Cathy Zoi has joined C3 as its Chief Strategy Officer following her work with Silver Lake clean energy fund Kraftwerk. She was formerly the acting under secretary for the Obama Administration. Read more »
Downtown Vegas is going personal car free (or hoping to) with the launch of Project 100, the out-there transportation service for the Downtown Project, from Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. Read more »
The Weightless SIG claims the new standard will allow for ultra-low-power transmissions at long-range and at a cheap manufacturing cost. If true, that would make the technology ideal for M2M communications. Read more »
A new software update for Jawbone’s Big Jambox brings several performance improvements. Only iOS 6.1 devices will get one of the biggest though: two extra hours of battery life on the wireless speaker. Read more »
Applied Micro, a chip company with a market cap of $500 million, is set to take on Intel and AMD with the first 64-bit, ARM-based server part that mimics an entire rack on a chip. Read more »
Tesla is offering a new financing option that will provide a lease for potential Model S customers. Leasing electric cars could help bring the technology to more mainstream car buyers. Read more »
Tesla is successfully morphing into a profitable electric car maker, while Fisker is coming ever closer to stumbling, has lost its founder and hasn’t made a car since last Summer. How did these two end up in such different places? Read more »
Battery startup Aquion Energy is raising another round of $35 million from Bill Gates and other new and existing investors. The company has been planning to build a factory in Pennsylvania that can produce its low cost power grid batteries. Read more »
If you’re successful enough to start companies like Twitter and Blogger and you move on to something new, it’s fair to say people will be watching the new venture. This time, Biz Stone is hinting at his latest project called Jelly. Read more »
Tesla’s stock hit over $46 per share on Monday on news that the company would be profitable on a GAAP basis, and ship 250 more Model S cars than expected. That’s the highest Tesla’s been since its IPO in the Summer of 2010. Read more »
Tesla Motors is cancelling its basic Model S car with the smallest battery pack due to lack of demand. Only 4 percent of Tesla customers wanted to version of the Model S with a 160 mile range. Turns out the early customers care about range. Read more »
The era of constrained resources is just beginning, so right now access to resources acts as sort of dark matter, quietly putting pressure in complex ways on how the virtual world operates. Read more »
Energy management startup People Power is back with a new remote monitoring app designed to reuse old iOS devices as security cameras. It’s a nice app and People Power’s gateway drug to the internet of things. Read more »
Want the creation story behind the Philips Hue connected light bulbs? In this week’s podcast we explore that and what people are doing with Hue and what might be next for Philips in the connected home. Read more »
Fisker doesn’t seem to have nailed an investment partner or acquirer after months of discussions, so is now cutting costs and has placed its U.S. workers on temporary unpaid leave. Read more »
Khosla Ventures’ Keith Rabois talked about startups, dealing with the press, and the Series A crunch on Wednesday in Mountain View. Here are five pieces of wisdom from the Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur. Read more »
A startup hoping to make cellulosic ethanol finally pulls its IPO plans after a year and a half. The real question is why did it ever file to go public? Read more »
Remember eSolar, the solar thermal startup incubated by Idealab, and backed by Google.org, GE, and others? It’s still here and trying to raise a $30 million round, of which it’s close almost half. Read more »
Here’s a clever idea: Piggyback the installation of connected, smart utility meters with free Wi-Fi service for outdoor use. That’s exactly what the City of Santa Clara is doing. Read more »
Silver Spring Networks has scored a deal with a Singapore utility as its first win in Asia. The company hopes other utilities in Asia will follow, given the region is supposed to have significant growth coming. Read more »
Cleantech VC is receding because of poor short-term performance – no surprise in a post-bubble field with outsized time and money requirements. The category is about to go on a walk in the woods, where innovators will blaze a new trail. Read more »
A new solar inverter has been developed by a quiet startup called Empower Micro Systems, which could land on the market by the end of the year. The company’s CCO says the tech could disrupt the landscape. Read more »
With a smaller batch of startups this spring as compared to its demo day last summer, Y Combinator is scaling back in numbers but hopefully scaling up in quality of startups. Here are our picks for the five startups to watch from the morning’s presentations. Read more »
A startup called Choose Energy is offering consumers a comparison shopping site for electricity in deregulated markets, and is building tools to help retail energy providers acquire customers. The company raised a series A round from Kleiner and Stephens Capital. Read more »
If hardware is the new software, 3-D printers are a big reason. New research holds that even enterprise-class 3-D printers will be affordable enough to be widely deployed within a few years. Read more »
If NRG Energy starts offering solar leasing options to home owners and small businesses, it would represent the mainstreaming of solar roofs and also likely disrupt the current sector filled with a variety of smaller players. Read more »
A new startup backed Turntable’s Seth Goldstein plans to make connected software without the car. Joyride is building a gaming and entertainment suite for the smartphone designed to be entirely hands-free. Read more »
Many of the first apps for Google Glass will be about consuming and sharing content on the go. But what if Google Glass could unlock control over the world of the Internet of Things both inside and outside the home? Read more »
Cleantech investment is not dead, it just requires new approaches and a recognition that the traditional oil and gas industry may very well be the best patron for cleantech development and deployment. At least for now. Read more »
Apple’s massive solar panel and fuel cell farm are now live and providing clean power for its huge data center in Maiden, North Carolina. By the end of the year 60 percent of the power for the data center will come from these sources. Read more »
The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, which is the country’s largest pension fund, has put close to a billion dollars into cleantech over the past five years and says it’s only returned a tenth of that capital. Yikes. Read more »
Want to see big data in action? When it comes to planning out data center capacity, data can influence everything from the power usage to planning for disasters. Read more »
IBM thinks the internet of things is about far more than changing the color of your light bulbs, in large-scale implementations it can prevent traffic jams, save lives and lower costs for cities. Read more »
The headline-blaring, jaw-dropping tech company crash and burn doesn’t happen all that often. But when it does, you can count on there being some similarities in leadership, transparency, and hype. Read more »
Wrapping up the first day of GigaOM’s 2013 Structure:Data conference, entrepreneurs from six startups talked about big ideas that show ideals for how to derive valuable insights from large sets of data. Read more »
What can a pair of Google engineers do with their technical prowess at home? Create an Android app that controls a lawn watering system through an Arduino board and the web! Read more »
Masabi is a U.K. startup specializing and cloud-based smartphone ticketing technologies for public transit, and it just landed a $2.8 million strategic investment led by Bill Ford’s Fontinalis Venutures. Read more »