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Investors Leader Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank have shined on solar cell company Innovalight, providing $5 million in new financing toward the development of silicon solar modules so small they can be painted onto surfaces like ink.

The Sunnyvale, Calif. company uses liquid processing of silicon to produce nanosize solar prarticles that are not only more efficient than crystalline wafers, but also much cheaper to make than regular solar panels. It received $28 million last year at this time to work on the same project. And Silicon Valley investors remain enthusiastic about the solar industry, hoping to carve out a piece of what is predicted to be a $36 billion pie by 2010.

Innovalight isn’t the only player when it comes to flexible solar tech. Several companies are working on ink models using materials other than silicon, like Konarka, Nanosolar, Miasole, Solyndra, SoloPower and Heliovolt. Nanosolar and Solyndra recently brought in $300 million and $600 million respectively to develop panels and rooftop installations utilizing a thin film of solar modules. Meanwhile, Konarka has hired a flock of engineers from Polaroid and plans to add 100 more to its headcount over the next couple of years. These companies focus largely on a film composition called CIGS, comprised of copper, indium, gallium and selenide.

Innovalight previously received funding from Apax Partners, ARCH Venture Partners, Harris & Harris Group, Sevin Rosen Funds and Triton Ventures. CEO Conrad Burke wrote a guest column for VentureBeat last March.

Here’s the latest action:

Intel to launch six-core microprocessor – A chip code-named Dunnington is expected to debut on Sept. 15. Intel will put six cores, or computing brains, on a single chip. But this is really no big deal. I’ve got a 666-core chip of my own in the works. I used a cookie-cutter to make it.

Linkedin gets linked to CNBC – The popular business social network will integrate its community and networking functionality into CNBC.com. Linkedin has more than 27 million members now.

Security deal has investors under water – Secure Computing is buying Securify for $15 million plus an earn-out of $5 million — far less than the investment into the company.

Michael Cerda joins Venrock — Cerda, founder of Internet telephone company Jangl, who joined competitor Jajah briefly after Jangl was wound down earlier this year (and its assets sold to Live Universe) has already moved on, and has joined Silicon Valley venture capital firm Venrock as an Entrepreneur in Residence. He’ll focus on digital media, specifically “multi-modal marketplaces, platforms and services.” By multi-modal, he refers to services “that aren’t just web or just phone or just video or just TV…but services that have on-ramps in some or all of those modes.”

Liberty Media to make public its DirecTV stake – The cable company plans to spin off its 50-percent stake in DirecTV into a new public company dubbed Liberty Entertainment Group.

Another Siemens snafu – Siemens has been accused of posting its rival’s secrets. French software maker Dassault Systemes says a confidential trove of its customer data was found on Siemens’ intranet.

hi5 launches 0.8 version of open social – The social network announced that it has launched a version of the OpenSocial 0.8 standard which gives developers the ability to build applications in languages other than English.

Seven funds known to have invested in Miasole’s latest round — Miasole, one of the biggest thin-film solar startups, has been raising a $200 million round. So far, the company has obtained commitments from seven funds.

The full story of how Google Chrome came to be — Niall Kennedy has the scoop on something that has generated reams of blogger text in very short life. This story alone could double the number of words written about Chrome to date.

Get ready to chuck your Blu-ray disks in five years — Samsung exec says that Blu-ray has five years left to get the video disc market before something else takes over.

Microsoft’s answer to Google Docs — Redmond is reportedly going to blast back at Google’s cloud-based applications suite by the end of the year.

updated, with correction

These are heady times for the thin-film solar industry. The sector’s dominant player, First Solar, has been on a tear of late, recently announcing it would build a second 10 megawatt power plant in Nevada, while Miasole, once thought to be ailing, has staged an impressive comeback, raking in an eye-popping $220 million. Nanosolar has developed a new ultra-fast solar cell printer, and even giants like IBM and Applied Materials have gotten in on the game.

In the face of such intense competition, how will HelioVolt, a well-funded outpost of CIGS manufacturing in Texas, fare? The company hopes a new hybrid, super fast CIGS process it has developed in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), which combines its patented FASST process and NREL’s non-vacuum deposition technique, will help even the odds.

The Austin, Texas-based company licensed NREL’s non-vacuum deposition process, which allows for the quick application of liquid precursors onto a printing plate and substrate, to manufacture its solar cells with a 12.2 percent conversion efficiency at a fraction of the regular cost and in record time — under 6 minutes. Another advantage is that the substrate can be made from a variety of building materials, including glass, metals, plastics and roofing materials.

It remains to be seen how well this process will work, when it is applied to large-scale production. However, the technology recently won a vote approval when HelioVolt and NREL were given the R&D 100 Award, the technology and manufacturing industries’ equivalent of the Oscars, for developing this process.  The cost and time savings will help, but HelioVolt will need to move quickly if it hopes to catch up with the likes of Nanosolar and First Solar, who are both well on their way to making cells in high volumes.

John Langdon, HelioVolt’s VP of marketing, told us the new process would give his firm the flexibility to produce on a much faster time scale while still creating more expensive high-performance cells, although the technology would not affect HelioVolt’s short-term plans (over the next 6 months) as it is still focused on getting its 20 megawatt Austin plant up and running. He wasn’t sure whether the process would help bring the cost of cells below the oft-cited threshold of $1 per watt threshold, but it will speed up manufacturing and enable high-volume production.

“Sometimes vacuum processes are most cost effective and sometimes atmospheric processes are. All of our forecasts and models show we can get to extremely low costs in high volume processing with vacuum methods –- we are developing the non-vacuum methods for flexibility and to explore the fact that FASST can work with either kind of precursors,” Langdon said.

Those key advantages could help HelioVolt weather an inevitable round of consolidation in the thin-film industry. While Langdon wasn’t ready to predict how many of the 31 or so funded CIGS startups would remain standing, the company thinks there’s plenty of room for more than one winner — though the broader solar industry will likely experience more segmentation as multiple viable technologies crop up.

The use of aesthetically-pleasing solar cells in architecture, for example, will become an increasingly important segment as prices decrease. Five years from now, he predicts, thin-film solar will account for roughly 50 percent of the industry, with polycrystalline silicon cells accounting for the other half.

While Langdon hopes to see the renewable energy tax investments extended, he said he would prefer to have one set of rules put in place to eliminate the uncertainty that has plagued the industry and made investment, particularly in the wind sector, less consistent. Even if the financial incentives decrease over time, the clarity and continuity one common set of rules would provide would encourage the sector’s long-term growth.

Calling it a “sleeping giant,” he said the US offered the most potential room for growth. While European countries may currently have the largest markets, Langdon suggested that rising energy prices, combined with some well-timed incentives, could help solar flourish. If Texas were to implement the set of incentives that have helped California become the country’s largest solar hub, it could even surpass the Golden State.

Miasole, the thin-film solar cell maker that is the third member of a triumvirate of heavily-funded CIGS startups including Heliovolt and Nanosolar, has been pretty quiet since losing its CEO and laying off 40 workers late last year. In the interim, there has been plenty of speculation that it was faltering, and might even close its doors.

Not even close, according to a report this morning. Instead, Miasole is about to close a round of between $200 and $220 million, a source has told VentureWire — and, even better, the company will have a sky-high valuation of $1.2 billion. If true, the investment would be the largest single venture funding any solar company has received to date, although the reported valuation would be lower than Nanosolar’s.

This raises some questions about what’s going on inside Miasole. Why would investors pour money into a company that, as recently as April, lost a high-profile contract to a rival? Miasole was supposed to be in full production mode by early last year, but slipped on the dates. It was also reportedly planning an IPO, but no more mention of that was made after early 2007.

For the last few months, the company had declined to talk with the media.

A giant round of funding may indicate that the company has spent the extra time honing its technology, perhaps even entirely changing its manufacturing process, which some have suggested is inferior to its competitors’ processes.

That would explain a comment an investor, Bill Reichert of Garage Technology Ventures, made to me a couple months back. Although he would say nothing specific about the state of Miasole’s technology, and admitted that the company had taken “longer than we wanted” to mature, Reichert said that it was still making progress. “We’re extremely optimistic that these guys will change the world,” he told me.

Unmentioned by VentureWire is whether the money will come entirely from venture sources, as it has in the past. Another possible scenario is that Miasole is getting ready to build a large production facility. For that, it would likely raise debt from sources like banks, rather than selling shares. But with sizable new late-stage cleantech investment funds around like the one Kleiner Perkins (another Miasole investor) just announced, a $200 million venture round is plausible.

No matter what Miasole is doing, it will face some stiff competition. Heliovolt recently hit a record cell efficiency, and Nanosolar followed up by announcing a next-generation production tool that would put it in First Solar’s league. And since Miasole first started getting press, a hoard of other companies emerged from hiding or started up in thin-film production, from ultra-stealthy Optisolar to IBM’s new CIGS research division.

HelioVolt CEO BJ Stanbery is set to announce that his company has set a new speed record for CIGS conversion efficiency, ratcheting up the pressure in the competitive, high-stakes thin-film solar cell sector. The Austin, Texas, start-up, which raked in a cool $101 million in second round funding last October, claims its proprietary FASST reactive transfer printing process can produce cells with a 12.2% conversion efficiency in a mere 6 minutes.

This latest technological breakthrough comes as HelioVolt and competitors such as Nanosolar, Miasole, Solyndra and OptiSolar race to bring the cheapest, most efficient solar cells to market. All are competing to lower the cost of solar cells by using copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) instead of the costlier, but more efficient, crystalline silicon material. Silicon solar cells have a conversion efficiency of around 14-20%.

Nanosolar, the most heavily-funded thin film firm outside of the public market and one of the first to commercially sell its cells, broke the crucial $1 a watt price point in December — an important metric because it means cells can become competitive with conventional sources of electricity — and First Solar (NASDAQ: FSLR), the largest publicly traded thin-film firm, is close to doing so.

HelioVolt’s FASST process helps reduce costs by building CIGS cells 10-100 times faster than its competitors’ processes, Stanbery says. The 12.2% efficiency figure was independently confirmed by scientists at Colorado State University. Stanbery added that there was still much room for improvement, and that his company was focusing on squeezing a higher efficiency out of its cells.

The FASST printing process can directly apply (or “print”) thin film layers to a variety of substrates, including glass substrates for solar modules, roofing tiles and other construction materials. HelioVolt said last Tuesday that it would partner with Architectural Glass & Aluminum to develop building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) products.

Stanbery hopes to make a dent in silicon’s once indomitable lead in the industry by accelerating the commercialization of the high-throughput printing process to scale production at its soon-to-be completed 20 MW plant in Austin, after which it plans to aggressively expand its operations overseas.

Though it remains to be seen whether HelioVolt remains on schedule to get its cells out by the end of 2008, the company says its record breaking technology will put it out in front of its much bigger rival, First Solar, which uses cadmium telluride to build its cells, from the get-go. Even assuming its technology is superior, HelioVolt will have a lot of ground to make up if it ever hopes to catch First Solar, which already has over a gigawatt of production capacity, and some of its other rivals, which have announced more ambitious construction plans.

Nanosolar CEO Martin Rosecheisen, whose first plant’s capacity exceeds 400 MW, scoffs that HelioVolt’s plant looks more like a pilot project than a commercial-scale one. OptiSolar recently announced plans to build a 550 MW plant in San Luis Obispo County, California. It has already started construction on a 50 MW plant in Sarnia, Ontario, with two additional 20 MW plants to come in nearby Petrolia and Tilbury.

Here’s the latest action:

Kleiner Perkins preparing “big news” — Venerable venture fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has “big news” that it will be sharing tomorrow morning, we hear. We’ll be covering it first thing. One possibly related item is the recent registering of the firm’s 13th fund, found in a filing dug up by peHUB. The firm’s last raise was completed in February 2006, for $600 million. Data from Thomson Financial suggests the firm has invested a lot of that, or at least $556 in 107 startups over the past two years — though that does not include unannounced “stealth” deals.

Hewlett-Packard invents artificial intelligence circuit — Researchers at HP have come up with a circuit element for memory chips that will dramatically lower the power required and allow a range of values outside of binary code (zeros and ones), according to the New York Times. The device, a “memristor”, could revolutionize mobile devices, as well as easing the development of artificial intelligence functions like understanding speech.

Sims Online / EA-Land virtual world shutting down — EA-Land, the virtual world based off the popular Sims gaming franchise, will close its doors in two months. While Electronic Arts phrases the issue rather delicately, saying only “The lifetime of the game has drawn to an end,” it’s fairly obvious that they wouldn’t be closing the business if it were making money. And if a hot property like the Sims can’t succeed as a virtual world, other game developers should take note.

Generation Investment Management closes $683M cleantech fund – Headed by the infamous (and frighteningly named) duo of Al Gore and David Blood, Generation Investment Management is a London-based investor in both private and public cleantech companies. The new fund will invest in sectors including renewable energy, building efficiency, cleaner fossil energy (possibly meaning clean coal), sustainable agriculture and carbon markets, with an average investment size of $30 million. More details at the Financial Times. Gore, it should be noted, is also a partner at Kleiner Perkins.

Courts reject RIAA “making available” anti-piracy argument — A legal tactic used by the Recording Industry Association of America has been slapped down by a Federal judge, according to CNET. The RIAA’s argument was that simply making copyrighted files available over sharing networks constituted breaking the law, even if they were never downloaded by other users.

Radiohead won’t repeat free music experiment – A much-hailed experiment by Radiohead involving the public release of a new album on the Internet for optional donations by downloaders won’t be repeated, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The band still hasn’t said whether it considered the release a success. Radiohead is also working with MTV to highlight child slavery and sex trafficking, saying the opportunity is about “exploiting a situation while you have the chance.” Interesting wording…

Miasole just can’t get a break — Miasole, a thin-film solar cell maker that has raised a massive amount of cash, has run into quite a few problems over the last year, including delayed production, employee defections and disappointing cell performance. The latest blow: The loss of a $9 million contract from Dow Chemical, according to CNET. The money will go to a rival thin-film maker, Global Solar.

1. Funny or Die raises $15M, despite chance of latter
2. Did White House lead rejection of California’s emissions claims?
3. Redhat CEO Matthew Szulik resigns
4. Startup.com’s Tuzman to save Roo.com
5. Netsuite’s stock soars past $35
6. Cisco’s Charles Giancarlo, leaves to Silver Lake Partners
7. Jacked, online sports service, raises $6.5M
8. Top 10 Seattle-area tech stories of the year
9. Miasole reportedly lays off 40 workers
10. Ausra’s proposed 177MW plant is approved

Funny or Die raises $15M, despite strong chance of latter — Being funny is hard, but Will Ferrell made his career from it. That’s probably why Sequoia Capital and others have trusted Funny or Die, a startup project between himself and co-founder Adam McKay, with another $15 million. Here’s the problem: With 30 writers and only one big hit (The Landlord), we’re not so sure that “Funny” is a strong enough business plan to nurture this particular web baby. Portfolio has the full story.

Did White House lead denial of California’s right to regulate greenhouse emissions? — See here.

Redhat CEO Matthew Szulik resigns, replaced by Jim Whitehurst, former COO of Delta Airlines — CNET reports.

Online video company Roo.com lays off fifth of staff, and now appoints Kaleil Tuzman to take over — Roo was accused of mismanagement, board members were forced out, and an executive was indicted for money laundering and felony. Now Tuzman, the former CEO of the bubble era GovWorks.com, who was embodiment of excess during the Internet bubble, as captured in the documentary Startup.com, has taken over.

Netsuite’s stock opens $26, and roars past $35 on first day of trading — The company is now valued at $2.1 billion. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and his family own more than 70 percent of that.

Cisco Systems’s number two, Charles Giancarlo, leaves to Silicon Valley private equity firm, Silver Lake Partners — He was the heir-apparent to Chairman and CEO John Chambers, and he helped manage some important mergers, such as WebEx, and put in 14 years of service. But with Chambers set to stay between three and five more years, Giancarlo’s itch finally got too great. “I went home one day and talked to my wife and said, ‘Honey, I now know what you mean by a biological clock.’” In February, Cisco also lost Mike Volpi, another senior executive, who left to to join a start-up. (Forbes has details.)

Jacked, a service that runs stats, news and photos beside online sports programming, raises $6.5M — The Santa Monica, Calif. company’s first round was led by Core Capital Partners and Gabriel Venture Partners, with participation from Provenance Ventures. It announced a deal to provide its service on NBCSports.com

The top 10 Seattle-area tech stories of the year – Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter John Cook keeps a close eye on his city, and he’s assembled a list of the area’s top 10 stories of the year. Included are briefs on the area’s year in venture funding (the best since the dotcom bubble), strong results by Clearwire and Imperium Renewables, retreats from Jobster and Isilon, and more.

Miasole reportedly lays off 40 workers — Three disgruntled ex-employees revealed to VentureWire that solar CIGS maker Miasole recently laid off 40 of its staff. The story isn’t new, though; Back in October, CNET floated the same rumor, only to be told by Miasole CEO David Pearce that it was just a few contractors. The company itself isn’t currently responding to inquiries about the layoffs.

Ausra’s proposed 177MW plant is approved — We reported a month ago that solar thermal company Ausra is planning a 177 megawatt generation plant in California’s San Luis Obispo county, but the tricky hurdle of gaining regulatory approval for the plans remained. The bureaucrats have now given it a thumbs-up.

Miasole, the Silicon Valley company developing a new, flexible type of solar cell, has raised a significant $50 million in a fourth round of financing.

The funding deal, which comes after Miasole struggled to meet quality deadlines for its technology, was widely rumored to have been underway during the summer. News that it was in fact completed in July was first reported this morning by VentureWire (subscription required).

The Santa Clara, Calif. company says it has started shipping its cells to its first two customers, both in China, the solar power-hungry nation where regulations aren’t as tough to meet as they here in the U.S. The company assembles its solar modules in Shanghai.

The company has now raised $100 million.

Of about 10 investors participating in the new round, about six were new, former chief executive David Pearce said. One was a private equity or hedge fund, added Pearce, who stepped down recently after the company’s setbacks, and is now chairman. That means that several of the company’s original investors did not return to invest, which can sometimes be considered a warning sign. Previous investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, VantagePoint Venture Partners, Firelake Strategic Technology Fund, Garage Technology Ventures and Nippon Kouatsu Electric.

The company has also recently received some debt, Pearce said. Finally, earlier this week, the company received a $20 million grant from Solar America Initiative.

Three years ago, venture capitalists began investing in crop of Silicon Valley companies promising radical breakthroughs in solar cell technology.

One promising technology was copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS), a compound which experts believe can make cells and panels much more flexible — so that they could be stripped across vast parking lots, large roofs and more — and cheaper than the prevailing silicon technology.

However, the companies haven’t delivered as quickly as expected. Miasole, one of these start-ups, has just seen a casualty as a result: It’s chief executive, David Pearce (pictured top), who had said his company would be making $100 million by the end of this year and might even contemplate an IPO, has been replaced as CEO, reports Michael Kanellos at CNET. The company is nowhere near meeting Pearce’s revenue goal, and its lab results haven’t been that great.

The company is backed by big-name venture firm Kleiner Perkins and others.

Meanwhile, it is seeing younger companies joining the race, and getting funding.

Taking Pearce’s place is Joseph Laia (couldn’t find picture), a veteran of the semiconductor chip equipment industry, most recently at KLA-Tencor. The company is reportedly looking for more funding, which isn’t a surprise given its faltering.

Amid all the excitement about new solar technology, several promising companies are slipping on their delivery dates.

However, most of the companies still say they plan to deliver — it’s just a matter of time before they hit the market

Solyndra, a Santa Clara, Calif. solar company (see VB’s coverage), has seen one of its executives, Monier Nessim leave, after that company returned to more basic research and development, instead of push on toward production. Investors Redpoint and CMEA did not respond to a request for comment. The company could not be reached for comment. The company recently raised $79 million.

Meanwhile Palo Alto, Calif. start-up Nanosolar saw the departure of Chris Eberspacher, a recognized expert in solar “thin film” technology. Like Solyndra and several other companies, Nanosolar’s thin film approach uses a new flexible compound called CIGS for its solar cell material. The cells are cheaper to make, and can used for coating on large expanses of roofs and parking lots. The question surrounding them, however, is whether they will be efficient enough at converting the sun’s energy to be able to compete with silicon solar cells.

CIGS stands for copper-indium-gallium-selenide, and is made of those four elements.

Eberspacher was chief scientist at Nanosolar, and it isn’t clear why he left (see CNET Michael Kanellos’ story here, which first talked about the departure). CEO Martin Roscheisen said Nanosolar’s timing is still on track. While several years ago he suggested informally that the technology might be ready by 2006, that was never a firm date, he said. He said things are going well, and that Eberspacher’s departure does not impact the company. Werner Dumanski, who previously ran IBM’s storage disk R&D, product development, and manufacturing operations, has taken over Eberspacher’s job. He said: “Werner is the right guy in charge of this in this phase of our company.”

Eberspacher, meanwhile, is in talks to join Miasole, a Santa Clara, Calif. company doing something similar with CIGS. However, Miasole itself has slipped more noticeably. David Pearce, chief executive, had said in 2005 and 2006 his company would be in full production by now, but that hasn’t happened. (CNET’s Kanellos has another good story about this here.) Pearce tells VentureBeat that while the company has gotten its solar cells to the eight percent efficiency rate needed to grab a large market share, he hasn’t been able to do that in real production conditions — but that he hopes to soon. He plans to roll out production this summer.

He points to competitor First Solar, an Arizona publicly traded company that now has the highest market value ($5 billion) of any solar company. It uses thin-film solar technology too, but applies telluride, not CIGS. The company took 15 years of tinkering and testing before its cells became competitive. Telluride is much less efficient than CIGS in a lab setting, for instance. Its product began at six percent efficiency, but by last year it reached the desirable range of eight percent. That sparked demand so great that First Solar sold out of its product. First Solar went public in November. Now the company’s cells boast a nine percent efficiency. While that efficiency is still below that of silicon — used by companies such as SunPower ($4 billion market value) — it is much lower in cost, and so is still more desirable.

So it takes time. Pearce said he replaced Tim Starkey, his executive vice president of operations, with someone with more technical depth. He hired Stephen Barry, a thin film expert from the data storage industry, as vice president of operations, and Dallas Meyer, formerly at Seagate, as vice president engineering. He’s also in the process of raising more money, and has finished raising a significant portion of that — at a valuation that is higher than the round Miasole raised last October, from both new and existing backers. He expects to wrap up the rest by early July.

In separate but related to green tech:

See two-part series the Mercury News recently ran this week about California’s energy challenge:

First part: Is renewable energy enough?
Second part: Nuclear power?

And finally, see the unfortunate piece today about the Bush administration making a pro-auto industry pitch to members of Congress, urging them to oppose California’s efforts to enforce tough emissions standards on vehicles. The language of these pitches sounded suspiciously as if it were taken directly from the car lobby, according to the report.

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $168 million to 13 solar companies, many of them Silicon Valley start-ups, in what is the equivalent of manna falling from heaven for these companies.

It is cut-throat industry, where solar projects are expensive and difficult to get off the ground, but once at high-levels of production can prove efficient and profitable.

Just last week, a group of ethanol companies were awarded similar grants, to help create alternative fuels.

These are the most valuable awards yet for the start-up community’s push to create alternative energy sources to gasoline and natural gas.

The awards are part of President Bush’s Solar America Initiative.

The latest awardees include Berkeley’s PowerLight, and its parent company, San Jose’s SunPower. Particular noteworthy are the awards to Palo Alto’s Nanosolar and Santa Clara’s Miasole, two companies that are producing really thin sheets of solar cells that can be spread efficiently across vast areas, such as parking lots or roofs of large companies.

Miasole’s grant begins at $5.8 million for the first year and will total about $20 million over three years if it meets certain targets. Nanosolar will get about $20 million over three years if it meets its milestones.

More details here.