At $50 to $100 per square foot, smart glass — glass that reacts to a brief charge to change color — is too big of a budget-buster for most home and business owners. For now, one of the most common uses of this technology called thermally insulating fenestration are used in auto-dimming mirrors in high-end […]
BrightFarms: Fresher, greener food is as close as your rooftop
BrightFarms CEO, Paul Lightfoot , has a new twist on the green roof theme. His startup plans to drastically reduce the time it takes to get vegetables and other produce from the farm to your grocers’ shelves — and improve the environment — by growing them on their rooftops. The eco-goodness doesn’t end at shorter […]
Pure Storage enters flash startup race
Hot on the heals of flash storage all-stars Fusion-io and Violion Memory, comes Pure Storage, a startup that’s making some bold claims about its tech, particularly surrounding costs. Pure Storage, which just emerged out of stealth, has attracted $55 million in funding, including $30 million in a just-announced series-C round of funding led by Redpoint […]
Kiva + Kickstarter = 33needs?
Kickstarter’s hot, but not the only game in town. Mashable published a great profile on 33needs, a crowdfunding startup that specializes on projects that promote social good. In fact, it’s an outright requirement. Unlike Kickstarter, where any entrepreneur with a vision can solicit funds, 33needs strictly caters to projects and enterprises with strong social missions. […]
Stat of the day: 15,000 gigawatt-hours per year
Can you guess what industry lays claim to that energy consumption stat? It’s the telecom industry, specifically the 16,000 legacy TDM (time-division multiplexing) phone switches in the U.S. and Canada, which account for 15 terawatts of juice yearly or “roughly 0.4% of all electricity used in those two countries,” according to of Access Venture Partners’ […]
GE: “Everyone is talking about the Volt”
A fair assessment, judging by the press its getting by winning The North American Car of the Year title. And if you’re in any way invested in the EV ecosystem, there’s reason to be happy. GE spokesman Robert Peterson thinks that the other General’s win (GM) is significant because it represents a not only a […]
Global Cleantech 100: Who made the cut?
Cleantech Group has just released its ranking of the top 100 cleantech firms for 2010. Among them are smart grid networking sweethearts Grid Net, Silver Spring Networks and eMeter, smart meter maker Landis+Gyr, LED pioneers Lemnis Lighting and Bridgelux and EV charging upstart Better Place. Though most of the firms on the list share only […]
A trip to Costco for Clarian plug-n-play solar systems?
Clarian is betting that most homeowners would warm to solar panels if it weren’t for the hefty price of installing them. Starfish, the firm’s micro-inverter tech is designed to help DIY types piece together the building blocks of a solar system at much lower costs, and for some, without the need to hire an electrician. […]
Enforcing Efficiency with Armies of Ubiquitous, Long-lived Sensors
Sensors are becoming critical to maximizing energy consumption in data centers, but IBM feels that it can spread the love to other areas. Computerworld’s Patrick Thibodeau writes: IBM isn’t building sensors, but it expects to see wide adoption of sensor…
Cheap OLEDs on the Horizon?
Image Credit: Technology Review Annoyed by the lack of visually stunning, energy efficient and razor thin OLED displays for your home theater? Me too. But that may soon change if the large format OLED printing technology from a Menlo Park,…
