funding

Americans who receive meter data on their home energy use reduce consumption on average by 1.8 percent after the first year.

That's according to a study of 750,000 households of varied demographics in six states conducted by energy-management software company Opower and sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). The study followed homes enrolled in various utility programs that provided home usage data via Web portal, text, or paper reports mailed to consumers' homes.

The figure may not sound like much. But if every home in the U.S. reduced energy consumption by 1.8 percent, nationwide … Read more

A few students in Atlanta Public Schools will soon be driven to school in a the nation's first hydraulic hybrid conversion of a traditional school bus.

Financed by a $50,000 grant from The Ford Motor Company Fund and converted by students at Georgia Institute of Technology, the bus will run on recycled biofuel.

There are more than 480,000 iconic yellow school buses in the United States, but this 16-passenger school bus is being painted green by students at Mary Lin Elementary School in Atlanta, Ga.

The students at Mary Lin have also organized a drive for used … Read more

The camera market might be dominated by giants such as Canon and Panasonic, but a small start-up founded by a surfer in Half Moon Bay, Calif., has persuaded venture capitalists to invest.

GoPro, maker of the diminutive Hero line of cameras geared to record action video of snowboarding, base jumping, mountain biking, scuba diving, and car racing, announced the funding today. The "substantial strategic investment" of undisclosed magnitude is from Riverwood Capital, Steamboat Ventures, Sageview Capital, Walden International, and U.S. Venture Partners.

The company has found a niche for its products--including a range of accessories such as … Read more

Apple's stock is still very much in demand despite recent concerns that a lightening of its shares on the Nasdaq 100 would lead to a sell-off and thus a price drop, according to Reuters.

In an attempt to rebalance the weighting of companies on the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index, the exchange recently shrunk the percentage taken up by Apple to 12.33 percent from 20.49 percent--the largest individual change. At the same time, Nasdaq bumped up the weightings on the shares of other tech giants, including Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Google, Intel, and Oracle. Such weightings are used by … Read more

Two companies tied to prominent technology entrepreneurs are among those that received funding through the NASA's Commercial Crew Development effort, the government agency announced yesterday.

Blue Origin, which was started by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, received $22 million in the funding round. PayPal co-founder Elon Musk's SpaceX received $75 million. They were flanked by Sierra Nevada and Boeing, which received $80 million and $92.3 million, respectively.

The Commercial Crew Development program, which began in 2009, is arguably one of the most important efforts under way at NASA. Its goal is to help U.S. private enterprises develop … Read more

I had an interesting but frustrating discussion recently with Matt Crowe, the founder of Ahhha, a site for "social ideation," as he calls it. It's where people can float ideas for products and either seek help from the people who can actually help make the ideas real or just "claim" the ideas and let others run with them. Everyone who contributes is supposed to get a piece of an idea's financial success.

Crowe hopes that Ahhha will become a place where anyone with the germ of an invention will plant it, and that the community will select and grow the best ideas. A comparison voting system is supposed to help the good ideas bubble up, but currently non-serious and joke ideas flood the site, burying the few good ones on it.

Crowe says, "Nobody has a clue where to go if they have an idea," and that's very true, but I don't think a pure ideas market like this is the way to solve the problem. We already have systems for the registration and protection of intellectual property: Patents, trademarks, copyright, trade secrets, and counterfeit laws are all designed to protect the originators of creative work. Each of these systems may be criticized as being some combination of cumbersome, unfair, or expensive, but I would still submit that the last thing we need is yet another registration system, one where individuals can claim rights to an idea without putting any legal heft or real work behind their claims. Ideas markets are one thing, but helping people actually create products is more valuable. And several sites are doing just that.

Ahhha has some similarities to the gadget manufacturer Quirky, which puts an inventor community in front of its development calendar. Quirky has the smallest of filters to idea submission, but it makes the biggest difference: you have to pony up $10 to submit an idea. Quirky itself builds and sells those concepts that make it through the community voting process. Inventors get a cut of sales. Quirky appears to work only in plastics, so the ideas it can act on are limited.

Other services enable inventors and creators to fund all kinds of projects and find customers for them. For example, see Kickstarter and Indiegogo, where artists and inventors can collect monetary pledges for their projects. Funds pledged are held in escrow until thresholds are reached; then the money gets released to the projects. The people running the projects generally agree to send those who pledged their work output-- music tracks or theater tickets for artistic works; toys or gadgets for hardware projects.

Since pledge-based projects are expected to deliver actual output, the budding entrepreneurs on these services have to do more than have an idea: they have to be able to pitch successfully to the sites' communities. This filter leads to ideas sites filled with workable ideas that need, primarily, money and moral support (pre-orders are very effective in that regard). Pledge sites don't pretend to tell inventors that there's a shortcut to success, but they do add efficiency to part of the financial process.

A Medieval weapon, made with lasers I recently met some inventors working a fun project through the Kickstarter system: Michael Woods and Evan Murphy. They were students together at Caltech a few years ago, and recently realized their post-graduation startup, which made legal discovery software, wasn't going to work out. They dropped back to what they both love: Building stuff. In particular, toy trebuchets. The trebuchet was a siege weapon in Middle Ages. It has a special appeal to geeks, because it blends really interesting physics with a Lord of the Rings aesthetic.

Woods and Murphy wanted to build a quick-to-assemble desktop trebuchet, or "Trebuchette." Existing kits have to be glued together, but since "It's no fun watching glue dry," as Woods told me, they wanted to create a snap-together version. The started Siege Toys to do it.

… Read more

The Nasdaq stock exchange will cut the weighting it gives to Apple on a key index at the same time that it boosts the weighting for tech titans including Microsoft and Cisco Systems.

In a major rebalancing of the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index, which will go into effect ahead of the market open on May 2, the exchange aims to better reflect the current market values of several significant companies. For example, Apple's weighting on the Nasdaq 100 is currently more than six times that of Microsoft, even though Apple's market value is only 46 percent larger, according … Read more

Zynga's valuation is growing by leaps and bounds.

The company is trying to secure $500 million in funding on a valuation of $10 billion, AllThingsD reported yesterday, citing unnamed sources. The publication said that Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Investments, T. Rowe Price, and previous investor Kleiner Perkins are involved in the funding round, which apparently is nearly complete.

The New York Times published a similar report yesterday, citing unnamed sources of its own that said Zynga is nearing a $10 billion valuation and a $500 million funding round. The publication's sources said Zynga is also preparing for an initial … Read more

Andreessen Horowitz has invested more than $80 million in Twitter via purchasing stock in private secondary markets.

When called about it by BoomTown, a spokeswoman at the high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm confirmed the purchase.

To be clear, Twitter does not get this money--early investors and employees able to sell their privately held Twitter shares do.

Buying into the secondary markets--which have recently attracted some controversy and regulatory scrutiny--has become a common way for VCs to invest in a hot start-up without a complex and competitive funding bake-off.

The move is an interesting one, since Andreessen Horowitz was not part … Read more