Alt-transportation overload! Why is San Francisco so chock-full of these services? I’ve been thinking about it for awhile and I’ve got a pretty good idea. Here’s why I think it is:

Tech, startup cluster: One of the more obvious reasons is just the vibrant startup and developer ecosystem in San Francisco. Most of these alternative transportation services are reliant on mobile and web technology development, and having a strong developer and startup ecosystem here means there’s more of a braintrust of young creators willing to work on these tools. For example Scoot Networks’ secret sauce is based on using the iPhone as a dashboard for an electric scooter and Zimride’s new mobile app connects commuters and drivers in real time. In addition, local tech companies can provide the testing ground for some of these projects — both Ridepal and Scoot Networks are starting off by selling services to fellow tech companies.

Muni, BART, taxis and parking suck: There’s actually a real need for alternative transportation in San Francisco. Unlike in New York, where you can get a cab in most places pretty easily, and the subways system is pretty efficient, San Francisco’s public transportation and taxi services are pretty lacking. There are also a lot of commuters that come into San Francisco, but there’s very little affordable parking downtown.

San Franciscans are early adopters: San Francisco-ans have always been early adopters, given the city is the heart of the Valley and was the location of the birth of the Internet. Services that are reliant on iPhone use can actual gain traction here, because of the high penetration of iPhones. San Franciscans also care more than most about trying to have more eco-friendly, and more energy efficient, transportation, like car sharing and ride sharing.

Small enough: San Francisco is also compact and small enough that a startup can launch a pilot project here and can actually cover a decent amount of the city. While the same pilot project might be overwhelmed in Manhattan, San Francisco can offer a more compact scale with which to experiment.

City support: The city of San Francisco is actually generally very supportive of these types of transportation. Anything that can help alleviate the public transportation systems and parking spots in downtown can potentially get support from the city.

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Pike Research predicts that there will be 10 trends that shape this growing market over the next decade, like that they think building automation systems will shift over to using Internet Protocol as their basic standard, away from more conflicting and proprietary communication standards. Here’s Pike’s 10 predictions for the smart building market:

1). Cloud: These building energy management systems will largely live in the cloud. It might sound obvious, but for the older-school building industry it’s been revolutionary.

2). Partnerships: The vendors that offer building energy management systems right now are pretty fragmented. Some of the larger players are trying to provide end-to-end systems, and then there’s the startups that have new, novel ideas. Partnerships are emerging as a key way to grow the market.

3). M&A: On that note, large companies buying small ones is a major trend. See the list at the bottom.

4). China: Yeah we know China always seems to land on any of these lists, but it’s going to be a massive driver of growth. It’s building a lot of new commercial and factory building space and will provide itself on including the latest smart building tech.

5). Federal friends: The U.S federal government has emerged as a major customer and partner for companies offering energy services.

6). Standards shake out: The multitude of protocols are converging, but eventually everything will go to IP.

7). No more manual demand response: Demand response — the act of shifting energy consumption at a certain time when more energy is needed — is going all automatic. Previously much of this was done manually, but finally the service is entering the modern digital world.

8). Submeters! If you don’t know what submeters are, check ‘em out. Pike says they’ll be big one day.

9). Design from the ground up: Building information systems aren’t just shaping how buildings run, but they’re remaking how buildings are designed, too.

10). We are all one: The smart building is the smart grid, and vice versa.

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Gaston Gorali, Director General Creativo, Catmandu studios

Behind the doors of Catmandu studios, on a quiet street in the Capital Federal district of Buenos Aires, Argentina, dozens of young animators stare intently at their computer screens in a couple of low lit rooms, obsessing over the way a blade of grass bends or a character’s hair swishes as he moves. Some of the team, which hail from all over the world, have spent days, and weeks, animating a few seconds where bird crap falls on the face of a statue.

This is the crew, which has now blossomed into 120 people after five years in production, who will be responsible for whether Argentina will be able to produce a smash success out of its first real attempt at making a 3D computer animated feature length film. Picture what Pixar and DreamWorks are doing, but on a fraction of the budget, using a scrappy team and a startup mentality, and a decidedly Latin American flavor.

Of course the movie has to be about football (soccer, for you Americans) — the national past time, obsession and massive money-generating industry for much of Latin America, and the world. The movie is called Foosball, and it’s the tale of a young boy and a team of foosball characters that come to life and play football on a grand scale. The walls of the studio are covered in various misfit football characters that are running, dancing and playing, what else, football. (The team asked me to not photograph the characters directly as to keep some of the mystery hidden).

Dark rooms for animation at Catmandu studios

When the movie arrives in theaters next year, the creators, which include world famous, award-winning writer and director Juan Campanella, and executive producer Gaston Gorali, hope that it will be able to spark a “virtuous cycle,” and the beginnings of an Argentinian animation industry, says Gorali in an interview with a the Geeks on a Plane group in Catmandu’s studios last week. Gorali knows the risks, too. “If you make a bad movie, it really effects the next films,” that could follow, he says.

The project has the makings of a hit. Variety has described it as “the biggest film currently coming out of Latin America.” Before Foosball, Campanella directed and produced the Oscar-winning The Secret in Their Eyes and is the most famous Argentinian director of the past few decades. Gorali, who previously worked on an animated show for Fox Latin America, managed to convince Campanella to not only write Foosball, but direct it, too.

So what’s the problem then? Well, Argentina had no animation industry. At all. Gorali likens developing Foosball, while also building the Catmandu studio, as driving a train full speed while putting the rail road tracks down in front of it. The studio had to recruit and train new animators, some of which had little track record, but who all had the desire to work on something brand new.

Essentially the studio had to operate as the startup, scrappy version of the big animation houses. While DreamWorks might have a couple thousand people working on several different animated computer-generated films that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make each, Catmandu is making just one film, Foosball, and on a budget of $14 to $15 million.

Gorali says that to do this, the studio totally eliminated the various layers of management and executives that usually exist at the large animation houses. And while labor costs in Argentina have gone up a lot over the last two years, the salaries that the animators are paid are significantly lower than what American animators would normally bill for. The animators use basic software and the team has developed many of their own tools to be able to develop their own techniques.

If 3D computer-generated foosball characters don’t sound like a safe bet to you, you’re probably the wrong audience. The film isn’t targeted at American, or even English-speaking viewers, though it’ll be released in both Spanish and English. It’s distinctly being created for Latin America and Spain, as well as Europe. The first pre-sold territories are Russia, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America.

The world will just have to wait for 2013 to see how well Foosball is received by its fans. If it manages to score some level of success, the movie could become the gateway for an entirely new creative and technical industry for Argentina’s students and developers. And that would be a huge feat for the scrappy, young team, and would also would make them not unlike the band of misfit foosball players that they’ve spent years animating.

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Liquid Metal Battery is developing a battery for the power grid using molten salt sandwiched between two layers of liquid metal. The battery is still at least two years from commercialization, and the team has built a 16-inch prototype, though they might later scale that up to 36 inches. The company is betting that a battery based on liquid metal electrodes will be stable, scalable, and low cost enough that it could revolutionize grid storage.

Right now the grid has very little energy storage and power plants are basically producing the exact amount of energy that buildings and systems are consuming in real time. That makes the grid inefficient and also costly, and in addition the lack of energy storage is a barrier when it comes to adding less reliable clean power sources like wind and solar (the sun only shines and the wind only blows at certain times).

Gates originally learned about Liquid Metal Battery when he took Sadoway’s class via MIT’s online open-course program. Gates took Sadoway’s 34-lecture series on batteries and contacted Sadoway by email to meet with him and learn more. Gates is also a limited partner in Khosla Venture’s funds. In addition to the group of investors, the liquid metal battery project received a $6.9 million grant from the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program.

The bulk of the development work left to do at Liquid Metal Battery will be focused on getting the cost of the battery down and figuring out the optimal size and shape. The company will also likely need more money down the road when it wants to start commercially producing the battery.

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I have no idea if the lawsuit has merit or how likely it is to succeed. But I do know that gender discrimination and sexual harassment are alive and well in the traditional venture capital community and to some extent in the Valley. The issue is something that I’ve talked about ad nauseam with female founders, reporters and press over the almost ten years of my Valley reporting career. It’s not a secret — if you’re a woman that works in the Valley, you’re familiar with this.

But the reality is that this old school, old boys club mentality, is one of the many things about the established venture capital community that will need to, and I think eventually will, change, purely for competitive reasons — not necessarily because Sand Hill Road all woke up one day and took a class on gender discrimination. If firms are under utilizing women investors and are seen as unfriendly to women founders, it’s a competitive disadvantage.

Some of the younger, more nimble, incubators and firms know this and are actually using how undervalued women are in the traditional venture capital community as a competitive advantage. For example, an investment thesis behind 500 Startups is to invest in under-represented groups — both women founders and founders of color — and women make up more than half of the small team of 500 Startup’s partners.

There’s a growing amount of women founders taking place in Y-Combinator every year, though it’s still pretty small. But if a firm has a reputation for being not friendly towards women, then it’s just another barrier to doing these types of deals in an increasingly competitive environment. Internet firms like Etsy are trying to proactively grow — and then tap into — an emerging population of women engineers and developers. It makes sense, they’re a population that’s being under utilized. Women 2.0 is trying to grow a female founder, mentorship ecosystem as well.

There’s a lot of things that aren’t working for the traditional venture capital world. The Kauffman Foundation issued a report recently that found that the venture capital industry was not delivering the desired returns, and basically not adjusting to the times. I feel like an old-school mentality around gender is just another symptom of that failure to evolve. And VC firms that are continued to be seen as old boys clubs will just miss out on potential investment opportunities.

Tech Crunch and Fortune point out that Kleiner has more female partners than most, and that it’s been trying to lead in this area. I’m not sure what will happen with Kleiner’s lawsuit, but the fact that it’s out there publicly, clearly isn’t good for building their reputation around being women-friendly.

Image courtesy of stevendamron.

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Amonix

A solar startup with a new type of technology, and funding from Kleiner Perkins and the Department of Energy, will start cutting staff next month, reports Dow Jones Venture Wire. Amonix, which makes concentrating solar photovoltaic tech (CPV) that uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto solar cells, will cut 76 workers across its offices in California, according to the report.

Earlier this year Amonix, through its manufacturing service provider Flextronics, also laid off about 200 out of roughly 300 workers at its North Las Vegas solar equipment factory. The company said back then that it made the move so it could modify the production equipment for making a new product later this year. I’m not sure if the workers were ever rehired.

Amonix’s technology has gone into a high profile, large solar project in Colorado that was backed by a $90 million Department of Energy loan guarantee and is owned by a company called Cogentrix (owned by Goldman Sachs). That 30 MW project — one of the largest of its kind using CPV tech — started producing power in Colorado already, says Dow Jones.

But other than that win, Amonix has had a rough year. The company lost its CEO late last year in a tragic accident and the company no longer lists a CEO on it website.

The company managed to raise $129.4 million in the Spring of 2010 from investors Kleiner Perkins, Westly Group and the Angeleno Group, as well $25 million from Goldman Sachs and MissionPoint. Dow Jones reports that Amonix also had a $9.5 million federal tax credit and a $15.6 million Department of Energy grant. That’s in addition to the DOE loan guarantee for the Cogentrix project.

Amonix’s technology uses lenses to concentrate sunlight 500 times onto triple-junction solar cells. Each system has 53-kilowatts of generation capacity and is made up of 7 giant modules mounted on a dual-axis tracker. Each module measures 10-ft. by 49-ft and contains 36 sets of lenses and receivers; each receiver contains 30 solar cells.

CPV-evangelists says that the technology promises to significantly reduce the amount of solar cells needed for a solar project, which make up a big part of the cost of a solar energy system. The systems can also be smaller and more modular so can be built in more diverse places than the massive desert solar thermal plants. Well, that’s the idea anyways — the technology is still nascent.

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Good, but not great, growth has Wall Street punishing car sharing market leader Zipcar, which IPO’ed at $18 last year, zoomed to $28 and now sits at around ten bucks. But the question on many people’s minds is: What is Hertz doing?

The argument for Hertz successfully competing with Zipcar goes like this: Hertz doesn’t require an annual membership fee (Zipcar charges $60), has no late fees (Zipcar charges $50 per hour), it allows one way rentals in some locations, and yeah, it already has a massive fleet of diverse cars.

On paper, Hertz getting into the car sharing game doesn’t sound good for Zipcar, even if you believe there is room for multiple players and that this is a market with considerable future growth. There aren’t good market projections for this nascent industry, though a recent analysis from RAND Corporation took a stab at it, suggesting that with improving tech to locate and rent vehicles combined with favorable government policy, the industry could include 7.5 million users, more than ten times where it currently sits.

Hertz’s CEO Mark Frissora made news in March when Bloomberg reported that he had considered buying Zipcar. But confident that he could leverage Hertz’s existing fleet of 375,000 cars and its customer relationships, he ultimately decided to launch Hertz’s own service. Referring to the New York market, Frissora has said Hertz has 35,000 cars there and once they’re all enabled for hourly rental, Zipcar will “have a real problem.”

In 2009, Hertz acquired Paris based car sharing technology developer Eileo, which makes the Zibox that Hertz is relying on to convert its fleet. The Zibox immobilizes the engine and interfaces with the reservation system to allow drivers to enter and start the car. Hertz offers drivers a key fob that acts like an RFID card. In testing it found drivers wanted a key that they could take with them on their key chain that controls entry to the car. Drivers wanted to feel like they were carrying a car key. The actual car key that starts the car is tethered to the car so that customers don’t take it with them when dropping off the car.

How Hertz will do it

I caught up with Jordan Reber, the VP of Hertz On Demand, who is overseeing the global ramp up of Hertz’s hourly rental service. In our discussion about Hertz’s entry into the car sharing market, Reber noted, “It’s what people tend to ignore when they compare us to competitors, it’s the size of our logistics and parent infrastructure. The issue of car sharing is scale. When those cars are tech enabled, we’re able to put them where our customers want them, be it Omaha or New York City.”

And it’s this scaling up that will ultimately prove whether Hertz can be a market leader in car sharing. Zipcar currently has 709,000 members and 9,300 vehicles in the U.S. and Europe. Hertz has been fairly measured in its ramp up so far with 160,000 worldwide members and about 1,100 cars available. On the question of how much of the Hertz fleet would convert to hourly rentals, Hertz’s Public Affairs Manager Paula Rivera would only say that it would occur over the next 12-18 months and that Hertz is “aiming to get a significant amount of the fleet installed with the [Eileo] technology.”

If the ramp up feels slow, it’s partially because Hertz is being very careful not to cannibalize its core car rental business and Reber made a point of saying that internal data shows that 70 percent of Hertz On Demand users use the service for hourly rental or after hours use.

Moreover, if most in the car sharing market view car sharing as a discrete business, Hertz is far more inclined to view it as a potential source of incremental revenue where it can gradually pick off markets like New York where it’s well positioned with a high volume of locations and available cars. There are likely to be regional advantages that flow toward any player with good logistics in a given city.

You also don’t get the sense that Hertz wants to launch whole hog with national campaigns and run into the car sharing space (it has minimal presence in other markets like San Francisco). It’s not as if Zipcar is making money hand over fist right now as it hopes 2012 will be its first year of very modest profitability.

What’s interesting about the figures is that Hertz has racked up 160,000 members worldwide (90,000 in the U.S.) with a fraction of the number of hourly vehicles in circulation as Zipcar. Sure a big reason for this is that joining Hertz On Demand is free, but that doesn’t make it any less real that the company has millions of existing customers to market to, so that it can get RFID enabled key fobs into those hands so they can easily rent a car. Reber added that Hertz is open to enabling cars to be opened with smartphones when he believes near field communication technology and mobile payment systems are more mature.

Whatever the rate of Hertz’s ramp into car sharing, it’s not likely going away as a priority for the company. Reber was frank in saying, “Car sharing is closely controlled and watched by our CEO [Frissora]. It’s a big focus for us here, not because of me but because of our CEO.” At this point it’s just a question for Hertz of incrementally executing in key markets, which should be enough to give Zipcar a minor headache.

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The app, only available via invite for now, lets potential riders look for available drivers close by and request rides. The riders and drivers can look at each other’s profiles and the app is using Facebook Connect for log-in and social security. Once booked, riders can watch their drivers navigate to them on a mobile map in real-time. Riders pay the driver based on a suggested donation model via the app itself (no cash exchange) and Zimride says the rides will be about 30 percent cheaper than a cab.

The biggest hurdle with these types of apps will likely be safety issues — riders getting picked up by drivers they don’t feel comfortable with. To address some of these concerns, the company says drivers will be vetted via car inspections, background checks, personal interviews and DMV record checks. Zimrides says its fellow 500 Startups-backed company Task Rabbit advised it on some of these security moves.

For now the service will only be available via evening commute hours, which aligns it with car-poolers. Over time, the service will be available 24-7 says Zimrides. San Francisco is rapidly becoming a test bed for these types of next-gen, more efficient, transportation apps, like Scoot Networks and Ridepal. Love this growing movement.

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Customer rides of the Model S Beta

Electric car company Tesla Motors says they will officially start delivering Model S cars to its first customers on June 22 — a month from today (see how they conveniently made it a nice headline). A delivery ceremony will be live streamed that day.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk also tweeted that the company has just hit a major milestone: that all crash testing of the Model S cars has been completed and the cars can now be built for sale to the public. So Tesla is on its way to hitting its first major deadline since it launched its first electric car the Roadster.

To put this launch into perspective for you readers, the Model S is everything for Tesla. The car will be the company’s long road to profitability, and also its proof that it has been slowly morphing into a mainstream auto maker. The Model S has to succeed for Tesla to succeed. The next car, the electric minivan/SUV Model X, is also based on the basic guts of the Model X.

Customer rides of the Model S Beta

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The most poignant to cleantech folks was a slide from Khosla partner Samir Kaul on 6 lessons learned about cleantech funding. His talk was about raising money for cleantech outside of Sand Hill Road, and his main points seemed to be essentially about ways to save capital in the scale up process. Khosla has probably the single largest cleantech portfolio out there with a lot of early stage bets in biofuels and energy storage.

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