Executives from startup ETV Motors tell us, in an exclusive interview, how they’re shifting gears and divesting from the turbine business to focus on high-voltage, energy-dense battery cells for aviation, electric bikes and eventually plug-in cars. Read more »
EnerG2, a company working on synthetic carbon materials for energy storage devices, hit pay dirt last summer with the award of a stimulus grant under a DOE program. Today, in Albany, Ore., the startup at last kicked off construction of the factory made possible by that grant. Read more »
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 »
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David Gelbaum, the famously private greentech investor, has done one of his only high-profile in-person interviews published in this weekend’s Sunday New York Times. The article offers a peek into what Gelbaum’s peers and portfolio companies think, but stays away from his recent investing hurdles. Read more »
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 »
Former hedge-funder-turned-philanthropist — and greentech investor — David Gelbaum won’t be donating his usual $20 million to the American Civil Liberties Union this year. Nor will he contribute to the Sierra Club or the California Community Foundation’s Iraq-Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund. Put simply, it’s been a […] Read more »
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 »
Online annotation and research service WebNotes has been a useful tool in my arsenal since I reviewed it last year. Since that time, the company has released a Pro version and has solidified the feature set. In a move to further differentiate itself in the annotation […] Read more »
Electric car maker Aptera Motors has deep-pocketed friends — it’s raised more than $24 million from investors including Google.org, Idealab, The Beall Family Trust, The Simons Family, Esenjay Investments and David Gelbaum’s Quercus Trust. But Uncle Sam has so far declined to pony up the $75 […] Read more »
Pour enough cash into greentech startups and environmental efforts, and sooner or later a couple of your investments might cross paths — especially in a time when large-scale solar projects planned for the Mojave Desert are coming under fire from environmental groups concerned about desert species […] Read more »
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“We cook ‘em and squeeze ‘em.” That’s how LiveFuels CEO Lissa Morgenthaler-Jones describes her San Carlos, Calif.-based company’s process for turning algae-fed fish into oil for fuel using heat and high pressure. It’s a slightly more gruesome way of harvesting pond scum than the mechanical equipment […] Read more »
David Gelbaum’s Quercus Trust is at it again. The quiet venture capital firm, along with frequent co-investor 21Ventures, has just led a second round of investment in startup Advanced Telemetry, which has built a wireless dashboard for monitoring and managing energy consumption. True to form, the […] Read more »
There’s been a wealth of companies trying to do for the solar industry what Apple has done for consumer electronics: make a product that’s plug-n-play, low-cost and well designed. Here’s one that’s come out of the woodwork this morning that’s found a couple well-known backers and […] Read more »
Less than a year has passed since Quercus Trust and 21Ventures threw down $500,000 in seed money for a small Austin, Texas, startup, Graphene Energy, with a big idea for disrupting the energy storage market. The idea: Develop a technology using graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of […] Read more »
Although I normally follow Ian Dixon’s excellent Digital Lifestyle blog, I missed a great post recently. Lucky for me that one of our readers brought it to my attention. The gist of the post is about extending Windows Home Server by using Live Mesh. That’s a […] Read more »
On the day I give up on my iPhone and trade it in for the iPod Touch, AdMob, a mobile advertising startup released its report that shows a big uptick in mobile Internet usage via Wi-Fi in the month of January 2009. According to AdMob, Apple […] Read more »
Graphene Energy, an Austin-based developer of ultracapacitor technology, has raised $500,000 in seed investment from Quercus Trust and 21Ventures. The investment represents yet another move by David Gelbaum’s Quercus Trust, which was the third-most active venture fund investing in cleantech in all of 2008, according to […] Read more »
Solar startup Lightwave Power said today it has closed a Series A round of just over $13 million, with Quercus Trust leading the investment and 21 Ventures co-investing. Lightwave co-founder Lawrence Kaufman told us the funding began in June, just six months after the company launched […] Read more »
A raft of startups has set out to harness energy from waves and tides, many of them in the turbulent waters of Scotland’s Pentland Firth. A subset of that group has emerged in recent months with plans (and prototypes) for tapping river flows. Rivers have powered […] Read more »
Unless you’re actively seeding torrent files or dream of one day having HD content streamed from the web to your TV, the debate over managing networks can seem hopelessly abstract. To help the rest of us understand why fast networks with a lot of capacity are […] Read more »
Disclosure: I am the founder of Der Mundo, a multilingual blogging service and translation community that combines human and machine translation (provided in part by Google), and I have researched translation technology for more than 10 years via the Worldwide Lexicon project. Blogoscoped reports that Google […] Read more »
The Big Muddy could soon be a bit greener with some hydrokinetic turbines from Hyrdo Green Energy. The Houston, Tex.-based startup tells us it is planning to have the first commercially operable hydrokinetic energy project in Mississippi River waters up and running by September. Hydro Green […] Read more »
The dream of taking the contents of our trash cans and putting them into our fuel tanks has moved one step closer to reality with BlueFire Ethanol’s announcement that they’ve been granted permission to build a waste-to-fuel ethanol plant next to a landfill in Lancaster, Calif. […] Read more »
I was having a lot of trouble getting my iPhone applications to sync with iTunes. I tried doing backups and full syncs to no avail. Finally, in a moment of desperation, I righted clicked on my iPhone and chose the option “Transfer Purchases” and to my […] Read more »
Video compression company On2 said today that CEO Bill Joll was stepping down, effective immediately. In addition to the chief executive role, Joll had served as president and a member of the company’s board of directors since May 2006, but now he appears to be leaving […] Read more »
Our favorite stealthy private equity investor, David Gelbaum’s Quercus Trust, is involved in two investments in battery/energy storage startups, re-upping on one existing investment and joining on as new investor in the other. The new investment comes with the disclosure that Quercus played a part in […] Read more »
I recently reviewed the drag-and-drop Web-based site building tool Webon and marveled at its ease of use and add-on features. I’m equally as impressed with MOLI, a social networking management tool and so much more. According to their site, MOLI is …a next-generation social networking site […] Read more »
The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) is holding its big trade show in Vegas this week, and I’m not sure there’s enough caffeine to help me keep up on all the news — but here’s a round-up, so far, from day one: NAB president David Rehr […] Read more »
Heeeeeere’s Jonny! James and I are listening to the Asus news and the talk is WiMAX, WiMAX, WiMAX. Asus sees the mobile Internet as the future and is betting big on WiMAX. Anticipated range in urban areas is up to 10k with ranges of 50k in […] Read more »
iLife ’08 users, check for updates! Apple has unleashed a grand total of 9 updates for iLife ’08. They did sneak in a firmware update for my MacBook Pro as well. Here’s the list: Keynote 4.0.1 Pages 3.0.1 Numbers 1.0.1 iDVD 7.0.1 iMovie 7.1 GarageBand 4.1 […] Read more »
I am sad to report that Sally and I are no longer an item. As happens in many relationships, Sally has recently been requiring more and more of my attention and the only thing that made her happy was to throw ever increasing amounts of money […] Read more »
Thanks to a Technorati RSS feed, I caught this post from Fanatical (Fanatic-Al) that shows off some cutting-edge mobile tech….from 1994! Pictured above is a small, 386-based Toshiba notebook and one of the first GSM phones available in the UK. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on 8 […] Read more »
Like a man in love, I just cannot get enough of Bit Torrent. So I have been finding all these great articles about the file sharing software and the open media revolution it has unleashed. For instance here is this piece by Clarence Ladson, a college […] Read more »
You can get as much information about the Chinese telecom boom as you want, but world’s second hottest market is going unnoticed and as a result, I am introducing a new once-a-week column by Dr. Abhishek Puri, who will send us the buzz about broadband from […] Read more »
CED Magazine: The cable industry and a troupe of partners have been invited to the VoIP (Voice-over-Internet Protocol) dance. Level 3, MCI, Sprint, Vonage and other voice service providers (VSPs) are teaming with cable operators to build and deploy VoIP services. A few short years ago, […] Read more »
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