Green Tech : How air freshener research led to a new fuel-cell charger for phones

Fuel cell gadget charger PowerTrekk is finally hits store shelves in the States. Starting May 2012, you can head to outdoor equipment store REI to purchase this nifty device, which charges electronics with only water.

PowerTrekk first debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show 2012. The small device can charge cell phones, MP3 players, and eventually laptops with the addition of mere tap water. The key is a special reaction that produces hydrogen on demand, which is stored in a hydrogen fuel cell battery. All you have to do is pour water into the device to start charging whatever your heart desires (so long as it can be charged with a USB cable).

The water is confined to a PowerPukk, a small disc that holds the powder and can be sealed up after the water is added. That way you don’t accidentally spill water all over the iPhone you’re trying to charge. The PowerTrekk charger is currently available in parts of Europe and slowly making its way to the U.S., retailing for $230. By the end of this summer, you’ll be able to buy them at REI stores across the United States.

The science behind PowerTrekk was developed by Michael Lefenfeld of Signa Chemistry. Lefenfeld’s grandfather challenged him to create a bathroom air freshener, never realizing he’d wind up with reaction that could produce hydrogen.

“My grandfather was a vain man who had stopped smoking in later years, so he no longer carried matches around. He wanted an air freshener for the restroom,” said Lefenfeld in an interview with VentureBeat.

He used his chemistry background to develop a metallic powder-based air freshener that could go in the toilet. The powder had one key problem though: When combined with water it would ignite. After some tinkering, Lefenfeld removed the combustible aspect of the reaction, but was pleased to discover he could now create hydrogen on demand.

“I started working on the science side, I found that the material would react with water and produce hydrogen in a controllable reaction,” Lefenfeld said.

Fuel cell company MyFC got wind of Lefenfeld’s discovering and saw the great potential in creating hydrogen by mixing water and small amounts of the metal powder. The company realized it could use the hydrogen in a fuel-cell battery set up and wound up developing PowerTrekk.

Signa Chemistry grew out of the air freshener project, becoming a full-fledged business that specializes in stabilizing reactive metals. Other companies took notice of Lefenfeld’s work for consumer applications.

Lefenfeld’s hydrogen-producing powder is also used in Pedego electric bicycles. He hopes that his chemical discovery will be used to replace “noisy gas generators,” and will push forward an overall trend of greener energy solutions.

Other fuel-cell chargers have popped up in the last few years, most notably the Horizon MinPak. The device uses a special cartridge to create hydrogen, but isn’t mass marketed. You can only purchase the MiniPak from Horizon’s website and you must inquire for pricing information.

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Green Technology : Ahalife gets $10.1M in its shopping cart

Ahalife, an online shop for curated one-of-a-kind, luxury wares, has raised $10.1 million in a second round of funding.

It must be hard to be rich. You’ve already bought everything new from Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus, and Saks, so where else can you shop for something more unique than the latest $5,000 Hermes handbag? You take to the Internet to buy the most exclusive, luxury gifts — like a $10,000 bag made from crocodile skin.

Ahalife’s founder and chief executive Shauna Mei has an impressive fashion background; prior to Ahalife, she started a business with former Marc Jacobs chief executive Jeffrey Aronsson, Donna Karan, and Oscar de la Renta. Wanting to offer the most unique luxury goods out there, she created Ahalife to sell hand-selected products.

Ahalife reveals one new product every day from one of its celebrity curators — people like designer Donna Karan, fashion consultant Tim Gunn, and makeup artist Carmindy. Each product has a thoughtfully written story about where it came from, how it was made, and why it’s worth its price tag. The site’s inventory is made up of clothing, food, beauty products, accessories, home decor, and tech products, along with travel experiences.

Services such as Of a Kind, Gilt, and Fab, offer similar shopping experiences to Ahalife. Of a Kind offers small-batch items for sale, so you know you’re one of only 20 people who own a specific designer handbag. Gilt and Fab are more focused on finding you a good deal while still shopping for higher-end, hand-picked products.

The funding will be used to grow the company. Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten led the round, with participation from existing investors DCM and FirstMark Capital. The company has raised a total of $19.1 million.

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Green Technology : Electric vehicle charging gets a jolt with a $47.5M investment

As electric vehicles gain popularity in the automobile market, EV charging station manufacturer Coulomb Technologies has raised $47.5 million in fourth-round funding.

With Tesla, Nissan, Chevy, and Toyota pushing out economy to down-right luxury electric cars, more people are shunning gasoline in favor of electric models. For EVs to be practical and more widely adopted, there needs to be a strong infrastructure of charging stations for people to fill up their electric tanks. Coulomb Technologies made its way in the green tech market by providing outdoor charging stations for EV owners on the go.

Coulomb Technologies boasts 6,000 charging stations in 14 countries, in North America, Europe, and Australia. Every station is connected to a network called ChargePoint, helping electric car drivers find them on mobile apps and the ChargePoint website. Each station is also capable of sending text message alerts to a driver to tell them when their car is juiced up.

The company has partnered with Nissan to be the official charging stations for it Leaf electric cars. Coulomb Technologies has also worked with BMW, Ford, GM, and Fisker Automotive to create charging station support for their electric offers.

Braemar Energy Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led the funding round, joined by Toyota Tsusho Corporation and existing investor Rho Ventures. Voyager Capital, Siemens Venture Capital GmbH, Harbor Pacific Capital Partners, and Hartford Ventures also participated.

Better Place is one of Coulomb Technologies biggest competitors these days, because it offers an alternative chargingapproach for EV drivers. Better Place lets you swap your depleted battery for a fully charged one, a process that takes significantly less time than completely recharging a battery. EvoCharge and OpConnect also provide commercial EV charging stations.

“These funds enable us to provide cloud-based solutions to cities, retailers, employers, parking operators and property managers that will drive the adoption of clean transportation,” said Pat Romano, chief executive officer of Coulomb Technologies in a statement.

Coulomb Technologies is based in Campbell, Calif., in Silicon Valley. The company has raised a total of $80.3 million, including this new round.

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GreenTechnology : Driven to make the world a bit greener

The Chevy Volt is unique among electric cars because it runs on two sources of energy. You have an electric source – a battery – that allows you to drive gas-free for an EPA-estimated 35 miles. And there’s also an onboard gas generator that produces electricity so you can go farther. So if you want to drive using only electricity, you can. If you want to drive using electricity and gas, you can do that, too. Feeling all charged up? Check out what this current Chevy Volt driver has to say about his unique driving lifestyle:

Adam Meltzer’s life is anything but predictable. With three jobs and plenty of running around to do come the weekend, he says he relies on his Volt to keep him moving and motivated. “In Los Angeles you spend a lot of time in your car. If your car is not comfortable, it’s like working in an uncomfortable desk chair with a bad computer screen,” he says. Luckily, he loves his ride. “Before this car I didn’t even like driving. It was something I had to do.”

Meltzer says his affinity for the Volt has everything to do with how the car appeals to his environmentally conscious side. “The Volt for me has been an opportunity to step into a luxury car, not at a luxury price, and at the same time contribute to the ongoing conversation about how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks in the world.” In fact, Meltzer feels like he is making a statement every time he gets behind the wheel. “When I get in front of large SUVs on the road and they see the back of my car, maybe they’ll think for a minute: ‘Why am driving this out-of-date gas guzzler?’ he says.

The Volt has definitely made the term “gas guzzler” a thing of the past for Meltzer. “I get about 175 mpg, and drive mostly electric,” he says. His favorite place to charge up is at the Electric Lodge Arts and Environment Center in Venice. “It’s 20 miles from my house. I top off my battery, and I can pretty much get anywhere else in Los Angeles,” he says. Overall, Meltzer highly recommends the Volt to people every chance he gets. “It’s modern, sleek, technologically sophisticated, and most importantly, doesn’t pollute the air [when in electric mode].”

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Green Technology : Get social and eco-friendly this Earth Day (infographic)

Earth Day is Sunday, April 22, and if you have no idea how to celebrate, we can help.

This weekend people will unplug their electronics, get out of their houses, and ride their bikes to a tree planting Earth Day celebration, hoping to make up for all those times they sent a water bottle to a landfill or poured paint down their drains. But if the thought of going outside and interacting with nature makes you shudder, you can do your eco-friendly part from the comfort of your couch.

Recyclebank, a company that rewards people for doing earth-friendly things like recycling and planting trees, put together an infographic of social actions you can take to be more eco-friendly.

If every one of Facebook’s 845 million users cut one minute off their shower time, the amount of water saved would fill 1.1 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. If every person on Twitter turned their computer off for one hour, the energy and carbon emissions savings would be equivalent to taking 9,128 cars off the road each year.

Given Pinterest’s ever-growing popularity, if every person on Pinterest pinned a green tip to one of their boards, there would be 12 million green tips pinned every month. This tip may be the least energy-saving of the bunch, but spreading the green love around can’t hurt.

Whether you celebrate Earth Day indoors or out, you can reduce your carbon footprint by shutting down your computer, taking a shorter shower, and recycling those water bottles already.

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Green Technology : How tech companies are waking up to global responsibilities, opportunities

For the private sector, making money isn’t enough anymore.

It’s not enough for Walmart to have a market capitalization of $200 billion — more than the GDP of 147 countries worldwide. Or for Nokia to sell 420 million new phones in a year — increasingly to developing countries in Africa and Asia. People expect global brands to use their vast resources to make the world a better place. Now more than ever, consumers are making decisions based on companies’ social agendas — and market share hangs in the balance.

While Walmart supports everything from women’s empowerment to disaster relief through its foundation, the public is expecting even more from major tech companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon. Not only do they have some of the most visible wealth, they’re also intrinsically innovative — capable of solving some of the world’s hardest engineering problems and creating sustainable solutions.

As investment in social enterprise becomes more common, major brands and venture capitalists alike are learning how to make a difference without sacrificing their profit-driven missions.

Nokia is a prime example. With 51% of the mobile market share in Africa, it’s one of the continent’s most recognizable brands. Lacking televisions, computers — and, in some cases, electricity — many people throughout Africa access information and communicate solely through their mobile phones. Nokia has not squandered this opportunity — it’s using it to extend affordable, life-changing services and tools to African farmers.

Through its Ovi application store, Nokia offers Ovi Life Tools, an SMS-based app available on extremely cost-effective handsets that provides farmers with timely weather and agricultural information to optimize preparedness and crop yields. Nokia partners with organizations like the Kenya Meteorological Department, agriculture NGOs, and more to serve up tips, techniques and market stats that could help them prevent food shortages and get the best prices for their goods. Life Tools is also being used to deliver lesson plans to teachers, learning games to kids and accounting services for small businesses.

Facilitating connections between people and expanding access to global networks is one major way tech companies are doing their part for social good. Both Twitter and Facebook exploded last year during Arab Spring, becoming primary platforms for coordinating rallies, organizing protests and disseminating news and information quickly among millions of young people. Nine in 10 Egyptians and Tunisians surveyed by the Dubai School of Government said they organized or found out about protests on Facebook alone.

These social networks found themselves playing huge roles in historical democratic movements, and gaining users by the millions. The number of Facebook users in the region jumped by 30%, and tweets from Egypt jumped from 2,300 to 230,000 in the week before Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation. It might seem counter-intuitive for platforms essentially created for entertainment to be playing key roles in geopolitical events, but in this case, revolution was also good for business.

Like Twitter and Facebook, Google also provides tools that have helped people around the world communicate, organize, and be more productive. But its made a more concerted effort to not just promote social good, it’s investing in it too. In 2009, it created Google Ventures, a venture capital investment arm that funds for-profit tech startups. And while its investments are financially motivated, many of the companies it backs have strong social missions.

All six of Google Ventures’ energy-related portfolio companies are pursuing clean, efficient and renewable energy solutions. They include Nest, maker of the world’s first learning thermostat that helps users become more energy-efficient, and attracted a lot of buzz for its sleek, Apple-esque design. Its life science portfolio is stacked with companies pursuing innovative cancer therapies and genetic diagnostic systems to make medicine simpler, leaner and more affordable. And even some of its mobile picks have a social bent, like Miso Media, which creates entertaining educational software to make learning fun and easy.

Google may be more overtly philanthropic through Google.org — it gave away $115 million in grants and over $1 billion in in-kind support to nonprofit and educational orgs last year alone — but, in many ways, Google Ventures is more indicative of the future of tech brands and social enterprise. It combines doing good with doing well, a hard balance to strike.

That said, it’s a balance pursued not only by big names in tech, but also by the VCs trying to find and fund the next generation of big names. More and more, venture capital firms in Silicon Valley are seeking out socially-minded startups that have the potential to make money and a positive impact at the same time.

Marquee firms like Khosla and Kleiner Perkins are investing heavily in cleantech startups like Ecomotors, Stion, Sundrop Fuels, and Fisker Automotive. Kleiner even launched what it calls its Green Growth Fund to support later-stage greentech ventures that have gained traction and have the potential to slow climate change.

On the far end of the spectrum, you have firms like social enterprise incubator Hub Ventures and Omidyar Network, which exclusively seek out companies looking to do good in the world. The latter not only gives grants to a slew of nonprofits, it funds for-profit microfinance organizations and consumer tech companies focused on connection building and information sharing like Digg, Meetup and Wikia.

Across the board, Silicon Valley seems to be waking up to the reality that having resources and brainpower obligates them to do more for the rest of the world. With consumer eyes fixed on which brands do what — whether it’s Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg giving $100 million to Newark Public Schools, or Amazon launching an environmentally-friendly packaging initiative — it’s more important than ever for tech companies to do their part.

That said, if recent examples prove anything, it’s that making money and a difference don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Finding these ideas that sit at the intersection of impact and profitability is what the Grand Challenges Exploration program is all about. A grant program funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the program is looking for bold, creative ideas to solve the biggest problems in global health. People from all disciplines, age groups and professions are encouraged to apply. In the past, the program has seen groundbreaking submissions come from unexpected sources, from astrophysicists to mechanical engineers to students.

The deadline for submissions to this year’s program is May 15. Successful projects will win support and have the chance to land $1 million in additional funding to bring their ideas to fruition — and maybe even change the world!

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Green Technology : Get money for your crappy old phones

Brush off those dusty old electronics and broken phones sitting in a drawer. EcoATM has raised $17 million for its electronics recycling “ATM” kiosks, which give you money for handing over old phones, MP3 players, and even laptops.

The other day I was walking through San Francisco’s Westfield Mall when I came across an EcoATM. I had never seen one before, but after figuring out what the ATM did, I wished I had been carrying around one of my many old dumb phones that will never see the light of day again. The kiosk prompted me to insert a defunct electronic device into its deposit slot. The screen said it would scan my old hunk of plastic and metal, tell me its second-market value, and ask if I wanted money in exchange for saying a final goodbye to my old device.

“We read a report from Nokia that three percent of cell phones were being recycled and felt that needed to change. So we thought, how can we make it really easy and rewarding?” said EcoATM chief executive Tom Tullie in an interview with VentureBeat.

EcoATM knows that most people want to keep e-waste out of landfills but also don’t want to part with their $500 phone and get nothing in return. In order to get more people to recycle their electronics, the company will make it worth your while to part with your old device by giving you money or discounts on new phones. If you feel really, really nice, you can donate the cash to charity.

The idea of device-recycling ATMs has gained a lot of attention from investors. Coinstareven dropped some cash into EcoATM’s bucket with an investment two years ago. EcoATM also won the Best Clean Tech Startup Crunchies Award for 2011. Investor Randy Hawks of Claremont Creek Ventures is clearly impressed.

“They’ve got a great business model, [with the] idea of having kiosks that are convenient for consumers. They are constantly updating their price estimates for devices, so you know you are getting the best pricing for your 18 month-old Android phone,” said Hawks during a phone call with VentureBeat. “They have a stellar management team and have a great way to monetize the value of old devices.”

Claremont Creek Ventures, Coinstar, and TAO Ventures led the $17 million second-round funding, with PI Holdings, Moore Venture Partners, AKS Capital, and angel investor Koh Boon Hwee participating. The money will go towards a national rollout of EcoATM kiosks.

“[There are] 50 units in the field now, and we plan to deploy nationwide. We will be buying kiosks to deploy and building our infrastructure of sales and marketing,” said Tullie about how the company will use the funding.

EcoATM unveiled its kiosks at DEMO Spring in 2011 and has since raised a disclosed total of $31.4 million in funding. The company is based in San Diego, Calif.

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Green Technology : Meet the $60 ‘Earth Day’ LED light bulb

Just in time for Earth Day, Dutch electronics company Philips is unveiling a new super energy-efficient light bulb today with a shelf life that should last about 25 years.

The catch? It costs about $60, but Philips is said to have forged deals with some stores to bring that cost down to about $20, according to the BBC. Still, that price might be too high for consumers, as VentureBeat has previously pointed out.

The new bulbs are made of light emitting diodes (LEDs) that are more energy-efficient than traditional incandescent bulbs, and have same color quality as standard bulbs. LEDs are typically found in TVs, computers, and car headlights.

Philip’s new bulb won the Bright Tomorrow competition last year from the U.S. Department of Energy, which asked companies to create an affordable energy-efficient alternative to the standard 60-watt incandescent light bulb. Philip was an easy winner, as the only entrant in the competition.

Even at the cheaper $20 price, the new LED lights face heavy competition from the much cheaper  compact fluorescent bulbs.

The new bulbs hit retail store shelves today.

Photo via Philips

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