The latest from TechCrunch
- John Doerr On Bloom Energy Launch: "This Is Like The Google IPO"
- Spotify Competitor We7 Screws Up Its iPhone App Launch
- Hot And Bothered: Walmart Shutting Down Vudu's Adult Section
- 1/3 Of Americans Don't Use Fast Internet
- An Investment Bank That Cares? CODE Advisors Opens For Business
- The New Twones: Delicious Meets StumbleUpon For Online Music
| John Doerr On Bloom Energy Launch: "This Is Like The Google IPO" | Top |
| After eight years of operating in quasi-stealth, Bloom Energy came out with a bang today at an event in Silicon Valley attended by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Colin Powell, Larry Page, John Doerr, and executives from eBay, Walmart, Coca-Cola, and FedEx. All of the big-name companies, including Google, are beta customers of Bloom’s distributed energy fuel cell technology (which was the subject of a 60 Minutes profile on Sunday and various other stories since then). Doerr, the Kleiner Perkins VC who backed both Bloom and Google, said today: “This Is Like The Google IPO.” Except without the IPO part. Doerr was referring to the fact that, like Google, Bloom has kept its business close to its vest until it actually could show some progress in terms of customers and products. Five Bloom energy boxes about the size of a parking space each now provide 15 percent of the power at eBay’s campus. Walmart is testing the boxes in two locations where it is carrying 60 to 80 percent of the energy load of an entire store. Google co-founder Larry Page calls the technology a “very big deal” and looks forward to the day that it can expand the number of Bloom boxes Google uses to the point where it can power one of its data centers. Bloom founder and CEO KR Sridhar, who got his start designing technologies for NASA that would allow humans to live on Mars, explained how Bloom’s fuel cell technology works. It takes almost any fuel from ethanol to biomass and turns it into electricity. Fuel cells are nothing new, but Bloom has figured out a way to make them cheaply and efficiently. A Sridhar claims that a Bloom box, which he calls an energy server, is twice as efficient as the electricity grid. “For the same amount of electricity, you need half the fuel,” he says. “If you use a renewable fuel you are carbon neutral. Use all the electricity you want and don't feel guilty about polluting the environment.” Each fuel cell, which is made from sand essentially (zirconium oxide), is a square wafer about the size of a CD box. Each wafer can produce about 25 watts of energy, enough to power a lightbulb. Stack them together and you get a box that could power a house. Group them into larger units, and you get enough energy to power a building or an entire campus. He calls them energy servers because they are modular like servers in a data center. Need more energy? Add more boxes. They are like backyard generators. No electricity is lost through distribution, and they can convert a variety of fuels into electricity, allowing customers to use whatever is locally available or cheapest. There are no moving parts, vents, or discharge other than heat. Right now, only businesses and large facilities can afford these things. They cost about $750,000 for a 100 kilowatt system (Google is using a 400 kilowatt systems to power one building on its campus, and the Walmart stores are also using 400 kilowatt systems). Nevertheless, Bloom says the systems should pay for themselves within three to five years because of lower electricity costs. A typical electricity cost for commercial customers is 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour versus 13 cents for what they might pay a California utility. That 3 to 5 cents per kilowatt-hour in savings adds up if you are running a huge retail store or a data center. The costs should come down over time to the point where Bloom boxes really can be used in homes. One potentially disruptive feature of the technology is that it works both ways: fuel can produce electricity, but it can also go the other way so that electricity produces fuel. Sridhar foresees the killer app for his technology becoming practical in about a decade: a Bloom home energy server combined with solar panels or some other renewable energy. The electricity from the solar panels could produce fuel, which can be used to produce electricity to power the house or even to gas up your (modified) car. Dreams like those are the kind that fuel something else: big IPOs. When’s the real one, Doerr? CrunchBase Information Bloom Energy Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Spotify Competitor We7 Screws Up Its iPhone App Launch | Top |
| It’s probably tricky to time these things to perfection, since Apple pulls the strings. The UK Spotify competitor, We7 , has had its iPhone app approved and is now available to download from the iTunes App Store. The problem is that the associated premium music subscription service, needed to run the app, doesn’t seemed to have launched yet. Or at least that’s how it looks. Judging by the site’s subscription page and reviews published in the App Store, whilst you can download the app, since you can’t yet subscribe to the mobile version of We7’s music subscription service, it’s currently useless. | |
| Hot And Bothered: Walmart Shutting Down Vudu's Adult Section | Top |
| When it was announced that retailer Walmart would buy streaming movie startup Vudu a couple days ago, a number of sites wondered what it would mean for Vudu’s adult content. Here’s what it means: bye bye. An email is currently being sent out by Vudu letting its After Dark (the adult portion of its service run with adult publication AVN ) partners that the section will be discontinued in the “coming days.” Find the full email at the bottom of this post. Vudu has the distinction of being the only major streaming service with an adult section which includes hundreds of titles (including many in HD) from the leading porn studios. This section also allowed for “discreet billing” so movie titles wouldn’t appear on statements. Walmart, on the other hand, couldn’t be any more the opposite with regard to its adult content policy. As in, there is none allowed in its stores. Famously, in some cases it will also only agree to carry edited versions of explicit music albums. This move comes at a time when Apple is also removing what it considers to be explicit material from the App Store (though none of it was technically porn). Though there are now hints it may launch a new explicit area of the store at a later time. Below, find the email going out to Vudu partners. As you can see, it’s asking partners to voluntary terminate the agreement amicably, even though the existing terms aren’t up yet. We’ve reached out to Vudu and Walmart about the shutdown, but they have yet to get back to us. We’ll update when they do. Dear VUDU After Dark Partner, As you may have recently heard, VUDU was acquired by Wal-Mart. In conjunction with this acquisition we will be discontinuing the "After Dark" adult service over the coming days. Upon completion of the shutdown process, we will settle all accounts with you and ensure that you are paid the full amount you are owed under our existing agreement. Attached to this agreement, please find a voluntary termination notice to our existing distribution agreement. As there has been no breach of contract by either party, there are no grounds to terminate the agreement under its existing terms. However, given the discontinuation of After Dark, we believe it makes sense for both sides to voluntary terminate the agreement. The alternative is to allow the agreement to expire under the existing terms, but we believe this is cleaner for all parties. We ask that you complete, sign and return this termination notice at your earliest convenience. Please let me know if you have any questions. CrunchBase Information Walmart Vudu Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| 1/3 Of Americans Don't Use Fast Internet | Top |
| According to the FCC, about 93 million Americans don't use fast, broadband Internet, citing cost and complexity as a factor in their refusal to enter the 20th century. The study, below, found that 80 million adults and 13 million children either still use dial-up or don't use the Internet at all at home, suggesting that either the survey methodology might be flawed or we're in serious trouble. | |
| An Investment Bank That Cares? CODE Advisors Opens For Business | Top |
| Former CEO of CBS Interactive Quincy Smith has joined with CBS Interactive EVP Michael Marquez and music industry veteran dealmaker Fred Davis to launch CODE Advisors , a new Silicon Valley and New York based investment bank. As with all investment banks, CODE Advisors will look to advise companies on mergers and acquisitions and capital raising, for a fee. But the company also wants to be a long term partner for buyers and sellers, acting as a sort of outsourced business and corporate development group. This is something most banks promise, but few deliver on. Unless you’re a high velocity buyer like Google or Microsoft, in which case you get all the attention you want and more. And these guys are certainly positioned to do that. Smith, Marquez and Davis are among the most connected people in the media and technology worlds. Smith and Marquez spearheaded the growth of CBS Interactive and its acquisitions of CNET and Last.fm, both of which are seen as successful buys, and both have deep experience in those industries. Davis, a former music exec, is known for representing just about every online music venture over the last several years. When startups want to do business with labels and the other players in music, they go to Davis. These guys literally know everybody. And they are also opinionated on which exactly what the world will look like when the old media and new media worlds finally collide. I sat down with the three partners on Tuesday for what I expected to be a 5-minute interview on the launch of CODE Advisors. When we were done, we had well over thirty minutes of footage. The conversation was mostly hovering around the future of online video and online music. CODE Advisors already has several clients, including CBS, Comcast and Spotify (which was in the news yesterday ). We’ll have a full transcript of the video up later today, but the video is below. CrunchBase Information CODE Advisors Quincy Smith Michael Marquez Fred Davis Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| The New Twones: Delicious Meets StumbleUpon For Online Music | Top |
| Twones started life as a FriendFeed-type service that aggregated various music services into a single stream, which we dubbed a social music feed when we first caught wind of it. Problem was, the startup says, since users generally couldn’t play the music on their site and were constantly being directed to third-party websites and apps for streaming, people never really got that FriendFeed experience that would compel them to come back. The Dutch company figured they needed to do something else, and the result of their overhauled strategy will be going live in alpha mode this morning. The short version: it’s Delicious-type bookmarking meets StumbleUpon-type discovery for online music. Essentially, Twones will now focus on what it refers to as the “Music Bar”, a browser add-on / bookmarklet that lets users bookmark music that is being streamed on other websites or MP3 blogs and discover music others have bookmarked in a fun way. The Music Bar will debut as a Firefox extension, but Chrome and Internet Explorer versions are near completion, I’m told. When installed, you can use Twones to bookmark music on thousands of supported websites, manage your virtual collection in a sidebar that looks a lot like Delicious, and share music with others in Twones or on services like Twitter and Facebook. In addition, any music you stream can be scrobbled to Last.fm so you can keep track of it there. Finally, there’s an ‘Explore’ button that basically lets people jump to any random track that is in Twones’ database – no need to install the Music Bar even for that. This can be a great way to discover new music, but arguably there is a need for some kind of controller that lets you explore tracks within a certain genre, at least. The problem with Twones is that, since it revolves almost entirely around music that’s being shared online elsewhere, you’re never quite sure if the songs you’re so carefully bookmarking are going to be there tomorrow, because the source could be gone for whatever reason. The startup says it’s working on ways to downsize that issue. Twones aims to make money from advertising, affiliate revenues, maybe a premium version down the line, and/or as an analytics service for online music sharing (kind of what Bit.ly does for general links today). They haven’t really figured out which path to take right now, but the startup says the $500k seed funding it raised earlier is enough to buy them time to do so, as they are very ‘cost efficient’ in the sense that there’s no need to store a gigantic amount of music on their servers, seal license deals or run a complex content distribution network. All in all, I could see myself using Twones for sure, but it feels more like a feature than a solid business to me. We’ll see if the next iterations of the service will make me change my mind. CrunchBase Information Twones Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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