Kidding aside, that’s actually quite an ambitious goal in a Hadoop market that’s big and growing, but that’s exemplified by expensive consulting arrangements and purpose-built applications. Even more so for companies that want to do something other than transforming unstructured data into structured data (often called ETL) or run back-office analytics jobs. In fact, WibiData has spent the last 18 months doing just this type of deal, and Bisciglia says every single customer has already engaged with one of the big three Hadoop vendors (Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR).

Home energy-management startup Opower is a good example of this process. It’s actually one of Cloudera’s banner customers, but “when they wanted to take [their software-as-a-service tool] beyond batch analysis and ETL workloads,” Bisciglia said, Opower came to WibiData. So whereas the Opower service was originally focused on nightly data analysis comparing users’ energy usage against that of other users, it’s now working on dynamic recommendations for users and letting them engage with the application in new ways.

The WibiData architecture

During these engagements, WibiData has been building up its core technology for connecting those brawny back-office Hadoop environments to predictive customer-facing applications – a collection of HBase, data-formatting tools and machine learning algorithms that the company has been slowly open-sourcing under the Kiji banner. It has also been learning the similarities among the applications it’s building for customers in the same field, figuring out what’s repeatable. What does any given company in the retail space, for example, need to get started on its own recommendation engine?

And now, Bisciglia says, WibiData is going to double down on building application software based on what it has learned. The first two industries it targets will likely be financial services and retail, two areas where the company has seen a lot of traction. He envisions the finished product including some pre-defined schema for formatting data and some pre-built predictive models, both broadly applicable across that industry rather than specific to a single user.

There will also be different interfaces that allow different types of users (e.g., data scientists, systems engineers and business users) to interact with the data in the ways they need to.

Time will tell if WibiData can actually accomplish its goal of turning Hadoop into a collection of somewhat specialized software packages, but someone has to. Even industry heavyweights like Cloudera see the need, but their hands are full just getting Hadoop integrated into existing environments and getting those early uses up and running. As Cloudera CEO Mike Olson said at Structure: Data in 2012 to anyone ambitious enough to tackle the Hadoop-application gap, “Call me, I’ll connect you with funding. The money is out there.”

If you want to hear more about the need for Hadoop applications, check out this panel from Structure: Data 2013, where I speak with WibiData’s Omer Trajman, Continuuity’s Jonathan Gray and Pivotal’s Muddu Sudhakar.

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Evolution of the home energy market

That Nest and Opower have emerged as the leading companies fighting over this business says something about the small and slow-moving industry. Over the years the market for devices, websites and services that attempt to get consumers to reduce their energy use — a largely unsexy and unappreciated task — has been riddled with struggling startups and failed clunky product launches.

Home energy dashboards never made a dent with consumers. Various startups from Tendril to EnergyHub realized early on that high-end energy dasboards were not the way to go. People don’t care enough about energy and didn’t want to spend money on an energy-specific device.

At the same time, residential-focused energy efficiency services from utilities have taken years to roll out in any meaningful way. Utilities are notoriously slow moving and cautious. Companies that tried to work in these markets got frustrated, too. Google and Microsoft both shut down their energy efficiency web tools after failing to gain much interest or develop any partnerships.

Opower’s entrance

When Opower launched almost six years ago, it found early success with an energy efficiency product that provided immediate value to utilities: mailed energy reports. While Opower has always been an energy software and data company, it were these mailed reports that were initially valuable to utilities that (particularly back then) had unsophisticated digital presences.

Honeywell & Opower’s iPad smart thermostat app

The Opower reports came in envelopes that looked like bills (so were almost always opened) and they used behavioral techniques (smiley faces, peer competition) to gently convince the utility customer to reduce consumption. The mailed reports were also relatively inexpensive compared to home energy devices and dashboards.

But over the years Opower has had to morph into a company that largely sells digital energy data products to utilities. There’s only so much business — and so much effect on consumer behavior — that paper reports can have.

Opower now largely interacts with utility customers through email, text messages, and websites. Its newer digital products include a Facebook app and more recently software for connected thermostats, in partnership with thermostat giant Honeywell.

Opower’s work with Honeywell and its connected thermostat product was one of the first indicators of how competitive Opower and Nest could become. The thermostat has emerged as the great hope for creating a gateway into home energy efficiency following the demise of the energy dashboard. In addition, Honeywell saw Nest as a pretty direct threat, having previously sued Nest over patent infringement around the learning thermostat.

It’s unclear how much success the Honeywell/Opower thermostat is having, given that it’s such a new product. PG&E was the first utility that piloted it and some early results suggested that customers liked using the smart thermostats and particularly liked being able to remotely control the thermostat using their iPhone.

But one of the key differences between Opower and Nest’s business models is clear through that partnership. Opower’s utility products are almost always white-labelled for utilities, so, for example, if it creates a website and system of emails and texts for PG&E customers, then Opower’s alerts are branded with PG&E’s logo. In contrast, Nest has long been focused on selling directly to consumers and building a consumer brand.

Nest emerges

Nest was officially launched toward the end of 2011, though the company had been building its technology for a year and half before that. Its core business philosophy involves the production of a well-designed thermostat that users would covet and that could also collect data about the user and learn their behavior. The thermostat can use that knowledge to shave off between 20 and 30 percent of the user’s monthly heating and cooling, and Nest has mostly focused on selling the thermostat directly to consumers.

But Nest has more recently started to move into offering utilities and energy service providers energy efficiency services. Last month Nest launched a variety of energy services, including demand response, and also this week acquired a startup, MyEnergy, that aggregates and analyzes utility data. It’s clear that one of the most important aspects of the Nest thermostat is the services that can be run based on both the consumer’s individual and the collective Nest users’ data.

Nest appears to want to maintain its brand and its ability to connect directly with customers. When it launched its energy services last month, the company told me that its services sit between the consumer and the utility. It also approves eligible customers and monitors how the services are performing and how the customers are reacting.

This direct-to-consumer approach could also prove useful if (and when) Nest launched any more connected home products in the future.

Power in the data

Essentially, both Nest and Opower are cloud-based data analytics companies that are using various — and increasingly competitive — ways to access home energy data. Nest calls its cloud-based big data algorithms Auto-Tune, and the data that is collected is from its increasingly large amount of thermostats being installed throughout the world.

Opower has built out its big data platform, Opower 4, which collects data from at least 75 utilities, processes data from more than 50 million homes, and has 15 million homes fully connected into the Opower platform. Opower is analyzing 16 percent of all of the smart meters in the U.S.

Each company’s approach has unique benefits and hurdles. Opower has been widely successful with utilities using the approach of starting out with a basic data analytics service, and adding on more complexity and control over time. Utilities are hard customers to win over, so the benefits of winning their business early is invaluable. Nest, with its direct to consumer approach, could be slightly threatening to some of the more conservative utilities.

Nest, on the other hand, has the capacity to build a consumer brand that can make money from direct consumer electronics sales as well as working with energy service providers. Opower has little consumer brand presence and mostly subverts its brand to its utility customers.

Which method will prove more successful over time? It’ll be interesting to see, but in reality there will be room for both. It’s also refreshing to see different types of innovation and execution in the home energy efficiency space — an industry that has been neglected for quite a long time.

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MyEnergy is a startup that was founded back in 2007. The company was called Earth Aid for several years, and has developed algorithms that collect, analyze and provide recommendations around utility energy data. MyEnergy CEO Ben Bixby told me in an interview that MyEnergy is already hard at work stitching MyEnergy into the fabric of the Nest service, and he thinks that the union between the two services could be a “game changer” for energy data.

Unlike some startups like Opower that collect and aggregate energy data for utilities to deliver services to their customers, the MyEnergy platform aggregates utility energy data largely to deliver energy efficiency services straight to the consumer. For example, if your utility has an online account, and you gave MyEnergy permission to link that account to its system, then the site would pull your energy consumption data into its network. MyEnergy then would use that data to offer the user recommendations for how to reduce energy consumption and also create a sort of social network around energy consumption. The important part to remember is that your utility doesn’t even have to be involved in the process.

In recent years some utilities have embraced the Department of Energy-backed Green Button program, which is supposed to make this process of collecting and managing utility energy data even easier and standardized.

MyEnergy also has a utility-facing data product, but Bixby clarified that the utility data product isn’t white labelled (the way Opower’s is), and is branded with MyEnergy. Nest said it will also use MyEnergy to provide services for energy providers, so it clearly will be using MyEnergy for both straight to consumer data services and utility data services.

The acquisition move shows how Nest is increasingly working with utilities and energy service providers on energy efficiency and energy services. While Nest, founded by former Apple designers, is well known for making a chic learning thermostat, one of its under appreciated values is its ability to collect and use energy data in new ways. The move also puts Nest in closer competition with leading energy utility data companies like Opower.

Last month Nest announced a variety of energy services that its collective thermostats can provide to energy companies and utilities. Examples of energy services include “demand response,” which is when power companies turn down power usage of a collective group during peak times (like a hot summer afternoon).

MyEnergy doesn’t provide detailed numbers on how many users it has, and Bixby would only say that its customers are found within 1,500 utility service territories. Boston-based MyEnergy had 12 employees before the acquisition, and some of those folks will be coming out west to work with the Nest team. MyEnergy is backed by Point Judith Capital, Clean Energy Venture Group, and Conservation Services Group. Nest is backed by Venrock, Kleiner Perkins, and Google Ventures.

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Nest is initially launching three different types of energy efficiency services working with a couple of utilities in Texas, including Reliant Energy and Austin Energy, California utility Southern California Edison, and east coast utility National Grid. Nest has been working with Reliant Energy, the utility arm of NRG Energy, since the summer of 2012 to offer Reliant’s customers’ its thermostat.

Nest’s most important new service is its answer to a demand response program, which it’s calling Rush Hour Rewards. Demand response programs are widely used by utilities to better manage the grid, and utilities use them to collectively get some of their customers to curb their energy consumption during peak grid events, like late afternoon on a hot summer’s day. For Rush Hour Rewards, the Nest thermostat uses a variety of techniques to shave off energy consumption during a peak grid event, but while maintaining comfort levels within the home.

Customers opt into the Rush Hour Rewards program and agree to have their thermostat automatically managed during that time period; in return, they save money on their energy bill. They can override the programs whenever they want. Customers who participate can save between $20 to $60 per season, according to Nest.

The startup went out of its way to not use the words “demand response” in its service’s name and marketing, and it seems to have put substantial thought into how to market this to consumers to make it attractive. Nest has also been piloting Rush Hour Rewards for over two years, it said.

Nest’s two other programs include an instant online rebate program, where customers can get one of the learning thermostats when they sign up for an energy plan, and a service called Seasonal Savings, which is a reoccurring energy efficiency tuneup. Seasonal Savings nudges the temperature or cooling slightly to see if the tiny changes affect your daily behavior. If you override those changes, the software will remember that and adjust, but Nest says that 80 percent of the time people acclimated to the small adjustments.

Behind these new services is the cloud-based big data algorithms that are the secret sauce of Nest, and which Nest has now named Auto-Tune. Now that Nest has gotten hundreds of thousands of thermostats out there in the market, and has done two years of field trials, it has been able to collect a large amount of data about how customers use and react to temperature and cooling changes. Nest uses this data about behavioral changes to inform its services and how its algorithms work.

Nest combines this behavioral data with utility data, weather data, personal use data, demographics data and more to collectively manage the thermostats and deliver energy savings. Nest said its services sit between the consumer and the utility, and they approve eligible customers, monitor how the services are performing and how the customers are reacting.

Nest’s offering could be powerful because the company first worked to begin to build a brand and a consumer-focused buzz. Other startups are offering next-generation demand response services with utilities, including EcoFactor, Opower, EnergyHub and others. But the biggest difference between these startups and Nest is that Nest has developed and sells its own learning thermostat.

Nest was founded by a team from Apple, and is led by designer Tony Fadell, who developed versions of the iPod and iPhone. The company is backed by Google Ventures, Venrock, and Kleiner Perkins.

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Putting small energy data in perspective

Barry Fischer, head writer at the data blog from Opower, the company that crunches data for utility companies servicing almost half of all households in the United States, passed around sample bills that chart consumers’ year-to-year energy use and show how consumers compare with their neighbors. Besides the information for bills, Opower also provides alerts if consumers are on track to get a high energy bill and a Facebook app for consumers to compare their energy use with that of their friends. The data Opower collects — consumption figures from utilities, preferences from users and third-party weather, housing and demographic statistics — also enable Fischer and other company bloggers to present simple and consumer-friendly correlations, such as the fact that Yahoo Mail users typically pay $110 more per year in energy bills than those who use Google Mail. Taken together, Opower’s uses of data show how millions of people can benefit from contributing their own individual data.

In January, GigaOM’s Katie Fehrenbacher named Opower one of her 13 energy data startups to watch in 2013.

Etsy bakes a Funnel Cake

In another session, three data engineers from Etsy revealed how they use Hadoop to detect issues with various functions on the website, and they talked about building a program other employees use to optimize the parts of the site that generate the most revenue. At Etsy, already a big Hadoop user — at one point, engineers ran 5,000 Hadoop jobs for a variety of purposes in a single month — a popular term is the attribution funnel, or the process customers take as they buy products on the site. The data engineers wanted other employees to be able to identify the steps where customers get caught up before purchasing, such as email address verification to establish new accounts. So they built a program called Funnel Cake, which scales better and deliver real-time information faster than Hadoop, said engineer Wil Stuckey. Running Funnel Cake, employees can streamline the process and increase the percentage of site visitors who end up buying products. Beyond that, they can see which kinds of pages lead to the most sales and focus more or less attention on browsing and searching functions or storefronts from product makers.

Vending machines, advertisements and babies

Other use cases on display at the conference spanned from vending machines to babies. One company has installed sensors on its vending machines and now monitors the resulting data in real time to spot theft and cut down on purchasing new machines to replace stolen ones. An internet advertising company now uses highly scalable software based on Hadoop MapReduce, Apache Nutch and Apache Solr to detect traffic sources for advertisements, bringing new revenue. And a hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit has implemented a visualization tool for real-time health statistics that shows signs of “baby crashing” and thereby can reduce mortality rates.

Executives from Aetna, Williams-Sonoma, Facebook and other companies will discuss big data use cases at the GigaOM Structure:Data conference in New York on March 20-21.

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• A near-term outlook for big data
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• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1

Here’s a list of 13 startups that we covered last year that I would keep an eye on in 2013. A couple of these, like Opower and Nest, I also included on my list last year:

1). Stem: Formerly called Powergetics and founded in 2009, Stem‘s software tracks and analyzes energy use in buildings and helps companies predict and control their energy budgets. In addition, the company helps buildings owners tap into installed battery farms to use stored energy when grid electricity is expensive. The company got a new CEO and announced its first customer — InterContinental Hotels — in San Francisco in 2012.

2). Opower: I’ve covered these energy software leaders closely, so I won’t rehash them here. But in 2012 the company made strides like launching smart thermostat utility software trials with Honeywell, and it helped customers collectively save 2 terawatt hours of energy by the end of last year.

Honeywell & Opower’s iPad smart thermostat app

3). AutoGrid: A newbie launched by some progressive former utility execs at PG&E, AutoGrid is working on an Amazon-style recommendation engine for utilities’ energy data. Its Energy Data Platform (EDP) can take petabytes of grid data — both structured and unstructured — and crunches it to predict and analyze what is happening on the grid in real time. The company is backed by Foundation Capital, Voyager Capital and Stanford University.

4). Nest: While most people think of Nest as a smart thermostat maker company, some of the startup’s powerful innovations are the analytics that collect energy data and train the thermostat to learn your habits and shave off energy when it works for you. That data will also be valuable to utilities in some respect. Nest launched its redesigned thermostat in late 2012.

5). Viridity Energy: Viridity Energy has been around for awhile, and it uses energy data to create a new type of demand response service, or the process when utilities connect with building owners to turn down a building’s energy consumption. In 2012, Viridity got a large round from Japanese giant Mitsui. (photo of Viridity Energy SVP Western Regional Division Laura Manz)

6). EcoFactor: EcoFactor is like the service version of Nest (without the designed hardware) and is working with utilities and service providers like cable companies to manage connected thermostats in real time. In late 2012, EcoFactor raised another $8 million from Aster Capital, Claremont Creek Ventures and RockPort Capital Partners.

7). Bidgely: Launched in late 2012, Bidgely has created algorithms that can dig into real-time smart meter energy-consumption data, can reduce consumers’ home energy use by between 4 percent to 12 percent, and it can also deliver other beneficial home services to consumers. The company is backed by Khosla Ventures.

8). Space-Time Insight: Fremont, Calif.-based Space-Time Insight develops geospatial analytics around sectors like electricity, oil and gas and transportation. California’s Independent System Operator deployed the company’s software to power a control room featuring an 80-foot screen that displays map views and real-time information about energy infrastructure. The company raised a series B round of $14 million last year.

9). PlotWatt: Like Bidgely, PlottWatt has developed smart algorithms that can crunch energy data down to the appliance level to determine which of your household devices is sucking up more than its fair share of power. The company is four years old but raised a series A round of $3 million from Felicis Ventures and Acorn Ventures last summer.

10). WegoWise: WegoWise is looking to lower energy costs for apartment buildings, helping both landlords and tenants. The company uses lots of data to help property managers see where their units can stand to be improved. WegoWise bought data startup Melon Power late last year.

11). Retroficiency: Retroficiency has created data analytics that basically can give a building (or a group of buildings) an energy audit remotely, without auditors having to come to the site of the building. It uses a lot of publicly and privately available data to do that. The method is a much more low cost and quicker way to plan energy building reductions.

12). GridNavigator: GridNavigator’s software and cloud-based service perform energy consumption forecasts throughout the day to help building managers manage their power consumption. The company was founded in 2009 and is based in Redmond, Wash.

13). Honest Buildings: Honest Buildings doesn’t just collect energy data, but it has created a repository for building-related data enabling renter and home buyers, property managers, and organizations to learn about and compare the energy efficiencies of buildings. It also has info about green building materials and certifications like LEED.

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• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1
• A near-term outlook for big data

Meantime, our loyal readers also appreciated our profiles of new and under-the-radar startups, feature stories on clean energy and electric car trends, and explainers on new battery technologies.

Here are our 10 most-popular cleantech stories of 2012:

10). A Khosla-backed big data energy startup you should know about: Published in late October, this profile of energy data startup Bidgely, which has backing from Khosla Ventures, had a combo of buzz-worthy terms like “big data,” “startup” and “Khosla.” The startup does energy data appliance disaggregation, which means it can take data from your smart meter and accurately determine which of your appliances are energy hogs and which are energy misers.

9). Bill Gates-backed Liquid Metal Battery is now . . . Ambri: In this nice little exclusive, I wrote about how a battery company called Liquid Metal Battery had decided to change its name to Ambri, as the company moves closer to commercialization. The internet cared partly because Bill Gates has invested in the company, and also because the founder of Ambri, Donald Sadoway, went on Jon Stewart later in the year.

8). Video: We test drive Tesla’s Model S electric car! Now this was a fun one. For our Green Overdrive show this summer, we got to be one of the first journalists to do a test drive of Tesla’s Model S electric car. It was a smooth, vibration-free ride, and the car had excellent torque.

7). The story behind how Apple’s iCloud data center got built: Whenever I get a chance to travel or visit a site where new clean power technology is being installed I take it. For a data center road trip series, I drove around North Carolina and visited some of the towns and talked with the economic-development folks that helped pave the way for Apple’s huge new solar farm there, which is being built next to its data center. My most popular story in the four-part series was “The story behind how Apple’s iCloud data center got built.”

6). Nest thermostat reviewed: A smart device for all seasons: GigaOM’s mobile guru Kevin Tofel wrote a detailed review of the Nest learning thermostat, after he used it for several weeks at his house. Tofel is used to getting attention for his stories: His reporting helped influence Apple’s decision to build the iPad mini, and he’s recently been doing some great stories about GM’s Chevy Volt, which he bought a month ago.

5). A rare look inside Facebook’s Oregon data center [photos video]: On a tour in mid-August we visited Facebook’s energy efficient data center in Oregon and learned about its outdoor chilling system and its new server architecture. We grabbed a series of mini Flip videos, as well as a full photo spread of the technology that Facebook is using there.

4). Hands-on video with Tesla’s electric Model X: Thanks to the mad-dash editing skills of GigaOM Creative Director Chris Albrecht, we shot and unveiled this video of Tesla’s Model X electric car over a few-hour period at Tesla’s event in February 2012. Because the live feed of the Model X launch was delayed that night, we also got a nice audience boost as it was the only footage — video and photos — of the Model X at the time.

3). The first photos of Tesla’s electric SUV the Model X: Along with the video, we posted these first photos of Tesla’s Model X car. We were one of the first sites to post these, and we were one of just a few journalists at the preview event, so we got a lot of traction with them.

2). A battery breakthrough that could bring electric cars to the masses: A profile of promising battery startup Envia was near the top of the top 10 list, at #2. I got out early with the story, so that helped draw attention, but thanks to Reddit, the article also got some more mainstream attention.

1). Behold Apple’s massive solar farm from the sky [photos]: Sometimes the killer posts are the ones that just kind of fall into your lap. North Carolina’s TV Station WCNC-TV sent me some aerial photos they took of Apple’s solar farm in North Carolina, after I did an interview with them about the data center cluster in the state. I popped a snappy headline on top and the rest is page view history (with over 50,000 page views on the post alone).

Runners-up included:

• Bill Gates: We need crazy energy entrepreneurs
• The ultimate geek road trip: North Carolina’s mega data center cluster
• 12 smart grid startups to watch in 2012
• 10 reasons Apple, Facebook, and Google chose North Carolina for their mega data centers
• Opower the big data energy player to beat

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

Remote control of the smart thermostat could prove to be one of the first smart grid applications that is a clear benefit to consumers. One of the major problems with smart meters is that consumers haven’t really seen the direct benefits (beyond savings) of having the smart meter installed at their homes — a lot of the benefits of smart meters are actually for the utility. But remote control of a thermostat is a service that even companies like Comcast and Verizon are looking to sell to their customers.

Honeywell & Opower smart thermostat website

For the PG&E trial it’s still early days. So far the pilot program is pretty small, and PG&E is still recruiting customers to it. According to a report issued last week, there are currently 888 customers involved in the smart thermostat trial, but only 276 of those actually had one of the thermostats installed. 421 of the group were chosen to get a smart thermostat installed (the rest were in the control group that didn’t get thermostats), but 145 of those homes didn’t have a successful installation for whatever reason.

The main reason that the thermostat installation didn’t work even for customers that had been chosen, was that the homes were actually found to be ineligible for the program (say, because of a faulty or incompatible HVAC system, or lack of a broadband connection). But often times that ineligibility wasn’t determined until the installer was at the home, which is inefficient. The report says:

The number of treatment group customers without a thermostat installed is a problem that could compromise the precision of energy savings estimates when the impact evaluation is conducted once the trial is fully enrolled.

So for future recruitment the program needs to be tweaked to evaluate if the home is eligible before the installer gets there.

PG&E is looking for more pilot participants for the trial and eventually wants to have 500 homes with the thermostats installed. Future participants need to own their homes, have central heating and cooling, not move for at least a year, have a broadband connection, and live in certain zip codes like in Fresno and Bakersfield.

Honeywell’s thermostat with Opower software

PG&E isn’t the only utility trialling smart thermostats. Texas energy service provider Reliant is offering smart thermostat services from two Silicon Valley startups Nest and EcoFactor. Startup EnergyHub is also working with cooperative utilities Gibson Electric Membership Corporation and Mid-South Synergy — the EnergyHub service, called Mercury, reduces customers’ heating and cooling consumption at times of peak demand.

One of the earliest utilities to tap smart thermostats for energy management was Nevada utility NV Energy. NV Energy is providing 50,000 customers with a home energy dashboard from Control4 and a programmable thermostat. Another 50,000 are supposed to be signed up down the road.

Utilities can use smart thermostats to collectively and remotely manage home energy consumption at peak times. They can also just use the thermostats for energy efficiency, and for having customers cut their energy bills. Earlier this year I wrote a report on the battle for the smart thermostat, GigaOM Pro (subscription required). Increasingly energy software startups like Opower and Nest are competing over the home smart thermostat.

PG&E is expecting the smart thermostat service to lower its customers’ energy consumption by 5 percent, and potentially by more for customers that use gas for heating and cooling. Update: The Honeywell/Opower thermostat can specifically reduce a home’s heating and cooling by 15 to 25 percent. In comparison Nest says its thermostats can cut 20 to 30 percent of a homes’ heating and cooling energy consumption. So they are about the same in terms of their energy reduction potential. The software is a little bit different though, in that Opower’s thermostat software doesn’t use learning algorithms.

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• Let the battle for the smart thermostat begin
• Report: Cleantech’s Third-Quarter Growing Pains
• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1

So here’s my first, where I parse out what I think have been the top 10 best, and the top 10 worst, things that have landed on the cleantech scene in 2012. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

The best:

1). Tesla remains (mostly) on track and is one of the last standing: Tesla hit its goal to launch its second electric sedan the Model S in the Summer of 2012, and reservations have remained high throughout the year. The introduction of the car was met with rave reviews, and towards the end of the year the car won Motor Trend’s Car of the Year award, making it the first electric car to do so. While Tesla did assemble and ship some of those cars more slowly than expected, the company remains on track with its slightly lowered estimates. Tesla CEO Elon Musk even tweeted recently that the company has now become cash flow positive.

In comparison, a lot of other electric car makers, and electric vehicle parts makers, struggled in 2012. A123, which supplies batteries for electric cars, declared bankruptcy, while sales of GM’s Volt and Nissan’s LEAF in the U.S. are lower than expected.

2). Google put almost a billion dollars into clean power: Even though Google isn’t a power provider or utility, the search engine giant invested almost a billion dollars ($990 million) into clean power projects. Google is doing this because it wants to power its data centers with clean power, but most solar and wind are more expensive than fossil fuel power right now.

Last year Google shut down its Google.org-sponsored RE<C project, and many saw this as a sign that Google was moving away from its clean power commitments. However, just this week, Google announced that it has hired energy innovation wiz Arun Majumdar — the former ARPA-E program director — to work on Google.org’s energy research strategy. Expect to see some interesting energy innovation outta Google in 2013.

3). Rock bottom solar prices: Super cheap solar panels might have caused problems for solar manufacturers, but for companies and home-owners that want to put solar panels on their roofs, low cost panels are leading to an unprecedented amount of new solar installations. The super cheap panels has been leading to solar installers doing well, and SolarCity had a successful IPO just last week.

4). Clean Web, Green IT, digital green, or whatever you want to call it: It’s become very clear that investing in capital-intensive cleantech manufacturing technologies is a lot harder for most investors, than investing in software, computing, mobile and the web. Which is why new phrases called Clean Web, and digital green, have emerged to explain startups and big companies that use digital technology to address resource constraints like energy, water and food. See photo below of investor Sunil Paul talking about Clean Web back at Green:Net 2011 (our conference focused on this topic).

5). Big data and energy collide: One of the biggest trends, that is making startups money and actually helping buildings reduce their energy consumption, is new types of energy analytics for energy data. Some of the companies that are playing in this space include Opower, Nest, Tendril, EcoFactor, EnergyHub, Bidgely, Stem, Auto Grid and others.

6). Low power servers: Using low power ARM chips for servers, finally got some more mainstream traction in 2012. Our analysts at GigaOM Pro just held a webinar about this on Wednesday. Earlier this year AMD bought SeaMicro, a startup building servers based on ARM low power chips, and Intel is also into so-called “microservers,” too.

SeaMicro’s SM10000-64 server.

7). Obama won: We’re not super political here at GigaOM, but the fact that President Obama will be the President for another four more years, means that a lot of the incentives for clean power and energy innovation will remain in place. Some might get cut, but the Obama administration has been really active in supporting energy innovation and put an unprecedented amount of funding into clean power, electric vehicles, biofuels and energy technology through the stimulus package.

8). Chinese investors: Chinese giants like auto parts maker Wanxiang are stepping in to buy up low cost cleantech assets that aren’t getting the needed funding in the U.S. Wanxiang is acquiring bankrupt battery maker A123 Systems (given the deal is approved in the U.S.) and also invested in GreatPoint Energy, and Smith Electric Vehicles. It’s not great for the U.S., but the funds are helping energy innovation stay alive in difficult times.

9). Food and Ag tech innovation: One of the most interesting areas to emerge in recent months is startups that are looking at ways of using technology to make food consumption and production more sustainable. There’s now startups building new types of plant-based proteins, invitro meat printing, biotech for crop development, new kinds of insurance for crop production, and more.

10). Desire to address “big problems”: Pervasive across the web and mobile sectors, is a growing desire of entrepreneurs to tackle really “big” and difficult problems. The idea has even graced the cover of the MIT Tech Review recently. As those struggling in the cleantech sector know, this is one of the main reasons that many cleantech entrepreneurs started their businesses. Now a second wave of web entrepreneurs is focused on “big problems” with new investment methods like Peter Thiel and Obvious Corp.

+1: Bill Gates. An outsider to energy that’s fully embraced funding and discussing energy innovation.

The worst:

Since there were a lot of bad things to happen in cleantech in 2012, I’m just going to briefly run down some of the hurdles:

1). Electric cars struggled: Electric vehicles moved way more slowly than expected in 2012. The Volt and the LEAF are below their numbers in the U.S., and Better Place is struggling gaining traction in Israel, it’s first target market. Fisker Automotive has been plagued by problems, and battery makers like A123 Systems have gone under.

2). Solar prices hurting manufacturers: Solar prices kicked solar makers in the teeth in 2012 (and yes, this is also one of the best things). There’s been dozens of solar companies that have closed factories, gone bankrupt or gotten out of solar completely in 2012. It’s even affecting solar thermal companies, which make systems that use mirrors to harness the sun’s rays to make heat, as well as solar concentrating thermal companies, which have developed hybrid systems.

3). Natural gas prices undercutting clean power projects: Super cheap natural gas might make the U.S. energy independent and lower overall carbon emissions, but the low prices are making wind and solar projects less economical. Expect higher natural gas prices in 2013, as they really can’t get much lower.

4). Cleantech got politicized: Cleantech, clean energy and electric cars became fodder for the U.S. Presidential election and it has yet to recover. Somehow clean energy became a cause to fight for by the left, and fight against by the right, despite that some red states are adding clean energy jobs at a faster rate than blue states. Hopefully that will die down now that the election has been decided.

5). Lots of cleantech investors lost money: Many of the generalist venture capitalists that put money into cleantech over the last 5 or 6 years have lost money, and decidedly pulled back on investments in 2012. That will continue in 2013. Though, this is also a good thing, as it is weeding out investors that didn’t make money. The same thing happened in the dotcom bust.

6). World coal domination: As developing countries look to add more and more cheap energy, coal is becoming the defacto energy option. By 2017, coal could replace oil as the largest source of energy. That’s really bad as coal doesn’t just have a lot of emissions, but it has other problems like air pollution, and safety issues for workers. There’s a time factor for clean technologies, and if the world becomes even more dependent on cheap fossil fuels it’ll be hard to turn that boat around.

7). UN climate change discussions: Every year they don’t deliver on important decisions, and end up determining just the very basic needs in the 11th hour. It’s time for a new method of discussion, and a new way to make these important decisions.

8). Advanced Equities: The Chicago broker that raised funds for capital intensive cleantech companies like Fisker, Bloom Energy, SolFocus and Serious Energy, was charged and settled with the SEC over lying to investors. It makes the entire industry, and particularly the VCs that invested early in these companies, look really bad. Thanks guys!

9). Solyndra still hurts in 2012: Despite that Solyndra’s fall was over a year ago, the ghost of the company is still hovering over cleantech deals, investment, political discussions, and the public’s view of solar.

10). Expensive and slow moving battery innovation: One of the reasons electric cars are still not mainstream is because the batteries needed to power them are too expensive and don’t give the cars enough range. While there are a lot of innovative new battery startups, chemistry just moves a lot slower than computing innovation. Sigh — look out another decade for game changing battery innovation.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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