Enlighted says its customers include Google, LinkedIn, Bank of New York, Turner Broadcasting and the City of San Jose. New investors RockPort Capital and DFJ JAIC joined the round, along with existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Intel Capital.

The startup’s lighting control tech can individually measure and manage lighting at each light fixture and can cut energy consumption from lighting in office and commercial buildings by 50 to 75 percent. The sensors can detect light level, occupancy, temperature and power consumption in the 100 square feet under each light. The company says it’s saved some 15 gigawatts of electricity since it began installations two years ago.

Enlighted’s first customer was green carpet company Interface Global, which used the lighting management system on its 35,000 square foot facility located in Acworth, Ga. Interface says it was able to cut its lighting power by 70 percent, and achieved a return on investment in 18 months.

Big data analytics and sensor tech — IT — is appearing as one of the bright spots in cleantech startups these days. Some investors call this the so-called Clean Web, or using digital tech to manage resources from energy to water to food. Check out our 20-page premium research report on Building Energy Management Systems: Overview and Forecast, on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

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Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel

Adrian Ionel, CEO of Mirantis, insisted that involvement by Dell and Intel does not neuter the company’s vendor-agnostic pitch and that the investments comes after collaboration with both companies.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company already worked with Intel and Dell on OpenStack projects including Dell’s Crowbar cloud installer, as well as with Cisco on its OpenStack-based Webex implementation and sees no reason that it can’t work with other OpenStack backers going forward. Hewlett Packard, Red Hat, Nebula and other companies are all creating their own take on OpenStack clouds. Update: (Last week, a Dell exec  acknowledged to ITworld that the company was delaying its public OpenStack cloud till late this year.)

WestSummit, based in China, is also an important strategic backer.  ”China and the Asia-Pacific region is huge on OpenStack  – and WestSummit can help us enter that market which, given the cultural peculiarities, is hard to penetrate without local connections,” Ionel said.

While Intel and WestSummit will get board seats, Dell will not. “We have a strategic relationship with them but nevertheless we remain vendor independent so we can work with the broadest ecosystem of partners,” Ionel said.

This is not a typical Series A round, he added. “We’ve had a good run doing things ourselves, we have 300 employees and 30 projects, but OpenStack has gotten too big for us to keep making meaningful progress without financing and strong strategic partnerships,” said Boris Rensky, Mirantis’ executive VP and co founder.

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New investor Intel Capital led the round. Current investors Ignition Partners and Madrona Ventures ponied up $8.5 million in an initial funding round in March, 2011.

The Bellevue, Wash. based company is one of a growing number of players chasing the enterprise platform as a service (PaaS) market.

Developers — both within and outside companies — like to use these platforms to build and test out applications. But not all corporate IT executives are thrilled about actually deploying mission critical applications on PaaSes — especially those running on public cloud infrastructure.

That’s the kind of thinking companies like Tier 3, ActiveState, Appfog, Red Hat (with OpenShift) would love to blow up.

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The new service from Time Warner Cable, called IntelligentHome, will provide customers with connected home management services, like security, with remote home-video viewing and window and door sensors, as well as wireless management of home heating, cooling and lighting. The service is already available in upstate New York and Southern California. (I will add pricing details when they send it to me).

IControl has worked with cable companies before: It is the company behind Comcast’s similar smart home service that was launched last summer. Comcast is also an investor in iControl. IControl provides the software layer while the cable companies provide the broadband connection, and third-party hardware providers make the dashboards and security gadgets. IControl has long had the strategy to white label its service and to avoid getting into the hardware market itself.

Cable operators as well as telcos are increasingly beginning to offer home management services as a way to try to avoid becoming a dumb pipe and also as a way to reduce churn and add extra subscription revenues. Verizon launched a similar service about a year ago, which included home security control and monitoring as well as energy reading devices, smart thermostats and smart appliance control devices, among other applications. Verizon worked with Motorola’s 4Home(a startup that it acquired a couple of years ago) as well as Ingersoll-Rand for the security applications.

At CES the big-box retailers Lowe’s and Best Buy are also both looking to have a presence and push new smart home devices and services. Lowe’s is working with UK smart energy company AlertMe, while Best Buy is selling a variety of devices like the smart thermostat Nest.

Connected devices that control home energy consumption can make homes more energy-efficient. The Nest smart thermostat can reduce home energy consumption by 20 to 30 percent.

IControl is backed by Comcast, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Charles River Ventures, Intel Capital, Cisco, GE and security firm ADT.

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Do these struggles represent the beginning of the end for green technology?

Overall, it looks like business as usual for Silicon Valley, which, of course, is good. Only one in ten start-ups ever make it, VCs like to say. Failure makes you stronger. Some CEOs are visionaries and others are professional managers geared toward scaling up companies, etc. etc.

Remember all of those articles with journalists yammering about how green technology needs a Netscape moment? Well, this is it. But it’s not the moment when Netscape zoomed in its IPO. It’s the moment when it got absorbed into the gaping maw of AOL. Netscape became irrelevant, but life went on. The Internet, in fact, became even larger. Netscape’s demise simply proved that the so-called First Mover Advantage is vastly overrated.

Computing didn’t die with Sperry Rand either.

The analogy between green and computing isn’t perfect. Green technologies often require far more capital and time to get to market. Many also have to compete against existing technologies — like coal and incandescent light bulbs — that have spent decades winnowing out costs and building up manufacturing infrastructure. But VCs have thrown away large amounts of capital on companies serving the web, too. Anyone remember Akimbo? @Home? AltaVista?

Green technologies tend to get subjected to a higher level of scrutiny. Some critics seem emotionally dead set against the industry. Incumbents want to undermine it. Many entrepreneurs also grossly underestimated the technological challenges. Still, the reaction seems to go over the top. The founder of Friendster didn’t have to commit the public equivalent of self-immolation because Facebook succeeded and Friendster didn’t. But the public seems to want blood from every green company that fails to achieve corporate immortality.

Case Studies

Examine the two prominent collapses. Aptera wanted to make three-wheeled cars. Both Google and NRG Energy invested in it while Darrell Issa, the Republican Congressional Representative that championed investigations into Solyndra, sought to get federal loan guarantees for the company.

The Aptera 2e was a blast to drive. After emerging from the car during a test drive in San Francisco in 2009, individuals on the sidewalk stopped to take my picture and ask me questions. I felt like the Man of the Future: if only I had worn my silver skin suit.

But buy it? Three-wheeled cars have been nonstarters for years. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion crashed during its public debut. Sidecars as a fashion statement went out with the Third Reich. The only truly successful three-wheeled vehicle has been the wheelbarrow. Aptera had one really interesting aspect to it: the body was made from a high-tech composite that is stronger than metal but far lighter.

Range Fuels, meanwhile, wanted to produce cellulosic biofuel with a variant of the Fischer-Tropsch process. FT, however, has only been popular with countries and regimes — Apartheid-era South Africa and again the Third Reich — cut off from oil imports. Companies with arguably more advanced processes leveraging biology — Solazyme, Gevo, and Amyris — all pulled off IPOs.

Range Fuel’s success in landing VC fund and government loans was to some degree due to its fortunate timing. It emerged at the dawn of green tech investing, when VCs and others were optimistic and desperate for new ideas to fund. At the time, many also mistakenly believed that the same skills required to succeed in computers would directly map to green. Mitch Mandich, a former Apple exec, served as CEO. Few people would now think, “Fuel additives, all-in-one desktops that come in five designer colors. It’s all just sales. Hire him.”

Now look at Google terminating the RE<C Program, an initiative to develop technologies that could produce electricity at cheaper prices than coal. A noble ambition, but not one for a software company. Google was building heliostats, or mirrors, for solar thermal power plants. Imagine being an engineer on that project. You’re in the company cafeteria where everyone is talking about deep linking and you’re trying to steer the conversation to reflective surfaces. All of your closest peers are at Brightsource Energy, 3M and DuPont. You might as well have a hairy mole on your upper lip.

Google, however, is not giving up on green energy. It desperately needs to get a handle on its energy consumption. It will continue to invest in solar farms, as well as use Google Ventures to get an early look at technologies like the AC-DC converters from Transphorm. In other words, it will begin to act more like Intel Capital than a nonprofit.

China’s trade war? Things will get cheaper and the case will drag out until everyone has forgotten it.

Only a few hit it big

And now for the positive news: Siemens will buy eMeter. For years, eMeter has been one of the most promising and successful start-ups in smart grid. If eMeter were a cloud company, it might have been able to stay independent for a longer time.

But the smart grid is an unusual market with a very, circumscribed client base. Only around 3,000 utilities exist in North America versus the hundreds of thousands of customers that want cloud services. Utilities also tend to be quite conservative. An acquisition was the logical, inevitable outcome.

Expect more to follow. Conglomerates like Siemens, Areva, Schneider, Toshiba and ABB have been on an extended shopping spree in the U.S.

So cheer up. This is par for the course.

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MasterCard and Intel Capital, which are new investors in mFoundry, join existing investors Motorola Mobility and FIS in this round. The money will help build mFoundry’s existing mobile banking business, which includes creating mobile apps for some top banks, including Bank of America and PNC. As it showed last week with its MasterCard partnership, mFoundry is looking to turn those mobile banking apps into digital wallets by adding support for MasterCard’s PayPass NFC payments. That will allow banks to provide their own digital wallets that work at NFC-equipped point-of-sale terminals.

MFoundry, which has raised $50 million to date, is trying to leverage the quick growth of mobile banking, which it said is on pace to hit 50 percent penetration in six years, far faster than ATMs and online banking, which took 15 and 20 years, respectively, to get to 50 percent consumer adoption. It has previously worked on mobile payments with Starbucks, developing and managing its Starbucks Card Mobile payment app.

“The opportunity in mobile financial services is enormous,” said mFoundry CEO and co-founder Drew Sievers. “While our existing mobile banking business is scaling rapidly, there are many other related opportunities that we believe can add significant incremental value to our company.”

This move to add more payment tools could be a big opportunity for mFoundry. As I wrote before, the banks have one of the most trusted financial relationships with consumers and are in a very good position to offer digital wallet services and teach people about new technologies like NFC. At the very least, having an option like mFoundry lets them offer their own alternatives to services like Google Wallet and Isis, the NFC carrier joint venture from Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile.

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A household name in PCs, Intel is conspicuously absent from the smartphones and tablets that make up the modern mobile computing market. Virtually all of those devices–hundreds of millions sold each year–use processors designed by ARM and manufactured by Samsung, Texas Instruments, Nvidia, and others. And that’s despite years of work on the Atom processor Intel has targeted for this space to no avail.

But mobility is about more than phones and the iPad, and the story of mobile computing is far from over. Intel has been trying to spur interest in devices such as the Ultrabook, a thin laptop geared for travelers, with a similar fund and will likely find its way into a commercially available phone or tablet running Android or Windows 8 at some point.

Hence the fund, which made its first investments Monday in Urban Airship, a startup that is building marketing and development tools for the mobile minded, and 4tiitoo, which is working on an open-source tablet operating system and hopefully received enough money to buy a new name.

“The fund is built to advance computing innovations based on Intel architecture in key areas such as digital media consumption, context-aware computing and infrastructure applications. While the investments will focus across multiple technologies and devices, key areas include cross-platform technologies such as HTML5, as well as experiences designed specifically for Ultrabooks,” Intel said in describing the mission of the fund.

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Smart devices in buildings

Let’s drill down into devices used to light, and heat and cool buildings, and the efficiencies that can be delivered when these devices are networked and can talk to each other. Only 1 percent of the world’s buildings use systems to control and network lighting, and just 7 percent of lighting in commercial buildings is controlled by smart control systems.

But the efficiencies from networking lighting and using smart software to control the lighting in an efficient way, are clear. Earlier this month, a startup called Enlighted Inc. launched a product that places wireless sensors on every light fixture in a commercial or office building, and the company says by using distributed sensing, its system can cut energy consumption from lighting in office and commercial buildings by 50 to 75 percent. Enlighted Inc.’s first customer is green carpet company Interface Services, which used the lighting system to cut down on energy consumption of a 35,000 square foot facility in Acworth, Ga.

Smart lighting controls are so under used, and could be such a large market, that a half-dozen venture-backed startups have launched products. Enlighted Inc. is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Intel Capital, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Competitor Adura Technologies is funded by NGEN, Claremont Creek Ventures, and VantagePoint Capital Partners. Redwood Systems, a lighting control company which sells a control and sensor system for LEDs that runs over an optimized version of Ethernet cables, raised money from Battery Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, Index Ventures and Mitsui & Co.

Beyond lighting, networked heating and cooling devices can cut loads of energy consumption, too. Regen Energy is a Canadian startup that makes wireless nodes that can connect to HVAC systems and it uses “swarm logic” software to manage the HVAC systems like a swarm of bees or a flock of fish. Last month, Regen said it had raised $5.5 million from investors and opened its first U.S. office in San Diego.

To note, these are a lot of startups in the smart building industry, and the industry is dominated by companies like Honeywell and Johnson Controls, who have been working on a less digital and networked version of the smart building for decades.

Smart devices on the grid

By now, I’m assuming you’ve all heard about the huge efficiency and business opportunities of the smart grid. While Cisco has changed its smart grid strategies in recent months, Cisco CEO John Chambers still insists that the smart grid poses a bigger opportunity than the Internet. Cisco’s original smart grid product is selling ruggedized grid-specific routers and switches.

Most utilities in the U.S. have at least started to plan a strategy for how they will enter the digital age and are increasingly looking to add connected devices to their grids to reduce blackouts, add more clean power, and engage more with their customers. Smart devices are being installed on all levels of the grid from the substations to transmission to distribution to each home.

Many startups have tried to enter the smart grid at the individual home energy management level, and most haven’t really succeeded yet. That’s because consumers aren’t all that interested in monitoring their own home energy, yet, and utilities are price sensitive to expensive home devices. But one day the digital home, will also be the smart energy home, it’s just a matter of how, and when.

Cell phone companies, who are building the networks for much of the Internet of Things, are looking to have their networks run the smart grid, too. Some utilities are game, like Consumers Energy, and Duke Energy, though many utilities are opting to build their own smart grid specific networks.

Smart devices in cars

And finally, vehicles and transportation, are also becoming part of the Internet of Things, and are benefiting from efficiency gains. Car sharing companies use the Internet and mobile phones to manage the use of vehicles down to 15-minute intervals, and install connections in each car to manage the service. Car sharing directly leads to the reduction of personal vehicle ownership, turns the car into a service, and more efficiently utilizes the car. Peer-to-peer car sharing, where people rent out their own cars into the a network, can lead to even more efficient uses of personal vehicles.

Less obvious are the efficiency gains that GPS navigation services have added to vehicles. If you know the most efficient way to drive to a destination, you save on gas.

Electric cars will be even more reliant on networks and software to manage the charge (so the utility’s grid isn’t overwhelmed) and so drivers can find the nearest charging outlet while on the go. Electric vehicles are only slowly rolling out, due to slow-moving car companies, and a sluggish economy.

Boring factor

Lighting, heating and cooling, the power grid, and cars, might not be the coolest applications for the Internet of Things (well, cars are pretty cool). But they are ways that the Internet of Things can make a major positive impact on developing far more energy-efficient systems. In an environment that has struggled to deliver clean power, biofuels, electric cars and other cleantech products, the Internet of Things could be one of the most important ways to influence energy use.

Images courtesy of Redwood Systems, Duke Energy, Regen Energy.

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I’m not entirely clear how it works, as the company’s website is rather cryptic, but Enlighted Inc.’s press release says that there’s no wiring installation needed and that the installation process only requires a change of lightbulbs and fixtures. The company’s first customer is green carpet company Interface Services, which used Enlighted Inc.’s tech for its 35,000 square foot facility located in Acworth, Ga. Update: The tech uses wireless sensors at each fixture.

Other lighting control startups include Redwood Systems, which sells a control and sensor system for LEDs that runs over an optimized version of Ethernet cables; wireless lighting management startup Adura Technologies; and wireless lighting control company Daintree Networks. The potential opportunity for lighting controls in commercial buildings could be large: As Daintree Networks CEO Danny Yu wrote for us recently, only 1 percent of buildings use smart lighting control systems, and just 7 percent of lighting in commercial buildings is controlled by a smart control system.

The commercial building owners are looking for tech that has a relatively short return on investment, is easy to install and provides enough control and functionality to reduce monthly energy costs. Also, standards are a good thing, as building owners don’t want to be stuck with one tiny vendor. These Valley-backed startups will eventually benefit from partnering with the big building automation companies like Honeywell or Johnson Controls.

Enlighted Inc. says that its tech has a return on investment of 18 months. The company was founded in just 2009 and is based in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Check out our report on An Assessment of the Lighting Control Market Segment, on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

Image courtesy of OLR2004

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iControl says the new funds will be partly focused on expanding its energy-based software and services, which enable home owners and utilities to be able to remotely manage lights, connected thermostats and smart appliances. Smart energy tools have been a smaller piece of the overall package of home automation services, which also includes applications like connected video camera security, but are supposed to be a growing piece of the pie over the coming years.

As I wrote earlier this year (GigaOM Pro, subscription required) there’s been an emerging trend around broadband service providers and security companies looking to sell smart energy home tools, with Verizon and Comcast launching these services in recent months, AT&T and Motorola acquiring home automation and energy players, and startups like Consert, EcoFactor and OPower looking to develop innovation around the smart energy home. Pike Research predicts that globally there will be 63 million users of home energy management systems (in home displays, web sites, mobile apps) by 2020, up from about 1 million users this year.

Utilities are also an important market for home energy players, and iControl seems to want to work its way further into that smart grid home energy ecosystem, where it will compete with utility-focused companies like Tendril, OPower, Control4, Silver Spring Networks, and many others. Utilities are investing millions of dollars in installing smart meters, and will eventually roll out home energy dashboards and services to its customers in order to leverage these new digital assets.

At the same time, remember selling better ways to manage energy use is a difficult market. Consumers don’t necessarily care about reducing energy on its own, but they could be persuaded to use a service that reduces their energy bills, and could also be interested in turning off and on lights as a security feature. At the same time, utilities are notoriously very slow moving, and have taken years to do pilot tests of this type of technology.

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