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Chris Nuttall

Cheaper, brighter, leaner are the qualities driving light-emitting diode advances and no less than three companies have announced breakthroughs on Tuesday that further advance LEDs as our bright, lighting future.

Soraa, a Silicon Valley start-up, has emerged from stealth mode with a halogen-replacement product (pictured), North Carolina-based Cree says its new product delivers twice the lumens per dollar of previous-generation LEDs, while Britain’s Plessey says it has a new process that cuts costs by 80 per cent.

Chris Nuttall

Despite the disaster of Solyndra, now is still the best time to invest in solar companies, the FT and Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Financing Innovation conference was told on Tuesday.

In a panel discussion, Steve Westly, a leading cleantech venture capitalist, said that, while the Californian solar cell maker’s bankruptcy had been a terrible thing, four or five global solar brands would emerge within five to 10 years.

Richard Waters

The collapse in solar panel prices has not been bad news for everyone: installers are having a field day. But how do you create a large-scale business quickly in an industry that has always favoured local operators?

US solar installer Sungevity has one answer – it is about to venture into Europe, making it the first to make the move.

Chris Nuttall

Better Place, the US company building battery-swapping stations for electric cars, has raised $200m in third-round funding and plans to use the money to expand its networks to other countries.

The Silicon Valley startup is due to launch a limited commercial service in Denmark and Israel in the first quarter of 2012.  Its Series C financing will allow it to expand further in Western Europe, it said on Friday, while it continues to advance deployment projects in Hawaii, Northern California, Canada, Southern China and Japan.

Tech news from the web:

Barnes & Noble is to introduce the Nook Tablet, a lighter, faster, 7-inch color touchscreen e-reader, Engadget reports. The Nook Tablet is set to be released on November 16th for $249.

According to a study by Ernst & Young LLP, US venture capital investment in clean technology rose 73 percent from last year in the third quarter, Bloomberg reports.

Richard Waters

An IPO of Silver Spring Networks has long been one of the most hotly anticipated deals from the world of “greentech”. On Thursday, the Silicon Valley-based company finally disclosed its intention to go public – though some of the shine has come off its story since the heady days of the 2009 US stimulus act, which was passed to reinvigorate the economy in the depths of the financial crisis.

Chris Nuttall

Raising awareness about energy management was always going to be a slow burner of a project, no pun intended, for Google and Microsoft.

But, within days of Google announcing the closure of its PowerMeter service, Microsoft has announced Hohm will be discontinued. Both were only two years old.

Chris Nuttall

Google’s grand design to organise the world’s information crumbled at the edges on Friday as it announced the abandonment of services that stored users’ health and energy consumption data.

The forthcoming closure of Google Health and PowerMeter represents a considerable narrowing of ambitions for a company that has reached for the stars and supported missions to the moon.

Tech news from around the web:

Google has announced  its new solar energy fund for SolarCity, a residential solar power provider, ZDNet reports. Google’s $280 million dollar investment in the fund is the company’s largest in clean energy to date, the company said in a blog post.

Richard Waters

With all the brouhaha around social media, it’s easy to forget a sector that was meant to have had a few hot IPOs of its own by now. A company that is trying to make money by selling green slime hopes to change that.

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About this blog Blog guide
Richard Waters, Chris Nuttall and April Dembosky in the FT's San Francisco bureau share their views - plus tech insights from Tim Bradshaw and Maija Palmer in London and Robin Kwong in Taipei.

The blog includes a separate section on personal technology.

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Contact the FT Tech Hub team: richard.waters@ft.com, chris.nuttall@ft.com, april.dembosky@ft.com, maija.palmer@ft.com, robin.kwong@ft.com and tim.bradshaw@ft.com.

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