Behind the doors of Catmandu studios, on a quiet street in Buenos Aires, Argentina, dozens of young animators stare intently at their computer screens in low lit rooms, obsessing over the way a grass of blade bends or a character’s hair swishes as he moves. Read more »
Liquid Metal Battery, a startup developing a battery for the power grid that already counted Bill Gates and oil giant Total as an investor, has now brought on another high profile backer: Khosla Ventures. Read more »
The venture capital old boys club is just that: old school. And like many things that aren’t working for the traditional VC’s, a failure to evolve is just a competitive disadvantage. Read more »
Amonix, which makes concentrating solar photovoltaic tech that uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto solar cells, will cut 76 workers across its offices in California, according to a Dow Jones Venture Wire report. Read more »
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? Read more »
Ride sharing startup Zimride is launching a new experimental mobile app called Lyft that will enable drivers and riders to connect in real time, and even watch the drivers navigate to the agreed upon pick-up spot via a map on the smartphone. Read more »
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). Read more »
Check out Khosla partner Samir Kaul on 6 lessons learned about cleantech funding. Read more »
Not aggressively creating a social strategy years ago with a site like Facebook was one of the biggest mistakes of my career, says Daniel Rabinovich, CTO of Latin American e-commerce pioneer MercadoLibre, in a talk with the Geeks on a Plane group, in Buenos Aires last week. Read more »
The over a decade-old company that makes the building blocks — chips, gear and software — for ZigBee-based wireless networks is finally being acquired. Austin-based chip company Silicon Labs announced on Monday that it has acquired Boston-based Ember for $72 million. Read more »
Despite the fact that solar panels are quickly becoming a commodity — cheap and uniform — it looks like investors are still willing to put a small amount of funding into the next-generation of solar equipment. Read more »
About an hour drive outside of the packed streets of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and into the sprawling Sorocaba region, GE has quietly been leading the way on clean water technology. Read more »
Kleiner Perkins says it has closed its next $525 million fund 15 and confirms that cleantech-focused investors Ray Lane and Bill Joy will not be leading investments for the new fund. Read more »
Compared to Mexico, the web and mobile startup ecosystem in Brazil is hot — probably too hot. Here’s 10 things you should know if you want to build, buy, invest in or work at a tech startup in Brazil. Read more »
Get a peek behind the scenes of the hacker space Casa da Cultura Digital, or the House of Digital Culture in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Read more »
Energy storage company EEStor put out a press release on Tuesday saying it’s still alive and making progress on its technology. Read more »
The disclosure on last week’s earning call from Amyris that it was shuttering or scaling down production at two of its three facilities, effectively putting off major biofuels production for another two to three years, is not altogether surprising. Read more »
What’s a Mormon white guy from Southern California doing running a tech fund in Mexico? Paul Ahlstrom, the founding partner of one of Mexico’s rare venture capital firms, Alta Ventures, says he gets that question all the time. Read more »
Niklas Zennstrom, the founder of Skype and Kazaa and the founding partner of investment firm Atomico, tells me that he’s been spending a significant amount of time in Brazil looking for and meeting with Brazilian entrepreneurs. Read more »
How many of us have gone through numerous batteries for our laptops, because aging batteries start to lose their ability to charge? Yep, me too. Stanford’s materials scientist Yi Cui is working on a lithium ion battery that could last six times longer. Read more »
What Billy Beane is to baseball, Dave McClure wants to be technology startups. And like Beane, he is willing to go anywhere in the world to find a slight edge to beat his richer, bigger and fancier rivals on Sand Hill Road. Read more »
Carter Bales, the co-founder and Chairman of private equity firm NewWorld Capital Group, is driven by dire pessimism and over-whelming optimism that converge through his livelihood: environmental investing. Read more »
In Enphase Energy’s first earnings report as a public company, the solar micro inverter maker showed strong revenue growth, doubling its revenues between the first quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2011. Read more »
Light is the fastest known phenomenon in the universe, capable of traveling at 186,282 miles per second. The lighting business, by contrast, is one of the slowest industries in the world. Read more »
Building a startup that develops solar-powered microgrids in rural Indian villages is as hard as it sounds. Hear the lessons learned from one entrepreneur who co-founded a startup called Mera Gao Power and turned it into a real business. Read more »
Electric car company Tesla Motors is continuing to spend heavily to get its second electric car the Model S out the door, but now says the first Model S shipments will happen in June, a month earlier than expected. Read more »
Despite continued struggles for next-gen biofuel makers, VCs are still putting money into startups, particularly when it comes to follow-on rounds. EdeniQ announced that it has raised another round of more than $30 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and The Westly Group. Read more »
A startup making smart windows that can tint and block light, Sage Electrochromics, has been acquired by French glass and construction giant Saint-Gobain. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Read more »
A new startup called Gridium, which launched a couple months ago and is co-led by energy entrepreneur Tom Arnold, has developed software that can help industrial and commercial building owners tap into smart meter data to help lower their energy bills. Read more »
The tragic story in which a man rented a car in Boston via peer-to-peer car sharing company RelayRides and wound up seriously injuring four people while losing his life, raised a familiar question for the share economy: Who’s responsible? Read more »
Finally the worlds of big data geeks and clean energy nerds have collided. Researchers have proposed building a “GreenHadoop,” that is a version of the MapReduce programming framework that could manage a data center’s computing workload to optimize clean energy from a solar system. Read more »
The bare-knuckle boxing match between thermostat giant Honeywell and smart thermostat startup Nest Labs entered round three on Monday, with Honeywell’s official denial of Nest’s counterclaim. Read more »
Smart meters eventually will be ubiquitous globally over the next few decades, but, interestingly enough, installations of smart meters in the U.S. will actually sharply decline over the next two years, before they pick back up, according to Pike Research. Read more »
A startup called GELI, lead by battery guru Ryan Wartena, has developed an operating system and software for grid batteries and plans to launch its beta software in the coming weeks. Think of it like the Android for energy. Read more »
Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse has agreed to have his compensation slashed by $3.25 million under the pressure of Sprint’s shareholders that are unhappy about the high upfront costs that Sprint has to pay for the iPhone. Read more »
While hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent on television ads in the run up to the 2012 Presidential election, the real trench warfare will take place in Internet memes, says Daniel Sinker, the creator of the Rahm Emanuel for Mayor twitter feed. Read more »
We see a lot of early-stage research coming out of labs of universities around the world. And because we don’t always have time to cover these innovations in stand-alone articles, I’m resurrecting an old column: In the labs! Read more »
The Kickstarter for solar, Solar Mosaic, is just about to launch the truly disruptive part of its business: this Summer the startup plans to start offering people a way to buy into rooftop solar panel projects, and make back a return on their investment over time. Read more »
A startup called Scoot Networks, which is looking to be the Zipcar for electric scooters, recently launched its beta service in San Francisco after being incubated out of the Greenstart program. For GigaOM TV’s latest Green Overdrive show, we go on a ride with Scoot. Read more »
There are expected to be over 9 billion on the planet by 2050 and you can expect that to strain the world’s resources like energy, water and food. But big data tools will be able to help organizations track and attempt to solve this problem. Read more »
