VentureBeat

Hoping to capitalize on the tremendous amount of free, tidal energy offered by the St. Lawrence River, the government of Ontario has committed $2.2m for a 15 MW underwater turbine project to be handled by New York-based Verdant Power. The turbines will be installed on the floor of the river and used to generate enough electricity to power up to 11,000 homes.

Company officials estimate that there may be enough power in Canada’s water currents, rivers and channels to produce close to 15,000 MW — enough to provide electricity for over 11m homes. Verdant Power’s first — and only other — large-scale turbine project, the RITE (Roosevelt Island Turbine Energy Project), in New York’s East River is expected to generate close to 10 MW when it is completed.

The RITE Project has, however, run into several problems over the course of its implementation — mostly resulting from the river’s strong currents, which overwhelmed the construction of the turbines. Their propellers were sheared off a third of the way down and destabilized as a result of having weak bolt connections to the turbine hubs. Based on initial results, Verdant’s turbines produce electricity for 7-8 cents/kWh, competitive with non-renewable sources.

The turbines’ environmental impact is considered relatively benign; the blades are blunt-edged and rotate slowly enough that they allow fish to pass through without harm. The real question is whether underwater turbines will prove a viable investment over the long term: They might still get knocked down by a strong current, their blades could get gummed up with barnacles or they might simply degrade over time due to wear and tear.

Verdant has received $15m in initial funding from Tudor Investment. One of Verdant’s competitors, Oceana Energy, inked a deal with PG&E last June to develop a similar project in San Francisco Bay and is also working on expanding its presence upstream of Verdant’s site in New York.

In Europe, commercial-scale projects like SeaGen, a 1.2MW tidal energy convertor backed by Bristol-based Marine Current Turbines, are set to begin operations soon.

Updated

The advertising revolution continues, in both the Internet and wireless worlds.

Spot Runner, the internet start-up that gives advertisers an easier, cheaper way to insert their ads into local TV programming, has raised $40 million more in backing.

And Rhythm NewMedia, meanwhile, has soaked up $18 million more in venture capital, to claim a stake in the other sexy ad area right now: inserting ads in wireless video clips.

This is a lot of money for both players. For SpotRunner, it is significant because backers include major buyers and sellers of advertising: WPP, CBS Corporation and the Interpublic Group. WPP says it manages about $50 billion in advertising budgets and Interpublic Group says its ad agencies serve 4,000 clients. Existing shareholder Allen & Co. led the third round of financing.

It suggests Spot Runner is getting traction. Its model is compelling: The complexities and cost of producing a video and buying air time are daunting for most small business owners. Spot Runner, which we first wrote about here, has developed a self-serve, web-based ad-buying system for TV.

The service works like this: The local business owner goes to the Spot Runner site, picks a business category and then chooses from among thousands of generic, pre-taped video ads. Each ad comes with pre-written voice-over text that can be customized. Once the business has picked an ad, it tells Spot Runner how much it wants to spend on air time and which media markets it wants the ad to run in.

Also among the latest investors are Tudor Investment and Capital Research and Management, and existing investors Battery and Index Ventures.

Meanwhile, Rhythm NewMedia’s technology, which is still in development, will use its new funding to work with carriers to insert relevant ads in video streamed to their users’ cellphones, the company told VentureBeat Friday. Carlyle Venture Partners led the investment, while existing investors also participated. These include Rembrandt Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures.

Separately, the company told VentureWire (sub required) it is about to launch with two carriers — one in the U.S. and one on the U.K — with one of those as early as this quarter, the second during the first quarter of next year.

Catching up:

YouTube is making $7.5 million a month –Everyone has been guessing whether YouTube is profitable, given the high costs it faces hosting all its videos. This guy says YouTube is doing $7.5 million a month in ads, and is profitable.

FON, the company that wants to encourage people to share their WiFi routers, having problems? — The general manager of US division has left. We’re beginning to think this Fon idea my be too clunky to fly. You buy a router to let other people use it, and it lets you tap into other peoples’ FON routers when you travel. It is a chicken and egg problem; Why buy it, unless you know lots of others have bought it too? Problem is, there are so many ways to get online these days. For starters, FON’s own backer, Google, is building out free networks. Google is using a WiFi router built by Mountain View’s Meraki.

Filmloop to launch online version — Filmloop, which let people create slideshows on their desktops and then have friends see updated versions automatically on their own computers, has created an online (browser) version too. It’s facing plenty of competition, but says more than 1 million users have uploaded 42 million photos.

Time for these podcasting services to make money — Evan Williams, of podcasting start-up Odeo, is making some public confessions about having trouble, and he is shutting Audioblogger, which allowed you to post on your blog via a telephone call. (Details here.) So eyes have turned to how these companies can make money. PodZinger, an audio and video search engine of Cambridge, Mass., has just launched a way for podcasters to insert advertising in both audio and video files. It says it has “content classification” technology which allows it to match ads to the podcaster’s content. It also says it has algorithms for analyzing a user’s “intent” and provides ad matches that way. The content creators, or podcasters, can decide whether or not they want the service, which can bring them extra revenue — which they share with PodZinger.

Ning’s video & photo move — The Silicon Valley start-up Ning, backed in part by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, gives you multiple tools you build your own web site, as we’ve mentioned. Now it has released more stuff, including letting you customize your own niche, YouTube-like video site, or Flickr-like photo site. The company took us through a demo last week, and it’s easy to use. The video site gives your own embedded player that you can brand as your own, which you can place in your blog or at MySpace — but which runs on Ning’s servers, and so you aren’t paying hosting costs. Ning bets it can cover the costs by taking a share of the advertising revenue. It says its advertising is lucrative compared to some other sites, because its users are creating content-focused sites, and so can be targeted by advertisers appropriately. The ads are generating $2 or more per 1,000 page views, the company said.

Rebtel raises $20 million for (complicated) online calls — Like Jajah, this Stokholm company (co-founder Greg Spector is here in Redwood City office, though) Rebtel lets you make calls cheaply by accessing its own system of low-cost Internet lines. But it gets complicated. It works when you dial a local number it has assigned for the person you are calling (yep, a different number than the one you already have for him or her). Once you call the other person, they have to hang up, and call you back. There’s logic to it: The system is trying to find the cheapest combination of Internet and local lines. It has raised $20 million in venture capital, including from Benchmark and Index. They charge $1 a week, and calls are otherwise free. We’re seeing a lot of these cheaply built phone services emerging; they’ll appeal to the frugal phone user, but not to those of us who want simplicity. (More here).

Asides:

Speaking of ads, there’s not enough place online to host them all — Here’s news that 100 million people watched online videos in July, and evidence that advertisers can’t find enough online inventory to put their ads.

New VC podcast — Levensohn Venture Partners, a venture firm in SF has started a podcast series called VC — Inside Out.

Bono’s direct connection with Apple, gone — Apple said Fred Anderson, who served as the company’s chief financial officer from 1996 until 2004, resigned from the board, because of the option scandal. Anderson remains a partner at the Silicon Valley buyout firm Elevation Partners, which as you’ll remember is where U2’s Bono hangs out, and who promoted the U2 iPod.

Google executive, Marissa Mayer, shows how to hold meetings efficiently — Meetings can be a waste of time. What if your company had the same discipline as Marrisa? You’d get a lot more done. This shows the Google trait of schizophrenia — creativity and discipline in one.

Google has a bunch of new products — No wonder Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently burst out, criticizing his developers for releasing too many products, and not focusing on making them work well. Here’s a recap of last week’s bombardment alone. One lets you restrict the sites you are searching (details here). Next, here’s the latest on the Google gadgets you can put on your Web site (choose from 1,200 of them). Google has also launched an experimental site, called Searchmash, tracking behavior of users off its main site. There’s a new initiative to allow you to build Web apps on top of Google search, whereby Google has opened its APIs to allow an AJAX search box for videos (click on one of the videos to see), for example. Finally, Google launched Code Search, a way to search for source code from around the Web.

Yahoo’s flip-flop– Yahoo has donated $1 million to Stanford University’s John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists, seven months after handing over information about a professional journalist to Chinese authorities. You may view it cynically, but this is a good move, nevertheless — it is earmarked to support journalists from countries where there are restrictions on freedom of the press.