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BOSTON--For consumers, the face of the smart grid is most likely to be a home energy monitor that gives people insight into home electricity use. But from a business perspective, there may be more action catering to business customers, rather than homeowners.

A panel of smart-grid company executives here at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen East conference on Tuesday said saving commercial, industrial, and business customers is an easier sell than helping consumers save on utility bills.

Home energy monitoring systems and Web applications such as Google PowerMeter let people get details on where home electricity is going. But it's unclear … Read more

BOSTON--To many communities, trash-to-energy means burning garbage. But a handful of companies say they are close to bringing cleaner technology to market for making electricity or ethanol from waste.

At a panel discussion on waste-to-energy at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen East conference here on Tuesday, representatives from four companies detailed their plans to use gasification to convert waste products to usable energy. Some products are ready to be deployed more widely while others are still in the pilot testing phase.

The promise of using municipal solid trash or other waste products for useful energy is tantalizing: it's a renewable resource … Read more

Even after a massive jolt from the U.S. government for green technologies, investors are tempering their expectations.

Consulting company KPMG on Tuesday is expected to release results of a survey that reflects the conflicted feelings of many venture capitalists.

The societal forces toward clean energy--including energy security and climate change--continue to gain momentum. But the financial crisis has hit the clean-energy industry so hard that even the recently passed stimulus plan cannot completely reverse its course.

"There is no doubt that the green-tech sector remains an attractive investment area, but the lack of available credit and the difficult economic environment … Read more

If you're not the type of person to carry around a notepad or voice recorder with you, there are a handful of Web services raring to help you out if you've got a mobile phone. ReQall, a service that launched back at Demo 07 has a great new iPhone application that does just that. I got in touch with Sunil Vemuri, ReQall's chief product officer who showed it off during one of today's CEO pitch sessions at the AlwaysOn Summit.

The application's killer feature is that it saves your notes both locally and to the … Read more

PALO ALTO, Calif.--There are nearly 30 start-ups promoting their wares today as part of AlwaysOn's Stanford Summit--and that's just before lunch. Many have been profiled by Webware in the past, but I wanted to take some time to dig into two of my personal favorites from this morning's CEO presentations.

MyTrybe. This is a behind-the-scenes service for site owners who want to add recommendation features to their content. It uses a sliding scale happy face that you can drag on tagged pieces of content like stories, videos, and pictures to establish a ranking. MyTrybe will … Read more

NEW YORK--Will it blend? This innovative ad campaign sure did.

A lot of Madison Avenue types have packed into midtown Manhattan's upscale Mandarin Oriental hotel for the annual OnMedia NYC conference, a sort of Silicon-Valley-meets-the-ad-industry event. The conference, which started Monday and ends Wednesday, is presented by new-media trade publication AlwaysOn. At the end of the day on Tuesday, AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins announced 2007's "Best of Broadband (BOB) Awards," a hand-picked list of the top Web video ads that achieved viral success and actually worked.

Gimmicky? Of course. But after a day of panels and … Read more

HALF MOON BAY, Calif.--Homesick entrepreneurs longing to return to China or Europe may find the motherland is offering more than a warm embrace: funding by eager investors.

China's stock market has climbed fivefold over the past two years, and efforts are under way to create an emerging market that would cater to younger companies.

"The China market has turned over five times, so it's very, very hot. But there've only been a handful of local companies that have done an IPO," said Kuantai Yeh, managing director of Intel Capital and a panelist Friday at … Read more

Entrepreneurs got some answers Thursday from investment bankers and institutional investors during the AlwaysOn Venture Summit in Half Moon Bay, Calif.

For starters, companies looking to cash in via an IPO, or acquisition, are finding that it's usually through the acquisition route, said Paul Deninger, vice chairman of Jefferies & Co.

Over the past five years, mergers and acquisitions have provided 80 to 90 percent of all equity returned to investors of venture-backed technology companies, compared with 30 to 40 percent in the early 1990s, he noted.

And that trend concerns Deninger, who compared the situation to venture capitalists &… Read more

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