Author: Blancer

No matter how big your company is, maintaining platform parity — that is, keeping all of your apps functionally identical across multiple smartphone platforms — is tough work. Even Facebook can’t seem to get their Android app quite up to par with their iPhone app.

Later today, PayPal will be introducing version 2.0 of their Android App, which seems to be aimed at bringing it up to speed with its iPhone counterpart.
Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Poor old Spotify. Less than a week after Billboard magazine reported that the music-on-demand service had “rebooted” its negotiations with US labels, rival service Rdio has just opened its doors in both the US and Canada, proudly boasting deals with many of those same labels.

So what gives? What does Rdio – another European startup boasting unlimited music, anywhere – have that Spotify doesn’t?

Two words: faux humility.

But I’ll get to that in a second. First there is a convention – so widely adhered to that it might as well be a law – that if you’re going to write anything critical about Spotity, you have to first acknowledge the amazing slickness of its product.

So here we go: Spotify is amazingly slick as a product. Really it is. You want to listen to a song – almost any song ever recorded – just type its name into Spotify and it plays. For free. If you want to listen to unlimited songs without obtrusive ads, or if you want to download the songs for offline listening, then you pay ten Euro a month and it’s all yours. It’s a thing of beauty.

But here’s what would also be a thing of beauty: a magic ATM that, using a slick point and click interface, handed out free dollar bills, printed with tiny ads. A magic ATM that, for a small monthly fee, would allow you to upgrade from withdrawing ad-supported singles to withdrawing unadulterated fives.

Like that magic ATM, Spotify’s app is writing checks its business model can’t cash. In Europe the company claims that it’s racing towards profitability: subscription numbers are climbing – with founder Daniel Ek (pronounced ‘Eek’) telling a South by Southwest audience in March that they have 320,000 paying customers. And yet according to persistent rumours, the company is in the midst of frantic renegotiations with European labels due to the founders’ over-confidence when they first agreed licencing terms. In short: Spotify was so convinced that it would be successful that it agreed to a deal where it would pay a significantly reduced royalty in its first couple of years of operation, with payments stepping up after that launch period to reflect the huge cash cow that the product would become. A deadline that expires right about now, with the company still barely a cash calf. Uh oh.

And yet to read the European business press – or what passes for it – you’d think that all is well at Spotify. So desperate is Europe to have another dot com success story – to stick it to the Valley – they they unquestioningly print any bullshit that Spotify’s spin machine churns out. When Billboard ran their story about the company’s stalled negotiations with US labels, Ek simply picked up the phone to a journalist from the Telegraph in London and reiterated that “Spotify will launch in US by end of 2010”. That claim became the story’s headline across much of the UK and European press, despite the company’s numerous missed deadlines and their history of – yes, I’ll say it – deliberately misleading the media. It’s clear that Ek passionately believes that Spotify is the future of music online and that sooner or later the world will realise that fact. If his spokespeople have to bend the truth slightly in the meantime to buy the company a few extra months then – meh – it’s for the greater good. They’ll see. THEY’LL ALL SEE.

Unfortunately while Ek’s balls-to-the-wall style of doing business might play big on the old continent, it has precisely the opposite effect in the US. Put bluntly, America wants Spotify to fail. Or rather, unlike Europe, America – represented by music labels, journalists and anyone else with a vested interest in the space – doesn’t have any reason to want Spotify to succeed. And they certainly have no time for an arrogant European demanding that they have to change how they do business just because he says so.

“Sure,” say the labels, “if Spotify wants to talk about launching a fully subscription based version of their cute little European service, perhaps with a very short trial period, then we’ll take the meeting. We’ll even promise not to laugh at their quaint accents. But if they won’t play by our rules, we’re quite happy to continue working with Rhapsody, Mog, Napster — and now Rdio.”

Oh, yes, Rdio. Founded by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom – formerly of Skype – Rdio offers much of the same functionality as Spotify — but with a waaaay crappier interface. Really it’s bad: so bad that it’s actually a challenge to figure out how to make it play music. Even when you get the thing working, the service is only free for a very short amount of time – three days! – before users are asked to stump up $10 for a subscription. In no universe is three days enough time to get users hooked on a new music service, particularly when it takes two-and-a-half of those days to figure out how the hell it works.

And yet, despite sucking harder than Divine Brown trying to pick up a golf ball with a hosepipe, Rdio’s launch has been welcomed to America with open arms. How did Friis and Zennstrom manage where Spotify has failed?

By playing the colonials like a violin.

From the start, Rdio has pandered to the US music industry’s every demand: launching as a subscription-only service that barely allows a note of free music out before users are shaken down for money. It’s pandered to reporters too: cleverly positioning itself as the approachable antidote to arrogant old Spotify by talking to every reporter who called, not lying to them, and even dishing out free invitations to sites like – uh – TechCrunch to share with their readers. Of course America lapped it up. Screw you, Ek, these Europeans are OK. They know their place.

As a European living in the US, I understand Rdio’s strategy completely: after all, it’s exactly the same one that any sensible Brit, Swede, Frenchman or Spaniard should take if they want to get on the good side of the Yanks. Clearly Daniel Ek didn’t get the memo so, in the interests of Euro-American relations (and in the interests of being able to keep listening to Spotify over here), I’m willing to do what I can to help him. Because I’m a nice person. Really I am.

(If you’re American, please stop reading now; perhaps go and look at these pictures of Scottish castles or Norwegian fjords.)

Daniel,

You and I can agree on one thing: Europe is better than America. We speak more languages. We made stronger, tastier cheese. Our money is more colourful. We embrace the letter “u” in our words.

Like all good Europeans, we are at heart socialists, not capitalists: we think music – like healthcare – should be free. And we also have a healthy contempt for journalists who would question our ability to pay our bills.

Most importantly, though, like all good Europeans, we also know that Americans are – to a man – suckers: albeit with far more than one born every minute. What’s theirs – including their money – is rightfully ours, Daniel. After all without us they’d all be speaking – well – American.

And yet, trying to conquer America with arrogance is like trying to conquer a sheep with wool. Rather, the secret to victory is to to play into their ego, not to fight against it. I realised this when I moved here: by playing the unemployable drunken Brit card I was able to get a job writing anti-American diatribes like this for TechCrunch (“oh, the Brit sense of humo(u)r”) and to start charming their women with my accent. Rdio understands the need for faux-humility too: they’ve used it to beat you to launch here, despite a far inferior product.

Life is good on this side of the Atlantic, Daniel, and Spotify could be living it too. All you have to do is start telling America what it needs to hear. Swallow your ego and do whatever deals you have to do to get Spotify US launched, even if it’s as a full subscription product. Yes, it will be an embarrassing climb down but, while you’re stubbonly sticking to your guns, Rdio is romping away with your market share. If VHS vs Betamax has taught us anything, it’s that the clear superiority of your product doesn’t matter a damn if Rdio has all of the users by the time you finally launch in 2095.

Once you’ve launched here, everything will change. Once every man, woman and child in America is hooked on Spotify (which they will be, because it’s the best music service in the world, right Daniel?) then you can start to show your true colours. Slowly extend the trial period – first to a week, then a month, then get a bit lax with paying your licencing fees; maybe a contract renegotiation or two to tip the financial balance further in your favour. By that point the labels will need you, Daniel, and you can do whatever the hell you like. Oh, yes, Daniel, they’ll see. THEY’LL ALL SEE.

Alternatively keep playing the same old broken record, telling the world that you’re launching your fremium service in the US before the end of 2010. And in the meantime, I’ll keep enjoying your free magical musical ATM until the cash runs out.

Redbeacon, which won the TechCrunch50 launch conference in 2009, has raised a $7.4 million round of financing. The round was led by Mayfield Fund and Venrock.

Raj Kapoor, Managing Director at Mayfield, and Brian Ascher, General Partner at Venrock, will join the company’s board of directors.

This is Redbeacon’s first outside round of financing. The company has funded development and operations to date with just $200,000 – $150,000 from the founders and $50,000 for winning TechCrunch50.

The company lets users search, browse and book local service providers – from plumbers to lawyers – on its website. Service providers pay a fee to Redbeacon for new paying customers, or in some categories, like lawyers, for a lead.

Soon the company will launch a widget that allows third party websites to embed core Redbeacon features into their sites, and Redbeacon will pay a share of revenue generated from those customers. See redbeacon.com/p/affiliate for more information.

They are live in the Bay Area and will soon expand to new markets, says CEO Ethan Anderson.

I sat down with Anderson and incoming board member and investor Kapoor in our studio in San Francisco to talk about the company’s progress and the new funding round. Anderson wanted to wait to raise any outside money until they’d fine tuned the model in at least one market and could show good conversion from website visitors to bookings. The video is below.

The angels are lining up to give Y Combinator startup Embed.ly some cash. Betaworks, Ron Conway, and Chris Sacca are investing $250,000 in the company, which specializes in turning links into embed codes.

There are hundreds of Websites and APIs out there which let people embed media and data all across the Web. Connecting those embed codes with their underlying links is a Herculean task, one which Embed.ly is doggedly pursuing. Embed.ly launched in March with a way to search for embed codes, but quickly pivoted to helping sites manage multiple sources of embed codes through one API. So when Web users share links to embedded media on Reddit, Yammer, German social network StudiVZ, Embed.ly automatically converts those links into inline videos, photos, charts, documents, or other data.

Embed.ly currently supports 112 different embed-code publishers, including YouTube, Ustream, Flickr, Picassa, Scribd, PollDaddy, and even CrunchBase. Eventually, Embed.ly will offer publishers analytics on how and where their content is being embedded.

With so many links being shared these days, turning those links into the underlying videos, photos, and other data will help people consume that media without having to click away.

Women 2.0 Labs, a 5-week crash course in entrepreneurship, is somewhat of a misnomer.

Although it is indeed a lab where professionals work in teams of four to develop a startup (or at least the prototype of a startup), it is far from a women’s only club. Of the 20 participants, 65% are female and 35% are male— an eclectic collection of engineers, designers, marketing professionals, and recent graduates.

The goal of Women 2.0 is to promote a new reality, where women voices are not isolated or merely highlighted but seamlessly integrated into the fabric of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.

“Real innovation comes from diversity – diversity of experience, of context, of vision. Gender diversity and even ethnic diversity opens up a creative environment for innovation and different ways of thinking to emerge,” says co-founder of Women 2.0, Shaherose Charania.  “We want[ed] to create realistic scenarios – if a women goes out in the world today to meet her future founder, she’ll likely work with a man and that’s reality since less than 5% of women are founders of tech companies. We aren’t afraid of it, we embrace it.”

Although the ultimate mission of Women 2.0 is gender-focused, gender identity took a backseat during the 5-week program, which culminates in a demo event tonight at True Ventures’ San Francisco headquarters. Over the course of the program, participants formed teams, turned ideas into potentially viable startups, worked with industry advisors and extensively tested their product by conducting hundreds of surveys, consumer reviews.

While the participants were chosen based on their diverse backgrounds, they are virtually all full-time professionals who are moonlighting as entrepreneurs-to-be. The few who are not in that bucket are generally professionals in transition or recent graduates— like Priya Sheth, co-founder of team GeoSquish, who until recently was an aerospace engineer and is now pursuing a career in user interface design. To accommodate people’s full-time schedules, the teams met on weekends and week days at True Ventures offices from 6 to 9 pm and organized mini-demos on Thursday nights for visting advisors (like Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Dave McClure and Ann Muira-Koo).

“What really is important is what happens after the program, do the teams stick together, has the idea changed, has the idea pivoted in any way, most likely yes,” Charania says. “Of course not all of them, 5 week is a crash course, and that’s why we call it a pre-incubator, it’s not a full-fledged incubator we’re not taking equity…A lot of the people that came to the group they have a job, and they just have no one to ideate with, they have no one to actually build something with…It’s that community that’s the most important thing.”

On Wednesday night, we got a chance to talk to Charania and the founders at their ad-hoc workspace. For more on the program and a sneak peak at the startups, click on the video above.

Editor’s note: The following report comes from Don Dodge, who blogs at Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing and is a Developer Advocate for Google. TechStars is a seed accelerator program that selects about ten companies a year and provides funding of $18,000 per team, as well as support and mentorship. Dodge covered the last Boulder TechStars class in August, 2009 when six companies (including SendGrid and Next Big Sound) went on to secure venture investment of more than $10 million in total.

TechStars has now been operating for four years. According to results data that TechStars has published, six of the first twenty companies to go through the program have been acquired by larger companies, and about 70% of its companies have been funded and/or are now profitable. This week, TechStars is debuting 11 new startups from the fourth Boulder class. The teams are presenting on Thursday to about 250 VCs and angel investors for the first time. These companies are about three months old and have two or three founder employees. Below are Don’s notes on the startups that presented.

ADstruc is an auction and listing marketplace for outdoor billboard advertising. The company says that outdoor advertising purchases are currently managed offline. They provide an online inventory management service for sellers, as well as a marketplace for transactions. Today, it’s difficult for would-be buyers to identify and purchase outdoor advertising. ADstruc aims to bring the same level of access and transparency to the outdoor advertising market as Google does with Adwords for keyword search.

StatsMix allows companies to easily build, visualize, and share custom management dashboards for displaying and analyzing key metrics from their own Websites and external APIs. StatsMix already supports and integrates with metrics from about 30 popular web services, including Google Analytics, Quantcast, MailChimp, Freshbooks, Twitter, Facebook, Get Satisfaction, WordPress, and YouTube, and is adding more regularly. They also provide a REST based API and other simple mechanisms to integrate with internal metrics. The company showed off a unique “insight engine” which automatically draws correlations between various metrics, helping users to quickly identify what may be driving trends or anomalies.

GearBox is a smart toy company that has created a robotic ball which is controlled via a smartphone. Applications can be built on the smartphone via a simple API which requires minimal coding. Early applications include “Sumo,” where two people attempt to knock each other off of a table, “Golf,” where you swipe the phone to shoot the ball at the hole, and “Kittens,” in which users can earn points by playing with their cat and causing certain interactions. Here’s a video of the ball that has already attracted 63,000+ views. The company has other smart toys already in development that will use a similar API.

Vacation Rental Partner makes it easy to manage your vacation rental home. Targeted at individuals who have vacation rental homes that they manage who don’t want to pay 30-50% of their income to management companies, Vacation Rental Partner handles the entire process including managing booking requests, contracting, billing, as well as handling outside vendors such as housekeepers and pool cleaners. The system allows homeowners to manage their vacation rental calendar in one place, but allows for automatic distribution to popular advertising outlets such as VRBO, Craiglist, and many others.

Omniar wants to make the real world clickable. They demonstrated impressive visual search technology that enables others to easily build applications using their toolkit. They are working with early adopters in the real estate, museum, and retail sectors, enabling them to allow one-click visual search and information retrieval. For example, Omniar is working with real estate companies to allow users to simply snap a photo of a home which then returns information about it. For museums, they demonstrated snapping a photo of a specific piece of art and then quickly retrieving details about it such as the artist and the story behind it. The interesting thing here is that Omniar allows anyone to enable their own applications with visual search capabilities, using their own corpus of data. Those customers can use Omniar’s technology to “scan” in the 3D models using the mobile phone as well, by simply recording a video from multiple angles. Omniar says that it is different from other visual search technologies by their unique ability to recognize fully 3D objects from any angle.

Spot Influence finds top influencers for specific topics across the entire web including Twitter, blogs, and other types of content. The company provides a search engine and has made their technology available using APIs for partners who want to integrate it more fully. Rather than using a generic “influence score” and focusing just on Twitter, Spot Influence searches the entire web and returns results based on influence for specific topics.

BlipSnips is a way to create social context around specific moments in time in a video. Long-form videos are hard to “sample” or quickly “scan” and as a result don’t attract the quick social web interactions that shorter clips do. BlipSnips allows users to easily share specific moments in a video across their social graph and increases engagement with those videos. BlipSnips has a set of free consumer tools, but also works with video publishers to drive engagement for commercial video.

Kapost creates a marketplace for web content. It enables publishers to use the same crowd-sourced virtual newsroom approach popularized by The Huffington Post and others. Kapost works with existing content management systems such as WordPress and Drupal via plugins, and enables publishers to collect and manage content from a network of community members or external contributors. Kapost provides both the tools to manage the process as well as a marketplace for publishers and contributors and tracks reputation, manages rights, and handles payment transactions between parties.

RentMonitor takes the headache out of being a landlord. Targeted at landlords who are managing 3 to 50 properties, the system handles rent collection, advertising, tenant screening, maintenance, and tax issues for landlords. If you have ever rented a property either as a landlord or as a tenant you will understand the need for automating the process. As a tenant, wouldn’t it be great to just fill out one set of documents, background checks, credit checks, and use it to apply to multiple landlords? The system is very affordable, ranging from just $5-$50 per month depending on the number of units being managed.

ScriptPad transforms the iPad and iPhone into a digital prescription pad allowing doctors to write prescriptions faster and safer than their existing paper process. ScriptPad eliminates deadly prescription writing mistakes that contribute to over 7,000 deaths each year and sends the prescription directly to the patient’s pharmacy. The company integrates with all major pharmacies through existing partnerships. ScriptPad described a “magic” business model, in which even their free users generate revenue for the company because they are paid for each prescription that is transmitted. ScriptPad also offers a premium version that qualifies doctors for government incentives.  Here’s a fun Apple-style video showing how their e-prescribing application works.

RoundPegg scientifically ensures that every hire you make is a fit for your company culture. According to RoundPegg, half of all hires fail due to poor fit with the company employees and culture. Most companies do a great job of hiring for skills, but they are flipping a coin when it comes to cultural fit.  Through simple self-service surveys, RoundPegg blends technology with psychology. It allows hiring managers to make sure candidates have a strong fit, provides interview questions to ask, answers to look for, and pros and cons that are specific to the match between the candidate and the company, the team, and the hiring manager.

Further to our post yesterday on the sale of Slide to Google, we’ve spoken to a source with knowledge of the terms to understand what everybody made from the deal.

As we speculated yesterday, founder Max Levchin did the best out of the sale, making a comparable sum to the one he made from PayPal – proving once again the value of investing in your own idea.  Also, while the sale price represented a big come-down in valuation, it’s important to note that no one lost money on the deal.

Here’s how it breaks down…

Levchin, who invested $7m of his own money in the series A round, made $25m from his preferred shares in Slide plus $14m from common stock for a total of $39m. Scott Banister who also took part in the series A made $5m from the sale.

BlueRun Ventures, who invested $8m in the series B round made $28m.

The Founders Fund and Mayfield Fund, both investors in the series C, each made their money back.

Fidelity Investments, part of the series D: also made their money back.

In addition, Keith Rabois, Slide’s VP of Strategy & Business Development made $1.5m from the deal. Our sources also tell us that, along with the $182m purchase price, Google has agreed to pay an additional $46m in employee retention bonuses, making the total deal size $228m.

Oh those jokesters at Twitter.

Late last night, blogger Louis Gray stumbled upon what appeared to be an upcoming Twitter feature called “Shoutout.” The evidence was a protected Twitter account with a cute birdie icon and the following bio “Contribute your shoutouts to peeps.” It also happens to have only followers that are Twitter employees. So is it the next big thing from Twitter?

No, says director of communications Sean Garrett. In an email that he clearly had some fun sending to a bunch of people in the media this morning (even though we didn’t reach out to them about it in the first place), Garrett digs into the vernacular of using “shout out” versus “give props to.” He also talks about how the feature might be revealed during Dancing with the Stars or during halftime of a football game.

And he links to a YouTube video of nearly 30 year old Super Bowl halftime performance and even faked a DM fail this morning to keep the game going.

Nice job, Sean.

Of course after his paragraph of kidding around, he notes at the bottom of his email that: “However, what we can say is that it’s not a product. It’s an internal account where Twitter employees “give props” to each other.“

So basically, Twitter Shoutout is their internal Warm Fuzzy Jar. Meanwhile, another protected Twitter account found last night, Twitter On Notice, is likely their internal Cold Prickly Jar.

Cute.

Below find Garrett full email:

There have been reports of a Twitter Shout Out™ product being launched on the market soon. We can neither confirm or deny a product at this time. Not even if you ask us really nicely*. However, what we can say is that we are always optimizing for user value and relevance. For example, just the other day Ev was saying that we should totally find ways to “give props” to users adding value on the system in a way that is organic to how people are already using Twitter.  Someone told Ev that “give props” wasn’t something that people said anymore. Biz — or was it Jason? — then said that “shout out” was now a more common vernacular for a “kind mention of a homie” (Urban Dictionary).  Anywho, where were we?  Oh yeah, Twitter Shout Out™ and that freakin’ leak. Or was it a leak? Or was it after-midnight sleuthing? You tell me. Or, maybe the this is all some sort of some special tease to later to be revealed during Dancing with the Stars or, better yet, at halftime of an exhibition football game.  Speaking of which, whatever happened with the folks in Up With People?  Do you think they are really are still that happy?

*However, what we can say is that it’s not a product. It’s an internal account where Twitter employees “give props” to each other.

[image via]

In May at TechCrunch Disrupt, we got our first look at Tunerfish, a Comcast-owned service that asks users the question, “What are you watching?”. Today, the app is headed to the iPhone — you can download the free application here.

The gist of the application is simple: instead of aimless channel surfing, which often yields lackluster results, Tunerfish lets you see what your friends are watching (think Foursquare for video). Launch the Tunerfish app, and you’ll see a list of the shows your Tunerfish friends have checked into (you can choose to check into content that spans television, movies, and online video) as well as trending shows. Once you’ve found something you like, you can check-in to notify the rest of your Tunerfish-using friends what you’ve come across. Updates can be syndicated to Facebook as well.

It’s a little basic, and I suspect that most people won’t have many friends who use the service yet, but it also has potential down the road. Tunerfish was built by the Plaxo team that Comcast acquired in 2008. John McCrea, who leads the team, says that at this point when you use Tunerfish and come across a show you’d like to watch, you’ll still have to surf to the proper channel yourself (in other words, there isn’t any integration with Comcast’s cable box or your TV).

However, he says that such automated channel changing will eventually be possible through “integrations with channel-changing apps and IP-enabled TVs and set-tops”. In the meantime, though, he says “the most important battleground for TV check-in apps will be smartphones and tablets”. McCrea also says that the team is talking to Comcast’s online video streaming service Fancast about ways to integrate the two services (picture seeing what your friend is watching and tapping their status update to start viewing that show immediately).

McCrea also says that an Android app is on the way.

Most green technologies gather energy above ground, but like Jules Verne, we want to take you on A Journey to the Center of the Earth. Alright, not even close to the center, but deep down nonetheless, where naturally occurring hot water can be turned into clean energy above ground.

It is estimated that the amount of heat within 30,000 feet below the earth’s surface holds potentially 50,000 times more energy than all global oil and natural gas resources combined. According to the Geothermal Energy Association, up to 6,400 megawatts of new capacity could be created from the geothermal projects under development in the U.S. But getting to that energy is proving to be a challenge.

Geothermal energy comes in a variety of forms, from residential fixtures to power a single home, to commercial plants that can power a city. Energy is usually harnessed from hot underground water or steam that naturally rises to the surface. Power plants drill holes into the rock to gain more direct access and use the hot water and steam to drive electric generators. After its use, the water can be pumped back underground to heat up anew. Power plants use different energy harnessing designs based on the type and temperature of the geothermal resource available.

Geothermal deals are heating up as it begins to prove itself as a viable energy source. For instance, Ormat Technologies recently bought Constellation Energy’s 50% share of the Mammoth Geothermal Plant in California for $72.5 million. The deal gives Ormat three power plants capable of generating 29 megawatts of power and rights to more than 10,000 acres of undeveloped federal lands.

Ormat’s home state of Nevada is a geothermal powerhouse. According to the Geothermal Energy Association, the state produces more geothermal energy than all but eight nations. Its geothermal capacity jumped from 200 to 400 megawatts during the last five years, and as many as 3,000 more megawatts are expected to be generated from developing projects. A typical coal-fired power plant can generate about 500 megawatts, though some are much larger. Nuclear power plants typically range from a 500 to 2000 megawatt capacity.

Unlike wind and solar, whose energy outputs fluctuate based on weather conditions, geothermal provides consistent base load electricity, which is the minimum amount a power utility’s customers need. It is also considered clean because it produces no greenhouse gas pollution, and renewable because the water can be reused. Last year, Obama gave $350 million in Recovery Act funding for geothermal projects.

Most geothermal plants have been located near the edges of tectonic plates, where there is a lot of geothermal activity, but companies like AltaRock Energy, which has received funding from Google, among others, are developing ways to generate steam in other geographic areas. The technology, known as Enhanced Geothermal Systems, drills into hot rocks miles below the surface and pumps cold water down to them to generate steam. The technology has been in development for a while, though there have been concerns that EGS might trigger seismic activity that could lead to earthquakes.

It’s been a very rocky road, to say the least. Last year, AltaRock abandoned its trials near a plant called The Geysers in northern California when instabilities in the rock caused the borehole to collapse. The company moved its tests to Oregon where it is working on a three-year EGS demo near Newberry National Volcanic National Monument. AltaRock’s competitor, Ram Power Corporation, purchased The Geysers in June. If the AltaRock’s Oregon demo is successful, a power generator will be placed next to the wells to test how much energy can be harnessed from them.

Photo credit: Flickr/Johann kr.