Wednesday, October 10, 2007

DOE to Invest in Projects to Store 1 Million Tons of CO2

About half of the electricity Americans consume comes from coal, and China's economic boom is being fueled by the dirty-burning stuff. So while we'd prefer an end to all coal, technologies to capture and store the carbon emissions from coal plants will just have to help us out in the meantime. The DOE said today that it has awarded the first three large-scale carbon sequestration projects in the U.S., the largest single set of projects in the world to date.

The three projects — the Plains Carbon Dioxide Reduction Partnership, the Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership, and the Southwest Regional Partnership for Carbon Sequestration — will test the storage of 1 million or more tons of CO2 in deep reservoirs. The basins supposedly have the capacity to store over 100 years of CO2 emissions, and the DOE will invest $197 million over ten years, subject to Congressional approval. Including partnership cost share, the total value of the projects is $318 million.

For now the technology of capturing and storing carbon emissions is unproven, expensive and still in the research stage. And clean coal technologies in general are highly controversial. Though that hasn't stopped the venture world from investing in startups like GreatPointEnergy and Secure Energy. Check out the release for details on the individual projects .

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Tuesday, October 09, 2007

outside.in Raises $1.5 Million

from Silicon Alley Insider by Peter Kafka

Outsidein outside.in, the Brooklyn-based "place blogging" site, has raised $1.5 million, which it will use to build out the site and develop a geo-targeted ad platform. The site, founded by writer-entrepreneur Steven Berlin Johnson last year, raised $900,000 this spring.

Most of the original investors re-upped for this round: Union Square Ventures, Milestone Ventures, Village Ventures, George Crowley, John Seely Brown, Esther Dyson and John Borthwick. We're confirming whether Marc Andreessen, who invested in the first round, participated in this one.

Related: outside.in Launches Neighborhood News Widget
Brooklyn Bonkers About Blogging

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Nine Inch Nails Help Seal Record Industry’s Coffin

Highly popular Industrial Rock Band Nine Inch Nails have announced that as of today they are free agents, and will not be using the services of a record company in the future.

Nine Inch Nail's Trent Reznor wrote on the NIN site that the writing is on the wall for the traditional music distribution model, saying that the music business has radically mutated from one thing to something inherently very different today and that "it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as i see fit and appropriate."

It's expected that Nine Inch Nails next album will follow on from Radiohead's Rainbows and be released directly to the public.

I think Gizmodo hits it right on the head when they write:

If two of the biggest acts in the industry can see the digital writing on the wall and totally embrace it—that the old way of doing business is broken—why can't the labels? What Radiohead and NIN are showing is that the business model "of the future" feared by entrenched interests isn't arriving some time in the horizon. It's touching down now.

See also Michael's take on the music industry here.

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Search Engine Marketing Firm ReachLocal Takes $55.2 Million

reachlocal.jpgWoodland Hills based search marketing firm ReachLocal has taken an additional $55.2 million in funding, brining total funding to $67.9 million on a valuation of $305 million.

The round was led by Rho Ventures, with original investors Galleon Crossover Fund VantagePoint Venture Partners also participating.

ReachLocal offers a local-focused search marketing product that targets SMBs. ReachLocal offers campaign management for online advertising on major services including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, and also provides campaign specific site building and click tracking to customers.

For what is basically a SEM firm, the valuation is staggering; however despite the direct to buyer model of advertising options such as Google Adwords there is a growing market for middle-man services such as ReachLocal. There will be many people in the SEM business who will be re-evaluating their company valuations following ReachLocal's new round of funding, and I'd suggest that many of them may be sitting on a lot more value than they had previously thought.

(in part via LA Times)

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What The Kids Are Stealing These Days -- And What They'll Be Buying Soon

ZoeThe same record labels that complain about the epidemic of file-sharing/song-stealing also pay close attention to what songs file-sharers are swapping. Why? Because song-stealers tend to have the same tastes as song-buyers, but they tend to move faster. So if you track the what songs are moving quickly on P2P file-sharing systems, you can get a good sense of what's will be selling in a few weeks' time.

Online measurement firm BigChampagne has generated a "biggest movers" chart for us, which tracks which songs have had the biggest week-to-week increases on file-sharing networks. We've published it after the jump. Note that it doesn't correlate at all to CD sales, because people who buy CDs aren't buying them because there's one good song on them. But if there's more than one good song on them, they tend to do very well. That's why we're confident that Gorilla Zoe, who we'd never heard of prior to today, will be selling a lot of copies of his album Welcome To The Zoo in the coming weeks. The album, released by Warner Music Group (WMG), has two fast-moving songs on the BigChampagne chart.

Related: Big Music "Wins" Trial Against Song-Stealer; Industry Still Screwed

Bcchart

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