A couple months after that, boy megastar Justin Bieber got one for his 18th birthday as a present from his manager. The car even had its television debut driven by Ashton Kutcher, playing an internet mogul, on Two and a Half Men.

Fisker’s Project Nina, later called the Atlantic, which was never manufactured.

That summer gas prices were predicted to rise about 40 percent, leading to a boost in sales of fuel-efficient cars. A year earlier, electric-car company Tesla held a blockbuster IPO, and Nissan’s low-cost electric car the LEAF had gone on sale. The country seemed like it might finally be ready for electric cars, and perhaps ready for the first car enthusiast’s plug-in hybrid, as the Fisker Karma was being called.

But the limelight was short-lived for Fisker. In the months and years that followed, the company spiraled downward, burning its dreams and reputation to the ground — just like faulty parts did to a couple of its cars. Fisker has been reported to be on the brink of bankruptcy, lawsuits are piling up, and a government hearing is reportedly in the works.

There are a lot of crash-and-burn stories in Silicon Valley. It’s in the nature of entrepreneurs, startups and investors to take risks and sometimes fail. But it’s not often that you see such a dramatic downfall.

Those that have been tarnished by Fisker’s demise include venture-capital grandaddy Kleiner Perkins; Fisker’s executives, many of whom had long distinguished careers in Detroit; and Fisker’s broker, Advanced Equities, which helped the company raise hundreds of millions of dollars and has now disbanded entirely. Fisker raised and spent more than a billion dollars over its lifetime.

A handful of celebrities and politicians that championed the company have also been caught up in its wreckage, as has the Department of Energy, which ended up loaning the company close to $200 million. The entire electric-vehicle industry could take a hit because of Fisker.

How did this do-gooder dream that was supposed to combine Silicon Valley-backed tech innovation, gorgeous design, and eco-friendly hot-rod cars turn out so horribly wrong for so many people? That’s what I’ve tried to find out in a dozen interviews in recent weeks with people at the center of the Fisker story.

Summer of 2011

It was in that summer of 2011 — even as the company outwardly was showing some signs of hitting its stride —  that I first started to wonder if something wasn’t going awfully wrong at Fisker. Mitt Romney had just announced his presidential run, a federal grand jury had indicted John Edwards, and we were enduring the second hottest summer in the U.S. on record.

I had been following Fisker since its founding four years earlier, and the company was on the cusp of delivering its first electric hybrid sports car, the Karma, to customers. Though the delivery was running 18 months behind schedule, there was a sense of anticipation among the media, investors and car enthusiasts.

Then two things happened that gave me pause. An auto industry executive that I trusted made me an offhand bet that included the idea that Fisker’s second car — then called Project Nina and partly funded by a Department of Energy-approved $529 million loan — might never see the light of day. Fisker had deep pockets, such high-profile investors and so much media hype — I really hadn’t considered something so shocking. Clearly I lost that bet.

The second unsettling event of the ’11 summer was when Fisker invited the media to watch “the delivery” (re-enacted reality TV- show style) of one of the first Karmas to Kleiner Perkins partner Ray Lane. Outside Kleiner’s offices, in the hot parking lot, Lane held up the keys in celebration of the delivery and talked about the joys of driving his Karma as a large group of photographers, reporters and TV crews captured the moment.

Afterwards, I did a long interview with Lane back in the air-conditioned comfort of the Kleiner offices, where he explained to me his counterintuitive thesis for backing Fisker: Either get the valuation high enough so they don’t get crushed on dilution or get low-cost loans that are high leverage for equity investors. “My partners thought I was out of my mind. But I had a thesis,” said Lane.

Kleiner Partner Ray Lane receives the keys for his Fisker Karma, Summer 2011.

The media learned a couple weeks later that the Karma hadn’t received any of the needed regulatory approvals — so the car wasn’t legally driveable on public roads. It wouldn’t get full certification from the EPA until three months later.

The early days

But to understand Fisker’s missteps you have to go back to at least 2006. Fisker’s founder Henrik Fisker was a well-known car designer formerly with BMW and Ford who had his name on hot cars like the Aston Martin DB9 and the BMW Z8 Roadster. In 2004 he started a luxury-car company called Fisker Coachbuild with his long-time buddy Bernhard Koehler, who was later his co-founder at Fisker. In late 2006, Henrik Fisker started working on a contract basis with Tesla, creating designs for Tesla’s second car, a sedan, later called the Model S.

This was also the year that Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth debuted, and some in the Hollywood elite were starting to embrace hybrid cars and eco causes. Henrik Fisker has told reporters that he was inspired to build Fisker Automotive after seeing DiCaprio drive a Prius to the Oscars and thinking he should have something more high-end. DiCaprio later became an investor and marketing partner to the company.

In 2006 and 2007, cleantech investing was the all the rage among VCs. Research firm the Cleantech Group called 2006 a “watershed period” for cleantech venture investing. VCs put $3.9 billion into global cleantech startups that year, an increase of about 50 percent over 2005. The annual investment numbers grew even more in the following years, but 2006 was a turning point.

Around that time Kleiner Perkins had a plan to bet a third of its fund on cleantech investing. More than a decade ago, Kleiner made a fortune from investments like Google and Amazon, and in the early 2000′s was trying to find the next big thing. Some of the Valley’s most well-known investors like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and VantagePoint Capital Partners were also excited about cleantech back then, and had decided to put millions into Tesla, led by charismatic PayPal co-founder Elon Musk.

At some point at the very end of 2007, Kleiner became Fisker’s early flagship venture backer. Musk told PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy last year that Kleiner actually tried to invest in Tesla before Fisker, during Tesla’s Series C round, but Musk said that Kleiner wouldn’t let him choose the Kleiner Partner for the board seat. Musk wanted John Doerr, but Kleiner’s transportation guy at the time was Lane, who later joined the board of Fisker. Musk ended up going with VantagePoint, and Kleiner ended up funding Fisker. Clearly Tesla’s VC funding, followed by its IPO in the summer of 2010, were significant motivators for Fisker’s investors.

Tesla’s Roadster, with VC-backing, was first delivered to customers in Feb 2008.

In early 2007, after a chance encounter with the girlfriend of then-Quantum Technologies CEO Alan Niedzwiecki, Henrik Fisker and Niedzwiecki decided to meet for lunch to discuss the possibility of launching an electric car based on the Quantum drivetrain. In late Summer of that year, Fisker Automotive was officially born as a joint venture between Fisker Coachbuild and Quantum.

The idea at the time was ambitious, exciting, and perhaps even a little threatening to potential competitors. A little over a year after Henrik Fisker did design work for Musk’s company, Tesla sued Fisker (Jalopnik called it the world’s most expensive girl fight) for breach of contract and allegedly using the design work to raise funds from venture capitalists and launch a company. The suit went to arbitration, and the arbitrator sided with Fisker.

The heart of Fisker’s business model was in that early deal with Quantum. The idea was to design a gorgeous car, and have suppliers like Quantum provide the technology because off-the-shelf parts from suppliers would help keep costs down.

But there were problems with this strategy: Sometimes, those parts had to be custom-made to fit the design vision, which resulted in higher prices for Fisker. Other times, parts were delivered late or, worse, faulty, but Fisker was locked in to those supplier relationships. Sources close to Fisker have also said that many of the parts were owned by the suppliers themselves, so Fisker didn’t own a lot of the internal technology.

Compare that approach with Tesla‘s strategy: Tesla has invested millions of dollars to amass electric car intellectual property. It can make money selling its core technology to other large auto makers like Toyota and Daimler, and a decent amount of Tesla’s value is in its tech IP.

Toyota’s electric RAV-4 has Tesla tech inside.

Indeed, Fisker’s business model wasn’t the type that funders in the Valley typically like — it’s the polar opposite of the ‘Intel inside’ approach. That so many investors were so eager to back the company has left many in the electric car and tech industries scratching their heads over the years. “It would have only taken a couple a phone calls to industry veterans to have prevented all of this,” says electric car advocate Chelsea Sexton, adding “there’s no excuse for not doing homework. It appears none was done.”

Fast forward to the end of 2012, when Fisker was desperately searching for a lifeline to help it survive, and was bidding itself to Chinese auto giants. Media reports have said, and I’ve heard as well, that the Chinese firms were partly scared off after they took a look under the hood and found that Fisker didn’t own much of its own technology.

Funding an electric car startup from scratch

One of the things Fisker will be most remembered for is the huge amount of capital it tapped into — the at least $1.2 billion it raised and the close to $200 million loan it received from the government.

When Fisker first showed off the Karma at the Detroit Auto Show in January 2008, Kleiner Perkins investors were front and center. Lane told the Wall Street Journal that their early investment in Fisker was more than $10 million and was one of the firm’s bigger investments at the time. Lane also said that the Fisker deal was one of the first in which former Vice President and Kleiner advisor Al Gore provided advice.

But those funds were just the initial drop in the bucket for what Fisker would ask for to grow and produce its cars. In the following years, Fisker raised venture rounds of around $65 million and $86 million. But venture firms couldn’t supply all of the funds for building an electric car, which can cost a billion dollars.

Part of the answer came from the U.S. government. When President Obama took office in 2009, he pledged to support electric cars and low-emission vehicles. His administration used the massive stimulus package to create green jobs and build a so-called clean energy economy. But even before that, a program called the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing, or ATVM, was created in 2007 and funded by Congress in 2008 and offered loans for companies making vehicles in the U.S. that had better mileage or reduced dependency on foreign oil.

In the summer of 2009, the first wave of ATVM conditional loans were announced, and went to Nissan, Ford and Tesla. Soon after, Fisker itself got approval for a conditional loan of $529 million. Fisker’s goal at that time was to produce 11,000 to 15,000 Karmas per year by September 2011, and 75,000 to 100,000 Project Ninas (later called the Atlantic) in 2012. The DOE ended up only delivering about $200 million of that loan after Fisker didn’t meet milestones for its Karma. Fisker delivered none of its Ninas, later called the Atlantic.

Much of the political reporting that will come out on Fisker, as well as a planned upcoming hearing on April 24, will likely focus on how Fisker got approval from the DOE. Was there cronysim, and did Gore play a role? In the past I’ve looked into rumors suggesting Fisker got the loan because it agreed to build a factory in Vice President Joe Biden’s home state and deliver Delaware green jobs. I’ve never found a direct connection there.

But I would imagine that, as with Solyndra, the DOE and the administration trusted the company’s backers and liked the idea of a beautifully designed, American-made electric car. Fisker fit into their thesis of using public funds to stimulate the clean-energy economy and create green jobs.

Joe Biden speaking at Solyndra’s ground breaking in August 2010

The broker

Getting the conditional loan was a key turning point for Fisker. It gave the company clout and the ability to raise additional funds. Soon after Fisker received the loan agreement, it started working more closely with a broker in Chicago called Advanced Equities.

Over the course of three years, according to my sources, brokers at Advanced Equities raised somewhere between $600 million and $800 million of Fisker’s over $1 billion in funding. The sources say Advanced Equities sold Fisker shares to over a thousand wealthy individuals. These aren’t professional investors that are used to taking on startup risk; they are people who did well in life and wanted to invest in the tech-driven dream of a sleek electric car.

One of those investors was DiCaprio, and numerous sources close to the company have told me that Kleiner Perkins partners Doerr and Lane put millions of dollars of their own money into Fisker. Another person that Fisker listed as a Director on a funding filing in late 2011 was Timothy Shriver. In a recorded internal sales call with Advanced Equity brokers from early 2010 that we’ve obtained, Advanced Equities co-founders tell their brokers that the Fisker opportunity is such a good one that they should bring the deal to their best customers.

Of course, many of the investors through Advanced Equities weren’t household names in San Francisco or Los Angeles. Chicago’s prepaid college saving’s fund, the Illinois Student Assistance Commission, invested $10 million. An investor named Daniel Wray invested $210,000, and later sued the company and its broker.

Fisker’s venture backers commonly pitched in to help Advanced Equities. Sources tell me that it wasn’t unusual for investment calls with Advanced Equities and potential investors to feature Kleiner’s Lane, as well as NEA’s Scott Sandell, sharing Fisker’s vision.

If you asked venture capitalists in the Valley around that time what they thought about Advanced Equities, a common response was that it didn’t have a very good reputation — “snake oil salesmen” was the term often used. I’ve long wondered why Kleiner and NEA would actively work with a broker that had a weak reputation. Advanced Equities brokers, for their part, made millions of dollars in sales commissions from these deals.

It wasn’t until December 2011 and into 2012 that the more dubious efforts of Advanced Equities became clearer to Fisker’s hundreds of investors. The last few hundred million dollars of Advanced Equities’ fund raising for Fisker, starting with the D-1 round, was what brokers call “pay to play.” As Fisker was running into technical, delivery and political problems, its valuation was quickly declining. But the company still needed more money, so the brokers went back to its current investors and said: Unless you give this more, your current shares will be diluted and your preferred stock will be converted to common stock.

It was essentially a gun to their heads. This is why investor Wray sued Fisker in February 2012, alleging he was on the receiving end of this tactic. In his lawsuit, he says Advanced Equities sent him a letter dated Jan. 18, 2012, stating that he needed to decide if he wanted to invest in Fisker’s next round, and pay around $84,000 by Jan. 27, 2012 — a little over a week from receiving the letter. He also says that Advanced Equities assured him that he would have anti-dilution protection. According to the audio clip from Advanced Equities’ internal sales call in early 2010, Advanced Equity leaders say that the Fisker deal will “suffer no dilution,” and was “a dream scenario.”

That dream would soon end. In September 2012 after Fisker closed on $1.2 billion in funding, the bulk of it organized by Advanced Equities, the SEC charged the broker with misleading investors when it raised money for another company back in 2009 and 2010 (Bloom Energy). Advanced settled, agreeing to pay $1 million, and its co-founders were personally fined. Two months later Advanced Equities closed up shop.

The public problems start

In the summer of 2011, Fisker cars finally start rolling off the production line — Lane got one of the first, and so did DiCaprio, Gore and other luminaries. By October, Fisker said about 40 Karmas had been shipped to the U.S. from the factory in Finland, and before the year was out, at least 200 people had Karmas.

But this was still a lower number than expected — delayed regulatory approval was part of the problem. As a result of the delays, Fisker’s battery supplier, A123 Systems, had to lower its yearly revenue guidance.

Ray Lane’s Fisker Karma, Summer 2011

At the end of the year, a dark cloud appeared over Fisker’s celebrity parade. In December, 239 Fiskers were recalled because of a faulty battery hose clamp. The news was alarming, but Tesla had faced the same type of recalls in its early days, and so customers and the media were somewhat forgiving.

Then another red flag: As the ball dropped on 2011, I noticed that Fisker was quietly raising more money using Advanced Equities. That seemed unusual because the company was now delivering its cars, meaning it could bring in revenue, and it had already raised so much. It would take another month for me to figure out why.

Fisker in February 2012 confirmed media reports that its DOE loan had been frozen after $192 million because it hadn’t hit the milestones with its Karma. The last payment Fisker had received was all the way back in May 2011. Many of Fisker’s investors are now wondering why the DOE wasn’t more vocal about the frozen loan when it happened back then, as they had continued to fund the company based on the assumption that the DOE loan was still moving forward.

Regardless, the confirmation of the frozen loan kicked off one of the worst years — both self-inflicted and just plain bad luck — for a startup I have ever seen.

Founder Henrik Fisker stepped down as CEO, and he was replaced by an auto executive from Chrysler. Six months later that executive was replaced by a third CEO, who previously worked on the Volt at GM. Fisker stopped work on its second car and laid off all the workers in its Delaware factory. (When this story was published, the DOE still has a note on its ATVM page saying Fisker created 2,000 permanent jobs in Wilmington, Del.)

In the spring of 2012, Consumer Reports bought a Karma, and when it broke down after less than 200 miles, the magazine understandably gave it one of the worst reviews in automotive history. One of the problems with the Consumer Reports’ test car involved the battery. But the battery issue turned out to be much more widespread that just the review car, and Fisker’s battery supplier decided to replace faulty battery cells to the tune of $55 million.

Later that year, A123 Systems itself went bankrupt, causing more problems for Fisker. Fisker claimed that A123 Systems owed it $140 million, but a bankruptcy settlement reduced that to a paltry $15 million. Chinese giant Wanxiang wound up buying A123 Systems; adding insult to injury for Fisker, sources have told me that Wanxiang also looked at, but seems to have passed on investing in or buying the electric car company.

That summer, Fisker also recalled a cooling fan after it caused a slow-burning fire in a Karma in Woodside, Calif. Watch the disturbing video of a fireman putting out the flames. In hindsight, Fisker is lucky no one was killed while driving its vehicles.

Then there was the just plain terrible luck for the ironically named Karma: Super Storm Sandy wiped out 338 of its Karmas in storage in New Jersey. The cars first drowned, and then caught on fire — salt water damage caused a short circuit that was spread to other cars by high winds, Fisker said at the time.

With all of this happening in public — and in a presidential election year — Fisker’s struggles became highly politicized. The company was mentioned numerous times in presidential debates and speeches leading up to the election. Republican nominee Romney called Fisker and other DOE-supported companies losers.

Where did all the money go?

Fisker had a phenomenal amount of funding in its coffers — so where did all the money go? It’s no doubt expensive to launch a car company, but the way Fisker spent the money didn’t seem to create much lasting value.

The company didn’t seem to invest substantially in technology innovation or tech IP, and seemed to spend a disproportionate amount on suppliers. For example, numerous sources have told me that the company paid upfront for 15,000 of some of the parts for its planned 15,000 Karmas. It ended up only selling around 2,000 of the cars. I’ve also heard that Fisker paid some funds upfront to have BMW make engines for the 100,000 Nina cars it hoped to produce — in the end, Fisker didn’t deliver a single Nina.

Costs to build each Karma also creeped up because the company missed its volume targets, and because engineering had to change designs around supplier constraints. No wonder the company ended up adding $20,000 to its initial sale price.

Expensive hires may also have sucked away chunks of Fisker’s funding: Sources I’ve talked to say that Fisker filled the upper levels of the company with seasoned auto executives from Detroit. At the high point of Fisker, the company had around 300 employees, plus dozens of contract staff. Bringing in a certain amount of the old guard could help a car startup ramp up quickly, and also impress potential investors with “industry names.” But those people are also used to big auto-industry budgets that included extensive travel and salaries — that’s the opposite life of a tech startup.

The end

The bottom line for Fisker: It sucked down over a billion dollars and delivered around 2,000 cars to customers that now have few places to turn if those cars have mechanical problems.

At Kleiner Perkins, the dust is still settling. Reuters reported earlier this year that Kleiner partner Doerr apologized to his limited partners (groups that put money into VC funds) for a weak fund performance and promised to do better in the future. Lane has transitioned away from bringing in new investments for Kleiner’s future fund. Spooked by bad deals, venture firms across the board pulled back on cleantech investing by a third in 2012.

There are political repercussions, too. The DOE was on the hot seat when Solyndra went bankrupt, and now will be equally under scrutiny over Fisker. The ATVM program has essentially been frozen, and the DOE says that despite the fact that it has $16.6 billion remaining in the fund and seven applications pending, it will not award any more loans.

The worst part of the Fisker story could be the fallout for electric cars. Helping reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil and lowering the carbon emissions of personal transportation is necessary. Introducing more electric cars is one way to do that. But with the industry in such a fragile, nascent stage, Fisker could wind up delivering the knock-out blow.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Green IT Overview, Q2 2010
• Electric vehicle outlook: 2012–2017
• Green IT Q1: Cleantech Breaking Out — and Bracing for Hard Times

Since I don’t really review devices like my talented colleague Kevin Tofel, I will restrict myself to things I like and dislike about Facebook Home. And then, I will share my quick impressions of the actual hardware. So here we go – and please don’t treat this as anything more than just my impressions!

What I like about Facebook Home (on First)

1. Facebook Home is visually very attractive and makes Android a lot more attractive and qualifies for “good” sobriquet. I wouldn’t expect anything else considering that the company has been stockpiling nuclear arms of design war. It reminds me of some of the elements we loved in Al Gore’s book, Our Choice, which was published to the iPad by Push Pop Press. (Facebook acquired that company and Push Pop co-founder Mike Matas works at Facebook.)
2. Facebook has made Android faster by removing a lot of crud that typically ships with Android on carrier-branded phones. It has taken many design and use-case cues from iOS and Facebook’s iOS app and applies them to the Android environment. For instance, notifications are much more improved, not just for Facebook but also for other applications.
3. The check-ins and process of taking photos are more tightly integrated and are simpler to use.
4. Facebook Home took its inspiration from the “Launcher” category that is extremely popular in Asia and made a far superior product. Home is a very polished product and focuses the phone owner’s attention on all the right things. (I remember buying similar skins for Windows XP and Windows 98, back in the day when it was a thing to do.)

What I dislike about Facebook Home (on First)

1. For a service that is supposed to bring us updates in real time, this isn’t close enough and it is clearly working on Facebook Time. Facebook hasn’t been able to fine tune its algorithm and as a result it shows only a very specific kind of update — big bold pictures — from your newsfeed. You can actually feel the slow speed (and infrequency of updates) of the feed when you compare it with the desktop feed which moves at a faster pace.
2. It is still hard to do many of the basic Facebook tasks on Facebook Home.
3. While I appreciate the unified messaging option of Facebook Home, the new “Chat Heads” feature is not as easy to use. For example, If you hit five (or more conversations) it takes over the entire screen. It is quite intrusive and really hard to get rid of the chat screen.
4. I found navigating between Facebook Home and the Android environment a little confusing and jarring — enough to feel the difference.

And now about the hardware:

1. HTC First has a 4.3-inch display. It is powered by a 1.4 GHz dual-core Qualcomm 400 chip and it comes with 16 GB of storage and an adequate 1 GB of memory. It uses Android 4.1 Jelly Bean as the base operating system.
2. The phone has a soft-touch rubber design which is easy to grip and it is something I appreciate because my phone keeps dropping from my hand. In this age of giant Android phones (and phablets), the 4.3 inch screen device is actually a pleasant change.
3. Despite the company’s claims, the HTC First isn’t very responsive and feels underpowered. I have used the Nexus 4 and let’s just say, this feels like a mid-range smartphone at best.
4. It started out as very responsive, but over a couple of days of use, I felt that swiping between apps, messages and photos wasn’t as brisk.
5. The device’s look is a little dated and reminds me of iPhone 3GS.
6. It gets really hot and the battery isn’t anything to write home about.
7. AT&T’s LTE network isn’t as good as advertised, slowing down in places during my tests which also showed connection drops.

Bottom line: I am unlikely to use this device. But if you are a Facebook addict, are on a budget and have solid AT&T coverage in your area, this might be a good one for you.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Mobile 2012 and beyond

Plans for the soon-to-be-rebranded Al Jazeera America include a fresh slate of content which may not have room for previously-existing Current programming — but you know who doesn’t seem that worried about it? One of Current’s biggest personalities.

Cenk Uygur, of the nightly live series The Young Turks, came to Current after his relationship with MSNBC went south last year; since then, the opinionated host has become one of Current’s most-watched anchors.

But that’s not why Uygur seems extremely confident about his show’s potentially uncertain fate. See, The Young Turks was born initially as a radio series in 2002, then expanded to YouTube in December 2005. Currently, TYT has nearly 500,000 YouTube subscribers and over 900,000,000 views on its primary channel. Or, as Uygur puts it on Twitter:

For knucklehead conservatives making jokes about @theyoungturks because of @current sale, TYT has over 40 million views a month online.

— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) January 3, 2013

Facts: @theyoungturks network has over a billion views online, 40 mil views, 15.5 million unique viewers and 100 mil min. viewed per month.

— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) January 3, 2013

With our 15.5 million unique viewers a month online, @theyoungturks is much bigger than Rush Limbaugh and almost any cable news show on TV.

— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) January 3, 2013

These stats refer to The Young Turks‘s YouTube channel, not the Current series of the same name, which will continue for at least the next three months before the conclusion of the Al Jazeera takeover.

However, there’s been some confusion about the difference between TYT the YouTube channel and TYT the live Current show. This lead to questions about whether or not The Young Turks had been sold to Al Jazeera along with Current — questions which Uygur addressed in a video released on Thursday, frankly entitled “TYT Is Independent, Not Owned by Current or Al Jazeera.”

In the video, Uygur refers to the connection between the two iterations of the TYT brand as “a mutually beneficial relationship and we hope to continue that.” He then showed off a little bit of Arabic.

According to the New York Times, the Al Jazeera acquisition does mean that layoffs are coming for at least some Current staffers. But Uygur will still have a platform for getting his voice out — and more importantly, an audience.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• When video gets democratized, who wins and who loses?

This news will likely come as a disappointment to Internet-savvy news junkies, and it’s a departure from Al Jazeera’s current distribution model. Shunned by big cable service providers, Al Jazeera has long streamed its English-language programming live through sites like YouTube as well as dedicated apps for mobile and connected devices.

However, through the acquisition of Current.tv, Al Jazeera is gaining cable distribution to some 40 million households through service providers like Comcast, DirecTV, Dish, Verizon FIOS and AT&T Uverse. Only Time Warner Cable decided to ditch the channel, something that was possible through an exit clause in the event of an ownership change.

And with new carriers, there are new responsibilities. Cable TV providers don’t like to compete with free online distribution, and instead want content to be made available only to authenticated subscribers. It’s too early to tell whether Al Jazeera America will go down that route, but it’s certainly a possibility, as Peter Kafka mused today.

Still, there is good news for cord cutters: Al Jazeera will continue to operate its Al Jazeera English channel as a separate entity to target English-language audiences around the world. And Al Jazeera English will continue to stream online, at least for the time being. Plus, with Al Jazeera staffing up in the U.S., it’s likely that there is going to be more coverage of U.S. news events on Al Jazeera English as well.

Now, there may be some uncertainty during the transition period. Current.tv is supposed to wind down its own programming over the next three months. At that point, it is going to be replaced by an Al Jazeera English feed until Al Jazeera America is fully operational and ready to launch in a few months. A spokesperson couldn’t rule out that during that transition, the Al Jazeera English live stream could become unavailable to U.S. audiences.

But even without a dedicated Al Jazeera America live stream, there is hope that the network is going to offer online audiences more than competitors like CNN, Fox News and MSNBC have been willing to do. In the past few years, Al Jazeera English has embraced a wide range of online tools and platforms, ranging from crowdsourced video subtitles to Reddit chats to social media in crisis hotspots. it’s unlikely that the network is going to ditch these efforts once it launches in the U.S. in honest later this year.

Want to learn more about ways to watch news without paying for cable? Then check out my ebook Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable.

The round was led by True North Venture Partners, the $300 million fund started by Ahearn and Ahearn will join the Board of Directors of Harvest Power. True North Venture Partners officially launched Summer of 2011 and this is one of the first investments I’ve heard coming from them. Oil refinery firm American Refining and DAG Ventures also participated in the round.

Trash giant Waste Management was a previous investor, but isn’t named in this round on the release. Back in January 2010 Harvest Power also announced a deal with Waste Management to access organic waste (feedstock for its recycling processes) from Waste Management’s operations across the U.S. and Canada, but I’m also not sure on the status of that deal. I’ll update this when I know more.

Founded in 2008, Harvest Power says it’s sold “millions of bags” of organic soils and mulches in 2011 and is in the process of building “two of the largest foodwaste to energy facilities in North America.” The company plans to complete construction of those plants this year, and has been operating seven other smaller sites.

Harvest Power previously raised $51 million about a year ago, putting its total funding raised to over $160 million. The company used part of that money to add recycling technologies, such as a high-temperature process to create synthesis gas. Syngas can be used to produce electricity, transportation fuels and other chemical products.

While Harvest Power Harvest is developing its own technology, it also makes use of others’ know-how. The company previously teamed up with Germany’s GICON Bioenergie to engineer and build processing plants using GICON’s anaerobic digestion technology.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the company — which makes money by selling fertilizer and power, as well as charging waste pick-up fees — generated less than $50 million in revenue in 2011, and expects to generate between $75 million and $100 million this year.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Locating data centers in an energy-constrained world
• Key technologies for the smart city
• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry

In a joint message featured on the front page of Current.com, Gore, the network’s chairman, and Hyatt, who took over again as CEO in recent months, tell viewers:

We created Current to give voice to those Americans who refuse to rely on corporate-controlled media and are seeking an authentic progressive outlet. We are more committed to those goals today than ever before.

Current was also founded on the values of respect, openness, collegiality, and loyalty to our viewers. Unfortunately these values are no longer reflected in our relationship with Keith Olbermann and we have ended it.

We are moving ahead by honoring Current’s values. Current has a fundamental obligation to deliver news programming with a progressive perspective that our viewers can count on being available daily — especially now, during the presidential election campaign. Current exists because our audience desires the kind of perspective, insight and commentary that is not easily found elsewhere in this time of big media consolidation.

They also introduced his replacement, former New York Gov. Eliott Spitzer, and went on at length about the wonders of an election-year Current sans Olbermann. (Safe to say, after his performance with Sean Parker at SxSW, the former VP won’t be doing his own interview show any time soon.) What they don’t really address is their own role in a hiring that seemed like a stretch when you got beyond Olbermann’s liberal status and his following.

Olbermann’s reply via Twitter was swift, a series of 11 tweets summed up in one long statement promising legal action:

I’d like to apologize to my viewers and my staff for the failure of Current TV.

Editorially, Countdown had never been better. But for more than a year I have been imploring Al Gore and Joel Hyatt to resolve our issues internally, while I’ve been not publicizing my complaints, and keeping the show alive for the sake of its loyal viewers and even more loyal staff. Nevertheless, Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt, instead of abiding by their promises and obligations and investing in a quality news program, finally thought it was more economical to try to get out of my contract.

It goes almost without saying that the claims against me implied in Current’s statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently. To understand Mr. Hyatt’s ‘values of respect, openness, collegiality and loyalty,’ I encourage you to read of a previous occasion Mr. Hyatt found himself in court for having unjustly fired an employee. That employee’s name was Clarence B. Cain. http://nyti.ms/HueZsa

In due course, the truth of the ethics of Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt will come out. For now, it is important only to again acknowledge that joining them was a sincere and well-intentioned gesture on my part, but in retrospect a foolish one. That lack of judgment is mine and mine alone, and I apologize again for it.

Olbermann and Hyatt gave every appearance of a meeting of the minds when I interviewed them together at paidContent 2011. They were still in a honeymoon phase and Olbermann, who stayed off video for several months between MSNBC and Current, was months away from launching his show. That show involved rebuilding studios, hiring a New York staff and more.

It was an attention-getting move that caused some to think again about Current and certainly hiring Olbermann put the network, which has yet to have its real break through, in the spotlight. But it also put it on the hot seat. Building a network on ideals, worth a shot. Hinging it on one volatile personality, not so much. Olbermann is right when he points to a resume that show how long he’s worked with some people and when he challenges his labeling as peripatetic. He’s also charming, amusing, incredibly bright, knows his baseball, reads James Thurber stories out loud, and has seen the Book of Mormon an unfair number of times.

But he’s also had a series of confrontations and missteps that often make the story more about him, than about any network or its goals.

Al Gore and Joel Hyatt knew that when they courted him. Whatever the reasons for the ultimate split — and I doubt it’s as one-sided as either party wants it to appear — they had to know honeymoons end.

As for Olbermann, he may miss cable networks for a while but he always has the Net.

Olbermann and Hyatt spoke at our paidContent 2011 conference, where they explained how Olbermann joining Current was a match made in heaven.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Connected Consumer Q2: Digital music meets the cloud; e-book growth explodes

Here’s how it works, according to Roger Rosner, Apple’s VP of productivity software: Textbooks appear on the shelf, and then you tap to launch. The books occupy the full screen and can be paired with embedded video content and introductory movies. Multitouch is used to navigate textbook pages and can also help manipulate integrated 3-D models for biology books, for example. These books definitely go well beyond static text and even most media-rich e-books that we have seen to date.

Rotating books let you focus on text, and there are built-in, linked glossaries and tablets of content to make navigation a snap, plus everything’s searchable. It looks like Al Gore’s Our Choice, which we covered in depth at launch.

Textbooks in iBooks 2 also incorporate highlighting, note-taking and interactive Q&A sections at the end of each chapter, which also provide immediate feedback: No more hunting for a key in a separate book or appendix to see how you did. Notes and highlights are automatically turned into flash cards for study purposes. In short, it looks like Apple has taken a lot of the best aspects of services like Inkling and Kno and integrated them into its own product.

The new textbooks reside in a dedicated iBookstore category and will offer free samples before you buy. The iBooks 2 app is free, and it is available on Thursday via the App Store. Textbooks will be priced at $14.99 or less and will initially be aimed at the high school market. That’s some seriously competitive pricing, and Apple’s initial partners are Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which together are responsible for 90 percent of textbooks available, according to Schiller.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A clouded view of Google Music
• How emerging technologies will influence collaboration
• Readers weigh in: future prospects for Twitter

The Nest thermostat (in cooling mode).

The iPod of thermostats is sold-out until 2012. Nest Labs, makers of the connected, smart, “learning” thermostat, say on their website that the hot thermostat is “sold out through early next year.” In the meantime, the company has closed its online store at Nest.com.

I just pre-ordered one via the Best Buy website, and mine won’t ship until between Jan. 9 and Jan. 16, 2012. (Sorry, Mom and Dad, your Christmas present will be late.)

Nest says on its site that people who reserved a thermostat via the Nest store, and received a reservation number, can get theirs between Dec. 2011 and Feb. 2012. For people who pre-ordered one on Best Buy and Nest.com, the shipping date on your confirmation email still stands.

I’ve reached out to the company to see what kind of volumes have led to the company selling out til 2012. It’s a $250 thermostat, so regardless, that’s pretty impressive.

The thermostat was created by Tony Fadell, the former chief architect at Apple, who led the development of the iPod and the first three versions of the iPhone, and who left Apple two years ago to start connected thermostat company Nest Labs. The thermostat has a unique design and learning, behavioral algorithms, which can help home owners save 20 to 30 percent on their energy bills. Fadell told me in an interview last month that he wanted to make the device “a coveted, cherished object that sits on your wall.”

Nest has been operating for about a year and a half, has 100 employees, and raised funding from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures and Al Gore’s investment fund. The company only came out of stealth on Oct. 24 (about a week ago) to reveal its smart thermostat design and energy efficiency ambitions.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• The economics of clean-data-center innovation

While Palo Alto, Calif.-based Nest has been operating for about a year and a half, has 100 employees, and funding from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures and Al Gore’s investment fund, it just came out of stealth on Tuesday to reveal its smart thermostat design and energy efficiency ambitions. Nest says the thermostat is the first “learning thermostat” in the world. It will be available for $250 in mid-November, and can save 20 to 30 percent in a home’s energy consumption.

The idea behind Nest

Fadell explained to me in an interview that he and his wife (who led human resources for Apple) decided to leave Apple about two years ago to spend more time with their young children, and basically retire. But you know how that goes for the ambitious, young, Silicon Valley types. While designing a green home in Tahoe, Calif., Fadell became hung up on the lack of options for a thermostat for the home — they were expensive, not smart, ugly, and basically “crap” says Fadell. And like all good entrepreneurs he thought to himself: there’s got to be a better way.

That option ended up being getting back on the Valley treadmill, and creating one of the most ambitious greentech ventures I’ve seen to date. Nest has raised tens of millions of dollars (they wouldn’t disclose the amount) from high profile venture capitalists including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures, Al Gore’s investment group Generation Capital, and Shasta Ventures.

While other companies are targeting the smart thermostat market (see my article on The next home energy battleground: the smart thermostat) like Opower and Honeywell, Radio Thermostat Company of America and EnergyHub, and EcoFactor, Nest is the first company that has created an end-to-end smart thermostat service, which offers the software, a gadget and a data-filled website. Fadell tells me that everything that the consumer touches has been designed by Nest.

That’s why it has 100 people and have raised a lot of money. The team building the learning algorithms includes Yoky Matsuoka, the former head of innovation at Google, and machine learning expert while Stanford Professor Sebastrian Thrun is an advisor to the company.

How Nest works

What will stand out most to energy nerds like me that look at a lot of thermostats, is the unique design of Nest. The thermostat’s form is a simple circle, with a ring on the outside and a single button, that controls the entire interface. Like the iPod and iPhone, Fadell wanted to make the device intuitive and simple to use and he says for the Nest system to work “it needed to be a coveted, cherished object that sits on your wall.”

In contrast, a major problem with most thermostats is that only two out of five are programmable and of those that are programmable, only 6 percent are actually programmed by the owners, says Fadell. Most thermostats are confusing, boring, or just not smart enough to keep the home owner’s attention.

The Nest thermostat, on the other hand, is supposed to learn your energy consumption behavior and program itself, and then automatically help you save energy in a convenient way. Once installed, the thermostat takes about a week of hardcore learning to recognize the standard way you heat or cool your home, and then recommends settings that are slightly more efficient than what you already do. It also automatically turns down the thermostat at times that are convenient to you. The device also continues to do lighter learning of your behavior via pattern recognition and your manual interaction with it, throughout the life of the device.

The recommendations and energy efficient mode appear to the Nest user as a leaf on the interface, giving direct feedback on energy choices. But the automatic control of heating and cooling will likely have a bigger impact on energy use. The Nest thermostat has five sensors — temperature, humidity, light and two activity sensors — and the activity sensors can notify the device to turn down the heating and cooling when no one is in the house.

The Nest thermostat also has a feature called “time to temperature,” which shows the home owner how long it will take to heat or cool the home. Say, you set the thermostat for 75 degrees, the Nest interface could read, 75 degrees in 25 minutes, letting you know how long it will take. The idea behind that feature is that most people set a thermostat like an accelerator, says Fadell, increasing the temperature or cooling way above or below the actual desired setting. But giving the user more feedback can help curb this problem — think of it like seeing how long a download of a file will take.

In addition to the thermostat device itself, Nest has created mobile apps and a website to be able to remotely turn up or down the thermostat, and also to give far more detailed data about home energy use. For example, you can log into the Nest website and see how much money you’ve saved, how many times you’ve turned up or down your thermostat.

The smart grid and Nest

The Nest thermostat also has Zigbee and Wi-Fi chips, so that it can connect with both your home broadband connection, and also other Zigbee devices like a smart meter, or smart appliances. Fadell says that thermostats are installed only every decade or so, so when the smart grid is fully deployed he wants the Nest thermostat to be ready.

Other companies like Opower and Honeywell are using a smarter thermostat as a way to connect with and control the smart energy home. While a lot of companies have focused on fancy dashboards that can monitor and control a home’s energy consumption, these devices haven’t really caught on, and smarter thermostats seem to be a better way in.

However, Nest is one of the only companies that is directly targeting consumers for its thermostat. Nest plans to sell its thermostat at Best Buy, via building specialty channels, and through its website. Fadell tells me the company wants to “connect with the iPhone generation where it shops.”

But at the same time that Nest is going direct to consumer, the device will clearly have a utility play, which the company is being quiet on right now. Like EcoFactor’s smart thermostat service, I could imagine utilities could work with homes that have Nest installed, to collectively curb energy consumption during peak grid events. This type of service is called demand response, and the saved energy per household helps utilities manage their grids during really hot summer days. Since the device also has ZigBee installed it could potentially connect with utilities’ smart meters, too.

Nest says that home owners can save 20 to 30 percent on their energy bills, which is one of the highest estimated ways to curb home energy use on the market. In contrast, mailed detailed energy bills from Opower are helping home owners cut around 2 percent. EcoFactor says with its similar thermostat service (but no designed gadget) it can get home owners to cut their energy consumption by 17 percent. If Nest actually takes off, utilities will be interested in working with that double digit energy reduction, though I’d like to see that 20 to 30 percent reduction validated in larger real world customer deployments.

My impressions

I think Nest is one of the more ambitious, and cool, ideas I’ve seen in the greentech space. The Nest thermostat is also beautiful and the idea is game changing on its own. However, I’m not so convinced it will work (I want it to! Prove me wrong!). I just don’t know if people will spend $250 on a thermostat, particularly in this economy. You can buy a connected, digital, programmable thermostat for $50, and $100 on the high end.

Also while Nest includes detailed instructions on how to install the thermostat (including a Nest screwdriver), installing a thermostat is actually kind of confusing. I’ve tried to tinker with some of the newer connected thermostats, and usually I end up wishing I hadn’t tried to do this myself — it involves circuit breakers and electrical wiring. Nest says it will offer Nest-approved installers, if people don’t want to install it themselves. Maybe the Best Buy Geek Squad will be able to help with this.

At the end of the day, it will take an army of Nest-inspired early adopters to convince the rest of the country and world to adopt Nest. Silicon Valley will probably rave about it, as they should, but will the other 99 percent of the country get on board with a $250, do-gooder, smart thermostat that’s as pretty as the iPhone?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

Stuff Magazine’s South African editor Tony Shapshak took to Twitter to note that part of Gore’s address included him stating, “Not to mention the new iPhones coming out next month. That was a plug.” Gore has been on Apple’s board since 2003.

Still, Gore’s statement is really the closest anyone at or near Apple has come to making a firm statement about a new iPhone release date, with the possible exception of France Telecom CEO’s Stephane Richard, who said early this month that we could expect to see a launch Oct. 15. In both that case and this new one with Gore, it’s possible that the men were simply referring to the many rumors citing October for the iPhone 5 launch, including the latest report earlier today from AllThingsD.

Even though Gore did say “iPhones” and not just the singular “iPhone,” we shouldn’t read into the phrasing too much, despite rumors Apple will diversify its smartphone line. Gore may just have misspoke, or he could be referring to multiple storage capacities of a single model of iPhone 5.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Development strategies for the app-developer community
• A near-term outlook for the mobile app marketplace