“The average American spends 20 hours a week on it – listening to music. Historically, about 3 of that is spent on music that you own; so, on-demand let’s call it. And about 17 of it is spent listening to radio,” he says.
Westergren thinks Spotify falls into the 3 hour on-demand category while Pandora helps make up the 17 hours of radio listening.
Watch the founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Pandora talk about the future of his company and how music consumption will change.
It looks more and more as if the United States will pull the plug on its ill-advised ban of online gambling later this year. This morning, the House Financial Services Committee voted 41-22 in favor of a measure that would regulate, but legalize online poker and some other forms of gambling.
It’s an obvious move for the federal government, which could make money from taxing the activity, and can’t hope to prevent it anyway. It would be a huge win for online poker sites that had their businesses devastated by the 2006 ban.
Another, less obvious winner from a repeal: social gaming companies.
With 28 million monthly active users, Zynga‘s Texas HoldEm [sic] Poker is the most successful Facebook game not named FarmVille, and it’s far from the only gambling themed game on the platform. Just today, Playdom, fresh of its acquisition by Disney, announced a branded poker game with World Series of Poker.
Obviously, these games are played with play money for now, but a source close to Zynga tells us the company is keeping an eye on the legislation, and that it would be excited to move into real-money poker given the opportunity.
Indeed, social gaming companies would be crazy not to take a look at this. The real question, however, is whether Facebook will allow gambling on its platform. Unlike the game developers, which are far less well-known than their games, Facebook needs to be very careful with its brand. Despite all the recent privacy noise, Facebook maintains a much more wholesome image than its competitor on the wrong side of the tracks, MySpace. That’s incredibly valuable.
Facebook won’t comment, telling us that it’s “too early to speculate or get caught up in hypotheticals.” We think Facebook could find a way to keep gambling tucked away without compromising its image too much, and that the potential revenue would be too great to ignore.
But if Facebook does decide to keep this activity off its site, it will no doubt find itself in a fight with developers that makes the row over Credits look like a minor scuffle. And it will be a big opportunity for other social gaming platforms.
I spent the month of May working with Albert Wenger out of the Union Square Ventures offices and had the chance to dive deep into the New York Consumer Internet scene in the past few weeks.
What I am seeing leads me to believe that this city is developing into a serious challenger of the Valley when it comes to Consumer Internet (and SaaS) activity, combining some of the best VCs and most interesting startups with the incredible energy New York always had.
The city seems to have reached critical mass to a point that some entrepreneurs don’t even travel to the Valley anymore to raise capital or do bus dev deals.
So when I think that New York can beat the Valley in the next 5-10 years and become the place for Consumer Internet, it is mostly for 3 key reasons:
- New generation VCs: New York has very few large “legacy” funds but instead a high density of smaller “boutique” funds, micro VCs and angel funds that have been very successful in investing in the next generation of Consumer Internet companies. Union Square Ventures (Twitter, etsy, Zynga, Foursquare) is certainly leading the pack and the most prominent NYC VC firm by far but there are tons of other very successful investors in this market: Betaworks, FirstRound (with their new NYC office), Chris Dixon’s Founders Collective, Metamorphic Ventures, Wider Wake or Greycroft. As the VC landscape is going through a transition to less and smaller VCs, NYC seems to have a clear head start compared to the Valley.
- Tons of engineering talent: for the past decade Wall Street sucked up most of the engineering talent out of Columbia and NYU but this is largely history. It is now cool to work for a start-up and not in finance and this transition has just started.
- Deep domain knowledge in some of the fastest growing Internet sectors: NYC is the place with the deepest domain knowledge in some of the hottest Internet verticals like advertising, fashion / apparel and big data and it is not a big surprise that most advertising start-ups reside here or a company like Gilt was founded and built in NYC.
So NYC really feels like the most exciting place to start an Internet company at this stage – and it seems that the West Coast crowd has figured this out as well and is increasingly investing here.
Fox News has a long and illustrious history of saying some fairly outrageous things. A story today on FoxNews.com may be one of the best yet — certainly from a tech perspective.
The post entitled “For Apple Followers, It’s a Matter of Faith, Academics Say” argues that while people may joke about Apple being a religion (JesusPhone, etc), to some, it may actually be a religion. Better, they wonder if Apple shouldn’t pursue that path. Here’s Fox News’ keys as to why Apple is similar to a religion:
Apple’s creation story epitomizes the humble garage origin of its technology — not unlike the humble manger of Jesus’ birth.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs is perceived as a messianic leader who was fired but rose again to save the company.
Apple has traditionally had an evil archenemy, the Devil, as represented first by Microsoft and now by Google.
Yes, Apple’s start in a garage is very similar to Christ’s birth.
They also note that the Pope is scared of such a religion because he once rhetorically asked if a savior was needed in a modern wired world. Clearly, that means Apple.
The story goes on to wonder if Apple — not some crazed Apple fanboys, mind you — might apply for religious status in the future. “Indeed, it would be interesting if Apple were to apply for such a status in the future.“
Naturally, the main impetus behind this farce is that the author can’t understand why people continue to buy iPhones even though they don’t work. Therefore, Apple must be a religion. “It’s not a matter of rationality, it’s a matter of faith,” the author argues.
Meanwhile, back on the planet Earth, the story remains the same. The iPhone 4 does indeed have an antenna issue, but it’s not a major issue in real world use. If it were a major issue, the millions of people who have bought the device over the past month would be returning it en masse. If something doesn’t work, you return it — it’s that simple. That isn’t happening.
So which argument makes more sense? Are the returns not flowing in because it’s really not a big deal — and overall the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone out there? Or is it because Apple is a religion?
You’ve normally got two choices in site heatmapping (figuring out where eyeballs land on your site), you can either buy costly specialized equipment ($40K) or pay a consultant to use their own equipment, which costs upwards of $5K. Y Combinator funded GazeHawk has figured out a more pared down and innovative solution; Why not use webcams?
Co-founded by Brian Krausz and Joe Gershenson, newly launched GazeHawk is less expensive than most already existing eyetracking services at 1/10 the price. And heatmapping, something that required custom hardware and bringing people into a lab, now requires simple consumer hardware and proprietary software.
GazeHawk has its own network of test subjects; All you need to do as a website owner is give them a url or a screenshot and you get back a site map of the most active viewed places on your website, instead of having to got through the unwieldly and costly processes described above.
Though similar in concept to UserTesting, GazeHawk is disruptive in the sense that we’ve never seen a low-cost, low-effort eye tracking service before. According to Krausz, GazeHawk’s future plans include a number of extra features, better visualizations, allowing people to use their own test viewers, and eventually expansion in to the UX industry — Creating product based on tester feedback, i.e. what people want to see.
Weary readers have learned to ignore ads, especially those placed in the bottom right corner. Say Krausz, “People are so good about identifying ads nowadays that if anything looks like one you lose the entire area.” Below is a GazeHawk heatmap of our homepage — most notably people are looking at our story rotator, ING ads and not our events stuff. So quick look to the bottom right! Look!
Aside from being fascinating, accurate heatmapping is crucial to informing online ad placement, cost per click and cost per impression are just not as accurate when measuring brand conveyance. For those interested in trying it out, GazeHawk is offering a 50% discount for TC readers, just enter TECHCRUNCH10 at checkout.
Tomorrow, Friday, is our fifth annual yearly blowout party at August Capital – the event I look forward to all year. Tickets to that event are long gone, but a handful are left for the all day conference we hold prior to the party, the Social Currency CrunchUp.
2. Playdom CEO John Pleasants is joining us for a special interview just days after he sold his company to Disney for $763.2 million. He promises to tell everyone in the audience how to build and sell a company for at least that much.
3. Chamillionaire will be on stage in the afternoon to explain how, after you sell your company for $763.2 million (see no.2 above), you can go on to dominate the hip hop scene and become famous as one of the most talented musicians of a generation.
4. You’ll then see a special demo of new search engine Blekko. Only 30 or so people in the world have used Blekko to date. Attendees will get access to the new service.
5. It’s the only damned way you can get into the party at August Capital at this point, and you definitely don’t want to be the person who just reads about it on Twitter the next day.
Yes, I know the CrunchUp is $300, and some of you aspiring entrepreneurs really need that $300 for food while you build your empires. So we’re going to give away four tickets to the event to the four people who leave the most believable comment below as to why this will change their lives, and they must attend. Also, if you can juggle really well, that’s a plus, and we’ll probably put you on stage between sessions. We’ll pick the winners at 5 pm California time.
People don’t send postcards anymore. Why bother when you can photo MMS a friend? Attempting to restore some of the social experience behind photography, SwingVine has created SwingVine Gallery an app that attempts to bring back some of the mystique and enjoyment of social photo sharing.
Using your iPhone’s camera and GPS, the SwingVine Gallery app allows you to send a photo to a friend “secretly,” which they are unable to see unless they also participate by sending a photo back, sort of like a mobile game of photo tag.
While both the idea and the app interface are simple, SwingVine gallery does have its appeal, as it’s pretty hard to resist wanting to see whatever photo postcard is under wraps. I genuinely felt a level of excitement as I waited for my “secret” postcard to be revealed (It was, of course, a photo of the Eiffel Tower).
The app, expected to arrive in the app store within the next 24 hours, also functions as a photo album, with all the secret photos you receive being saved alongside your own personal photos. “Our goal is capturing people’s lives visually” says co-founder Ling Bao.
For those that can’t wait until it drops, you can try out the feature on the web here.
Amazon’s Kindle has always been an interesting device to me. When I first heard about it in late 2007, I was sure I wouldn’t want one. It was awkward looking and at $399, way too expensive. But when the second iteration came in 2009 with a sleeker look, I decided to buy one to see what all the fuss was about. I quickly learned to love it.
That said, I still didn’t see any real future for such a product. At $359, it was still absurdly expensive. And with all the rumors swirling about Apple’s impending tablet device, it seemed like it was a temporary niche product, at best. But on the eve of the unveiling of the third iteration of the device, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is making things more interesting.
Specifically, Bezos seems to understand that he cannot compete with the iPad. And he doesn’t want to. “Mr. Bezos said he intentionally left off some potential whiz-bang features from the new Kindle, like color and touch-screen controls, that would have introduced compromises to the reading experience such as glare,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“There are going to be 100 companies making LCD [screen] tablets. Why would we want to be 101? I like building a purpose-built reading device. I think that is where we can make a real contribution,” he continues.
Whether you believe that or not, it goes against reports from last year that Amazon was trying to figure out how best to compete against more advanced tablets by offering features such as color screens. Bezos even said that they had them in the laboratory to test out. But he also said that they weren’t ready for prime time, so color Kindles were at least a few years away.
But his new statements seems to indicate that Amazon may never go in that direction with the Kindle. If their goal is just to focus on making the best reading device, why go with color and video, is his reasoning. Here’s his killer quote from the WSJ piece:
For the vast majority of books, adding video and animation is not going to be helpful. It is distracting rather than enhancing. You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets.
That’s a smart position to take — for now. From a consumer hardware perspective, Amazon was never going to be able to compete with Apple — they simple lack the experience. So instead, Amazon is going to forge ahead with this dedicated device in hopes that it will catch on with mainstream consumers before the more expensive tablets do.
Naturally, the key to all of this is the price. The new Kindle will come in two flavors: a 3G one for $189 and a WiFi one for $139. The latter price is almost a full third less than the original Kindle was. It’s also a much, much cheaper than the entry-level iPad at $499. $99 still seems like the ultimate sweet-spot for the Kindle, but it’s hard to argue with $139.
The problem here is that I’m not convinced Amazon really wanted to go that low. Remember that it was only hours after Barnes & Noble announced their Nook would be $199 (and $149 for the WiFi version) that Amazon dropped their price from $259 all the way down to $189 — exactly $10 cheaper. Undoubtedly, Amazon has lowered the costs associated with the making the Kindle over the past three years, but $399 to $189 is pretty dramatic.
Everyone felt the Kindle was far too expensive at $399 or $359 but Amazon still resisted the pressure to lower the price quickly. The reason? They had complete control of the market — they didn’t have to. It was only when the Nook, Border’s Kobo, and the iPad came out that the prices truly started to fall fast.
So the question now: is Amazon making any money on selling these devices? Some may think that doesn’t matter because they’re Amazon’s way to move their content (pretty much the anti-Apple approach). But as Bezos points out, the Kindle store and the Kindle hardware are completely separate entities within Amazon. “Internally, we view them as two stand-alone businesses that have to succeed on their own merits,” he tells WSJ. Can selling the Kindle hardware at such a low price fulfill that?
So is Amazon content to rule the space for a couple of years while not making a lot of money on devices? Or is Bezos simply bluffing on Amazon’s future Kindle aspirations?
Also, does anyone really think Hemingway would have been pleased with his work on a Kindle?
Local deal goliath Groupon is launching a major new feature today: deal personalization, giving the site the ability to send you the deals it thinks you’ll be most interested in. Before now, Groupon has always offered one or two deals per city per day to its users. That’s still going to be true, but with a twist: the site will be sending different deals to users based on criteria like their gender, buying history, and their interests. The change may sound fairly minor, but it will likely have a big impact on Groupon’s bottom line.
Groupon’s simplicity has no doubt contributed to its success, but this is one case where it has some very good reasons for introducing a few extra options: personalization will help the site fend off the 500 clones that are gunning for it, it will allow Groupon to offer an unlimited number of deals, and the site can now offer deals from businesses located outside of large cities. Local personalization is rolling out to six cities for now (Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle), with the rest on the way.
CEO Andrew Mason says that one reason why there are so many Groupon clones is that the site simply hasn’t been able to accommodate all of the businesses looking to serve up a local deal, leading the businesses to turn a competitor. Deal personalization changes this, because Groupon can now distribute multiple deals in the same city on a given day. Where Groupon was previously limited to one deal (and maybe a second so-called “side deal”) per day, it can now offer as many deals as it has eager businesses.
Again, to users, this won’t be readily apparent. When you sign up you’ll be asked for your zip code and gender, and Groupon will also allow you to specify if there are any particular types of deals you’re interested in. But there’s a good chance most people will have no idea that they’re receiving a different deal than their neighbors — they’ll still receive their daily deal in their inbox, and there won’t be a button to see the dozen other deals that might be available in that city. Deals will be distributed based on a personalization algorithm (Mason said they hired someone from Netflix to build it).
Of course, that could introduce a problem: you may ask a friend if they’ve gotten in on the latest Groupon, only to find that you’ve both got different coupons. To remedy this, Mason says that you’ll still be able to send any Groupons you receive to your friends.
In addition to allowing for an unlimited number of deals, the new system gives Groupon more flexibility behind the scenes. First, it can allow companies to stagger their deals, offering it multiple times over the course of a few months to different buckets of users.
It also allows the site to offer deals to businesses from smaller cities. Groupon has historically only offered deals to businesses in major metropolitan areas — San Francisco, New York, etc. But plenty of users who might sign up for San Francisco deals live in a suburb, like Palo Alto. Now Groupon can identify which users live in those suburbs based on their zip codes, and send them deals from businesses in Palo Alto. This is going to be part of a broader trend for the site, which is shifting from “What’s your city?” to “What’s your zip code?”.
And all of this has one other nice side effect: the deals landing in your inbox should be more relevant to what you’re actually interested in.
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We’re excited to announce that we’ve just raised another round of financing, courtesy of New York-based RRE Ventures and our existing investors.
This capital will help us continue to expand the site and bring you many of the things you have been asking for–and faster than we would be able to develop them under our own power.
We’ve raised about $3 million this time, which is a vast sum relative to the couch change we’ve been running on since we launched three years ago ($2.7 million in total). In media terms, it’s still small potatoes*, so we won’t be able to go hog wild, but we should be able to significantly accelerate our pace of development.
Specifically, RRE’s investment will allow us to:
* Expand our newsroom * Do more original reporting * Launch new industry verticals * Expand the amount and type of content we publish from readers and contributors * Launch cool new tech features that will make being a member of our community a lot more fun * Launch our professional research service * Launch international editions
Someday, the money may even allow us to hire a copy editor.
In conjunction with the investment, RRE co-founder and partner Stu Ellman will be taking a seat on our board. Stu has been a major presence in the New York VC community for more than 15 years, and he has helped lead more than 40 of RRE’s 100+ investments. Stu is currently a board member of Yipit, Drop.io, and other New York-based companies, and he and RRE partner Jim Robinson have contributed several popular columns to Business Insider.
In fact, one of Stu’s recent columns, “Sorry, Just Because You Tried Hard Doesn’t Mean You Deserve A Prize” has already put us on notice about what we can expect if we let you and Stu down. But there’s nothing more valuable than a partner than great business sense, fire in the belly, and forthrightness, so we’re thrilled to have Stu and RRE on the team.
In short, we’re excited about what this capital will enable us to build over the next couple of years. We’re also happy to continue to have the support of our existing investors, including Allen & Co., Kohlberg Ventures, Pilot Group, Marc Andreessen, Gordon Crovitz, Ken Lerer of Lerer Ventures, and others.
And since none of this would be possible without the loyal support of you and our generous sponsors, we want to thank you again for all you have done for us. It is no exaggeration to say that Business Insider would not exist without you, and we’re very excited about what is still to come.
* Portfolio Magazine, for example, consumed about $100 million in its short life, and cable networks routinely gobble far more than that.
Motorola’s officially not pulling any punches, with a full-page Droid X ad in the NY Times today making it clear that their phone don’t need no stinking bumper. If their last ad was a jab, this one’s a full-on haymaker.
At first I was going to underline the part of the body copy that went after Apple specifically, until I realized that, well, the whole thing does:
At Motorola, we believe a customer shouldn’t have to dress up their phone for it to work properly. That’s why the DROID X comes with a dual antenna design. The kind that allows you to hold the phone any way you like to make crystal clear calls without a bulky phone jacket. For us it’s just one of those things that comes as a given when you’ve been making mobile phones for over 30 years.
Obviously, there are a few not nice things you could say about Droid X as well. But after Apple called out Droid X specifically in the Antennagate aftermath, it’s only fair that Motorola has a chance to respond. And do they ever!
First question: will there be a round three? I’ll be sitting here with my jumbo popcorn bucket just in case. [Droid Life]
CEO/”Chief Ninja” Seth Priebatsch claims this new feature, which encourages users to answer a quick question or two about the establishment to unlock a prize, is the answer to making SCVNGR use mainstream, not just a nerd fascination.
Mobile Roadie, a startup that helps anyone develop and create iPhone and Android apps, has launched a more customizable version of their app builder today, called Mobile Roadie Pro.
The idea Mobile Roadie Pro is to offers clients more creative control over the development of their app, offering customization of menu layout, colors, buttons, and fonts. Pro also supports multiple categories of content, a global search for users, and newly designed landscape views. And the functionality that is included in Mobile Roadie’s basic app creator is also available. For example, the apps can feature integration with YouTube, Brightcove, Flickr, Twitpic, Ustream, Topspin, Google News, RSS, Twitter, and Facebook.
Mobile Roadie has been testing the Pro version of the platform with a number of branded apps, including one for the hotel Wynn in Las Vegas. The app allows users to explore the rooms in the hotel, make reservations, read the restaurant menus and reserve a table, and learn more about nightlife, shopping, and entertainment options in the area.
Mobile Roadie Pro starts at $499 to setup and $29 per month. The company says that using the platform requires no tech knowledge, and apps can be created in about 30 minutes. And another bonus of Mobile Roadie’s platform is that its CMS allows users to simultaneously make updates to both their iPhone and Android Apps. And using push notifications, customers can send alerts that appear on users’ screens, geo targeting messages down to a one-mile radius.
For a fledgling startup, Mobile Roadie has been able to attract a number of high profile brands and celebrities using its platform, including Taylor Swift, Madonna, Live Nation, Levi’s, Twilight, and Vera Wang. Mobile Roadie also developed the official iPhone app for LeWeb, the foremost European technology conference organized by French entrepreneur and Seesmic founder, Loic Le Meur and his wife, Geraldine. The app was a huge hit at the conference. Mobile Roadie also recently struck a deal with Random House to power iPhone apps for authors.
The future, as William Gibson once said, is already here. It is just unevenly distributed. You can find the future in new technologies and the people who wade into them early on—people like Nick Bilton, the chief blogger for the New York Times. (His official title is lead technology writer because the New York Times doesn’t like to admit it employs bloggers, I guess). Bilton, who previously worked in the R&D department of the New York Times, has a book coming out titled, appropriately enough, I Live In The Future & Here Is How It Works.
Apparently, that future does not include Apple’s iBooks, the digital books Apple sells on the iPad. The book will be available in September in print, digital editions for the Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s eBooks, but not for the iBook. Bilton’s publisher, as a division of Random House, does not make its titles available in Apple’s iBook store. But no matter. There will be an accompanying iPad app, iPhone app, and mobile website.
I caught up with Bilton a couple weeks ago, and he showed me a preview of the mobile website, which he explains in the video above. Each chapter has a 2-D barcode that can be scanned with a camera phone to bring up a corresponding Webpage with all of the links referenced in that chapter, videos, and the ability to comment. In that way, each chapter will become like a blog post with reader comments and discussion. I am not sure you can do any of that stuff with an iBook anyway. In the future, everything is an app.
Part of the book tries to answer the question of what effect the Internet is having on our brains. Unlike another author named Nick (Carr), Bilton does not think the Internet is a making us stupid. I concur (you can watch Carr interviewed on TechCrunchTV by Andrew Keen). When Bilton looks at the brain research, he finds evidence that people can process information just fine when skipping from text to video to links, as long as all the different bits are related.
The company had introduced extensions support in Safari 5 last June, giving developers the opportunity to start creating browser add-ons using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript standards.
Perhaps surprisingly, two fierce Apple competitors were given the opportunity to tout their extensions first and foremost, namely Amazon.com with their Wish List extension and Microsoft with their Bing Extension for Safari. Also featured in the press release: MLB.com, The New York Times and Twitter (eBay also gets featured on the Gallery site).
The new Safari Extensions Gallery is accessible straight from the browser menu or at extensions.apple.com. Users can download and install extensions from the gallery with a single click, and there’s no need to restart the browser (much like Google Chrome, and unlike Firefox).
I did a quick count and came out at above one hundred extensions already.
Add-ons can be automatically updated and are managed within Safari. Users can enable or disable individual extensions, or turn off all extensions with one click.
Every Safari Extension comes signed with a digital certificate from Apple to “prevent tampering” and to verify that updates to the extension are from the original developer. Safari Extensions are also sandboxed, which prevents them from accessing information on a user’s system or communicate with websites aside from those specified by the developer.
As Apple had made clear earlier, Safari Extensions run solely in the browser.
For example, with this new Olark tool, dubbed Shopping Cart Saver, a site owner can get an IM every time someone hits the site. And you can see the referrer indicating how they got there. While they’re there, you can see what pages they’re visiting and most importantly, what items they’re putting in their shopping cart. If a user has a question, this same IM window serves as your way to interact with them.
You could get some of this information before with Olark, but now the service is designed to ping you depending on how you set it up. For example, if the value of the items in a user’s cart goes over a certain number, you can get an IM letting you know that.
Most importantly, this gives owners a way to stop what Olark calls “shopping cart abandonment” — yes, users putting things in their cart and then leaving. Now, you can see exactly what’s in their cart and ask if they need any help to make sure they completely the purchase.
Sure, that may sound a little creepy — kind of like a shop owner who follows a customer around the store to make sure they buy something — but it’s also extremely useful. And this type of tracking is actually not any different than the data most sites can already see — it’s just that with this IM integration, you get to see it in real time. Well, and annoy people.
Olark co-founder Ben Congleton is clear with who they’re targeting with this product: small to medium size business owners. Obviously, if you installed this on Amazon.com, your computer might explode with IMs.
Olark has partnered with the online store creation tool Shopify to offer this product with the click of a button. This IM tool will work with all the major IM services, iChat, AIM, Gtalk, Adium, etc.
The business model for all of this is a freemium one. Basically, you can try out the features up until a certain point, then you have to buy one of their plans, which start at $15 a month and go all the way up to $149 a month. This model has helped Olark reach cash-flow positive status almost from the get go, Congleton says.
Beyond the Y Combinator seed round, Congleton says Olark raised a small angel round a few months back. Since they are cash-flow positive, he’s not too concerned just yet about a larger round, but envisions it happening soon.
A Kyle, Texas company that makes utility scale power storage systems, Xtreme Power, nabbed a $29.5 million, series C round of venture funding the company announced today. The investment was co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners, the venture capital arm of The Dow Chemical Company and clean tech investors SAIL Venture Partners.
Xtreme Power aims to alleviate problems associated with renewable energy sources with utility scale, dry cell batteries and other technology.
Providing reliable solar and wind power storage at a large scale means that when the sun’s not shining or the wind’s not blowing, power utilities can still meet peak energy demand with electricity generated by these non-hydrocarbon sources.
Xtreme Power’s fiberglass dry cell batteries are already working in systems from Antarctica to Hawaii. The company says they can work for 20 years, then get recycled. The batteries work even after they’ve been shot through with bullets, Xtreme Power has claimed.
As reported earlier by Industrial Fuels and Power: “Xtreme Power is retooling a closed Ford Motor factory…as part of a joint venture with Clairvoyant Energy with the aim of producing 2000 megawatts of batteries a year…”
An Xtreme Power spokesperson today confirmed that part of its newly attained funding will be dedicated to the development of that joint venture, and the site now known as the Ford Renewable Energy Park.
The park (in Wixom, Michigan) will be used by Clairvoyant Energy and Xtreme Power to continue research, development, manufacturing and demonstration of their products. But the 320-acre site will also be open to suppliers and other manufacturers in the energy industry. Clairvoyant Energy and Xtreme Power have another goal of creating a minimum of 4,000 energy jobs in the area.
Another piece of Xtreme Energy’s C-series funding will go to to bolster its wind power generating farm project in Hawaii. The New York Times today reported that Hawaii’s “state officials want 70 percent of energy needs to be met by renewable sources like the wind, sun or biomass by 2030.”
Jesus. Maybe literally.
You’ve normally got two choices in site heatmapping (figuring out where eyeballs land on your site), you can either buy costly specialized equipment ($40K) or pay a consultant to use their own equipment, which costs upwards of $5K. 
Tomorrow, Friday, is our fifth annual yearly blowout party at August Capital – the event I look forward to all year. Tickets to that event are long gone, but a handful are left for the all day conference we hold prior to the party, the 
People don’t send postcards anymore. Why bother when you can photo MMS a friend? Attempting to restore some of the social experience behind photography, 
Amazon’s Kindle has always been an interesting device to me. When I first heard about it in late 2007, I was sure I wouldn’t want one. It was awkward looking and at $399, way too expensive. But when the second iteration came in 2009 with a sleeker look, I decided to buy one to see what all the fuss was about. I quickly learned to love it.
Local deal goliath 
Last August, we first wrote about 
