That is why I am particularly excited to announce that Perry Chen, the co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter is going to join me and Katie Fehrenbacher on stage for our second annual RoadMap conference, scheduled to be held on November 5 in San Francisco.

Chen, in an interview earlier this year, told me that society is reaching a new “bursting point of creativity.” We will explore this and many other aspects onstage. The theme of the conference is how design and user experience are going to help us navigate the connected planet.

Chen is the latest  to join an already stellar line-up of speakers for our event. Other speakers we have announced include Steve Case (co-founder AOL and Revolution) Evan Williams (Blogger, Twitter & Obvious Corp.), David Karp (CEO of Tumblr), Kevin Systrom (CEO of Instagram), Tony Fadell (co-founder and CEO of Nest), Ben Silberman (CEO of Pinterest), Katia Beauchamp (CEO of Birchbox) and Jennifer Pahlka (founder and Executive Director of Code for America). For a full line-up of speakers, visit the Roadmap website, and you can buy your tickets for the event here.

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Essentially for the investor it will be like buying the safe and predictable return of a mutual fund. The way it works is that a building owner will lease the solar equipment and enter into a contract for a fixed, low, electricity rate, commonly over about two decades. Solar Mosaic is working with solar lease providers like Sungevity, but Solar Mosaic is the one that organizes the crowd-funding of the money to get the solar rooftop installed. Once the project gets funded Kickstart-style, the rooftop solar panel installation process starts.

Solar rooftops are a surprisingly low risk investment. As Daniel Rosen, co-founder of Solar Mosaic put it in an article for us last month: solar loans are backed by a revenue-producing asset (electricity) and the building owners are just continuing to pay for the electricity that they are used to paying for day in and day out. There is little risk to investors that the buildings owners will default on their electricity payments, particularly since they are also saving money on their energy bills from day one. In addition the costs, timelines and returns for solar panels are pretty transparent as the technology has become increasingly commoditized.

Right now, banks are one of the major ways that solar rooftops get funded in the U.S. An installer like SolarCity (which plans to IPO soon) will raise a several-hundred-million-dollar fund from a bank to provide financing options like leases to building and home owners for solar panels. The bank can get a good return on the investment over time — some estimate 12 percent. Some corporations are starting to see the money-making potential of solar rooftops, too, and Google has created a $280 million fund for SolarCity, and a $75 million fund for Clean Power Finance. Warren Buffett is investing in these types of solar projects, too.

Make money off of the sun

Solar Mosaic is looking to bring that money-making opportunity down to the everyday investor (including you and me). The big question will be how much of a return will investors and everyday people be able to make off of funding these projects?

Nick Allen, a Partner with Spring Ventures — Solar Mosaic’s investor — told me last year that he thought the solar projects could one day provide something like a six-percent return, and the company could offer returns on one- to three-year notes. “How many people are happy with the one-percent return they get from their bank?” Allen explained to me, adding that the concept is “an exciting emerging asset class where people can invest money, create solar and do well.”

Solar Mosaic had planned to start offering this type of return in 2012, but the momentum has been accelerated because of the recently passed Jumpstart Our Business Start-ups (or JOBS) Act. The series of six bills bundled together — which had the support of Google, Steve Case, Angel List and many others — makes it easier for startups to gain access to capital including crowdfund investing. Solar Mosaic was founded in October 2010 and funded by Spring Ventures and a group of angel investors.

Beyond the soon-to-be-launched money-making aspect of SolarMosaic, solar seems to be the perfect application for crowd-funding. Like Kickstarter, lenders to projects are inspired by the project itself and want to have “skin in the game,” as Allen explained it to me. The lenders are also motivated to engage with the project and promote lead generation.“Solar is viral, crowd funding makes it more so,” said Allen.

I’ve experienced it first hand. I bought a $100 “tile” in Solar Mosaic’s first five solar projects, which were all fully funded with $350,000 and 400 investors (one “celebrity investor” gave $250,000). As soon as the Oakland solar project that I helped fund got fully funded last month, I got really excited and sent the link to all of my friends. I think the idea of combining the crowd-funding model with solar rooftops and adding in the potential to make money could be truly disruptive.

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Loosecubes is a website that enables companies to rent out office space and extra desks by the day — think of it like the Airbnb for offices. The startup is part of the growing trend of collaborative consumption, or using the web and mobile to help people share “stuff,” like cars (Zipcar or Getaround), apartments (Airbnb) or even dogs (Dog Vacay).

Case, through Revolution, has pioneered the web-sharing economy, and has invested in car sharing company Zipcar and luxury home sharing company Exclusive Resorts. At the Verge conference Case explained how car sharing couldn’t exist without the Internet and cell phones: “it’s only possible because of the first Internet revolution.”

Collaborative consumption also has a sustainability and efficiency aspect — if more people and workers share office space, less buildings will be built. Essentially the sharing economy is about more efficiently using resources, which is something that a world of 9 billion by 2050 will need to embrace.

Loosecubes is also part of another trend: a distributed workforce and more people embracing co-working. Deskmag has found that there are more than 1,100 coworking spaces worldwide, more than double the number in 2006. Investors, beyond Revolution, are putting money into new co-working spaces like New York based General Assembly, which raised $4.25 million from Yuri Milner of DST Global.

Image courtesy of Greenbiz and Loosecubes.

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FedBid runs a reverse auction site where qualified sellers compete for government business, bidding the price down to win the deal. This bizarro eBay for federal purchasing agents is one example of how the Internet can make buying processes more transparent and efficient for even the biggest customers.

Leonsis, who is now chairman of the board for Vienna, Va.-based FedBid, said the money will help the company expand its service to state and local governments. It plans to add staff, which stands now at 130 people.

There is “tremendous upside” in a move beyond the federal government — state, federal and local governments combined buy trillions of dollars worth of goods and services annually, Leonsis said on a conference call on Tuesday.

Currently, FedBid’s seven biggest customers are the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the State Department, the Department of Interior, the U.S. Park Service and the Veterans Health Administration,  according to Ali Saadat, FedBid CEO.

For the 2011 fiscal year, FedBid saved the feds $150 million on the sale of $1.4 billion worth of goods and services, Leonsis said. This year, the company is on track to hit $2.4 billion this year, Leonsis said.

FedBid takes a transaction fee of up to 3 percent of the total purchase. That fee is factored into each bid submitted through the marketplace. Average net savings on deals is 11 percent, including that fee, FedBid said.

Saadat said rivals sell software and consulting services to help build e-commerce sites like this one, but “we operate a fully managed marketplace.” The federal buyer posts what he or she needs and lets the service do its thing. “You post your buy and you don’t have to sit on your computer at all” since FedBid handles the process, Saadat added.

Technology aside, FedBid has also identified and recruited more than 3,000 authorized purchasing agents who post what goods they want to buy.

Some say there’s a downside to this automated process. Contractors contend that federal buyers use reverse auctions as an overly easy way to buy IT goods that might stand a closer, more detailed assessment, for example.

Still as government budgets remain under fire, Internet-based commerce sites could help cash-constrained agencies get what they need for less.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Diana Parkhouse

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Accelerating health entrepreneurs

While the headline is attention-grabbing, the move is more about the larger goal of stimulating health entrepreneurship, something Levin has been learning first hand after joining OrganizedWisdom, a startup which gathers health information from medical professionals. Levin, who will chair StartUp Health, and OrganizedWisdom CEO Steve Krein came up with the idea of building a community of entrepreneurs dedicated to health care after realizing that there weren’t the same type of resources, investors and mentors focused in this field as there are in other sectors. The two got together with Startup America Partnership officials at South by Southwest earlier this year and began putting together a partnership.

StartUp Health — which is being unveiled on Thursday at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Institute of Medicine’s Health Data Initiative Forum – will build off the work of OrganizedWisdom and will offer start-ups access to its technology, the information it has learned and its board members and mentors, like Levin and entrepreneur Esther Dyson. The idea is to help supply entrepreneurs in this field with the tools, connections and funding necessary to help them scale from an early stage start-up to a polished company.

“As I got deeply involved in OrganizedWisdom, it looked like all the talent in the industry was going to e-commerce, location and games but relatively few were going into health and wellness and that struck me as something that needs to be corrected,” Levin said. “We’re trying to create a vehicle to inspire the creative talent of entrepreneurs and create a community not only to provide guidance and financing but a strategy for long-term company building.”

Public-private partnership

The initiative is just getting underway, and there are more details about funding sources and mentors and the structure of the program that will emerge in the coming months. One of the first steps will be to initiate a series of StartUp Health Roundtables, the first of which will be hosted in July in New York. StartUp Health will partner with StartUp America Partnership for the event and Case will moderate it. StartUp Health will partner with StartUp America by sharing resources, tools and deal flow analysis.

The Department of Health and Human Services has also helped the cause by releasing health care data to support innovations in information technology. HHS CTO Todd Park will host a second roundtable later this year. And the department is also joining the StartUp Health pledge to show its commitment to the initiative.

OrganizedWisdom CEO Krein said the time is ripe for innovation in health care. Krein said while it used to take millions of dollars to develop breakthroughs, the barriers to entry have been lowered and we’re now seeing websites and mobile apps that are tackling real health problems. Meanwhile, the government is making more data available for innovators to leverage. The key is to accelerate the growth of health startups, he said.

“We want to connect the dots around the ecosystem so there is finally a place entrepreneurs can find a roadmap and get resources to start a business,” said Krein.

Healthcare unites

That Levin and Case are reuniting over health care shouldn’t be too surprising, and it’s almost fitting. Both have migrated to health care issues after their companies’ merger. In 2002, Levin opened the Moonview Sanctuary, a health and wellness treatment center in Santa Monica with his wife. Case launched Revolution Health, aimed at improving the wellness of people. Both have also seen the need for health care first hand. Levin has been diagnosed with Parkinsons disease while Case’s brother died of cancer.

Levin said the two have kept in touch over the years, but this is the first time they’re working together again. He said it’s an important collaboration because healthcare is a critical area that need innovation.

“It’s kind of nice to meet each other again,” Levin said of Case. “He knew of my interest in health care and given his family history he has reason to be really active in it too. Everyone has some kind of back story that relates to health care. It’s a universal thing.”

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I sat down with Case on Friday at the TiE Silicon Valley conference to get a few more specifics on his newest roles. A short video clip from our talk is embedded below.

Startup America is generally focused on “celebrating and accelerating” entrepreneurs across all sectors and geographic regions of the U.S. by providing tools to help them grow, Case told me. “We particularly help people in the speed-up phase, when you really see one of these companies on a growth trajectory,” he said. “What can be done in terms of giving them access to services, or access to customers, or access to talent, to increase the odds that they’ll make that transition to be a successful company.”

Meanwhile, with the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, he advocates for specific governmental policies that would make it easier for people to start and build companies. “That’s really more trying to get people in [Washington] D.C., the White House working with Congress, to put policies in place that are more entrepreneur-friendly.” He said the council is currently targeting policies on immigration, FDA regulations, and regulations around initial public offerings, to name a few.

In both roles, he’s hoping to create Silicon Valley-like ecosystems across the country and in sectors beyond technology. ”There is something magical about Silicon Valley,” Case said. “It’s hard to get a healthy, vibrant, entrepreneurial ecosystem working… and Silicon Valley does have that.” 

Case also offered advice for what entrepreneurs themselves can do to position their companies for success: Don’t start a company just because you think it will be a quick flip. “A lot of people are starting businesses because they think it’s an opportunity to make some money,” Case said. “You occasionally get lucky, but that doesn’t really work. You have to be passionate about it.”

In this video, Steve Case talks to GigaOM about how he juggles his many roles, how Silicon Valley is the “epicenter of innovation” in the US, and why entrepreneurs should be motivated by more than money:

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The news is good for both Zipcar, which needs the funds to expand its user base, as well as Zipcar’s early investors, including Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners, Smedvig Capital, and AOL founder Steve Case’s Revolution LLC. The bullish pricing is also positive news for the future of car sharing, an early-stage industry that now includes a lot of city dwellers and college students who essentially use cars as a service, instead of owning them outright.

Zipcar, which has 560,000 members and was founded in 2000, filed for a planned IPO last June. Then back in December, the company raised $21 million in private financing, which — at least in my mind — called the planned IPO into question. That summer S1 came on the heels of Zipcar arranging to borrow $70 million under a one-year credit facility for the purchase of new cars for its U.S. fleet (through Zipcar Vehicle Financing, a wholly-owned subsidiary), and also came about six weeks after Zipcar acquired its largest competitor in the U.K., a car sharing provider called Streetcar.

Running a car sharing service is expensive and a high-capital business. Maintaining the fleet and buying new cars, sucks up a major portion of the sales. For the year ended December 31, 2010, Zipcar generated revenue of $186.10 million, with a net loss of $14.12 million. As of December 31, 2010, Zipcar had an accumulated deficit of $65.4 million, and in the company’s risk factors the S1 says, “We expect to incur a net loss in 2011. We do not know if our business operations will become profitable or if we will continue to incur net losses in 2012 and beyond.”

As of September 2010 (when I did this analysis), Zipcar had 8,541 cars in its fleet, most of which it leased, but 1,692 of which it owned outright. The Zipcar fleet is routinely being turned over, and that requires access to capital. Zipcar only keeps its cars, on average, two to three years, after which it sells the cars to the used car market. Zipcar is also constantly removing cars and adding cars to its fleet depending on seasonality (busier in summer and spring) as well as meeting its expansion plans. That’s a whole lot of vehicle financial transactions.

To move to lower-cost vehicle turnover and growth, last spring, the company established “Zipcar Vehicle Financing LLC, or ZVF,” which is “a special purpose entity wholly-owned by Zipcar,” that will be used to purchase vehicles. ZVF currently has $70 million available for vehicle purchasing, and Zipcar plans to increase the amount of owned vehicles in its fleet, compared to the amount of leased vehicles, which can provide a lower-cost way to manage its fleet.

Car sharing needs a lot more members to make it profitable, but analysts have been predicting the market will grow. According to Frost & Sullivan, the revenue from car sharing programs in North America will increase to $3.3 billion in 2016, up from $253 million in 2009.

A next generation of car sharing startups has already emerged in recent months focused on building car sharing around personal vehicles (owned by people in your community or neighborhood instead of an entity like Zipcar). Those companies include RelayRides, GetAround, and Spride Share, and if you come to Green:Net 2011 on April 21 in San Francisco, you can hear from RelayRides CEO Shelby Clark and Spride Share founder Sunil Paul. Think of neighbor-to-neighbor car sharing as Zipcar without the large capital overhead.

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Steve Case, the founder of America Online and the architect of the most disastrous technology merger of all time — the $165-billion combination of AOL and Time Warner in January 2000 — has made it clear at various points over the years that he thinks the merger was a great idea, and that the media giant screwed things up, leading to the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in market value. Now, the AOL founder seems to have found a new platform for his defense of AOL and the Time Warner deal: Quora, the question-and-answer service that has been adding new users at a tremendous pace of late.

Maybe it was all the free time the AOL founder had over the Christmas vacation, but Case has responded to almost a dozen questions on Quora over the past 10 days. Some are relatively innocuous, such as the one about the Stanford women’s soccer team and their chances for the playoffs, or the question that asked for Case’s top five pieces of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs (in which he linked to a speech he recently gave). But the ones that are most interesting are about AOL and its strategies during the boom, and the failed merger with Time Warner. One question asks why, after AOL-Time Warner lost over $100 billion in market value, “the mantra about building a large number of users is still accepted without question as an acceptable business strategy.”

In his response, Case notes that before the merger, AOL was “the most valuable Internet company and one of the most valuable companies in the world,” and that this market value allowed it to merge with Time Warner “in a deal that gave AOL shareholders 55 percent ownership of a company that had nearly $40 billion in revenue and almost $10 billion in EBITDA” or free cash flow. So why did the merged company later collapse and obliterate so many billions? Case leaves no doubt about where he thinks the blame lies:

The management of the combined AOL Time Warner was unable to capitalize on the opportunities that existed to innovate and build more value. As Marlon Brando said in On The Waterfront, it could’ve been a contender! But as Thomas Edison noted a century ago, vision without execution is hallucination. That, sadly, is the AOL/Time Warner merger in a nutshell.

Case doesn’t name names, but the chief executive of AOL Time Warner after the merger was Gerald Levin, who was then replaced in 2002 by Richard Parsons. Case himself was chairman of the combined company, a position he stepped down from in 2003 — the year the merged entity recorded an annual loss of $99 billion, which at the time was the largest corporate loss in U.S. history. CNN founder Ted Turner, who at one point was vice-chairman of the company, said later that he personally lost as much as $8 billion as a result of the merger, and during an interview with fellow billionaire Richard Branson at the recent World Climate Summit compared the experience to “going down with the Titanic.”

Case wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post in 2005 arguing that the two companies should be separated, something that finally happened in late 2009 when Time Warner spun AOL off as a separate company.

And what does Case think about the new AOL? He answered that too, in a question about what his initial vision of the company was and what he thinks of it now, saying:

I feel great about what our team accomplished — indeed we achieved all those goals, as well as others. Obviously the past decade has been more challenging — and the merger with Time Warner very disappointing — but I am cautiously optimistic that the “new” AOL is on a much better trajectory. Go AOL!

Other questions the AOL founder has answered on Quora include one about why the company made it so hard to cancel an account with the online service — in which Case admitted that “as AOL got bigger it became more of a hassle to cancel, and that probably was a mistake,” and added that “a few years ago I remember hearing audio of a conversation somebody had with AOL when they were trying to cancel, and was mortified by the runaround they got,” which appears to be a reference to this legendary incident.

If nothing else, Case’s responsiveness to questions on Quora — even if the answers seem somewhat defensive and/or self-aggrandizing — shows a willingness to discuss those kinds of issues in a public forum, something very few senior tech-industry players do on any kind of regular basis. And it’s also a sign that Quora’s strategy of building the kind of positive community that can attract such people is paying off, although it remains to be seen how much longer it can maintain that kind of control as its growth starts to accelerate.

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Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user TEDxMidAtlantic