Can quantum computing be the key to a much safer power grid? A California startup, GridCOM, plans to show just how quantum encryption could be a nearly fail-proof shield against cybersecurity breaches. Read more »
When planning our solar panel home project in 2011, we figured on paper that it would take nearly a dozen years to break even on the investment. Turns out that adding an electric vehicle has cut that figure roughly in half. Read more »
An annual Stanford University startup competition awarded $150,000 in prize money on Friday to ideas in construction engineering and medical devices, among others. Read more »
At our current pace of consumption, the world’s demands for compute power will quickly outpace the energy provided by our data centers. The solution is a global smart grid, and Europe provides a model for what that might look like. Read more »
Mark Zuckerberg’s immigration reform group Fwd.us is losing two big players this week: Elon Musk and David Sacks. A bad sign for the Valley’s latest political group? Read more »
Capturing energy from light and heat using tiny antennas could be a way to produce solar energy at a lower cost, and capture and reuse waste heat from industrial processes. They’re still in the prototype phase. Read more »
Algorithms to manage connected thermostats and collect their data have become a hot property in 2013. Alarm.com snaps up startup EnergyHub for its thermostat management software. Read more »
Following the Fisker debacle, another auto maker with a government loan has stopped operations. Vehicle Production Group, which made natural gas and gas-powered vans for disabled passengers, says it’s closed up shop. Read more »
Google, NASA, USGS and TIME have released a set of photos that show a “picture of Earth through time.” It is stunning to see Amazon rainforest shrink and a glacier vanish. Impressive Read more »
Combine the internet of things and Numenta’s machine learning algorithms and a new world of possibilities emerge. In this week’s podcast we cover machines that will tell you before they break and fields that ask for water. Read more »
Tesla stock jumped almost 30 percent in after hour trading on the news that electric car maker Tesla has delivered a profit for the first time. Read more »
Tesla hit its goal of the first profit in its 10-year history, and also delivered a record revenue, and boosted its guidance of Model S car sales by 1,000, to 21,000 for the year. Read more »
Tesla is about to announce what is says will be one of the best quarters in the company’s history, reaching profitability for the first time. But Tesla’s ambitions are much higher than its current $6.4 billion marketcap. Read more »
The leading energy data startups Nest and Opower have quietly started to look more like competitors, though with some significant differences. Read more »
Android @Home has been missing in action ever since it was announced in 2011. There’s a good chance that this will change at next week’s Google I/O conference. Read more »
We’ve got the results of our survey on how Fisker’s struggles could affect the electric car market, government incentives and cleantech investing. Check out my 21-page report I wrote for GigaOM Pro, and some of the teasers in this post. Read more »
Learning thermostat maker Nest has acquired a Boston-based energy data startup called MyEnergy. The company will help Nest develop its energy data services and continue its missions of working directly with the consumer to reduce home energy consumption. Read more »
The Tesla CEO says he’s weighing a form of autonomous driving technology that would do away with the expensive laser tracking systems adopted by most automakers and instead uses cameras to sense the car’s surroundings. Read more »
Can a Valley-backed startup help usher in a transition to plant-based proteins dominating the meat counter? Read more »
After reducing production and costs and closing a big solar panel factory, First Solar says it’s done a better job of managing its supply and has sold out of its production through nearly the end of the third quarter of this year. Read more »
Does Intel still stand a chance in the highly-competitive mobile chip market? Yes, if the company’s new Silvermont chip lives up to its promise of 3x the performance of today’s Atom or 5x the power efficiency. Read more »
One of the biggest challenges for the electric car business in the U.S. has been unreasonable projections. The reality is that sales of electric cars, installations of public charging stations and the valuation of industry leader Tesla are all going up. Read more »
The city of Glendale, Arizona, could be one of the first in the U.S. to get a next-gen plant that gasifies trash and turns it into electricity. The tech is decades old, and popular in Europe, but new plants are not commonly built in the U.S. Read more »
Harvard researchers have created a working prototype of a robotic bee, although the next steps of making it wireless and giving it a powerful brain could prove challenging. Read more »
The internet of things is purportedly going to change our lives, boost our profits and create loads of economic opportunity. I don’t doubt this, but I do want to know how we’ll measure these gains. Read more »
Electric car startup Fisker Automotive, along with its plug-in sports car, is turning out to be one of the worst venture capital bets of all time. We asked GigaOM readers a variety of questions about what they think will happen to Fisker and what they think will be the broader implications of and lessons learned from Fisker’s high-profile crash and burn. Here are the results. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
SunPower is signing up residential solar leases at a nice pace in the U.S. while seeing a good demand for its highly efficient solar panels in Japan’s residential market. The company is still posting losses, though it’s doing better than in previous quarters. Read more »
We’ve all heard that following weak returns, venture capital cleantech investing has retrenched. So what’s next? A style of investing that is a whole lot more rational, return-driven, shorter timelines and capital lite. Read more »
Want to know what your power company thinks about the internet of things? If you live in Austin, you’ll know exactly what it thinks, but for everyone else my podcast with Austin Energy may still provide some valuable insights. Read more »
Here’s the details of the class action lawsuit filed against Coda Automotive that I referenced yesterday: it’s a complaint that Coda Automotive allegedly violated the WARN Act, that requires large employers to give employees 60 days written notice of mass layoffs. Read more »
Smart grid company Silver Spring Networks held its first earnings call as a public company on Wednesday, and delivered a flat quarter. It’s a hard knock life in the hardware biz. Read more »
Electric car company Coda Automotive has filed for bankruptcy, following slow sales and lawsuits. It’s the latest electric car startup to struggle and falter. Read more »
Belkin on Tuesday launched another set of products aimed at the internet of things. This time it released an electricity and water monitoring system that uses sensors and algorithms acquired from Zensi. Read more »
Like Fisker Automotive, electric car company Coda Automotive is getting hit with lawsuits. It’s got over a half dozen filed within the last couple of months. Read more »
A report on Tuesday indicates Apple has bigger plans for the car beyond a hands-free assistant app: teaming up with carmakers to offer Apple Maps and Siri on a car’s in-dash system. Read more »
Verizon is making its largest commitment to clean power to date with a planned $100 million investment into installing solar panels and fuel cells at its facilities. The company joins the league of Apple and Google with its aggressive investments in distributed, renewable energy. Read more »
After doing something similar in Belgium, Google is using its seawater-cooled data center in Hamina, southeastern Finland, as a way to solidify its presence among local startups. Read more »
While Fisker is in the spot light for failing to pay back its close to $200 million loan from the DOE, there were a half dozen other alternative car startups that wanted loans from the DOE but were rejected. Was the DOE’s ATVM performance all that bad? Read more »
IBM has a new box for the internet of things, but it’s the MQTT protocol inside that box that’s worth a long look. The protocol could become the messaging layer for the internet of things. Read more »
A Midwest startup wins a big business plan competition by showing the promise of its technology to create a longer-lasting lithium ion battery that also can charge at a faster rate than what batteries in smart phones can deliver today. Read more »
