bubble

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--It's fashionable these days to ponder whether there's an investment bubble in clean tech. But I believe this discussion obscures a bigger problem for the clean-tech crowd: not enough money.

A panel of venture capitalists at the Technology Review EmTech 2008 conference on Thursday took the bubble question head on. The response from investors tends to be nuanced: no, there isn't a bubble, but there are some silly company ideas getting funded.

Before I delve into the details of the bubble debate, let me say that focusing on venture capital deals is a myopic view of the market that could ultimately give the "clean-tech revolution" a bigger black eye than just a few failed start-ups.

Clean-, or green-tech, venture capitalists will tell you times have never been better if you judge by the number of business plan proposals crossing their desks and their ability to raise funds. Many an entrepreneur and investor sees energy and environment as a ripe area for technology innovation.

What worries me is whether the hundreds of newly formed energy tech companies will have enough capital to actually succeed--and change the world as they all set out to do.

Insiders have been fretting about the dreaded funding gap, or "Valley of Death," for years. It's the stage a company must cross to take its technology to commercial scale, such as building a manufacturing plant. In energy-related businesses, it usually take lots of money.

Now the financial crisis could actually make that gap tougher to bridge, given the difficulty in the public markets and the projected cost of an anticipated Wall Street bail-out plan.

Spending hundreds of millions of dollars for say, a solar manufacturing facility, is outside the range of most VC funds. To some extent, project finance can fill in the gap, said CMEA Ventures investor James Kim. … Read more

The crisis rocking the U.S. financial sector is rippling into the clean-energy business, bruising more mature industries like wind while leaving young start-ups relatively untouched so far.

The unraveling of debt-heavy investment banking firms--including the demise this week of Wall Street icons Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch--means that financing for large-scale renewable energy projects will get harder and more expensive, according to analysts.

"This isn't good news for anybody--it's going to have an impact economy-wide," said Ethan Zindler, head of north American research at New Energy Finance.

New Energy Finance's clean-energy stock index is … Read more

A would-be social network called Wallop has shut its doors, according to a message on the home page.

"Thank you for being part of the Wallop beta social-networking site," the message reads. "We really appreciate your feedback and support. The beta period will end on September 18th, 2008--after that date, you will no longer be able to access your account."

But Wallop wasn't just another tale of crushed Silicon Valley dreams. The site, which once aimed to compete with the likes of MySpace, had backing from none other than Microsoft.

Microsoft hadn't invested in … Read more

I may get fired for saying this, but I miss the convenience, focus, and robustness of desktop apps. Sometimes I just want the clarity of a dedicated app--or the isolation; all too often when I'm in a browser, a rogue JavaScript-heavy site will crash not just its own window but the 20 different tabs I have open at that moment.

Building a Site-Specific Browser (SSB) is possible with technologies like Prism from Mozilla, but that doesn't do much for non-developer users. If all you want is an icon to click on your desktop to open a specific URL, … Read more

Social.fm, a music site that was known as Mercora until last year, has officially folded.

"We regret to inform you and apologize for this inconvenience, but Social.fm will be shutting down the system on July 31st, 2008," a message on the site read.

The shutdown was first reported by GigaOM.

Despite having raised $5 million in venture funding from Norwest Venture Partners and signing a deal with Microsoft, Social.fm never found its niche. It originally started out as a peer-to-peer Web radio and music search site, and CEO Srivats Sampath once made the dubious claim … Read more

PodTech, a video podcast network that had taken over $7 million in venture funding, has been sold--and the price may have been a downright embarrassing $500,000.

The news was reported this week by Eric Eldon at VentureBeat, but Valleywag's Jackson West was floating the rumor with less detail last week. And Fake Steve Jobs jumped the gun a little bit by declaring the company dead last October.

The buyer is the Los Angeles-based ViewPartner, a "communications technology company" that seems to only produce Google results about the fact that it bought PodTech. And while no financial … Read more

If you've been a longtime Webware reader you might remember a service called Bubble Guru I checked out back in late 2007. It let you create small video pop-ups you could stick on your site to say hi to users, or simply to serve as a more attention-grabbing sticky note. Just launched Bubble Comment is a very similar service, and in fact it's from the same folks. The big difference is that it's completely free, albeit with some limitations.

One of those limitations, for example, is that you can't simply embed Bubble Comment bubbles on any … Read more

I'll say this upfront: I'm not a good predictor of economic events. That's why I'm a journalist and not on Wall Street. Well, that and I don't like getting up early.

That said, those leery about Web 2.0 looking a lot like Web 1.0 have even more to worry about. As noted earlier this morning, there were no VC-backed companies that went public last quarter, according to a new report from Dow Jones VentureSource.

A second report, looking at the media, information, and marketing services areas showed that, although the number of VC … Read more

NEW YORK--You can't avoid the bubble question when it comes to clean-tech investing. Get used to it: with a massive movement of capital into the sector projected in the future, people are bound to fret.

It's understandable. Billions of dollars worth of venture capital have gone into this sector, which wasn't on the radar screens of most Sand Hill Road venture capitalists just a few years ago.

A panel of private equity and venture capital investment pros addressed the bubble question at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum here last week. In general, the response was that there … Read more