Working in Broadwind’s favor the company reported a 50 percent increase in significant customers from 4 to 6 and expects product orders to be stronger in 2010. But until the company can start closing deals like rival A-Power Energy (APWR:NASDAQ), fully utilizing the company’s production capacity while maximizing revenues and profits will be difficult.

Shares of Broadwind were expectedly down 20% in afternoon trading while A-Power was up 3 percent.

Half of Sensata's revenues come from auto makers, which have had bleak sales globally. It also sells circuit breakers for aircraft, temperature controllers for electric motors, and other industrial technology.

Sensata is one of the few IPOs this year to price within the expected range. It is also the first IPO of the year in the tech sector.

Sensata saw 2009 net revenue of $1.1B, down about 20% from the prior year. During the same period, the company narrowed its net loss to $27.7M from $134.5M.

Sensata is a spin-off from Texas Instruments that was backed by Bain Capital. Bain enjoyed a 177% rise in the amount that it paid.

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Matrixx was founded by CEO Dave Labuda who previously founded Portal Software which he sold to Oracle.

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LivingSocial has a few product - they include LivingSocial Deals which competes with Groupon and Facebook applications Visual Bookshelf and Pick Your Five.

LivingSocial Deals also took the announcement to time launches of four additional cities: Chicago, Denver, Raleigh Durham and San Diego, making the service live in 13 markets across the country, and they say they are growing to dozens of cities by year-end.

Finally, LivingSocial launched an affiliate program for sites to resell LivingSocial Deals.

It is easy to wonder about the future of group buying sites with their proliferation. You have Groupon, BuyWithMe, GroupSwoop.

But you can see from the numbers that LivingSocial posts that they are making real money. LivingSocial makes anywhere from 20-50% of deals. In a San Francisco sale, they sold almost 500 of a $50 buy at Blue Plate.

Any yet now that there are these group buying success stories, there are bound to be threats. Its only a matter of time before larger Yelp and CitySearch jump in. And then there are disruptive ideas like Syncfu which want to disintermediate the Groupons and LivingSocials by having the merchants sell group deals direct.

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Recently, First Solar, (FSLR:NASDAQ), Suntech Power (STP:NYSE), Trina Solar (TSL:NYSE), and Yingli Solar (YSL:NYSE) have stated that developing sales in Italy is important to their growth in 2010. SunPower (SPWRA, SPWRB:NASDAQ) recently announced it was acquiring Israel’s SunRay Renewable Energy who has a strong pipeline of projects in Italy.

With the expected reductions in Germany’s feed-in tariff program, Italy will receive plenty of attention from solar developers. In 2007, Italy enacted a feed-in tariff program that many believe is equal, or even superior to, Germany. Experts also believe that Italy’s solar capacity will reach 1.5 gigawatts by the end of this year.

Shares of MEMC Electronic Materials, SunEdison’s parent company, were up 1.4 percent in afternoon trading. Shares of First Solar were up 3.4 percent, Suntech Power’s shares were up 2.2. percent, Trina Solar’s shares were up 2.7 percent, and SunPower’s shares were up .43 percent as the Dow was off less than .01 percent.

Santa Barbara-based Sonos has raised $40M to date from angels and BV Capital.

Sonos has launched an iPhone controlled music system that sells at a very reasonable $399 for 5 speakers. Sonos gets great reviews as “hands-down” the best way to distribute digital music throughout your house.

We think this is the right product to be a sensation come Christmas time so it makes sense that they would be open to more capital to gear up.

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Terms of the deal were not disclosed but two years ago Southern California Edison announced it was budgeting the project at the ½ the prevailing cost of $7 per installed watt. According to Southern California Edison, the company is on track to keep the cost at $3.50 per installed watt.

Over the next the five years, Southern California Edison plans on installing SunPower’s T5 Solar Roof Tile product mostly on leased, large warehouse rooftops at the rate of 50 MW per year. Larger installations, typically 1-2 million watts, will be connected directly to neighborhood distribution circuits where the panels are employed. The panels will also be deployed in neighborhoods where electricity needs are rising.

Despite the “California connection”, Southern California Edison stated today that it chose SunPower due to the high efficiency of its panels and the speed and lower installation costs. SunPower’s relative proximity to Southern California Edison did not influence the decision-making process.

The project will cover approximately 50-100 rooftops and the first 2 MW were installed in Fontana, CA using First Solar’s (FSLR:NASDAQ). Last year a second roof in Chino, CA was also equipped with First Solar’s panels.

With approximately 45 MW yet to be committed, Southern California Edison is actively reviewing bids and expects to award the contracts in the near future.

Shares of Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison, were up 1.4 percent in early afternoon trading. Shares of SunPower were up 3.5 percent and First Solar climbed 3.4 percent.

Todacell clients include Fring, MobiLuck, Mocospace and TuneWiki. Todacell explains its technology examines and maps a publisher’s mobile ad inventory based on user data, location, time, and the performance of ad campaigns on that publisher’s mobile website or application.

While Todacell will get lumped in as a rival to AdMob, more specifically they compete with startups like Smaato. The company explains: "With strong targeting engines and automatic optimization we are able to achieve very high ROI to advertisers. Unlike others, who care only about CTR (click through rate), we measure the efficiency to advertisers. Not enough how many people click, but how many people actually bought the product? How many did the right search? Accuracy in the ad deliver process is our power."

Read more: http://www.vccafe.com/2009/06/26/exclusive-todacell-raises-1-million-for-mobile-ad-optimization-platform-interview-with-ceo-moshe-vaknin/#ixzz0hn4SUOgy

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ClearSlide is a presentation tool that allows you to upload your Powerpoint file and have it converted to a Web page - that way you can get Web analytics on it. You can see when your client or prospect opened the file, which and how many pages they looked at and how much time they spent on it. We are interested to see how protocals will evolve - whether sales people will tell prospects they see that they did or didn't open a proposal or maybe they will keep that knowledge to themselves.

Our ClearSlide contact told us a use case where a ClearSlide user was pitching a big client who passed on their proposal. But the client could see through ClearSlide that they never looked at the proposal. We find that simple feedback invaluable.

Other features are the ability to do live presentations including demos and site walk throughs. You simply give your audience a URL like www.clearslide.com/yourname and they can follow your presentation.

Some readers will wonder what is new about this that you don't get with Webex and GoToMeeting. We have never liked either of of those products and think that ClearSlide is just designed better. And again, we think the analytics on the email version is something the market will want.

ClearSlide has been demoing at the Sales2.0 event in San Francisco this week but they say they are trying to keep a low profile. The boast of some client deals at places like Yelp and Oracle so far.

The company was co-founded by Jim Benton, who is VP of Sales and who was VP of Sales at Adbrite. They started building a company called MediaShield that plans to protect brand advertisers from inappropriate content, but somehow they developed Clearslide along the way and decided to make a company out of it.

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The timing is right for HomeAway's push into Brazil is the market there is hot, and you have the global events of the Olympics and World Cup both taking place in Brazil. Some have speculated that there will not be enough tourist hotels in Brazil so home rentals will be a needed.

Homeaway Targets Scenic Brazilian beaches

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Subject to approval of the Bureau of Land Management, construction on the Desert Sunlight project is scheduled to begin at the end of this year and be completed by 2013.

The timing of the power purchase agreement couldn’t have been more fortuitous for PG&E as it has been seeing more local competition from the likes local government energy consortiums like the Marin Energy Authority (MEA) who are gaining momentum due to PG&E’s failure to obtain 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by the year 2010 as mandated by the state of California. With 7 of Marin’s 11 municipalities participating, the MEA will be buying electricity from Shell Energy North America that will have 25 percent renewable electricity in the mix at the same rates offered by PG&E.

Despite the increase in production, First Solar’s shares were down 2.2 percent and Edison International was off .09 percent as the Dow inched up .5 percent in afternoon trading. PG&E was up .12 percent.

The company is one that seems to have benefited from the recession as mortgage-backed securities applications are key to analyzing historical prepayment and default risk on portfolios filled with securities collaterilized by loans.

1010Data recently did a deal with Equifax to provide consumer, demographic and financial marketing data to the retail industry.

1010Data is led by co-founder and CEO Joel Kaplan Before who was Managing Director and head of research and technology for non–equity trading at UBS North America and before that he was Managing Director and head of Global Fixed Income Research and Technology at Morgan Stanley.

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PlumWillow says it is building a social shopping site that will allow members to shop together with friends "make wardrobe choices from multiple brands, design their own outfits, customize an avatar and share these choices through their social networks."

We can buy into PlumWillow's take on shopping by teans as it is presented by Amazon and other sites that sell to teens the same way they sell to adults - get in and get out: "This ‘buy and buy’ mentality is particularly an anathema to teens. It goes against everything that shopping is to them. They go to the mall looking for fun, diversion and companionship. They do shop, and often buy, but the joy is in the experience, the sharing with friends, the ability to buy something at one store and take that item around to other stores and find something to go with it."

Easier said then done. PlumWillow has not yet launched. Certainly retailer stores in malls have been able to design an environment that will get teens to hang out, socialize, spend and come back.

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Postabon is "pre-revenue" but plans to launch a lead gen program at some point. On the one hand, we buy in that its so much more effective to sell leads online than to do what Bed Bath and Beyond and others do each week - blast snail mail coupons to the world blindly. On the other had, from the shopper perspective it seems that it's getting harder to figure out where on the Net to go to get the past prices on a product - the market is screaming for a meta-site to analyze sale prices.

The company was founded by 3 Harvard Biz School kids - Stu Wall, John Buchanan and Shaneal Manek.

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In Q4 2009, Yingli reported that PV module increased 15.7 percent from the previous quarter and increased by 86.6 percent from the 281.5 megawatts (MW) shipped in 2008. Also working in Yingli’s favor were improved gross margins of 29.6 percent for the quarter helping raise the company’s gross margins for the year to 23.6 percent, a level the company had not achieved since 2007. Gross margins for the same quarter in the previous year were 13.2 percent and for the full year 2008 were 21.6 percent.

Revenues for the quarter were $370.8 milllion, a 14 percent increase from the 326 million reported in the previous quarter and 44 percent increase from the $258.1 million reported in the same quarter of the previous year. The dramatic increase shipments without proportionate increases in revenues is similar to the numbers recently reported by Canadian Solar (CSIQ:NASDAQ) and Trina Solar (TSL:NYSE).

Profits took were absent this quarter as Yingli reported a loss of $0.04 per share, a drop from the $0.12 per share profit reported in the same quarter. Yingli also reported a $0.12 profit in the same quarter of the previous year. For full year 2009, the net loss reported was $0.48 per share, a sharp contrast to the $0.77 profit reported for the full year 2008.

But following lock-step with the rest of the Chinese solar PV module manufacturers, Yingli offered guidance for shipments in 2010 in the range of 950 MW to 1 gigawatt, basically doubling 2009’s output. To support these numbers, Yingli plans on expanding its sales in the United States Spain, Italy, and China. To help make this guidance a reality from a production standpoint, Yingli today announced a 300 MW expansion of its 600 MW production facility in Baoding China. Yingli is currently constructing a 100 MW production plant in the Hainan Province.

With approximately $523 million currently in the bank, Yingli plans on financing the plant expansion through a $220 million project loan and a $37 million line of credit through China’s Bank of Communications Co., Ltd., Hebei Branch.

Investors placed emphasis on the lack of profits versus the upcoming production capabilities and Yingli’s share price was off over 5 percent in late afternoon trading. Canadian Solar was off over 2.2 percent at the same time while Trina Solar was only down 1 percent. Domestic solar manufactures faired better as First Solar (FSLR:NASDAQ) was up .2 percent and its chief competitor, SunPower (SPWRA,SPWRB:NASDAQ) saw only a .1 percent drop in its shares. Evergreen Solar (ESLR:NASDAQ) was even on the day.