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Journalist John Heileman is interviewing John Doerr on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today. His first question: Who should Barack Obama name as chief technology officer for the U.S. government?

Doerr said there are three big technology problems the government will face: energy, basic research, and investment in universities. And he recommends Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun and a partner at Doerr’s own firm, for the CTO job.

What should a U.S. CTO do? Doerr says we invest less than $1 billion in renewable energy each year, compared to $32 billion for healthcare. He also says the country should boost education and invest more in creating more engineers. He says we should “staple a green card to the diploma” of any immigrant students who get a degree in engineering.

Doerr repeated what he said at VentureBeat’s downturn session: The loss of $60 trillion in wealth — 40 percent of the market value — in the last month or so isn’t just a downturn. It represents a crisis of confidence in the country’s leadership. At the height of the venture capital boom before the 2000 bubble the peak VC investment was $100 billion. In 2007, the peak VC investment was $37 billion. A lot smaller. The 2008 number is likely to be about $15 billion or $16 billion. Next year, new VC commitments are expected to be $5 billion to $10 billion.

The optimistic view: If hardcore entrepreneurs can raise money in this environment, they can do anything.

Will good ideas still get funded? Doerr says yes. Only 5 percent of the VC firms make all of the profits and none of those firms are going out of business, he says. But liquidity isn’t likely going to happen much in the next few years. “Google just isn’t going to buy,” he says. “Don’t cut with a meat ax.”

Doerr covers what startups should do in the downturn (as he did earlier in our panel). While he recommends that companies curtail spending, he says, “Make sure you don’t cut hope.” Despite a recent Fortune magazine story saying Kleiner Perkins had given up on the web, Doerr says Kleiner has made nine investments in web-related companies, including a number in iPhone-related investments. That’s maybe $60 million in investments. Digital tech startups are getting about as much money as cleantech companies from Kleiner, Doerr says.

“We are doubling down on this opportunity, but doing it very strategically,” he says.

Doerr says he’s bullish on the iPhone. He notes that 6 million were sold in the first year, and 6 million more in the last 120 of the second model. Doerr says the most exciting Kleiner-funded company based on the iPhone is one that is familiar to VentureBeat readers: Neil Young’s Ngmoco. The first two games rocketed to 1 million downloads, 6,000 per hour, all because of the iPhone’s App Store, Doerr says.

“Gaming has been recession proof,” he says. “We’ll see where it goes. We had no idea it would go like that.”

He is also high on Kleiner-funded Zynga, a social gaming company that’s doubling its users every 90 days, and he’s excited about visual-interface company Cooliris.

Feds now providing short-term debt — The Federal Reserve will provide money for companies to finance their day-to-day activities, in the government’s latest effort to staunch bleeding in the credit markets.

Live presidential debates hit the web — Hulu will stream tonight’s presidential debate live, something of a breakthrough for Internet TV.

Smart grid co. Silver Spring Networks raises $75M — Rapidly growing energy efficiency startup Silver Spring Networks, which makes communications equipment that connects utilities to electricity consumers, has raised $75M led by Kleiner Perkins’ Green Growth Fund. The company’s $60 million third round was only completed in April of this year.

Social media campaigns have high failure rate — No matter how much you pay your “social media consultant”, your campaign has a 50 percent chance of utterly failing, according to an analyst.

Investors of all stripes hunker down — CNET reports that a recent venture capital meetup held by Northbridge Venture Partners was bubbly on the surface, but worries about survival and changing business models set the real tone. Meanwhile, Fred Wilson points out that major corporations aren’t buying back their own stock, despite seemingly very attractive valuations.

Online advertising may not shrivel, after all — Web startups are plenty worried about an advertising recession due to the credit crunch, an event that could kill many of them off. Blogger Mathew Ingram instead points to a study on the Great Depression, which suggests that advertising was resilient even during the country’s worst financial crisis.

Europeans indicted for US cyberattacks — A pair of men have been fingered for a wave of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in 2003, part of the FBI’s Operation Cyberslam. The FBI shouldn’t crow over its victory, though; five years is ancient history on the Internet, and the majority of online criminals still roam free.

Ad delivery outfit BlackArrow gets $20M — We’ve previously covered BlackArrow, a company that slips targeted ads into on-demand television. The company raised $20 million more from previous investors Cisco Systems, Comcast Interactive Capital, Intel Capital, Mayfield Fund and Polaris Venture Partners.

Oberon Media gets $20M from Chinese fund — Mobile and online casual gaming company Oberon, located in New York City, was funded by the Infinity I-China Fund.

Magazines turn to readers for content — A number of consumer glossies are finally turning to user-generated content, including This Old House, which just printed an entirely user-generated issue.

As badly as the rest of the business world seems to be doing, renewable energy just keeps picking up steam. There has been a string of recent financings going to solar panel makers, financiers that help consumers and businesses buy solar installations, and now solar thermal company Ausra.

Ausra is one of several large, heavily funded startups that use arrays of mirrors to concentrate sunlight on a central receiver containing water, which quickly reaches the boiling point to produce steam and drive a turbine. It just took $60.6 million from KERN Partners, Generation Investment Management, Starfish Ventures and founding investors Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

The company last year signed a deal with Pacific Gas & Electric for a 177-megawatt plant in San Luis Obispo County, Calif., and also began construction on a production facility near Las Vegas that is now churning out components like Ausra’s cheap, flat mirrors, which are called Fresnel reflectors.

Those mirrors are cheaper than the curved heliostats other companies use, as are some of Ausra’s other components. Chief executive Bob Fishman says those are some of the factors that will make Ausra the first solar thermal startup to plug a full-scale electricity generation plant into the grid (in the middle of next year), although Ausra’s plans are far outsized by Brightsource’s contract for 900 megawatts of thermal solar.

Given the current banking problems, I also interviewed Fishman to ask about how the credit crunch will impact large-scale renewable energy.

VB: You just took an equity funding. Will the credit crunch affect project financing — that is, bank and private equity loans to build large, utility-scale plants?

BF: In general, project debt is done on the merits of the individual project. That’s what determines whether you can get it. And you’re going to see people willing to put money into things they perceive as having a lot of long-term value.

As part of our market we also have the ability to just sell steam to industrial customers, who are looking at it as a way to save energy. There are a variety of ways we take our product to market, whether as electricity, steam or an augmentation to an existing power project.

VB: Your investors have pointed out rising materials costs, for steel, glass and so forth, as a challenge. How are those affecting Ausra’s plans?

BF: If steel goes up, the cost of our facilities go up. But the cost of a coal or gas plant goes up even more. If we’ve already signed a contract, we have to absorb the cost, but we take measures to accommodate that. But one of the few advantages to the crisis right now is that it’s actually weakening commodity prices.

VB: As a former natural gas plant operator, what do you predict happening to the costs of non-renewable fuels and energy?

BF: I think we’re already at parity with natural gas. There are other options, but if you want to talk about California, if you need power in four to five years, nuclear is 10 years off for the first plant. Clean coal doesn’t exist yet, so let’s also call that 10 years. What you have left to do, in the United States at least, is natural gas and renewables. Right now, we’re at par with natural gas, and as energy prices increase, I think it will pass us [in price]. I think what you’ll see getting built in California for the next 4-5 years is gas-fired plants and solar thermal.

VB: Are environmentalists still raising objections to the amount of land used by solar thermal plants? What about water?

BF: With respect to land use, we’re the most land-efficient solar technology there is. We use half the land that Brightsource uses, and a quarter of what solar PV uses. In terms of disturbing the land, if you look at our stuff, we have small foundations on the ground and the mirrors are about eight feet up. And this is a facility that uses almost nothing that’s remotely toxic. It’s glass, steel and water, and we recycle all the water. There are always people who oppose anything, but people have to get their mind around it. If you want energy, there are choices. Unless you want to sit in the dark.

Development of applications for Apple’s iPhone has already proven to be big business. Already, 100,000,000 apps have been downloaded in just 60 days since the iPhone 3G’s launch and Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has hinted that he thought the App Store could be a billion dollar marketplace. All of this likely means that venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers decision to start the iFund, a $100 million fund to spur iPhone app development has been a good bet. Today, the firm is launching a blog about the fund.

Specifically, Kleiner Perkins says it’s starting the iFundVC blog “to share (and hear) perspectives around the iPhone and emerging open mobile ecosystem. We’ve been blown away by the amount of entrepreneurial activity in mobile since launching the iFund on March 6th.”

In his initial post, Kleiner Perkins partner Matt Murphy also shares some interesting numbers. Since the fund’s launch, the firm has received over 2700 plans. It says this is 20 times the amount it received during the same time period last year — indicating that many proposals are simply interested in the iPhone. Kleiner Perkins has only funded five companies so far with the iFund money, and only one of those, Pelago, with its location-based network Whrrl, has been released so far.

Also of note from the post is this blurb:

“According to our estimates and M:Metrics data, that’s more iPhone application downloads in 30 days than all US carriers combined have in a quarter.* That means a relatively small base of handsets (~12M, mostly US) is dramatically outperforming the other 250M.”

Tesla Motors may have significant competition in the high-end electric vehicle space soon, if Fisker Automotive continues on its current path. The Irvine, Calif. sports car company just announced another $65 million in funding, led by a Middle Eastern firm, the Qatar Investment Authority.

Design work is well underway on Fisker’s first car, the Karma. Unlike Tesla’s model, the Roadster, Fisker is planning on making the Karma a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), which should make it more practical for regular or long-distance driving — assuming anyone is looking for practicality in luxury sports cars that cost double the average person’s yearly income.

However, Fisker is following Tesla’s lead in outsourcing its manufacturing. The company announced a couple months back that Valmet, a Norwegian contractor, would build the Karma starting late next year. Once fully scaled up, Fisker expects to make, and hopefully sell, around 15,000 vehicles per year.

Building a car is notoriously difficult, so it should be interesting to see whether Fisker can stick to its deadlines. Its fundings so far suggest that it’s making good progress. Along with its rounds from previous backers Palo Alto Investors and Kleiner Perkins (who also joined this investment), Fisker has taken over $75 million. But ultimately, the company will need double that amount or more to bring its plans to fruition.

Silicon Valley start-up MetaRAM is announcing its second-generation chip set today with backing from Intel. MetaRAM’s technology can quadruple the memory capacity in a server, cutting the server costs as much as 90 percent. The Intel endorsement is a big win for a little San Jose company that has proven more clever than giant memory chip makers.

It’s no surprise that Intel will give MetaRAM some of the limelight at its “digital enterprise” keynote speech today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. MetaRAM is one of the most interesting chip startups, with marquee backers such as Intel itself and tech luminaries Bill Joy and Vinod Khosla.

It was founded in January 2006 by Suresh Rajan, who had a simple but elegant idea. He figured out a way to trick a server’s memory controller. Normally, a server can access a limited amount of memory chips on a single memory module. MetaRAM creates a chip set for the memory module that lets the memory controller count multiple chips as just a single one. In doing so, it lets the controller overcome the memory limitations and access as much as four times more memory on a module.

This trick comes at a critical juncture for computer servers, whose processors are far outracing the performance of memory chips. It removes a bottleneck. That, in turn, can cut the cost of a server by as much as 90 percent.

MetaRAM is now launching a second generation chip set which supports DDR3 memory. As a result, Intel is endorsing MetaRAM as a solution to go with Intel’s upcoming new microprocessors, code-named Nehalem. Earlier this year, MetaRAM announced its first-generation chips based on DDR2 memory. That solution proved popular in servers from companies such as RackSpace. But it was used in a much smaller slice of the market for servers that use processors from Advanced Micro Devices. The new DDR3 chip set will be available in the fourth quarter. Memory chip maker Hynix is showing memory modules today with working MetaRAM DDR3 chip sets, including the world’s biggest 16-gigabyte memory module for Intel servers.

“Now the entire server market is open to us,” said Rajan, who shifted to vice president of marketing after he recruited a CEO, in an interview.

These kinds of servers will be able to run more efficiently, saving electricity costs in big data centers and allowing servers to handle complex files such as medical images without choking on the huge amount of data. The company has a team of 40 employees. The CEO is Fred Weber, the former chief technology officer at AMD who helped conceive the Opteron processor, which debuted in 2003 and saved AMD.

Weber serves as president and chief executive. The company has raised venture money from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Storm Ventures, and Intel Capital. The amount hasn’t been disclosed.

MetaRAM’s rivals include the world’s biggest memory chip makers such as Samsung and Micron. But as the deal with Hynix suggests, those competitors could also be its partners, as MetaRAM still helps those memory chip makers sell lots of chips.

The hardest thing about starting a chip company these days is the cost. A big team of engineers has to work for 18 months or more to create a custom chip. Then it takes $1 million for the templates, or masks, that the factory needs to stamp out the chips. It takes 16 weeks for the chips to run through the factory.

The cost can hit $65 million before all is said and done. eASIC, a start-up in Santa Clara, Calif., is working hard on attacking these problems so that chip start-ups — which are kind of a dying breed in the inappropriately named Silicon Valley these days — can flourish again. The company has figured out how to reset the cost equation so that even complex chips can be affordable to design and don’t take as long to make, said Ronnie Vasishta, chief executive of eASIC.

Since the ante for chips is so big, the number of custom chips that are being designed has declined for the past decade. But since eASIC debuted its start-up friendly design process in 2006, the company has won more than 120 customer designs. Today, it is launching a second generation of its design process, Nextreme 2, that may make its customers even more competitive with the biggest chip makers.

eASIC said it will let customers design 45-nanometer chips (the number refers to the microscopic width between circuits), with the first chips coming out sometime this fall. Previously, only the biggest of chip makers, such as Intel, had access to the 45-nanometer technology. eASIC will be using a contract chip manufacturer, Chartered Semiconductor, to make its 45-nm chips.

eASIC combines two traditional chips: the application specific integrated circuit (ASIC, a $20 billion market) and the field-programmable gate array (FPGA, a $3.7 billion market). As such, its competitors are big companies that range from Toshiba to Xilinx. Some companies such as Altera , On Semiconductor’s AMI Semiconductor division, and a partnership of IBM and Xilinx have tried to create hybrid models of ASICs and FPGAs. And companies such as Tensilica and eSilicon are also trying to cut the high cost and time it takes to design ASICs. But there are built-in trade-offs to the designs.  Vasishta says that eASIC’s recipe maximizes customization without requiring extensive chip rewiring.

ASIC chips are fast and low cost, but they are expensive to design and take years to finish. FPGAs are generic chips that can be programmed quickly at the last minute to fit a rapid product cycle. But they cost a lot and are slow.

eASIC can fuse these chips by creating generic chips that are inexpensive to make. But it allows for full customization by allowing the customers to add the final layer of metal on top of a nearly-finished generic chip. This kind of customization cuts factory turnaround times and costs because it doesn’t take much time (just six weeks) or special design work to add that last metal layer. The upfront design costs can be as low as $20,000 to $100,000, much lower than the cost of designing an ASIC.

The chips therefore have the hybrid benefits of the full customization of ASICs and the short turnaround times and flexibility of FPGAs. The promise of eASIC is that it can make it a lot easier for start-ups to get to market faster. That is why it has been able to raise $80 million to date from Khosla Ventures; Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers; Crescendo Ventures, Evergreen Venture Partners and Advanced Equities. Most recently, the company raised a $48 million round in March.

Getting to 45nm is a big accomplishment, since only 14 other chip makers have made such announcements. Vasishta said that the company started with 90nm technology and decided to skip the 65nm generation. For the past two years, it worked on delivering a 45nm technology that would leapfrog many competitors and put the company in lock step with giants such as Intel in the technology race.

Customers are making chips for a wide range of applications, including security cameras, cameras, smart phones, and a variety of consumer electronics and computing gear. While ASICs often require huge orders to offset the engineering costs, eASIC doesn’t require minimum orders. Roughly 30 percent of the company’s customers are billion-dollar chip makers, while 40 percent are start-ups.

Customers are expected to use eASIC’s tools so that they can begin fabricating the first 45nm designs later on this year. The first product will be a new graphics chip, Vasishta said. Full told, eASIC customers should be able to get into the make with $150,000.

iPhone games publisher Ngmoco has raised a first round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Kleiner Perkins partner Bing Gordon, the former chief creative officer of Electronic Arts, will join the San Francisco company’s board. The amount was not diclosed.

It isn’t too hard to connect the dots here. Neil Young (pictured left), a longtime EA veteran, recently quit to found Ngmoco (whose name means next-generation mobile company) to make iPhone games. In April, Gordon (pictured below) left EA after more than 26 years at the big game publisher to become a venture capitalist.

So it’s no surprise that Young has raised his first round from an old friend. Maples Investments, an early stage fund with expertise in games and social networks, also participated in the round. Ngmoco will use the investment to create, acquire and publish games built specifically for the iPhone.

The money comes from Kleiner Perkins’ iFund, a $100 million fund for iPhone and mobile computing investments. Since starting in June, Gordon has been actively joining boards of companies that Kleiner Perkins has funded.

It will be interesting to see whether Young can make Ngmoco into a mobile games player. There is stiff competition from the likes of Glu Mobile, Sega, Electronic Arts’ EA Mobile division, Gameloft and a variety of other companies. Those companies all have a head start making games for the iPhone.

On Apple’s new AppStore, games are the No. 1-downloaded application, as MG Siegler has reported. About 53 of the top 100 downloads are games. But Young stated previously that the current generation of iPhone games reflect early thinking and that he believes there is plenty of room for new innovation. He believes that there is a gap in the market between cheap mobile phone games and the Nintendo DS games that sell for $30. The average price paid for iPhone applications is $4.96.

How do you know when one of the world’s most respected investment firms has veered off path and bet wrong?

That’s the crux of the question raised by a piece in this month’s Fortune entitled “Kleiner bets the farm” that puts Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers under the lens for its recent investment decisions.

The firm’s fortunes have emerged as the subject of discussion in Silicon Valley, now that the firm has largely abandoned the Internet investments that made it famous. “Several Valley investors who monitor startups tell me they don’t bother sending Web-oriented entrepreneurs to pitch Kleiner anymore; they say the firm just doesn’t seem interested,” writes Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky, citing one off-the-record source. “If they’re wrong, it’ll be the end of Kleiner Perkins.”

Lashinsky is a veteran reporter, held several interviews with the firm, and gave it a fair chance to respond to the critique. You should read the whole story, because Kleiner has its perspective — that is, that the investment cycle is long, and the firm’s partners say they believe strongly in the new direction of the firm. They say it will harvest investments made in areas such as clean technology and biotech drugs.

The signficance of the piece, however, is that it’s one of the first really hard-hitting piece by a credible reporter who appears to want to call the end of Kleiner’s era of dominance. Sure, questions have been raised about the firm before. Several years ago, valley insiders starting asking how long it could be led by the visionary directives of John Doerr, even as other high-performing investors (Vinod Khosla, Kevin Compton) left the firm. But with Kleiner’s big bet on Google in 1999, and the billions the firm reaped from that and other earlier investments, it was difficult to criticize the firm without giving it a few more years to generate another killer IPO.

Amost a decade later, still without one, the number of skeptics are growing. Lashinsky quotes one source: “What the hell happened to them?” It’s something of a rhetorical question, since Kleiner has actually remained in the headlines, announcing high profile moves such as partner Al Gore, opening a $500 million special fund for green investments, and making high profile investments like the Think America electric vehicle. Kleiner Perkins has staked a lot of its money and even more of its reputation on cleantech being the next big thing.

The firm is betting on some bold, meaningful ideas. None of them are safe. Fuel cells are a notoriously difficult technology, but Kleiner Perkins has bet big on Bloom Energy; ditto for the cellulosic ethanol technology of Mascoma, wacky (and not yet terribly popular) scooters from Segway, and the high-performance electric cars of Tesla Motors competitor Fisker Automotive. Adding it all up, one might begin to think Doerr has lost control of his emotions and begun investing more like a tree-hugger than a tycoon.

The real story, however, is a bit more complex. Lashinky mentions Terralliance, a Kleiner Perkins energy investment that has taken up to a billion dollars. While the firm has spent plenty of time talking up renewable energy portfolio companies like Ausra, it never mentions Terralliance. The ostensible reason is that the company is in stealth mode. But while Terralliance is an energy play, it’s no feel-good green investment; it’s an oil wildcatter that has already drilled up to 100 wells. Another Kleiner Perkins investment not mentioned in the Fortune article is GloriOil, which helps extract more oil from mature wells.

Those investments, which might horrify environmentalists, should comfort the investors behind Kleiner Perkins. Everyone knows what happens to big businesses that put social responsibility over profits: Once they face real competition, they often fall short. (See the six-month drop in Whole Foods Market’s stock price.) Kleiner Perkins, it would seem, still has a firm enough grasp on capitalist realities, and Doerr, who won’t comment on Terralliance, could be generating noisy cleantech PR as an investment strategy as much as for personal global warming sentimentality.

And outside cleantech, Kleiner Perkins is still making plenty of investments, albeit with less fanfare. Although it’s not betting big on Web 2.0, it has redirected $100 million to iPhone applications, and with the hiring of Bing Gordon, it appears interested in gaming. Along with high-profile biotech deals like Pacific BioSciences, it’s also quietly investing in infrastructure in China, including a profitable shirt factory.

If anything, Kleiner appears to have turned its attention away from quick wins to long-term, but potentially massive plays — companies that could become even bigger than the firm’s most recent grandslam, Google. In the energy industry, the $4 trillion grandaddy of all markets, that’s not so hard to imagine.

(Image source for John Doerr: Fortune Magazine)

VentureBeat is proud to announce a gathering for clean technology entrepreneurs next Monday, May 12. We’ve joined forces with SF Green, a San Francisco gathering founded by Steve Newcomb that aims to help shape the region’s cleantech and environmental future.

The aim is to bring together some of the brightest local entrepreneurs and investors, as well as other interested parties — environmentalists, government representatives and regular citizens — in one place, helping to forge connections and spark new ideas, just as we did last week with our Digital Media launch party.

Keynoting the next SF Green are Ray Lane, the managing partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who invested in Fisker Automotive, the new Think America partnership and the solar thermal startup Ausra; plus Tesla Motors’ VP of marketing Darryl Siry, and a Roadster or two. Both will join us for Q&A sessions at different times during the evening, with the chance for the crowd to ask a few questions of their own.

SF Green was started this March by Newcomb, a founder of Powerset who left to pursue legislative issues and an as-yet-unannounced startup. The first event was a hit, drawing together several hundred people from various backgrounds in the sustainability movement.

By holding an open event, we hope to continue attracting members of all those groups to come together and discuss their ideas. Along with Newcomb, we hope that we can help influence the Green Economy by sparking new discourse. Newcomb has more thoughts on why he founded the event at his blog.

If you’ve noticed a transportation theme for this particular event, you’re dead on: We’ll also have one of the new Smart cars to exhibit inside the venue. Naturally, much of the talk will revolve around the subject we’ve chosen, but if it’s anything like the first event, there will be conversations about every sector of cleantech. And to help round out the night, we’ll have other cleantech companies demoing amidst the crowd.

We’ll also have our generous sponsors on hand: Ernst & Young, Sun Microsystems, Dig Communications, Network Verde, California Cleantech Open, and the SF Chamber of Commerce. Our organizer is Room Full of People, who also plan the popular SF Beta event.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, 111 Minna is a gallery and bar south of Market Street in the Financial District. The place only holds about 400 people, and tickets are going to go fast. If you’ve got $15 and an open night on Monday, swing on by. You can get your tickets right here.

With oil past $120 a barrel and possibly headed to $200, cellulosic ethanol companies are looking like a smarter investment choice every day. Following the increase of Range Fuels’ second funding to $166 million, its competitor Mascoma has pulled the wraps off an $81 million funding of its own, with $10 million coming a major oil and gas producer, Marathon Oil Corporation.

Range, Mascoma, Coskata and others are all racing to raise huge amounts in an attempt to bring the world’s first full-scale cellulosic plant online. The stakes are high: If the process proves to be cheap enough, investors will be eager to pour money into new plants. On the other hand, waiting to see if competitors fail won’t be particularly helpful — each company has its own proprietary process.

Mascoma will begin production this year at a demonstration plant in Rome, New York, but is also planning facilities in Michigan and Tennessee. By comparison, its two largest competitors will build a single, big plant each, a bet that could presumably result in a more spectacular success, or failure.

Backing each company is a network of high-profile investors, some of whom overlap. General Motors has investments in both Coskata and Mascoma. Morgan Stanley is with Range Fuels, which also counts Khosla Ventures as an investor — and Khosla has invested in Mascoma, as well. Taking venture fundings and government grants together, Range Fuels is the most heavily funded, Mascoma coming second with just over $200 million now, and Coskata third.

It’s possibility none of the three emerge with a competitively priced product — something that also hinges on whether oil prices continue to climb, or fall back to somewhat saner levels. If all three find their methods too expensive, there is still a constellation of smaller cellulosic startups waiting for their own turn in the spotlight, like Zeachem.

Other investors in the round included Khosla, Flagship Ventures, Atlas Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Pinnacle Ventures and Vantage Point Venture Partners. Out of the total amount, $20 million was venture debt provided by Pinnacle.

Sidewalks used to be so much nicer, before the Segway Personal Transporter started hitting the streets. Remember being able to walk peacefully along, happy on the two legs God gave us? Then Dean Kamen brought us the Segway, and suddenly you couldn’t step outside without one whizzing by. Everyone and their neighbor bought one, making Kamen and his investors rich –

Whoops, sorry, wrong future. In retrospect, it seems at least a little silly that the Segway got as much hype as it did back in late 2001 and 2002, to the point of top Kleiner Perkins VC John Doerr saying that Segway would be the fastest outfit in history to reach $1 billion in sales. Yet the firm has also survived thus far, and appears to be expanding the $10 million third round of funding we reported in January, according to a filing dug up by VentureWire.

Segway’s blessing and curse is its oddball design. It’s packed with electronics and gyroscopes that keep the vehicle balanced and make rolling around at the pace of a running human effortless. Unfortunately, aside from being ridiculous looking, Segways are also expensive, a combination that has sent most potential consumers buyers packing to alternatives like Edge scooters. Nobody except the company knows how many have been bought for recreational use, but the fan club has long since disbanded, and in most places, just spotting one makes for a red-letter day.

What has saved Segway, at least so far, is its business customers. Police departments and security love to use Segways for what were previously onerous foot patrols. Warehousing businesses and golf clubs have bought them for employee and visitor use. Google, predictably enough, offers them as a perk to employees. Other uses abound — anywhere walking, biking or driving is impractical, a Segway can likely fit in.

What’s interesting about the reported funding is that one of the new investors is the Masdar Clean Tech Fund, an arm of Abu Dhabi’s Masdar Initiative. While that could just be a venture investment, it’s possible it was more of a strategic funding — after all, Abu Dhabi will need to figure out some zero-emissions transportation options for its promised zero-emissions city.

If Segway is selling worldwide, especially to other small cities that need a local transportation option, the company could get recoup its investments, which have now reached almost $150 million of venture capital and $100 million in development costs. And though the fan club may be dead, Segway is still reaching for a consumer base, with its recently launched Segway Social network. There’s also the strong likelihood that the company will roll out other transporter designs in the future.

Backers on the round, which VentureWire says is $35 million total with a recent tranche of $9.5 million, include Kleiner Perkins, CSFB Private Equity, the Masdar fund, buyout firm Duff, Ackerman & Goodrich, and others.

[Photo credit: Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten; Flickr]

Here’s the latest action:

Kleiner Perkins preparing “big news” — Venerable venture fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has “big news” that it will be sharing tomorrow morning, we hear. We’ll be covering it first thing. One possibly related item is the recent registering of the firm’s 13th fund, found in a filing dug up by peHUB. The firm’s last raise was completed in February 2006, for $600 million. Data from Thomson Financial suggests the firm has invested a lot of that, or at least $556 in 107 startups over the past two years — though that does not include unannounced “stealth” deals.

Hewlett-Packard invents artificial intelligence circuit — Researchers at HP have come up with a circuit element for memory chips that will dramatically lower the power required and allow a range of values outside of binary code (zeros and ones), according to the New York Times. The device, a “memristor”, could revolutionize mobile devices, as well as easing the development of artificial intelligence functions like understanding speech.

Sims Online / EA-Land virtual world shutting down — EA-Land, the virtual world based off the popular Sims gaming franchise, will close its doors in two months. While Electronic Arts phrases the issue rather delicately, saying only “The lifetime of the game has drawn to an end,” it’s fairly obvious that they wouldn’t be closing the business if it were making money. And if a hot property like the Sims can’t succeed as a virtual world, other game developers should take note.

Generation Investment Management closes $683M cleantech fund – Headed by the infamous (and frighteningly named) duo of Al Gore and David Blood, Generation Investment Management is a London-based investor in both private and public cleantech companies. The new fund will invest in sectors including renewable energy, building efficiency, cleaner fossil energy (possibly meaning clean coal), sustainable agriculture and carbon markets, with an average investment size of $30 million. More details at the Financial Times. Gore, it should be noted, is also a partner at Kleiner Perkins.

Courts reject RIAA “making available” anti-piracy argument — A legal tactic used by the Recording Industry Association of America has been slapped down by a Federal judge, according to CNET. The RIAA’s argument was that simply making copyrighted files available over sharing networks constituted breaking the law, even if they were never downloaded by other users.

Radiohead won’t repeat free music experiment – A much-hailed experiment by Radiohead involving the public release of a new album on the Internet for optional donations by downloaders won’t be repeated, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The band still hasn’t said whether it considered the release a success. Radiohead is also working with MTV to highlight child slavery and sex trafficking, saying the opportunity is about “exploiting a situation while you have the chance.” Interesting wording…

Miasole just can’t get a break — Miasole, a thin-film solar cell maker that has raised a massive amount of cash, has run into quite a few problems over the last year, including delayed production, employee defections and disappointing cell performance. The latest blow: The loss of a $9 million contract from Dow Chemical, according to CNET. The money will go to a rival thin-film maker, Global Solar.

Electronic Arts‘ chief creative officer William “Bing” Gordon announced today he is leaving the video game company he joined in 1982 to become a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He will start at his new post in June with a focus on start-ups in consumer technologies. During the past decade, Gordon has served as chief creative officer at EA and he will continue in an advisory role at EA as Chief Creative Officer Emeritus. Gordon joined the company as one of the earliest employees working for founder Trip Hawkins and he is the last of the original employees who were pictured in EA’s first magazine ad with the caption, “Can a computer game make you cry?” (Hawkins founded EA so his team could make games that were as emotionally involved and rich in storytelling as movies.) We spoke with Gordon this afternoon about why he made the move. For more coverage, see N’gai Croal’s Level Up blog.

VB: Bing, how long were you thinking about making this move?

BG: Probably in the 1980s but I never did it. My wife used to work extensively with Kleiner on recruiting. I would see the people she was talking to. My sense was always that I loved the big thinking and teamwork of the Kleiner guys. I noticed that they didn’t have a distinctive competence in consumer. It crossed my mind periodically. But I was on a mission. Mission accomplished.

VB: What did you feel you accomplished to allow you to make this move?

BG: It was seeing John Riccitiello take over as CEO last year and Frank Gibeau, a long-term protege, becoming president of one of the studios. There are a new generation of cool people coming in. It looks like the company is in good hands for the next five years. I got to see that transition. I don’t feel like I am putting my EA legacy at risk by leaving right now. A couple of years ago it felt it- would have been at risk. I feel like I have 10 or 15 more years to go. If I want to try something new, now is the time. I’m kind of ambitious about trying something new. It arose all at once. The sense that EA is in good hands settled in over time.

VB: Did the reorganization of the executive team last year have anything to do with the decision to leave? EA reorganized into four decentralized groups and your role seemed like a very centralized job.

BG: In the last year, we expanded my job and covered what I did with more people. That group will persist as a central group reporting into the CEO. It’s like the equivalent of a CTO’s organization. That creative office has expanded. I like the new organization structure a lot. It’s a perfect org structure to develop and n