Investors loved the wind energy sector, and they showed it by blowing the most investment dollars that way in 2010. They also were most busy with energy efficiency deals, the number of which surpassed other cleantech categories last year, according to a U.S. market report by Peachtree Capital Advisors.
Will noise from ocean installations influence migratory marine animals? How should ocean power proposals be evaluated? A round of grants totaling over $4.2 million announced on Tuesday will support a crop of research projects seeking answers to these questions and more over the next three years.
Renewables rule the day when it comes to investments in the energy and utilities industry. A Dow Jones VentureSource report shows the renewable energy sector accounted for $221 million of the $359 million raised by the energy and utilities industry during the third quarter of 2010.
If the third quarter represented anything, it was that M&A is alive and well, particularly in the Big Data space. If a company can store or analyze large amounts of data with any degree of innovation, a larger vendor is likely eyeing them for an acquisition.
BrightSource Energy and French power giant Alstom have formed a partnership aimed at building solar-thermal power plants in a ring around the Mediterranean. In terms of geography, if not scale, the plan echoes the scheme of the Desertec Initiative, the mega-giant of solar-thermal projects.
The UK government unveiled major spending cuts today, taking bites out of welfare benefits and other public programs while pledging to provide £2.2 billion pounds (about $3.5 billion USD) for renewable energy and carbon capture projects and preserving a feed-in tariff for solar power.
Want Facetime-like video chat on your iPhone 3GS or Android phone, but you don’t have a front-facing camera? Then iSeeU could be the right solution for you: It’s a simple mirror that you mount to your phone to film yourself with your rear-facing camera. Neat.
Aside from the news we covered here, today also brought some interesting nuggets about Verizon’s data center plans, Twitter’s new data format and yet another scale-out storage vendor getting acquired. Further, there’s a lot to be learned from Intel’s huge recession profits and Cloudscaling’s cloud-benchmarking proofpoints.
Hadoop World is taking place today, and, indicative of the general momentum around Hadoop, there is plenty of news coming from the event. As one should expect, Cloudera is driving the action, but it brings vendors and service providers of all stripes into the mix.
As we adopt more and more cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications for work, keeping track of those logins and passwords becomes a real pain. For companies, knowing which employees have access to which services and which content becomes a security, compliance and operations nightmare.
