There’s been an explosion of interest in web-sharing services, a growing movement of lending and bartering services that create economical and sustainable consumption methods. Take a few minutes to tell us how you feel about this movement in our new survey, and maybe even win prizes.
Zipcar’s stock is still flying high after the car sharing company debuted on the Nasdaq last month. To the CEO of neighbor-to-neighbor car sharing startup RelayRides, Shelby Clark, Zipcar’s IPO has shown investors that there’s real money to be made in car sharing.
While many smart grid technologies use wireless networks, Power Tagging has developed a way to fingerprint energy on the grid using digital signal processing. At Green:Net last week, I interviewed John LoPorto, CEO of Power Tagging, which was one of our 10 Big Ideas winners.
Capturing waste heat from systems and turning it into usable power could be a good way to collect money. Watch my interview with Phononic Devices founder, CEO and President, Anthony Atti, from the sidelines of GreenNet last week.
Listen to Fenix International founder and CEO Mike Lin talk about Fenix International’s ReadySet energy storage device that is delivering power to the off-grid world.
On the sidelines of our Green:Net event last week, I did a series of video interviews with our 10 Big Ideas companies. First up is a startup marrying big data and connected cars: Virtual Vehicle Company.
In case you missed all the action at our third annual Green:Net event last week, we’ll be pulling together the photos, videos and presentations from the event over the coming week. Here are 20 of my favorite photos from the show:
Making all-electric vehicles is easier if you haven’t been building gas guzzlers for the better part of a century: That’s the mantra put firth by representatives from Tesla and CODA. Both said today at GigaOM’s Green:Net conference that there is space for indie EV car makers.
Connected networks that analyse traffic, weather and other conditions will tell the office worker of the future if it makes economic sense to make the trip to their headquarter, or wether they should work remotely. All this is part of networks becoming the fourth utility.
In an afternoon chat today at Green:Net, Google Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl explained that the future of data center efficiency will not come from improved data center designs themselves, but from more-efficient hardware and cleaner sources of energy.
For this year’s Green:Net, a team of GigaOM editors and industry insiders chose 10 innovators in the digital energy space to present their “big ideas” for using information technology to fight climate change. Here are some of the insights they shared.
As kids, we were all taught to share our favorite toys. At Green:Net Shelby Clark from RelayRides and Joe Gebbia from Airbnb talked about how their companies are leveraging the power of social media to take sharing into the grown-up world.
There was some concern that the Department of Energy’s loan program would fall victim to budget cuts. But at GigaOM’s Green:Net conference Thursday, DOE Loan Chief Jonathan Silver said that despite those fears, changes in the new budget have actually been somewhat favorable to the program.
The future of the power grid is combining clean energy together with the intelligence of the smart grid. But kickstarting that convergence requires some serious salesmanship to convince consumers of the benefit, as NRG Energy’s David Crane and Silver Spring Networks said at Green:Net.
If you want to change something, first you have to measure it, and when it comes to energy consumption and generation we don’t have the tools yet to do either. But as Saul Griffith said at Green:Net, we’re still in the dark ages for energy literacy.
Do you think companies like Facebook, Twitter and Amazon should clean up their acts and stop using coal? Are you into electric vehicles? Do you want to know what’s next in the clean energy market? Then tune into the live stream of GigaOM’s Green:Net conference.
Viridity Energy is competing for a Defense Department contract to control power use at federal and military facilities, and has already signed up one military base customer. That’s a big prize for a startup, if it can scale to match its demands.
In the run-up to Earth Day on Friday, here’s the must attend event of the week: our third annual Green:Net event! OK, you can tell I’m a little excited about it.
At Green:Net next week, we’ll be exploring how adding IT technologies to anything from the power grid, to data centers, to buildings, to lighting can lead to energy efficiency and a more sustainable consumption of increasingly-constrained resources.
With Zipcar’s expected public market debut today, the year of the car as a service (in contrast to personal ownership) has arrived. Internet and mobile technology is the platform for cars as a service in a world with increasingly constrained resources.
Our third annual Green:Net event is coming up on April 21 (yep, next week!) and we’re getting really excited about all the great speakers, announcements and discussions that will go on. Here’s a cheat sheet of 10 things you can’t miss at the show.
Can the U.S. government do for clean power, what it did for airplane technology almost a century ago? That’s the plan that nerd-rockstar Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu detailed at the Berkeley Stanford Cleantech Conference this weekend.
Schneider’s energy-themed acquisition tear looks like it’s moving to a whole new level. On Monday morning, Bloomberg reported that French electric giant Schneider Electric is eying a take over of Tyco International in part to get ahold of Tyco’s building and industrial energy management systems.
NRG Energy is kicking off what it calls the first, privately funded, plug-in electric vehicle charging network in the U.S. in the country’s oil state: Texas. On Friday morning, NRG Energy officially started up the first charger in the network at a Walgreens.
Entrepreneur and investor Sunil Paul, who made his first cleantech investment about 9 years ago, is big on the idea of the “CleanWeb,” or using IT to address constrained resources. At Green:Net Paul will give a talk on who’s leading the CleanWeb and why it’s important.
Ever wondered how big data, smart grid and cloud computing will impact an average person? Now you can, thanks to Opower, which molds terabytes of data into delightful insights, shares them with many of us, hoping that we will do our bit as willing conservationists.
Turns out programmable thermostats in our homes are almost as much of a nightmare to figure out as confounding DVRs. According to a recently-published study from Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, a significant portion of users of programmable thermostats are incorrectly using them.
One of the early problems with the cleantech sector was that many of the big public companies that offered exits for innovative cleantech startups hadn’t yet matured into aggressive acquirers. But I think the power gear firms have finally woken up to purchasing innovation.
Close to three dozen CEOs of clean power companies — from First Solar to SunPower to Nanosolar — are pleading with congressional leaders to save the funding for the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program.
Presenting our 10 Big Ideas winners, which are some of the most innovative in the digital energy space, and have novel “Big Ideas” for how to use information technology to fight climate change. The winners will present at Green:Net 2011 on April 21 in San Francisco.
Power gear company Schneider Electric has made one of the larger acquisitions in the industrial and commercial energy management sector. Thursday afternoon Schneider announced it has bought energy procurement and management company Summit Energy for $268 million.
With so much data flowing over networks and with so much computing power needed to crunch that data, computing infrastructure needs to be as low power as possible to both make the era of “big data” economical and also more eco-friendly.
The growth of the cleantech industry may have started slowly, but it is surely happening. Silver Lake Kraftwerk Partners, Adam Grosser and Cathy Zoi, will speak for the first time publicly about the second wave of cleantech funding and growth at Green:Net 2011.
For our latest Green Overdrive show we get an inside look at Tesla’s Model S Alpha program, which Tesla will use to test out design and functionality of its next-generation all-electric car the Model S.
The latest wave of electric cars rolling into the market will be cars connected to the power grid and increasingly, to cellular networks. Along with smart meters and the smart grid, electric vehicles and EV charging stations will be areas to watch.
It’s almost that time again! Our third annual Green:Net 2011 conference, which focuses on digital energy and how information technology can be used to fight climate change, is fast approaching on April 21 in San Francisco.
One of the top reasons people buy an iPad probably isn’t to balance a checkbook, but doing anything on a desktop is so 2009. However, few native financial iPad apps exist. Fear not though, we’ve combed the pool to find the best.
Today on the Net: Verizon’s CEO says that cable companies should watch out because cord cutting is real, MySpace has tapped Andy Marcus to lead its entertainment division and Dell is evaluating Internet connected devices running Google TV.
The adult industry’s Free Speech Coalition has been using technology from Vobile to track porn piracy for a few months now while also trying to educate consumers. The results of these efforts have the coalitions executive director thinking about embracing iTunes-like pricing for adult content.
For all you folks asking for the slides and presentations from our Green:Net event last week, here’s the entire slide deck embedded below from SlideShare. It includes all of the presentation slides in order of the day’s events.
Efficient data centers are key to managing the cost of running a massive computing operation such as Google’s, but they also seems to tie into the search giant’s “Don’t be evil” credo. That’s the sense I got when interviewing Bill Weihl, Google’s green energy czar.
Advances in computing and communications are changing the world — enabling huge changes in the way we can develop new materials and derive energy, but as they bring innovation to other areas of the economy those providing the computation and bandwidth must become more efficient.
The Green:Net launchpad event showcases 10 startups or new products hand-picked by the Earth2Tech staff. The judges selected ecoATM as the winner, with People Power and Soneter tied for second, while Soneter won the audience choice award.
At Green:Net today, venture capitalists said that there was opportunity for money to be made by companies focusing on metering and smart grid technologies. But they also identified some other opportunities.
Over the next 10-15 years we will fundamentally reinvent the structure of society said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures speaking today at the Green:Net conference in San Francisco. Khosla explained that he’s now investing in areas that two years ago he would never have considered.
Jonathan Koomey of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and Stanford is one of the world’s reigning experts on “dematerialization,” which he defines as two things. First, “removing the need to create a physical product.” And second, “the energy savings associated with not having to transport that product.”
Carbon pricing will become an important part of corporate accounting. But pricing aside, executives at today’s Green:Net conference said that carbon software can give companies a view into other inefficiencies in their operations.
As information technology begins to improve energy efficiency in other industries such as transportation and electricity generation, it will grow to consume ever more energy, forcing IT providers to be even more concerned about enegry consumption said Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar at Google.
It’s a testament to how exciting and likely the idea of a networked car is that a panel full of experts at Green:Net chose to focus their attention on the trials, tribulations and pitfalls of future of the automotive industry. No boosterism for us, thanks!
Before you do business in a state, you must think about what the public utilities commissions in those states are there to do, was the message for entrepreneurs and investors attending the Green:Net conference from Dian M. Grueneich, Commissioner, California Public Utility Commission.
The cost of commodities trend in one direction: up. Coal, oil, gold, even rice, it’s all the same, said greentech and software pioneer Bill Gross at Earth2Tech’s Green:Net conference today. “The one thing that’s going down is the cost of computational power.
Microsoft and Google are both working on applications for monitoring and controlling energy usage in the home. At Green:Net, the Internet giants laid out their strategies for enabling consumers and utilities to keep track of their power consumption.
Thanks to Moore’s Law, information technology over time revolutionizes more and more industries, and is currently creating trillion-dollar opportunities in the green tech industry said Steve Jurvetson, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson today at the Green:Net conference in San Francisco.
At Green:Net today, former California governor and 2010 gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown said you can’t turn to government to drive innovation in green technology, but that it needs to work together with entrepreneurs to foster innovation.
With mainstream EVs entering the market in the next year, utilities are worried about cars plugging into the grid en masse. To anticipate and handle those overwhelming spurts of power demand, they are looking to infrastructure upgrades, networked management systems and customer education.
The smart grid is finally being built, and with it will come hundreds of new companies and models that threaten to disrupt the way utilities currently do business, according to a panel of smart grid experts speaking today at the Green:Net conference in San Francisco.
Green:Net is almost sold out! The only conference dedicated to the intersection of IT and green has just a handful of tickets left; they’re available on a first-come, first-serve basis. GigaOM readers can get a $75 discount, so register now.
The second annual Green:Net conference, the only event that examines the intersection of greentech and IT, will be held next Thursday, April 29th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco — exactly one week from today. GigaOM readers get $75 off!
In light of our upcoming Green:Net conference — which looks at the intersection of IT and green — we’ve decided to revive the second edition of the 25 Who Ditched Infotech for Cleantech list. Check it out:
How do all our favorite Internet and computing companies, like Google and Apple, stack up when it comes to fighting climate change? You’ll soon find out in the latest release of Greenpeace’s IT ranking system, which it will launch at our Green:Net event.
Green:Net 2010 will see top green entrepreneurs, technologists and market-leading companies convene on April 29th in San Francisco. Register now for the conference where you can meet with thought leaders, technologists, investors, press, new startups and their future customers and get $75 off your ticket!
The intersection of the Internet and the greentech boom represents an incredible opportunity to define new markets, solve big problems and apply the talent of the Internet industry to the most important cause to date: saving the planet.
The intersection of the Internet and the greentech boom represents an incredible opportunity. Green:Net 2010 will see top green entrepreneurs, technologists and market-leading companies convene on April 29th in San Francisco.
The intersection of the Internet and greentech represents an incredible opportunity to define new markets, solve big problems and apply the talent of the Internet industry to the most important cause to date: saving the planet. Check out Green:Net 2010 on April 29th.
Sakti3, a Khosla-backed battery startup spun out of the University of Michigan, has filled its coffers with $7 million — more than doubling its total fundraising to date.
Exactly one month from now — on April 29th — California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown, uber-investors Vinod Khosla and Steve Jurvetson, Google’s Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl, CPUC Commissioner Dian Grueneich and many, many others will take the stage at our annual Green:Net conference.
It’s that time of year, folks! We’ve selected 10 companies, all of which are using information technology to fight climate change, to launch or unveil interesting new products at our Green:Net conference on April 29th in a session we call the LaunchPad. Drum roll, please…
One of my favorite parts of last year’s Green:Net event was the launchpad section, where 10 companies that are using information technology to fight climate change launch themselves or new products. So I’m excited to announce this year’s 10 winners of the Green:Net2010 Launchpad.
We at the GigaOM Network are proud to announce that 2010 California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown and leading greentech investor Vinod Khosla will be speaking at Green:Net 2010 on April 29th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco.
California Attorney General, former Oakland Mayor and gubernatorial candidate will speak at Green:Net 2010, which will be held in San Francisco on April 29. In his talk, he will focus on how information technology will be used to fight climate change.
Have you been cooking up a great business idea for how to use IT to fight climate change? You need to enter our Green:Net 2010 Launchpad! We’re only accepting submissions until 5 p.m. PT on Friday, so make sure you and your colleagues enter soon.
Green:Net 2010 is the GigaOM Network’s conference where green and IT meet. And we’ve scored a trio of leading venture capitalists to judge the popular Launchpad competition, which features 10 hot startups with applications for leveraging IT against climate change.
One e-book device can displace the buying of some 22.5 physical books a year, according to the Cleantech Group, which translates into an estimated savings of 370 pounds of CO2. To learn more, join us at Green:Net 2010 on April 29th in San Francisco.
Our platform focus continues this fine Sunday with the e-Book Echo, our take on the week in the digital publishing world. Smartphone maker HTC is set to unveil a new iteration of its Sense interface for phones, and an e-book reader will be in the offering.
The Internet and computing fundamentally changed the way we communicate, work and consume entertainment — devices like the iPad, and applications like Twitter…
Understanding that the computing and Internet revolutions are what will provide the tools needed to fight climate change, we will host our second annual GreenNet on April 29th here in San Francisco, where will be joined by a who’s who of industry players.
Our annual GreenNet 2010 conference is quickly approaching, to be held April 29th, at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Among many notable speakers, Googler and former NASA astronaut Ed Lu will be there. Here is how you can get a discount.
Will networked automobiles be the next platform for green apps? That’s just one of the possibilities we’ll be looking at on our panel “The New Networked Car” at the Green:Net 2010 conference on April 29th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco.
A panel of energy measurement entrepreneurs speaking at Green:Net had surprisingly fuzzy thoughts towards terms like accuracy, precision, and standards. It wasn’t…
President Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package has put cleantech companies in “a feeding frenzy,” says Jesse Berst, managing director of research…
Better Place Founder and CEO Shai Agassi’s vision of building out charging infrastructure and battery-swapping stations for electric vehicles was never going…
Green building is growing, but researching and evaluating the numerous green-building products available — and calculating which ones can help buildings rack…
You’ve probably all heard that California has aggressively cut energy consumption through energy efficiency programs. After all, the state has saved a…
At Earth2Tech, we’ve been poring over business plans and PowerPoint presentations for the past few weeks, searching for innovative young companies that…
We’ve been poring over business plans and PowerPoint presentations for the past few weeks, searching for innovative young companies that are leveraging…
First comes infrastructure, then come the cars. That was the logic behind San Francisco’s deal with vehicle-charging network startup Better Place, and…
The Obama administration’s $825 billion economic recovery package, nicknamed the “Green New Deal,” is packed with references to doubling renewable energy generation,…
Chipmakers are starting to come out with low-power offerings that, while they won’t all keep your iPhone running longer, could play a role in boosting the efficiency of a growing number of new devices.
When Google acquired startup @Last and its 3-D modeling product, SketchUp, most observers saw it as a nice add-on for Google Earth, perfect for “hobbyists and enthusiasts.” Since then, the SketchUp program has blossomed into a tool in its own right, and is now nurturing a growing ecosystem of green design startups.