bills

Liquid Metal Battery, a company formed to make cheap storage for wind and solar power, has hired its first CEO.

Phil Giudice, who was the third employee of demand-response company EnerNoc and the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources Commissioner until earlier the year, announced his "new gig" on Twitter. One of his tasks as CEO is to raise more money to build up the company, he told The Boston Globe.

Liquid Metal Battery was spun out of the lab of Donald Sadoway, a professor of materials chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Funding for the company has … Read more

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Bill Clerico may not be Steve Jobs, but he's doing something very Jobsian: "I'm pushing people to do things they don't think are possible."

Clerico is CEO of WePay, an online payments collection service that is taking on the likes of PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, and others, and which is growing--fast. Its 2012 revenues will likely be several times that of 2011, and that means a big expansion in users and employees. Plus long hours and hard work for those already on staff.

It's nearly 10 a.m. on a recent Monday, … Read more

There's a fierce debate going on in Silicon Valley about the state of startup funding. Some are screaming that valuations are way too high. Others are arguing early stage startups are facing a cash crunch and are unable to raise their first real money, known as the Series A.

Longtime venture capitalist Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital said recently that every day he gets five to 10 introductions to startups that need Series A money--up from one to five a year ago--but that there just isn't enough capital to invest.

Whatever the reality--and TechCrunch just crunched some numbers … Read more

Following his death, Steve Jobs has been lauded by many as one of the world's most imaginative inventors. But a portrait of the Apple leader in The New Yorker paints him as more of a tweaker on a never-ending quest for perfection.

In a column for the magazine's new issue, the New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell relates several stories from Walter Isaacson's bio as evidence that Jobs' real contribution was zeroing in on an existing item, no matter how minute, and refining it until it fit his vision of perfection.

Jobs forced the designers of the original … Read more

BilltoMobile has been on a roll recently.

The company, which handles purchases of digital goods that customers make on their phone by linking payment to their cell phone bill, just last month signed AT&T as a partner, locking up the fourth and last national wireless carrier. BilltoMobile CEO Jim Greenwell said that the industry is poised to see a rapid explosion of purchases made through the carrier billing model. Rather than enter the credit card information on the phone, a person can use this option to pay for the good and have the expense show up on their … Read more

Some relationships become competitive. And some have competitiveness at their core.

The latter surely was the case between Microsoft's Bill Gates and Apple's Steve Jobs. So no one could have imagined that Jobs would have offered too many conciliatory quotes in Walter Isaacson's biography.

In an interview with ABC News, Gates says he's thoroughly and utterly cool with Jobs tossing zingers his way.

"None of that bothers me at all," he told ABC. He added a finely generic eulogy: "Steve Jobs did a fantastic job."

The thing is that, even in the … Read more

Let's talk money and hamburgers.

Sometimes you can spend a lot of money on a hamburger, sometimes very little. For example, at the Four Seasons in San Francisco, you can pay $18 for a very nice hamburger with exquisite french fries.

It is spectacularly better than the ones at the Golden State Warriors games, where, please believe me, the burger and fries are almost the same price as the Four Seasons and of a similar quality to the team in 2002. (And 2003. And 2004.)

These--and several other--thoughts on the finance/hamburger axis have been occupying my mind because of a fascinating speech and Q&A session yesterday at the University of Washington featuring Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

The way the Seattle Times records it, one enterprising listener asked Gates how she could become as blindingly rich as him.

Gates explained that money hadn't been his goal. He just loved what he was doing. Even better, he could involve his friends in this thing he loved. Soon, he had more money than he knew what to do with. Which he described as "a responsibility."

But here's the meat of it. … Read more

In the tech news this week, Stephen and Brian bust me for buying an iPhone 4 on eBay to tide me over until there's a phone I really want--or until my Verizon contract is up. Nicole Lee joins us to talk about Nokia and Microsoft's new baby, the Lumia 800, and Sony's plans to get serious about making smart phones. Plus, stock advice from the gang, the coming nightmare that is the Stop Internet Piracy Act, and Computer Love.

Writer Walter Kirn tweeted something mid-summer that rang so poignant and true, I immediately "favorited" and re-tweeted: "The brilliant dark governing insight of social media is that most people prefer socializing alone."

Sure, all of this newfound sharing and real-time communication is awesome indeed. But the very same digital tools that heighten our reach and accessibility are somehow alienating us from each other more so than ever before. Human-to-human connection and communication, it seems, tends to get too intermediated by gadgets and gizmos.

Today, there's a new social network rolling out nationwide to help bridge … Read more