools market

Speaking of PayPal, the company has teamed up with News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace to “virally fundraise” for nonprofits and politicians on the social networking site. PayPal has developed “fundraising badges,” which are basically widgets that are a bit fancier than the typical PayPal “donate” button that could be copied onto any site to inspire philantrophy via the Internet.

The widget, which can be found on over 20 charity and politician profiles on MySpace, makes it easy for site visitors to donate money to their chosen cause. Once users donate funds, their name is added to a scrolling list that includes the names of other supporters of the particular campaign. Since each of these widgets can be copied and pasted into any user profile, web site or blog, the idea is that the badges will spread virally and subsequently increase the amount of funds raised. To encourage the viral effect to take place, the widget also displays a “supporter tree” that tracks the users who have added the tools to their profiles, and how much each person has raised.

The fundraising widget was created in “PayPal Labs,” a new division of the company designed to look for innovative and creative ways to leverage the online payment service. Launched today, the PayPal Labs site (which can be found at x.com) also describes a Facebook app that can be used to send and get money from friends.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• The 2013 task management tools market

Braemar Energy Ventures

Formed in 2002, nine of Braemar’s prior portfolio companies, including energy management firm EnerNOC (ENOC), have since gone public and an additional eight companies have been sold. Braemar’s current portfolio investments include Solicore (thin film batteries), Verenium (cellulosic ethanol), Stion (thin film solar), and Enerkem Technologies (syngas).

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• The next generation of battery technology

Compiling a list of the top 10 women in cleantech proved to be a difficult task. But as you’ll see from the brief profiles of those that we selected, their recognition is more than well-deserved.

1. Nancy Floyd, Founder and Managing Director of Nth Power: When Nancy Floyd started Nth Power in 1993, women were even less common in the industry that would become known as cleantech. A serial entrepreneur, Floyd decided to start her first venture firm with a focus on clean energy technology because she was already an expert in the space.

Prior to Nth Power, Floyd founded NFC Energy Corp., one of the country’s first wind development firms, which when it was sold three years later, generated a 25-fold return.

Floyd understands why it’s uncommon to find many women in the field. “You just don’t have many women with backgrounds that investors would back,” she told us. “You’re looking at energy industries that have been male-dominated for years and years. It’s not easy for anybody, but for investors to write a check, they’re going to want to see relevant background.”

2. Lissa Morgenthaler Jones, CEO of LiveFuels: Years ago, Jones would have never dreamt that one day she’d be running an algae biofuels startup. The daughter of one of America’s earliest venture capitalists, David Morgenthaler, Jones majored in economics at Princeton University and went on to win national regard as the top mutual fund manager in the U.S. for her management of the Monterey Murphy New World Biotechnology Fund. After a few other ventures and a short break, Jones founded LiveFuels in 2006. She hopes to help get the cost of algal biofuels to a point where they’re competitive with fossil fuels by 2010. Jones told me earlier this year when I interviewed her for Red Herring that for women CEOs in Silicon Valley, “…it gets a little easier day by day, but only by nanometers.”

3. Marianne Wu, Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures: Wu focuses on cleantech investments for MDV, a venture capital firm that has backed the likes of Nanosolar (thin film solar), Jadoo Power Systems (fuel cells), ZeaChem (cellulosic ethanol), and other clean energy companies. Prior to joining MDV, Marianne was vice president of marketing at ONI Systems. She earned both her doctoral and master’s degrees from the School of Engineering at Stanford University. When we asked our sources to recommend the key women in cleantech right now, Wu always topped the list.

“As a woman, I find working in cleantech really gratifying,” Wu told us in an email. “I can marry my entrepreneurial, technical, and social interests. It’s a very diverse sector that draws from business, policy, and a broad array of technologies including biotech, material science and IT. I really enjoy combining all these different disciplines. They say women are better at multiplexing and enjoy it more. If so, I think cleantech really suits women.”

4. Diana Propper De Callejon, General Partner, Expansion Capital: With more than 14 years of work experience in clean technology, Propper is no newcomer to the industry. Her experience spans across energy, water, advanced materials and transportation. As part of her work at Expansion Capital, a cleantech venture firm, Propper serves on the board of directors of optical sensors firm Tiger Optics and Orion Energy Systems, an energy efficient lighting company that filed for an IPO in August to raise up to $100 million.

5. Julia Judd Hamm, Executive Director of the Solar Electric Power Association and Chair of the Solar Power Conference and Expo: Julia Judd Hamm makes our list for organizing Solar Power, one of the largest solar conferences in the U.S. This year’s conference had over 8,000 registered attendees, up from last year’s 6,500. Previously, she worked as a senior associate at ICF International, an energy and environmental consulting firm, where she supported the EPA with implementation of its Energy Star program.

6. Whitney Rockley, Principal of New Energy and Clean Technology Ventures, Nomura International: In February, Whitney Rockley relocated to London from Canada — where she worked as VP of finance with non-profit TEC Edmonton and helped establish an early-stage technology fund — to join Nomura, where she now works as a Principal of New Energy and Clean Technology Ventures. Prior to TEC, Rockley worked at EPCOR, a power and water company that owns power generation, transmission and distribution networks in North America. As director of corporate venture capital at EPCOR, she started and managed an energy and water venture fund. She also led and developed the company’s greenhouse gas emission reduction portfolio strategy.

7. Susan B. Leschine, Founder and Chief Scientist of SunEthanol: A senior faculty member in the Microbiology Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Dr. Leschine is internationally known as an authority on the biology and diversity of cellulose-digesting microbes. Her research formed the basis for SunEthanol’s Q Microbe biodigesting technology and in August, the company raised its Series A funding round to commercialize the finds of Leschine’s research.

8. Rachel Segalman, Charles Wilke Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley: We learned of Segalman’s research work when she was recognized this year in Technology Review’s TR35, a list honoring the top innovators under age 35. Segalman’s research involves producing cheap electricity from heat. Since most of the energy in fuels is wasted in heat, figuring out a way to turn that waste energy into actual useful fuel or electricity is a worthwhile challenge. Segalman has discovered that cheap organic molecules can be used to generate electricity from heat. Voltage amounts are small for now, but Segalman and her research team are constantly experimenting and modifying the molecules to see if they can improve the electricity output.

9. Christine Bergeron, Vice President, Investments, Chrysalix Energy Management: Bergeron has worked for Chrysalix since its inception in 2001. Now she leads the firm’s investments, which have included Novazone, Fat Spaniel Technologies, Akermin, and HydroPoint Data Systems. She currently serves on the board of Akermin and is also a director and member of the investment and finance committee of E+CO, a public purpose investment company that supports local enterprises supplying sustainable energy in less-developed countries. She is also a board member at LightHouse Sustainable Building Center, an enterprising non-profit society dedicated to advancing sustainable building practices.

10. Lorraine Bolsinger, Vice President of General Electric’s (GE) Ecomagination: A former engineer, Bolsinger previously headed up marketing for GE’s aircraft engine division before shifting gears to run GE Energy’s “Ecoimagination” initiative, which launched in 2005. Bolsinger is now responsible for partnering with customers, researchers and organizations with a goal of bringing to market technologies that will help its customers meet environmental challenges.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• The next generation of battery technology