Lithium-ion battery

How battery startups are trying to survive in tough times

The demand for lithium-ion batteries hasn’t grown as quickly as many battery developers have anticipated, and that leaves a rather bleak near-term outlook for startups who had counted on the rise of electric car, grid storage and even laptops as lucrative markets.

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Japan-U.S. smart grid project now live in New Mexico

A Japanese consortium of government groups and tech companies teams up with a New Mexico utility and a federal lab for a smart grid demonstration project to figure out how to integrate solar electricity and energy storage into an electric grid.

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An accelerator lab for battery startups launches

Can the startup accelerator model work for battery companies? The folks behind CalCharge, the brainchild of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and California Clean Energy Fund (CalCEF) that hopes to attract some 30 battery companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, think so.

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Battery maker A123 posts big losses

A123 Systems was supposed to be a success story about an innovative U.S. battery company, but it has struggled to live up to that expectation. The company on Tuesday posted lower revenues and greater losses for the first quarter of this year, about two months after it launched a program to replace defective batteries.

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The long road to integrate wireless charging into cell phones

Today wireless charging for cell phones is pretty kludgy. But the idea — and eventually the goal of Powermat — is that one day the cell phone companies will embed the company’s wireless charging tech right into the phone itself, making wireless charging a whole lot more simple.

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Boston-Power lines up $125M to make EV batteries in China

Boston-Power, which once dreamed of building a lithium-ion cell battery factory in the United States, announced Tuesday it has lined up $125 million of investments to shift a big part of its business to China and thin its operation in the U.S. by about 35 percent.

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A123 Systems hooks into China’s grid

Only 72 percent of China’s wind-power sources are connected to its grid — meaning there’s a good deal of wind turbines that are spinning that aren’t providing usable clean power. Battery maker A123 Systems hopes its first deal in China can help with that problem.

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Why Start-Stop Vehicle Tech Is Important (& What It Is)

The market for electric vehicles is moving more slowly than expected. That’s why companies like Johnson Controls are focusing more heavily on “start-stop” vehicle technology, which is a system that automatically cuts off the engine of a gas-powered vehicle while it’s idling.

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Amprius Raises $25M: Better Li-ion Batteries on the Way?

Stanford University spinout Amprius has landed $25 million from investors, including Kleiner Perkins and Chinese firms IPV Capital and Qian Neng Fund, to bring its silicon nanowire lithium-ion battery anode technology to commercial production, most likely for consumer electronics batteries.

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Beyond the Breakthrough: Finding Killer Apps for Battery Tech

Turning battery breakthroughs into a sustainable business means requires a team to find the “killer application” for their particular technology, and figure out who’s willing to pay for it, says Maurice Gunderson, a senior partner for CMEA Capital’s Energy and Materials group.

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Battery Maker Boston-Power Lands $60M

Boston-Power has raised $60 million in fifth-round financing — cash that the startup hopes will fuel a rapid expansion of its capacity to build energy storage devices for plug-in cars and the electric utilities.

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A123 Insiders Squeeze Trickle of Cash Out of IPO

In the weeks since restrictions lifted on insiders holding the bulk of A123’s stock, some executives have started to cash out. The transactions represent just a trickle of cash compared to the wealth created on paper in the first day of trading.

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Daily Sprout

Farm Groups Win Battle for Offset Oversight: In a major victory for agriculture groups and defeat for environmental organizations that hoped the…

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Stop Looking for a WoW Killer

Ever since World of Warcraft started showing signs of cancer-like growth — ravenously consuming massively multiplayer online game subscribers — video game industry entrepreneurs and investors have hunted for a WoW killer, the next big game capable of toppling the 11.5 million subscribers developer Blizzard has amassed worldwide. They need to stop looking.

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Google's PDF Search Throws Some Light on the Dark Web

Google today said on its official blog that it has developed optical character recognition technology to the point that its search engine can read any scanned document in Adobe’s PDF format, effectively turning scanned images into words that are searchable and indexable.

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iGasUp: Find Cheap Gas

While the price of gas has been dropping from $4.00 down towards $3.00 in recent weeks, I still pay attention to which…

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ExxonMobil Boosts Battery Biz With $325M South Korean Plant

Battery maker TonenGeneral Sekiyu K.K., a Japanese subsidiary of Exxon Mobil, has started construction of a $325 million battery plant in South Korea which will make the critical separator film needed to maker lithium-ion batteries. The plant will sell the film to battery maker LG Chem.

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