VentureBeat

BrightSource Energy, an Oakland, Calif., solar thermal startup, has landed a hefty $115 million funding round from investors including Google to develop its solar power tower technology.

Solar thermal technology is one the leading hopes for alternative energy. It uses like mirrors and lenses to boil water, the steam of which is harnessed to generate electricity.

This third round was led by Google.org, VantagePoint Venture Partners, BP Alternative Energy, Statoil Hydro Venture and Black River; returning investors included DBL Investors, Draper Fischer Jurvetson and Chevron Technology Ventures. The company has now raised $160 million.

The company recently signed a massive contract with PG&E to supply it with up to 900 megawatts from its plants, whose construction will begin in 2009. Its Distributed Power Tower (DPT) technology is basically an array consisting of thousands of small mirrors, called heliostats, which concentrate sunlight on a single point — in this case, a boiler chamber mounted on top of the tower. Because its heliostats are able to follow the sun in two dimensions, BrightSource claims they are much more efficient than rival solar thermal technologies.

Each field of heliostats, dubbed a Solar Power Cluster (SPC), can produce 20 MW of solar power; a typical BrightSource power plant, made up of five SPCs, is therefore capable of generating up to 100 MW. To reach the 900 MW mark, the company plans on having one 100 MW plant up and running by 2011 and four 200 MW plants up by 2016.

Rivals Ausra, Solel and eSolar use similar technologies to produce electricity, though their specific designs differ. The latter, for example, uses flat mirrors in smaller groupings to produce up to 33 MW at a time –a practical strategy that allows the firm to plug directly into the existing grid and to eschew the burdensome process of obtaining permits. Costs will likely remain the biggest obstacle for these companies, but BrightSource, which is chaired by Arnold Goldman, a man with an extensive background in solar thermal, will be well positioned to handle them.

[See also: CNET Green Tech Blog

BridgeLux has secured a hefty $40 million round to use for product development and expansion, despite facing ongoing patent litigation from giant LED maker Cree.

BridgeLux, like Cree, makes the chip that is the light-emitting part of LEDs, which it then sells to other firms. The company’s chips are predominantly in electronics and automotive applications, but are also being delivered for use in general lighting for homes and businesses.

The funding is notable because it’s one of the larger LED investments to date. BridgeLux is one of a generation of startups that is working toward the point, likely only a couple years off now, that LED lighting becomes widespread in the consumer lighting market.

In the United States alone, that market is estimated to be worth $1 billion by 2011, growing at about 37 percent each year. Other segments of the LED market will also grow significantly, if not quite as quickly. Adoption should be driven by the higher efficiency, reliability and safety of LEDs over other forms of lighting.

Some other LED companies that have taken funding within the last month including Illumitex, with $5.25 million; Optoelectronix, which took $6 million; and Luminus Devices, which grabbed a whopper round of $72 million in early March.

BridgeLux, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., also took $23 million last August; its total funding is now at $71 million. The lead investor for this round was VentureTech Alliance, which was joined by DCM, El Dorado Ventures, VantagePoint Venture Partners, Chrysalix Energy and Harris & Harris Group.

When we talk about solar power projects, the cost is generally counted in the millions, not billions, of dollars. But a new deal between the California utility PG&E and a solar thermal company heralds the next age of renewable energy, when capital begins to flow in earnest.

BrightSource, which has signed a contract with PG&E to supply 900 megawatts of energy (enough to supply over half a million households), will require between $2 and $3 billion to build several plants in the Mojave Desert. It’s the biggest solar project planned to date.

To get the full 900MW, BrightSource will need to build five separate plants. The first, a 100MW facility, will be running by 2011, CEO John Woolard told the San Jose Mercury News. The remaining four 200MW plants will be built over the following five years.

Solar thermal, in a nutshell, uses fields of mirrors to concentrate lots of sunlight on a single point, usually to boil water that in turn drives turbines. Specific designs vary; BrightSource uses a central tower with a boiler chamber mounted on top. But like a race horse, it’s performance that matters, not appearance.

Among current technologies, BrightSource and its rivals — Ausra, Solel and some smaller players — offer the cheapest way to generate electricity from the sun’s rays, far outstripping solar cells. But their real competition is energy from every other source, including coal, nuclear and oil.

The rates at which PG&E agrees to buy electricity from renewable sources aren’t disclosed, but the utility will likely pay prices close to those on existing energy sources — and if PG&E got the upper hand at the bargaining table, it might even pay rates low enough to be competitive with coal, which could drive some solar thermal players out of business. To date, PG&E has also struck deals with Ausra for a 177MW plant, and with Solel for 553MW.

BrightSource is perhaps more familiar with the cost equations than any other company. In fact, it’s chaired by one of the few people in the world with decades of experience in large-scale solar thermal — Arnold Goldman, whose Luz International built nine plants in the 1980s. The plants still exist, but Luz is long gone. BrightSource, which has a subsidiary called Luz II, is its spiritual and technological successor.

While Luz I didn’t survive, its extinction can also be attributed to the return of cheap oil, a scenario we aren’t likely to see again. When oil prices dropped, California and the federal government saw less reason to subsidize oil alternatives. In 1990, the company even admitted that if goverment incentives dried up, it would need “a miracle” to survive.

Those miracles — peak oil and global warming — are here, even though they’ve arrived 18 years too late for Luz. Under those twin threats, BrightSource and other solar thermal companies will likely benefit from incentives and rebates until they definitively succeed (or fail) in their quest to provide cheap energy.

There are a few more rays of hope for BrightSource. According to the company, its current technology is almost twice as efficient at converting solar power to electricity as Luz’, and the cost per kilowatt-hour has dropped to 70 percent of what it was. It also switched from curved to flat mirrors, making production cheaper. And if it doesn’t survive with all those positives — well, at least the plants will keep operating.

BrightSource is based in Oakland, Calif., while its Luz II subsidiary is in Israel. It has taken less than $50 million in venture funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the J.P. Morgan Bay Area Equity Fund and VantagePoint Venture Partners.

Mascoma, an East Coast biofuel startup with a multi-pronged approach to commercializing cellulosic ethanol, has just become one of the most heavily funded companies of its kind with a $50 million funding reported by peHUB.

Based in Cambridge, Mass., Mascoma is in the process of building several demonstration-scale ethanol plants in three other states: Michigan, New York and Tennessee. It’s partnered with a variety of different corporations and universities at each location.

What that boils down to is hedging its bets — by experimenting with several different feedstocks and processes, Mascoma is making itself more likely to hit the jackpot, a cost-effective cellulosic ethanol facility. The feedstocks it’s using include wood, switchgrass, and in New York, mixed materials like paper sludge and corn stover.

The $50 million funding was broken into a $30 million venture round and $20 million in debt. Participating were one new investor, General Catalyst Partners, and previous investors Khosla Ventures, Atlas Venture, Flagship Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Pinnacle Ventures and VantagePoint Venture Partners. Including various government grants, the company has taken just over $100 million to date.

Livescribe, the company that has developed a computer pen that listens to what is said when you are using it, and which will let you post to your blog straight from your paper, has gotten $23.2 million in venture financing.

On Monday, at the DEMO conference, Oakland, Calif.-based Livescribe will share more details about its pen, and the tools that developers will be able to use to build applications on its open platform. The pen has not yet been made generally available, though you can pre-order it at Livescribe’s site for $200.

VentureBeat learned of the funding news separately. The round is led by VantagePoint Venture Partners.

Livescribe’s pen records audio and syncs it to what is written. So if you take notes with it during a lecture, and then stumble over your bad handwriting later when reviewing your notes, the pen can play the audio back to you at the part of the lecture where you stumbled. This lets you retrieve everything that was being said, even if you spaced out during the lecture admiring the birds and the bees outside.

That’s just the beginning of its capabilities. It does things like upload its stored information to your computer — text or audio — and so you can share it all with friends, or post your pen notes immediately to your MySpace page or blog with a few tap on your notebook. See our original coverage here.

When Shai Agassi departed software giant SAP AG in March, it surprised many people because he was on track to become chief executive of the giant company.

He left declaring bold plans to help convert his native Israel and its neighbor Jordan into gasoline-free economies with nationwide electronic transportation systems. It was a noble vision.

Well, now he’s already emerged, leading a new Silicon Valley company to make electric cars, backed with a whopping $200 million in initial funding from Israel Corp., an Israel-based oil, trade and shipping conglomerage (which invested $100 million), VantagePoint Venture Partners and others.

The WSJ has the scant details available on the still-stealth, Palo Alto, Calif., company code-named Better Place, which already employs ten.

According to the piece, Agassi wants to use existing battery technologies, which are enough to get cars to go about 100 miles before recharging. The twist: Instead of making customers pay for the car and the expensive battery, they’d pay only for the car.

Meanwhile, his company would buy and own the batteries, and charge the car owner a monthly subscription fee to recharge the batteries. It would also set up a network of service centers to charge the batteries. It’s not clear whether this will substantially reduce costs, because someone would still have to pay the cost of dealing with the batteries, and the cost leaves electric cars still more expensive than conventional cars. But at least it takes away some of the stress on consumers who balk when they consider the complication of having to replace batteries every few years.

Here’s the latest action:
1)Google’s hires astronaut, funds algae-in-space research
2) Google slowly but surely moves apps to work offline
3) AdaptiveBlue makes its “Smart Links” smarter
4) YieldBuild wants to improve the placement and color of text ads
5) Technology to let machines drive cars is six to eight years away
6) Network Physics dies, sells assets to Opnet Technologies
7) Facebook sued for messaging
8) Visto declares it wants to go public for fourth year in a row
9) NBC Universal has pulled it channel from YouTube, with Hulu on way

Google’s hires astronaut, funds more space research – Google has really pulled out the stops on its space exploration ventures. It has committed almost $3 million a year to support 15 researchers at NASA/Ames, including Jonathan Trent, who is trying to figure out how to capture methane emitted by algae in the South Bay and turn it into a sustainable energy source. The thinking is the algae can be used to sustain human habitats on the moon or Mars, and be clean too, according to the Mercury News, which carries the latest details. Google digitizing NASA’s historic documents and images, and working with the space agency to add a “disaster response” layer to Google Earth that would quickly incorporate fresh satellite images of an area after a disaster, such as an earthquake. Google has even hired astronaut Ed Lu (image left), a veteran of three NASA space missions to manage Google’s space competition. (Image courtesy of Patrick Tehlan)

Google slowly but surely moves apps to work offline — It is using Google Gears to make Google’s blog software, Blogger, work offline. There’s a YouTube demo of it here. Google Reader is already offline, and Gmail and Docs should come soon. (Sidenote: VentureBeat’s writers have been using Google Docs to edit stories, and we’ve been having serious problems with Google Docs lately. It’s not showing edits as they’re updated, leaving one writer with one version and another writer with another — leaving our editing process in tatters on more than one occasion. Hope they get the online basics fixed first, before the carried away with the off-line version)

AdaptiveBlue makes its “Smart Links” smarter — Bloggers can now add a line of code to their site, and AdaptiveBlue’s technology will automatically take links to supported sites (Amazon, IMBD, Last.fm, Yahoo! Finance and more) and make them dynamic. Clicking on a Smart Link to the book, Love in the Time of Cholera, for example, will bring up a window with a short summary of the book, links to stores, reviews, and the Wikipedia entry on the author. A Smart Link to a stock offers a summary of its performance, links to Google Finance, CNN Money and SEC filings. You previously had to create Smart Links manually, and this new feature reduces that significant barrier to adoption.

YieldBuild wants to improve the placement and color of text ads — The company’s technology automatically tweaks the format of text ads based on their performance. It is similar to the Rubicon Project, which automatically places ads from the ad networks that deliver the most revenue. However, the Rubicon Project works with both display and text ads and its network-matching is a more robust technology. It’s not hard to imagine Rubicon replicating YieldBuild’s functions but it is hard to imagine it going the other way around.

Technology to let machines drive cars is six to eight years away — That’s the prediction of Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford computer professor, who leads the Stanford Racing Team in this year’s DARPA Urban Challenge, and knows as much as anyone about how well machines can drive cars. He talks about technology that will keep the “car much better in the lane, can brake much, much earlier in a much more regulated way. That would conceivably allow us to increase the packaging density of cars by a factor of two or three. Say it’s two, so at 16 percent occupied, just cut the space between cars in half, all of a sudden you’ve doubled the capacity of the U.S. highway system. That’ll sustain us for another 30 years with the current traffic loads given that the population is increasing and using more highway space.”

Network Physics dies, sells assets to Opnet Technologies – The publicly traded Opnet has paid $10 million in cash to buy the assets of the Mountain View, Calif. Network Physics, which was backed with more than $51 million in eight years from VantagePoint Venture Partners, Sofinnova Ventures, SunAmerica Ventures, Lucent Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Trinity Ventures and Palomar Ventures. Network Physics sells an application performance management appliance.

Facebook sued for messaging — Facebook is being sued by an Indiana woman who alleges Facebook profited from its members sending thousands of unauthorized text messages to her mobile phone and other phones of others that previously belonged to other people. The messages allegedly included explicit language and unsettling remarks, and resulted in charges of 10 cents per message on her phone bill.

Wireless-email company Visto declares it wants to go public for fourth year in a row– This is quite remarkable. Why did it take this publication take so long to call it out?

Here’s the latest action:

1) Dash Navigation opens platform
2) Flock releases new browser, with Facebook in sidebar
3) Patriots successfully sue ticket scalper, StubHub
4) Google’s great quarter: Net income up 46 percent
5) Brad Greenspan’s tell-all essay on MySpace
6) Microsoft releases Popfly, allowing non-geeks to build apps
7) Comcast steps away from Net Neutrality

Dash Navigation opens platform — Dash, you’ll recall is the cool GPS device that you can use in your car, and which will be constantly connected to the Internet. The company orginally said it was going to release its product this fall. However, last month, it delayed the release and will come next year. Notably, at the Web 2.0 Summit today, it also declared it will be an open platform. So you can do mashups with maps, and use Zillow, for example, to track the values of homes as you drive by them. That’s a good turn, because earlier year we criticized the company for being closed. That’s when it signed an exclusive contract with Yahoo to offer people search. What’s the point of letting people use the Web from their car if you’re going to shut them out from using other services? We still think this company is somewhat hyped. Accessing a decent, reliable Internet connection from your car is going to be a very difficult thing to do, and there’s loads of competition out there. As mobile internet access gets more robust, however, this device will get more attractive.

Flock offers new version of its broswer to the public here — We’ve written about its sidebar, which lets you operate within some of your social networking accounts without actully going to their site. New is the ability to access your Facebook account, and do upload photos directly to that account from your browser (see image).

Sports: Patriots successfully sue StubHub to gain ticket resellers’ identities – Stubhub, a marketplace that lets people buy and sold tickets they have purchased for sports games, concerts, and other events, was forced to divulge the identity of 13,000 of its users to the team. The Patriots claimed reselling tickets violated a Massachussets state law against reselling tickets for over two dollars the price at which they were purchased. EBay-owned Stubhub has begun notifying its affected users that the Patriots have their names, addresses and phone numbers. The Patriots management says it may revoke the tickets of people who resold on Stubhub. The Boston Globe has more. The team is now spying on its fans, after having been busted for spying on its opponents, as others have noted.

Google widens lead in search – Google’s said net income in the third quarter rose 46 percent compared to a year ago. Sales climbed 57 percent, beating estimates. Its profit margin declined somewhat, but its market share keeps rising, and competitor Yahoo said its revenues had grown just 12 percent.

Funky macro economics — We’re not certain how this will affect start-ups, but the dollar is an all-time low, at $1.42 to the euro, and the price of crude oil also hit a record, briefly breaching $90 a barrel yesterday. This could mean inflation, but housing woes are keeping things in check. (Details here).

Comcast steps away from Net Neutrality — Web companies like Joost and BitTorrent that have business models based on peer-to-peer sharing rely on the concept of “net neutrality,” meaning all traffic on the internet will be treated the same. Net neutrality isn’t a law, though; internet service providers can manipulate traffic in other ways if they wish. Comcast, the nation’s second largest internet service provider, has now been shown to be selectively blocking some peer-to-peer traffic, with no regard to the source of the traffic — in other words, they don’t care whether it comes from illegal file sharing or a legitimate business, they just don’t want it.
It’s not time for P2P-based companies to panic just yet. Comcast was already notorious for heavy-handed tactics to limit their bandwidth, and the bad publicity may force them to drop the practice. On the other hand, if the company manages to set a precedent, Joost et al. could be in trouble. And to make matters worse, many customers can’t vote with their feet by leaving Comcast — in many areas, only one or two service providers are available to choose from.

The tell-all essay of Brad Greenspan, Myspace “founder” – Greenspan played an early role at a company called eUniverse, which gave birth to MySpace. However, while he claims to have been a founder of MySpace, Myspace executives dismiss his role there. Greenspan writes in a long, unedited essay on the anti-Myspace site: I was forced to leave eUniverse at the end of October as [venture capital firm VantagePoint Venture Partners] took control of eUniverse and Myspace. His screed, complete with court documents, tells the story of how he was the driving force behind Myspace, and how a cast of characters took the company out from under him. Greenspan has already tried suing News Corp over his grievances, but his case was dismissed. See our previous coverage of the issue here. Found via YC hacker news.

Software giant Microsoft’s drag-and-drop Web mashup development tool, Popfly, now open for public testing — Its for people who don’t know how to code, and gives anybody the ability to build applications. As it becomes easier to mix and match programs, like building a house from Lego pieces, maybe the rest us will really start building applications. This may have limited popularity, but it won’t be a blockbuster.

Featured companies: DirectFlow, Direvo, Indigo Biosystems, MacroGenics

Direct Flow raises $27M for heart-valve implants — Santa Rosa, Calif.-based Direct Flow Medical, a startup developing heart implants, raised $27 million in a second funding round. Investors included Johnson & Johnson Development, Foundation Medical Partners, VantagePoint Venture Partners, ePlanet, EDF Ventures, New Leaf Venture Partners and Spray Venture Partners.

Direct Flow makes minimally invasive aortic-valve replacements for the heart. This particular field happens to be booming — we’ve previously covered competitors JenaValve, AorTx and Sadra.

MacroGenics signs Eli Lilly pact worth initial $43M for autoimmune disease — MacroGenics, a Rockville, Md., biotech developing antibody-based therapies for autoimmune disease, signed a partnership with Eli Lilly that could be worth more than $600 million. MacroGenics is working on antibodies designed to tamp down autoimmune responses by inducing tolerance to antigens that might otherwise promote strong immune reactions to the body’s own cells. The company’s first drug candidate targets diabetes — specifically “type one” diabetes that results when the immune system targets insulin-producing cells in the pancreas.

OTHER HEADLINES OF NOTE:

• Indigo Biosystems gets funding for lab-data software (VentureWire, sub req’d)
• Germany’s Direvo pulls in €12M for biomanufacturing (release)

1) LGC Wireless to be acquired by telecom components company
2) Rumors abound that News Corp. is buying RockYou for hundreds of millions of dollars
3) Myspace + Skype: newly-joined parts of the “Web 2.0 address book”
4) Apple finally decides to return developers’ love
5) Treemo, another mobile and online content sharing service, raises 2.5 million
6) LiveScribe, a near-magical pen for taking written and audio notes at the same time, raises $22 million

LGC Wireless to be acquired by telecom components company — LGC Wireless, which sells technology that improves spotty wireless coverage in garages or in thick-walled buildings, will announce the purchase by the end of the month, we’re told by sources. LGC’s offering always made a lot of sense, because coverage from the main carriers like Sprint, Verizon and others have been poor in many shielded areas. Problem is, the carriers balked at paying for the company’s services, seeing it as a needless expense: Most consumers seem to simply sigh and put up with crappy service. LGC kept plugging away though, and nine years and $93 million in venture backing later, it is finally getting bought by a large, unnamed telecom components company.

Rumors abound that News Corp. is buying RockYou for hundreds of millions of dollars – Last night, Valleywag posted an anonymous tip that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. will buy top widget-maker RockYou for the bubbly purchase price of $800 million — considering the company is still developing its revenue model. Today, an apparently different anonymous tipster told Facebook-focused blog AllFacebook a similar rumor but with a lower price: A mere “$300 and $500 million, with earnouts that could push the $600 to $650 million range.” We asked RockYou and the company flatly denied the rumors, saying only that the tipsters must “have us confused with a different company.” Murdoch will be presenting at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco later today. We’ll see what he has to say about any possible acquisitions, as well as any news about the rumored Myspace developer platform.

Myspace + Skype: newly-joined parts of the “Web 2.0 address book” – The social network subsidiary of News Corp. and the internet calling subsidiary of eBay will introduce a feature in November to let Myspace users make Skype calls through Myspace’s instant-messaging feature.

This pairing of social information and a popular communications service is the tip of the proverbial iceberg, according to Tim O’Reilly. He thinks that social networks will grow into a “social network operating system” that combines social information about you and your friends together with all of your contact information from across email, phone and IM.

This, remember, is also the original vision behind Facebook’s developer platform — the thousands of toy-like widgets on Facebook right now are just another small chunk of the iceberg’s tip.

Apple finally decides to return developers’ love — Since the iPhone release earlier this year, developers have hacked, cracked and otherwise abused the phone’s software platform in every way imaginable, despite repeated cautions from Apple that the phone’s firmware shouldn’t be tampered with. In many cases, the result of installing outside applications has been an unusable iPhone.

The company has finally decided to respond to strident pleas and threats from legions of unhappy developers by releasing a software developer’s kit (SDK) next February. The SDK, which will give developers easier access and more information to create new applications, should encourage innovation and even some startups based on the iPhone platform.

Now, to connect your social information on Facebook with your contact information in your iPhone.

Treemo, another mobile and online content sharing service, raises 2.5 million – PaidContent has more on the Seattle company.

LiveScribe, a near-magical pen for taking both written and audio notes at the same time, raises $22 million – The funding was led by VantagePoint Venture Partners, reports PEHub. Our previous coverage of the company is here; check out the video, below, to see more.

Featured companies: Ablynx, Bind Biosciences, Maas Biolab, Oriel Therapeutics, ThromboVision, Xcellerex

(UPDATED: See below.)

Contract biomanufacturer Xcellerex pulls in $31M — Marlborough, Mass.-based Xcellerex, a startup that provides contract “bioprocess” development and manufacturing, raised $31 million in a third funding round. Investors included VantagePoint Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, and SCG Investments.

Xcellerex develops modular “turnkey” manufacturing systems for complex biomolecules such as the proteins, peptides, antibodies and nucleic acids used in biotech drugs and vaccines. The company doesn’t, however, appear to name any of the corporate partners for which it is presumably providing these services.

Maas Biolab receives $2.1M grant for potential Lou Gehrig’s treatment — Maas Biolab, an Albuquerque, N.M., company focused on turning the older immunosuppressive drug cyclosporine into a treatment for Lou Gehrig’s disease, received a $2.1 million grant to further its work. The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke provided the funding.

Maas believes that cyclosporine is a neuroprotective drug and says that it extends the lives of mice with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the technical name for Lou Gehrig’s disease. The company’s experimental drug Mitogard is a proprietary form of cyclosporine specifically intended for adminstration into cerebrospinal fluid. It’s not clear from the Maas Web site if it developed Mitogard or licensed it from elsewhere. The drug is not yet in clinical trials; Maas says the drug will undergo “dose escalation” and “pharmacokinetics” studies — that is, work to ascertain its dose-effectiveness and the way it is distributed and then broken down and eliminated by the body — in order to enable an application for human tests.

Nanopartical startup Bind Biosciences hooks $2M award for targeted drugs — Bind Biosciences, a Cambridge, Mass., biotech developing nanoparticles capable of ferrying drugs to specific locations in the body, received a $2 million grant to further its work. NIST provided the funding.

Bind Biosciences is one of several startups hoping to tailor the biological, physical and chemical properties of nanoparticles in ways that will cause them to hone in on particular tissues or protein targets. By attaching drug molecules to these nanoparticles, it should theoretically be possible to turn them into a new version of “smart-bomb” targeted therapies. Other startups at work in this space that we’ve written about include Tempo Pharmaceuticals and Carigent Therapeutics (see our coverage here and here).

Oriel Therapeutics raises undisclosed sum for new drug inhaler — Oriel Therapeutics, a Research Triangle Park, N.C., device maker focused on a new form of inhaler, raised an undisclosed sum in a third funding round, VentureWire reports (subscription required). The investment was lead by New Leaf Venture Partners; the company declined to disclose other investors or the amount. Oriel claims to be developing a new type of “active” inhaler for drugs for asthma or lung disease.

OTHER HEADLINES OF NOTE:

• Houston’s ThromboVision gets $1.5M grant for personalized-medicine diagnostics (Houston Business Journal)
• Infusion-services firm Critical Homecare Solutions files for $125M IPO (Edgar)
• Belgium’s Ablynx, maker of mini-antibodies from llamas, plans IPO later this year (Reuters)

UPDATE: Expanded items on Xcellerex, Maas Biolab, Bind Biosciences, and Oriel Therapeutics.

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.

Yesterday, we reported the hightlights of the latest DEMO conference, writing stories about the most significant technologies being announced.

They included ThePudding.com (our coverage), MyQuire (our coverage), Tubes (our coverage), Glam’s Digg feature (our coverage), Fluid Innovation (our coverage), CashView (our coverage), Vyro-Games (our coverage), LiveMocha (our coverage) and MetaRadar (our coverage) and more (our coverage).

Here’s a review of a few other companies and technologies that we didn’t get to, but which are worth a mention: 360Desktop, MuseStorm, DimDim, YourTrumanShow and Shoutlet.

360Desktop — The Australian company wants to expand your desktop view. It produces a 360° panorama out of the base screen, so that if you direct your cursor to screen edge, your screen backdrop turns with it, and keeps turning — giving you much more space to store your icons and other windows open at one time (see image at left). This may not sound like much at first — but the desktop is a valuable piece of computer “real estate” that nobody has yet figured out how to monetize. 360Desktop is the latest attempt to do so. Their program starts by offering you a 360 degree picture as wallpaper. The added space provides ample room for the numerous open windows and icons that vie for space on the average person’s desktop. There’s also enough room for banks of widgets to be installed — miniature webpages that load up say, today’s version of the New York Times or a current weather forecast.

Although the 360Desktop will continue to function normally while users are offline, it’s the online time that’s valuable. One way for it to make money is to give let say, a car company create customized desktops that include advertising. The risk, of course, is that users will balk at having even subtle advertising invade their desktop. Those wary users will be able to build their own, without advertising. 360Desktop is launching into closed beta testing now, and founder Evan Jones plans to move the company to the U.S. in the coming months, taking on an investment from a local venture capitalist in the process. The Australian variety, he notes, “just don’t understand.”

MuseStorm — The Israeli company produces web widgets, which are tiny self-contained web pages that can be seeded around the internet. MuseStorm’s focus is on giving advanced analytics functionality to publishers, thus allowing close tracking of how web surfers interact with the widgets they see. Since we last wrote about the company in July, they’ve been hinting of more to come. The new version allows widget customization, produces automatic embed code for them to be placed on social networks, and advertising. The most unique feature, however, is “interaction metrics,” which allow publishers to see detailed reports of exactly how surfers used their widgets — for example, rolling their mouse pointer over a headline or scrolling through content.

MuseStorm is the only widget platform we know of that gives its users such close oversight of their widgets, although we expect their competitors to catch up quickly. After all, there’s real money flowing into the space. 3Guppies, a Seattle mobile-blogging company, launched yesterday, saying it has $20 million in venture capital from VantagePoint Venture Partners; their service uses a widget to connect to social networks through a user’s mobile phone, allowing them to check on and update their social networks.

DimDim –This is an open-source replacement for WebEx we wrote about earlier this year. Started by Deb Dutta Ganguly, who sold his company Advanced Internet Management back in 2001, the video meeting service is finally launching its free service at DEMOfall. Like other web meeting software, DimDim can be used for broadcasting live video to hundreds or thousands of people simultaneously. However, according to Ganguly, it’s the only one that doesn’t require any sort of installation by the user to run. The team has spent the months since our last mention working on time lag, so that if you’re in the U.S. having a meeting with someone in China, the difference isn’t notable. The feature list is heavily dependent on what the service’s lead users have so far requested; Ganguly says that open source is all about accepting the innovations of users. And, since DimDim is open source, it will be free for anyone to run.

DimDim wants to make money from clients needing assistance with larger applications — for instance, a university wishing to hold a live meeting for a class of several hundred students. The company will also provide hosting for meetings, starting at about $99 a year for the service, with dynamic scaling provided by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. WebEx, by comparison, charges $39 per month, making DimDim a serious threat to its business.

YourTrumanShow — This company launched a few months ago as a place to upload video diaries today launches VideoMap, a fun widget that lets you use video as a means for exploring and expanding your social network.

Take a look at this screen shot:

The widget creates a clear and easily navigable map of your social network with you at the center and your friends as nodes. Clicking on one of your friends will extend a map of their friends, and so on. VideoMap scrapes the videos that your friends (and their friends) have uploaded, and when you click on any of these people, you can browse through their videos and play them without leaving the widget.

In an alternative mode, seen in the screenshot below, the videos themselves become the nodes. Again, you start at the center but it’s your uploaded videos that surround you. Now, when you click on a video, the widget displays other VideoMap users that have uploaded the same video. Clicking on these people will let you explore their videos, instead of their friends. It’s an innovative way to find others who share your interests and discover new content at the same time.

YourTrumanShow still holds out hope of becoming a destination site, and will so launch a celebrity-diary series in pursuit of that goal.

Shoutlet — Produced by Sway, a Chicago company, Shoutlet is a tool that allows users to distribute content across multiple media (RSS feeds, podcasts, SMS texting and widgets) and track results in real time. It’s designed for marketers and PR professionals. BuzzLogic, another company we’ve written about, allows marketers to assess the influence of blogs and their communities, but does not offer the sort of distribution that Shoutlet does.

Ausra, an ambitious Silicon Valley company wanting to build a solar thermal electric power plant double the largest ever built, has raised somewhere north of $40 million in a first round of capital.

However, just as Ausra was preparing to make its announcement Monday that it has applied for a permit to produce a record 175 megawatt plant, its Oakland Calif. competitor, BrightSource, stole some of the thunder late last week by saying it has applied to build a larger, 200 megawatt solar plant and two smaller ones.

The Ausra investment is significant, though, because it’s the largest best so far made by Khosla Ventures, the firm started by successful venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. Khosla has made dozens of investments in the area of green technology, but the size of his bet on this technology reflects his enthusiasm for the Palo Alto, Calif. company, he said. He invested $25 million of the total.

Another top venture firm, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, joined in the investment too.

Solar thermal is different from photovoltaics, the popular technology used for residential solar power. Ausra’s solar thermal technology uses large mirrors, made of steel and glass, to concentrate the sun to heat water into steam. (See Forbes’ explanation of how the two processes are different). Ausra’s process drives a turbine with the steam, to generate electricity. Notably, the energy can be stored in pressurized tanks, so that electricity can be generated day or night. The electricity can also be transported for long distances. In an interview, Khosla and Executive Vice-President John O’Donnell told VentureBeat that if a 92 square mile region of Nevada were covered with the technology, Ausra would be able to fulfill the nation’s entire electricity needs. (They are actually half-serious about this being a possibility, pointing out that much of Nevada’s land is owned by the federal government. Only 10 percent of that land would be needed.)

The technology has been around since the 1990s, when Ausra’s founder David Mills, conceived the idea at Sydney University, and worked on it with scientist Graham Morrison between 1995 and 2001, but Ausra was formed late last year. Khosla and Kleiner Perkins’ Ray Lane met with the company and moved it to the U.S from Australia.

The idea is to help California utilities meet requirements to install 17 gigawatts of clean power by 2020.

Within a year, Ausra will match the price of natural gas plants, which generate electricity at about 9.2 cent per kilowatt hour, O’Donnell said. Within three years, it will match the cost of coal-fired plants, which is about 6 to 8 cents per kilowatt hour (without clean coal processes such as carbon sequestering or gassification). Existing competing solar plants, including one in Nevada, generate electricity at between 16 and 22.4 cents per kilowatt hour.

Among Ausra’s competitors is Brightsource, formerly named Luz II (which we covered here), backed with $30 million from VantagePoint Venture Partners and others. The difference is that Ausra has cut the cost of producing the solar reflecting mirrors — making them on a mass production line, in return for slightly less efficiency, says O’Donnell. (Here’s a Pdf presentation about the company, including a look at its technology.) Ausra said it wants to build a 175 Megawatt plant, more than twice as large as the reigning champ, an 80 megawatt plant in the Mojave desert built in the 1990s.

Other players include France’s Acciona Energy, which recently raised $266 million in debt-and-equity project financing facility to cover the capital costs of constructing a 64-MW solar thermal plant in Nevada (see overview here), and Seville, Spain’s Abengoa Group, which has built a plant in Europe. There are several other smaller players, too.

Multiply, a social network aimed at 30-somethings, has just announced additional venture funding of $16.6 million

The Boca Raton, Florida-based Multiply struggled after launching in late 2003. It was part of the early pack of social networking companies that sprung up in the wake of path-breaker Friendster. It got some initial buzz, but then MySpace, also part of the pack, blew everyone else away. Multiply has trudged forward, almost in the background.

However, it started growing quickly this year. It had more than ten million unique visitors in August, with two million in the US. The number is expanding ten percent a month, the company says. Unique visitors have doubled since it introduced a more streamlined user interface last year, chief executive Peter Pezaris tells us (see Hitwise graph at bottom of article).

Multiply has seen its number of registered users grow to more than six million, Pezaris says, with around 96 percent of existing users returning at least once a month. Note that the number of unique visitors is higher than the number of registered visitors because Multiply allows users to email, say, photo albums on Multiply to friends who are not members, and let those friends view these pages without registering.

So Multiply becomes part of an ever expanding group of social networking also-rans that venture capitalists want to take a bet on — because it might still prove a break-out success.

When the site first launched it was designed to be an all-in-one site for sharing pictures, videos and other media. Key features were created but buried by a slew of bells and whistles — most importantly, its message boards showing users their friends’ activities was placed in a menu together with other options.

The message boards, as the company has more recently discovered, have proven vital for gaining and keeping user attention. Present since the site launched, this feature lets you distribute photos, videos, comments and other information to all of your friends and friends-of-friends. Then Multiply displays this information based on its algorithms for weighing the relationship between you and the people in your Multiply network. The result is a stream of information that users care about most from the people closest to them, flowing through their personal message boards.

The company, however, didn’t give this feature prominence until last November, two months after Facebook launched its own version, called “news feeds.”

At that time, Multiply made its messaging system its users’ homepage, like Facebook (see the company’s sample below). On both sites, this feature has forced users to see what their friends are up to whenever they log in, serving as bait to get users to click through to friends profile pages, photo albums and other items of interest.

Unlike Facebook or Myspace, the median age of a Multiply user is 35, according to Pezaris, which shows the site’s focus on private, close connections is what this demographic wants. Besides the message boards, Multiply has developed all of its features specifically for networks of friends and family, without the voyeurism of MySpace or the college dorm feel of Facebook. It lets you define your contacts as family, friends, acquaintances, etc. so you can decide who gets access to things like your photo collection; when you share information on Multiply, you have the option to choose exactly which type of person gets to see it in their message board. The average Multiply user has around 1000 people in their network, ranging from close relationships like a spouse, to more distant ones, like a friend of a friend at work, according to Pezaris.

Besides larger social networks, like Myspace, Facebook, Hi5, etc., competitors include Friendster (which is also growing fast), which claims to have already nailed the 30-something market, TeeBeeDee for people over 40 and Eons for people over 50.

The big question for Multiply is whether it can distinguish itself as more 30-somethings join Facebook and other sites. Multiply didn’t rank in Comscore’s recent study of the top social networks worldwide, released in July, because it didn’t yet have the 10 million unique visitors required to be included in the study.

The funding round was led by VantagePoint Venture Partners, with Point Judith Capital and previous investor Transcosmos Investments participating.

VantagePoint’s David Scott Carlick will join Multiply’s board. Carlick was formerly Chairman of Intermix Media, the parent company of Myspace before it sold to News Corp. in 2005.

There’s a NYT story about social networks, including Multiply, that target “seniors” here (via IHT).