VentureBeat

[Update: Lost in the press blitz about the Google.org investment was the fact that Altarock took $26.25 million in total. Advanced Technology Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Vulcan Capital all participated.] Here’s a fact: If you go outside, wherever you are, and start drilling a hole, once you get deep enough it will become very, very hot. Using that heat for electricity is the cornerstone of geothermal power, and it’s great if you can reach the hot spots — just ask Iceland. But much of that heat is difficult to reach or use, a detail that has inspired the latest investment by Google.org.

The type of geothermal power that has been used for over a century comes from underground reservoirs of water that are heated from below. Areas that are easy to access, like California’s Geysers geothermal development, are a valuable source of power. But in many other places, there are heated areas relatively close to the surface — in Google’s view, that means three to 10 kilometers down — that also don’t contain water.

To draw power from those locations, you’d need to not only drill down far enough, but also pump in water and retrieve it as steam to run turbines. That technology is called Enhanced Geothermal Systems. The Google.org funding, for $10.25 million, has been split two ways. Altarock Energy will get $6.25 million, and Potter Drilling will receive $4 million. Separately, the Southern Methodist University Geothermal Lab will get about half a million dollars for ongoing research.

Between the three, Google is tackling the various requirements for drilling and injecting water, as well as mapping out new resources. However, the amounts are small compared to other recent Google.org investments.

We speculated that Google.org would be making a geothermal bet back in May, right after it had helped plow over $200 million into solar thermal firms Brightsource and, separately, eSolar. Those amounts suggested that Google was ready to put serious weight behind any technology it thought could take off.

The investments announced today could indicate that EGS isn’t ready for prime-time, or that the companies Google funded are simply a bit earlier in the development cycle. Or it could mean that Google is nervous about some of the risk factors with EGS, like the possibility of losing large amounts of the water you pump in or destabilizing the ground beneath plants (not a small concern in California).

Another company we’ve written about, Australia’ Geodynamics, is planning thousands of megawatts of geothermal development using technology similar to Altarock’s, but has already had to abandon at least one well that it drilled. If successful, both it and the Google companies estimate that they can produce geothermal power for under 10 cents per kilowatt hour, the usual figure required for success.

We’ve also written about Altarock before, when it received at $4 million investment last year from Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures.

Evri, a startup spun out of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s investment firm Vulcan Capital and headed by a long-time software executive from Amazon.com, has an idea for how natural language processing and semantic technology can help people navigate the Internet. And their idea has nothing to do with search.

Like all semantic startups, Evri is all about helping machines connect concepts, using the structure and meaning of human language to create some order. The first wave of similar companies, like Powerset, Hakia and the still-stealthy Cuill, are all about using that concept to out-do Google and return better results. But where traditional search requires a definite aim and returns answers — good or bad — a better metaphor for Evri is Internet tourism, with an eye toward serendipitous discovery.

When surfing content on the Internet, you’ll be able to click a link for a person, place or thing you’re interested in and move into a sort of parallel web built by Evri. The company automatically constructs “nodes” for concepts like Paris or Megan Fox based on their relationships to other nodes in the database. Each node contains some information, like a Wikipedia summary or video, about the thing you’re interested in, and links to associated content.

That may sound something like an automated Mahalo, but CEO Neil Roseman says there’s a key difference. On sites like Mahalo and Wikipedia, “You go to a page on the Holy Grail there, you read it and you’re done. With us, we want to help people look into the content deeper,” he says.

For example, if you were reading a news article about Paris and clicked through, you might find links out to more content about Marais, the neighborhood the article deals with, or a local musician, Julien Ribot. The most closely associated content comes up first, so you can read more about the subjects the article deals directly with if you want. But because the semantic linking recognizes any connection, you could also find yourself following a link to another person, place or thing that happened to have been mentioned alongside Marais or Ribot elsewhere.

The result should be an entertaining journey for the casual surfer, reminiscent of a myth my dad told me about how the local roads were planned in the rural Virginia county where I grew up. First, he said, engineers dipped a cow’s tail in paint. Then they let it free to roam, and cleared a road anywhere they found paint. The result were winding, meandering roads that did a better job of showing you the local scenery than getting to a definite destination. That’s basically what Evri promises to do for the Internet.

Of course, any Wikipedia user who has spent hours clicking through related links already knows the concept is good. The difference is the delivery. Evri plans to launch first with publishers like newspapers, offering either links in the content or a separate widget. And because its nodes are permanent pages, they should show up in search results, just like Wikipedia pages.

Given Google’s continuing dominance of search, this angle seems somewhat more likely to have a broad appeal. The only question is the technology. It looked reasonably good when Roseman gave me a tour of the site, but also contained flaws and confusing or seemingly unrelated links. Steve Hall, a partner at Vulcan, says the technology is still coming together.

“You’ve got the equivalent of a bunch of 7^th grade grammar students going out on the web and collecting information bases on verbs and nouns,” he says.

The aim is to make the software almost as smart as the web surfer using it. Roseman thinks that the basic concept is going to quickly find traction, and that there’s a big win in store for the company that does best. He says he expects to have only about 18 months to perfect the current iteration before needing to roll out even bigger and better implementations.

Evri is based in Seattle, and has been funded entirely by Vulcan to date. It’s planning on opening up to other investors soon.

Audience, a maker of voice processing technology that mimics the sort of audio processing that happens in the human brain, has announced its $15 million third round of financing.

We actually covered Audience’s unveiling in February, and first broke news on the funding, but the announcement fills out list of investors,and now includes Tallwood Venture Capital and VentureTech Alliance. We already mentioned Paul Allen’sVulcan Capital and New Enterprise Associates.

The Mountain View, Calif., company makes the A1010, a voice processor that can filter out noise and sharpen voice reception in cellular phone headsets. The company will use the money to accelerate its business growth.

The investment brings total funding amount to date to $45 million.

The A1010 groups and processes complex mixtures of sound and thus handles sound the way people actually perceive it and filter out noise. Trends in cellular usage will favor this company. Laws such as California’s upcoming law require cell phone users to use hands-free headsets while driving, but the quality of voice head sets is poor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the latest (updated) action:
1) Kyte.tv raises $15 million
2) Electric Sheep Company lays off 22
3) FCC receives 700MHz auction applications
4) Microsoft signs $500M ad deal
5) GPS devices fly off the shelves
6) Netsuite sets high price for planned IPO
7) Eric Eldon, celebrity at large?

Kyte.tv raises $15M second round — An online startup that offers a video player allowing near-live communications by video, photo and chat, Kyte has picked up some steam online, attracting a decent-sized audience and celebrities like 50 Cent to its service. The $15 million second round was provided by Telefonica, Nokia, DoCoMo, Swisscom, Holtzbrinck and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, according to Robert Scoble. Quite a hefty amount, in comparison to the $2 million investment into live streaming video company, Ustream that we reported in yesterday’s roundup. However, Kyte still has some work to do in competing against newer, sharper-looking rivals like Qik, which says it can stream live video straight from your phone, something Kyte doesn’t quite do (though is working on).

Electric Sheep Company lays off 22 employees — It’s time to cull some lambs from the fold for the Electric Sheep Company, which builds software that third-party companies can add to virtual worlds Second Life. It had planned to build an ad network within these worlds. Instead, it has cut almost a third of its workforce, and is giving up on the ad plans for now. It plans to branch out beyond Second Life to worlds like Metaplace (our coverage). More details are at ClickZ News.

FCC receives applications for 700MHz auctions — More than two hundred applications were filed to bid on the upcoming Federal Communications Commission auction for the 700 Megahertz wireless spectrum, planned to begin January 24th. Although some applicants must correct and finalize their applications, the list contains some notable names — Google, of course, but also Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s venture firm Vulcan Capital, and startups like Frontline Wireless (expected). Check out the lists of finished and unfinished applicants yourself for more.

Microsoft signs $500M ad deal with Viacom – Taking a first step toward becoming a viable competitor to Google in the online ad market, Microsoft signed a deal with Viacom that it says is worth about $500 million, over a contract period of five years. Google, in turn, immediately claimed that the deal is proof that Federal anti-trust watchdogs should allow its merger with DoubleClick to go through. Microsoft may well be kicking itself, because as Bloomberg reports, the Federal Trade Commission will likely approve the Google-DoubleClick merger this month (although it must also find approval with European regulators).

NetSuite sets high price for planned IPO — First the expected range for NetSuite’s initial public offering was $13 to $16, then underwriters boosted it to $19 to $22. Now the final price has been set at $26, almost double the original range. That means that Larry Ellison, the billionaire CEO of Oracle whose family owns over 70 percent of the company, will make out like a bandit. NetSuite, of course, is a competitor to Salesforce, whose own stellar performance on the markets likely helped improve NetSuite’s outlook. Ellison was also at one time an early investor in Salesforce, which is now run by a former employee of his, Marc Benioff.

GPS devices becoming cheaper, more ubiquitous — Many GPS devices have dropped below $100, and even the better units often retail for little more than $200. Sales of the devices at local malls are through the roof, according to Dean Takahashi. Cell phones, likewise, are providing an ever-cheaper way to find your way around. Excellent news for the dozens of startups that have sprung up offering to show you the way to the nearest store, friend or event — now the question is, which will come out on top?

VentureBeat’s own Eric Eldon becomes a celebrity — Admittedly, those are the words of Speedddate.com, a dating startup that ran a session with eight “celebrity bloggers.” We (or he) will take the compliment. Way to end those lonely nights of blogging, Eric.

Hypertext is a secretive Seattle-based startup that says it’s focused on making information on the web more “intelligent.”

It comes to light after a publicly traded company, Insightful Corporation, announced it has sold its InFact search technology and other related intellectual property rights to Hypertext for $3.65 million in cash. This suggests Hypertext has some sort of financial backing; Paul Allen is reportedly behind it, says John Battelle (Update: Allen’s Vulcan Capital is indeed behind this).

Here’s another blog post about the company, from employee Chalo Bolo, though it doesn’t say much. Job listings reveal it is recruiting heavily in machine/artificial intelligence and data mining.

We’ll try to find out more.

[Note: This story was originally published Tuesday evening, but a software bug caused it to disappear. We're publishing again]

Updated

Redfin is one of the more controversial web companies trying to make home buying and selling more profitable. Specifically, it’s cutting out real estate agents.

Eager to do more cutting, it has raised another $12 million, led by venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. It is expanding its listings from most West Coast cities and Boston, now adding the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

The company handles the most of the home-buying process online, effectively cutting out real estate agents who perform similar services in person. For sellers, Redfin typically charges a flat fee — of several thousand dollars– which works out to be lower than the percentage-based commission most agents charge. For buyers, the company rebates two-thirds of the commission.

Here’s the kind of headline the Seattle, Wash. company inspires: “Realtors brace for area debut of Web rival Red Fin.”

CEO Glenn Kelman makes no bones about wanting to “disrupt” the real estate industry, which he estimates to be worth over $90 billion. Other large real estate sites, such as Zillow and Trulia, also help users learn more about prospective homes, but don’t take over the role of the broker.

[Clarification:] Redfin’s business model of giving rebates to homebuyers is banned from Oregon, New Jersey and Tennessee. Additionally, the site has been fined by the Pacific Northwest regional listing office of the Multiple Listing Service, a nationwide database of home listings. It has also taken heat from the National Association of Realtors, which in many cases owns local and regional MLS offices. The reason for the fine, Kelman says, is that RedFin was altering the data after receiving it to include independent reviews by its users of the properties.

Kelman has told Congress that the MLS rules hinder innovation (official PDF here).

Realtors also charge that Redfin is taking their money by taking the information from the MLS and using it to more efficiently serve clients.

Even as they scream “unfair,” some argue people want a human touch when looking at buying or selling homes, and that such personal service will appeal to most even if the cost is slightly higher.

The company made more than one million dollars in net revenue last year — after the home-buyer rebates — but has made even more than that during just this past quarter, says Kelman.

This helped spur the investment, no doubt. Kelman said he wanted DFJ because the company needed Silicon Valley connections, and daily exposure to innovations happening here.

Besides DFJ, investors include the Madrona Venture Group, Vulcan Capital and BEV Capital.