VentureBeat

In what may be a first step toward bringing some real-time intelligence to local recommendation sites like Yelp and CitySearch, a startup called Sense Networks is today unveiling a new platform, called Citysense, that it says can create a Google-style “index” of places in a city based on where people are going.

Think of people as being a bit like members of nomadic tribes, and you’ll be on the track to understanding what Sense wants to do. By tracking where users go by their cellphone signal, the company plans to map out the hot-spots of different social groups within cities, both collecting historical data and updating on a moment-to-moment basis.

If it’s Saturday night, for example, a jazz-lover in his 30s might check his Blackberry for a recommendation on where to go from Sense, and he’ll get a listing for the jazz club where people in his age-group are headed to that particular evening, instead of simply the club users have found best overall.

CEO Greg Skibiski calls the platform an “experiment” for his company, whose main offering is a product called Macrosense that offers data to companies, mainly retail stores, that want to know where to place their business. To date, Sense has built up most of its information from data it buys from taxi companies, which track the movement of their cabs around cities via GPS. Sense will also apply the cab information to CitySense, using internal machine learning software to start its initial index of San Francisco.

Skibiski is interested in what other companies might want to do with the information from Citysense. The possibilities seem abundant. Sites like Yelp have enjoyed robust growth, but generally fall short in being able to tell you what to do right now. On the flip side, sites like Going and Eventful have information on planned events, but can neither tell you about how busy one street is compared to another on a given evening, nor whether that hyped-up DJ night at the local club is actually attracting people or not.

Any of the above sites could use a platform like Citysense to provide mobile alerts and up-to-the-minute information to users, or a new contender could show up with a clever interface — club owners could testify that a simple application just showing where all the women in a city are going would be an instant hit. Skibiski, for his part, is confident that the data Citysense will generate is good, saying that its true strength is its machine learning, which factors in historical data, allowing it o function well even with few users in the system.

Another take on the concept is Where.com’s Buddy Beacon, which lets you keep tabs on where your friends are. However, Citysense seems fairly original, since it shows similar people rather than just friends, thus potentially adding much more data and helping out users in unfamiliar towns.

For its early users, Citysense will be available for download onto Blackberry phones, with a release planned soon for the iPhone.

Sense Networks is based in New York City. The company recently closed a first funding; Skibiski wouldn’t disclose the amount, but VentureWire reports that it was $3 million, from Passport Capital and unnamed hedge funds. The company was founded in 2003.

Cellulosic ethanol producer Range Fuels has heaped more than $50 million extra onto a $100 million round we reported two months ago, picking up the support of Passport Capital, Morgan Stanley Capital Group and others.

While the company originally planned to keep the round to $100 million, it appears to have received intense interest in its project. While the round was at first over-subscribed to $130 million, according to Ethanol Producer Magazine, Range has now taken a total of $158 million, according to a regulatory filing obtained by VentureBeat. The cap on the round is currently $166 million.

The additional funding should give Range the edge it needs to speed ahead in the race to open the world’s first full-scale cellulosic ethanol refinery in Soperton, Georgia, which broke ground last November. At 100 million gallons per year of capacity, the plant will be larger than many existing facilities that make ethanol from corn. Importantly, it has trees from the surrounding forests on-hand for use, rather than counting on next-generation feedstocks like switchgrass that have yet to be planted at scale.

Size is important for Range, because the thermo-chemical process the company uses works better at large scale. Yet even with its size advantage, a number of onlookers have speculated that the company may suffer from the pitfalls of being first to try out a complex process. Just breaking down woody fibers into a product isn’t good enough — Range’s ethanol must also be cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels, albeit with the help of subsidies.

Its investors either don’t have the same expectation, or have been caught up in the drama of (maybe) leading a (possible) revolution.

Range’s competition for the distinction of being first is from two companies. One, Coskata, has a partnership with a plant construction company and plans for a 40 million gallon per year plant. The other, Mascoma, took on $50 million more in February and just today announced a partnership with General Motors, which also backs Coskata.

The round was led by Passport, with participation from a passel of others: PCG Clean Energy & Technology Fund, Khosla Ventures, Blue Mountain Venture Capital, Leaf Clean Energy, Pacific Capital Group, Morgan Stanley, and possibly some unlisted investors.

HelioVolt, one of about ten companies racing to produce solar power cells based new cheaper material than traditional silicon, has raised $24 million more in financing for a its second round.

This brings the Austin, Texas’ company’s total second round to a huge $101 million, making it the largest clean-tech venture capital financing on record — or at least that we’re aware of. The company raised $77 million in August.
The funding comes at a time when about a half-dozen competitors are poised to release their own versions of the product on the market. By raising tons of cash, Heliovolt hopes to beat the rest by accelerating its manufacturing and sales process.

Like these other companies, the six-year-old Heliovolt is using the promising material called Copper Indium Gallium Selenide (CIGS), which is much more flexible and cheaper than silicon, the traditional material used in solar cells. One challenge CIGS has faced, however, is the efficiency at which it converts sun into electricity. CIGS has proven efficient in the labs, but in practice it has bedeviled some companies, leading several to delay their plans to hit the market.

However, the market for CIGS promises to be huge. CIGS is more efficient than telluride, another alternative material that has done well in the market. For example, First Solar, an Arizona publicly traded company that now has the highest market value ($5 billion) of any solar company uses thin-film solar technology too, applying telluride, not CIGS.

The huge funding suggests the investors at Heliovolt are confident the company will deliver. Investors include Sequel Venture Partners, Noventi Ventures, and Passport Capital. One of Noventi’s investors is Sorgenia, an Italian utility focused on its developing renewable energy.

The initial tranche of $77 million was led by Paladin Capital Group and the Masdar Clean Tech Fund. Additional participants were New Enterprise Associates as well as Solúcar Energia, Morgan Stanley Principal Investments, Sunton United Energy and Yellowstone Capital. HelioVolt says its CIGS deposition process is quicker and more reliable than competitors. It also says it can print CIGS onto a variety of materials and that its production line can be embedded into partners’ manufacturing facilities.