VentureBeat

Two companies have been tapped as the first recipients of an investment from a program called RechargeIT, run by Google’s philanthropic arm: Aptera Motors, a Carlsbad, Calif. company that is gearing up to sell a futuristic three-wheeled car; and ActaCell, a battery company that hopes to help make electric cars both cheap and safe.

Each company is receiving $2.75 million from Google.org (although ActaCell also has other new investors). The announcement comes as RechargeIT is releasing the results of a plug-in hybrid vehicle (PHEV) test showing that a modified Prius can get over 90 miles per gallon.

The 230+ miles-per-gallon Aptera has received plenty of attention over the past few months, and a post here on VentureBeat asking whether readers would drive the odd-looking vehicle continues to get responses indicating that yes, quite a few people are interested in the $30,000 car. The Google investment is also only part of a total $24 million round that should bring the company closer to its production goals.

However, ActaCell is appearing for the first time with this investment. The company, spun out of the University of Texas at Austin and based in the same city, is working on a lithium-ion battery technology that it thinks might be able to change the dynamics of the electric car market. At the moment, li-ion is by far the preferable battery type in terms of performance, but it is also far more expensive than competing technologies like nickel-metal hydride (NiMH).

Outside of the funding details, CEO Bill Ott didn’t want to say much about the technology when I spoke to him. However, he was willing to admit that there are a few broad problems that ActaCell wants to tackle. One of the top priorities is safety — li-ion batteries are famous for exploding or catching on fire in laptops. Cars, obviously, need to operate without either of those things happening.

Just as important is the cost. Ott suggested that a major component of cost is in the materials that go into li-ion batteries, which often include “precious commodities” like cobalt and nickel. “If you want to build a successful company,” he told me, “you have to have a low-cost material.” Also important is extending the life of the battery so that it needs to be replaced less often.

The company plans on releasing the details of initial tests of its batteries later this year, and Ott says that they should be commercializing the technology by 2010, around the time they’ll need another round of funding.

Major competitors to a technology like ActaCell include A123, a li-ion maker that is loaded with cash and appears to be contemplating an IPO, and secretive EEStor, a maker of so-called “hypercapacitors” that entered a partnership with defense giant Lockheed Martin this year. EEStor, by the way, hates talking to press, but a new mystery blogger has been talking about the company; if you’re curious about their progress, try checking it out.

The total investment taken by ActaCell was for $5.85 million. The round was actually led by DFJ Mercury, with participation from Google.org, Applied Ventures, and Good Energies.

Unwired Nation launched a service today turns online content into an audio podcast so that users listen to the content in their car, at the gym or any other place they carry their phone.

Coincidentally, another new company, BlueGrind.com, offers a similar service. It lets you find an RSS feed for your favorite site, and the converts text content into an MP3 file and submits it to iTunes. For blog and other site owners, it is useful too. It places the audio version into a player that can be embedded into the site, so each article will have a “play” button. Users can then listen to articles one after another while surfing the Web.

They both plan to make money the same way: advertising with the audio. Unwired will insert ads into the content, which it also gets via an RSS feed from publishers. It will let publishers serve their own ads, rotating so that UnWired and the publisher both make money. Publishers can also trade this right amongst themselves, paying for advertising inventory in another publisher’s feed if they so choose.

Other services exist to translate text, but they’ve been expensive, and cater mainly to large businesses. Unwired and BlueGrind are free, and are going after the masses.

UnWired of Austin, Texas company, has raised slightly more than $7 million in two rounds from Gefinor Ventures, Accent Texas, Aegis Texas Venture Fund, DFJ Mercury and other investors. It has partnered with Pheedo to help it to serve ads into the vocalized feeds. It also announced partnerships with uShip, an online marketplace for shipping services, Zooven, a real estate search engine that will use Unwired to distribute lead information to real estate agents, and Loanables, a neighbor-to-neighbor borrowing network.

UnWired Nations’ original product, UnWired Buyer for eBay, has let millions of people bid on eBay auctions over mobile phones. The latest service allows touch tone interaction, to allow publishers to guide users through the content.

BlueGrind is similar in its advertising strategy. It will insert an ad after introducing the article’s headline. Vick Madenian, VP of product management, told us the company wants to be the “Google of audio ads.” The Pasadena, Calif. company is bootstrapped (no outside funding), and launched in January.

Here’s an example of how it works with Wordpress.

Although I try to stay on top of events in the life sciences, announcements do sometimes manage to slip through the cracks. Some days, in fact, I end up triaging. Because the roots of this site — not to mention many of its readers — are in Silicon Valley, Bay Area events are a priority. Then come announcements from the rest of the U.S., then Asia, then Europe. Also, smaller or partial fundings tend to take a backseat.

Looking back over my notes — it’s the only way I keep anything straight — I see quite a few of these orphans have piled up. So for the sake of completeness, I’m inaugurating this occasional feature to recap the fundings, mergers and IPOs that got away from me. I’ll put all the details below the fold, so only forge ahead if you’re really interested. RSS subscribers, unfortunately, are going to get the whole thing anyway.

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