[Editor's Note: We asked selected Xconomists a series of questions designed to zero in on the big issues of the year, including "What would you be willing to throw a punch over?"]

In both of my fields of distributed renewable energy infrastructure and environmental composites, I would throw a punch at corporations and/or public sector entities, agents, or elected officials who have an environmentally destructive agenda, yet make no real effort to alter that agenda—and to add insult to injury, lie about their activities in the interest of power or profits. “Greenwashing” is rampant in most industries and sectors and needs to be targeted. It is a particularly disingenuous form of false advertising.

Plundering our environment is a type of crime, and in most cases it is done, not out of ignorance, but out of a singular focus on profit above all else. This is unacceptable by any standard.

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Like a lot of big companies that offer contract R&D and specialized services, Columbus, OH-based Battelle has kept an office in San Diego for decades, mostly to manage technical programs and help clients like the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps on special projects.

That started to change, though, just over a year ago when Bhima Vijayendran arrived in San Diego from Malaysia. Vijayendran spent his previous three years leading research at a renewable energy laboratory in Kuala Lampur operated jointly by Battelle and Japan’s Mitsubishi Corp for PETRONAS, Malaysia’s government-owned oil and gas company.

“Until recently, this used to be more of a service office in San Diego,” says Vijayendran, a materials expert recognized for his work in polymers and surface chemistry. “Because of my background and my interests, I’m trying to bring a little bit more of a technology flavor” to Battelle’s San Diego operations.

Among other things, Vijayendran says he’s on the lookout for new business opportunities with local companies, as both an R&D partner and as a potential investor. Aside from managing seven federal research laboratories, Battelle has focused its business in three areas—national security, health and life sciences, and energy and cleantech. These focus areas coincide with some of San Diego’s most-prominent innovation clusters, so it would seem like a business match made in heaven.

Battelle is no ordinary business, however. It is the largest private nonprofit R&D organization in the world, known officially as the Battelle Memorial Institute, doing $6.5 billion in contract research with a global workforce of more than 22,000 employees. When Battelle licenses its technology, sells its stake in a startup, or acquires a new laboratory management contract, Vijayendran says the company donates 25 percent of the proceeds to charitable causes. Past inventions include xerography copier technology (which Battelle sold to Xerox), the scannable universal product code, the compact disc, and fiber optics technologies now owned by JDS Uniphase.

“We strongly believe that we’ve got to do creative work,” Vijayendran says. “We’ve got to make discoveries and inventions, but more importantly, these things have got to … Next Page »

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In the 1880s, Thomas Edison was locked in a battle with the legendary inventor Nikola Tesla and the entrepreneur George Westinghouse.

Edison argued that alternating current was “impractical” and highly dangerous. He supported the demonstration of electrocution of numerous animals to show the press and the public the danger of alternating current. He even went so far as to commission the development of the electric chair as part of the campaign. Alternating current was also dangerous economically to Edison and his new company, General Electric, as they were set up to exploit direct current and they lost one of their core advantages if the world went to alternating current. It was the classic innovator’s dilemma.

Well, after a fact-based analysis, alternating current was chosen to be piloted for Niagara Falls in the 1890s, and it clearly worked and all the hysteria was swept away. History has shown it to be clearly superior to direct current for most applications. Later in life, Edison came to regret that he had made this clearly off-base calculation, as well as his tactics.

Fast forward to today. Last week on the front page of The New York Times an article titled “Gas Wells Recycle Water, but Toxic Risks Persist” (the title is different in the online version) was yet another example of the publicity campaign to warn people about the dangers of natural gas production if we are not careful. Is this a balanced fact-based dialogue on how to address the problems of a probable energy source that can so dramatically help our country on each of the three fundamental criteria that we should be making energy decisions today—economic security, environmental, and economic? Or rather are we falling into the same mistake that happened in the 1880s with alternating vs. direct current?

Much like the safety considerations of alternating current which were real and needed to be addressed, the concerns with water are legitimate and must be addressed. It is essential to our country that these issues are discussed in a rational manner to avoid a situation where FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) rules as opposed to a constructive, fact-based dialogue.

From what I understand speaking with people who are much more expert than I in this, the challenges for dealing with water and natural gas fall into three categories:

1. Misperception: The fact that people continue to think that natural gas drilling affects the aquifer, is a misperception. Once the facts are understood, this is not a serious consideration.

2. Process: The purification and disposal of water from the fracking (hydraulic fracturing) process—which is where the real issues are—relate to whether the companies and governments are … Next Page »

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What does it mean for a product to be environmentally friendly? How about sustainable? Or even biodegradable? These words may appeal to a rapidly growing body of environmentally conscious customers, not to mention the major corporations and startups who appeal to them by touting their own “greenness”—but unless they convey a clear meaning and can be substantiated, green advertising may land companies in a lot of hot water.

More than 95 percent of green products are guilty of greenwashing—meaning they contain false or misleading environmental claims—according to a recent study conducted by environmental marketing company TerraChoice. To address this pervasive problem, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (the FTC) recently released proposed revisions to its Environmental Marketing Guides. Once finalized (probably in early 2011) the FTC guidance will establish significant new rules of the road for companies that advertise the environmental attributes of their products, services, or business practices. It will address everything from general environmental claims to certifications and seals of approval to claims of recyclability and compostability to renewable energy use and carbon offset claims. Companies currently making any environmental marketing claims to consumers, whether through traditional advertising, websites, or social media, need to pay careful attention to the FTC’s existing and forthcoming guidance if they wish to avoid the prospect of enforcement action or related consumer litigation.

Informally known as the “Green Guides,” the FTC’s Environmental Marketing Guides provide guidance on how Section 5 of the FTC Act and similar state laws—all of which prohibit deceptive or misleading marketing acts or practices—are likely to be enforced with respect to environmental advertising claims. Noncompliance with the Green Guides has also been used as the basis of consumer class actions and claims initiated by competitors under the federal Lanham Act. Additionally, the National Advertising Division of the Better Business Bureau (the NAD), a self-regulatory organization that resolves disputes between competitors and has the authority to initiate its own challenges, operates an active enforcement program in the area of green advertising. Like the FTC and state regulators, the NAD looks to the Green Guides when evaluating green advertising claims.

The FTC first issued the Green Guides in 1992 and revised them in 1996 and 1998, but during the last 10 years the FTC has brought few enforcement actions. That pattern may be shifting. Since President Obama took office in 2008, the FTC has used the Green Guides in seven lawsuits to enforce laws against unfair and deceptive advertising with regards to environmental marketing claims. This reflects a significantly greater enforcement rate when compared to prior administrations. If the recent proposed Green Guide revisions become final, more vigilant enforcement is likely to continue.

The Green Guides are a major step in the right direction. Both businesses and consumers benefit from clear advertising rules that create market transparency. Customers should get what they pay for, especially when it comes at a cost premium, and should be empowered to send clear market signals about the types of products they want to buy. Equally important, companies that are true environmental leaders need a mechanism to communicate their efforts so they can distinguish themselves from competitors and reap rewards for their innovations. Hopefully the Green Guides will facilitate development of a clearer lexicon for communicating the ever-increasing methods that companies are using to “go green”…whatever that means.

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Yesterday we published Part 1 of a Q&A with Danny Kennedy, the former Greenpeace activist and administrator who founded Oakland, CA-based Sungevity in 2007. The company’s mission is to make it easier and more affordable for homeowners to reduce their monthly utility bills by installing rooftop photovoltaic panels. The main strategy: computerize as much of the solar installation process as possible. For example, Sungevity has developed Google Earth-like tools that allow it to generate accurate cost estimates without having to send technicians to customers’ homes. Homeowners can apply for low-cost leases online, and the company manages the local permitting and other red tape involved in solar installation behind the scenes.

Sungevity thinks of itself as the “Amazon of solar electricity,” Kennedy says. By that he means the company has designed its systems to accommodate millions of customers while keeping the company’s own overhead low and profits high.

The focus on profits may be new for Kennedy, the former Greenpeace activist, who once led a campaign that helped to bring key solar installation rebates to the state of California. But to him, it’s all just another form of social entrepreneurship. While he’s working hard to make the 90-employee company succeed, he says his bigger goal is to help more homeowners bypass the fossil-fuel-powered electrical grid, make a real dent in carbon emissions, and blunt the impact of global climate change.

“Sometime in the next century or two we will make [the] transition from this dumb experiment from digging up sunlight and burning it to using fresh sunlight,” Kennedy says. “I am trying to usher in that transition faster than the current economy would have it happen.”

In the second part of our conversation, transcribed below, Kennedy and I talked about his history at Greenpeace, his transition to the startup world, how Sungevity stands apart from its competitors, and (for a bit of dessert) what he thinks about Bill McKibben’s latest book Earrth and President Obama’s record so far on energy.

Xconomy: What motivated you to leave Greenpeace and become an energy entrepreneur?

Danny Kennedy: I have been passionate about global warming and climate change for 20 years or more. I felt like we had turned the corner in 2005, where we had finally convinced the majority that there was a problem, and then there was Gore’s Nobel Prize and all these other things. Suddenly we were no longer arguing that there was a problem, but what are the solutions. In my theory of social change, it is actually incumbent on social movements to start demonstrating that there are solutions. Groups like Greenpeace are great at knowing what they are against, but not as good at knowing what they are for.

I had done a bunch of renewable energy campaigning, for Gray Davis’s Renewable Power Authority, and solar bonds in San Francisco, and other things in Europe and Australia and China. But I wanted to get more involved and roll up my sleeves and build a business that was leading by example. Deeds, not words. Then I partnered with these two great entrepreneurs, Andrew Birch [Sungevity's CEO] and Alec Guettel [senior vice president of corporate development]. Andrew is a serial entrepreneur and Alec was an old friend from 20 years ago when he was a student activist.

In 2006 and 2007, as we were coalescing around the plan, our common sense was that the industry was too fixated on the hardware. There were a bunch of geeks engrossed in their gadgets, but the gadgets were commoditizing before the market had matured. The customer is what matters. So we decided to build a business not on the hardware side but downstream, focusing on … Next Page »

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If we’re not careful…China’s going to eat our lunch in cleantech.

This was the overwhelming feeling I was left mulling over during my return flight from China last week. I had a great trip, visiting Beijing, Tianjin, Suzhou, and Shanghai over five days as I looked at some new investment opportunities. It was a lot of fun—and I was really impressed by the alignment of government policy and startup-driven innovation that have China poised to lead the world in a number of important cleantech markets.

At this point a Tom Friedman-esque rant on U.S. ineptitude comes naturally—but in this blog post I will instead focus on what China is doing really well right now:

Investment in infrastructure. Many of the big cleantech markets of the future—smart grid, vehicle electrification, distributed renewable generation—require big-time infrastructure investment, and the pace of investment in China right now is astounding. Whether it’s the “mag-lev” train to Pudong airport, the state-of-the-art regional technology centers, the Olympic Stadiums (Bird’s Nest, Water Cube), or just simply the hundreds of cranes and bulldozers you see during the course of a morning commute, the government’s capacity to invest in critical infrastructure is mind-boggling. In a world where the developed western world is debt-laden, this is a major advantage, and China’s government has proven its ability to swiftly make bold investment decisions.

Government’s strategic focus and resolve. China is determined to become the world’s leader in energy and clean technology. And unlike a western democracy, when China President Hu Jintao makes up his mind, action follows quickly. I was struck by examples of this routinely on my trip, but two examples really hit home for me:

• Vehicle electrification: China has announced its 20-city electric bus program, whereby 20 leading cities will have 1,000 EV buses on the road by 2012. It turns out this is a very shrewd initiative. The key to the EV market is gaining real-world experience—ie miles logged—with vehicles on the road. Buses average 16 hrs/day and maybe 100 miles/day, versus 20-40 miles/day for a car—and with a bus it is easy to collect the actual drive-cycle data from a single owner/transit authority. Therefore, going “buses first” makes a lot of sense. And it’s not like the China bus market is small: by 2012, buses sold in China could exceed 200-300 MWH of aggregate battery capacity, which is roughly the equivalent of the aggregate battery capacity of Toyota Priuses sold in the U.S. in 2009.

• Carbon trading: Though cap-and-trade legislation passed the U.S. House of Representatives in June 2009, and the Obama administration supports the initiative, just this week the U.S. Senate gave up climate legislation in favor of a narrower energy bill. Meanwhile, China moved swiftly into action following the talks at Copenhagen, and on Friday morning I read the announcement of China’s rollout of a cap-and-trade system. What is amazing is that China took this step even though, as a developing country, China will not be subject to the same stringent carbon emissions caps as developed countries, even if/when an agreement is finally reached at a successor event to the failed Copenhagen summit last December. China’s utilities and heavy industry will be poised to succeed in what will inevitably become a carbon-constrained world in the future.

Culture of entrepreneurship. I had expected to find a layer of bureaucracy and red tape in the way of entrepreneurs in China, whereby startups wait for earmarks and other subsidies to determine a market’s winners and losers. I found just the opposite. I found myself feeling very comfortable in meetings with Chinese entrepreneurs and industry executives, as the ways in which they communicated (even if at times in Mandarin!) were very familiar to me. People were direct and transparent, and there was an informality that any entrepreneur in the U.S. would instantly recognize as an important part of successful startup culture. One of my mentors in the venture business once told me, “I can’t list out all the necessary and sufficient attributes of a great entrepreneurs, but I know it when I see it.” I agree that great entrepreneurs share a certain je ne sais quoi—and I saw more of it in China this week than in any of my trips to Japan or Western Europe.

All in all, it was a fun week in China and I was deeply impressed by the pace and breadth of innovation. There is no doubt that the U.S. remains in a class by itself in terms of fundamental research and “ideation,” but the winners in cleantech will ultimately be those that ride aggressively down the experience curve and deliver the best value over the long-term. The experience curve in cleantech is influenced by government policy in ways to which U.S. entrepreneurs are not accustomed, and this is where China is determined to lead.

[Editor's note: This article also appears, in slightly different form, on Jon Karlen's blog, Venturing Forth.]

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Corey Goodman, the prominent biotech entrepreneur, looked at the view from his home at Tomales Bay in Marin County, CA one day in the late ’90s, and was stunned by what he saw. Officials were taking water samples, looking for bacterial contamination that was making people sick. It was all a big mystery where it came from, and what to do.

“I remember thinking, here we are in the Bay Area, in the era of molecular biology and genomics technology, and we’re using technology to sample water that was about 100 years old, literally from the 19th century,” Goodman says. “You could watch public policy being made, and they were doing it blind. I figured there has to be a better way.”

It took a long time to find, but Goodman is betting he’s found the answer now in a startup called PhyloTech. This is Goodman’s first foray into environmental health, after a long and decorated career in academia, as the co-founder of such medical biotech companies as Exelixis (NASDAQ: EXEL), and Renovis, and as president of Pfizer’s Biotherapeutics and Bioinnovation Center. Now he’s the chairman of PhyloTech, and one of the angel investors who have pumped in $1.2 million in seed financing, along with Seraph Capital and Wavepoint Ventures.

The new company is led by Thane Kreiner, a former senior vice president at Affymetrix and a Goodman protégé. The science comes from the lab of Gary Andersen at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley, CA. The vision is to perform the first-ever comprehensive, and highly selective analysis of all 55,000 known forms of bacteria in nature, what’s known as the “microbiome.” It’s possible to hunt for certain bacteria based on their genomic signature with next-generation sequencers or RT-PCR machines, but it costs too much, takes too long, and can only look for a limited number of varieties of bacteria in a sample. No technology until now has been designed to tackle something as broad as the full microbiome, Kreiner says.

Corey Goodman

PhyloTech’s method, licensed from Lawrence Berkeley, uses a gene chip it calls the “PhyloChip,” paired with bioinformatics software, that can spot specific signatures of all the bacteria in a sample of food or water, Kreiner says. By hiring a contract lab in North Carolina, and saving money on servers by renting space through a cloud computing vendor, PhyloTech has found a way to run these comprehensive tests for customers for less than $1,000 per sample and send back the results in a few weeks. This structure made it so the company could pursue a variety of hundred-million-dollar plus markets, like water testing, food safety, and even possibly diagnostic uses to look for clues into why people get allergic reactions, for example.

Based on PhyloTech’s lean cost structure, and the demand it sees from customers who have been coming to Andersen’s lab, Kreiner says it’s possible for the company to become profitable as soon as the end of 2011.

“The sky’s really the limit for our potential,” Kreiner says. “There could be multiple subsidiaries, spinoffs, and joint ventures over time.”

Besides Goodman and Kreiner, Janet Warrington is one of the co-founders and key architects who will help decide which opportunities to pursue first. She worked alongside Kreiner for 12 years at gene chipmaker Affymetrix (NASDAQ: AFFX), where she was the vice president of research and development.

The story about where this technology comes from is pretty interesting. Goodman, as mentioned above, was flabbergasted that state and federal environmental officials … Next Page »

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All of the research in the world will be unable to mitigate the potentially devastating impact of climate change without a plan that brings measurements into a coordinated operational system. That system must enable accurate change forecasts, must monitor compliance with emission restrictions, and must verify that emission restrictions fulfill their purpose.

While the Unites States and other nations have taken initial steps towards taking Global Climate Monitoring (GCM) into the operational realm, much additional progress is needed to avoid the economic and social disruption that climate change could cause.

Potential effects include sea rise and more severe storms that would impact populated coastal areas and island nations, drought in areas that supply much of the Earth’s food, greater rainfall in flood-sensitive areas, as well as a spread in the habitat range of disease-carrying insects. More storm damages, increased cost of food, and mass, climate-induced population migrations might be some of the consequences.

Much scientific research is being done to better understand the following important effects: increases in the atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases; changes in sea temperature and acidity conditions; shifts in land hydrology and biota conditions; rates of loss of global ice mass. Space, air, sea, and land-based observational assets are applied to collect climate data to support the research. In parallel there are numerous efforts to development sophisticated climate models. The current goal is to provide a basis for better understanding climate change and to determine to what degree climate change is driven by human activity rather than natural cyclical phenomena.

Most of the climate change research efforts to date have been pursued as a scientific enterprise. Specific issues or paths of inquiry are identified by researchers, and resources to sponsor applicable investigations and sensor platforms are competed. The result is many one-of-a-kind studies, each of finite duration that each help to address scientific questions along a specific paths of inquiry. Furthermore, the collected data is often not made widely available, and is stored in a variety of formats that are not mutually compatible.

The challenge now is not just to understand the causes of climate change, but to track its primary drivers to enable prediction, adaptation, and possibly mitigation. This will require continuous measurement, over many decades, of a variety of specific parameters. It will require sharing and cross-comparison of resulting large databases to account for the integrated meaning of all the … Next Page »

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Developing the economy of Detroit and surrounding areas is going to take some significant time. Thus, some entrepreneurs and innovators need to take the long view by engaging with the research universities, institutions and medical centers to develop people and new innovations for the future.

This would include working with leaders of these institutions to encourage public, local, state, and federal resources. It would also involve including promising leaders from these organizations in new startups and established businesses.

Since many of the major challenges of the future such as sustainable energy, food, environment, and health care at a sustainable cost are related to life sciences, this field of science should not be overlooked for investment and development. The convergence of life sciences with engineering, physical sciences, and IT is an emerging opportunity that will help generate many exciting future jobs.

[Editor's note: To help launch Xconomy Detroit, we've queried our network of Xconomists and other innovation leaders around the country for their list of the most important things that entrepreneurs and innovators in Michigan can do to reinvigorate their regional economy.]

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John Gilleland’s first day on the job was a little different from most people’s. The nuclear physicist showed up at Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, WA, and sat down at the conference table with his new boss, CEO Nathan Myhrvold, and another, shall we say prominent, techie.

“The guy on my left looked familiar,” Gilleland says. “It was Bill Gates.”

Gilleland had been on the job for all of three minutes when Myhrvold said jokingly, “John, you’re late on your deliverables.”

That was back in December 2006. Gilleland is now CEO of TerraPower, the spinoff from Intellectual Ventures that is focused on creating a fundamentally new kind of nuclear reactor. It’s the invention firm’s biggest research project to date, spinning out as a separate entity in the fall of 2008 with 30-some staff and untold amounts of funding from Gates and other investors. It is a project that Intellectual Ventures likes to cite as a potentially transformative, homegrown invention.

The basic idea is to create a reactor that needs only a small amount of enriched uranium to get started, and then uses depleted uranium (spent fuel) or natural, unenriched uranium to produce the nuclear-fission reactions necessary to generate power for 60 years or more without refueling. The design is called a traveling wave reactor, and the idea dates back to the early 1990s. If it works, the key benefits would be cheaper power, much more plentiful fuel, more efficient nuclear waste disposal, and less risk of nuclear proliferation.

Gates has been gushing about the project as of late. He mentioned TerraPower prominently in his talk at the TED conference in California last month, calling out the proposed reactor design as a possible “miracle” innovation in the effort to provide clean energy to more of the world’s population without increasing carbon emissions in the atmosphere. (Nuclear power provides about 20 percent of the electricity in the U.S.)

Gilleland (see photo, left) has been given the keys to Gates and Myhrvold’s nuclear kingdom for good reason. Previously, he co-founded and led Archimedes Technology Group, which developed improved techniques for cleaning up nuclear weapons waste, among other things. Before that, he was chief scientist and vice president of energy programs at Bechtel, and U.S. managing director of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program for fusion energy, and he spent 16 years at General Atomics doing fusion research.

The traveling wave reactor is certainly an intriguing idea, and one that could be a true breakthrough. But the question, skeptics say, is whether it can be made to really work—and how long that will take. The idea is that the reactor makes its own fuel and uses it as it goes along: the neutrons emitted by a small amount of enriched uranium convert depleted uranium into plutonium, which splits to produce energy and also emits more neutrons that continue to “breed” new fuel. There is no precedent for TerraPower’s particular design, and the project faces some major challenges—technical, business, and regulatory. So far the physics has only been tested in computer simulations, albeit using the most advanced supercomputers available. (It’s worth mentioning that only someone like Gates could afford to fund this and risk having it not work—which is exactly why Myhrvold sees the need for an “invention capital” industry.)

On the plus side, the environment for nuclear power development is more promising … Next Page »

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These days, it seems there’s nothing that can’t be accomplished by the use of online social communities. Even lowering energy consumption.

That’s the approach taken by GroundedPower, a Gloucester, MA-based startup that produces a system that monitors consumers’ real-time energy consumption and spurs them with goal-setting and online community engagement to lower that consumption over time.

The company formed in mid 2008 from the union of a psychologist and educational software developer (CEO Paul Cole), a utility company veteran (president Carl Gustin), and a software engineer who previously helped found an online behavior change program to help smokers quit (VP of engineering Michael Bukhin).

Monitoring consumer energy usage for information purposes isn’t new. Existing smart grid technology includes intelligent monitoring systems that track the electricity coming from homes. But the point of GroundedPower’s Interactive Customer Engagement System (iCES) isn’t just to tell consumers where and how much energy they’re consuming, but to help them change their behavior in practical ways. The company uses the psychology background its founder Cole to incite consumers to lower energy consumption based on what really makes people tick

“It became clear that information by itself without helping people to think on what to do about it wasn’t going to help,” Cole says he, and the other founders, discovered when they initially started developing their product. “That brought us to an integrated system where there’s a self-audit capability and social feedback.”

iCES starts with a monitor on home energy meters, which sends information to a wireless gateway device in the home. The gateway then transmits that information (via Ethernet) to GroundedPower’s online dashboard, which users can access by logging onto the company’s Web portal. Once logged into the system, users can view their energy consumption, set goals, and create profiles to compare their households to others in the iCES user community.

“Our whole premise is that information alone will not create a persistent behavior change,” says David Rosi, the company’s senior VP of marketing, sales, and business development.

The energy monitoring system then allows users to set goals for their household energy consumption based on different sets of motivation, such as money, the environment, competition, learning, and encouragement. For those who recognize their main motivation as the dollar, their iCES interface reports their energy consumption and savings to them in terms of monetary value.

GroundedPower’s system also allows users to track their energy usage based on carbon output or kilowatt hours, to appeal to the environmentally minded. For the competitive types, users can … Next Page »

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To Voyager Capital managing director Daniel Ahn, “cleantech” is just a buzzword. “Clean IT” is much more precise—and, to the point, it’s something a hardcore techie venture capitalist can get his hands around.

Last week, I spoke with Ahn by phone about Voyager’s recent investment in Coulomb Technologies, a Campbell, CA-based startup focused on electric vehicle infrastructure (networked smart chargers). The deal was a little different from what the Seattle-based VC firm is best known for investing in—digital media, software, and wireless—so I wanted to know if it’s a strategic shift, and whether this means we should expect more action at the intersection of energy and software. I particularly wanted to hear Ahn’s thoughts, since he is one of the Silicon Valley-based partners with Voyager who I don’t see as often as the firm’s local partners.

“It’s a very conscious focus rather than a huge shift,” Ahn says. “This is a big opportunity,” for the “long term.” Voyager has made two previous investments in clean-IT, including Tropos Networks (green, cellular Wi-Fi) and Sensys Networks (vehicle traffic detection), both based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Coulomb builds on Voyager’s favored theme of using smart networks to increase efficiencies—this time in the burgeoning electric vehicle market.

The Coulomb investment came about in part because of Jim Billmaier, the CEO of Seattle-based digital music firm Melodeo, which is also in Voyager’s portfolio. Billmaier is a founding investor in Charge Northwest, a five-person startup based in Woodinville, WA, which has a partnership with Coulomb to distribute its networked charging stations in Washington, British Columbia, Alaska, and a few other U.S. states. (At least one charging station has been deployed in Washington state so far.) Billmaier helped introduce Coulomb to the Voyager VCs, and once they understood the startup was solving a big software problem—not a capital-intensive energy problem—they were in.

Voyager is looking at the “whole energy distribution problem,” Ahn says. “How can IT networks be used to make this more efficient, and make the electric grid more efficient?” He emphasizes that a lot of cleantech-related companies are not right for VCs, because of the large amount of money needed to develop projects in solar or biofuels, for instance. (This sounds similar to what Rick LeFaivre from OVP Venture Partners told me almost a year ago about the sweet spot for cleantech venture investing.)

Ahn says he is looking at several other prospective clean-IT investments, in both Washington state and the Bay Area, which involve software and energy efficiency. “It really ties into our multi-location geography strategy,” he says. “It really helps to have a presence in all these different markets.”

Not surprisingly, Ahn sees a huge market for electric vehicles, especially in the Northwest. Besides the eco-friendly stereotype, fueled in part by things like having the highest penetration of Toyota Prius hybrids in the country, there are state mandates and incentives for electric vehicle use and infrastructure development in Washington. (Meanwhile, some other techies in the Seattle area, like Mark Aggar of Microsoft, have raised concerns about electric vehicles and the environment.)

Billmaier, who helps run the startup that sells electric charging stations locally, is naturally bullish on electric vehicles, too. “Washington and Oregon are going to set the model for how the nation does this,” he says. Billmaier also talks about his involvement with Charge Northwest with an eye toward the long-term sustainability of transportation and the environment. “We had the ‘a-ha,’” he says. “We’ve caused our children a lot of problems, so it’d be nice to solve a problem.”

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With all the froth around big tech company earnings, device announcements, and mobile app stores, it’s refreshing to see some long-term research in computing being funded. Google announced today it has awarded $1.35 million ($900,000 up front) to the University of Washington for work on mobile data collection for public health and environmental monitoring, and $100,000 to UC San Diego, for research on energy efficiency.

The awards are part of $5.7 million in the first Google Focused Awards Grants being given to a dozen projects led by 31 professors at 10 universities in the U.S. and U.K. The areas of research also include machine learning and privacy. The grants are for two to three years, and give the recipients “access to Google tools, technologies and expertise,” according to a blog post by Alfred Spector, Google’s vice president of research and special initiatives.

The UW grant is to computer science professor (and former Intel Research Seattle director) Gaetano Borriello, in collaboration with Deborah Estrin at UCLA. (Wade and I have previously reported on the work of these two professors in wireless sensor networks.) The new grant is for researching the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environmental monitoring applications.

“Here at Google Seattle, we deeply appreciate our strong relationship with the University of Washington,” said Brian Bershad, Google Seattle’s engineering director (and former UW computer science professor), in a statement. “With this focused research award, we see an example of how that collaboration and recognition extends broadly across Google.”

Meanwhile, the UCSD grant to computer scientists Tajana Simunic Rosing, Steven Swanson, and Amin Vahdat, is for studying energy efficiency in computing. Energy efficiency has been among the topics of interest at the UC San Diego campus of Calit2, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. Calit2 director Larry Smarr views global warming as a serious environmental threat, and has highlighted efforts at UCSD and elsewhere to make data centers and other IT operations more energy-efficient.

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It feels like the dawn of a new era. As of yesterday, Bill Gates is officially on Twitter, where he has already attracted more than 235,000 followers in the first day or so. Gates also just announced a new website, called the Gates Notes, where he will be sharing his thoughts (that extend greater than 140 characters) on what he’s working on and the societal issues he’s passionate about—global health, education, the environment, and so forth.

The Microsoft co-founder and chairman—also the co-chair and trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—has always communicated extensively through memos, speeches, and books. Now he will be using social media and the Web to reach an even bigger, more mainstream audience, and to impart his message on a wide range of global issues he’s dived into since leaving his full-time job at Microsoft in June 2008.

To me, this feels like a big deal—like social media has passed another threshold. Gates being on Twitter means even the world’s richest man cannot hide from this mode of interactive communication. The world’s most influential people can no longer operate solely behind the scenes. I don’t know about you, but I don’t necessarily want to know what Gates is thinking about on a daily basis. Part of what makes certain leaders special is that you don’t know what they’re working on all the time. In any case, let’s hope his Web writings truly reflect his personal views and analysis, and are not just the product of a finely honed advisory staff and PR team.

The Gates Notes site is currently divided into a number of nevertheless intriguing sections: “What I’m thinking about” (including ways to deal with carbon emissions through innovation in transportation and electricity); “What I’m learning” (including references to books by Vaclav Smil, a global energy and population expert); and “My travels” (including his impressions of health care in India).

Gates says the site is an extension of the annual letter he writes for the Gates Foundation—this year’s will be posted on Monday, Jan. 25. “I decided to write an Annual Letter because in 2008, Warren Buffett encouraged me to find a way to share my thinking more broadly about the foundation’s goals and to assess as frankly as possible our progress toward achieving these goals,” Gates writes on his site. “I wrote my first Annual Letter in 2009, and I have to admit I was surprised by the outpouring of interest after it was published.”

For a little more context, Gates’s introductory note on his new site reads, in full:

“Since leaving my fulltime job at Microsoft to dedicate more time to our foundation, a lot of people have asked me what I’m working on. It often feels like I’m back in school, as I spend a lot of my time learning about issues I’m passionate about.

“I’m fortunate because the people I’m working with and learning from are true experts in their fields. I take a lot of notes, and often share them and my own thoughts on the subject with others through e-mail, so I can learn from them and expand the conversation.

“I thought it would be interesting to share these conversations more widely with a website, in the hope of getting more people thinking and learning about the issues I think are interesting and important. So, welcome to the Gates Notes.”

And welcome to a brand-new era of transparency in thought leadership.

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Seattle knows green—green trees, green ideas, and green innovation. As businesses rush to become more environmentally friendly, organizations like New York and London-based 1E and Seattle-based Verdiem have emerged as leaders in green-IT management. They offer systems that allow companies to cut off power to their computers remotely, saving energy and IT costs, and make decreasing a company’s environmental footprint as painless as possible. But only Woodinville, WA-based Adaptiva has built a system that integrates directly with the biggest software company in the world: Microsoft.

Adaptiva’s centerpiece is a product called Companion, a software extension that allows companies to control power usage based on when an individual computer is being used. It is run directly through Microsoft’s existing System Center Configuration Manager, which is a software product for managing large groups of Windows-based computers.

“Because we plug deeply into Microsoft’s management infrastructure, we didn’t have to build a management framework into our product,” Adaptiva chief technology officer and co-founder Deepak Kumar said. That means the product is cheaper, and easier to maintain, because as long as the Microsoft System Center software is working, Adaptiva’s product will work.

Powering down a computer may not sound like the cure for climate change, but in a company with hundreds of thousands of desktops, it takes a huge slice out of the carbon footprint. The trick is how to manage the green master switch. “Turning off computers remotely is very easy. The challenge is to detect which computers are actually not doing anything useful and turn them off selectively,” Kumar said.

Many companies wait until after hours to perform their maintenance tasks, so as not to disrupt their employees. This creates a Catch-22 when machines have been powered down and are unable to be updated with the rest of the network—something Kumar sees as a fundamental flaw. “The goals of IT are somewhat contrary with green-IT,” he said. “The second missing piece is the ability to turn on computers when those maintenance tasks are required.”

Adaptiva’s software gives administrators the ability to set parameters for automatically powering up and down, as well as network-wide maintenance schedules, without interrupting anyone’s work and risking the loss of data. There is also an add-on, called Green Planet, which allows individual users to customize their computer to save energy around their personal schedule.

“Users see value in it because now when they come in, the machine is already powered up and they don’t have to wait. And when they go away, the machine turns off safely,” Kumar said. “If they [admins] want to deploy a patch to 1,000 machines, they go create a policy in System Center to do that. We’ll read it from there and we figure out which 1,000 machines are required at what time and we’ll turn on those machines automatically.”

Adaptiva’s plug-in abilities make the system cheaper than others, but also limits its … Next Page »

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In the past, Microsoft has had a reputation for being slow moving in the areas of green technology and energy-saving innovation. However, in the last two years, the corporation seems to have turned the tide, stepping up to the sustainability plate and implementing a number of company-wide green initiatives.

First, it hired Rob Bernard as chief environmental strategist, a position created specifically for him. It began integrating power management capabilities into its products—the latest release of Windows 7 and Microsoft Hohm include new energy tracking and management features. Partnerships were formed with the Clinton Foundation, the Carbon Disclosure Project, and the European Environmental Agency. And, most recently, Microsoft sent a 12-person delegation, led by Bernard, to the COP15 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Microsoft’s director of environmental sustainability, Francois Ajenstat, has been with the company for nine years, working in various groups including Office and SQL Server. He moved to sustainability, a personal passion of his, 18 months ago. His job includes everything from working with product teams to reduce the harmful environmental impact of their customers to talking with governments and NGOs around the world about climate change, and working on Microsoft’s own commitment to going green.

On the last day of the conference, Friday, I spoke with Ajenstat about how the company was received in Copenhagen and what its current environmental strategy entails.

“A lot of people join Microsoft to change the world,” he said. “This is clearly an opportunity where I could go in and have a significant impact on the world by also helping change the company.”

Here are a few edited highlights from our conversation:

Xconomy: Microsoft has recently put much more emphasis on sustainable technology. Why now?

Francois Ajenstat: The way that I describe how things were originally is we had a lot of what I call “well intentioned chaos”—a lot different people within the company doing great work, but not necessarily a line to a broader vision or broader strategy. Sustainability has moved to the forefront of everybody’s minds, both in terms of our customers asking Microsoft how we can help, government talking to Microsoft, our employees looking for what the company was doing, shareholders. It was almost more of a whole mountain of requests coming from all directions. What we wanted to do was have a thoughtful approach that made sense based on what society needs and also based on the real capabilities that Microsoft can bring to the table.

X: What are the key components of Microsoft’s environmental strategy?

FA: There are really three parts to the strategy. The first one is to use IT to improve energy efficiency. The second is to accelerate research breakthroughs. And the third is about responsible environmental leadership. A number of different studies have shown that the IT industry represents about 2 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions that are emitted. And you might say that 2 percent is … Next Page »

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Craig Mundie is a geek, and I mean that in the best possible way. Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, the 17-year veteran of Redmond, WA, still talks like an engineer, throwing out terms like “heterogeneous machine architectures,” “GUIs” (graphical user interfaces), and “clouds and clients” like there’s no tomorrow. It’s kind of refreshing, given that he is in charge of setting the long-term agenda for one of the most powerful companies on the planet.

Mundie is in the midst of a weeklong tour of some top universities around the country. He called me yesterday from Cambridge, MA, where he had just finished a presentation to Harvard University students, faculty, and guests. He visits the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (my alma mater) today, and comes to Kane Hall at the University of Washington tomorrow afternoon. It’s similar to the college tours Bill Gates used to do.

From what I can tell, the goal is to stir up interest in computer science, give audiences a glimpse of future computing systems as Microsoft sees them, and stimulate discussions about how these technologies can help solve some pressing global problems. (You can read more about Mundie’s tour and demos in this Seattle Times story.)

Besides hearing Mundie’s thoughts on computer science education and the future of computing, I wanted to drill down and ask him about the challenge of taking on Microsoft’s strategy development (after Gates stepped down last year) in the most difficult economic times in recent memory. I also wanted to ask him about the deeper culture of Microsoft, the renewed role of research in the company’s future, and the importance of nurturing relationships around the world—and his secret ally in that quest.

Here are some edited highlights from our conversation:

Xconomy: What are you trying to get across to university audiences on this tour?

Craig Mundie: In these presentations, I’m trying to get them to think not only about how computing evolves, but with that evolution, what kinds of problems will become approachable, and what are the new methods? Several things are evolving in parallel [and leading to more heterogeneous and complex machines]. That begets the requirement of how to do programming around parallel computing. With very high-scale computing facilities, the cloud and the client come together to form one system that people will program. They will use those things together with new display and sensing technologies.

Just as the GUI revolutionized computing, we could see a similar revolution with more natural interactions with machines, rather than just “type and point and click.” That will expand the number of people who can interact with computers. With the diversity, rooms can become computers [for instance]. You won’t think of them so much as a computer.

X: What are some of the global problems you think advanced computing will help solve?

CM: Beyond the computer science realm, I’ve talked about energy and the environment. I show one piece of research work we’re doing to compose computational models, a simplified climate model, at Princeton and Microsoft Research. It shows linkages between deforestation in the Amazon and atmospheric temperatures around the rest of the world. If you were a policy person, these kinds of things would give you tools to support your decision making.

In energy, we’re doing computer modeling and direct visualizations. I showed a model, loaned to us from TerraPower [the nuclear power firm spun off from Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures … Next Page »

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Seattle-based Zino Society has announced the winners of its 2009 Zino Zillionaire Investment Funds. Bellevue, WA-based Enroute Systems, a maker of analytics and transportation management software for parcel-shipping businesses, received $60,000. Arlington, WA-based MicroGreen Polymers, a company focused on making plastic products more environmentally sustainable, also took home $60,000. The companies presented to investors back on September 17.

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When California Gov. Gray Davis created the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology in 2000, it was part of a broad state initiative that spawned four new centers for science and innovation with a shared mission “to invent the future.” The specific mission for the institute known as Calit2 (Cal IT²), which is based at UC San Diego and UC Irvine, was to “radically expand the capacities of communications and information infrastructures.”

In the nine years that he has served as Calit2’s director, Larry Smarr has done all that and more. He describes the institute as a “collaboration framework” that enables researchers throughout the University of California to take a multi-disciplinary and systems-based approach to complex problems. As a result, Smarr says Calit2 has engaged hundreds of UC researchers, formed affiliations with over 300 federal agencies, and worked with more than 200 industry partners. “I have to say we’re pleased with the progress we’ve made,” he says. (Smarr talks about the origins of the Internet in Part 1 of my story here.)

But Smarr also is looking at the path forward. He tells me he’s spent the past six months “on a vision quest” to identify the large societal challenges that he anticipates the next decade will bring. And if there is a thread that runs through his vision, it is to harness the power of Calit2’s expanding resources—“to build across the successes that we’ve had”—to tackle four over-arching problems of the next decade. These are Smarr’s big ideas for what he calls the digital transformation of healthcare, energy, the environment, and of our culture itself:

—Healthcare. Smarr sees healthcare moving increasingly to “a prevention and wellness model” that relies on innovations in the emerging field of “wireless health” technologies and the digital transformation of medical care. In our conversation, Smarr compares the way it will work to an automobile maintenance schedule:

“I just bought a new car, a hybrid,” Smarr says. “It has 30 computers in it. It probably has another 60 or 70 sensors, actuators, and memory chips. So my car will easily run … Next Page »

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One of MIT’s leading business professors, Richard Locke, came to Seattle yesterday to talk about the “S” word. Yes, we’ve been hearing a lot about sustainability lately, in the context of technology and business. Big companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Boeing are talking seriously about the issue. Smaller Seattle-area companies like Verdiem, Powerit Solutions, and R.W. Beck have been making progress in important areas like energy efficiency and water management. To Locke, and many others, sustainability is much more than a corporate buzzword.

Locke is deputy dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a professor of entrepreneurship and political science at MIT, based in Cambridge, MA. His research specialties include labor standards and practices, global entrepreneurship, and sustainable businesses. I sat down with him at the Westin Hotel downtown to get his perspective on Northwest companies’ green initiatives, and their possible partnerships with MIT. Locke was coming from meetings with Intel in the Portland area the previous day (the Santa Clara, CA-based chipmaker has manufacturing and development facilities in Hillsboro, OR). His other meetings in Seattle included a stop at Amazon to speak to Sloan School alums about the changing face of MBA education, and about sustainability in the corporate realm.

Locke defines sustainability broadly as “using resources today in a way that permits future generations to use them as well.” By this he means not just natural resources—energy, materials, water—but also social resources like people, jobs, and standards. “Let’s redefine sustainability in such a way that we can show the opportunities available, not just the constraints,” he says. “Once you broaden the definition, you expand the scope for individuals and organizations to try to do something about it.” (As I understand it, this definition of sustainability could include managing employees so they don’t burn out, creating jobs that last, and establishing fair labor standards that endure.)

Take Intel, for instance. Locke says the company is pursuing a series of initiatives to reduce its carbon footprint, improve its supply chain efficiency, and reshape the way it uses energy, water, and people. “Are there ways they can make, for example, new chips that might require less energy? They’re having a very interesting internal discussion about chip speed versus energy consumption. I find it fascinating that a large company in an extremely competitive sector, that still does manufacturing in … Next Page »

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