As overall venture investing for cleantech declines, many VCs are expressing new excitement about software and mobile based solutions to resource conservation. The so called “cleanweb” beckons new investors.
San Francisco is truly the test bed for alternative tech-focused transportation. And on Tuesday, folks in the Bay Area will have access to yet another option: SideCar, a mobile app that will offer real time ride sharing.
This is a presentation I made for a decal class at UC Berkeley’s Haas school on Wednesday night. I learned of BrightSource pulling its IPO on my way out of the class, which made me feel like the guy in the first slide.
About two weeks ago, I sat down with Zygna founder and CEO Mark Pincus to discuss the importance of mobile gaming to his company and evolution from Mark the entrepreneur to Pincus the CEO of a company that is valued at billions by Wall Street.
Spring Ventures founder Sunil Paul braved the rain and the ever-present SoLoMo apps to give a rendition of his presentation on the Cleanweb, or using computing, mobile, and the web to address resource constraints like energy, food and water.
Spring Ventures founder Sunil Paul presented at South by Southwest on how the future of cleantech is actually the cleanweb. AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher has posted Paul’s slide deck online and it’s worth a look. Paul strongly believes that the future is about using the internet and mobile phones to increase resource efficiency, rather than just developing new technology to generate renewable energy. Classic examples of this are collaborative consumption leaders Airbnb and Zipcar, which rely on smartphones and the internet to help folks share homes and cars. It’s a very Silicon Valley startup approach to altering energy use, but you have to rely on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to do what they know—using low capital expense, web based tools to find solutions to problems.
This weekend in New York City, dozens of developers gathered for the second Cleanweb Hackathon, where programmers spent the weekend building mobile and web apps around new ways to manage energy. The event is the latest sign the ecosystem around clean technology is changing.
When people think about cleantech, they typically think about solar panels or converting biomass into fuel. But the momentum right now in cleantech is as much about connectivity and how it can drive energy efficiency as it is about advancing sources of renewable energy.
Peer to peer car sharing company Getaround closed $3.4 million in seed funding. It has a new app that allows users to locate a rental car and unlock it with their smartphone. This is a great example of how mobile can be leveraged in cleantech. Perhaps coincidentally, this round of funding coincided with Sunil Paul’s Cleanweb Hackathon, an event that occurred this past weekend in which developers competed to create an application that would reduce resource consumption. The winner was Team TACO (total cost of ownership), which produced a Google Chrome browser extension that shows users the total cost of owning a product as they shop for it online.
We’re getting excited about the first Cleanweb Hackathon, which kicks off this weekend in San Francisco! The “Cleanweb” is the trend of using information technology — software, the web, social media, mobile — to address resource constraint, from energy, to food, to water.
