VentureBeat

What’s the best local place for coffee? What about a burrito? Chances are if you don’t know, you know where to find out: Citysearch, Yelp, Zagat or any number of other sites. But that isn’t preventing a new generation of startups from trying to get their foot in the door. The latest is Praized Media, which is launching into public beta today.

Despite the ubiquity of local listings, sites like Yelp have some weak points that can be attacked. In areas outside the big cities — San Francisco, New York and so forth — listings are sparse. But inside those urban areas, too many reviews can overwhelm users, who don’t know which to trust.

Praized, rather than maintaining such a top-heavy site, offers a platform that ties into media like blogs and social networks with a light-weight voting and comment system. Bloggers and publishers can easily integrate the Praized tools into their sites so that if, for instance, they write about a coffee shop, Praized is attached. For users, there are “tribes,” which represent their friends, allowing them access to trusted reviews.

The problem for Praized is going to be lack of a distinct identity. The voting tools look very similar to Loladex, which launched its social listings platform on Facebook in March. Another site, Center’d, wants to create its own social network based around events and listings.

Praized does have brand-new partnerships with Yellowbook and Localeze. But if its scheme appears to be working, the existing listings sites are still young and nimble enough to add in basic tools that mimic what Praized and others are doing. At the very least, the competition will be stiff.

The Montreal-based company raised $1 million in funding last year from Garage Technology Ventures.

A San Francisco-based company with plans to help the developing world snuff out its kerosene-burning lamps and replace them with cheap, solar-powered LEDs and compact fluorescents has finally unveiled its production models and announced the details of its for-profit business plan.

We’ve followed the progress of D.light Design from a Stanford design competition in late 2006 through its launch in the non-academic world, to the present moment. Started by two Stanford MBAs, D.light has been working on light designs cheap enough to be affordable for families making as little as a dollar a day, but with a big enough market to create a sizable company.

The problems with kerosene are numerous: It’s polluting and harmful to the health of those who regularly use it for light, it can start fires that injure or kill people, and surprisingly, it’s also relatively expensive — according to co-founder Ned Tozun, kerosene is a $38 billion market that can suck up to 30 percent of the income of families that have to use it regularly.

Unfortunately, that’s quite a lot of people, in part because areas that are ostensibly powered by electricity actually only get a few hours a day of current. D.light, along with similar companies like Mightylight, uses the figure of 1.6 billion people, although its initial target market in India includes “only” 72 million families.

D.light is unveiling three light designs. The one they brought to show me (far left, below) is most faithful to their original design: A nearly unbreakable plastic casing enclosing a bright, ultra-efficient LED, with a connection for a single-watt solar panel that can charge it throughout the day. The light has several settings, allowing it to last between 12 and 500 hours on a single charge. There are two other designs: A CFL-based light that charges if there’s electricity available, and a small lamp that also has a solar panel. The various parts, including the sealed lead-acid battery, are all replaceable with standard parts.

The basic idea D.light has is almost identical to Mightylight. Because of target consumer group, though, price, rather than innovation, is the most important point. D.light’s units range from $12 to $25 for an individual buyer, far below Mightylight’s $45 lights. (Another company, Selco India, is also making solar powered lights, as well as various overseas startups.)

However, Tozun said D.light still might not be cheap enough for some. “We’re cognizant of the fact that there are some families that just can’t afford the lights, no matter how low you price them,” he told me, suggesting that there’s potential for a micro-finance model to help the extremely impoverished gain access to light. There are also non-profits helping to buy the lights.

But for the families that can afford the D.light’s products, Tozun says there’s no shortage of demand. He told me that two people sent to India to scope out the target market were nearly mobbed by villagers who had been tipped off to their arrival — only to find out that they had brought none of the lights with them to sell.

Now, about that “for profit” part. It’s easy to be skeptical that D.light can make money, even on its bare-bones design — even with the founders moving to China and India to help with manufacturing and distribution. Tozun says they’ll make money, but didn’t want to discuss specifics. However, a little basic math isn’t too difficult. If D.light manages to sell 10 million units for an average of $18, using a conservative, ultra-slim 2 percent profit margin, it will have made $3.6 million. For the company’s target market of over a billion people, just multiply by a hundred; and, as with every startup, there will be opportunities to diversify.

Tozun says there’s plenty of room for other entrepreneurs, provided they’re able to understand the particularities of developing markets. He pointed out income generation, or “anything that can help these people make money,” as well as mobile phones and communications as especially hot areas.

D.light’s founders are headed out in the next week or two, and the company will be based out of China and New Delhi, India. Its investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Garage Technology Ventures, Indian firms Mahindra & Mahindra and Nexus India Capital, social investment firms Acumen Fund and Gray Matters Capital, and Michael Marks, the chairman of Flextronics, but the company has not disclosed how much money it has taken.

Following in the theme of great-but-unusual cleantech startups I talked about last week, I recently took some time to talk to Bill Reichert of Garage Technology Ventures about a couple of his firm’s latest investments in the field.

Garage is the firm that Reichert heads up with Guy Kawasaki and Joyce Chung. An early-stage investor, the fund also had one of cleantech’s first IPO exits with its investment in Hoku Scientific, which makes materials and equipment for the fuel cell and solar markets.

The two more recent investments, however, don’t even sound like cleantech. One, ThermoCeramix, has a special material that heats up easily. The other, D.light Design, makes lamps for the developing world.

Thermoceramix
It’s a well known fact that energy is lost every time it’s converted from electricity to machinery, and vice versa. Cars don’t run at anything near peak efficiency (hence hybrid designs) and the electrical grid leaks energy at every stage from generation to consumption.

Much of the problem is heat loss. Heat leaks from car engines, lightbulbs, any kind of machinery, wasting precious energy. Many startups aim to lower heat loss — for example, by replacing incandescent lightbulbs, which dump out as much heat as light, with LEDs. The easiest way to explain ThermoCeramix is to say that it’s exactly the opposite: It wants to lose as much heat as possible.

The standard method of heating everything from hot water tanks to stoves is using a metal wire that emits heat. However, these wires tend to lose as much as a third of the energy that goes into them without converting it to heat.

ThermoCeramix makes materials with a much higher “emissivity”, meaning they’re more efficient at heating up. These materials have some obvious uses in everyday household appliances like those I just mentioned, as well as commercial processes.

However, there’s a bit more to the business. The materials are actually coatings that the company can apply to nearly any surface. So imagine, instead of having a centralized water heater in your house, having a bit of ThermoCeramix material wrapped around the pipe in your faucet. When you turn on the hot water tap, it heats up instantaneously.

The company hasn’t tested out that application yet (Reichert says his house will be the first to be fitted with such pipes), but it’s a fun mental exercise to count up the number of stages at which energy would be saved by doing that. Here’s what I came up with:
1) The material itself has better emissivity than the metal used in a hot water heater
2) Even the best-designed water tanks leak heat constantly; no need for a tank here
3) A great deal of heat is lost from water that’s flowing through, or sitting still in pipes
4) No need to have both cold- and hot-water lines in future plumbing arrangements.

On the other hand, the electrical wiring would need to be a bit different — I’d imagine it wouldn’t be long before a plumber ended up electrocuting himself trying to install a ThermoCeramix system. The company is working first with some large manufacturers on making appliances, including General Electric.

D.light Design
It’s nice to return to D.light, because we’ve covered the company since its beginnings at a Stanford entrepreneurship competition. The basic idea behind D.light is to replace dirty, polluting kerosene lamps used in developing countries like India with an LED lamp charged daily by a solar panel.

D.light has now finalized a design and begun to distribute the lamps, which, as we mentioned in our more extensive coverage of the company, sell for far less than some competing options like Mightylight.

What’s interesting about D.light is that it sounds more like a philanthropic mission than a highly profitable company. But its founders, a pair of Stanford MBAs, think that having a good business is actually the secret sauce — a more profitable company has a better chance of having an impact than a money-starved non-profit.

Reichert says he had the same reaction. “When we looked at it initially, we said OK, it’s not really a venture investment. But they’re driven by the idea that the best way to make a big contribution is to make a huge for-profit company, and that’s absolutely aligned with the venture capital model,” he said.

updated
Last week we covered Jawbone’s noise-cancelling bluetooth headset, but this week STEP Labs debuted a headset technology that STEP chief executive Robert Mitro says will blow the competition out of the water.

Mitro says STEP’s technology creates a virtual acoustic bubble six inches from your mouth, so that all the other noises are blocked away. He says its minimal processing power, instantaneous voice transmission and lack of voice distortion give STEP an edge over its competitors. It also doesn’t require a skin sensor.

The benefit is that bluetooth headsets enabled with STEP’s technology allow clear, consistent voice communications in severe, high-decibel noise environments, such as a rock concert or a trade show. But the technology goes beyond wireless headsets and cell phones. STEP aims to be the “Intel inside” of all things audible, including auto (voice recognition), medical (ultrasound), and military (sonar/radar). Watch the video here.

The company showed off its STEPware Headset Monday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It used a talking mannequin called Nadine to demonstrate clear voice reception even in a 92 to 95 decibel range. It’s in stealth partnership with three headset manufacturers in Asia, Europe, and the U.S. to release a bluetooth headset “soon.”

“We think we have the story of 2008. We feel we’re superior — in every way — to anybody else,” says Mitro, who worked 17 years at IBM and has been involved in eight successful startups, seven of which had successful exits, he says. Mitro has registered a number of patents for its “voice separation” tool.

The company has just raised a $6.5 million in a second round of funding from Gabriel Venture Partners, which led the round, Individuals’ Venture Fund, Garage Technology Ventures, Garage Canada, North Coast and individuals.

The company, founded in 2003 by a host of engineers, has Dr Jon Taenzer on staff — one of the “top five” acousticians in the world, according to Mitro. STEP spent three years building intellectual property and then brought Mitro on board as Chairman and CEO. He also personally invested in the business, although he won’t say how much. After Mitro came on board the company decided to focus on the bluetooth headset market, because it was the easiest to get into. Now they’re expanding beyond headsets. The company installed the technology in a Cadillac XLR convertible, which was driven top-down at 70 mph and still produced clear voice reception, he said.

STEP Labs’ second financing round actually closed in October, but a chance encounter on an airplane with an investor — whose principal investment is in a headset manufacturing company — led to STEP opening the round back up. Another investor, Scott Chou, a partner at Gabriel Venture Partners, said he once threw a cellphone headset out his car window because the quality was so poor. He said headsets using STEP’s technology are better than any other he has used.

We haven’t tested the technology yet, but when we do, we’ll let you know if it lives up to the hype.

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.