The Green Frog from Silicon Valley

Cleantech goes global, Bay Area still a key hub

March is always a key month for cleantech in California. It starts the season of pre Earth Day events like the ECO:nomics conference in Santa Barbara. A first quarter into the year, the cleantech community gathers in San Francisco at the Cleantech Summit to discuss the new trends. The CEO of Cleantech Group opened the 10th Summit with a keynote on the power of global partnerships in cleantech.

One evidence of that is the multiplication of green business and networking events around the world. Agrion is an organization with offices in San Francisco, New York City, Paris, Frankfurt, and Beijing. They animate the local debate in energy, cleantech and corporate sustainability by offering almost daily webinars and monthly gatherings in each city. I attended their symposium on smart cities last week, and San Francisco remains a key hub for them.

Investments are flowing into smart water

The flow of venture investments in water tech companies is slowly increasing. The CEO of Pasteurization Technology Group (PTG) just closed a $1M seed round for a green double play. The investment was announced during the 3^rd Water Tech Summit in Santa Clara, CA. Greg Ryan, PTG's CEO, was meeting with other entrepreneurs along with financial investors, industry professionals, and consultant engineers. Water is one of the cleantech sectors expected to grow in 2012.

An increasing number of water tech companies are positioning themselves at the intersection of water and other sectors to get more bang for the same buck: avoid costs to deal with contaminated water liabilities and create a new revenue stream. In the case of PTG, they generate renewable energy from biogas as they heat water to clean it. They use a capital-light model that VC investors like. However, they found their lead financial backer in Canada where the summit was held last year. The US is not necessarily the smartest country to deal with water and Silicon Valley is not the water innovation hub in America.

Mac World: is Apple becoming The Man?

Macworld, the ultimate iFan event, was on last week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. What used to be the main Apple event where Steve Jobs would introduce killer products like the iPod or the iPhone, is now an independent tradeshow for brands and merchants that gravitate around Apple's growing empire. The story tells that Apple's founder did not like losing control of the stage lighting and other aspects of the products launch. The big Apple event is now the WordWide Developper Conference event in June, also at the Moscone Center. The 2,500 tickets typically sell within a few hours.

Steve Jobs was a perfectionist at the border of arts and technology and was a control freak with his colleagues, as depicted by Walter Isaacson in his official biography. He is now part of the popular culture. The question today rather relates to the extent of Apple's control outside the company circle and its grip over a growing manufacturing empire. The New York Times gave insights in the world of the consumer electronics giant in a recent article analyzing how the US lost on the iPhone: behind its 63,000 employees, 700,000 workers assemble iPhones in China, and tens of millions of units shipped to customers worldwide last quarter.