VentureBeat

Like a new car, a solar system is a big investment. Some home owners can front the $10,000 - $30,000 for the panels and installation, but most need help. SunRun is one of a new breed of companies that’s figuring out ways to set up almost anyone with solar panels, whether or not they have lots of money.

The earliest solar vendors were expert mainly in setting up and maintaining solar systems. SunRun, on the other hand, is a bit more like a leasing agent. Instead of just selling panels, SunRun sells its customers something called a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), which locks into a low electricity rate for a period of 18 years. The customer agrees to host the panels and pay for the power, but never needs to invest a large sum.

The model is a variation on a new business category that has been dubbed “solar services,” and contains several strong startups. These include SolarCity, which provides leasing or payment plans; Sungevity, which tries to make solar dirt cheap; and Recurrent Energy, which sells power to businesses and government. For its part, SunRun limits itself to the residential business.

Like all good ideas, solar services is a bit more complicated than it seems on the surface. The companies have to contract out the actual installation to specialists, or train their own installers. They also have to figure out how to cover their financing options, either through banks or their own on-hand cash. And they have to plan well into the future, because most remain responsible for servicing the panels they install.

The practical considerations aren’t stopping their rampant growth, though. SunRun co-founder Nat Kreamer told me recently that demand is exceeding the company’s expectations, and that he sees solar service “emerging as the dominant business model.” In one example, a contract for multi-residence installation the company won rights to bid on in San Jose saw three quarters of the households choose SunRun’s PPA agreement, while only a quarter opted to buy their systems outright.

There’s plenty of room for growth. Although the majority of these companies operate mostly in California — with some notable exceptions like Standard Renewable Energy — they’ve got around a million rooftops to cover before they have to start fighting for customers. And as costs for solar go down, the other 49 states will await.

The $12 million funding was led by Foundation Capital, and is SunRun’s first venture round. The San Francisco company was seeded by angel investors and its management team.

For years, various companies have emerged to try to give you the nirvana of centralized control of all your devices in your home.

But most have failed to live up to the vision articulated by people like Bill Gates, who has long sought to wire his entire home, and Martha Stewart, who envisioned a way for homemakers to receive an email when their kids arrive home or verify their pet has been fed while out of town.

But with Internet technology continuing to get more robust, a range of companies are making good headway.

One relatively quiet company that impressed me with a demo of its product last night is Utah-based Control4, which told me it has just raised $20 million more in financing. The round was led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Foundation Capital.

With a single remote control, it lets you manage everything from your video-recording equipment to your thermostat. It even provides a way to let your local utility communicate with your home so that you can take action to reduce costs. For example, the utility can send your Control4 system a signal when its load is at peak, so that your system can automatically turn down your air conditioning, lighting and other energy-hogging devices.

The Control4 control box is about the size of a standard set-top box, and sells for $699. It manages everything by an Internet connection. It is about to sell a new version for $499, the company told me last night.

Control4 competes against Silicon Valley’s iControl, a company with a similar name that has also been working away for years on its own system to control your devices. iControl raised $15.5 million in April, led by Kleiner Perkins. There’s also 4HomeMedia, which raised $2.4 million from Pond.

Today, at the Supernova conference in San Francisco, Control4 will also announce plans to work with electronics company LG to build HDTV sets that allow hotel guests to control lighting, room temperature, draperies and entertainment systems through the television with a single remote control.

Control4 is already working with hospitals to give similar controls to nurses and doctors.

You can blame the popularity of YouTube for the success of Solarflare Communications. Because demand for internet video keeps on growing, the need for infrastructure to handle the growth is also on the rise.

Solarflare Communications has raised $26 million in venture capital for its high-speed networking chip business as part of an effort to create more energy-efficient data centers.

The Irvine, Calif.-based company is creating 10GBASE-T chips, which can transfer data at 10 gigabits a second over the Ethernet protocol. Such chips are used in servers and switches inside data centers to boost the transfer of data from one piece of hardware to another with the lowest power consumption.

The company is in a good spot because it is the first to capitalize on a generational shift in networking, as network speeds move from 1-gigabit-per-second to 10-gigabits, said Russell Stern, chief executive of Solarflare (pictured below).

The round includes previous investors such as Oak Investment Partners, Foundation Capital, Accel Partners and Amadeus Capital Partners. The round slightly exceeds the amount raised by rival chip company Aquantia, which raised $25 million in March.

Solarflare was started in 2001 as a chip design firm focused on 10-gigabit Ethernet networking. In 2006, it merged with Level 5 Networks in Cambridge, England. It started shipping a low-power 10GbE vNIC controller/MAC chip in February 2007.

Solarflare said it will use the new money to launch its next-generation products, including a low-power 10GBASE-T PHY. The company hopes to dominate 10-gigabit networking the way that Broadcom and Marvell have dominated 1-gigabit networking.

“The interesting thing about networking is that no player has dominated more than one generation of product,” Stern said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that national energy consumption by servers and data centers could nearly double by 2011 to more than 100 billion kilowatt hours, representing a $7.4 billion annual electricity cost.

With technologies such as Solarflare’s networking chips, it becomes easier to shift data to outlying sites with greener energy sources, such as solar or wind power. The computing of data can happen at those locations in a more energy-efficient manner than inside a power-hungry data center, said Andy Hopper, a fellow at Corpus Christi College and head of the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

The latest investment brings the total amount raised by Solarflare (and its acquired entity, Level 5) to over $126 million in seven years. Solarflare’s partners include Accton, Citrix, Delta, Ixia, Panduit, SMC and VMware. The company has 125 employees.

There has been no shortage of attention to market research in the past few years. Established business like Nielsen and J.D. Power have struggled to encompass the Internet and use its information to give their clients a better idea of how new products are seen by consumers. Where they’ve fallen short, multiple startups have bloomed to do a better job.

The innovation has led to plenty of acquisitions: Umbria, Buzzmetrics, Telephia, Audience Analytics and others have all made exits for their investors. But according to Biz360, which just took a fresh $10 million round, the market for market research is still seriously lacking in creativity.

Biz360’s current offering is a media tracking tool called Media Insights. Any time someone like me writes about, say, a digital camera, Biz360’s automated process picks it up and does some analysis on the thrust of the article: Did I like or hate the camera, and why? The data is then returned to the business customer that produces the camera. But what corporations choose to do when given that data is changing, says CEO Brad Brodigan.

“Two years ago, people were buying media analysis for defensive purposes — they wanted to know when people were saying bad things,” says Brodigan. But now companies want to know how to compete better. “What’s driving someone to buy one digital camera over another, or one car over another? There’s been a big shift from defense to offensive tools,” he says.

That sort of information is mostly revealed by customer opinions, of course, which means Biz360 — and its competitors — will have to move toward much more analysis of social media and customer opinion on websites like Amazon.com. Brodigan admits that some companies already do that, but says Biz360 will provide a superior product by merging its new findings with its existing media research.

And, in any case, the trick is in the analysis, not simply collecting the data. There’s no shortage of information on the Internet, but just like search engines, market research startups have to find ways to understand that information, and give it to their clients in a processed, easy-to-understand format. The aim is not just to see whether people like your camera, but specifically which features and characteristics they like and dislike.

Startups are hard at work to bring that level of detail to market research. One example is Networked Insights, which tags reviews and conversations to figure out, for instance, what percentage of customers really care about the camera’s 24X zoom. Another company is BuzzLogic, which recently acquired the Firefox add-on BlogRovR, to give it better data. But as far as the old guard of market research, Brodigan says he doesn’t think there are any that have a strong product. And down the line, that will likely mean another round of acquisitions by companies struggling to catch up.

The $10 million funding was led by Foundation Capital, and partner Bill Elmore joined the board. Previous investors Granite Ventures and Scale Venture Partners also participated. It’s the second full round of funding for Biz360, but it hasn’t disclosed the total amount of the first round. The company is based in San Mateo, Calif.

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Rearden Commerce, a Silicon Valley company that wants to become your personal concierge everywhere, including on your mobile phone, has raised $100 million in funding from some financial powerhouses.

So far, the company has worked for years on a web-based personal assistant service, which lets you do everything from book travel arrangements to manage your calendar. But the company recently demoed its coming mobile service to VentureBeat. It is preparing for a major offensive in mobile, to be announced at the end of this month.

Investors include JPMorgan Chase, American Express, Oak Investment Partners and Foundation Capital. The latter three has also pumped in an earlier $100 million round. The company is now valued at more than $500 million, according to an anonymous source cited in a separate Dow Jones article (no link).

It comes at a time when there’s a big race on among companies to be able to offer advertisers a compelling mobile platform to reach consumers. Rearden says it can offer advertisers detailed information, about where people are located at any given time, what their travel plans are and all sorts of other information about them.

It is growing quickly. It has 300 employees, and wants to have 500 by the end of this year.

The Foster City, Calif.-based Rearden Commerce was created by Patrick Grady, who has worked on this since 1999, and who was previously an investor.

Notably, it also comes at a time when fast-growing social networks like Facebook are developing more robust mobile versions, which also contain useful applications that might compete with Rearden. However, Rearden says its product is more robust for transactions.

Indeed, the company’s user-friendly personal assistant helps you manage a variety of tasks, including dining, managing your address book and more. But it has focused on business-to-business applications, making sure transactions can be conducted securely. But the company will eventually deliver the Rearden Personal Assistant for consumers. The company also plans to rapidly scale its on-demand platform, to allow new merchants and third-party applications providers to be integrated into its concierge service. A demo of the company’s initial technology is here.

The downside, however, is that its platform isn’t completely open. If you prefer Yelp as a restaurant review service, for example, you can’t sub it instead of Rearden’s default service, Zagat. While the service will open up more going forward, executives aren’t saying when that will happen.

The mobile version isn’t yet public, but the demo we saw shows that the mobile features use some of the cooler features of Yahoo Go, such as the ability to scroll through your services, carousel-like, via a menu on the left-hand side of your phone.

Rearden Commerce has also inked strategic partnerships with American Express and JPMorgan Chase. In the past 18 months, Rearden Commerce has added more than 1,700 new corporate customers representing more than one million contracted users. The customers include Fortune 500 companies such as ConAgra Foods and Thomson as well as small enterprises C-COR, Diagnostic Health, and Symplified Technologies.

It’s worth noting that the company raised the big pile of cash during a weak environment for start-ups to raise venture capital.

The company came out secrecy in 2005. Its Rearden Personal Assistant helps users find and book the range of services they need based on company policies, their personal preferences, location and the context of what they’re doing.

Just like a seasoned executive assistant, the Rearden Personal Assistant automatically inserts details into the user’s calendar and proactively notifies them of schedule changes via phone, email or text message — whether they’re in the office or on the road. Chase said it plans to use the assistants as the basis for a program to manage a new credit-card service for millions of consumers.

The company is not yet profitable but says it has growing revenue streams from some 137,000 merchants that are hoping to gain distribution through the assistant.

The green building sector has been awash with VC cash in recent months: Despite there only being a few dozen startups in the nascent field, investors have started paying close attention — helping several raise new rounds of funding.

Newark, California-based CalStar Cement has received $3.4 million from several investors, including Foundation Capital, while Serious Materials landed a hefty $50 million second funding round, led by New Enterprise Associates, Rustic Canyon Partners and Foundation Capital. The Sunnyvale-based startup had earlier capped a $5 million first round. Los Gatos-based Calera, which is developing a cement capable of sequestering carbon dioxide, is backed by Khosla Ventures.

New Jersey-based Hycrete, which produces an admixture (or liquid solution) that is used to waterproof concrete, completed its second round in 2006. Just one more, CEO David Rosenberg says, could take it to profitability; in late February, he said he was seeking $10 - 20 million. Its investors include RockPort Capital Partners and NGEN Partners. Hycrete’s admixture was one of the first to receive a cradle-to-cradle certification through McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, a green product and design firm. The designation “cradle-to-cradle,” coined by architect William McDonough and Michael Braungart, refers to a product that can be completely recycled or re-used. It was also selected as a Technology Pioneer at this year’s World Economic Forum.

A mixture of sand, aggregate, cement and water, the admixture acts as a replacement for the external membranes that are typically used to keep water from seeping into concrete. When it is mixed into concrete, it links up to metallic ions and behaves like a hydrophobic solution (like oil) — repelling water. Because it doesn’t require volatile organic compounds (VOCs) or other harmful chemicals, the corrosion-resistant concrete can safely be recycled and reused in other projects. Conventional forms of concrete, which use permanently bonded waterproofing membranes, are sent to landfills.

Hycrete’s technology has already been used in more than 75 projects worldwide — including several Marriott and Hilton hotels and condos and apartments in Seattle. Other applications include mixing it into roofing material to make green roofs — roofs covered by lawns — or into drywall to stop moisture seepage.

The admixture reduces energy waste, cuts costs and lets builders receive Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) points. Developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, the LEED accreditation indicates a building has successfully adopted a suite of rigorous green building standards. The rating is seen as a boon by companies seeking to bolster their environmental credentials and is increasingly being implemented in new construction projects. Hycrete’s product helps builders reach that goal faster.

SiBEAM, a company developing technology to stream high definition video more quickly than any existing technology, has raised $40 million in third round of funding.

The financing was led by New Enterprise Associates. The other firms backing up SiBEAM are Foundation Capital and U.S. Venture Partners.

SiBEAM, of Sunnyvale, Calif., is developing a technology called WirelessHD. The technology helps you move rich, high-definition data like video wirelessly from one gadget to another, such as from your portable digital video camera to you TV. We’ve covered the company earlier.

WirelessHD competes with WirelessUSB and WiFi. Wireless USB transfers data at a speed of 480 megabits a second over three meters, while wirelessHD uses the 60-gigahertz spectrum and works in higher speeds, starting at four gigabits at 10 meters and with the theoretical maximum speeds of up to 25 gigabits a second, as the technology matures. That is more than ten times faster than WiFi solutions.

SiBEAM is the first company to build 60GHz chipsets using a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology that lowers the costs of the WiHD solution so that it’s affordable for the mass market.

With the money raised, the company hopes to get is the first WiHD-gadgets to shops by the end of this year.

If SiBEAM succeeds, it will be remarkable. The video market is huge, and who wouldn’t want to download videos faster?

The first devices available to consumers will be “little adapter devices” that are used with the existing gadgets like TV, HD movie players, camcorders and gaming consoles, says John LeMoncheck, the President and CEO of SiBEAM.

The price of the adapter is expected to be on par with WiFi adapters. With the adapter, WirelessHD can be used with old gadgets. WirelessHD chips embedded to new TVs and other new gadgets will appear in shops in the beginning of year 2009, LeMoncheck says.

If you’ve just bought a flat-screen TV, and want to transfer hi-definition video from your laptop or camcorder to your TV, you can buy the adapter — instead of having to buy a new TV.

He says that the main target for the solution is new flat screen TVs. WiHD will work with a range of ten meters, so it’s meant to be used between the devices in one room, not in the whole house.

John LeMoncheck said he is convinced that WiHD will win “the battle of wireless technology” and become the standard in wireless. WirelessHD is promoted by SiBEAM, Intel, LG Electronics, Panasonic, NEC Corporation, Samsung Electronics, Toshiba and Sony. The companies formed a group to promote WirelessHD standard in the year 2006.

SiBEAM was founded 2004 by experts in wireless communications from the University of California, Berkeley and the private industry. The company has 80 employees.

Xoopit wants to help you more easily distribute your photos, videos and files — and taps into your social network through your email account to do so.

The San Francisco-based company is in private beta, and it has a few components. It’s a plugin for Firefox that works in Gmail, it’s also a free-standing site and an iGoogle widget. Here’s the gist of how it works in Gmail (VentureBeat readers can get invites at the bottom of the article).

First, you install the plugin, then sign in to your Gmail account: Xoopit’s application appears within Gmail, above your messages. It searches through all of your emails to find attachments and links to photos, videos and other files, putting everything into a simple interface.

It collects lists of friends in your email, based on their relationship to the media file, so you can do things like comment on a photo and it will be emailed to the person who sent you the photo. You can also search Xoopit’s collection based on the person or topic. You can also post an item from Xoopit, from within Gmail, to Facebook or a blog.

In my testing today, the tool only pulled up a fraction of the media files that I have in Gmail — but the company’s site is no doubt getting hammered by its first big wave of users. The core of the company’s work has been in developing search and data-organization technology to enable it to access and sort so much data, and the team is comprised of experienced engineers from a variety of well-known search and data-analysis companies, so I expect these bugs to get fixed in short order.

The company is branding itself as a sort of social network for email because, as Bijan Marashi says, email is the largest, oldest data set on the web, and data in it is a mess.

The longer-term vision is to allow users to seamlessly import and export data across email services, social networks and other sites. Xoopit, like many startups, hopes to one day have complete access to data on sites like Facebook — so maybe Gmail users, could for example easily either dump all of their photos collected by Xoopit into Facebook, or vise versa. Marashi imagines someone being able to tag him in a Facebook photo, which he could comment on from within Xoopit in Gmail, and then have that comment appear on the photo in Facebook.

The company received seed funding from Foundation Capital 18 months ago, and Accel Partners joined the firm in funding the company in a Series A round, with total funding coming in at $6.5 million.

Get your invites here.

I just talked to Steve Vassallo, a principal at Foundation Capital who focuses on cleantech. In this post, I go over some of the highlights of that conversation, including discussion about Foundation’s strategy for cleantech investment, some parts of the field that seem to be hot right now and also the recent announcement (our coverage) that HP Labs will be partnering with Foundation for an Entrepreneur in Residence Program.