watering

DAVIS, Calif.--What kind of clean tech product will thrive over the long term?

"Something that doesn't defy laws of physics, and there are plenty of those," said Rodrigo Prudencio, a partner with Nth Power LLC. The venture capital firm helped Evergreen Solar and Imperium Renewables to get off the ground.

Nobody at the AlwaysOn Going Green conference was making bold predictions about what might become the Google of green tech, but the sector is expected to continue expanding at a rapid clip.

Clean tech companies receive the third largest amount of venture capital, a staggering increase … Read more

We're cursed: Every year we learn of the best summer products just when the weather is turning. (Unless we're in San Francisco, where summer and winter are interchangeable all year long.)

This year we learned belatedly of the perfect MP3 cooler to go with our MP3 barbecue. Now we get word of the "Hov Pod," a personal hovercraft that can reach speeds of 45 miles per hour. Actually, according to BornRich, this gem can be used in all four seasons, able to "smoothly navigate across all sorts of terrain including water, mud, sand, snow, ice … Read more

DAVIS, Calif.--Here's a novel business plan. Prairie Village, Kansas-based Nowa Technology has come up with a wastewater treatment plant that sucks out materials from wastewater and some of these removed products can be consumed as a diesel additive. It depends on what's in your wastewater, but Nowa CEO Richard Nelson says you find the fuel there quite a bit.

You can mix it 50-50 with diesel and get about the same amount of energy as pure diesel, according to Nelson. (I ran into him in the hallway at the GoingGreen conference taking place here.) This is different … Read more

All of this talk about reworking the Internet and IPv6 has me thinking: has the Internet become as important as water? Some would surely say that I'm off my rocker on this one and say that, of course water is more important than the Internet. And while I agree that without water we can't survive, and without the Internet we can, this is not meant to be a discussion on biology. The truth of the matter is that we, as a world, have become so reliant on the Internet that it's quickly becoming just as important as … Read more

Clear Water Compliance Services has raised $25 million from hedge fund Plainview Asset Management, according to VentureWire. It's the latest deal in the growing market for water technology.

The company specializes in equipment that can take impurities out of water spilling out of construction sites, ports and other places. This dirty water can infect municipal water supplies. Meeting regulations isn't always cheap either, so services like this can help builders avoid cleanup costs.

As an added bonus, the company's Web site sports a video of Bill Nye the Science Guy holding some crabs and lecturing on water. … Read more

Clear Water Compliance Services has gotten a $25 million investment from hedge fund company Plainfield Asset Management, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports.

The Seattle-area company has a system for purifying water used on construction and industrial sites that uses crab shells among other materials. Water is typically pumped into a pool, treated and then sent into rivers and streams.

The investment, which will give Plainfield Asset Management a majority stake in the company, will be used for expansion, according to the report.

Even though there has been a huge influx of investment in clean technologies, water-related companies have received only a … Read more

Now that fellow Craver Rich Demuro has shown that we can dry our hands properly at long last, it's time to revisit an idea whose time may finally have come: washable computer equipment.

Most of the submergible peripherals we've seen to date are keyboards, but now there's a mouse to go with them. Belkin's cleverly named "Washable Mouse" can take extended bubble baths because of a unique design that places uses a "scroll pad" instead of the usual wheel, according to Gizmodo.

This comes as good news to those of us in … Read more

When it comes to bathtime, bubbles aren't just good enough anymore. You either need a floating music player, or maybe light-up disco balls for your bath salts. But even that might not suffice in today's cutthroat bathtub-gadget culture.

Enter the Aqua Rain, which does all of the following: 1) lights up via LED to illuminate your tub in soothing, color-changing hues, 2) plays waterfall noises, and 3) creates a mini-fountain of water. I'm normally a fan of things that change color, but really, I don't see any point to this whatsoever. And it's $40.

Next, … Read more

NanoH2O, a desalination company that grew out of research at UCLA, has raised $5 million.

The company is trying to commercialize a membrane that consists of a matrix of porous polymer sheets embedded with specially designed nanoparticles. The nanoparticles attract water molecules and repel other particles. In reverse osmosis, seawater passes through porous membranes. The pores allow water to pass, but are too small for salt and other particles, thereby purifying the water.

Because they attract water and repel other substances through their inherent chemical properties, the particles cut in half the amount of energy required to pump the water … Read more