investing

Clean-technology investing could be seeing a rebound.

Cleantech Group, a research firm backed by Deloitte, released a preliminary report on Thursday showing a slight uptick in clean-tech funding during the second quarter of 2009 in North America, Europe, China, and India.

After two quarterly declines, the increase is good news, but the Cleantech Group noted that the quarter-to-quarter comparison for the same period a year ago is still down.

"The (second-quarter) total is up 12 percent from the previous quarter, although down 44 percent from the same period a year ago. The average round size in (the quarter) was $… Read more

A good friend of mine is still fuming over picking HD-DVD over Blu-ray. He's held the grudge so long he just recently dumped the player and even some of the discs and bought a Blu-ray player.

I know another guy who's steamed that his $2,000 6-year-old receiver doesn't have HDMI switching, so to get Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio he plays his Blu-ray over the receiver's 5.1 channel analog inputs. Fine, but the receiver doesn't do any sort of bass management over its analog inputs. The sound isn't so hot.

Do you know anybody who bought a plasma TV in 1999 for around $10,000 who still uses it as their primary display? I don't, but I'd bet most of those buyers are on their second or third display by now.… Read more

Venture capitalists expect the green-technology area to grow faster than traditional areas of venture capital investment in the coming years.

In its annual Global Trends survey of 725 venture capitalists, Deloitte Research and the National Venture Capital Association found that over 60 percent expect investments in green tech to increase over the next three years. Medical devices, too, offer growth potential, investors think.

More mature industries, such as semiconductors and software, are seeing a slowdown in interest.

"The venture capital community continues to glom onto technologies that are truly ground-breaking technologies and are starting to leave the technologies they … Read more

Investors who want to determine the possible returns of their funding, plus figure the impact of amortized goodwill and other factors, will certainly want to check out this preformatted Excel spreadsheet.

The Investment and Business Valuation tool is a preformatted spreadsheet with four tabs: Assumptions, Before (investment), After (assumptions regarding value of investment), and Results (Return on Investment). The initial tab, Assumptions, lets you choose either New or Existing investment and to enter a number of key factors: taxation and amortization, capital, and cost of capital--including risk-free rate, market risk premium, and weighted cost of capital. The interface is well-designed … Read more

The stock market is a tricky way to earn money. However, many invest hoping to generate more revenue in their lives. Amateur Invest offers a program aimed at helping newcomers to the stock market, but might prove to be too much for those it aims to assist.

The program has a complex interface that is made slightly easier thanks to the start-up wizard that appears when you start the program. Here, you can set your currency, stocks to purchase, and even watch a helpful tutorial. A tutorial is a great idea, since this program is intimidating with its clustered layout. … Read more

Facebook has unveiled a list of 18 applications--for the Facebook Platform, Facebook Connect, and Facebook Connect for the iPhone--that have been awarded investments from its FBFund seed funding program and invited to participate in a summer incubator workshop in its hometown of Palo Alto, Calif.

The workshop, called FBFund REV 2009, will run for ten weeks from June through August, according to a post on the Facebook developer blog by company representative Cat Lee. The post also contains a full list of winners, which range from a paintball game app to a dating service to an e-mail management program.

"… Read more

SEATTLE, Wash.-- Despite the growing list of toppling multinational corporations, Timothy Draper, the founder and a managing director of VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, told an audience full of Seattle entrepreneurs and investors that right now is the "best time ever" to start a new business.

To illustrate the point, Draper pointed to over two dozen companies that were founded in recessions and depressions including giants like General Electric, Chevron, and Coca-Cola. Also included were more tech-oriented companies like Skype (of which Draper was an investor), Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Kodak, and Adobe Systems.

In his keynote address to … Read more

Lithium ion battery company A123Systems has received a $69 million investment round from General Electric and others, the company announced Monday.

With its latest funding, A123Systems plans to expand its facilities in Massachusetts and Michigan, as well as build new facilities in Michigan. A portion of the proceeds will also be used to develop applications for the smart grid, such as utility-scale storage. The company has its headquarters in Watertown, Mass.

GE invested $15 million toward this latest round, bringing its total investment stake to 10 percent in the company. A123Systems also announced GE will receive a seat on its … Read more

Venture capitalists have poured $3.2 billion into open-source companies since 1997, according to a new report from The 451 Group. It's about time we started delivering a return on that investment.

In some ways, of course, this $3.2 billion investment has already been repaid several times over. The Linux Foundation, for example, estimates that that the Linux kernel is worth $10.8 billion in free research and development, and a compelling argument has been made that open-source vendors have already saved customers $60 billion in license fees they'd normally be paying.

Indeed, if you expand beyond … Read more