GigaOM » Sunil Paul

Introducing SideCar, the Uber for personal cars

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 13:01:09 +0000

San Francisco is truly the test bed for alternative tech-focused transportation. And on Tuesday, folks in the Bay Area will have access to yet another option: SideCar, a mobile app that will offer real time ride sharing.

The idea behind the app is to connect drivers who want to make a little extra money, with passengers that are looking for an alternative to driving, biking or public transportation in real time. Picture what Uber is trying to do with an on demand car service but for regular car owners. Ride sharing company Zimride recently started offering something similar through its Lyft mobile app. “It’s a rethink of transportation,” Sunil Paul, SideCar’s CEO and investor through Spring Ventures, tells me in an interview.

The app is launching to the public today, and has been in use in beta since February. So far 10,000 rides have been shared over the past few months, says Paul.

The technology came from a team in Michigan, and Paul says he himself holds a patent for using smart phones for coordinating transportation. The company was seed funded from a long list of well known investors including Huron River Ventures, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, First Step Fund, Jeff Clarke, Lisa Gansky (who wrote The Mesh), Robert Goldberg, Jared Kopf, Konstantin Othmer, Mark Pincus, Martin Roscheisen (former Nanosolar CEO), Josh Silverman, and Thomas Varghese.

An interesting hitch is that to avoid having the driver be classified as running a commercial service (and thereby violating his/her insurance policy) SideCar has no formal payment plan in place for rides. The system will show the average donation paid for a ride, but the payment itself is voluntary. While that might seem a little weird, I think that most riders will just default to the average — the mentality behind tipping works the same way. And because the system runs on credit cards, that avoids the awkward exchange of cash.

A big focus for the team in the beta phase has been making sure its drivers and riders feel safe and secure. The achilles heel of the collaborative consumption movement is security, from Airbnb’s security scare last year, to Hi-Gear shutting down its luxury car sharing service after being targeted by thieves.

Paul says that both drivers and riders are screened and vetted. The passengers need to have already entered a valid credit card, and drivers need to have a current drivers license, are interviewed and background checks are conducted. The cars being used in the system also can’t be too old and have to have four doors.

SideCar is an example of two emerging trends. First, the CleanWeb, or using information technology to manage resources and infrastructure. Paul coined this phrase and it’s the basis for his investing thesis. SideCar can reduce the amount of cars on roads (and fuel burned) by providing alternative transportation options. Second, the collaborative consumption movement, or using mobile and social to share “stuff” from apartments (Airbnb) to cars (RelayRides).

Other alternative startups available in the Bay Area include Uber, peer-to-peer car sharing companies RelayRides and Getaround, electric scooter sharing with Scoot Networks, Google-style commuter buses with RidePal and old-school car sharing companies Zipcar and CityCar Share. Paul previously was incubating a peer-to-peer ride sharing company called Spride Share, but decided to shelve that company because he says he decided he didn’t like the business model.

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Cleantech: Y U No Working?

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:44:03 +0000

This is a presentation I made for a decal class at UC Berkeley’s Haas school on Wednesday night. I learned of BrightSource pulling its IPO on my way out of the class, which made me feel like the guy in the first slide. The presentation isn’t meant to be totally comprehensive, but a high level, and casual, overview of my thoughts on the space for a roomful of undergrads. (Thanks to Matthew Nordan & Rob Day for history pointers, and I borrowed a slide from Sunil Paul’s CleanWeb talk at SXSW). There’s also a bunch of notes in the PPT, for what I said during the presentation, but you get the gist from the images I think.

View this document on Scribd

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Zynga’s CEO on leadership, startups & mobile gaming

Om Malik — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:27:05 +0000

A few weeks ago a sharp comment by me on Twitter about Zynga’s copy-cat games ended up in a meeting with Zynga founder and chief executive officer Mark Pincus. Of course, we chose to disagree on those issues. Regardless, it has taken nearly two weeks for me to get to actually writing about the conversation.

I have known Mark for a long time. The first time we met, he and Sunil Paul were busy running Freeloader. Later, when I relocated to San Francisco, we ran into each other often, for the post-bust Silicon Valley was a very small (and quite bleak) place.

Like many of my age, he has seen the tech economy behave like a yo-yo, where he has oscillated between success and failure. Freeloader was successful, but Tribe never realized its true potential even though it came much earlier than Facebook. He also started Support.com. But it wasn’t up until Facebook opened its platform in 2007 that Zynga actually started on a path to big time.

Our conversation, held against the backdrop of a very noisy Zynga cafeteria (with a sound system blasting Pumped up Kicks), followed two threads. One was about Zynga and the future of social gaming; the other was about how the past decade of success, failure and now mega success with Zynga has changed him as a person.

OM: Mark, so you have seen the ebb-and-flow that is startup life. How have you changed over past decade?

Mark Pincus: I had to go through a lot of change to be successful. For a while I thought it was about control and VC and things like that but I don’t think that the story served me at all. I needed to grow up. I needed to be a CEO and not an entrepreneur and a leader to be followed. My approach involved having to grow up and evolve.

OM: How?

MP: I have had to learn. In fact, I have to be constantly learning. If you don’t learn something new every week, you lose your edge and in the end you lose. You need to be aware of that in order to adapt as a CEO.

With Tribe, I didn’t do that — and I never changed Tribe and that we were an open social network like MySpace, when Facebook was clearly having success with its private, trust-based model. I was not changing. I was just trying harder.

OM: What is the biggest lesson learned of this past decade?

MP: I think the biggest lesson I have learned from the last decade is that to be a good leader, you don’t need to be liked or loved by everyone. I wanted to be liked by everyone. I think if you know what is the right course, you got to go full in, but also be willing to listen to the right input and most importantly listen to your customers.

OM: So what does success look like, say, on the consumer Internet?

MP: The other thing is being in the right place at the right time with the right currency. That gets you a lot of leverage in the equation. I think when you know what success on the consumer internet) looks like – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo – you know that is real success. I think you need to have instincts to be right but you also ~~show~~ should be able to use data to prove those instincts.

I think the biggest single change is that I grew up and I want to build a family and career, in that order. (My wife Alison and) I have worked our ass off for last five years and are staying with it, every day. There are so many staging points for the entrepreneurs — highs and lows. You have to stay with it.

OM: Does the current startup environment worry you? I mean we have seen this over-funding environment before and that didn’t end well.

MP: The more things change, the more things remain the same. It looks familiar but in reality things are different. The market opportunity is very different that it was 12 years ago. Today reminds me of the Renaissance. It feels substantial and feels more than just a company. It is happening all around the world. It is awesome.

PART TWO: Future of social games and importance of mobile for Zynga

OM: So what is the biggest challenge for you right now?

MP: My biggest challenge is to deliver on the promise of social gaming. We haven’t yet convinced you (as in me) to play just yet. Social gaming has to get to a level where Facebook has gotten to — you just cannot avoid it. It is a social norm for connections and we want to get there with games. That is what we are doing (with) Word for Friends, so we can get to bigger, broader market and get to more people.

OM: My belief is that Zynga is in competition with not other games but more in competition with Hollywood as both businesses are based on capitalizing on our attention.

MP: [It is] just as television competed with radio! It didn’t replace radio, it just made the radio move over. ~~Our research shows that~~ Research is that nearly 70 percent of people who are playing social games are also watching television. Our games are played inside a tab and that is a [brand] new behavior. I think we are part of a new category of gaming that is about stealing back lost time like when you are waiting in cabs or in the airport. We are playing these games when we are, say on a boring conference call.

Agreed, that the new business model is less about clicks and more towards engagement and entertainment. I think we have the benefit of being part of the newer trends like mobile. I think the real competition is between mobile and the television. If the smartphone replaces the television, then games are the entertainment. (Related: Zynga and the perils of becoming a platform.)

OM: Tell me more about your mobile plans?

MP: What I want us to do next is be a “poke with a purpose.” You are essentially SMS-ing people and that is carrying a more snack-y game experience. Even more casual games and an even more engaged experience. [Think of an even more atomized version of Words with Friends.] This is more of a different experience that we have now and an experience that is more vertical and more engaged and served up in a tiny container. I think that is the big story here.

OM: From my understanding, you guys are slow to mobile?

MP: One of the lessons we learned from the FarmVille for iPhone was that web and iOS are entirely different and have different mechanics. That is why we did FarmVille Express. The difference is that on mobile it is a 2-minute session versus a 45-minute session on the computer.

Words for Friends doesn’t do as well on Facebook as it does on the iPhone, because they are a mobile first experience. Our poker game does well on the mobile as well. Even Facebook is trying to figure it (mobile) out, we are all trying to figure it out. Instagram and Path are mobile first experiences and are different. I am liking the new Twitter application as well.

OM: From the way I see it, all web services (and not just games) should basically be instant start from the cloud but adapt to the screen they are being accessed. That has to be table stakes. Are you guys thinking along those lines?

MP: Right now we are building back-end technology, so that your game state can be saved and served up in difference screens/devices. The interaction cues will take from the different devices. In other words, you can play a game on a computer and call it up on XBox and you resume from the point you left off, except the game play will now be customized for the Xbox controller.

OM: Thanks, Mark.

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Amidst SoLoMo & tacos, Cleanweb peeks out at SXSW

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 17:30:29 +0000

There’s never a big focus on next-generation energy solutions at the annual geekfest South by Southwest — I’ve skipped the show over the past few years. But Spring Ventures founder Sunil Paul braved the rain and the ever-present SoLoMo apps to give a rendition of his presentation on the Cleanweb, or using computing, mobile, and the web to address resource constraints for energy, food and water.

AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher covered Paul’s talk, and shared his presentation (see below). SXSW is really the right crowd to learn about Paul’s own brand of cleantech investing, which looks more like collaborative consumption (car sharing startup Spride), and KickStarter (crowd-sourced solar with SolarMosaic) than the clean energy investing he’s done in the past (thin film solar company Nanosolar) or that some of his peers continue to do. The group also hosts reoccurring Cleanweb Hackathons, encouraging developers to make apps to address resource issues.

Cleanweb is about tapping into the IT infrastructure that already exists. That means it’s a lot more capital efficient than the next-gen energy tech that is looking to build new infrastructure to disrupt cars, gasoline use, the power grid, coal power, and building energy. And over the years the cleantech investors have learned that it’s best, if possible, to avoid opting for the capital intensive route.

cleanweb_presentation-Sunil-2012-mar-10

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Sunil Paul presenting Cleanweb at Green:Net 2011:

Image of Sunil Paul at Green:Net 2011.

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Hacking solutions to the world’s resource problem

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 04:10:53 +0000

This weekend in New York City, dozens of developers gathered together for the second Cleanweb Hackathon, where programmers spent the entire weekend building mobile and web apps around new ways to manage energy, water, food and fuel. As Sunil Paul, the founder of the event and a partner with Spring Ventures, put it in a short talk on Sunday afternoon, the idea behind the project is that “Information technology is the most powerful lever we have to address resource constraints.”

Over the weekend, the Cleanweb hackers created applications like NYC BLDGS, a web data base of the energy consumption of buildings in New York that pits the best and worst buildings against each other in friendly competition. Econofy, a web site created over the weekend that enables consumers to compare the energy consumption of appliances, won both the audience choice award and the judges’ award for best overall hack.

The first Cleanweb Hackathon was held in San Francisco in September of last year, and the New York event this weekend was a slightly more high-profile affair. Judges of the hacks included investor Fred Wilson and Rachel Sterne, New York City’s chief digital officer. United States Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra made an appearance as a special guest.

The event is the latest sign the ecosystem around clean technology is changing. As investors look back at the mistakes that have been made and money lost in capital-intensive investments like next-gen solar, biofuels and electric cars, some investors are taking a different route and looking to make cleantech investing look a lot more like web and mobile investing — literally. Paul’s firm Spring Ventures invests in Cleanweb companies like Solar Mosaic.

The Cleanweb is an attractive way to attack the problem of climate change and resource management for an age of 9 billion people. Information technologies are available now — compared to the science experiments in biofuels and parts of clean power — and thanks to Moore’s Law they are cheap, and will get increasingly cheaper. Now it’s time to tap into the innovation of the developer community to try to create new ways to leverage IT to solve the world’s problems.

Check out the video of the event below and Paul’s explanation of the Cleanweb at our Green:Net 2011 event:

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Cleantech, meet connectivity: a new era of energy efficiency

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:49:19 +0000

When people think of cleantech, they typically think about solar panels or wind turbines or labs trying to convert biomass to oil. But the momentum right now in cleantech is as much about connectivity and how it can drive energy efficiency as it is about advancing sources of renewable energy, says Adam Lesser, GigaOM Pro Green IT analyst, in a new report for GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

So if cleantech had once been thought of as just the energy-generating technology that could move the economy off fossil fuels, the evolving concept of cleantech is about altering consumer behavior. This is done by accelerating the data that various systems have about those very consumers and using it to reduce consumption. Sunil Paul, the founder of venture capital firm Spring Ventures, calls this the “cleanweb,” and its one of the areas that is actually growing in cleantech.

To read the rest of the 10-page report, which covers car sharing and collaborative consumption, building energy efficiency technology, the smart grid, and electric cars check out “Cleantech, meet connectivity: a new era of energy efficiency.”

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The Cleanweb Hackathon kicks off this weekend

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 22:30:43 +0000

We’re getting excited about the first Cleanweb Hackathon, which kicks off this weekend in San Francisco! The “Cleanweb” is the trend of using information technology — software, the web, social media, mobile — to address resource constraint, from energy, to food, to water.

The Hackathon, the brainchild of investor and entrepreneur Sunil Paul, will bring together developers, UI specialists and business execs, to create usable Cleanweb tools over the course of the weekend. The teams will present their tools and Sunday and creators of the best tools will win prizes.

We’ll be checking out Paul’s kickoff talk and the overview of all the datasets compiled (there are a lot of ‘em) on Saturday morning, and we’ll be live streaming and covering the presentations and award ceremony early evening on Sunday. Paul’s group is looking to bring in inspired and talented developers who want to create Cleanweb tools.

Here’s a video of Paul’s talk on the Cleanweb at our Green:Net event earlier this year:

greennet2011 on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

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Introducing: The Cleanweb Hackathon

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 18:13:57 +0000

Calling all do-gooder developers looking for your next opportunity — we’re officially introducing the Cleanweb Hackathon, a developer contest and event, which will take place on the weekend of Sept. 10 and 11 in San Francisco.

The “Cleanweb” is the trend of using information technology — software, the web, social media, mobile — to address resource constraints and too many people on the planet looking to consume a limited amount of energy, food and water. Think startups like Airbnb and RelayRides, carpooling mobile apps and electric car charging maps like PlugShare. The theme is similar to our Green:Net conference, and investor and entrepreneur Sunil Paul, who coined the phrase Cleanweb, gave a speech on the topic at Green:Net in April (see video below).

Paul’s group is looking to bring in inspired and talented developers who want to create Cleanweb tools in an attempt to win some $5,000 worth of prizes. Sponsors of the event include Opower and Microsoft, and more details about prizes will be revealed closer to the date.

We’re looking to explore the creativity of developers, UI specialists and business people to create Cleanweb applications, and the goal will be to produce something usable by the end of the weekend, Paul told me in an interview. Contact the Cleanweb folks here to apply for the event. At the end of the weekend, the developers will be able to show their apps to the public during an open forum.

Watch live streaming video from greennet2011 at livestream.com

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Green:Net Speaker: Sunil Paul on the “CleanWeb”

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 07:00:00 +0000

Entrepreneur and investor Sunil Paul made his first cleantech deal about nine years ago in thin film solar company Nanosolar. Back then the term cleantech had barely been coined, there was no clean power stimulus package, and there certainly weren’t the amount of cleantech deals being done like the near record of the most recent quarter. As Paul put it to me three years ago (in the first interview I did for this site) “it was a lonely crowd in the beginning.”

Now Paul, who founded the fund Spring Ventures and is leading neighbor-to-neighbor car sharing service Spride Share, continues to innovate with new ideas and new initiatives. He founded the Gigaton Throw Down, which awards companies for carbon reducing activities, and spearheaded the Cleantech for Obama group that supported Obama during his campaign run.

Paul’s latest philosophy is the notion of “the CleanWeb,” a category of cleantech based on IT and which focuses on constrained resources. At our Green:Net 2011 event in San Francisco on April 21, Paul will give a talk on the CleanWeb, how it works, who’s leading it, and why it’s important.

Here’s an essay Paul wrote on the CleanWeb, which we’re republishing for your reading pleasure (originally published on his blog):

What Is the “CleanWeb”?

by Sunil Paul

“CleanWeb” is a category of clean technology that leverages the capability of the Internet, social media, and mobile technologies to address resource constraints. It’s the next stage of development for cleantech. We’re big fans of the CleanWeb at Spring Ventures.

The whole idea of “cleantech” is applying innovation to the problems of energy, water, and waste. Those problems are caused by a confluence of diminishing resources and increasing populations and affluence. Our challenge is delivering affluence in a world with limited clean water, limited clean air, and limited physical space. For the last decade, the solutions we developed were cleaner electricity sources, cleaner fuels, and better ways to use electricity and fuels through efficiency and storage. To date, most of those innovations in cleantech have drafted off the innovations in semiconductors, biotech, nanotech, and materials.

New companies are now starting to show how to use the power of Internet applications as cleantech applications. There are some recent ones that show the power of what is possible. Opower shows the impact of social and gaming dynamics on energy use. Hara is a kind of Mint.com for th corporate eco-footprint. Spride* is reducing the need for cars by encouraging sharing.

Plus, as the hardware of cleantech gets deployed, it’s opening up opportunities to create an “application” layer of software, services, and new business models on top. Distributed power like solar and the smart grid are especially well suited for these new ideas because the existing “application” layer — utilities, banks, EPCs, etc — don’t quite know what to do with this new category.

It is early in the development of the CleanWeb. A few companies are out there to show the outlines of what is possible and the big impacts and the big companies are yet to come. Here are some categories to think about:

Transportation: Transportation is a great example of resource inefficiency. In the U.S. we buy almost two cars per adult and then leave them idle for about 90 percent of the time. Efficient high-mileage cars make economic sense over their lifetimes — now about 16 years in the U.S. — but consumers typically only own them for 3 years and aren’t willing to pay the up front cost.

Innovations like Better Place take the battery pack of an electric car and make it a service. What if you make the whole car, the whole idea of transportation, a service? That is what companies like Spride* are doing. There will be continued innovations along these lines. We think the next “car” for millions of people will be their cell phone.

Finance: The traditional architecture of electricity and fuels is centralized creation of power and then distribution through wires or pipes. Think centralized power plants and big refineries. The emerging model, though, is distributed and while financing utility scale wind or solar farms is second nature for the financing ecosystem, it’s stymied in distributed electricity and fuels.

A whole new ecosystem of finance is needed for distributed power starting with roof-top solar. The new ecosystem will look like financing for other distributed assets but account for the peculiarities of power generation and storage. We are out looking for companies that can fill that new ecosystem.

Re-use and Recycling: The granddaddy of the CleanWeb, eBay, helped make re-use profitable. A proliferation of new sites allow sharing, sale, or trading of “previously owned” products. ThredUp is one that allows parents to trade kids clothes. Lots of others are doing interesting things to either find new life for old products or to improve recycling through better coordination and communication.

Here is one that always bugged me: why is it so hard to find a second life for components of your house? Right now the stuff just goes to the landfill and much of it turns into methane after decades of being buried. Will someone figure out a solution please?

Tele-presence: Much business travel is a waste of time and money if a high resolution videoconference were available instead. High definition videoconferencing is getting better and more affordable from the six figure systems Cisco and others have been selling lately. Internet vidoeconferencing is closing in on the proprietary HD systems. How long before it makes more sense to telecommute across oceans and continents 80 percent of the time? We’d love to find a company making that a reality.

Food: It accounts for about a third of a US resident’s carbon footprint and a significant part of worldwide emissions. Poverty and famine are problems of distribution. And massive quantities of food are wasted each year for lack of coordination, lack of market, or lack of information. Radical application of information technology could build a better food distribution, consumption, promotion, and disposal system. One small example is Local Dirt.

Buildings: Buildings are the largest users of energy around the world. While the traditional focus has been on reducing the energy used by buildings, what about reducing the need for buildings themselves? A significant part of buildings are either unused or underused, so what if you could better match up demand with supply? That is exactly what companies like Airbnb provide. Airbnb has been so successful that hoteliers in New York City have recruited city hall to fight back their success by passing a law prohibiting nightly rental in apartment buildings.

Logistics and shipping: Information technology has already been applied rigorously to logistics and shipping but I bet there is more to be done. Take the Carbon War Room’s* new rating system for ships, shippingefficiency.org. For the first time the efficiency of ships is visible for anyone with an Internet connection. For a bunch of reasons that sound a lot like the building sector; ship owners aren’t incentivized to upgrade the efficiency of their ships. By making the information available, ports, shippers, receivers, investors, and the whole shipping ecosystem can start taking action to save money or create new products.

The spread of the share economy (or the Mesh or Collaborative Consumption depending on which flavor of Kool Aid you prefer) will reduce the need to produce as many goods. Consider Thredup, the company that allows parents to swap clothing for kids. Makes great sense. Kids outgrow clothes quickly. Why not reuse them? Shared access to resources only makes sense when transaction costs are low. The web is like a solvent for transaction costs.

Paper: Yes, the paperless office has always been the future and some say it always will be. But wait. How much paper do you use compared to a decade ago? I bet it’s less. Electronic “paper” is better in so many ways. We published the Gigaton Throwdown* study almost entirely online and formatted it for a screen because we knew most people would read it that way. Forests that were destined to be pulped are going to be saved because of new technologies.

What else? There are all sorts of ways to think about these problems and opportunities. I can’t wait to talk to entrepreneurs who’ve figured out new ways to crack the nut.

* Open disclosure: I and/or Spring Ventures are funders of these companies or organizations.

Images courtesy of Katie Fehrenbacher, Jim Bahn, Cisco.

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Amidst a Weak COP 16, Greentech Optimism

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:00:41 +0000

The first week of the U.N.’s climate change negotiations has kicked off in Cancun, Mexico and not surprisingly, there are low expectations of any meaningful agreement coming out of the talks. In fact, the discussions seem more heated and chaotic than even last year’s disappointing event in Copenhagen (if you believe all the media reports coming out).

This week, Japan has publicly discussed a stance that the Kyoto Protocol should not be extended beyond 2012 (though it doesn’t seem to have officially abandoned the treaty), and it’s a feeling shared by Canada and Russia, too. At the same time, countries are unsure how to deal with the Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism if the treaty isn’t extended beyond 2012. China, India and developing countries, not surprisingly, don’t want to shift away from the Kyoto Protocol, while the U.S., which was the only developed nation not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, wants a version of the Copenhagen Accord, the fly-by-night agreement that was hashed out in the 11th hour at last year’s COP.

It’s pretty clear international negotiators probably wont be making much progress anytime over the next week (fingers crossed, though!). Combine that with the failure of the U.S. Congress to pass a comprehensive energy bill in 2010, as well as recent indications by House Republicans that they’ll shut down a global warming committee created by Democrats. Governments, in terms of policy moves, just aren’t coming through.

What remains, and what will likely provide the most optimistic glimmer out of the Cancun talks, will be the future of greentech and green-leaning business. Sunil Paul, early stage cleantech investor and founder of the Gigaton Throw-Down project, heads to Cancun tomorrow to help put on the Gigaton Awards, which will give an award to a company that has demonstrated the most leadership for emissions reductions. Paul told me in an interview on Thursday that “Even in the absence of government action, companies are taking actions.”

Indeed, one of the most high-profile side events of the COP 16 negotiations will be the World Climate Summit, which is a meeting for business leaders, and will feature talks by entrepreneur and investor Richard Branson, media mogul Ted Turner and Emilio Azcarraga, President and CEO of Grupo Televisa.

China is looking at the problem through this same lens as well. While China and the U.S. were at odds over disclosures needed for the Copenhagen Accord last year, and China, along with the U.S., is one of the biggest barriers to moving forward, the Chinese government is taking a decidedly different approach in terms of stimulating its domestic greentech industries. In its backyard, China is investing an unprecedented amount into clean power, smart grid and electric vehicle technology, taking advantage of its swiftly growing economy.

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Image courtesy of Mike McHolm.