The company's strategy is to partner with utility companies to install solar panels on utility poles. This has two benefits in that the poles are cleared for solar panels so don't have to undergo lengthy public debate and the grid doesn't have to be extended to capture solar energy.

Petra Solar will use the new round of financing to expand its customer base, with plans to hire another 30 executive and professional employees immediately. By the end of 2010, the company expects to employ 165 people, a ten-fold increase from its base of 15 last spring.

Last year, Petra began shipping photovoltaic modules embedded with power management and communications systems to New Jersey's PSEG which recently entered into a contract with Petra Solar, valued at $200M. Under the contract, Petra Solar is set to deliver approximately 200K units for installation by PSEG plans for installation on poles in its service territory, which includes the state’s six largest cities and some 300 rural and suburban communities.

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We have been wondering recently why there is not an industry standard service for voice to text. The answer is that quality is poor. So it makes sense that 3Play combines tech and humans. The hard part will be to market the service we think. Many people in different walks of life will want such a service but how do you find them. The company recently hired a guy to run marketing for them. Kudos if he succeeds.

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So why aeroponic methods vs. outdoor or greenhouse methods? AeroFarms says: Compared to conventional growing, AeroFarms systems grow the same yield using:

+3% of the land
+ Less than 20% of the water
+ 2% transportation fuel & miles

The final point that is key to why they target urban areas. Rather than fly in vegies from Chile to the urban areas you can grow in the urban and often cold areas and then just get it to market a few miles away. We don't know much about farming but there seems to be some logic here.

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With solar industry still facing a cash crunch, solar cells and panels manufacturer SunPower Corp. (SPWRA, SPWRB: NASDAQ) should be expanding its project portfolio of more than 550 solar systems installed. Today SunPower announced it will be working with KeyCorp (KEY:NYSE) to make it easier for small to mid-size companies to develop commercial-scale solar systems. Key Equipment Finance, a subsidiary of KeyCorp, will make up to $50 million available to SunPower customers.

Qualified SunPower customers looking to develop projects ranging from 50 kilowatts to 1 megawatt will be able to apply for a loan or capital lease. Customers applying for the loan will be able to combine the cost of panels and installation into one payment while allowing them to take advantage of the 30 percent federal investment tax credit.

For SunPower, today’s announcement helps them preserve the $472 million in cash they reported at the end of Q3 2009 (approximately a $250 million increase from the same quarter in the previous year). Not financing small to mid-size solar installations will hurt the diversity of their revenue stream but with economy still fairly challenging for solar companies, the trend of shifting financing away from the manufacturer seems to be growing. And with more solar companies looking to improve the quality of their cells and build manufacturing plants closer to their customers, shifting this segment of financing to KeyCorp will provide SunPower with the flexibility to pursue these paths.

Today's deal makes a lot of sense for KeyCorp as getting involved with SunPower is another way for them to diversify their $93.3 billion asset portfolio with a small initial investment.

Shares of SunPower A and B finished 3 percent lower today while KeyCorp shares ended the day 1 percent lower.

With offices in the US and UK, AMEE has quickly advanced in the "clean-tech" space, as an independent source for carbon calculations. It provides detail accounts of carbon emissions, which is makes it easier to audit and track the environmental impact of daily business activities and products. This is good news for carbon accounting practitioners and governments looking to track their carbon footprint and set emissions reduction targets. Using AMEE's API, practitioners can embed best-practice carbon models required by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC), and others.

Enterprise carbon accounting is projected to reach $4B by 2017, yet enterprise management is not is the only focus in AMEE's strategic vision. Today's deal is only one avenue to become "the world's energy meter." In December, the company partnered with energy management service AlertMe, to provide business intelligence solutions for home-based businesses as well.

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By Hanif O'Neil

In the UK, SecretSales competes with the likes of Brand Alley, Vente Privee, Cocosa and The Outnet.

In November 2008, Brands4friends, raised over €10M in third-round funding recently. The round was led by Partech International, joined by Mangrove Capital Partners and Holtzbrinck Ventures.

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They highlight a couple of key points. You may start a company with Web 2.0 companies but you are in fact an enterprise software company selling to businesses and dealing with their long cycles. And just because you are making something cool doesn't mean that you are necessarily generating revenues that you can get a piece. We would also add to their post-mortum that when you are targeting a niche industry - like events - it helps if you have worked there. For sure lots of good businesses have been started by outsiders but it can take them more time to learn the ropes.

Eventvue has won $300K in funding. The startup was one of ten in the local TechStars incubation program in 2007. The funding was led by Foundry Group Managing Director Brad Feld, with TechStars' David Cohen, Dave McClure, and others.

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LA-based Ranker has raised $750K in a seed investment round and plans to tack on another $250K to the seed round. The round was led by Siemer Venture Capital with angel investors. Ranker is a riff on the online publishing staple of top ten lists. Amazon has encouraged visitors to make lists for a while. Link hungry blog sites have learned that lists are easy money. So ranker has taken a good URL and made some structure to encourage visitors to create lists, and then make a living by running ads on the lists. Should be a nice growth story but we don't expect it to be a break-out success. So far traffic has been OK but we would expect it to climb. And the CPMs on the site are bound to be poor.

Ranker is led by CEO Clark Benson's who previously founded eCrush, which was sold to Hearst in 2006.

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Many of the residents of Marin County California will soon have a choice as to whom they want providing their electricity. Upstart Marin Energy Authority (MEA) unanimously voted to approve a 5-year contract with Shell Energy North America to provide electricity for the authority. As soon as next week, MEA will start contacting Pacific Gas & Electric (PCG:NYSE) customers to see if they want to switch.

Residents in 7 of Marin’s 11 municipalities (Belvedere, Fairfax, Mill Valley, San Anselmo, San Rafael, Sausalito, and Tiburon) will have the opportunity to choose whether or not they want to stay with PG&E or buy their power from MEA. Residents who opt for MEA will then have the opportunity to choose between buying power that is 25 percent renewable energy, or they can pay $3 – $6 more per month and purchase power that comes from 100 percent renewable sources. And according to the MEA, Shell’s electricity rates are far below those of PG&E.

Eventually, MEA plans on developing its own renewable energy sources. “While we’re not going to develop anything in the next month or so, part of the business plan is to develop renewable energy including solar, wind, geothermal and biomass.

How interested are the residents in Marin County in buying renewable energy? To help the MEA raise the $1.7 million it needs for start-up costs, 4 residents of the county are loaning the authority $750,000.

Could PG&E have prevented this from happening? While it isn’t clear why the utility giant hasn’t been able to meet its goal state mandated goal of 20 percent renewable energy in 2010, PG&E has decided to wage a full-scale public real campaign campaign to try and stop the MEA and others from getting into the utility game. On a local level, PG&E created a web site called Common Sense Marin and has been threatening the MEA with lawsuits saying the voters should decide and spreading messages saying that brining in renewable energy will contribute to higher greenhouse gas emissions.

Calling it the “Taxpayers Right to Vote Act”, PG&E has spent at least $6.5 million according to state records in trying to get an initiative on the June 8 ballot that will require towns to get a two-thirds voting majority before local governments could approve an alternative energy provider. And according to sources, PG&E plans on spending millions more on this initiative to make sure it passes. It may take millions more of their money to successfully pass the legislation as no other utility in the state is publicly standing beside PG&E.

While last night’s decision will cost PG&E less than 1 percent of its 15 million customers in the Golden State, Ms. Weisz believes that others will soon follow making it even more difficult for PG&E to fund renewable energy projects.

“San Francisco isn’t far behind. They are very close to selecting a power supplier,” added Ms. Weisz

PG&E’s share price actually rose over 1 percent today.

LensVector's tech will be sold for both still and video cameras. Their goal is to bring auto focus functionality to cameras without mechanical moving parts. LensVector later migrate to the proliferation of micro-cameras in laptops, netbooks, pocket video camera and other devices. The big picture is "to replace all the mechanical aspects of a camera with solid-state alternatives, starting with autofocus,” says the company's CEO Derek Proudian.

Interestingly, LensVector plans to build its chips in Silicon Valley, rather than Asia.

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Monthly revenue is declining by less than $1 million at Ormat Technologies’ (NYSE:ORA) Puna Power Plant in Hawaii due to a decline in the supply of steam. Recent repairs to the plant had Puna running at 25 MW and was expected to eventually increase the output to 30 MW, the plant’s designed capacity.

But according to Ormat officials, the plant was generating 17 MW of power last month. Fortunately for Ormat, they believe that a wellbore restriction is reducing the flow of steam to the plant. Ormat is currently working to correct this problem by cleaning the wells in hopes of allowing more steam to reach the plant.

To also help the Puna plant reach full generation capacity, Ormat is drilling a another well at the tune of $11 million. This well should be completed by the end of the second quarter.

So who should care about this news? Investors. Losing $1 million per month in revenue isn’t exactly pocket change for the company and increasing costs by $11 million. But with Ormat announcing an exploration concession in Chile yesterday that could easily erase any of the company’s current revenue losses if it is fruitful. And even though geothermal power generation is hardly a perfected technology, Ormat’s success in running other plants in the U.S. and globally should comfort investors.

Ormat closed the day down over 5.4 percent.

The company is founded by Gil Elbaz, who was co-founder of Applied Semantics which was acquired by Google in 2003 for $100M and was the starting point for Adsense.

Factual is similar to something like Wikia in that it solicits a community of volunteers to create openly available content. Facutal content is organized around tables, rather than the standard wiki template. The great feature about tables is of course that you can reorganize data as you do a spreadsheet. So give a list of senators you can sort by birth data, party affiliation, etc. As a user, you initiate a table and then Factual will help you out by sending out spiders to collect supporting data. Factual also providers collaboration tools. Like Wikia, there is a history of disputes over data accuracy.

Currently, there does not seem be a business model, however, given traffic to the site advertising can be an option. They let us know that: "Factual Tables are currently available without a fee for registered users. Over time as the product evolves, there may be features that are restricted to paid subscribers of Factual."

What to make of Factual? We are buyers. We can surely see a community developing here? Its a bit of Wikia with a bit of Scribd, Docstoc, and Slideshare. But its also its own unique template and purpose.

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Light induced degradation (LID) has been an issue for photovoltaic (PV) cell and modules manufacturers. Owners of solar panels usually experience LID of 2-3 percent when they first “plug in” their panels. China’s Solarfun announced today that they have developed a new panel that reduces LID providing owners with improved solar power generation.

By reducing the impurity concentration in PV cells, Solarfun’s “Eclipse” line will reduce LID to 1 percent, a 50 – 66 percent improvement that will result in only losing 2 watts on a 180 watt module.

“By adjusting chemical properties in both the ingot-making and cell-processing phases of manufacturing, we have achieved a low concentration of impurity while still maintaining high yields,” stated Peter Xie, President of Solarfun. “We remain committed to our strategy of continually enhancing our technology to produce differentiated and more efficient products for our customers."

Back in December 2009 Solarfun announced they would be building a module production facility in Jiayuguan City. Building a manufacturing plant is a part of a deal with the government of Jiayuguan City, Gansu Province where Solarfun has been contracted to contstruct 100MW solar power plant. It’s reasonable to assume that this new plant will be manufacturing the Eclipse product line.

Despite offering a new product line that generates more electricity from solar panels, Solarfun’s stock was down 1.5 percent on a day the Dow finished .3 percent lower.

Yammer has raised $10M in second round venture funding. Emergence Capital led the round with Ron Conway's SV Angel along with previous investors Charles River Ventures and Goldcrest Investments.

Yammer looks to bypass corporate IT goons by allowing anyone in a company to start a Yammer network and inviting colleagues free of charge. Yammer then charges up to $5 per month, per head for premium service

Yammer claims 60K businesses and organizations and clients but is not saying how many of those are paid accounts.

Yammer features include mobile applications, company and group directories including org charts.

We like the Yammer model. The main challenge that we see is that they do have a fair amount of competitors including HipChat, http://hipchat.com/, Presently http://presentlyapp.com/ as well as traditional enterprise collaboration tools that are adding Twitter functionality.

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What infuriates tech insiders is how Glam spins. Their press release on the funding announcement is dateline "Silicon Valley" rather than the literal Brisbane, CA. The first sentence indicates that Glam is "number one in global reach for women online." What does that mean? Does Glam reach more women than Google or Facebook?

Be that as it may, Glam Media has raised $50M in a private equity mezzanine funding at a $750M valuation. The Series E round was led by Aeris Capital with existing series D investors Burda Digital and Mizuho Capital. Proceeds of the funds will be used to build a "Digital Media Technology Center", expand internationally and for acquisitions. Glam had already raised $125M previously.

We don't know if or how much money Glam has in the bank, but if they need to raise $50M, we think they spent most of the $125M raised. We could understand that level of investment if they were manufacturing cars or solar panels but this is an ad network. You should be profitable within a year with an ad network.

Glam sources have been reporting that it is profitable and that revenues were $55M for 2009, up from $40M in 2008. But the math does not ad up. If they are profitable, then where did all the money go?

Next step for Glam is likely an IPO. It will be very interesting to see if Wall Street buys in as private equity investors have.

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