VentureBeat

(Update: The company’s supporters have orchestrated a campaign to criticize this article; see comments below)

Venture Vehicles, a Los Angeles company developing a three-wheeler car that you can plug into a electrical outlet, with a glass canopy roof that can reportedly out-accelerate a Porsche Boxster — and get 100 miles to the gallon — has just raised $6 million in a first round of funding.

NGEN Partners made the investment.

We’ve mentioned the company before. It is just one of several companies pushing new kinds of electric vehicles. Pasadena, Calif.’s Aptera Motors Inc., backed by Idealab, is also making a three-wheeler (see our coverage of that quiet project).

VentureWire (subscription required) carries more funding details today.

The challenge for this car, though, is that it costs $20,000, which is pricey for a three-wheeler that some would place in the glorified motor-scooter category. Indeed, the advantage of a three-wheeler, at least for manufacturers, is they don’t have to meet the same safety standards as four-wheelers, even if Venture Vehicles’ VentureOne will have things like a steel roll cage, collapsible steering columns, side impact rails, driver’s air bag and a rear bumper. The classification should lower the cost somewhat, but at $20,000, its still in the region where it competes with more standard hybrid-electric cars that will have more mass appeal. This is a long shot, in our view.

Updated

New Internet technologies, defined vaguely as “Web 2.0,” have gone mainstream, but the cycle of innovation may be slowing, suggests a venture capitalist.

Separately, data shows that venture investments in Web 2.0 companies last year increased strongly, but that valuations actually dropped.

Peter Rip, of Crosslink Capital, who has invested in several Internet companies considered Web 2.0-focused, including Riya, Vast and Teqlo, posits that one way to check the “energy dissipation” around Web 2.0 is to look at Web 2.0-centric media, including Techcrunch, Gigaom, and Technorati.

All three of these properties show a similar falloff in reach from their Q4 peaks, all notably right around the Web 2.0 Conference, he notes, pointing to graphs from traffic-measuring service Alexa.

Peter’s post is here. He suggests the early easy wins by new companies targeting Web 2.0 have been had. Now that Web 2.0 has gone mainstream, the hard work begins.

The real debate takes place in comments on Peter post, which he has already shut down.

Of course, Alexa data is notoriously unreliable.

Update: Another controversy is how Web 2.0 is defined. One good definition has been produced by VentureOne and Ernst & Young (we wrote about their definition here).

Today, the two released their latest report, which shows venture capitalists more than doubled their investments in this area last year (see table below), but that the valuation they placed on these companies actually dropped. On its face, this suggests a cooling in the hype around the sector. However, the value drop may stem from other factors. For example, investors may be having to find and invest in Web 2.0 companies earlier in their cycle, because the companies need fewer overall dollars to grow– and so bypass taking capital later on. That means the value of the companies is lower at the time of the investment, but doesn’t necessarily mean a cooling off of interest. Indeed, many investors we’ve talked with say valuations are higher than ever, once you factor in how early these companies are in their traction.

Update II:

VentureOne and Ernst & Young have released a very useful table of Web 2.0 investments and their details here (download Excel file)

And here is a ranking of the most active venture capital investors in this latest cycle (more detailed info here; downloads Excel file)

Folks, venture capitalists are investing money at the sweetest terms since the fourth quarter of 2000 — which was shortly after the all-time high when the Internet bubble burst.

Now is the time to go raise your money for your start-up: Venture capitalists valued U.S.-based private companies at a median of $23 million while investing during the second quarter of this year, or $7 million more than the same quarter a year ago.

This comes from a report released yesterday about valuations by Dow Jones VentureOne, the publisher of VentureSource, a group that is probably doing the best research out there right now when it comes to venture capital (at least, in our view).

The jump in value means that you, as the entrepreneur, can take the cash from VCs and give away less ownership of your company to the VC — because their investment represents a smaller share.

A year or so ago, we said the timing was good. Now it is even better, and it could be a peak for a while (but we don’t know).

Here’s a summary of the survey’s findings:

–The jump “can be attributed to the significant values for second- and later-round deals in health care and key information technology segments.”

–”The increased opportunity for successful exits is clearly playing a role in the value of these companies. Venture capital firms tend to assign higher valuations to their portfolio companies when they see an active liquidity market, as is currently the case for acquisitions in IT and IPOs in healthcare.” (Note: Regarding acquistions in tech, we noted the recent moves by media companies to bolster acquisitions here — scroll down).

–”For example, acquisition prices for IT companies rose to a median of $60.4 million in the second quarter, which was the highest point in six years, thus driving up the value of still private companies.”

–”The median second-round health care valuation was $31.6 million in the second quarter, up from $15 million a year ago. Later-stage medical devices companies posted the highest valuations in the quarter, at $60.7 million, up from $38 million.”

–”The median second-round IT valuation was $22.5 million, up from $12.3 million in the second quarter of 2005. Within the IT category, the electronics, information services, and semiconductors segments all posted significant increases in valuations.”