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Tom Siebel’s $100M big data energy startup C3 finally emerges as a player

February 7, 2013 by Steven R. Gerbsman

Article from GigaOM.

For years little has been known about what stealthy energy data startup C3, founded by Siebel Systems bazillionaire Tom Siebel, has actually been up to. The company has been like a Will Smith summer blockbuster that’s supposed to come out three years from now and will only hint at its plot through artsy abstract trailers. Well, turns out, school is finally out for the summer for C3 — the company has just completed some major milestones for its newly emerged big data energy product, according to Siebel during a talk at the Cleantech Investor Summit on Wednesday.

Siebel, now CEO of the four-year-old startup, said that in September 2012, C3 launched a data grid analytics project for PG&E, which crunched a whole lot of data about commercial and industrial buildings (the kind owned and leased in California by the likes of Cisco, Kaiser Permanente, Safeway and Best Buy). C3′s platform collected disparate data about a half a million buildings, from places like publicly-available data found via Google, to energy consumption data from utilities, to weather data from weather information companies.

The entire project required 28 billion rows of data (at least 8 terabytes) that C3 aggregated, normalized and loaded at 5 million records an hour said Siebel, adding, “this is really hard stuff.” PG&E used this data analytics tool to work with building owners to perform energy efficiency audits in real time for all of the commercial and industrial buildings in its footprint. It was a major success, said Siebel, and in the first few weeks of January of this year PG&E exceeded their energy auditing goal for the entire year.

C3 was also quietly involved in a more high profile big data energy project with GE, which I profiled last week when it launched at Distributech, although at the time I didn’t know C3 was involved. Siebel described the project with GE as “a joint development deal” at grid-scale, trying to solve “petabyte type of problems.” As I reported last week, GE’s Grid IQ Insight software can pull in disparate data from a variety of sources like grid sensors, utility databases and even social media sources on a per second interval basis, and utilities can use the software to peer into their grids, and combat blackouts, in real time.

Siebel says C3 has three of these types of projects live with customers, that combine a big data layer, an analytics layer and a customer presentation layer. The company plans to launch another five projects in 2013 and another five in 2014. Other customers include Entergy, Northeast Utilities, Constellation Energy, NYSEG, Integrys Energy Group, Southern California Edison, ComEd, Rochester Gas & Electric, DTE Energy, as well as GE and McKinsey.

In addition to C3′s commercial and industrial platform it built for PG&E, the company also has developed a residential energy efficiency program, which launched last week, said Siebel. The service, which is in development with Detroit Edison and Entergy, is a loyalty program that gets customers to engage in energy efficiency behaviors in exchange for coupons and points at retailers like Amazon. I’m assuming that this platform has incorporated the technology from the startup Efficiency 2.0 that C3 acquired last Spring. Mailed marketing has long been considered the cutting edge in the utility sector, and “I don’t know if we even get mail at my house,” joked Siebel.

C3 has spent four years, and on the order of $100 million, building the software platform that it is now aggressively selling to utilities and energy vendors. At its core, the C3 platforms use Cassandra for database management system, and all of the applications store all of this data in the cloud, which is a relatively new phenomenon for many utilities to deal with. The company also has some big names as directors, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former Senator and Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham.

Grid analytics is a sector that is growing 24 percent a year, said Siebel, and C3 intends to be the software layer that sits on top of the grid. He compared the opportunity to “the Internet in 1993.” Siebel, who sold Siebel Systems to Oracle in 2006 for close to $6 billion, is one of the few entrepreneurs in cleantech that would know what that looks like.

Lastly, Siebel said his latest startup endeavor isn’t about saving the world from climate change or reducing carbon emissions, despite the company’s three C’s moniker, and despite the fact that that’s important. Ultimately, he says, “It’s about making money.”

Read more here.

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Cupcake Digital’s Infusion of Common Core Standards Positions the Company for Continued Growth and Leadership

February 4, 2013 by Steven R. Gerbsman

UnknownMaintaining continued growth and leadership in the evolving children’s application market requires maximizing the value of our products to serve parents and children.  In this paper, we discuss how infusing Common Core State Standards into our apps/games and conducting our business in a socially responsible manner contributes to building trust among our target purchasers and to our future success.

Objective:

To demonstrate how Cupcake Digital is maximizing its potential for leadership in the children’s app market by infusing its apps with educator-developed learning moments specifically aligned with Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

Background:

The Common Core State Standards will play a critical role in the education of America’s children going forward.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a state-led effort — developed in collaboration with teachers, school administrators and experts – to provide a consistent framework that will help ensure children are college and career-ready by the end of high school. The CCSS set the requirements for children K-12 in all academic subjects and provide teachers and parents with a common understanding of what students are expected to learn.
However, as the introduction of the Common Core State Standards is in its earliest stages, communication to parents about this new concept and what is means to their children’s education is not yet clear or sufficient.

Common Core: A Social Responsibility

Cupcake Digital is committed to being a thoughtful, socially responsible company that parents, caregivers and educators can trust. We believe that producing apps that not only entertain, but also help ready a child to meet nationally acknowledged academic requirements can only enhance our own potential for success.

The apps and games we produce are based on well-known, highly successful children’s entertainment media properties.  These delightful stories are adapted in the form of deluxe storybook experiences and interactive games.

The infusion of learning moments — aligned with Common Core State Standards – enables us to maximize the educational value of our apps and games.

Cupcake Digital has taken a leadership role in the curriculum-infused children’s app market by creating free, educator-developed worksheets and activities that supplement learning moments in the story.

While 47 states have committed to adopting the Common Core Curriculum by 2014, awareness of the initiative’s specifics and value is not yet widespread.

Cupcake Digital has identified a clear opportunity to help inform parents about the Common Core State Standards – in layman’s terms – in the Common Core Corner at the end of each app.  It is intended to help parents understand how the app is preparing their children to meet the CCSS challenges at school and what their children are learning through the app’s activities and the process of reading the app itself.

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Infusion of Common Core State Standards: Serious Business

“Digital media offers children unparalleled opportunities to learn, imagine, participate, practice, and create. But without a guidepost, we know parents, educators, and kids have difficulty finding engaging, enriching interactive experiences,” said Susan Crown, founder and chairman of SCE.

Cupcake Digital is one of the first companies in the children’s digital space to blend entertainment with Common Core State Standards learning moments, and we do so responsibly.

“The process of infusing our apps with CCSS was not one we approached lightly,” says Susan Miller, President and Co-founder of Cupcake Digital.  “To align our learning moments effectively with Common Core requirements, we looked to educational consultants  — experts in the Common Core State Standards – to work with us,” she continues.

An example of how CCSS-aligned learning moments are infused into Cupcake’s apps is attached. (link to examples provided at the end of this position paper) The example shown addresses the infusion of English language arts and mathematics activities in Wubbzy’s Dinosaur Adventure.

Cupcake is dedicated to the notion that there is room for fun in learning.  While our apps are infused with the CCSS, we make the learning process entertaining and thoroughly enjoyable!

Common Core: A Competitive Advantage

Cupcake Digital is one of the first companies in the children’s digital space to recognize the opportunity to serve parents and children better by maximizing the value of our products through the infusion of Common Core State Standards learning moments.  In so doing, we are also striving to help make CCSS easy to understand and easy to practice for parents and kids.

“As the children’s digital market floods with new products at exponential rates, parents will need guidance in choosing the highest quality products for their kids,” says Brad Powers, Chairman and CEO of Cupcake Digital.

“Our goal,” he adds, “is to be the number one choice among parents for apps that they can trust to entertain, inspire and help prepare young children for success in school and beyond.”

The Common Core State Standards are here to stay; and   national awareness of them will increase over the next two years. Cupcake Digital’s authority on the subject of CCSS and accountability for responsible infusion of the standards into our apps will continue to provide us a strong competitive edge.

Example:

Three games in Wubbzy’s Dinosaur Adventure are specifically designed to help prepare children to meet the requirements set forth for Kindergarten by the CCSS.  The games illustrate how Cupcake Digital blends entertainment and learning in games that are fun and fanciful, while also instructive.

Dino Alphabet Game

Children are asked to drag the dinosaur over the trees to eat all the letters. As the letters are eaten, the letter name is spoken by the narrator so that children can make the association.

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The Dino Alphabet Game supports the English Language Arts CCSS for the foundation of reading, which require children to recognize and name all upper- and lowercase letters of the alphabet.

Dino Numbers Game

Children are asked to help the dinosaur to eat all the numbers from one to 10.  The numbers are read aloud, so that children can learn to recognize them.

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The Dino Numbers Game supports math learning by motivating children to count a variety of quantities and numbers. CCSS requires children to be able to count to 100 by ones and by tens.

Dino Word Game

Children are asked to help the hungry dinosaur find some words to snack on. A word appears at the top of the screen and is read aloud.  Below the word is a list of three words.  The child must select the one that matches the word at the top of the screen.

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Dino Word Game supports the English Language Arts CCSS requirement for children by teaching them to recognize a list of basic sight words that make up the majority of text and are critical to reading.

About Cupcake Digital Inc.
Cupcake Digital, Inc. was established in June 2012 with the intent of transforming children’s entertainment properties into deluxe story experiences infused with educational moments. Its first venture into digital applications was based on the Emmy Award-winning television series “Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!” The app immediately rose to # 1 and # 3 among children’s book apps on Amazon and iTunes respectively. Since then, every subsequent children’s story app created by Cupcake Digital has achieved a top 10 rating on Amazon. Headquartered in NYC, Cupcake Digital was founded by proven professionals in the fields of technology, family entertainment, publishing and brand marketing. In October of 2012, Cupcake Digital received its first round of private funding and has since gone on to partner with additional major children’s entertainment properties. For more information about Cupcake Digital Inc., please contact Carmen Hernandez at pr@cupcakedigital.com or visit www.cupcakedigital.com.

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7 stories to read this weekend

February 2, 2013 by Steven R. Gerbsman

Article from GigaOm.

For some odd reason, I felt that it was slim pickings when it came to stories for this weekend. It just might have been my NyQuil. Here are some great stories for you to enjoy while you relax over the next two days.

  • More drugs, more sports, same old Alex Rodriguez: By now you may have heard about New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez being embroiled in another performance-enhancing drugs scandal. Well, what you might not have done is read the whole 4,500 word piece that started it all. Miami New Times‘ Tim Elfrink in this old-fashioned investigative piece shows you don’t need to have a big budget to write stories that change the game.
  • In conversation with John Cheever: The Paris Review goes back in time and brings to us this conversation with one of America’s beloved writers.
  • Living the American Dream in West Bank: Vice‘s Kiera Feldman goes to hang out with Israel’s illegal homesteaders.
  • Home alone, no really: A Siberian family was cut off from the world for 40 years and lived blissfully unaware of World War II. Great piece.
  • The Art Collector: Steven Cohen, the man behind the hedge fund SAC Capital that is consistently in trouble with prosecutors over issues of insider trading, seems to spend hundreds of millions buying up rare and expensive art. I guess one has to do something with all that money. This is a great profile in n+1 magazine.
  • The parking meters and the coming revolution: Just a great little piece.
  • The spy novelist who knows too much: The New York Times reports on Gérard de Villiers, an 83-year-old Frenchman who writes pulp fiction books — four to five a year — and they are, well, literally ripped from the headlines. Someone please help me get the English translations.

Read more here.

 

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It’s still on: Silver Spring Networks could finally go public within a month

January 30, 2013 by Steven R. Gerbsman

Article from GigaOm.

In contrast to the findings of a research note on Tuesday that says Silver Spring Networks could soon shelve its IPO, I’ve been hearing that Silver Spring is actually getting ready to finally go public within the next four weeks, a year and a half after filing its S-1. A delay that long between filing and finally trading is not ideal, but it’s not unheard of for companies to wait through difficult market conditions, particularly as they negotiate pricing.

Beyond discussions I’ve had with sources, in Silver Spring’s latest S-1 Amendment the company notes that longtime investor Foundation Capital now says it plans to purchase $12 million worth of stock at the IPO price, following the IPO, in a private placement. If Silver Spring was planning to shelve its IPO it probably wouldn’t be negotiating this detail with its investor, and also wouldn’t continue to update its S-1 every quarter (it would just withdraw it).

Solar installer SolarCity’s investors used a similar tactic when the company went public last year to try to create interest from Wall Street. SolarCity investors Elon Musk, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and DBL Investors, agreed to buy up about a third of the Solar City float the day before trading, and that helped it get out and pop on its first day. Bankers could take it as a good sign that Foundation Capital is looking to buy up even more shares of Silver Spring.

Silver Spring has continued to grow over the years, despite the fact that selling smart grid networks to utilities is a pretty difficult low margin business. If you only look at Silver Spring’s GAAP revenue and net income it doesn’t look all that amazing, which is what this analyst did. The company hasn’t ever had a positive net income, and it recorded revenue of $147 million for the nine months ended Sept 30, 2012, which was down from $176 million from the same period in 2011.

But if you look at the deals that Silver Spring closed in 2012, and the amount it billed its utility customers for, it actually had a decent year last year. The company recorded billings of $219 million for the nine months ended Sept 30, 2012, up from $183 million for the same period of 2011. Billings are how much Silver Spring invoiced its customers, and they are considered deferred revenue until they can be officially counted as revenue. It had its highest gross margin yet on those billings of 34 percent. The company has a total of $473 million in deferred revenue as of the nine months ended September 30, 2012, and about $60 million in cash for the same period.

That’s the problem with selling gear to utilities. The deals and the sales cycles take a really long time to negotiate from a trial to a commercial deal, and then a long time to see through to the end. We’ll see how comfortable Wall Street is with looking at both its GAAP and non-GAAP financials when it comes to interest in the IPO.

Silver Spring Networks has networked 13 million smart grid devices, and has contracts to network more than 22 million total. The company has a total backlog of $745 million in product and service billings.

Now, we’ll see if over the next four weeks, Silver Spring is able to negotiate and get enough interest to price its shares at the valuation it wants. But from what I’m hearing it’s starting to aggressively try to do just that.

Read more here.

 

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‘Conscious Capitalism’: A business primer for doing well — and doing good, too By Lanny J. Davis – 01/28/13

January 29, 2013 by Steven R. Gerbsman

‘Conscious Capitalism’: A business primer for doing well — and doing good, too
By Lanny J. Davis –  Read more: http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/lanny-davis/279707-conscious-capitalism-a-business-primer-for-doing-well-and-doing-good-too#ixzz2JPVnIcib

Once in a while, a book about business theory and philosophy transcends the usual audience that reads “how to” business books — with lessons to be learned by everyone, business people and consumers alike. Such a book is Conscious Capitalism, recently published by the Harvard Business Review Press.

The two co-authors are John Mackey, co-CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods Market, a Nasdaq-listed public company based in Austin, Texas, which has become one of the most successful and premier supermarket chains and brands in the world; and Dr. Rajendra (Raj) Sisodia, professor of marketing at Bentley University, who in 2006 wrote, along with two other management specialists, Firms of Endearment, identifying 35 such firms, including Whole Foods, that have been successful as businesses and followed progressive, socially responsible policies.

Conscious Capitalism describes four specific tenets to teach companies how to implement policies and practices of this approach to business leadership and success.

The visual graphic in an early chapter of the book depicts both the interrelatedness and interdependence of these four tenets, as well as their prioritization. The three white, smaller triangles around the outer three sides of the large triangle describe three of the tenets: “stakeholder integration” (on top) and “conscious leadership” and “conscious culture and management” as the bottom two.

In the center — obviously, the most important, because of its central location and because it is highlighted in shaded gray — is a triangle with the first tenet of the book: “higher purpose and core values.” As Mackey once stated in a 2005 debate with conservative economist Milton Friedman, who argued that a company’s purpose must be almost entirely to make a profit, not to do good deeds:

“Making profits is the means to the end of fulfilling Whole Foods’s core business mission. We want to improve the health and well-being of everyone on the planet through high-quality foods and better nutrition, and we can’t fulfill this mission unless we are highly profitable. Just as people cannot live without eating, so a business cannot live without profits. But most people don’t live to eat, and neither must businesses live just to make profits.”

Whole Foods’s remarkable record is a case in point. In late 2008 and early 2009, at the time when the Federal Trade Commission appeared to have successfully blocked Whole Foods’s already completed acquisition of Wild Oats Department Stores, the company’s share price on the Nasdaq exchange plunged from $40 per share to $10. Whole Foods fought back against the FTC’s legal action, and the result was a compromise settlement that allowed the company to move on. On Friday, Jan. 25, the stock closed at $95.65/share — an increase of more than 900 percent in just four years.

Aside from shareholders, Whole Foods and its management team are proud of the way they have treated all others whom they regard as stakeholders — suppliers, employees, citizens of communities where stores are located and philanthropic causes — consistent with the fourth tenet of conscious capitalism, “higher purpose and core values.” For example, Whole Foods gives a minimum of 5 percent and closer to 10 percent of its profits to nonprofit organizations each year; allows all employees — called “team members” — to participate and vote on important working condition and company policy issues; puts a ceiling on the maximum ratio between the highest-paid executive and lowest-paid team member; and provides all full-time team members with virtually all their premium costs for health insurance, and part-time workers some healthcare benefits as well.

As readers of this column know, while I am a liberal Democrat (clearly on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from Mackey on some issues), I also search for “purple” areas where there are common values and subjects about which constructive, solutions-oriented conversation can occur between left and right. And I find many such places articulated in this book.

The fact is, Conscious Capitalism is an important book for exactly that reason. I believe it should be a must-read, with a message especially appropriate for these times of dysfunctional political polarization, with “red-state” Republicans over-simplistically depicted as conservative and pro-business and “blue-state” Democrats as liberal and anti-business.

This book teaches that there is nothing inconsistent between doing well and doing good. Indeed, both not only can co-exist, but each is dependent on the other. That is a crucial lesson with meaning both in the business community as well as the larger divisive political, cultural and social arena in which the country finds itself after the 2012 elections.

Davis, a Washington attorney and principal in the firm of Lanny J. Davis & Associates, specializing in legal crisis management and dispute resolution, served as President Clinton’s special counsel from 1996-98 and as a member of President Bush’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. He represented Whole Foods during its legal challenges with the Federal Trade Commission in 2008-09 and on various matters since then, but does not do so at this time.

 

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