investing

Political furor over the Solyndra bankruptcy has dealt a body blow to the idea that the government should try to help clean tech start-ups through the costly "valley of death" to commercial viability.

The capital needed to commercialize cutting-edge, renewable energy technology is seen as too risky for both venture capitalists and for the banks.

Until the fossil fuel industry has to pay for the carbon it emits, renewables such as solar and wind are unlikely to attain the scale needed to compete with cheaper coal, oil and natural gas, and will depend on government support.

The Obama … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Vinod Khosla is famous for investing lots of money in green technologies. But when it comes to his role models, it's all Steve Jobs, not Al Gore.

Khosla was interviewed today at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen conference here, where he espoused the idea of making big bets on potentially game-changing companies.

Even though Khosla got into green-tech investing out of environmental concerns, he said environmentalists have been a barrier to green tech because they assume that people need to pay more for cleaner alternatives to the status quo. They understand what the problems are, but when it comes to … Read more

Microblogging provider Tumblr has raised $85 million in a new round of financing.

Greylock Partners and Insight Venture Partners led the financing round, according to a statement sent to CNET today. Virgin Group chief Richard Branson, along with Spark Capital and Sequoia Capital, also contributed to the round. Tumblr did not disclose its valuation, but the company said that it plans to use the cash to "continue to scale our business and give real focus to the further development of Tumblr."

The New York Times earlier reported on the story.

Tumblr's $85 million in new cash is … Read more

It's no secret to anyone following green tech that the Department of Defense has taken a particular interest in advanced biofuels, vehicle fuel efficiency, renewable energy, and building efficiency. But many may not realize to what extent the DOD has changed its policy, or the large impact this shift is going to have on the economy, according to a report released yesterday afternoon by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The report (PDF) asserts that the DOD is one of the world's largest institutional consumers of fossil fuels, consuming 300,000 barrels of oil a day in 2009. The DOD's energy cost for 2010 was $15.2 billion (PDF) … Read more

Pity the "affluent Americans." With financial futures too complex to be forecast or planned by Quicken or Mint, but with insufficient resources to get top-flight financial planning from a wealth management firm like Goldman Sachs, these (approximately) 15 million households are woefully underserved.

That's the start of the pitch from Personal Capital, a new financial adviser firm with a strong, free online financial management app. The founders I talked with, ex-Intuit execs Bill Harris and Jim Del Favero, told me that most financial planning tools just don't sell. Harris said, "I built a tax planning tool twice. It sold practically zero, both times."

So he's trying to build instead a "complete solution" for the connected, sort-of-high-net-worth consumer: a product that gives Mint-like ease of use and information, but with a focus on giving these users grown-up insight. In particular, Personal Capital shows you your investment allocation across all your accounts, so you can see if you're, for example, too heavily invested in U.S. stocks vs. emerging market stocks, bonds, currencies, and so on.

… Read more

Motorola Mobility's investment arm, Motorola Mobility Ventures, has offered up some cash to video-services provider, Ooyala, the companies announced today.

Founded in 2007, Ooyala has quickly become a well-known, behind-the-scenes provider of video services to major brands. The company currently offers online video management, analytics, monetization, and publishing to more than 1,000 customers delivering video to more than 100 million consumers per month. All told, the service provider's customers deliver 1 billion streams each month.

Motorola Mobility, however, seems to care most about Ooyala's "multiscreen experiences." Ooyala recently unveiled a service called Ooyala Everywhere, … Read more

Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, is forming a venture capital fund to invest in some of the startups his bloggers write about, according to a Fortune report.

The $20 million CrunchFund will reportedly be funded primarily by AOL, which bought TechCrunch last year, as well as venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Greylock Partners.

Arrington and AOL did not respond to requests for comment.

Although the arrangement flies in the face of traditional journalism's principles of avoiding conflicts of interest, Arrington told The New York Times that the fund'… Read more

Entrepreneur Brad Hines' first solar company crashed and burned, but he's already started another venture, a story which offers cues on how the entire green-tech sector can reinvent itself in tough times.

In 2005, Hines left his work as a NASA engineer to build a radically new and powerful type of rooftop solar collector. But even after taking in tens of millions of dollars from top-shelf investors, the company, Soliant Energy, ultimately failed and its intellectual property was sold off, reportedly at bargain basement prices.

Now Hines is at work on another solar startup called Thermata with a whole … Read more

The wireless carriers' investment in 4G networks could be the salve that the ailing U.S. economy is looking for.

The carriers could invest between $25 billion and $53 billion in building out their 4G network through 2016, according to a study from Deloitte. That in turn could lead to the creation of 371,000 to 771,000 jobs, and gross domestic product growth of $73 billion to $151 billion.

"Investment in such a powerful form of communication contributes to the economic recovery and provides a job-creating engine for the future," said Phil Asmundson a consultant for Deloitte. … Read more