More idealab Stories

By
Proposed Isentropic Pumped Heat Electricity Storage (PHES) Unit - side elevation

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 »

By
2528634388_5ccb83e498_b

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 »

loading external resource

By
thermata1

The heat and rays of the sun aren’t just being harnessed for electricity. An early stage startup called Thermata, backed by Bill Gross’ Idealab, is looking to build a business around solar-powered boilers that produce steam for industrial processes. Read more »

By
RayTracker

First Solar’s own power generation projects have always been mounted on racks that don’t tilt throughout the day to follow the sun, but the company is exploring the use of trackers. First Solar announced Friday it has bought RayTracker for an undisclosed sum. Read more »

By
internet brands logo

Internet Brands, which operates hundreds of leading vertical service-oriented websites such as Cars.com and UltimateCoupon.com and was spun off from Idealabs in a public stock offering three years ago, has agreed to be acquired by Hellman and Friedman Capital, a private equity firm, for $640 million. Read more »

By
logitechceo-thumb

Logitech’s CEO Jerry Quindlen doesn’t think that consumers are sick of buying new boxes for the living room. In fact, he believes that the Google TV-powered set-top box his company is introducing this fall will lead to consumers buying even more hardware. Read more »

By

Of all the times to launch into the Twitter ecosystem — with developers quaking from last week’s revelation that Twitter would compete with them head-on, and Twitter expected to launch a monetization platform this week — Bill Gross is announcing his new company TweetUp. Read more »

By

A startup based in Bangalore, India, is selling an off-the-shelf device for less than the cost of a one-night stay in an average hotel in downtown San Francisco that can offer rural Indians a way to generate and store solar power, charge cell phones and other […] Read more »

By

Here are some of today’s phone conversations I enjoyed reading or viewing on the web, along with some brief thoughts: T-Mobile service disappears in U.S. (Twitter)– I think my facetious tweet sums it up best: “I felt a great disturbance in T-Mobile, as if millions of […] Read more »

loading external resource

By

You’ll now be able to stream Netflix content through two of Samsung’s Blu-Ray DVD players, and the two companies say they’ll be collaborating to integrate Netflix’s service on a range of home entertainment products. Read more »

By

eSolar, the startup that says it’s using computing and algorithms to produce low-cost solar thermal gear, says it has signed a commercial contract with Sundrop Fuels, a young solar startup backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. eSolar, which was recently backed by $130 million in […] Read more »

By

Aptera, maker of the swoopy, three-wheeled Typ-1 electric car, announced this week that it’s hired Paul Wilbur as their new president and CEO, replacing founder Steve Fambro in the top slot. Given the turmoil that prompted electric car startup Tesla to change its leadership, was this […] Read more »

By

eSolar, a startup building solar thermal power plants that was one of the first cleantech startups backed by Google, has pulled in $130 million, the company says this morning; the funding comes from Google.org, Bill Gross’ Idealab, Oak Investment Partners and other investors. The company also […] Read more »

By

Just about anyone who has been web working for a while has had to deal with this question from friends and coworkers: “How do I do what you do?” There’s something about our lives that just seems to make people envious, or at least curious. But […] Read more »

By

OK, I know the Man Bag is not the most masculine bag out there but today I was digging in my drawers (get your mind out of the gutter) looking for something else and spied the Man Bag sitting at the bottom of the drawer.  I […] Read more »

By

VC funding is flowing into the backbone of online games. Last week, Hummer Winblad put $4 million into game billing service Aria Systems; this week, Benchmark is investing $7.8 million into Vivox, the official VoIP solution provider for Linden Lab’s Second Life and CCP’s sci-fi Eve […] Read more »

By

Daylife, a stylized news aggregator that is the closest thing we’ve seen to a webified newspaper, beta-launched this morning. Daylife is a meatier version of aggregators such as Google News, Topix.net, and Techmeme, offering tools for pivoting around information by story, characters, time, popularity, photos, and […] Read more »

By

Reason is a complete music creation and mixing application that uses realistic looking components that can be controlled just like the real world equivalents.  There are sliders, knobs, wires and other switches that can be combined in any way the user wants to control their custom […] Read more »

By

That Forrester Research analyst John McCarthy is after US Department of Labor report made it clear that he and his ilk are mere fear mongers. He is stamping his foot, like a six-year-old nellie, and with a tiny tear in his eye, oh no one is […] Read more »