The latest from TechCrunch
- Puralytics CEO On Cleaning Water With Light, Winning The Cleantech Open
- Can Anything Stop The Facebook Juggernaut?
- Are You In A Foodpickle This Thanksgiving? Get Your Cooking Qs Answered In Realtime.
- Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques, Boldly Goes Where No Q&A Site Has Gone Before
| Puralytics CEO On Cleaning Water With Light, Winning The Cleantech Open | Top |
| The Cleantech Open — a prestigious annual competition for U.S. tech startups that protect, restore, and reduce the negative impact of humans on the environment— announced its 2010 winners this week. Puralytics, a clean water startup from Beaverton, Oregon, took first prize. The Puralytics team invented and sells a nanotechnology-based, photochemical water purification system that, in comparison to other available systems, can purify water more quickly, remove more impurities from it, and requires less electricity to do so. With 15 percent of the world’s total estimated 6.5 billion population lacking freshwater enough to live a healthy life today, companies with promising water technology are in demand, and could help abate a global water and humanitarian crisis . The executive director of the Cleantech Open Rex Northen said, “Puralytics stood out because they have developed something that will have a tremendous environmental and social impact. Their technology lets you use LED light or sunlight as a mechanism to clean water, and it lacks the toxic output many others have. The team was also very strong.” Puralytics’ chief executive and founder, Mark Owen, is a serial entrepreneur and inventor whose thirty-some successful patents (according to his own calculations) have generated over one billion dollars in revenue for companies he has worked for and founded. Owen spoke with TechCrunch about winning the Cleantech Open 2010 National Business Competition, and how his latest innovation cleans water with light. An edited transcript of the conversation follows below. TC: What environmental problem does your company solve? MO: Purifying water has been a dirty process using filters, membranes, cleaning chemicals and mercurcy lamps. The systems in use today waste most of the water they’re trying to purify, and require a lot of electricity. With reverse osmosis systems, for example, about 80% of the water that could be purified goes out into the sewer. We have a different way to purify drinking water or water for light-industrial and commercial use. Our system processes all the water, using half as much electricity, and doesn’t require you to produce anything toxic. It also removes things from the water that others cannot, like pesticides and pharmaceuticals. The EPA just released a list of 169 endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) that they will track from now on in domestic drinking water. These are things that even in small quantities can cause health problems for some people [and animals] including caffeine. Our system removes them from the water. TC: How does Puralytics’ technology work? MO: If I was explaining Puralytics to a classroom full of kids, I’d say, “There are little things in your water that may not be good for you. We use a special light to make those go away.” We use LEDs to illuminate a nanotechnology coating we’ve developed, that’s on a mesh where the water flows through a main system. This technology is not filtering at all. What it is doing instead, is creating a chemical reaction that causes molecules to break apart and break down in the water. The right wavelengths of light and this nanotechnology coating cause five photochemical processes that work to pull contaminants out of the water onto the surface of the mesh, then dump the energy of what's been absorbed into the molecules to break them apart. Most organic molecules are lots of carbons, hydrogens, and oxygen and a few other things. Essentially we break a long molecule apart, all the way down, and reform it as CO2 and water and minerals. We actively destroy contaminants in the water, but leave the minerals that are good for you in it. Other treatments take out minerals that are good for you. But ours does not. TC: Can you see the process? MO: It isn’t really visible. You see a kind of purplish light. If you could, you might see something that looks like water turning into steam and dissipating in the air. Something is changing form in there. TC: Where did you get the idea for this? MO: My previous company was Phoseon Technology. I’m still a director. We actually make light emitting diode (LED) drying equipment that can dry inks, coatings and adhesives very quickly using little energy. If you have any Ikea furniture, they spray on the coatings to make it look good, and make it durable, and Phoseon lamps dry it in about three seconds. I got to thinking about what else I could do with LEDs. The original idea was to replace mercury lamps that are used to kill germs in hospitals and in water with an LED array. It didn’t turn out to be efficient. There are other good solutions to killing germs, I learned. But there weren’t efficient solutions to take out chemicals and heavy metals and other things of concern from water. Another thing that inspired me was a building I saw in Japan, within Tokyo’s Expo City. It had been sprayed with a coating that kept it from getting dirty. Sun activates the coating to break up dirt and chemicals on the surface, so it mostly stays clean. I asked myself if instead of making the building clean, you could make the water clean. I brought together a team— experts in chemistry, optics and physics— and we started figuring out which wavelengths of light were optimum, what kind of nanotechnology we could use, what kind of coating was optimum, and all the other things that could commence this idea around 2007. TC: Do you have customers already? Who are they? MO: We began shipping to customers in 2009. The majority have been industrial process customers. They need water that’s ultra pure for use in the lab, or in processes they use to make their products. Tap water isn’t clean enough. We are useful to pharmaceuticals, biotech and semiconductor manufacturers, and coffee franchises alike. We have several Fortune 500 clients. TC: What’s next for Puralytics? MO: I told you about our primary product, the Puralytics Shield, which uses LEDs to purify water for light industrial and commercial use. We have another one called the Solar Bag. It uses the same technology but without the LEDs. So, you have a nanotech coated mesh inside of a bag. You fill the bag with water, stick it in the sun, and the nanotech purifies the water over the course of several hours instead of a few minutes. This is going to be important for getting clean drinking water to people without access in the developing world. One of our partners, Hydration Technologies humanitarian water division , is helping us sell the Solar Bag to nonprofits that can distribute it. We also work with different aid organizations around the world— including one in Kenya, and another one in Bangladesh— to supply our technology in developing world applications. We’ll be figuring out how to do more of this. We’ve been funded by four government grants, a seed round, and now some prize money. We’ll be using that develop a next generation product and expand our market presence. But we’ll also be looking to raise growth capital, soon. [Editor's note: The national competition prize included $150,000 worth of business services, and $100,000 in the form of a seed investment from a consortium of investors: Wilson Sonsini Investment Company, Stiefel Family Foundation, and the Cleantech Open.] Images courtesy Douglas Schwartz Photography More information about the 2010 Cleantech Open National Business Competition winners is available via the competition’s winners site and competition’s Youtube Channel . CrunchBase Information Cleantech Open Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Can Anything Stop The Facebook Juggernaut? | Top |
| So. Facebook. $35 billion valuation ; 600 million users ; 25% of all US internet traffic — and all that with fewer employees than Google has job openings . The inventor of the World Wide Web recently warned that the web may be endangered by Facebook’s colossal walled garden. A Google engineer was recently paid $3.5 million to not jump ship to work there. Facebook seems an unstoppable juggernaut. And I kind of want them to die. Not because of their policies. They’ve been reasonably sensitive to their users’ wants, and willing to admit when they were wrong (remember Facebook Beacon ?) There have been worrying signs of late, for example, their two-faced attitude towards data portability and their trademarking of the word “Face” , but I don’t (yet) object to what they do. I dislike Facebook because they’re mediocre . They have a platform and opportunity unlike anyone else, ever— and what have they done with it? Nothing. None of their so-called innovations are actually even remotely so. Copying Twitter was smart, but hardly new; ditto Foursquare. They called Facebook Groups an innovation; it’s a basic feature they should have implemented years ago. Now they’re laughably trying to claim that integrating email into their messaging system is a world-shaking revolution. As usual, William Gibson put it best : “Facebook feels like a mall. Twitter feels like the street.” (Which I suppose makes Zynga the mall’s arcade.) It’s one thing to shop there occasionally, but quite another to be a full-fledged mallrat—and according to the stats, that’s what we have collectively become. I want to believe that eventually we’ll wake up, and grow up, and realize that new and interesting things mostly happen elsewhere. And so, I speculate hopefully: what if Facebook is the new LiveJournal? You might not remember LiveJournal , a now-moribund social-blogging site, but Mark Zuckerberg does: the second scene in The Social Network depicts him liveblogging a hacking jag on his LiveJournal. (Unlike much of the movie, that scene is mostly true-to-life .) I was on LJ too, back then, mostly to keep track of my California friends while I was bouncing around the planet. Now their accounts add up to a ghost town—and while most have moved to Facebook, they’re far less active there. They’re not alone: LJ’s own stats indicate that while their userbase has grown, total user activity has actually declined. What if LJ’s decline is a warning bell for Facebook? What if the natural human tendency is for people to initially get all excited and obsessed about social networking—but eventually, after a few years, they grow increasingly bored with it, and begin to slowly drift away? This is a testable hypothesis. The key stat is the relationship between how long one has been a Facebook user and how much time one spends on the site. Only Facebook knows those numbers, though, and they aren’t talking. Until they do, I could cling to that hope . . . —but here’s the kicker; it doesn’t even matter. Facebook still can’t be stopped. Even if my apocalyptic prophecies of a global surge in enlightened self-actualization come to pass, and our collective Facebook obsession begins to fade, it will remain a mighty titan. For Mark Zuckerberg remembers LiveJournal too, and he and his braintrust have already ensured that Facebook will remain indispensable even if their users begin to lose interest. It isn’t just a site any more: like Amazon or Google, Facebook has become a utility. That’s not a metaphor. The number of apps and sites that rely on Facebook Connect and its Graph API is skyrocketing, according to all the startups/developers I know (and, heck, here’s some actual data too.) Even once-mighty MySpace surrendered to Facebook Connect last week. Google’s half-hearted attempts to forestall them are too little, too late. Facebook has become to the social web what Microsoft is to the desktop: mindbogglingly gargantuan, relentlessly mediocre, and almost inescapable. Like Microsoft twenty years ago, they will succeed because a bad standard is better than none: and like Microsoft ten years ago, they “innovate” by clumsily copying—and then trying to squash—the real innovators. So let the backlash boom! Maybe it will finally spur Zuckerberg & Co. into doing something genuinely interesting and innovative with their invincible machine. CrunchBase Information Facebook LiveJournal Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Are You In A Foodpickle This Thanksgiving? Get Your Cooking Qs Answered In Realtime. | Top |
| As everyone is getting their turkeys into the oven and putting the finishing touches on Thanksgiving Day meals, a lot of questions come up. What should the internal temperature of a turkey be to know it is done? How many mashed sweet potatoes would make 3 cups? How do I soften hardened brown sugar? The answers ( 165 degrees , 3 , and microwave it ) can be found on Foodpickle , a crowdsourced Q&A section of the foodie site Food52 . You can ask a question on Foodpickle itself, or tweet it to @foodpickle . Answers are tweeted back at you. Foodpickle also accepts text messages to 803-380-FOOD (3663). And if you are lucky, your question might even be answered by food writer Amanda Hesser. Food52 is her site which she is using to crowdsource her next cookbook with Merrill Stubbs. It attracts a very active community of cooks. Anyone can answer a question on Foodpickle, and the best answers are voted up. If you stil have any last-minute cooking questions this Thanksgiving, give it a try. | |
| Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques, Boldly Goes Where No Q&A Site Has Gone Before | Top |
| It seems as though Q&A network Stack Overflow has put the $6 million in funding it received back in May to good use, crossing the 10 million unique monthly visit mark as of yesterday. While Q&A sites like Quora bank on the winning model being one big monolithic site, Stack Overflow is showing success by carefully separating the Q&A game into different communities, launching 34 different sites on topics as diverse as Bicycling, Cooking and IT Security. The company had only three fulltime developers before its first round of funding, which included rockstar angel investors like Ron Conway, Chris Dixon, Naval Ravikant and Caterina Fake. Since then founders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood have hired 24 new employees including Stack Overflow power user Marc Gravell. Despite (or because of) its programming roots, Spolsky tells TechCrunch that the company’s biggest accomplishment in the past six months has been building Stack Exchange , which allows users to suggest new verticals for Stack Overflow-style Q&A sites like Chess, Aviation and Cryptography. This is a savvy move, as using a consensus model to decide which sites get built ensures critical mass upon arrival and high quality answers like this one . Stack Overflow traffic has soared, going from 6 million to ten million uniques in six months (it took two years to get to the first 6 million). Says Spolsky, “ Almost every programmer in the world knows Stack Overflow and visits regularly, usually because we have the answer to a problem they’ve typed into Google–and the new Stack Exchange sites are starting to spread rapidly beyond the initial audience of programmers.” In my experience, things that have massive traction with coders often pick up mainstream and viral tread, as programmers spend the most time online. Case in point: The new Stack Overflow vertical sites have only been up for a couple months but are already showing 33% monthly growth according to internal metrics. Aside from traffic, success is based on a variety of criteria, the most important of which is the percentage of site questions that have at least one up-voted answer. Spolsky says that all of the new sites have 90-100% answer up-vote rates. In terms of future plans, Spolsky is focusing on Stack Exchange and encouraging the growth of even more new verticals where experts can come together, “Ultimately we think there will be hundreds or thousands of these sites providing extremely high quality answers to detailed questions, so the most important thing we’re working on is really cultivating niche communities.” The network also recently received a small and mostly symbolic $50K spike of funding from Jason Cohen and Dharmesh Shah and just released a bunch of new features including a Campire-like interactive chat. May the best Q&A site (or sites) win. CrunchBase Information Stack Overflow Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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