The same smile appeared when I was filling out the brief quiz for True & Co., a new startup that’s trying to rethink how women buy bras. The company asks you a variety of questions that are meant to find out the best shape and size of your bras, and it has put a lot of thought into doing this in an innovative, creative, and tactful way (boobs can be a tricky subject).

For example one quiz question asks “Do your cups runneth over?”, basically asking in a playful way if the bra you’re wearing is too small. You can’t help but laugh at that, easing the tension that is natural when you’re trying to think about the shape of your chest. Email marketing company MailChimp has led the way for using this type of language in an innovative way to develop a brand and an emotion connection and deliver better results.

Everlane and True & Co are creating new online e-commerce experiences, and they’re using emotion and design to do it. Warby Parker has famously grown its online glasses business in this way, too. These are the new wave of e-commerce companies, ones that could rival not only big box retailers but also the first-generation of e-commerce companies like Amazon, or clothing companies that have moved into selling items online.

I think Fab founder and CEO Jason Goldberg put it best in an article he wrote last month on his personal blog:

The third wave of e-commerce is all about bringing emotional purchases online. Non-commodity products. More thoughtful purchase decisions.  I like to call this Emotional Commerce. This is categories like furniture, home accessories, home textiles, fashion, art, and jewelry. These are categories where people care about having something special in their lives.

It will be the Warby Parkers, the Everlanes, the Net-a-Porters, and the Birchboxes that will innovate around using design and UI to get you to part with your money online in exchange for a product that adds a little something extra to you life, your home and your wardrobe. At our RoadMap event in 2012, we highlighted a discussion between Birchbox CEO Katia Beauchamp and Warby Parker co-CEO Dave Gilboa, who discussed some of these ideas. For our next RoadMap event in San Francisco in November, we’ll continue that theme (tickets won’t go on sale until this summer, but you can sign up to get first access here).

The lesson for e-commerce startups, product developers, website designers, and anyone else building something that other people will be using — in the physical world and the digital world — is that the small details matter. A lot. Om recently gushed about well made shoes:

I don’t just love the shoes because of how they look — though that matters — but I also look at where the leather comes from, how it is stitched together and what kind of craftsmanship has gone into it. From shoe trees to little patterns on the toe to the packaging to the font on the label, all of those little things add up to the design aesthetic. And that way of thinking about the design aesthetic extends to other things, including website design. Yes, fonts matter, and the layouts matter, but so does the relative relationship to the kind of content, the speed of the web service and even the screen size and how it all correlates to me.

Design might be a buzz word in the tech world in 2013, and some high end designers might not necessarily like the bastardization of the term and its embrace by the tech industry. But in many ways, designers and design thinking is starting to be valued like never before at tech companies (and let’s face it, all companies are becoming tech companies these days).

This has led to better and higher paid positions by designers and new products that are connecting with us on an emotional level. And that’s a good thing.

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For example, rural Kenyan farmers can easily spend 30 percent of their income on fertilizer, but 80 percent of that fertilizer can be wasted because there is little data collected about the best places and times to use it. The lack of info isn’t just from the farmer’s perspective. Aramburu says when he met the CEO of a major fertilizer company recently, he asked him what he knew about his customers — his response: “very little.”

Re:char CTO Luke Iseman (L) and founder/CEO Jason Aramburu (R) showing off an early prototype of SoilIQ

A soil data cloud in the sky

The two young entrepreneurs latest project emerged from this black hole of information. Working within French telco giant Orange’s first accelerator program, called Orange Fab, Re:char plans to build a $5 plug-in device, called SoilIQ, for an Android phone that can read the moisture levels in soil. During our interview, Iseman takes a very early prototype of the device out of a pouch and shows me how it plugs into the Android phone and taps into the phone’s computing power to detect moisture levels between two screws.

Down the road such a gadget could be developed to pick up other soil data, like fertilizer-level readings. Iseman, an avid gardener, schools me on NPK — nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium — which he says are the holy grail of fertilizer readings. When SoilIQ is a commercial product, farmers could buy the gadget to take these types of readings, and enhance their farming productivity and the efficiency of their fertilizer use.

But the real value of such a system will likely be in the data collection, and the data analytics and services. The hourly and daily micro readings, which are coded with GPS data, could be used to create a cloud-based location data map of the quality and details of the land. This information could be used to launch data-focused services for both farmers, fertilizers companies, government groups, and others.

Re:char envisions using the data to launch a subscription service for farmers that can alert the farmers to the most fertile land, or even if there’s the danger of crop disease anywhere in the region (maize rot is a huge problem in rural Kenya). Fertilizer companies could use such data to offer better products to farmers, and potentially learn more about the end farmer customer (fertilizer can change hands ten times in Kenya until it reaches the person who will use it, says Aramburu).

Such land data could even be valuable outside of the farming communities. A massive data soil map in the cloud could help determine things like land values, or land ownership issues.

SoilIQ is part internet of things, part sustainability, and part data analytics. The entrepreneurs are actually very focused on developing tools that encourage the more efficient use of resources, which could (and should in my opinion) be the next-generation of cleantech focus.

The core concept also reminds me of what Safecast has been trying to do with its grass roots nuclear radiation sensors and data mapping in Japan. Safecast is bringing that concept to air pollution in L.A., too.

Orange interest

For telco Orange, which has a substantial presence in Kenya, such a system could help them increase mobile data use among customers. The Android devices obviously send the data to the cloud over the cellular networks. And Android phones — as Google announced this week at Google.io — are being used by 900 million people globally.

But potentially even more important is the branding involved. As Orange’s Executive Director of Business Services, Vivek Badrinath, told me in an interview at the Orange Fab event on Monday night, the mobile phone is often times the first branded product that a customer in a developing country has. That brand in turn has a unique ability to transition into offering core services, like mobile banking, and credit.

Orange has a mobile payment system, Orange Money, that is growing nicely and Re:char could plug into it for its planned services. And if SoilIQ becomes a killer app for the bottom of the pyramid, Orange would have a key position in it. Orange is interested enough in Re:char’s new idea that it not only brought the company into its accelerator program, but is investing in its angel round.

Re:char hopes to close an angel round by the end of the program, and later this year raise a series A round. By the end of the three months, Re:char also plans to have its soil moisture-reading gadget developed enough to move it into production.

If you’re a backyard composter or gardener — like Re:charge CTO Iseman — you’re probably wondering if you can get your hands on SoilIQ one day. Aramburu and Iseman tell me that they’d like to make it available in the U.S., too, so the gardening hobbyist could collect their own data.

Clearly, the team is in the very early stages of making SoilIQ, so a lot of their plans will hinge on these next few months. They plan to keep running the kiln bio charcoal business, and think SoilIQ could even help grow that business, too. They also might split the businesses in two down the road.

Ultimately if they can deliver a simple, easy to use, and cheap device, and convince Kenyan farmers to start using it, they could be on their way to unleashing data from Kenya’s rural landscape.

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On Thursday solar installer SolarCity announced that it has signed up Goldman Sachs, and other investors, to create a $500 million fund to support leases for solar panels for home and business owners. With that much money, SolarCity can install some 110 MW worth of solar panels.

Solar leases are a contract between the building owner and SolarCity, whereby SolarCity pays the upfront cost of installing the system, owns and maintains the panels, and the building owner pays for the monthly electricity for the power from the panels over around 20 years. As Ucilia noted on GigaOM Pro today, the residential solar leasing market alone is expected to grow from $1.3 billion in 2012 to $5.7 billion in 2016, according to GTM Research.

Some banks and even companies like Google have been willing to put hundreds of millions into these types of funds. SolarCity has been able to raise $1.7 billion in funding over its lifetime to finance installations from groups like U.S. Bancorp, Google, PG&E and Credit Suisse. Other solar financing companies — and the competition is now getting fierce — include Sungevity, OneRoof Energy, Sunrun and Clean Power Finance.

There’s such a demand for solar leases and financing that even some companies are falling behind on getting funding for these businesses. SunPower said earlier this month that demand for its residential solar leases is far greater than the money available to finance them. Power company NRG Energy also wants to retry getting into this space, after trying out this market awhile back.

It’s not just banks and corporate do-gooders that want the opportunity to make a decent return — some 10 to 12 percent in some cases. Crowd-funding is starting to appear as an interesting blip on the radar. Startup Solar Mosaic says that it’s now raised $1 million from its crowd-funders for its solar panel systems, which offer around a 4.5 percent annual yield. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that commercial‐scale solar panel systems can reach returns of 8 percent to 14 percent in states like Hawaii, Texas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

As big power players, upstart solar financiers and even everyday crowd-funders grow these funds and receive the returns, this market will start to expand significantly. As a boom of solar panels continues to hit the U.S., various parties can make significant money off this transition. Bloomberg New Energy Finance expects that residential solar panels could be installed on 2.4 percent of U.S. houses by 2020.

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What followed those milestones has been an interesting mix of attention on Tesla from the media and bloggers — including surprise, extreme 180-degree about-face, and a general lovefest — as well as attention from Wall Street, which bifurcated into newly won-over Tesla-believers and disturbed Tesla shorters. What most of these people fail to realize is that the road to true innovation in the auto industry takes a very long time.

On the blogging front, for example, in a Business Insider post on Wednesday called What Everyone Got Wrong About Tesla, a writer chronicles the criticism of Tesla over the years. The writer didn’t include my least favorite article from all of 2013 written on Tesla, by Henry Blodget, editor-in-chief of Business Insider, called “The Tesla Nightmare Shows Why Today’s All-Electric Cars Are (Basically) Dead On Arrival.”

It’s not that electric cars won’t struggle (see my long investigative piece on Fisker), but that many people just don’t get how the ecosystem, technology, and marketplace work and are so quick to make declarations about electric cars for the sole purpose of getting attention and — if you’re a blogger — page views. Tesla has actually emerged as a success story, not in the last week, but gradually over a decade by overcoming hurdles every day.

Another company took a very long time to twist and turn, and finally come out on top, too: Apple. And some of Tesla’s most gushy recent love-fest posts are about its comparison to the design-centric gadget maker: Tesla is the new Apple, Would Apple really buy Tesla? (no), and Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs. Like the legions of Apple and Jobs fanboys, Tesla and Musk are now on the way to developing their own fanboys that will track their every move and product.

When it comes to investors, short interest (the amount of shares that investors have sold short, expecting the stock to drop in price) in Tesla since the company went public in 2010 has been nothing short of remarkable. According to Bloomberg, “short interest in Tesla was 40 percent of available shares as recently as April 19, more than 11 times the average of companies in the Russell 1000.”

But following Tesla’s milestone’s last week, short interest dropped by 17 percent in the five days through May 13, noted Bloomberg — Tesla shorters were forced to “buy $276 million worth of the automaker’s shares, pushing the company toward the biggest rally in the Russell 1000 Index (RIY) this year.”

I don’t remember a company in recent years, other than maybe Apple, that has had such massive skepticism from media and investors, followed by such intense love. This week there’s Apple-style product rumors buzzing about Tesla showing off a self-driving Model S, and launching a battery-swapping service (that would actually be cool). Usually it’s the love-hate relationship unfolds the other way around. The internet is a weird place.

Tesla actually made it past its most recent dangerous startup phase over half a year ago. Back in November 2012 Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla had “made it through the Valley of Death,” and reached its goals for scaling up Model S production.

Musk might be a media and stock puppeteer (see the 5 lessons from the NYT, Tesla dust up) but as a leader of a public company it’s not in his best interest to publicly lie. Tesla was clearly on its way to success back then — after nine years of overcoming hurdles. The earnings and stock are just a delayed sign of that performance. And before that Musk made it through the darker periods of the company in 2008, by personally floating the company and even borrowing money from friends.

The reality is that Tesla has just started on its full court press on announcements, media coverage, and stock growth, and is hoping for a marketcap that rivals the big auto companies. These are 10 milestones that Tesla hopes will enable it to hit a $43 billion marketcap.

Tesla will also no doubt hit some hurdles as it tries to transition into a larger auto maker — if anyone remembers it delayed its Model X launch by a year to the end of 2014. But it’s actually pretty hard to be an independent new automaker, and true game-changing innovation is even harder and takes a very long time.

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On top of that Tesla says CEO Elon Musk plans to buy $100 million worth of common stock, of which $45 million will be bought in the offering, and $55 million will be bought directly from Tesla.

Tesla says it will use part of these funds — the notes specifically — to pay back the entirety of the loan to the Department of Energy early, and will also use some of the funds for other general corporate purposes. Tesla raised a $465 million loan from the DOE and has previously said it will pay that back in half the time it’s been allotted. So, that goal of half the time, has now been condensed even further.

Tesla has talked about raising more money for awhile, and many have speculated that company would want more funds to grow. This will be Tesla’s fourth offering (an S-3!). Back in 2011, Tesla also used a follow-on offering combined with a private placement to raise funds, and did so again, raising $221 million, in late 2012. The company went public in the Summer of 2010.

Tesla’s shares have been on a tear recently, and traded over $90 per share this week. On this news, Tesla stock was up 5.49 percent in after hours trading.

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The companies range from hardware startups that can help customers in developing countries use their phones in new ways, to data companies that are focused on things like identity verification and keeping cloud-based transactions secure. The telco selected companies that were creating a positive impact “on the way we use networks to improve our lives and businesses,” said the Chairman and CEO of Orange, Stephane Richard. The 6 startups were selected out of more than 100 applicants.

Working with startups isn’t really about funding companies — the startups have a potential to receive $20K from the program, but that’s more a token gesture than anything else. The real value of the partnership comes from the startups gaining access to Orange’s massive distribution channels, partner program and marketing heft. For example, startup Fenix International could work with Orange’s African operations to distribute its off-grid batteries.

Because Orange has such a large footprint in the developing world, the company has a particular focus on building apps and hardware for “the bottom of the pyramid.” Orange’s Executive Director of Business Services, Vivek Badrinath, told me in an interview at the launch event on Monday night that the mobile phone is often times the first branded product that a customer in a developing country has, and that brand then has the unique ability to transition into offering core services, like mobile banking, and credit.

During the accelerator program, called Orange Fab, the startups will have a chance to visit Paris, and at the end of the program will have a demo day to feature their progress. Here’s the first 6 out of Orange Fab:

1). Fenix International: We’ve covered this four-year-old San Francisco-based startup many times. The team has built a battery that can be used off grid to charge mobile phones and other electronics, and which can connect to various mini power generation systems like small solar panels, a bike charger, or the grid. The target customer is an entrepreneur in a village that sells cell phone charging, and SIM cards (hence why Orange is interested). These entrepreneurs are already selling these services but often times use shoddy and toxic car batteries for charging. Fenix already has distribution deals with carriers Vodafone and MTN.

2). Re-char: Re-char is a startup that makes a kiln that turns bio waste — woodchips, agricultural waste or leaves — into a bio-based charcoal. The startup has delivered about 1,200 “climate kilns” to farmers in Western Kenya. But with the Orange accelerator program, Re-char plans to build an Android-based device that can connect to a cell phone and can test the quality of the soil, including water content, and pH levels. Farmers would use these devices, and accompanying data service, to test and figure out which plots of land are arable and how much fertilizer to buy and where to use it. Beyond the services and product for farmers, the data from the testing and field mapping could create a valuable data base that could potentially be used by fertilizer companies, non-profits or government programs.

3). Phone Halo: This startup has built a location-based system that can use your phone to find lost belongings, like your keys or your wallet. The company uses quarter-sized button trackers that can be placed on devices — or potentially embedded in devices — to deliver an auditory ring when you need to find one of the lost items. The company has been working with consumer electronics companies to make third-party branded products.

4). AlephCloud: The team at AlephCloud is focused on creating secure connections between devices and across systems from Dropbox to box to email to Amazon. With the growth in the consumerization of IT (you know, like everyone in your office buying their own iPhone and using their own Dropbox account), distributed security systems will increasingly be needed.

5). Virtrue: Virtrue has developed an identification verification system that uses data and algorithms to verify identities across platforms. The service is intended to help companies and consumers reduce fraud and is prefaced on the idea that verified data is much more valuable than unverified data.

6). Talkdesk: Talkdesk is software that can enable a company to set up and operate a distributed call center. The software is browser-based and offers support for sales and marketing.

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RelayRides says it will acquire, among other things, Wheelz’s DriveBox technology, which enables Wheelz users to unlock and drive away in a rented car, without having to meet with the owner and get a key. Picture it basically like one of Zipcar’s unlocking and verification systems.

When RelayRides launched its business, it used to install this type of unlocking and verification technology in the users’ cars, but the installation process was lengthy and expensive. Later RelayRides started working with GM on connecting this type of system with GM’s Onstar technology. However more recently, RelayRides started opting for manual key swapping as a main option.

RelayRides staunch competitor Getaround launched its service around a box that car owners install in their cars themselves and which renters can use to automatically unlock cars using their smart phone. With Wheelz’s DriveBox tech, RelayRides can get back into the business of making car swapping more automated and easier for customers.

RelayRides has raised $13 million from Google Ventures, August Capital, General Motors, Shasta Ventures, and General Motor Ventures. Wheelz has raised at least $14 million from Zipcar and Detroit-based transportation investors Fontinalis Partners. The companies wouldn’t release terms of the deal.

The market for this type of peer to peer car sharing is still very early. Also execution and making people feel comfortable with the systems is key to growing this industry.

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There’s a few things you need to remember about Bloom Energy. First, manufacturing fuel cells is a very difficult business, and one that is capital intensive with low margins. Fuel cells take fuel (natural gas or biogas) and combine it with oxygen and other chemicals to create an electrochemical reaction that produces electricity.

Customers can buy several Bloom Energy servers to deliver distributed power on site at a building, and that can have a lower carbon footprint than grid power. Competitors include ClearEdge Power, which recently scored a deal with Verizon, and the publicly-traded FuelCell Energy.

But Bloom Energy has actually gotten some breakthrough traction in the market over the past couple of years, particularly with data center operators. Apple, eBay, AT&T, Adobe, Google and others have bought Bloom fuel cells (or the power from the fuel cells) for both their data centers and building operations.

Primack reports that Bloom Energy’s latest funding was an extension of a round raised in 2011, at a pre-money valuation of $2.7 billion. The lead investor that put in $100 million wasn’t named, but Primack says that Credit Suisse put in $30 million of the round.

Because the fuel cell business is so difficult (read my The pain point for Bloom Energy and other fuel cell makers), Bloom Energy is most likely not profitable even after 11 years. Bloom Energy CFO Bill Kurtz told me that the company was “half way to break even” in the Summer of 2012. Primack previously reported that Bloom’s retained earnings through Q3 2012 stood at negative $873 million, with $113 million left in the bank, and with positive gross margins on a pro forma basis. Bloom has a goal to be profitable in 2013.

Existing investors did not participate in the round, according to the report. Previous investors included Kleiner Perkins, NEA, DAG Ventures and GSV Capital. Bloom Energy was previously working with broker Advanced Equities (like on this round in the Summer of 2012) to raise funds, but Advanced Equities has since shut down. The broker was charged for misleading investors back in 2009 for fund raising for Bloom Energy, was fined and shut its offices.

We’ll be interviewing Bloom Energy’s VP Mission Critical Systems, Peter Gross, and eBay’s VP, Global Foundation Services, Dean Nelson, at Structure in San Francisco next month.

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Reuters said that Musk departed because the group funded ads for senators vocalizing support for the oil pipeline, the Keystone pipeline, and oil drilling in Alaska. Think Progress reported last month that Fwd.us has spent a considerable amount of money on these anti-environmental ads. Various environmental groups have been protesting the ad funding.

Musk is the CEO of electric car company Tesla Motors, and the chairman of solar installer SolarCity. Sacks is the founder of Yammer, which was sold to Microsoft last year. Other members of Fwd.us include Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Dropbox’s Drew Houston and many others including Facebook alumni.

Our own Om Malik weighed in on Fwd.us last month, and took issue to its angle, not necessarily to its fossil fuel ad funding:

If Mark and others really cared deeply about immigration reform on a holistic level then the conversation would involve a whole lot of other people — members of non-engineering and non-technology corps. So, no, I don’t buy that just because an immigrant works on an algorithm make her more important. I know, because I am one. Perhaps FWD.us and Zuckerberg should start actually learning about the whole and real problem: a society disrupted in connected age.

Updated at 1:45 PM PST, on May 13, to correct that eBay’s CEO John Donahoe was not originally a member of FWD.us, and was incorrectly listed on Credo’s petition calling for tech leaders to leave the group, as well as incorrectly reported on various media sites.

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RedWave Energy says on its website that early markets for the technology could be industries like explosives detection and high speed communications. But later down the line, the end goal could be harvesting solar energy in a method that has twice the capacity of current solar cells and panels but at a lower cost.

Nanotechnology is being used to eek out as much efficiency as possible from solar cells and panels. For example, Swedish startup Sol Voltaics says it has developed a low cost way to make tiny nanowires out of the semiconductor gallium arsenide. Sol Voltaics turns these nanowires into an ink, which can be layered onto basic solar panels and boost the efficiency of a standard panel by 25 percent.

But RedWave Energy’s nano scale antennas — or nantennas — work differently than solar cells. Nantennas act as an antenna or collector to absorb light of specific wavelengths and convert it into electricity. The technology has been around for decades, but RedWave Energy is now trying to commercialize nantenna technology licensed from Idaho National Labs, tech from University of Colorado, and is working with manufacturing company MicroContinuum.

RedWave Energy says it will start to talk more about its energy capture technology after it builds its prototype in the second quarter of 2013. We’ve reached out to the company and will update this if we hear back.

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