VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Visa to team up with Google for mobile payment platform — Credit card giant Visa will make a mobile payment application for Google’s mobile platform, Android. The app may also include location-based services to help you find where to rack up more credit card debt.

Is Google Chrome a security risk? – Experts have yet to weigh in, for the most part, but ZDNet suggests that some companies already consider the new web browser risky.

China Mobile requests a well censored iPhone — Chinese carrier China Mobile has asked Apple for a stripped-down iPhone, without WiFi or 3G web access, in order to keep users from fleeing to its competitor.

Book tells all about Harvard Business School — Ahead of the Curve, a book by a Harvard graduate, may be of interest to potential attendees: Its author calls Harvard Business School a “factory for unhappy people”. PeHub has a good review, including an excerpted account of venture capitalist Tim Draper trying to get a humorless HBS class to sing.

The future of computing — Microsoft chief researcher Craig Mundie “envisioned a 3D virtual world populated by virtual presences, using a combination of client and cloud services,” at the MIT Emerging Technology Conference. CNET’s Dan Farber has much more.

Angry workers kill Indian CEO — A mob of workers attacked and killed the Indian CEO of Graziano Transmission after they were laid off this week, shocking the country and aptly proving why American execs prefer to do their layoffs from a boardroom.

Vindigo finally joins the deadpool — Mobile content company Vindigo, which was founded almost a decade ago to make supply guides for the Palm, and which survived the web bubble, has finally been shuttered by its Japanese owner, For-Side.

SolFocus opens a plant in Spain — The concentrating photovoltaics company has proven itself by completing a 500 kilowatt installation and now has its eyes on California.

Content delivery network Abacast buys Tukati — Combined, Abacast and Tukati will offer streaming, on-demand and progressive download video, games, push delivery and software distribution.

Enterasys CEO suddenly passes away — Michael Fabiaschi, the chief executive of networking equipment maker Enterasys, died suddenly in his home at age 53. The chairman is acting as a stand-in.

Pay attention to the road – California has outlawed texting while driving.

Writing on Nanosolar’s blog, CEO Martin Roscheisen has unveiled the next prong in his firm’s business plan — a focus on municipal solar power plants of 2 - 10 megawatts in size. The idea is to build 10 acre lots on the outskirts of small cities that could feed into the municipal power grid directly.

Each lot, consisting of several rows of solar panels mounted on rails above ground, could provide up to 2 megawatts, enough to serve 1,000 homes. The panels would be mounted on rails to prevent them from affecting the surrounding wildlife and vegetation.

Nanosolar’s scheme could be scaled up to supply the needs of larger cities — for instance, 5 lots, which would generate 10 megawatts of electricity, could serve 5,000 homes. Unlike coal-fired plants, which typically take 10 - 15 years to build, solar power plants can be done in as little as 12 months — and much more cheaply.

Though Rosencheisen acknowledged the appeal of rooftop arrays, which solar installers like SolarCity, Sun Run and Sungevity focus on, he also criticized them as a business “that’s difficult to scale rapidly in a truly meaningful way,” and “a somewhat more expensive proposition.” Imagine having to hire a contractor to crawl around your roof to install an expensive array or — worse yet — having to set it up yourself, he noted irreverentially.

This small plant approach, though new to the U.S., has already been widely implemented throughout Europe and Asia in what Rosencheisen called a “silent revolution” that has yet to be picked up on by the mainstream press, and that is too often criticized by utility executives as being too costly or unrealistic. “It works, it is economic, and it is possible now,” he said.

Nanosolar has gotten plenty of attention for its claim that it can sell its cells for as low as 99 cents per watt, low enough to be competitive with non-renewable energy sources, as well as recently raising over $50 million more from EDF Energies Nouvelles. However, there are a number of other, less-sung companies that have either implied or outright stated that they have a similar game plan for small-scale power plants.

SolFocus, for example, makes large solar concentrator panels, which use mirrors to focus more light onto highly efficient solar photovoltaics. Its initial product isn’t designed for rooftop installation, but would work perfectly on open spaces near facilities that need modest amounts of power — such as universities or off-grid villages. It raised $63.6 million last year to build its panels in the U.S. and, through its new subsidiary SolFocus Europe, across the Atlantic.

In fact, the move to build small has swept most categories of solar power, as companies have come to realize that they can thus avoid most of the bureaucratic snags involved in building plants that produce over 50 megawatts. Furthermore, by grouping their panels into small lots, they’ve been able to grab small tracts of land on the edges of cities and towns, or on land that can be dual-purposed like farms. A secondary advantage is the ability to hook into the existing power grid without the modifications required to channel power from a large plant.

Another example is Cool Earth Solar, a startup based in Livermore, Calif. that hews to the “cheaper is better” model, using inexpensive reflective balloons to concentrate light on cells. It plans to suspend its balloons on cable-bound arrays 12-14 feet above active farmland, letting sunlight strike both the solar cells and crops beneath. The firm claims that it can produce electricity for 18 cents a watt, and hopes to ramp up its production of balloon concentrators to 50 megawatts by next year.

And there’s Infinia, a company that just raised its second round to $57 million, which specializes in the production of 3 kilowatt dishes that, lumped into groups, will generate 1-10 megawatts in small-scale projects. Finally, in the solar thermal category, there’s eSolar, which just snagged $130 million from Google, Oak Investment and Idealab to pursue a similar approach — building a number of small plants that produce up to 33 megawatts each.

The only category to have mostly stayed away from this trend is expensive silicon-based solar, which is generally relegated to rooftop installations. Yet even there a few exceptions are already starting to appear. OptiSolar, for example, a Hayward, Calif., based startup, makes somewhat less expensive thin-film solar cells. It last year announced plans to build a 40 megawatt solar power installation near Sarnia, in Ontario, Canada, and has since announced several more of a similar size.

SolFocus is the latest Silicon Valley solar power startup to raise generous amounts of cash from investors, despite not having a product on the market yet.

SolFocus, of Mountain View, Calif., makes solar panels with mirrors that concentrate sunlight on electricity-generating cells. This reduces the need for silicon, an expensive substance used by the semiconductor market.The $52 million second round of funding we reported two months ago has now grown to $63.6 million with the addition of an unnamed hedge fund. The money will be split between SolFocus and its new subsidiary, SolFocus Europe.

In addition to its previous round, the latest round brings the SolFocus war chest to over $95 million, although a whopping $31.1 million of the latest round will go to help jump-start SolFocus Europe, the company’s new overseas division.

Like other solar companies, SolFocus is eager to get into the European market, where government subsidies often both make manufacturing cheaper and consumers more eager to buy, because of the subsidized prices. A number of other solar companies have also headed across the Atlantic, including HelioVolt (our coverage) and Nanosolar (our coverage).

SolFocus uses mirrors to direct more light into the center of the cell, a strategy that the company says halves the cost of traditional solar installations. The company will begin installing its panels for industrial applications in 2008.

Although the SolFocus is highly valued, and investors compete to put money into it, it’s not the only company that says it can drastically reduce the cost of photovoltaic cells. Both of the other two companies mentioned above, for example, make PV cells from Copper Indium Gallium Selenide (CIGS), a much cheaper material.

SolFocus, a Silicon Valley company that uses mirrors to concentrate the sun on solar cells, continues to soak up large amounts of cash.

Two years ago, the company created a frenzy among investors, and took $32 million from investors, or more than twice the amount expected. It did so because investors valued the company so highly (meaning the company could give away less shares in return for the cash). Now it has raised $52 million more, according to a press release this morning, with about half going toward launching SolFocus Europe, a subsidiary in Madrid, Spain.

It’s one more sign of how hot solar technology is, especially new technology like SolFocus,’ which promises to produce electricity without using so much expensive silicon.

The parent company, based in Mountain View, Calif., will hold about 70 percent of the new subsidiary, with the remainder going to investors in the latest round, which include New Enterprise Associates, Moser Baer India, NGEN Partners, Yellowstone Capital Inc. and other undisclosed investors.

NEA’s Scott Sandell, the partner who helped bid up the value of SolFocus during the investment two years ago, will take a board of SolFocus Europe. The company’s chief executive said it’s easier to take an alternative energy company public in Europe, citing one reason for the move.

SolFocus will only begin selling its product in the fourth quarter of next year, raising the question of whether the company intends to go public before production, in order to tap into public markets to help it expand.

Updated

Practical Instruments has raised $8 million in a first round of funding to develop what it says is the most powerful solar “concentration” technology yet.

It uses solar panels that track the sun as it moves. The panels use mirrors to concentrate the sunlight for the photovoltaic process, thereby boosting performance.

It is the latest in a wave of entrants in the booming solar power industry, and will compete against a number of other “concentration” companies, including Energy Innovations, SolFocus and Solaria. It will be presenting its technology at the Solar Power 2006 expo in San Jose this week. (See summary of the solar wave in the Mercury News today.)

RockPort Capital Partners and Nth Power led the venture capital round. Trinity Ventures and Rincon Venture Partners also participated.

The wave of solar funding joins a wider boom in alternative energy investments: In just the last few days, we’ve seen solar monitoring start-up Fat Spaniel, power management company iWatt, biofuel start-up Primafuel (Long Beach, Calif.) and biofuel start-up Amyris all raise new financing.

Practical Instruments chief executive Brad Hines said he is taking a different tack than the other solar competitors. Two years ago, Hines left competitor Energy Innovations, which users a similar tracking technology. But that technology was early and the panels required “tower” and other support structures that created panels different to those the industry was familiar with, Hines said. As a result, the company struggled to create what is effectively its own distribution channel. While Energy Innovations boasted a good concentration technology, installers didn’t know what to do with it, he said. (We wrote about Energy Innovations here last year, when it raised venture capital. We contacted Energy Innovations President Andrew Beebe for a response to Hines’ critique; he declined comment).

So Hines, who was also a “chief architect” at NASA, founded Practical Instruments (see team in picture) with the goal of making panels that are the same shape as regular solar panels. He also pledges they will cost less and produce more power. The company’s panels can produce 30 percent more power for a given area than the current leaders, he says. However, the company hasn’t started delivering its product or set pricing yet, so we’ll see if he pulls this off.

The company’s technology resides on the rooftop, and so can be installed on more buildings than, say SolFocus, which requires a ground mounting and is more focused on serving utilities, he said.

Solaria, another company we’ve written about, has raised money for panels with concentration technology — but its technology does not use tracking, and so it’s limited to only two to three times the regular concentration of sunlight on the solar cells. Practical Instruments see concentration levels of about ten times regular concentration.

The investment will fund the production of Practical Instruments’ flagship product, Heliotube, the company said.