Five-year-old, Bill Gates and Khosla-backed, EcoMotors is finally commercializing its efficient engine technology. And it’s got a killer deal to do it: a $200 million plant being built by Chinese auto giant Zhongding Power. 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 »
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 »
Here’s a roundup of all of our coverage from SXSW — both the legendary Interactive section and the relatively new education conference. Sorry, no up and coming musicians. Read more »
Given advancements in computing, the growing penetration of technology and the rise of cloud storage, Bill Gates said now is a “special time” in education technology. But despite climbing investments, the sector still needs more. Read more »
Joachim Kempin is the former Microsoft exec who handled the company’s interesting relationships with OEM partners. Now he’s weighing in with ideas to bring Microsoft back to power. Read more »
2013 is a year where algae fuel makers are finally starting to try to reach scale where they can compete with oil. Will they make it? Read more »
Here’s 13 rare battery startups working on next-generation manufacturing, chemistry and printing technologies. These battery companies could create innovation that could revolutionize electric cars, the power grid and how we charge up our gadgets and cell phones. Read more »
Show me — that’s the common thread in the top 10 most-trafficked GigaOM cleantech stories of 2012. Exclusive photos and videos of emerging clean power and electric car technologies lead the year. (OK, we’re not so surprised by that.) Read more »
So what if it’s geeky power grid gear. Entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators are working hard on developing the next-generation of compressed air energy storage technology. Like an air battery. And Bill Gates is a fan. Read more »
Steven Sinofsky, who drove Microsoft Office and then Windows development for years, is leaving Microsoft abruptly. His duties will be assumed by Tami Reller and Julie Larson-Green, according to a company statement. Read more »
Is an advanced business degree from Harvard or MIT or Stanford something that tech startups really, really want? It didn’t seem so at last weekend’s Harvard Business School Cyberposium. Where do you sit in the on-again debate between the builders and the bean counters? Read more »
Peter Thiel is leading a large investment into an air energy storage startup called LightSail Energy. Thiel joins Bill Gates and Khosla Ventures as investors. Compressed air energy storage tech pumps air into tanks and releases it on demand to create a sort of air battery. Read more »
Given the world’s inability to stem the flow of CO2 in the atmosphere — or even put a price on that flow — new scenarios to mitigate global warming are coming to the fore. Pumping sulfuric acid into the stratosphere could help, says Harvard’s David Keith. Read more »
Come take a look at the first phase of Sapphire Energy’s algae farm in New Mexico. When eventually built out it will produce 100 barrels of algae biofuel a day, and currently the five-year-old startup is making algae fuel on ponds across about 100 acres. Read more »
Liquid Metal Battery — a promising battery startup backed by Bill Gates, Khosla Ventures and oil giant Total — has changed it’s name to Ambri, a shorter and less literal word that’s a nod to Cambridge, where the company was founded. Read more »
Researchers at national laboratories are turning to the sea for a rich source of uranium for nuclear power generation, and they have come up with a super sponge material to do just that. Read more »
After four years, Intellectual Ventures is spinning off the second company from its vast intellectual property portfolio. Kymeta is focused on using materials not found in nature to build radio-wave shaping satellite antennas, which could be used to connect any boat, plane or truck to the internet. Read more »
EcoMotors, a startup building an efficient engine, has raised a $32.5 million Series C round led by Braemar Energy Ventures, and including previous investors Khosla Ventures and Bill Gates. Read more »
Can a humble system of gravel and a heat pump provide a breakthrough for utility-scale energy storage? British startup Isentropic thinks so, and this week announced that they’ve raised $22 million in project funding and an equity investment. Read more »
Liquid Metal Battery, a startup developing a battery for the power grid that already counted Bill Gates and oil giant Total as an investor, has now brought on another high profile backer: Khosla Ventures. Read more »
Save the date: Amazon will host its first-ever partner and customer conference at the Las Vegas Venetian in late November. With this move, Amazon looks more like an old-school IT vendor than ever. It recently announced an official partner program, another sign of IT maturity. Read more »
It’s no secret that it’s been a rocky road for many venture capitalists that have invested in greentech. Now according to Dow Jones Venture Wire, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which has one of the largest greentech portfolios, is shifting away from investing in greentech startups. Read more »
As the 2012 election unfolds and debates about clean energy foment, looking back at the history of energy subsides tells us how the bulk of subsidies have gone to fossil fuels. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Google’s choice of thermal storage for cooling its data center signals interest from Internet giants in using stored energy to cool data centers rather than just drawing power direct from the grid when needed. Is this the future of on demand power for data centers? Read more »
Algae fuel startup Sapphire Energy is in the process of raising $144 million to build out its first commercial demonstration plant in New Mexico. It’s impressive, but it’s also about three years behind its original projections. Why does algae fuel take so long to scale? Read more »
Algae biofuel is getting a massive infusion of money. Startup Sapphire Energy, which uses synthetic biology to make a green crude out of algae, announced on Monday that it’s raising $144 million in a Series C round from investors including agriculture company Monsanto. Read more »
After an extensive interview with the founder and President of Energy Cache, Aaron Fyke, we bring you the details of how the gravel and ski lift technology works, how the company came into being, where it’s headed and how Bill Gates and Bill Gross became involved. Read more »
Who’s the startup behind Bill Gates’ recent description of a company he’s involved with that’s making energy storage out of “gravel on ski lifts?” Michael Kanellos guesses it’s Energy Cache, which is developing a solar-powered pump for delivering materials to the top of mountains. Read more »
We need “energy miracles,” in at least five areas, and in each of these areas “we need at least two hundred crazy people who think their idea alone can solve this,” said Bill Gates at the Wall Street Journal’s Eco:nomics conference on Thursday night. Read more »
Battery innovation, at least at the prototype level, is alive and well in the U.S. and could even lead the next-generation of transportation and grid tech. Read more »
The past year has been difficult for solar panel makers as many of them shuttered factories and filed for bankruptcies. The latest sign of this bleak time comes from a Tuesday announcement by Abound Solar, which is now suspending production and letting go of 180 workers. Read more »
Bill Gates told an audience of energy entrepreneurs, scientists and investors at the ARPA-E energy conference on Tuesday that “It’s crazy how little we’re funding energy.” Read more »
It may not be Silicon Valley but the Boston-Cambridge metro area has a lot going for it — infrastructure expertise, a deep talent pool, and VC funding. Facebook famously went elsewhere, but here’s why other local companies started here (and will stay put.) Read more »
Chinese investors and the Chinese government are starting to aggressively fund U.S.-based cleantech startups. There’s been a half dozen of these deals in recent weeks and months, so I thought I’d put together this list to point out the 10 big ones I’ve been watching: Read more »
One of the key misplaced assumptions that Valley VCs made in cleantech boom times is that the rapid progress of Moore’s Law could be created for cleantech with a little bit of VC funding and Valley smarts. Read more »
Neil Young put a lot of the media industry’s hysteria about file-sharing into perspective when he said in a recent interview that “piracy is the new radio — that’s how music gets around.” In fact, a certain amount of “piracy” can be good for business. Read more »
Was Bill Gates, chairman and co-founder of Microsoft, the power behind the proprietary Windows-and-Office juggernaut, really an open source champion? A new Wired article lays Microsoft’s wider embrace of open source technologies — including Node.js and Hadoop — squarely at Gates’ feet. Read more »
It looks like development superstar Ray Ozzie is about to come out of stealth mode: The force behind Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform-as-a-Service project and Lotus Notes is starting to hire developers for his new “Cocomo” project. Read more »
