If corn-based biofuels are the Britney Spears of the cleantech world (a fallen star but still all over the place), fuel made from algae is the next great “American Idol” winner (major potential in the pipeline). And despite the fact that algae-to-biofuel start-ups have been taking their sweet time bringing a pond-scum fuel product to market, some inroads have been made recently–GreenFuel is building its first plant, PetroSun starts producing at their farm on April 1, and big-oil Chevron and Shell have made some early bets as well.
Seesmic is a video start-up I’ve shied away from writing about too often, because I’m not sure I really get it. But I figure if so many smart people think there’s something good going on here, I should keep an eye on what the company is doing. So last week we had founder and CEO Loïc Le Meur on the “GigaOM Show,” where I and co-host Joyce Kim got to ask him what’s the big idea.
Now that Shai Agassi’s electric-vehicle network start-up Project Better Place has started to charge ahead in its first market, Israel, the company has begun to put the pieces in place to actually build the 500,000 electric-vehicle charging stations.
Clouds are gathering over Silicon Valley’s consumer Internet companies. The sale of social-networking company Bebo comes at a time when private investors are changing their tune. They’re no longer pumping money into start-ups at the same huge valuations they were doing last year.
Maybe two years ago, I hosted a panel discussion on the emerging Web 2.0 economy, and I asked my panelists if we were in a bubble. Because it’s clear to me that we are. Not that it’s a bad thing, mind you. This is how technology evolves: like life itself, in blooms and crashes. And I think we should all acknowledge where we are in the cycle. Anyway, one of my panelists, SoftTech venture capitalist Jeff Clavier, was adamant that this was no bubble. Now Mr. Not-a-Bubble is trying to convince start-up companies that their income, if it’s in the $300,000-a-month range–a range that most companies made up of three guys and a credit-card-funded Amazon S3 account would kill for–is “noise” that distracts them from their potential.
Hollywood and Silicon Valley have something of a Mars/Venus problem: The two sides are talking but they don’t speak each other’s language. A new venture involving a phone company may just add Pluto into the mix.
On Monday, the William Morris Agency, the Hollywood talent shop, will announce that it is teaming up with the Silicon Valley venture capital firms Accel Partners and Venrock to invest in digital media start-up companies based in Southern California. What makes the combination unusual, though, is the addition of AT&T as a limited partner.
Israel’s growing solar industry, early moves on electric vehicles (the home to Shai Agassi’s first electric-vehicle infrastructure project) and recently funded water start-ups are making the state one of the front-runners of the cleantech revolution. And Israel keeps churning out new solar start-ups; on Monday a solar photovoltaic company called Pythagoras Solar said it had raised a Series A round of $10 million.
The question of business-model timing seems to come up weekly with regards to some start-up. As Twitter usage has grown, have they f’ed themselves out of a real, sustainable business model? And has Pownce done something right by launching with a business model? Personally I prefer that a start-up come out of the gate with a business model–perhaps it’s the accountant in me.
by Jimmy Guterman, Editorial Director, O'Reilly Radar
Recently I produced a CD. It was independently recorded and distributed–and it was available for free on every peer-to-peer service on the planet weeks before it was officially released, so it was only a modest commercial success.
Don’t feel bad. It was entirely expected. Even if there was such a thing as a record industry anymore, [...]
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