The stealth toy startup founded by former Pixar CTO Oren Jacob, ToyTalk, will kick off our RoadMap conference bright and early on Monday morning. Get one of the few remaining tickets to RoadMap and hear more about what ToyTalk has been up to! Read more »
Electric car charging startup Better Place continues to raise money from its investors — particularly Israel Corp — as it seeks to finish building out its networks in Denmark and Israel. The company is raising another $100 million on top of its previously raised $750 million. Read more »
Our annual RoadMap event — a day long show on design in the age of connectedness — kicks off this coming Monday, November 5th, bright and early in San Francisco. Come hang with us! Read more »
Sadly, if there’s anything that will help deliver more public support for clean technologies, and low carbon energy and transportation infrastructure, it’ll be people experiencing the direct and indirect of extreme weather. Read more »
Will Advanced Equities’ charges from the SEC, and subsequent settlement, linger as an issue for Bloom Energy? As part of the settlement, Advanced Equities has to attempt to accommodate any investor in the fund in question if they want to sell the securities. Read more »
Introducing RoadMap Book, which we’ve designed and printed to exclusively give to all our RoadMap attendees. RoadMap, coming up on November 5th in San Francisco, is focused on design in the age of connectedness, and our book features interviews and essays from thought leaders. Read more »
The power outages caused by Hurricane Sandy on the east coast highlight the needs for a much greater investment in smart grid technology, energy storage systems, clean power, and ultimately a move to a more decentralized power grid architecture. Read more »
Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk says Tesla has now assembled 1,000 bodies for its Model S electric car. The company is going through a difficult period right now of needing to ramp up production quickly for the remainder of 2012. Read more »
AutoGrid, a startup that’s developed a big data analytics engine for energy, officially launched on Monday and unveiled its first product, and its first two customers. Picture if you took Netflix or Amazon’s recommendation engines and used them for utilities’ energy data. Read more »
What happened in cleantech on GigaOM Pro?: a hot new report on next-gen battery innovations, a column on why design matters for cleantech, and much more. Read more »
Solar startup Alta Devices, which makes thin film solar cells and is backed by Silicon Valley venture capitalists, says it plans to make a fast-charging solar iPad cover by the end of 2013. Read more »
Here’s my take on the cleantech roller coaster ride that’s been the last six or so years, and also why you should still be excited about cleantech. The slidedeck is from a keynote presentation I gave at the annual NREL Forum in Denver this week. Read more »
We’re excited to welcome Joe Gebbia, Airbnb co-founder and Chief Product Officer, to the RoadMap conference, a day long event focused on design in the age of connectedness. Read more »
The leading solar thermal developer BrightSource has raised a massive round of $80 million in private equity. It’s a rare move these days that a cleantech startup can raise that much money, but BrightSource has diligently been scaling up Ivanpah, its inaugural farm near Las Vegas. Read more »
Ambri (formerly called Liquid Metal Battery) gets the spotlight on The Colbert Report in an interview this week. Watch the video on this startup that was created by an MIT Professor and which has backing from Bill Gates, Khosla Ventures, oil company Total and ARPA-E. Read more »
Smart wireless bulbs are the latest addition to the Internet of Things. And companies like GreenWave Reality — and even Google — are developing these technologies. Read more »
GigaOM’s RoadMap conference is exactly two weeks from today and will feature speakers like Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen, Tumblr CEO David Karp, fuseproject CEO Yves Behar, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom, The Obvious Corporation CEO Evan Williams, MINIMAL Founder Scott Wilson and many more. Read more »
Are big data, analytics, and machine learning the answers to reducing the energy consumption of our homes? Yep, according to newly-emerged startup Bidgely that’s backed by Khosla Ventures. In an exclusive interview, Bidgely’s CEO gives GigaOM the details about what it’s been up to. Read more »
The market for electric cars is so new that Tesla wants (and needs) to help build out the charging infrastructure, which is one of the industry’s biggest barriers. Tesla’s first six solar-powered fast chargers are now live (and free) for Model S owners. Read more »
John Maeda, the President of the Rhode Island School of Design, and a pioneer of computer-based visual art at the MIT Media Lab, will take the stage at RoadMap, on November 5th in San Francisco, and talk about leadership, design and connected culture. Read more »
The Onion launches its first TED Talk spoof on compost cars: “Behind every great achievement is a visionary. Ill be your visionary and you do the things I come up with.” All you cleantech folks should watch, as the pitch is so spot on! Read more »
What happened this week in cleantech on GigaOM Pro, our premium research service? — The opportunities and risks in the share economy, the third quarter dreary cleantech figures, Google Ventures explains why it backed Nest, and Calxeda forecasts its next low power chip. Read more »
Cleantech companies with effective business models still have excellent prospects, while those who don’t have a viable product to sell in the marketplace won’t be rising from anywhere. Read more »
A startup building operating systems for grid batteries has shipped its first products to NIST for testing in a net zero home project. The company is an example of the Clean Web phenomenon, where startups use information technology for cleantech aims. Read more »
Google unveils photos, gives interviews, and even creates a Google Street View of some of its formerly secretive data centers. Greater transparency is the future of these massive facilities that will house the world’s information. Read more »
The internal combustion is officially still alive, and delivering efficiency innovation. Read more »
Do data centers that run on clean power seem like pipe dreams? Not when companies hit the massive scales of webscale computing. Execs creating business models from green data centers say that it’s the large size of the projects that makes clean power attractive. Read more »
Electric car startup Fisker Automotive says it won’t be producing its second car the Atlantic until at least the end of 2014, or early 2015. Is it moving into the realm of vaporware? Read more »
Battery maker A123 Systems, which was awarded a sizable federal grant, has finally filed for bankruptcy protection, after bleeding cash for months. Johnson Controls will buy up some of the assets. Read more »
Pandora’s CTO Tom Conrad talks to us about designing for the ears, as part of the book we’re creating for our RoadMap conference, which will take place on November 5th in San Francisco, and will focus on design in the age of connectedness. Read more »
Four years after the Pickens Plan was first announced, former oil baron T. Boone Pickens finally sells off his stake in the planned wind farm in Minnesota. Read more »
Not surprisingly Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan raised a brief argument about “green pork,” and referred to taxpayer dollars going to making “electric cars in Finland,” and “windmills in China.” And Fisker is now two for two in references in these debates. Read more »
Startups using smart algorithms and big data continue to attract venture capital funding. Read more »
Big companies, like GE, need to take on cleantech challenges and carve out a protected space to incubate start-ups. Read more »
Electric car maker Tesla Motors has been awarded a $10 million grant from California regulators to help it build the Model X. Tesla will match those funds with $50 million of its own money and ultimately hire some 700 workers in 2014 to build Model X’s. Read more »
Global investments in clean energy projects, like solar and wind farms, as well as funding for cleantech companies, dropped significantly in 2012, compared to the same time in 2011. Read more »
Tesla is a high risk venture because it’s a one product company, trying to do something that’s never been done. That means risks like a narrow list of suppliers, a new retail model, and the biggest risk of all — recalls. Read more »
Batteries used for content delivery networks could provide power savings up to 14 percent over networks without batteries, and that could increase up to 35 percent if new types of servers were created that could move in and out of different levels of energy states. Read more »
SolarCity publicly disclosed its documents for its planned IPO on Friday, giving us a look at some of its risk factors. Those include that the company is being investigated by the Inspector General about the Treasury Grant program. Read more »
Connected, smart wearables, are in a similar phase to the Home Brew Computer Club Days, according to Jawbone’s CEO Hosain Rahman. We’ll be talking about wearables, the quantified self and connected bodies at our RoadMap event on November 5th in San Francisco. Read more »
