investments

GE plans to spend about $450 million over the next 10 years to expand its wind turbine business in Europe, the company said Thursday.

The investment will finance wind turbine engineering, manufacturing, and service facilities in Germany, Norway, and Sweden by 2016, and a new manufacturing facility in the U.K. by 2020. The plans also include new facilities to demonstrate GE's 4-megawatt wind turbine.

Specifically, 75 million euros ($100 million) will go toward a research and development center in Norway, where there are plans under way to test GE's new 4-megawatt offshore wind turbines. GE already has … Read more

Nearly six years ago, Google went public and unleashed over $170 billion in employee wealth--money that is now being actively re-invested in building the next wave of Googles.

Is Google the exception, or is such reinvestment the rule for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs?

A quick scan of the industry suggests that Google is, indeed, exceptional, but perhaps not to the extent that people think.

Googlers aren't alone in spending their wealth on technology investments, of course. Well-known entrepreneurs like Marc Andreessen and other angel investors have gone on to fund new start-ups like Twitter and LinkedIn.

Such angel investors get … Read more

It's no surprise we spend money on the things we value. So the question is, how much would you invest in a decent hi-fi or sound system? Bear in mind that a good quality system will last a long time, so amortizing the investment over a period of five or even 10 years should be factored into the expense. The coffee's gone in a matter of minutes.

Let's see, at $4 a day, a $20-a-week Starbucks expense works out to $1,000 a year. You're not going to stop anytime soon, so Starbucks, or any daily … Read more

With investors getting smarter and start-ups getting bought, the mood is brightening in green tech. But the high-profile companies seeking to go public this year have some industry watchers talking bubbles.

For proof, investors point to the spate of planned initial public offerings, including electric car maker Tesla Motors, solar company Solyndra, and biofuels maker Codexis. Smart-grid company Silver Spring Networks and biofuels maker Amyris are rumored to be on deck.

Long-term trends may favor innovative green companies, as concerns about energy resources and the environment grow. But that doesn't mean this year's leading companies can navigate the … Read more

BOSTON--Relatively clean natural gas, not dirty coal, is a major hurdle to broader use of solar and wind power in the near term, according to a Morgan Stanley banker.

Paul Leggett, who oversees Morgan Stanley's clean energy banking practice, provided a snapshot of the green-tech investment area to professionals in advance of the GoingGreen East conference in March here on Friday. Overall, he foresees significant activity in the clean-energy areas this year, driven mostly by concerns over the economy and energy security, despite financial and policy challenges.

One is the low price of natural gas used to make electricity … Read more

The weak economy of 2009 took its toll on venture capitalists, though the year ended with hints of a recovery in store, says a new MoneyTree report.

VCs spent only $17.7 billion on 2,795 different deals last year, the lowest dollar amount and number of investments since 1997, according to the report released Friday by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), based on data from Thomson Reuters.

The numbers amounted to a 37 percent drop in dollars and a 30 percent fall in the volume of deals from 2008, marking the second consecutive year of declines. … Read more

Venture capitalists are still gung-ho on green technologies, but they are getting choosier.

The amount of venture capital that went toward green-technology companies fell to $4.85 billion in 2009, compared to $7.6 billion in 2008, according to numbers published on Wednesday by Greentech Media. The number of deals was up slightly from 350 in 2008 to 356 this year.

In a statement, venture capitalists cast the numbers in a positive light, saying that the number of deals has increased and the quality of entrepreneurs working in the area is improving.

But even with billions of government stimulus dollars … Read more

This is the fifth in a series of profiles that look at how the tech industry is working with the federal government.

"We joke about the Internet routing around bad government," venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson said when I asked him about launching and running companies that have to make nice with Uncle Sam.

Jurvetson, a managing director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, made his first big venture capital score by putting money into Hotmail. He also invested in Skype. Of these early investments, he said, "They fell outside the realm of regulatory friction."

But times have changed … Read more

We didn't know much about Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies before it invested $200 million in Facebook this spring. But it's been in the news a lot more recently: Russian newspaper Kommersant reported Thursday that the firm has purchased more Facebook stock, sending its stake in the massive social network past 5 percent at a $10 billion valuation. Its original stake was 1.96 percent. It's reportedly still looking to buy more.

A Facebook representative told CNET via e-mail that because it's a private company it opts not to discuss shareholder percentages.

According to the … Read more