VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:
1) Dan Farber takes the helm at CNET
2) Mozilla launches email-focused subsidiary
3) Scribd creates iPaper, an Acrobat competitor
4) Hewlett-Packard has great first quarter
5) Tesla Motors pulls in another $40M
6) Verizon, AT&T unveil new unlimited wireless plans
7) Oligarchs, proletariat run amok in Silicon Valley
8) Scientists suck up CO2 to make alternative fuel

Dan Farber takes the helm at CNET — One familiar figure is stepping aside for another at CNET, where long-time editor-in-chief Jai Singh is ending his long rule over the editorial arm of the media company. Farber, a veteran journalist and former EIC at some of the tech world’s most recognized publications, takes on the role at a time that CNET is struggling with activist investors including Spark Capital and Jana Partners. His own thoughts on the transition are here. (Image by Scott Beale of Laughing Squid.)

Mozilla launches new subsidiary to improve email — The Mozilla Foundation, which makes the Firefox browser, has launched a subsidiary called Mozilla Messaging that will work on improving the Thunderbird email client, another of the company’s products. In a painfully vague blog post, David Ascher, the CEO-to-be of Messaging, says that the new division will give Thunderbird the kind of attention Firefox has always gotten, adding new features and opening it to more contributions from outside developers. Despite the vagueness, as a major competitor to Microsoft Outlook, a next-generation version of Thunderbird may (eventually) be big news.

Scribd creates iPaper, an Acrobat competitor — Does clicking a link only to find it opening up a PDF file in a separate window bug the hell out of you? Scribd is hoping it can tap into that pain point to get a foothold over Adobe’s Acrobat, with a new document viewer called iPaper that will be embedded directly in web pages. The viewer will be able to display a variety of formats including normal text and Powerpoint presentations and, get this, advertisements powered by Google Adsense, without requiring a download. The app is quite similar to Macromedia’s FlashPaper, which Adobe effectively abandoned when it acquired that company. Ironically, iPaper is also made with Adobe Flash.

Hewlett-Packard has an excellent first quarter — Giant computer maker HP had an excellent first quarter, especially as compared to the recent earnings and stock performance of most of its compatriots on the NASDAQ. The company saw a small bump in North American revenue, accompanied by a jump in Asia and Europe. It’s often considered an indicator for the enterprise sector, so strong results coming now from HP suggest that the recession might not be so bad after all, at least for tech.

Tesla Motors pulls in another $40 million — Electric car maker Tesla has taken another $40 million, raising total investment in the company to date to $140 million, as we briefly mentioned yesterday. The lead investors were Valor Equity Partners and Elon Musk, the company’s chairman. Tesla is shooting for $250 million more over the next two years, and the launch of a new model; for more details, see yesterday’s article.

Two major carriers unveil new unlimited wireless plans — Verizon and AT&T now both offer unlimited-use wireless plans, starting at $99. Directed at the high-end market, the new packages are a significant step away from the set-minute “buckets” that the largest carriers have favored to date. They mark a further move toward using value-added services like applications and data as the major differentiator between wireless plans.

Oligarchs, proletariat run amok in Silicon Valley; middle class vanishing — Petit bourgeousie, where art thee? Recent employment figures for Silicon Valley show that overall employment levels are rising, but jobs in the $30,000 - $80,000 earning range are on the decline. Worse, the job growth for low-end earners  making less than $30,000 was at five percent, while growth for the $80,000-plus group was at only one percent. This might have something to do with an increasingly common business model: One well-paid CEO, one small army of interns.

Suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make fuel — A couple of new schemes hope to pull carbon dioxide from the air to create an alternative fuel. The idea reported here by the New York Times involves using a nuclear plant as the power source for the electrochemical reaction that would produce the fuel, though, so don’t plan on seeing it any time soon.

The first production version of Tesla’s Roadster, an electric sports car, was unveiled at the company’s San Carlos, Calif. facility earlier today. In fact, board chairman and proud new owner Elon Musk may be taking it for a spin as you read this.

“This represents the first production electric car on the road since God knows when,” Musk said.

This is good news for the company, which has had a tumultuous couple of months. We’ve reported on recent layoffs and production delays, but on the bright side, Tesla won the Crunchie award in January for top cleantech startup. The company said now it’s on-track to start production on March 17. Jeremy Cleland, Tesla’s senior manager of accessories and apparel, told me Tesla will ramp up slowly, initially building one car per week. When full production starts this summer, Tesla hopes to produce 1,000 or 2,000 sports cars – which can go 225 miles or more before needing to recharge – annually.

The price is still being determined, Cleland said. Early estimates pegged the cost at $98,000, but it’s probably going to be higher. All 600 of the 2008 models are already sold-out, and you’ll need a $5,000 deposit to get on the waiting list for 2009.

The company is also closing on an $40 million internal round of funding, spokesman Darryl Siry said. That’s on top of the $105 million Tesla raised previously. The company will likely go out for at least one more round this summer before going public sometime in the next year.

To welcome the first production car, Tesla hosted a big media event at its workshop. (The photo to the left is from GigaOm’s Earth2Tech.) Cleland walked me around the site, and gave me a close look at the both production car and some models used for testing. I’m not a automobile aficionado myself, but I can say the Roadsters look like real, honest-to-goodness sports cars, and nice enough that I was terrified of scratching the paint. The performance – 0 to 60 miles per hour in 5.7 seconds in this “public beta”, 0 to 60 in 4 seconds when the “permanent solution” is perfected later this year – hits “all the same figures” as other sports cars in Tesla’s price range, Cleland said.

The production model was actually assembled in England, the lithium-ion battery was built in Taiwan and installation will take place in San Carlos. I watched as workers started installing the battery in Musk’s car, but the process takes an hour or two, so I didn’t see the whole process.

Tesla isn’t going to stop with the Roadster, Cleland said. The next step is a four-door, five-person sedan, codenamed Whitestar, which Tesla hopes to bring to market in 2010. The company plans to make 10,000 to 20,000 sedans per year, which will be more affordable than the Roadster.

“The Roadster is just the beginning of the beginning,” Musk said.

That seems like a good step as far as going green and reducing fuel consumption. But I don’t know, a sedan just isn’t as cool as a sports car. So how about that raise, Matt?

[UPDATE: In an interview with CNET, CEO Ze'ev Drori said Tesla will be making two models of the Whitestar sedan: an electric model and a range-extended model, in which a small gas motor will recharge the battery. Read more here.]

Tesla Motors, the company making an electric sports car scheduled to hit the market next quarter, is now saying the first release of cars won’t have the promised performance.

Rather, they’ll come equipped with an interim transmissions that the company says should be considered “public betas,” or trial versions. Public beta is a software term that essentially means something is in a “testing” state, but can be publicly used while bugs or imperfections are ironed out. In other words, despite several delays already, Tesla is now saying the real deal won’t be ready in the first quarter after all, but will be ready in the second half of next year. GigaOm’s Earth2Tech has the news.

The company is also raising a $40 million round of capital from existing investors, in order to handle the extra costs caused by the transmission problem.

Chairman Elon Musk, the largest stakeholder, appears to be leading the round. It follows $105 million in previous funding from Musk and other well-known Silicon Valley investors, including Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. (See previous coverage here).

The Tesla’s transmission problems have been noted before, and have been cited as having caused earlier delays. However, this is the first time we’ve seen the company saying the final transmission won’t be ready until the second half of next year. The company hopes that it will move into “full production” at that time, it told Earth2Tech. Musk said the following of the first early, limited version: “…it won’t have the performance characteristics that we promised. And there may be some durability issues, not something that is made to last 10 years, but it should be fine for several months…”

He said the early transmissions will be swapped out for the tested ones once they’re ready.

updated

Mahalo.com, the latest company from entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, launched, with a stripped-down search engine designed to handle only the most popular requests in widely appealing categories.

Focused on areas such as travel, music, television, movies, cars, food, health, news and sports — and filtered with the help of a team of 40 employees in Santa Monica, Calif. — the limited results are meant to avoid the spam and other junk results that clog up the other search engines. They aim to fulfill the Web’s most repeated requests.

By cherry-picking only the most popular 10,000 search terms, it can organize results in the form of a more organized, thoughtful list about your search term’s attributes.

The challenge here, though, is that dozens of other search engines have launched to tackle specialized search already, including shopping search engines, job search engines, travel engines and engines like Hakia that organize results in similar ways to Mahalo. Moreover, there are other sites that provide real people to help assist in searches, such as ChaCha.com. Finally, Mahalo forces people to change their searching behavior, requiring them to calculate when to use Mahalo versus say Google or other engines — all things that make this a long-shot for quick, big success.

However, Calacanis, who co-founded Weblogs, a blogging network, sold to AOL for $25 million in 2005, says he has enough cash to tide him over for four or five years without turning a profit. Mahalo is backed by Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz, News Corp., CBS Corp., Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, co-founder of online payment service PayPal.

It has completed 4,000 of the 10,000 planned pages. If you search for something Maholo doesn’t have the answer to, it defaults to Google’s results.

More details here.

Example for search term “Porsche 911″ below:

Tesla Motors, the San Carlos, Calif. maker of a high-performance electric car, has raised $45 million more in financing.

The new backing for the car, due out later this year, is led by Technology Partners, a Palo Alto venture firm that has focused on green investments, and Tesla’s own chairman, Elon Musk. Also investing are Palo Alto’s Capricorn Investment Group, a private investment firm, and major existing investors. Two investors we haven’t mentioned previously are Valor Equity Partners, of Chicago, and Compass Venture Partners (larger list of investors here).

See Tesla’s full announcement here:

This is the fourth round of financing, and brings the company’s total to $105 million.

The company said it has received more than 400 deposits for its Roadster, which will go from zero to 60 mph in about four seconds, and cost $90,000. The additional financing will be used to develop its WhiteStar, a four-door, five passenger sports sedan planned for 2009 and costing $50,000 to $65,000.

Among those making deposits so far are Tesla backers Larry Page and Sergey Brin (co-founders of Google). Others include Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and actor George Clooney.

Updated

SolarCity, a new Silicon Valley start-up wants to be the Swiss arms-dealer of the solar industry, and has just raised $10 million to do it.

It wants to provide solar installation for individuals and small companies — by acting as an honest, neutral broker, and giving them the best, most affordable technology available.

SolarCity, of Foster City, is the latest start-up backed by serial entrepreneur and former PayPal co-founder, Elon Musk. Musk, who recently led an investment in the all-electricity car Tesla Motors, also in Silicon Valley, has led a $10 million investment in SolarCity. Musk put in about $9 million, and the rest was provided by several other individuals, including his cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive, who are running the company. Lyndon is chief executive, Peter is chief operating officer.

Peter and Lyndon told VentureBeat that the idea is to build a nationally recognized, trusted brand that can leverage economies of scale. There is no such branded company, they said. They want to make installation as easy as taking out a lease on a car. If you take out financing to install your solar roof, for example, there’s a good chance your monthly payment may be less than your existing electricity bills, they said.

Recent legislation, they explained, makes it possible to feed any excess power you generate back into the main grid, which has further helped investing in a solar installation a financial decision, rather than purely environmental. During the day, when you are at work and your roof is generating electricity, you may sell electricity at peak rates for 30 cents per kilowatt hour, while at night, when you consume electricity, you may pay a cheaper ten cents per kilowatt hour, they explained.

SolarCity will focus on consumers and small and medium businesses, they said.

There are a few competitors, including locally, for example Akeena and Borrego. But neither of those are great names to market as solar brands. Borrego means “silly sheep” in Spanish, for example. “Akeena is one of the bigger players in the solar industry, but when put in perspective, they’re a relative small company,” added Lyndon. “There’s ample opportunity to establish a nationwide brand.”

VentureBeat talked with Akeena’s Barry Cinnamon several months ago, when he took his company public on the bulletin board, which Cinnamon said made sense for a small company his size — as way to get cash to expand. However, SolarCity’s Peter Rive expressed surprise at Akeena’s decision to give up the luxuries of being privately held so soon. Akeena raised $2 million, gave up 40 percent of the company in the process, and paid $500,000 in legal fees, according to published documents.

SolarCity is also engaging in research and development — to make things as simple as possible for building owners, with the goal of making installation as straight-forward as installing a satelite dish, the two executives said. They’ve hired engineers for that research. The team is now 16 strong, but numbers 30 when contractors are included.

Elon Musk is also chairman and chief executive of Space Exploration in southern California. Lyndon, too, is a serial entrepreneur, having built and sold a company in his native South Africa, and then founded a company called EverDream, with Musk’s backing.

The company is also looking to purchase companies to help it expand. It already has made two acquisitions, and plans more — the company is thus generating revenue. “A big part of the strategy is to do a national rollup,” said Lyndon.