The idea of modeling government funds after venture capital has swirled, in various forms, around the Obama administration since back in the campaign days. Now comes the latest twist: The Obama administration has named a former VC, Jonathan Silver, to head up the Department of Energy’s […] Read more »
AppleGazette’s Kevin Whipps addresses the quandary over how to choose between a MacBook and a MacBook Pro, noting that it used to be that if you wanted a 13-inch Mac laptop (excluding the MacBook Air), the only option was the original MacBook. Now with a 13-inch […] Read more »
Energy baron T. Boone Pickens wants to see delivery trucks and just about any other vehicle that “returns to the ‘barn’ each night” running on natural gas. A relative newcomer to the U.S. market, Electric Vehicles International, has just moved to Stockton, Calif., from its former […] Read more »
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For electric cars at Chrysler, the game won’t kick into high gear until 2011 and beyond. The Detroit automaker, which tapped A123Systems earlier this year to develop battery cells for upcoming electric vehicles, said in a meeting today detailing its five-year business plan that it’s working […] Read more »
Jordan Hoffner will leave his position as head of content partnerships at YouTube to join Ben Silverman’s new content endeavor at IAC. The announcement was made yesterday at YouTube, and paidContent was the first to report it. Coming from NBC, Hoffner was an injection of big […] Read more »
“Inventing disruptive manufacturing innovations is every bit as hard as inventing new materials,” says Frank van Mierlo, President and co-founder of 1366 Technologies. Solar power, if it’s going to compete on cost with coal and other fossil fuels, needs both. It’s on that premise that 1366, […] Read more »
The $10 million in winnings for the Automotive X Prize competition can provide a welcome influx of cash for the DIY garage-based team, startup or even a more established automaker that builds the best 100 MPG car with a minimum 200-mile range, based on a number […] Read more »
The Winners and Losers in the Smart Grid Stimulus Funds: The $3.4 billion in smart grid stimulus fund awards were announced this week and close to 100 recipients woke up today to the equivalent of Christmas morning — here’s a chart showing 13 of the biggest […] Read more »
Well, that didn’t last long. Less than a year after Ford Motor and Smith Electric Vehicles announced plans to collaborate on an electric version of the Detroit automaker’s Transit Connect commercial van for the U.S. market, the two companies have called it quits on the deal. […] Read more »
The Department of Energy this week announced the first round of grants under its Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program, which was created to back risky but potentially breakthrough technologies. Out of the 37 projects awarded grants, three are focused on improving building energy efficiency and […] Read more »
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Tesla Motors just snagged a hefty tax break in California. The state’s Alternative Energy and Advanced Transportation Financing Authority, part of the Treasurer’s office, yesterday approved a request from the startup to avoid paying sales tax on up to $320 million worth of manufacturing equipment — […] Read more »
Envia Systems, a battery materials startup based in Hayward, Calif., has just entered an elite group: the 1 percent of applicants awarded a first-round grant under the Department of Energy’s high-risk energy tech fund, ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy). Given that Envia, founded in 2007, had […] Read more »
Of the $151 million in grants announced this week under ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy), the Department of Energy’s highly competitive program for high-risk, early-stage energy technologies, more than a fifth — some $33 million — has been allocated for green vehicle projects. Since the program […] Read more »
Project Nina — the $47,400 plug-in hybrid vehicle that startup Fisker Automotive aims to launch in 2012 — has a home. The Irvine, Calif.-based startup announced this morning that it will buy an old General Motors assembly plant in Wilmington, Del., for $18 million drawing funds […] Read more »
Is tomorrow the day of reckoning for the smart grid industry in the U.S., when utilities and companies will finally learn whether or not they will receive part of the close to $4 billion in stimulus funds? It’s starting to look like it. According to suggestions […] Read more »
If there’s one thing to be said about plug-in hybrid vehicle developer Fisker, it’s that the young startup moves quickly. A month after securing a $528.7 million loan from the Department of Energy, Fisker is reportedly in advanced talks to buy an old 3.2 million-square-foot General […] Read more »
It’s not often that the Department of Energy gets to go far out on a limb with its investments. But that’s exactly the point of ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) — a program funded under the stimulus package to support moonshot technologies that might be too […] Read more »
No fewer than 100 large-scale carbon capture and storage projects within about a decade, at a cost of some $56 billion — that’s what International Energy Agency chief Nobuo Tanaka said the world needs in order to help address climate change, Reuters reports. And it’s only […] Read more »
While it might seem like the spigot of stimulus money has just opened up — with new funding solicitations and announcements coming out every week and companies spending significant time and money in an effort to grab some of it — don’t get too accustomed to […] Read more »
We’d like to say thanks to this month’s WebWorkerDaily sponsors: Rackspace: Experience fanatical support. FreshBooks: Look Professional with FreshBooks. Read more »
After the Nasdaq opening bell rings Thursday morning, keep an eye out on the ticker for the symbol “AONE,” which represents Watertown, Mass-based battery startup A123Systems. The company is expected to set its price on Wednesday and trade Thursday and represents the first spot of relief […] Read more »
We’ve pointed out the net neutrality issue in the past but today might be the day it starts to become less of an issue if I read Stacey’s news report correctly at GigaOm. For those that haven’t heard the term, it essentially means that those companies […] Read more »
Nearly half of the electric car charging equipment installed worldwide by 2015 will be heading to China, according to a recent report from Pike Research. Today an announcement from Scottsdale, Ariz.-based charging infrastructure company ECOtality indicates that China’s role in the electric car charging boom will […] Read more »
Homer Simpson is on Twitter — for real! Well, in an account written by the folks on the digital team at Fox, with the handle HomerJSimpson. That’s the word from Hardie Tankersley, VP Online Content & Strategy at Fox Broadcasting Company, who we spoke with today […] Read more »
UPDATED Solar startup Solyndra, which makes tube-shaped thin-film solar panels, already managed to break new ground this year — snagging the first loan guarantee under a long-delayed Department of Energy program. This morning, however, the groundbreaking is literal. Just up the freeway from its headquarters in […] Read more »
What happens when a bunch of really smart and musically inclined PhDs who make iPhone apps team up with a popular hip-hop recording artist? You get a recording studio-quality, karaoke-style machine in your pocket, otherwise called I Am T-Pain ($2.99). It’s the latest in a string […] Read more »
Canada’s Zenn Motor has its eye on Michigan and funding from the U.S. government to develop electric cars using energy storage startup EEStor’s controversial ultracapacitor technology. According to a letter (dated June 29) from Congressman Mark Schauer, which was posted late yesterday on TheEEStory.com, Zenn’s U.S. […] Read more »
A dozen wind and solar projects have just snagged hefty grants from the Department of Energy — not enough to cover the entirety of their projects, but enough, the agency hopes, to get investors to pony up more capital. Among today’s big winners is Spain’s Iberdrola […] Read more »
By some accounts, the build-out of the smart grid could be the biggest driver of wealth within the decade and create an even larger market than the emergence of the Internet. And now, in the early rollout phase, thousands of startups and large tech vendors are […] Read more »
Battery startup A123Systems, which filed for an initial public offering more than a year ago but has yet to go public, took home one of the biggest grants in this month’s round of awards under the Department of Energy’s grant program for electric vehicle battery and […] Read more »
More than 100 companies have been jockeying in recent months for billions of dollars in federal grants and state incentive packages designed to help spur the growth of a U.S. battery manufacturing industry for plug-in vehicles. At this point, firms based in China, Japan, South Korea […] Read more »
Less than two months after the Department of Energy gave Tesla Motors the green light for $465 million in low-interest loans, the electric car startup has identified its first project for the funds: setting up a powertrain assembly facility and new headquarters at the Stanford Research […] Read more »
San Diego Gas & Electric has always been a forward-looking utility when it comes to deploying IT — it was one of the first utilities to work with Google’s PowerMeter and it’s now installing 1.4 million electric smart meters. But SDG&E also has one of the […] Read more »
It’s official: Long-awaited clean-energy manufacturing tax credits are really happening, finally. The U.S. Department of the Treasury and the U.S. Department of Energy on Thursday announced a program awarding $2.3 billion in tax credits for clean-energy equipment manufacturers. While there are already some tax credits for […] Read more »
How does the U.S. spur 50 million energy retrofits (40 percent of homes) from the current low level of hundreds of thousands per year? The Obama administration could meet that goal with two major policy initiatives plus a hefty investment from the public and private sectors […] Read more »
The biggest grants awarded this week under the Department of Energy’s $2.4 billion electric vehicle battery initiative went to big-name companies: battery giant Johnson Controls, IPO-hopeful A123Systems, General Motors, Dow Kokam and LG Chem’s Compact Power all snagged more than $150 million each. But some lesser-known […] Read more »
Tired of holding that phone when you’re sitting, but have no place to put it down? Yup there’s an app a solution for that. The Thiphone straps a handheld to your thigh, so you don’t have to worry about finding a spot to place your handset. […] Read more »
Updated: Google likes to buy things — sometimes with grand designs. But as we all know, grand designs have a habit of turning into delusions of grandeur. Today, the search giant made two moves. First, it made a smart and strategic bet by agreeing to buy […] Read more »
Tomorrow, tomorrow: The stimulus grants for advanced battery manufacturing that were supposed to be announced by the end of last week are reportedly now set to come out on Wednesday, auto industry insiders tell the Detroit News. Vice President Biden is slated to announce the first […] Read more »
As more and more households have multiple PCs, the idea of a “family pack” (i.e., a piece of software with multiple licenses for use) makes a lot of sense. Since Apple and Microsoft are set to release new versions of their respective operating systems this fall […] Read more »
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