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VentureBeat is proud to announce a gathering for clean technology entrepreneurs next Monday, May 12. We’ve joined forces with SF Green, a San Francisco gathering founded by Steve Newcomb that aims to help shape the region’s cleantech and environmental future.

The aim is to bring together some of the brightest local entrepreneurs and investors, as well as other interested parties — environmentalists, government representatives and regular citizens — in one place, helping to forge connections and spark new ideas, just as we did last week with our Digital Media launch party.

Keynoting the next SF Green are Ray Lane, the managing partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who invested in Fisker Automotive, the new Think America partnership and the solar thermal startup Ausra; plus Tesla Motors’ VP of marketing Darryl Siry, and a Roadster or two. Both will join us for Q&A sessions at different times during the evening, with the chance for the crowd to ask a few questions of their own.

SF Green was started this March by Newcomb, a founder of Powerset who left to pursue legislative issues and an as-yet-unannounced startup. The first event was a hit, drawing together several hundred people from various backgrounds in the sustainability movement.

By holding an open event, we hope to continue attracting members of all those groups to come together and discuss their ideas. Along with Newcomb, we hope that we can help influence the Green Economy by sparking new discourse. Newcomb has more thoughts on why he founded the event at his blog.

If you’ve noticed a transportation theme for this particular event, you’re dead on: We’ll also have one of the new Smart cars to exhibit inside the venue. Naturally, much of the talk will revolve around the subject we’ve chosen, but if it’s anything like the first event, there will be conversations about every sector of cleantech. And to help round out the night, we’ll have other cleantech companies demoing amidst the crowd.

We’ll also have our generous sponsors on hand: Ernst & Young, Sun Microsystems, Dig Communications, Network Verde, California Cleantech Open, and the SF Chamber of Commerce. Our organizer is Room Full of People, who also plan the popular SF Beta event.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, 111 Minna is a gallery and bar south of Market Street in the Financial District. The place only holds about 400 people, and tickets are going to go fast. If you’ve got $15 and an open night on Monday, swing on by. You can get your tickets right here.

Here in Silicon Valley, after a turbulent ride at a start-up, founders often find themselves emotionally drained (or charged) and looking for renewal.

For example, natural language search engine Powerset experienced its share of buzz, and hype, but last year its founding team reached an impasse when things weren’t going as smoothly as hoped. In a reshuffle, co-founder Steve Newcomb left, and immediately planned to do his own thing.

I met yesterday with Newcomb to catch up. His tale is a good example of renewal, the desire to find meaning and to have an impact for the good. Although a serial entrepreneur, he’s dipping his toes into politics, in hopes of influencing local government toward stepping up its green initiatives.

Unlike Lawrence Lessig’s recent flirtation with Congress, that doesn’t mean running for office. Newcomb wants to act more like a private lobbyist, pushing notable issues and using his personal network for effect.

He’s targeting two upcoming issues on the San Francisco ballot: One is an expanded rebate program for rooftop solar installations. The second is a push to build a two million square foot “Green Campus” in Hunter’s Point, an area in San Francisco with a reputation for its toxic dumps, high unemployment rate, and isolation from the rest of the city.

The latter initiative is being officially announced by the Mayor’s office this morning. There are no specifics yet, in part because development rights for the land in question are still being contested (a competing bill by Supervisor Chris Daly could halt the entire development project, according to the Chronicle). However, a comparable project successfully took place in Mission Bay, with several million square feet set aside for a biotechnology campus, so there’s precedent.

So exactly what can a private citizen (mostly — Newcomb is on the local Policy Committee) do to help guide policy in a city the size of San Francisco, and why would he want to spend his time doing so, instead of tackling environmental issues with a new startup?

Well, he says, both initiatives require business thinking and management: Solar installation requires a constellation of vendors, while major developments like the kind envisioned for Hunter’s Point are often public-private partnerships. A driven individual is needed to develop the political coalitions required to get results.

The second part of the answer is a bit more fanciful. Newcomb went through a personal awakening last year that made him decide to hold off on another venture idea. First, he saw a video of John Doerr’s emotional speech about global warming at the 2006 TED conference. And second, a “world leader” (specifically who, he won’t say) told him that his green efforts at Powerset (providing subsidies to employees who lived within a mile of work, for example) weren’t enough to make a real difference.

“Don’t get me wrong, though,” Newcomb says. “I don’t think I can really go out alone and change everything.” What he can do, he says, is help start a movement in San Francisco that will be a model for other cities.

As to why he left Powerset, he is, for the most part, keeping mum, citing only disagreements with Pell and a desire to work on sustainability projects like the two ballot initiatives.

Newcomb hasn’t completely abandoned the idea of private enterprise. He’s “investigating” a carbon credit fund that individuals would buy into. However, he says that nothing is certain yet. He’s also starting a regularly recurring event, similar to the popular SF Beta, called SF Green.

What do you guys think? Is it worthwhile to leave the startup world (not to mention your income) to become a public policy crusader? Or is there always a better chance to spark change through business?

Update:  Wired wrote a rather different article on Newcomb that includes a lot more details on the business plan involving crowd-sourced investment that I briefly mentioned above. Newcomb says he wouldn’t be the sole founder and isn’t even close to deciding on whether to try it at all, though.

updated
Powerset, the “natural language” search engine company saying it wants to take on Google, has seen a shake up in its management.

The San Francisco company received substantial hype when it emerged last year saying it had found a way to understand the phrases you type into your search queries. However, it has been slow to deliver on the technology, instead dribbling it out in small doses in a “labs” portion of its site.

Steve Newcomb (left), the chief operating officer and one of the founding troika, has left the company. Barney Pell, who was chief executive, is stepping aside and becoming chief technology officer. The company is looking for a chief executive, Pell told VentureBeat in a phone conversation.

The move comes after differences between Newcomb and Pell over the direction of the company, as well as a slip in the company’s delivery date of its product. Initially, it had planned to release its search engine to the public this year. Now, it plans to do that by the second quarter of next year, though it come even later. “This is really hard, what we’re doing,” Pell said, of the company’s ambitious goals. He said one cause of the delay was the time it took for Powerset to license key natural language technology from PARC. Powerset finally got access to PARC’s source code in January this year. The company is now on track, he said.

Pell has published the changes on his blog.

Powerset has also been trying raise money from venture capitalists at a very high valuation, and the shakeup suggests it wasn’t getting very far in its efforts.

This is instructive for founders and entrepreneurs who try to raise money early at stratospheric levels: Powerset last year raised $12.5 million last year from Foundation Capital, the Founders Fund and long list of individuals, giving it a post-money valuation of $42.5 million. Now, in order to raise money again, the company needs to seek a higher valuation, so that Foundation Capital and the other investors feel they are getting their money’s worth. However, that’s hard to do unless you’ve shown you can perform on your plan. We’ve mentioned Powerset’s various product releases, but none show that it is close to prime time — a year after the investment by Foundation et. al.

It isn’t clear to what extent the investor team pushed for the changes. Pell said there was a “fair amount of tension” in the style with which he and Newcomb wanted to run the company. “We were stressing each other out. It was a challenging marriage. That’s very common in start-ups. We were trying to work things out.” That’s when the board recommended to Pell that he bring in some consultants to help on organization, Pell said. Pell indicated he was ready to step aside in order to to position the company for progress. The recommendation was that Newcomb should leave. Newcomb did not respond to a request for comment made several days ago by VentureBeat. Pell said Newcomb has interest in politics, and that a mere “founders” role wasn’t enough to keep him at the company. Pell said other changes were made in the company’s management, to make sure key employees felt increased ownership and responsibility.

It should be noted that this company has continued to show creativity in developing its product. We once called the company a funny farm, but tempered that by observing the company’s resourcefulness. The quixotic nature of its team — embodied by the enthusiastic, relentlessly upbeat Pell — is doing quite a bit in its labs to create interest (see our coverage). It has opened a search box inside its Powerlabs, and offered several use cases such as Powermouse (see coverage). While the shakeup is a blow to the company, it still has substantial technology under its hood, and will not doubt continue to engage the search community. Natural language is a huge challenge, and Powerset is more focused on this problem than any other company.

The company is still not crawling and indexing the entire Web for its search engine. It is still focused mainly on an index Wikipedia, a site that has clear structure and relationships between objects and their definitions. This gives Powerset a nice testing ground for its product. But the wider web is much more complex, and Powerset has yet to tackle it. In part, Powerset has been hampered by limited resources, Pell said. While he said he wants the engine to be ready by second quarter, it might be later than that, he said, possibly even 2009.

(Update: See our subsequent funding story here)

We promised to bring you more on Powerset, that secretive company that wants to better Google with a new kind of search.

Powerset is going after the holy grail. It is called “natural language” search, or understanding language as it is actually spoken — and that is something that has defied everyone until now, even the Google guys.

Take, for example, if you type “Books by Children” into Google’s search box. Google essentially drops the word “by” and looks for all the pages that are relevant to “books” and “children.” That’s because the English language is so idiomatic that no engine has been able to understand meaning within sentences. Some companies, most famously Ask Jeeves, have tried. You prompted Ask Jeeves’ engine with a question ending with question mark, but as soon as your question got remotely complex, Ask Jeeves broke down • because its engine could only answer specific questions its engineers had prepped it for.

Google, while acknowledging that natural language is a big goal, hasn’t made very big advances in the area. This makes sense, because people have become trained to use “a grunting pidgin language,” as Powerset’s Barney Pell (pictured here) puts it. Pell calls this “Keyword-ese.” Many search engines recognize some advanced query syntaxes — for example to find Web pages that don’t carry certain words, or that have two words within a certain number of words of each other, and so on.

But people have a hard time remembering these advanced syntaxes, and each search engine has a different syntax. Finally, Google’s core engine has been built around this keyword-ese language, and it is hard to change all of the layers that have been built around it.

Which is where Pell and co-founder Steve Newcomb come in. We talked with them at their offices in Palo Alto. Pell is an enthusiastic guy, and has a rich career developing intelligent systems, but also trying to make them work in the market. Pell has just posted about the start-up on his blog here. Newcomb is the operations guys, previously having worked at voice recognition company Promptu.

Search is so crucial in our lives, Pell says, it is like oxygen. “It is a metabolic function,” Pell says. And yet, search is surprisingly underdeveloped.

Powerset is trying to solve the natural language problem, by making its core engine understand concepts of time, place, sentiment and other intent. But Pell and Newcomb stop short of going into the details of their computational linguistics approach, saying it is sensitive. They are also giving no dates about when it will be released.

They insist, however, that it is a radical improvement. So when Craig Silverstein, first employee of Google said it will take many years to get a computer to a point to understand exactly what people are searching for, Powerset thinks differently: “It is not a long way away,” says Pell. “This is not a change of some technology out on the periphery,” adds Newcomb, “we’re changing the core of the engine.”

He says such a transformation hasn’t happened in eight years, since Google invented “page rank,” a concept that ranks a page higher in relevance depending on how many people are linking to it. So while Google has bought companies like Applied Semantics to help find “themes” on web pages, Newcomb shakes his head, and says Powerset wants to do much more. “We’re switching the core out,” he says, adding that when you do that, you’re also going to fundamentally change the image, video, blog and all other searches that Google is doing. Google may be caught in an “innovators dilemma,” co-founder Steve Newcomb says, because it can’t turn on dime.

So, is this so much hype?

They point to the credibility of their investors, who include PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, analyst Esther Dyson, Reid Hoffman and the Amidzad fund.

And when you talk with Pell, you get a sense for why he may be as prepared as anyone to do this. While an undergraduate at Stanford, he spent much of his time working at SRI’s “natural language group.” There, back in 1988, he began working on the problem that restricts search engines from relying on natural language: In natural language systems, you have to teach the system every single word. If the system, doesn’t know a word, it crashes. So Barney went to work taking the words the system did know, and bridged the gaps formed by the words it didn’t know, which he said created better results. Later he built a language engine that talked with a office processing system — this way, a company could ask the system say, “What were the top five products ordered over the past week?” and the system could spit the results back in the form of a table. His PhD was in machine learning and games.

Then he worked at NASA, and architected the artificial intelligence system that was embedded in the $200 million Deep Space 1 mission. For a week, his system operated the mission autonomously. In 1999, he left and joined the internet revolution, working with Stockmaster.com, and then at Whizbang Labs, which used machine learning and statistical natural language processing to build advanced search applications. His company built Flipdog, a site that extracted job listing information from millions of sites on the Web • which was sold to Monster.com.

Later, exhausted by the post-bubble era, Pell returned to NASA and managed an 80-person operating division deploying information technology for NASA’s missions. When the market recovered, Pell did a brief stint at Silicon Valley venture firm Mayfield, which he left to start Powerset.

On the one hand, Pell and Newcomb have detractors. “We do have a lot of skeptics,” Pell said. But he and Newcomb also believe they are on to something: “We show the demo to people, and their jaws drop, and they say ‘Holy (expletive),’” says Newcomb. “They say: ‘I’ll never use the old search engines again!’”

Update: See search expert Danny Sullivan’s scathing critique of Powerset ambitions.

San Francisco social networking site XuQa has been approached by some suitors with acquisition offers, but the company may go it alone for now. The company has enough money in the bank and no dire need to raise money, co-founder Ali A. Moiz told us over the weekend.

“Some companies are interested, we’ve been talking with them for several months,” he said. The youth oriented site has stumbled upon what appears to be a nice business model, as we last mentioned here (scroll down). It has somehow gotten users to work for Xuqa’s advertisers!

Xuqa works by letting people boost their profile among their friends — which is done in part by acquiring currency, or “peanuts.” If you look at the site, it can be raunchy (this profile is on the front page, as of this posting; don’t go if you don’t like profanity). But it appeals to vanity. The stated goal is become the richest most popular person. The users build currency acquiring “peanuts,” by engaging in any number of activities, such as playing poker or winning modeling contests. More intriguing, though, users can get peanuts by signing up for offers from advertisers. This produces more revenue than other sites, Ali told us, because it provides direct action for advertisers, and so advertisers pay more. Unlike at other sites, such as YouTube or Facebook, where advertisers pay a dollar amount based how many thousands of people viewed the page, Xuqa’s users are actually filling out surveys from advertisers.

Advertisers might give a site like Facebook $5 for every 50,000 pages viewed, Ali explained, using a hypothetical example. Advertisers may assume they will get five customers. By contrast, Ali said Xuqa converts five customers by putting an ad in front of only 100 users. In six months, Xuqa will hit a run rate of around $30 million in annual revenue, he predicted. It is already profitable.

Xuqa has close to 1 million registered users, doing about 10 million page views a day, he said.

Users of Xuqa “want attention, status and popularity,” he said. They crave a hierarchy.” Xuqa is unique, he said, in mixing the traditional social network of a MySpace or Facebook with a clearly defined way to move up a hierarchy using game dynamics. Ali said this dynamic is similar to the popular World of Warcraft, of which Ali is a fan. Xuqa also provides a user with a real identity, something most games don’t. There are sites that mix gaming and social networking, such as Korea’s Cyworld, but that is based on an avatar system, and avatars are less popular in the western world, Ali said.

If there are companies that keep him awake at night, it is still Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, he said. But even here, he’s noticing many Xuqa users also using those other sites, so they aren’t mutually exclusive. Indeed, he’s finding most of Xuqa’s users getting hooked on the first and second levels of status at Xuqa — and they come back to make it to level 10. “I’m worrying less and less” about the bigger sites, he said.

The latest tech news in Silicon Valley:

The mobile TV revolution continues, and MobiTV is hot — MobiTV, of Emeryville is one of the start-ups on the forefront. It offers TV programming from networks and cable providers. It started out serving mobile phones. Now it has expanded, first to WiFi, and now with AT&T to anyplace with broadband.

Venture investors like Oak are paying a good price to play. MobiTV raised $70 million in a July third round, at a valuation in excess of a pretty $400 million, according to PE Week Wire. That’s compared to a value of just $50 million following a $15 million round in 2004. Oak invested $65 million of the total new investment.

Loopt, the mobile presence company, is finally launching — Loopt uses GPS and other data to give you the location of your friends, along with their presence status, such as available or away. Techcrunch has a review. The company has changed its name several times.

You’ll be able to get alerts when your friends are within a certain distance, and send messages to them (see image below). The service is initially available only to customers of pay-as-you-go service, Boost Mobile.

The Costco of travel sites — cFares, a travel start-up based in Redwood Shores, is charging you $50 to get access to wholesaler discounts, and the resulting prices are about $30 to $50 below those of other major sites, finds GigaOm. The company has raised $1.5 million from Garage Technology Ventures and is working on a second round. Also interesting: cFares.com has built a way for an airline to under-bid another airline at the point of sale, thereby providing a below-market price to the consumer. Finally, it has a “Name-Your-Price” feature, where it does an ongoing search online for fares priced at your wish, or lower.

Social networking siteXuQa raises more than previously thought — The youth oriented site, previously slammed by critics, has relaunched; it is focused on model contests, and revolves around a system of “gathering peanuts.” Goal is to become the most popular, and you get up to $1,000 in cash for rewards. We’ve mentioned the company before here. Some doubted it would raise VC money. But who isn’t able to raise money these days? Turns out, it has gotten $1.3 million from BV Capital and Morten Lund, an early Skype investor. It is based in San Francisco, with most of its developers in Karachi, Pakistan.

Yahoo Local revamps — It now lets you write reviews and submit ratings for local businesses, save your favorite locations, view local businesses on one map to see what’s around you and so on. (See more here, which includes a look at Microsoft Live Local Search’s improvements too.)

Yahoo seeks to retain talent — It is setting up an in-house incubator, called Brickhouse, and will be led by Flickr founder Caterina Fake.

Networking company Netgear ships a Skype phone that works with WiFi — The phone started shipping this week for $249.99.

Google’s market share in China is plummeting (see Red Herring article) — We got in touch with Kaiser Kuo, who wrote the piece, and he says the guy who led the study, Mr. Lu, is credible. As a start-up, Google neglected China. Chief executive Eric Schmidt first traveled there last year. More recenlty, Google was criticized for allowing censorship there, but China’s government has played hardball anyway, and now Baidu is eating Google’s lunch.

Google Earth shows you around the Bay Area with TurnHere videos — Google has released a host of new ways to find information while you’re zooming around its virtual globe. You click on the checkbox for “Featured Content” in the Google Earth sidebar, and a whole bunch of multimedia overlays pop up. In the Bay Area, we see the usual National Geographic feature boxes already announced. But now you see a whole bunch of new videos from start-up TurnHere; it’s a good way to check out restaurants or other places before you visit. In fact, TurnHere plans to shoot 25,000 short videos this year, most of them neighborhoods and local attractions. This could get interesting. Here’s a good Merc story on TurnHere. Here’s a story about Google’s Featured Content.