VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:
1) Wikileaks judge restores restores site, slaps self on wrist
2) AllPeers’ peer-to-peer scheme fails to capture users
3) Chevron, Weyerhaeuser join up for cellulosic ethanol
4) Saudi Arabia and IBM partner to develop green nanotech
5) Akamai wins patent fight, but not happy with ruling
6) Woz points out flaws in Apple’s latest products
7) Global warming, now with double the lethality
8) LinkedIn’s new features look a little more like Facebook
9) Fastcompany.tv launches with Robert Scoble
10) Fortune tops “Most Admired” list with Valley companies

Wikileaks judge restores site, slaps self on wrist — A federal judge who ordered that whistle-blower site Wikileaks be scrubbed from the web not only reversed his own order, but has since released a statement suggesting that he overstepped his bounds and possibly violated the First Amendment, acknowledging that free speech on the Internet is a tricky issue.

AllPeers’ P2P sharing extension fails to capture users, closes — AllPeers, a clever Firefox extension that allowed the peer-to-peer sharing, is dead. The prognosis: Not enough users to satisfy the investors, Mangrove Capital Partners and Index Ventures. There’s a brief obituary at TechCrunch.

Chevron and Weyerhaeuser join forces for cellulosic ethanol — Ain’t green great? Take Chevron and Weyerhaeuser, two giant companies known for environmental damage — the first for oil exploration, the latter for logging and creating Superfund sites — add an impending global crisis, and come up with Catchlight Energy, a new joint venture to research cellulosic ethanol. The company will employ up to 40 researchers, making it one of the larger cellulosic efforts.

Saudi Arabia and IBM partner to develop green nanotech — Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is keeping up with the Joneses by setting up its own nanotech research lab, which will put most of its efforts toward solar energy. The Jones here, in case you missed it, is Abu Dhabi with its $15 billion Masdar City initiative.

Akamai prevails in patent fight, but unhappy with the winnings — Akamai won a patent battle with rival content distribution network Limelight, but the amount — $45 million — was less than half of the $100 million the company thought it deserved, according to Xconomy. Limelight, for its part, would prefer to multiply the amount by 0; it’s appealing the case.

Woz points out the flaws with latest Apple products — Acting as the super-ego to the ego of Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak spent some time criticizing the Apple Air and iPhone to the Sydney Morning Herald. (The id, we’ll assume, is represented by Apple fanboys.) The brief version: He thinks that some fairly vital features were unnecessarily left out of the two devices.

Global warming, now with double the lethality — According to a study cited by the New Scientist: “A rise in CO₂ increases the temperature and water vapour content of the atmosphere, which in turn accelerate ozone production and encourage particulates to hang around in the air.” That means more lung damage, and ultimately, more deaths.

LinkedIn’s new features make it more like Facebook — Unfair perhaps, but the business networking site will inevitably be compared to Facebook. Web Worker Daily explains why new LinkedIn features like status updates make it more like its chattier rival.

FastCompany.tv launches entrepreneur-focused web shows — Robert Scoble has the first two shows on the new video portal, Fastcompany.tv.

Fortune ranks “Most Admired” companies, tech firms top list — Apple is number one and Google is number four on Fortune’s new list of the 20 most admired companies, which doubles as a clever way for Fortune to get 20 pageviews from a single article.

Continuing the trend of major oil companies taking interest in producing biofuels from algae that Royal Dutch Shell started last December, Chevron has opened a deal with Solazyme, a San Francisco biotech startup.

The partnership follows an agreement Chevron made last year with the Department of Energy to produce fuels from algae, while Solazyme, which works in several areas outside biofuels, has become more focused on algae in recent months.

Solazyme also announced today that it has produced an automotive-ready biodiesel from algae and tested it in a standard diesel-engine car. The company has already tested the fuel in long-distance driving conditions and is displaying the fuel at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, underway now in Park City, Utah.

Algae is a logical source of fuel, as the organisms are naturally oily. However, companies face a challenge in scaling production to levels that will make the fuel cost-effective. Researchers must coax the algae into churning out the right kinds of oil at a greater than natural pace.

Other companies working on algal biofuels include Cellana, the joint venture between Shell and HR Biopetroleum, Aurora Biofuels (coverage here), and LiveFuels, whose founder, Rich Hilt, wrote a contributor piece for VentureBeat on the future of algae.

Solazyme itself has captured a fair amount of funding recently, taking in $8 million in venture funding and $7 million in venture debt last year (covered here and here). The terms of its agreement with Chevron weren’t disclosed.

General Electric invests more into clean technologies than any other company.

The company’s yearly allotment for Ecomagination, its cleantech investment arm, totals $1 billion, and GE says it’s on track to raise the number to $1.5 billion by 2010. Compare that to the mere $844 million invested in U.S. clean-technology companies by the entire venture capital establishment last quarter, which is at record levels.

The GE money will go to both new research and existing projects, as well as partnerships with universities and labs, GE says. Areas of investment include renewable energy, fuel efficiency, lighting and water purification (look here for summaries.)

GE can maintain its investment flow into Ecomagination because the division is actually bringing in revenues — about $12 billion since it was opened in 2005. Like Chevron, which recently opened its fourth venture fund, the company also uses the companies and technologies it invests in for internal projects.

Chevron’s focus is broader than just clean-tech: The company is also investing in oil and gas and information technology ventures. About a third of the $75 million it has set aside will go to clean-tech.

The fund’s new director, Trond Unneland, said Chevron is mainly interested in technologies that can assist its own oil and gas operations, like a San Joaquin Valley project where solar panels help turn water to steam for use in oil reclamation.

Between its first three funds, Chevron has invested about $170 million, seeing an internal benefit of $50 million from increased efficiency and cost savings, it says. Asked whether the company planned on helping the companies it invests in develop in the outside world, Unneland said: “Our primary goal is [internal] technology transfers, but financial returns are important as well.”

So with their slightly different focus, where do giant companies fall in the venture capital spectrum? Aside from their focus on technologies they can use for themselves, they may also be more risk-averse than traditional VCs investing in cleantech, like Vinod Khosla.

Khosla Ventures has bet on a number of controversial projects, including one we reported on recently: Calera, which claims to be able to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to produce concrete.

By comparison, GE invests in projects like building cleaner coal plants or working on advanced desalination technology. Chevron, for its part, has put money into Brightsource, the photovoltaic steam-generation startup, and Konarka, a maker of so-called “power plastic”.

Konarka, yet another company experimenting with new-fangled technology to produce more efficient solar cells, hasn’t been able to articulate a clear business strategy in the six years since it started.

However, solar technology is hot, and the company has raised $45 million more in capital to give it more time to keep trying. It has now raised more than $100 million.

Like several other start-ups, the Lowell, Mass. company has been using non-silicon material to produce a more flexible thin-film solar cell to convert light into energy. However, it has continued to dabble on a number of solar projects, while its competitors have remained laser-focused on producing a producing a workable cell for the roofs of large buildings and other expansive areas. Even with focus, those other companies have been delayed.

The financing was led by Toronto investment firm, Mackenzie Financial, along with Good Energies. Other investors were Pegasus Capital and existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Asenqua Ventures, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and 3i.

Konarka is using a plastic, or “polymer” for its technology, and is testing it in a variety of areas, including portable and consumer products such as powering PDAs or recharging batteries on the battlefield, and in various parts of housing (windows, for example) other than rooftops. The products aren’t expected to hit the market until next year.

Other participating current investors include Vanguard Ventures, Chevron, Massachusetts Green Energy Fund, NGEN Partners, Angeleno Group and Asenqua Ventures.

A surprising $100 million has been raised so far in the fight over the California oil tax. Californians will vote in November on whether to put a tax on oil extracted from California wells.

There’s so much at stake in California, because its economic clout often means other states follow its lead. To put this $100M number in perspective, that’s 40 percent of what it cost to run for U.S. president last time, according to this summary in the Mercury News (registration required) about the fight between Silicon Valley supporters (including venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, pictured here) and Chevron and other oil interests.

Wired has a noteworthy piece by Vinod Khosla, where he describes his biofuel investments with more detail than we’ve seen before. Not only is Khosla at the center of the one of the biggest political battles the state has seen, he’s as frenetic as any investor right now in biofuels. In one example, he elaborates on the $3.3 million investment he made last month in Kergy, a Denver company, which is the first “anaerobic thermal conversion machine.” Kergy has been secretive until now; we mentioned it here.

So what, you ask, is anaerobic thermal conversion? Khosla explains:

Kergy’s machine is special because it makes cellulosic ethanol through anaerobic thermal conversion rather than through fermentation or acid hydrolysis. It does not need organisms or enzymes to do its work. Biomass is heated in an oxygen-free environment to produce carbon monoxide and hydrogen….The carbon monoxide and hydrogen are then reconstituted into various alcohols • like ethanol. Better still, fermentation and acid hydrol­ysis can take days to occur, but thermal conversion breaks down organic matter and converts it to ethanol in minutes.

And here’s the really exciting part: Because all organic matter contains carbon, [inventor Bud] Klepper can make ethanol out of cellulose or any form of organic matter. This means the usual suspects such as corn, switchgrass, sugarcane, and miscanthus but also any waste product such as wood chips, paper pulp, cow manure, and even human waste.

Khosla has his critics, as when he came under attack by The Oil Drum. When we visited him last week, he said his argument now is that nation can take incremental steps — but not necessarily huge steps — to wean itself from oil dependence. He dismisses hydrogen as an energy source, because it would require too radical a shift in resources. There is no infrastructure build to support it. He says he keeps getting pitches from entrepreneurs wanting to build a hydrogen company, and he responds: “Now what? Who are you going to sell it to?”

Corn ethanol, on the other hand, is already here, and has a ready market. So then you can build upon that, by moving to the much more efficient cellulosic ethanol, which is where Khosla is focused. He compares it to the Internet. The earliest version of the Internet was far from perfect. But it was useful, and some companies made money. But with AJAX and other cool new tools, we’re still innovating.