Archive for March, 2010
The only thing missing at Kleiner Perkins’ iFund event? An iPad
$200 million still won’t buy an iPad that you can show off before Saturday’s launch. At least, that’s one of the messages I took from venture firm this morning, where it announced it’s doubling the size of the iFund from $100 to $200 million.
Kleiner Perkins and its portfolio companies were all full of praise for the iPad, with partner There were Apple representatives at the event, and they had nice things to say about the iFund. But there was no iPad.
So Doerr couldn’t demonstrate the “swoosh of liquidity” that he seemed so excited about when describing the interface, and startups like Ngmoco and Shazam couldn’t show us their iPad applications in action.
During the presentations, there were even some jokes about Apple’s incredible secrecy and the nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) the company made its partners sign. After the event, I asked Kleiner’s Bing Gordon confirmed that he’d wanted to have an iPad at the event, but presumably he couldn’t get Apple’s blessing.
VentureBeat has had a brush with Apple’s iPad secrecy too, because a couple of companies launching at , the conference that we co-produce, wanted to show off their applications on an iPad emulator running on their computers — but even then, Apple said no, without an explanation. One of those startups, mobile presentation company MightyMeeting kept trying, even sending an email to Apple chief executive Steve Jobs (hey, ). A week later, Apple changed its mind — again, with no explanation.
On other hand, if you want to see the iPad in action, it looks like has been playing with one for the past week.
Companies: ,
People:
Report: Clean Tech Investments to Climb Dramatically
Good news on the clean tech front: a report from claims that global investments in the sector will climb this year by an impressive 35% in the face of flailing climate change legislation.
According to the report, Challenges and Opportunities For Energy Utility Companies Post-Copenhagen, the resurgence in investments is a result of government stimulus packages offering up cash to renewable energy companies. At the same time, the Copenhagen summit encouraged private investors even though the meeting didn't conclude witha definitive climate policy.
Datamonitor's news isn't all that surprising. The Cleantech Group, New Energy Finance, and Jeffries have all recently claiming that cleantech investments will grow in the coming years. If you've been following our of the clean tech sector, you probably already knew this--Obama has spent $3.4 billion in federal stimulus funds on smart grids alone. The big unknown, of course, is which country will come out on top: the U.S or China.
Anish Kapoor Wins Competition to Design London’s Olympic Tower
Over 375 feet high--that's 72 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty--'s ArcelorMittalOrbit has been as the monument to mark the London Olympics in 2012. The city's shy and retiring Mayor, Boris Johnson, has already nicknamed it the tower due to its striking resemblance to a shisha pipe.
Work is due to start on the steel sculpture, which the Mayor is hoping will become a rival to Paris' Eiffel Tower, in the next few weeks. The cost of the 1,400 ton steel structure has been put at around $30 million, although most of the bill is being picked up by steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal who, like Kapoor, is India born, but resides in the British capital.
Kapoor, however, who professed himself to be "thrilled" by his design's win, was modest in victory. "It would be terribly arrogant to compete with Eiffel who spent his entire life making that thing," he said. "What we're trying to make is the best thing we can do." He describes the structure, which can take 700 people an hour up to its viewing platform, as "an eccentric structure that looks as if it's going to fall over."
When it comes to size, nobody does it quite like Kapoor does. Marsyas,
his 2002 installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Britain (a beached
Leviathan of a disused power station on the banks of the Thames) was
absolutely .
Like the Olympic monument, it's a deep red trumpet created with Arup
Engineers, who will be overseeing construction of Kapoor's latest
design.
[youtube Du8dNvfY1bo]
Last year, the Royal Academy, housed in an imposing Palladian with a private courtyard, held a mammoth exhibition of Kapoor's work. For the first time in the RA's history, it allowed a living artist to take over the plaza. Whilst not on the scale of Marsyas or the Hubble Bubble (how can we not call it that?), his works were no less impressive. Most thrilling was a moving sculpture called Svayamb, or Train, a ten-meter-long lump of crimson wax and paint that slid its way through five empty galleries, passing through arched doorways and leaving a gloopy mess all over the place.
There were many entries for the competition, including this one, the , from a group of architects from MIT, which had the backing of Google. The judges, including Sir Nicholas Serota, head honcho at the Tate, and nabobs Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones,as well as Mayor Johnson, have been terribly secretive in the six or so months that the project has been running. But, given the of many architecture experts, wouldn't you have been?
Free OS Android Too Expensive for Net-Enabled TVs, Says Panasonic
, we know, loves to extend its grasping business tentacles in as many directions as possible, so the company's execs will be interested to learn of this particular G-fail: Panasonic is Android for TVs, citing expense.
More and more TVs are going high-tech, and there are enough experiments underway to suggest that the average TV is going to become smarter and Net-enabled, possibly to maximize the utility of set-top box Net TV show and movie content. And Panasonic is the fourth biggest TV maker in the World, making this even more of a stinging blow to Google.
But wait. Android--which would be perfect for the sort of simple to medium-complex tasks that a smart TV would require--is an open-source OS that's completely free to buy or use. So on what grounds is Panasonic saying that Android TVs would be too expensive to make? According to Robert Perry, Senior VP of the U.S. division of Panasonic, the cost of all the supporting electronics, particularly the CPU, which would probably come from Intel, is too high.
The industry would have you believe this is logical, as Samsung recently made similarly disparaging noises about Android TVs. But does this really add up? After all, Android-powered cell phones can be amazingly cheap, and they have a whole bunch of electronic parts that an Android TV wouldn't need. The build costs of using Intel chips also hasn't affected the netbook industry much, and Android powered netbooks and MIDs are among the lowest priced out there. The Atom was designed for this sort of task, and Intel priced it so low that it kicked off the whole netbook phenomenon. Adding, say, a hundred dollars or so to the build cost of a TV set that'll go on the shelves priced over $1,000 just wouldn't seem prohibitive--particularly since you could actually sell the sets for more, thanks to their added Net and app powers.
The skeptic may therefore consider that something else is going on. Is it these big players in the TV industry being super-cautious of the Google monster? Are they making preliminary moves to prevent Google from slipping into a position of power in the multi-billion dollar TV game, which would then let it scoop up more power in this new market? It's possible.
To keep up with this news and more like it, possibly on your Net-enabled TV, follow me, , on Twitter. That QR code on the left will take you to my Twitter feed too.
Waste Oil-Coated Smart Roof Could Save Energy
One of the simplest climate change geoengineering solutions we've seen is the white roof, which naturally reflects sunlight back into space and keeps buildings cool. Energy Secretary Steven Chu even went so far as to recently that slathering our pavements and roofs in white paint might offset 44 billion tons of CO2, or the equivalent of taking all vehicles off the planet's roads for 11 years. But a research and development company called thinks there is a better solution: smart roof shingles coated in waste-oil based polymers.
The liquid polymer, developed with funding from the Department of Energy, is made from fast food waste oil that turns into a sort of plastic when applied to roofs. Like white paint, the polymer reflects sunlight in warm weather, but it has the added bonus of absorbing heat in cold weather. In testing, the polymer showed a decreased roof temperatures between 50% and 80% in hot
weather compared to normal asphalt shingles along with a 80% increase in temperature in cold weather. It has all the benefits of white paint, in other words, with none of the drawbacks.
Don't worry--the polymer won't make your roof smell like french fries. But it might piss off diesel devotees who rely on waste cooking oil from restaurants to power their vehicles. We'd rather see the cooking oil end up on our roofs, though. Let diesel drivers switch to electric.
Toura helps museums build their mobile apps
, a company that wants to help cultural institutions offer virtual tours in the form of mobile applications, that it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from unidentified angel investors.
The New York company says that, by using its web-based tools, an attraction like a museum or a zoo could create interactive multimedia tours that can then be distributed on iPhone, Android, Nokia, and BlackBerry devices. These tours are a form of marketing for Toura’s partners, but they can also be seen as educational tools, allowing a museum to share its art collection with a broader audience, for example.
There are no upfront fees, Toura says. Presumably it shares the revenue if the application drives ticket sales or other purchases.
Although there are plenty of mobile app creation startups out there, Toura’s focus appears to be unique. None of its applications are live yet, so we can’t judge the results, but the company did announce its first partner, the .
Companies: ,
Fail Rail! High-Speed Train Connecting Vegas to L.A. Comes Up 100 Miles Short
Obama may have declared our country the last April, but here in California, we promised back in November 2008 to raise more than $40 billion to fund a massive running from San Diego to the Bay Area. But that didn't include an all-important spur for one of the most heavily traveled routes in the state: One third of Las Vegas' 38 million annual visitors are Southern
Californians who drive the four-hour route up I-15 in heavy traffic clogged by drunken bachelor party caravans.
Enter the DesertXpress, a $4 billion high-speed train that plans to , traveling from Vegas
to...well, not quite L.A., or Anaheim, or even San Bernadino. It will
terminate in Victorville (pop. 107,720), a city that's located a full 100 miles from
Los Angeles and possibly best known as the film location for Terminator III: Rise of the Machines.
Angelenos will have to take one train to Palmdale, then travel on another not-yet-planned route from Palmdale to Victorville before they finally board the final leg to Vegas (although planners assure us that the trains for all routes will be interchangeable so you might not have to switch trains). Still, though, that will hardly be convenient for anyone who needs to get to a slot machine by sundown...what gives?
A look at the fancy new station planned for Victorville was like a tip of leaders' hand--this is an economic full house for the small California city. But the biggest issue might be securing the right-of-way into Los Angeles--negotiations for a route get significantly more dicey once you enter its more populated Inland Empire. Either way, it seems like it's as sure a win as a royal flush, at least for gamblers in the greater Victorville metropolitan area. Plans for this train are full-steam ahead, with for later this year and completion expected by 2014.
Photo by Steve Marcus,
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