Friday, July 18, 2008

Cache & Packets

Solar and location technology extends its reach

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

With the Fourth of July holiday and the mad dash by many locals to vacation spots far and wide, some nuggets of news tend to get lost in the shuffle of early summer. But as an ongoing service that never sleeps, Cache & Packets is here to give you a packetized update for the first few weeks of the season.

You may not have noticed, but...

• Solar panel distributor and installer groSolar Inc. of  White River Junction, Vt., is expanding down the East Coast. The company has certainly benefitted from recent solar-related incentive programs in New England, such as  Massachusetts’ $68 million Commonwealth Solar Initiative launched last November, but it is not resting on its laurels on a local basis. Last week, the company expanded outside of New England with the acquisition of solar system installer Chesapeake Solar Inc. of Maryland, for an undisclosed amount.

The addition of Chesapeake Solar, founded in 1999, makes groSolar one of the larger solar distributors on the East Coast, according to executives, and gives the firm a greater reach into both residential and commercial solar markets.
In December, groSolar raised $10 million in its second round of venture capital, led by NGP Energy Technology Partners.

• Boston’s Skyhook Wireless Inc. is also expanding its geographic footprint. Having already mapped the wi-fi hotspots of North America for its mobile positioning and location-based service system, it has now launched in Europe.

According to executives, the company’s “mappers,” who drive through urban areas to find and report hotspots that can be used in the company’s positioning network, have already logged more than 750,000 kilometers on European roads, mapping a network that is accessible to more than 130 million people.

Skyhook takes mapping data from a given area and applies it to mobile services, such as “buddy finders.” In the U.S., Skyhook’s data is being used in mobile applications from a number of companies, including AOL LLC and Apple Inc. In Europe, the company has signed on a number of developers, including BuddyPing, a friend finder type of service from NinetyTen Ltd. in London, and Locle, a social mapping application from Leprecian Ltd. in Ireland.

• Kiva Systems Inc., a Woburn-based robotic inventory system developer we profiled back in 2006 , has had a very successful spring. In early June, the company shared first prize in the The International Federation of Robotics’s Invention & Entrepreneurship award with automaker Daimler AG. (This is the same award won by Burlington-based iRobot Corp. for the Roomba in 2005). Later in the month, CEO Mick Mountz received the Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year award in the Emerging Business category for the New England region.

While winning the awards, the company also has been closing business. Last week, the company announced that after four months of work, online shoe retailer Zappos.com had completed outfitting its Shepherdsville, Ky., facility with the Kiva system. The system is being employed not only to help Zappos fulfill shoe orders, but also to help the firm expand into new categories, such as apparel, sportswear and accessories.

• The International Fund for Animal Welfare cares for more than just animals. The nonprofit organization, which is based on Cape Cod in Yarmouth Port, recently installed an environmentally friendly 1,100-square-foot data center using all LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified equipment and materials, designed by Marlborough-based Electronic Environments Corp.  The facility is up and running and includes everything from energy-efficient lighting and refrigerants to LEED-certified adhesives for the raised access floor pedestals.

The center is not the first LEED-certified data center, but it is among just a few. With power becoming a more pressing issue for data centers across the country, it may be a harbinger of things to come.