The problem for new business owners is that, depending on the type of company they’re starting, there can be a number of different documents they need to file with various municipal organizations. And until now, there’s been no unified place for those business owners to find all that they need, all in one place.

So Nazar has hired researchers to go city-by-city and business-by-business to discover and obtain all the documents new business owners need to get off the ground. The result is a massive database of documents and instructions on what documents are necessary and where to file them.

It’s an ambitious project, and one that comes from Nazar’s interest in helping to support new businesses. In addition to his day job at Docstoc, Nazar has spent the last several years promoting entrepreneurship through Startups Uncensored, the largest tech meetup in Southern California. What he found was that many of the young companies faced the same challenge in trying to find all the necessary documentation to get off the ground.

But License123 goes beyond just the typical needs of tech startups in a certain region of the country. Whether a new business owner is opening a restaurant, opening a retail shop or running a new media operation, through License123 Nazar wants to facilitate the paperwork needed to do so. It’s also expanded well beyond just large metropolitan areas, hoping to provide coverage to all municipalities around the county.

At the outset, License123 is charging $9.99 for the service. But Nazar expects the venture could charge 10 times as much and still be extremely valuable to new business owners. Compare $100 to what it might cause in fines if necessary paperwork isn’t filed correctly, or at all.

But he also sees a larger opportunity, beyond just offering one-off reports to new business owners. There’s the possibility of providing a full-service offering; for instance, enabling new business owners to provide necessary information and then filing all necessary documents for them; also, the ability to receive recurring annual fees to support license renewals when necessary.

And then there’s the possibility of partnering with cities themselves. Nazar says he’s been in talks with some cities to offer License123’s database to their own municipal websites. That would be a win-win situation, he said, as it would encourage the creation of new businesses while also making it easier for business owners themselves.

For now, though, the site is still in beta, with about six states available. They currently cover about 60 to 80 percent of local cities, but Nazar hopes to have full coverage of cities and businesses throughout the country by the end of the year.

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After authorizing the app with your Gmail or Google Apps account, you’re presented with the top email in your inbox and have 90 seconds to decide what to do with it: Archive, reply, label or “boomerang” (which archives the email, but will bring it back into your email automatically at an allotted time). Each positive action taken adds points to your score and moves you to the next email. Take more than the allotted 90 seconds, or “skip” the email without deciding to take action on it, and you’ll lose points.

If you decide to reply to a message, you’re given three minutes to compose your reply. Again, if you delay, you’ll lose points, although you can always click the “add time” button if you have to compose a particularly long email. Note: By default, The Email Game adds a link to itself in your email signature, which I found a bit annoying; you can remove it in the app’s settings page.

The Email Game isn’t the first app to try to turn email into a game; we’ve previously written about 0boxer, for example, which also awards points for completing email actions, although The Email Game is the first app I’ve seen that adds time limits to discourage procrastination. Unlike 0boxer and  InboxScore, however, The Email Game doesn’t have any social features, so you can’t compete with friends using an online leaderboard, and it also doesn’t seem to be able to keep track of your scores between sessions; it’s probably not something that you’d want to use on an ongoing basis. However, it’s certainly a fun way to motivate yourself to power quickly through your inbox in order to achieve “inbox zero.”

The “gamification of work” is something that’s attracting the attention of a few companies recently. Rypple, for example, is using gaming mechanics to increase engagement with its employee feedback app. While it remains to be seen as to whether gaming mechanics really can improve worker engagement and productivity, as Jessica noted in a recent post, game enthusiasts do tend to display the kind of traits — being bottom-line oriented, tolerant of diversity, comfortable with constant change, happy to learn, and intensely interested in innovation — that should also be advantageous in the workplace.

The free version of The Email Game works only with Gmail and Google Apps accounts. An enterprise edition is available that works with Outlook/Exchange or IMAP accounts and costs a rather pricey $20/seat/month.

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Tallhamn said in the blog post that the company failed to draw a lead investor “willing to commit enough capital to fill out the round with follow on investors.” His insights are an indicator of the struggles for the entire energy management sector, including potential competitors that Tallhamn used in a slide from the Cleantech Open including Ecofactor, EnergyHub, AlertMe, and Control4.

The investment community’s perspective on this space had become significantly more critical since we got started, and probably for good reasons. A lot of capital has been destroyed in Series A-Z rounds of funding by our competitors, and most investors made it clear that they’d want to see massive traction before committing capital. They were taking a “wait and see” approach.

The business of helping consumers reduce and manage energy consumption in homes and across appliances and devices is such a small market right now, there can’t be too many players going after basically non-existent revenue. OPower, which provides data analytics and software for utilities for energy bills, is one of the few companies in energy management that I know of that is doing well.

Many of the revenues right now depend on scoring utility deals, which can take months and years to implement. Though, there has also been recent attention from the telcos and consumer electronics companies in the energy management space. But as we’ve mentioned pure play energy management gadgets probably won’t be that interesting to consumers — the gadgets will have to do something else, too, like manage your media or run a home security system. Tallhamn said in his blog post: “On a micro level, the average household’s energy costs are so small ($4k on average across electricity and fuel) that any direct to consumer product aiming to reduce them needs to deliver something beyond just savings.”

Hug was taking a free approach, and looking to mine energy information, with Scoble calling Hug the “Mint of your energy bill.” The company had launched a downloadable energy management application for computers that compiled how many minutes your computer slept and basically called your attention to how much energy you were saving. That app was only a “trojan horse” into a plan to grab a greater piece of the energy management sector, and the company’s idea was to start building a user base before the smart energy devices hit the market, “so that we’d be in a great position for becoming the leading supplier of analytics and control software once they had arrived,” writes Tallhamn.

But alas, you can’t build a product without funding. Tallhamn writes:

Knowing when to push through and when to call it quits is probably one of the hardest things for an entrepreneur, and while I’ll never know for sure, I feel quite confident that this was the right decision for everyone involved.

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CumuLogic was co-founded by Sun Cloud and Startup Essentials vets Rajesh Ramchandani and Laura Ventura, and touts Java creator James Gosling and former Sun CIO Bill Vass as the leaders of its technical advisory board. According to Ramchandani, he and Ventura were inspired to create a Java PaaS after they left Oracle and started thinking about how Sun could might have expanded its cloud computing efforts into the PaaS space had Oracle not killed Sun’s cloud project upon its acquisition of the company. We’ll never know how close CumuLogic is to what Sun might have done, but the company does appear to have embraced Sun’s legacy of giving users plenty of choice and control.

CEO Sandip Gupta told me that CumuLogic is focused on legacy Java applications, of which companies have written countless numbers over the years. Instead of rewriting applications to fit new platforms and, essentially, giving up application components on which companies might have standardized over the years, CumuLogic wants to give them the flexibility to keep using those components, from application platforms to databases. Further, CumuLogic wants to give customers choice of where to host their PaaS environment by providing a software product that can be installed locally or atop an IaaS cloud. Makara, the cloud software recently acquired by Red Hat, offers the same functionality with regard to deployment, but the companies differ in terms of scope.

CumuLogic also is trying to set itself apart by retaining a degree of IT control over the environment. Gupta explained that CumuLogic gives IT administrators the ability to do things like determine application lifecycles, establish permissions and transition environments from dev-test to production — all while giving end users the self-service, automated experience they expect from a PaaS offering.

As anyone following cloud computing over the past several weeks has noticed, however, options for Java PaaS are proliferating fast.  Among the offerings now supporting Java applications are Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk, Google App Engine, VMforce, CloudBees, Makara and Windows Azure. But each product differs in terms of where they’re hosted, what frameworks and stacks they support, and whether they also support additional programming languages. Gupta thinks CumuLogic can carve out a niche serving the likely sizable population of companies, service providers and ISVs that want to support legacy Java applications in the cloud, which probably is true for the time being until customers start writing new applications in today’s popular web languages such as Ruby and PHP. If that time comes, he added, CumuLogic is willing to look at expanding its scope.

Java image courtesy of Flickr user Dominic’s pics.

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Coskata has gotten a letter of intent from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a $250 million loan guarantee to build a plant to make ethanol from woody biomass. The plant will have the capacity to make 55 million gallons per year. Coskata’s plant plans seriously stalled during the recession, and Coskata has been waiting for this loan guarantee to come through. The company is well-known for touting a $1 per gallon production price and its backers including Khosla Ventures, General Motors, and Advanced Technology Ventures.

The USDA also awarded Enerkem a conditional commitment for an $80 million loan guarantee to build a 10 million-gallon-per-year refinery for making ethanol out of municipal solid waste. Enerkem, which uses a thermochemical trash-to-syngas process, was already awarded a $50 million Department of Energy grant, and also raised funding from trash giant Waste Management, Cycle Capital, Rho Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures and BDR Capital.

At the same time, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is awarding a $241 million loan guarantee — its first for a biofuel plant — to Diamond Green Diesel. The guarantee will help Valero build a plant in Louisiana that will make 137 million gallons of biofuel per year primarily from animal fats and used cooking oil.

The USDA said it’s not done doling out financial help to biofuel producers. It plans to announce new rules “soon” that will make more money available from the loan guarantee program, which originated from a 2008 Farm Bill.

Lining up money to build refineries has been a huge hurdle for a slew of biofuel companies in the past two years. The recession is only partly to blame. Many of these companies have encountered technical problems for converting plants and wastes into fuel. Investors once flocked to these startup companies, especially when the federal government announced goals to gradually increase the nation’s supply of renewable fuel until it hits 36 billion in 2022.

Well, hitting the goals has proven a lot more difficult. Congress initially set 100 million gallons as the 2010 target for cellulosic biofuel, but the Environmental Protection Agency cut that to 6.5 million gallons. It appears the industry might have produced less than 1 million gallons last year, reported ClimateWire, citing an estimate by a government analyst.

Just last week, reports emerged that Range Fuels, backed by venture capital firms such as Khosla Ventures, was laying off workers and shutting down its refinery in Georgia in order to tackle technical problems and raise more money. Colorado-based Range Fuels received an $80 million loan guarantee from the USDA to help fund its refinery, which began production by making methanol instead of ethanol last year.

Perhaps the USDA will see quicker success from its latest bets. Aside from Coskata and Enerkem, the agency also touted a loan guarantee conditional commitment for a $75 million loan guarantee to INEOS Bio and its partner New Planet Energy, which it first announced a few weeks ago.

INEOS Bio (which is the biofuel arm of petrochemical giant INEOS) and developer New Planet Energy say they will use the loan guarantee to build the “INEOS BioEnergy Center,” near Vero Beach, Florida, that will produce 8 million gallons of advanced biofuels and 6 MW of biomass power from plant waste and trash per year. The companies say the center will begin producing biofuels and bioenergy in 2012, and will create 175 jobs during the construction process and 50 jobs when the center is completed.

Loan guarantees are important awards for companies looking to build plants for these next-gen biofuel projects. A loan guarantee essentially is a promise by the government to back a loan if the company can’t pay it, and it enables companies to finance projects with a better interest rate and at a lower cost.

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Silicon Valley startup Law Pivot announced new funding and a new recommendation feature for its Quora-like Q&A service that aims to democratize access to quality legal advice. According to Nitin Gupta, Law Pivot co-founder and VP of business development, the new recommendation feature will add value to the service by helping companies target their queries to lawyers that best match their needs. Even before today’s news, though, Law Pivot has defied the odds by gaining traction in a notoriously technology-resistant profession.

Law Pivot targets technology startups without large legal budgets by letting them pose questions via the web service, which are then answered by Law Pivot’s stable of qualified lawyers. It all sounds great, although Gupta himself — a former lawyer — acknowledges that the legal industry is typically among the last to adopt new technologies. An ongoing shift away from the traditional billable-hours model was accelerated by the economic downturn, however, and now Gupta says “[L]aw firms are realizing that they have to change their ways.”

According to Gupta, Law Pivot has attracted participation from many skilled attorneys, including senior partners at large firms. He attributes the interest to the fact that Law Pivot allows lawyers to expose themselves to new clients more efficiently, as opposed to traditional methods such as attending networking events or doing speaking engagements. Many lawyers have begun to drum up new business by answering questions on Quora and LinkedIn, he says, but Law Pivot gives them the opportunity to do so in a confidential, controlled manner. And when Law Pivot ultimately starts charging for the service, the attorneys will get paid, too.

In this case, what’s good for lawyers is also good for startups. Customers, which include Ooyala and TweetSwirl, can get multiple answers to their questions for a fraction of the price it normally would cost and can establish long-term relationships with an attorney without the legwork normally associated with finding legal counsel.

I asked Gupta about a handful of ethical considerations — including conflict of interest and malpractice liability — that could negatively affect the quality of Law Pivot’s service, but he didn’t seem too concerned. He explained that attorneys understand the rules around concerns, and know that they need to take the appropriate steps to mitigate them, just like they would with in-person client consultations. Another issue that could arise revolves around payment for attorneys, as it’s possible they won’t prioritize Law Pivot questions when more-pressing or higher-paying work awaits with actual clients. For now, though, Gupta says everybody seems happy with the arrangement.

In addition to the recommendation features, Law Pivot announced $200,000 in additional funding, bringing its total to $600,000. The new money comes from Google Ventures and a handful of angel investors.

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There was good reason to expect a lower valuation from the Englewood, Colo.-based startup, Lux research analyst Samhitha Udupa told us in August. The company generated $660,000 and lost $19.89 million in 2009, and had accumulated a deficit of $50.3 million as of March 31, 2010. Still, Lux has put Gevo among its top-ranked biofuel startups for the past two years, giving it high marks for its innovative retrofit model toward cheaper production costs.

Gevo, which has backing from Khosla Ventures and Virgin Green Fund, wants to retrofit old corn ethanol plants to turn cellulosic feedstocks like agriculture waste into isobutanol, a fuel additive and precursor to plastics and other products. The startup is retrofitting an ethanol plant in Luverne, Minn. to produce about 18 million gallons of isobutanol per year, and says its retrofit model could allow it to scale up to 50 million gallons-per-year for about $24 million, or 100 million gallons for $40 million to $45 million.

Empty ethanol plants aren’t necessarily hard to come by — oil refining giant Valero bought up seven plants from bankrupt corn-to-ethanol maker VeraSun in 2009. If Gevo meets its new IPO targets, it could command a market value of $349 million, according to Renaissance Capital. The company booked $2 million in sales for the fiscal year ending in September 2010 and has said it has letters of intent from customers including chemical company Lanxess, French oil giant Total’s subsidiary Total Petrochemicals USA, plastic maker Toray Industries, airline company United Air Lines and oil industry technology developer CDtech.

One big question is whether Gevo will tackle the biofuel market right away, or focus on providing isobutanol for the plastics and chemicals industries. The company got EPA clearance to sell its isobutanol as a fuel additive in November, but it is also looking to supply makers of plastics, fibers, rubber and other polymers.

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The financing isn’t KLD Energy’s first. Last Summer the electric vehicle tech maker raised $4.9 million in equity, and then another $2.8 million in equity and debt earlier this month. KLD also announced a $1 million Series A financing round in 2009, and regulatory filings show a pair of $2 million equity raises during the first few months of 2010.

KLD Energy makes an electric drive system that includes a battery, battery management system, electric motor and motor controller. The company says its technology can give electric two- and three-wheeled vehicles speed and performance capabilities on par with gas-powered counterparts. KLD’s system has no transmission, has high frequency and low RPM, and uses a computerized controller.

Ferber told us last summer that KLD planned to build its business by first deploying its system in electric three-wheelers and scooters internationally (starting in Asia and South America), and targeting the electric scooter market in the U.S. through a deal with Vietnamese scooter manufacturer Sufat (with a starting scooter price of $3,288). KLD Energy offers the technology for licensing, while its subsidiary KLD Motors America manufactures electric motors using a nano-crystalline composite material at a facility in Vinh Phuc, Vietnam.

As we’ve noted before, companies that move early and fast to dominate the EV market in China — which has significant government support on its side and could reach $220 billion by 2030 — could use the country as a springboard for a broader international play.

But remember it’s not exactly easy to be a startup electric scooter maker. The business costs a lot of capital (as you can see by the fund-raising), and it’s a field that has no shortage of casualties (Vectrix closed up shop in 2009 but has more recently emerged). There’s also a lot of competition from players like Brammo, Zero Motorcycles, UltraMotors, Mission Motors, and Vectrix (and that’s only the startups).

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As Swoboda explained it to me, Intematix has developed an LED product that layers phosphor onto a material that separates it from the blue LED energy source, so LEDs made with ChromaLit have their blue light and white light separated. In most traditional LEDs, blue chips are actually coated with the phosphor compound. The result of ChromaLit, according to Intematix, is that LED makers can have more flexibility with lighting quality, and color, and can make LEDs that are both more efficient and have a lower cost.

“Rarely do LED makers talk about improvements in the phosphor performance,” says Swoboda. They’ve only focused on the chip performance, which is why he thinks the product will be so interesting to the LED manufacturers.

Well, that’s the pitch anyway. Eleven-year-old Intematix will be selling ChromaLit to LED makers, but didn’t announce any major customers at launch time. The proof in how revolutionary the product is will lie in how many LED maker customers Intematix signs up.

Intematix was formed over a decade ago to work on something called “combinatorial synthesis, which is a process of doing accelerated materials discovery and development,” explained Swoboda to me. But, yeah, as you can expect, that’s a rather broad process, and revenues are in successful niche applications. It wasn’t until 2005 that Intematix focused on phosphors and solid-state lighting.

Over the decade, the company has raised several rounds of VC financing, though Swoboda declined to name how much, from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Crosslink Capital. Swoboda tells me that Intematix is also looking to raise a “pre-IPO” or mezzanine round in the first quarter of 2011, which could help the company’s potential IPO at a later date.

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Anant Agarwal of Tilera (far right) at Structure 2010

Tilera, a chip design firm that hopes to build a 200-core processor for hugely parallel compute problems, has raised $45 million in funding from investors that include Artis Capital Management, WestSummit Capital Management and Comerica Bank. The company has raised a total of $109 million, and now counts strategic investors Cisco and Samsung among its backers. We’ve covered Tilera for years, ever since I named them one of the top 5 multicore startups to watch back in 2008, then again when it released its 100-core chip.

From that story:

Tilera scoffs at quad-core machines. The company’s chips already are used by 75 customers, and come with 36, 64, and now 100 cores. Agarwal says, “The core is the new transistor.” By cramming so many cores onto its chips connected by a mesh network of interconnect that allows the cores to communicate without bottlenecks, Bob Doud, director of marketing, says that Tilera can sell its chips to folks wanting faster memcached servers or better performance at web-scale computing. The chips, which provide 1.25 GHz of performance, are no match for Intel’s workhorse Nehalem processor that can top out at 3.3GHz. But Tilera’s chips only burn 33-50 watts instead of 130 watts that top-of-the-line Nehalem silicon can.

Tilera is joining other specialty chipmakers that are betting that the rising demand for computing power can’t be met by x86 processors without consuming too much power. Other chipmakers are repurposing popular chips from the consumer world, such as Nvidia’s emphasis on GPUs or Calxeda and Marvell’s decision to bring ARM-based chips into servers (Nvidia recently joined this camp too). However, Tilera has scorned the more-popular architectures and has built its own design (it uses a RISC architecture), and it hopes to achieve 200 cores by 2013. In a call to chat about the funding, Tilera executives said the company has made progress porting common software used in networking gear and data centers to its chip and that one of the top three webscale data centers is using a server that contains Tilera chips.

Troy Bailey, VP of marketing at Tilera, dismissed the current threat of ARM-based chips, pointing out that the designs from ARM, which are more commonly used in cell phones, are not offering 64-bit processors yet. This limits their ability to run certain types of corporate software. As for other architectures, Bailey believes many different architectures will have a place in different sections of the data center. In the meantime, the $45 million for Tilera will help it pursue its original networking and embedded market while tweaking its basic design for more specific types of workloads inside hyperscale and cloud data centers. It’s a lot of money, but as we’re seeing with funding for companies such as SeaMicro or Calxeda, venture investors think it’s a big opportunity.

For more on Tilera’s position for the cloud, check out the discussion from last year’s Structure conference, where executives from SeaMicro, Tilera, ARM, Dell and VMware discussed where the hardware for computers was heading.

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