VentureBeat

SpinVox, a London company that converts your voicemail into text, has raised more than $100 million to expand quickly by signing deals with large telecom carriers around the world — an apparent land-grab.

The amount of cash is significant, and a sign that SpinVox wants to sign up carriers before competitors such as Nuance or other emerging players, such as Jott or Simulscribe get there first.

Its SpinVox’s third round of capital, and investors include GLG Partners, Goldman Sachs, BlueMountain Capital Management and hedge fund Toscafund. It doubles the company’s investment. It had previously raised $100 million, including from ABN Amro, Gartmore, Allen & Co. and individuals. The six-year-old company has signed deals with 12 carriers, including with Alltel Corp., Cincinnati Bell, and Telus, and wants to double that number this year. The company is especially strong in Europe, though, allowing conversion of messages in English, French, German and Spanish.

It’s also hip, letting you do things like write text messages with your voice, blog via a telephone call, and use voice to update your profile at Facebook, Jaiku and Twitter.

SpinVox claims more than 6 million users.We’ve mentioned SpinVox before, in coverage of newer players like Jott, which is free and actually uses people to do the translations.

Update: Meanwhile, private equity fund Quadriga Capital Russia is reportedly negotiating a sale of its 35 percent stake in Speech Technology Center (STC), a St. Petersburg-based developer of speech recognition technologies, according to Kommersant (which we found via Yakov Sadchikov). Nokia and Nuance are mentioned as possible buyers.

Although it’s over two decades old, Infinia is a relative newcomer to the solar market, having only been working on its solar thermal generator for a few years.

That may not prevent it from quickly becoming one of the largest players, though, with a new $50 million investment to kick off production and a slate of manufacturing partners ready to help fulfill its first orders.

The most notable detail about Infinia’s technology is that it’s based on the Stirling engine, which uses thermodynamic cycling of air to produce energy. Basically, air within the engine is heated by the concentrated rays of the sun, and then converted directly to energy.

Stirling engines are noted for their high efficiency, but have so far confounded other startups that have attempted to use accident-prone “kinematic” versions with solar concentrators. “You don’t know when you fire those up whether they’ll run for 25 or 500 hours, but you do know they won’t work for 5000 hours, or 60,000, as ours will,” Infinia CEO J.D. Sitton told us in an interview.

Infinia uses a hermetically sealed, single-piston design that Sitton says drastically reduces maintenance costs, although it lowers efficiency somewhat. The outcome is a solar thermal generator with 24 percent efficiency, which is still much higher than most competing alternatives currently on the market.

However, rather than fight for utility-scale developments with other solar thermal startups like Ausra or Solel, Sitton says his company will compete with solar photovoltaics. The first Infinia product will be a dish which can be sited within towns or cities, singly or in small groups.

That strategy will give the company the ability to set its own margins because it 20-30 percent cheaper than solar PV, Sitton said, although he would not disclose exactly how much the 3 kilowatt dishes would cost.

The company plans to begin producing dishes in November, and build up to 200MW per year of manufacturing capacity by the end of 2009 by working with manufacturing partners from the automotive industry, who Infinia is helping retool their production lines with part of its funding.

GLG Partners led the $50 million round, with Wexford Capital and previous investors Vulcan Capital, Khosla Ventures, EQUUS Total Returns, Idealab and Power Play Energy also participating. It was Infinia’s second funding; it also took $9.5 million last year and $3.5 million in early 2005, for a total to date of $63 million.