EnerG2 Inc., an ultracapacitor startup that has kept quiet until now, is launching today with the official announcement that it has raised $8.5 million in its first round of financing. Founded in 2003, it has spent five years developing electrode materials that it claims can boost the performance of ultracapacitors, devices that are useful in electric cars and smaller electronic devices.
Unlike batteries, which store electricity chemically, ultracapacitors store energy as electrical fields and physically separate the positive and negative charges with an insulator. Some describe ultracapacitors as “mechanical batteries“, attractive for their ability to deliver large bursts of power, charge and discharge quickly and efficiently and last through many more cycles than batteries, as well as tolerate changes in temperature, shocks and vibration. And where a traditional battery lasts about 1,000 cycles (one charge and discharge), an ultracapacitor could last 1 million cycles or more, according to Rick Luebbe, EnerG2’s chief executive.
But low energy density, or the energy stored per kilogram, has long been a shortcoming of ultracapacitors compared to batteries. So a power tool that might run for 30 minutes on a lithium-ion battery and take two hours to charge –- and need replacing every few years – might run for only five or 10 minutes on a similarly-sized ultracapacitor, but would charge in 60 or 80 seconds and last the life of the tool, Luebbe said.
EnerG2 thinks it can help make ultracapacitors more attractive by boosting their performance and making them cheaper, both on a dollars-per-kilowatt and dollars-per-watt-hour basis, he said. The company didn’t say how much it expects to cut costs, but Luebbe said the electrode materials, the company’s specialty, are one of the largest cost components.
Working with technology initially developed at the University of Washingon, EnerG2 has taken the pure activated carbon typically used in today’s ultracapacitor electrodes, the plates that hold the electrical fields, and restructured it at the nano level, increasing its surface area and making it more porous so that ions can flow more easily, he said.
That material can already give electrodes up to five times the power density, or double the energy density of current electrode materials, Luebbe claims. And even when the material is optimized for one attribute, like power density, it can maintain the energy density of conventional materials –- the energy density doesn’t drop off precipitously when power density increases, he said.
Despite the improvements, EnerG2 isn’t targeting ultracapacitor applications that compete head-on with batteries, at least at first. Even with its new materials, ultracapacitors won’t approach the energy densities of batteries, so the company has set its sights on applications where other attributes, such as power density, cycle life or fast charging, are more important.
Instead, there are many applications to go after where ultracapacitors already have a place, such as electric rail systems that capture the energy released when a train brakes coming into a station and uses the energy to help start the train up again. That requires an energy-storage device to charge and discharge so many times that no battery can handle it, Luebbe said.
Industrial applications involving kinetic energy are another natural fit, he said. For example, systems that turn the motion of cranes, forklifts or elevators into electricity could take advantage of a storage device like ultracapacitors, again because of their ability to charge and discharge rapidly over and over again.
Still, ultracapacitors’ low energy density limits their market, said Brian Barnett, vice president of technology for TIAX LLC, a technology development and consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass.
“Capacitors have difficulty [reaching more than] 5 watt-hours a kilogram, and lithium-ions today can reach 20 or maybe 30 times that or more,” he said, speaking roughly. “There’s a big gap here, and as lithium-ions are able to do higher and higher power, it will be difficult for capacitors to find their appropriate niche.”
Aside from the industrial and electric-rail applications, EnerG2 plans to sell materials for ultracapacitors in hybrid-electric vehicles, consumer electronics, power tools and backup power in data centers, telco switching stations and even the grid, he said.
It should have plenty of potential customers. Big companies making ultracpacitors now include Panasonic Corp. and Okamura Laboratory Inc. in Japan and NessCap Co. in South Korea. The United States’ Maxwell Technologies is also going after the transportation market, along with Apowercap Technologies and Eestor.
EnerG2’s next step is to get the materials accepted into its ultracapacitor customers’ manufacturing systems, Luebbe said, adding that he hopes to see the first shipments in the second quarter of 2009; he says the company already has the ability to make “fairly good amounts” of electrode material. Later, it also plans to develop new materials for other energy-storage devices, including lithium-ion batteries, as well as natural-gas, methane and hydrogen storage.
OVP Venture Partners and Firelake Capital Management led EnerG2’s round. Washington Research Foundation’s WRF Capital, the Sustainability Investment Fund and members of the Northwest Energy Angels also invested in the Seattle-based company.
EnerG2 Inc., an ultracapacitor startup that has kept quiet until now, is launching today with the official announcement that it has raised $8.5 million in its first round of financing. Founded in 2003, it has spent five years developing electrode materials that it claims can boost the performance of ultracapacitors, devices that are useful in electric cars and smaller electronic devices.
Unlike batteries, which store electricity chemically, ultracapacitors store energy as electrical fields and physically separate the positive and negative charges with an insulator. Some describe ultracapacitors as “mechanical batteries“, attractive for their ability to deliver large bursts of power, charge and discharge quickly and efficiently and last through many more cycles than batteries, as well as tolerate changes in temperature, shocks and vibration. And where a traditional battery lasts about 1,000 cycles (one charge and discharge), an ultracapacitor could last 1 million cycles or more, according to Rick Luebbe, EnerG2’s chief executive.
But low energy density, or the energy stored per kilogram, has long been a shortcoming of ultracapacitors compared to batteries. So a power tool that might run for 30 minutes on a lithium-ion battery and take two hours to charge –- and need replacing every few years – might run for only five or 10 minutes on a similarly-sized ultracapacitor, but would charge in 60 or 80 seconds and last the life of the tool, Luebbe said.
EnerG2 thinks it can help make ultracapacitors more attractive by boosting their performance and making them cheaper, both on a dollars-per-kilowatt and dollars-per-watt-hour basis, he said. The company didn’t say how much it expects to cut costs, but Luebbe said the electrode materials, the company’s specialty, are one of the largest cost components.
Working with technology initially developed at the University of Washingon, EnerG2 has taken the pure activated carbon typically used in today’s ultracapacitor electrodes, the plates that hold the electrical fields, and restructured it at the nano level, increasing its surface area and making it more porous so that ions can flow more easily, he said.
That material can already give electrodes up to five times the power density, or double the energy density of current electrode materials, Luebbe claims. And even when the material is optimized for one attribute, like power density, it can maintain the energy density of conventional materials –- the energy density doesn’t drop off precipitously when power density increases, he said.
Despite the improvements, EnerG2 isn’t targeting ultracapacitor applications that compete head-on with batteries, at least at first. Even with its new materials, ultracapacitors won’t approach the energy densities of batteries, so the company has set its sights on applications where other attributes, such as power density, cycle life or fast charging, are more important.
Instead, there are many applications to go after where ultracapacitors already have a place, such as electric rail systems that capture the energy released when a train brakes coming into a station and uses the energy to help start the train up again. That requires an energy-storage device to charge and discharge so many times that no battery can handle it, Luebbe said.
Industrial applications involving kinetic energy are another natural fit, he said. For example, systems that turn the motion of cranes, forklifts or elevators into electricity could take advantage of a storage device like ultracapacitors, again because of their ability to charge and discharge rapidly over and over again.
Still, ultracapacitors’ low energy density limits their market, said Brian Barnett, vice president of technology for TIAX LLC, a technology development and consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass.
“Capacitors have difficulty [reaching more than] 5 watt-hours a kilogram, and lithium-ions today can reach 20 or maybe 30 times that or more,” he said, speaking roughly. “There’s a big gap here, and as lithium-ions are able to do higher and higher power, it will be difficult for capacitors to find their appropriate niche.”
Aside from the industrial and electric-rail applications, EnerG2 plans to sell materials for ultracapacitors in hybrid-electric vehicles, consumer electronics, power tools and backup power in data centers, telco switching stations and even the grid, he said.
It should have plenty of potential customers. Big companies making ultracpacitors now include Panasonic Corp. and Okamura Laboratory Inc. in Japan and NessCap Co. in South Korea. The United States’ Maxwell Technologies is also going after the transportation market, along with Apowercap Technologies and Eestor.
EnerG2’s next step is to get the materials accepted into its ultracapacitor customers’ manufacturing systems, Luebbe said, adding that he hopes to see the first shipments in the second quarter of 2009; he says the company already has the ability to make “fairly good amounts” of electrode material. Later, it also plans to develop new materials for other energy-storage devices, including lithium-ion batteries, as well as natural-gas, methane and hydrogen storage.
OVP Venture Partners and Firelake Capital Management led EnerG2’s round. Washington Research Foundation’s WRF Capital, the Sustainability Investment Fund and members of the Northwest Energy Angels also invested in the Seattle-based company.
Sun Microsystems said today it is going to cut 5,000 to 6,000 jobs to align its costs to deal with the weak global economic climate. It’s another sign of how weak the economy has become, and how Sun is still struggling to find its footing after years of cutbacks.
The cuts are likely to fall heavily on an already reeling Silicon Valley. Cuts like this show just how bad the companies — particularly already battered ones such as Sun — are expecting the economic storm to last. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based server maker said the cuts add up to 15 percent to 18 percent of its work force. As part of the move, the company will reorganize its business groups.
The reorganization will place more emphasis on open-source platforms and the fastest growing sections of the technology market. Sun said the new structure would recognize the importance of software, such as Sun’s recently acquired MySQL open-source database software.
Sun expects to cut costs by $700 million to $800 million annually. Total charges will be in the range of $500 million to $600 million over the next twelve months. Anil Gadre will move from chief marketing officer to head of the Application Platform Software division, which includes Java and MySQL. Systems Platforms will be headed by John Fowler and include Sun’s Solaris operating system, virtualization software, and other system-oriented software. In the musical chairs, Sun’s current head of software Rich Green has chosen to leave the company.
And Dave Douglas will head a Cloud Computing & Developer Platform division, with cloud-based services including NetBeans and StarOffice.
Meebo, the company that powers social interaction through instant messaging and group chat on its own and partner sites, has partnered with Hearst Magazines Digital Media, a unit of Hearst Magazines. Seventeen.com and Popularmechanics.com are two of the digital media properties that are integrating Meebo’s chat and instant messaging services to drive user traffic on the sites, strengthen online communities and increase revenue.
The key reason Hearst entered the deal is to increase engagement on its sites, according to Daniel Bernstein, Meebo’s director of business development. “When users load up a Meebo room, they stay in it for thirteen minutes. We have widgets that get longer session lengths than some of the world’s biggest websites,” he said.
To kick off the partnership, Seventeen Magazine, the popular teen publication, has integrated Meebo chat rooms into a “Style Stars 2008″ online feature to spark buzz and conversation around fashion and the best (and, inevitably, the worst) dressed celebrities of the year. Released just a few hours ago, Meebo’s technology enables members of the Seventeen.com community to chat in real time, as well as check out the latest photos, articles and videos of their favorite fashion icons.
Once you select your personal favorite style maven — please don’t choose Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen — the site takes you a customized chat room that centers around that celebrity. Below is what ensues when teenage girls profess their undying love for pop star Beyoncé Knowles and her sartorial choices in real-time (note the abundance of exclamation points and smiley emoticons): 
Meebo chat rooms can be tailored for specific content to great effect, such as a recent Popular Mechanics online article that generated 20,000 lines of conversation in the first 48 hours. Magazines are finding it increasingly essential to establish strong online presences and communities and offer special online-only features in order to make up for sagging print sales and a decline in subscriptions.
To date, Mountain View-based Meebo has raised $37.5 million from Sequoia Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, JAFCO Ventures, Time Warner Investments and KTB Ventures.
Jason Kilar, chief executive of Hulu, the online streaming video site backed by NBC and Fox, is delivering a keynote at NewTeeVee Live in San Francisco. I’ll be liveblogging his talk.
Hulu has always focused on premium content. Kilar’s keynote focused on what drives the Hulu team, what inspires the product that they create and what they believe has contributed to the site’s astounding success. It reinforced the ongoing trend that a lot of advertisers are gravitating towards this 20 billion dollar market, especially because they can better control their brand in terms of what types of content their ads will appear in.
Kilar also addressed the distribution markets competing for viewer’s eyeballs. Why focus on getting an individual to purchase Season 1 of Mad Men on DVD when episodes can be streamed directly from a computer? Money comes in from ad revenue, but a lot of that goes back to the content providers and partners. If you put too many advertisements in a video, users will be turned off. How do you strike a fine balance, so you can generate enough revenue from advertisements to cover the high cost of premium content? Will consumers sit through five or ten ads in a premium show for Hulu to afford streaming this content? There aren’t any easy answers.
My frantically-typed notes from the keynote, below:
10:03 am: Jason Kilar wants to cover three topics in order to create a transparent window into how Hulu operates: A big wave, obsessing and results.
The Big Wave: 12.6 billion represents the number of streams in the US according to comScore. If you look at this number a year ago, it was a fraction of 12.6 billion. “Something is afoot here…a lot of users are responding to premium content, both long-form and short-form. Hulu is able to innovate on behalf of users.”
Why is online such a growth category for the Internet? Kilar likens it to what Starbucks has done for coffee. More people around the world now drink premium coffee and hot chocolate. Why is that? Starbucks gets that by making it easier to consume. People will probably consume more of it since it’s so accessible.
“Media is an impulse business…powerful things happen when you make it easier to consume.” People will consume more of it. That’s the heart and soul of Hulu, making it easier and fun for people to consume content.
10:05 am On Obsessing: Hulu’s mission: “Helping people find and and enjoy the world’s premium content; when, where and how they want to.”
Their rallying cry: “To deliver a service that users, advertisers, and content owners unabashedly love.” They want to be careful in making a service that everyone will love. The luxury at Hulu is that they got start with a clean piece of paper and build a mission and culture together as a team. What defines Hulu? How is it structured? Kilar says it boils down to their mission and rallying cry.
Strategy: “brain-spray awesome” quality. More on the source of that description later. Hulu aspires to deliver that kind of service.
What inspires the Hulu team? Disney. Kilar’s whole life changed when his family took a big trip to Disney World, and exited the railway to see the Main Street and castle. It made such an impression on him that’s universally shared. What really impressed him is that Disney was spotlessness- you can’t find a gum wrapper on the sidewalk. It’s that obsessiveness with detail and quality that separates Disney World from every other theme park on the planet.
Kilar says he was so consumed by the whole story behind Disney that he went to work there after school during college. What a coincidence! I, too, worked for Disney during college (for Disneyland, though, the original), and was the best Mickey Mouse-shaped pretzel and churro peddler ever.
The Hulu team obsesses over every pixel in the screen the way Disney street sweepers obsess over the tiny pieces of debris in the amusement park. The design over the site, the fonts, the whitespace — everything that informs the user experience, is of utmost importance, as minute as it may seem.
10:11 am: Hulu is committed to giving users and advertisers choice. The aim is to listen to the audience and empower users. Hulu listens by giving users feedback features such as the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” buttons on the lefthand side of ads.
Relentlessly innovate: The thumbnail you get when you search for a video, such as the Saturday Night Live short of Natalie Porman rapping, changes depending on the words you use to search. Searching with the term “Natalie Raps” will give you a result with Natalie’s face. Searching for “Andy Samberg” will bring up the exact moment he appears in the video with Natalie.
“Being neurotic is a very good thing for users,” says Kilar.
10:13 am: Listen. Take action (quickly). On Thursday, November 6, a small bug was spotted on Hulu at 12:34 am by a user. There was copy on the site that wasn’t updated, announcing that the election was approaching, even though it had already happened the day before. Hulu’s response time was astoundingly quick. By 12:54 am, Eric Feng, CTO of Hulu, had replied to user directly, thanking them for their quick catch, and had corrected the page.
A Hulu first-time user, Marisa Wegryzn, posted that “My first hulu experience made my head explode in a brain-spray of awesome.” This is the kind of feedback Hulu is trying to elicit from users and advertisers.
On results: In September of this year, Hulu had 12 million monthly users, and 145 million monthly video streams. PC World Magazine named it the #1 product of 2008, and TIME Magazine rated it among the top 5 inventions of 2008.
10:18 am: Hulu has been embedded 1,500,000 times on over 60,000 sites. Kilar stresses that the company remembers its humble roots, despite its astounding success. Kilar says that if you look at the content streams before Hulu launched, Fox has been able to triple their overall online business since March 12.
Kilar says that they want to build a better mousetrap, by building an ad service that has higher recall rates. He is adamant that they focus on the brand, because users notice this. And now, for some questions from the peanut gallery.
Q: What are you hearing from users about ads on Hulu? Would you prefer to have this ad, or that ad?
A: Ten times out of ten, people would take a free car over paying for a car. People know there’s give and take for access to incredible shows like SNL and 30Rock, and the price is being exposed to advertising. Feedback regarding the advertising experience runs along the lines of, “Hey, it’s great the ads are just 30 seconds.” People see the promise of having an experience that’s relevant to them. Kilar admits they’re not there yet, but the more data you can collect about users, the more you can create products that are truly relevant and meaningful.
10:23 am: In answering a question about Hulu’s international plans, Kilar wants people to be able to watch content from anywhere, but can’t release more plans about globalization or a roadmap for where they want to go. He stresses that the way they make decisions, they look at a hundred potentially good ideas, but funnel down to the top three ideas that they can implement now, because they’re still a start-up constrained by limited resources.