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With its newest facility, Vantage Data Centers wants to prove that a low-power data center in Silicon Valley is not an oxymoron. Vantage's new Santa Clara, Calif. V2 data center claims an impressive 1.12 PUE (power use efficiency) energy rating.

Meter giant Itron has made a rare smart grid acquisition. On Wednesday afternoon Itron announced that it plans to acquire smart grid cellular networking company SmartSynch in a deal worth around $100 million.

European Union's decision to approve the Microsoft & Skype merger without any objection isn't sitting well with Cisco, the unified communications giant who is worried that Microsoft will use Skype to dominate the video calling industry. Sour grapes for a company caught in it own business-model.

Tesla (s TSLA) reported fourth quarter and full year earnings on Wednesday and in its shareholder's letter revealed that it has started a development program with Daimler to build a new electric Mercedes-Benz vehicle with a Tesla powertrain.

Tesla (s TSLA) reported fourth quarter and full year earnings on Wednesday and in its shareholder's letter revealed that it has started a development program with Daimler to build a new electric Mercedes-Benz vehicle with a Tesla powertrain.

Facebook released some metrics around early partners for its app platform, showing how the apps affect their traffic. The results? Partners like Pinterest, Fab.com, Artfinder, Foodspotting and Foodily are seeing large increases in the number of users connecting to their sites.

Solar Frontier, the largest manufacturer of copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) solar panels, announced Wednesday that it’s shipped 13.2MW to NRG Solar (s NRG), which is evolving from being a buyer of solar power projects to a developer.

Bleacher Report appears determined to prove that love of minutia-based sports fare has no bounds. Today, the upstart sports site announced the launch of new YouTube channels, though its business strategy behind these video offerings isn't clear.

Startup Camp Berlin 2012 (March 16–17) has managed to bring together Fabian Heilemann (DailyDeal), Andreas Kottmann (DriveNow), Ron A. Hillmann (Yachtico.com), Christoph Kappes (Fructus), Edial Dekker (gidsy.com), Ijad Madisch (Research Gate), Itamar Weiss (UPcload) and Prof. Tobias Kollmann (University Duisburg-Essen). See who else is one board.

Electric car company Coda Automotive is raising more funds as it moves closer to shipping its first electric sedans. According to a filing, the company is looking to raise another $150 million, and has closed $21.5 million of that round.

An LED startup led by the great grandson of the founder of Philips electronics has broken the $5 price floor for LED bulbs. Netherlands-based lighting company Lemnis Lighting is now selling a line of LED bulbs for $4.95 called the 200-lumen Pharox BLU via its website.

Game giant Zynga is weaning itself off of Amazon's infrastructure as it moves the bulk of its workloads onto its internal Z Cloud infrastructure. Zynga's CTO said the company has optimized Z Cloud for its games so it is more efficient than the public cloud provider.

As we reported last week, although Google has yet to confirm the rumors, the company is said by many sources to be on the verge of introducing a cloud storage service. The service would compete with Dropbox, which many users love, and our readers weighed in with other cloud storage services that they are fond of, including Tonido and Pogoplug. In the meantime, there are a lot of reports appearing that say that there is no need for another free cloud storage service and that Google should be looking elsewhere for ways to make a difference. What's missing from these analyses, though, is that Google's own cloud storage service would not just complement Chrome OS and Android, but would fill huge gaps in for these platforms. InfoWorld claims that a cloud storage service (reportedly dubbed Gdrive) from Google won't set the cloud on fire: "Gdrive enters an established market as a me-too offering, competing against respected providers with cheap and even free versions...The cloud storage...

Last year, stepping up what is already fierce competition in the race to provide cloud computing platform infrastructure, Citrix Systems announced that it had completed the acquisition of Cloud.com. Cloud.com had many notable customers who favored its cloud stack infrastructure, which is centered on OpenStack, including GoDaddy and Zynga. Now Citrix is accelerating its focus on the cloud, and likely competing directly with Amazon and VMware, with its announcement of CloudStack 3, the first release of the open source cloud platform under the Citrix brand. As Citrix notes: "CloudStack is already the world’s most successful platform for public clouds, powering over $1B in revenue for more than 85 large scale production clouds, including some of the biggest brands in the industry. With the new CloudStack 3 release, Citrix brings the power of true Amazon-style clouds to customers of all sizes. For the first time, enterprise customers who want to build clouds the way the world’s most...

Engagio, which launched on Wednesday backed by seed funding from Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and other angel investors, pulls in comments and replies from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Tumblr and a number of other social services and sites to create a one-stop social dashboard.

Mobile backend as a service StackMob is announcing a hosted HTML5 solution that will make it easier for developers to build HTML5 and hybrid apps that use HTML5. The move allows the company to become a more full fledged platform as a service.

FreedomPop plans to give away mobile data access to most of its customers for free, charging only premium users a monthly fee. If can it can make the math work, it could potentially shake up the wireless market, extending mobile data to broad swathes of the population.

Using sophisticated algorithms and big data tools, the energy savings for buildings -- consumed by lighting and heating and cooling -- can be rapidly evaluated at low cost for buildings.

When it comes to the future of music, we all like to talk about Spotify, file sharing and the decline of the CD. But those flashy stories may distract us from a much bigger trend - a trend that is powered by CMS systems and CRMs.

Benchmark results of a quad-core Android smartphone appeared on the web and the handset tests twice as fast as recent smartphones, such as the Galaxy Nexus. But there's an important aspect to remember here: software is still catching up to hardware, so set your expectations accordingly.

SpiderOak says its new Nimbus.io cloud storage service, will offer consumers and businesses a cheaper way to keep their data archives. Yes, cheaper than Amazon S3. The service, to go live later this quarter, will be available as a commercial product and open-source project.

Chirpify, a Portland OR start-up, is unveiling its Twitter commerce platform today, an all-in-one tool that taps PayPal and allows users to monetize their tweets. The company said it's the first one to turn Twitter into a direct sales channel.

In a move that echoes Amazon's purchase of Zappos back in 2009, Russian web store Ozon is buying online shoe seller Sapato.ru -- a deal that Ozon CEO Maelle Gavet says will turn it into a "powerhouse online retailer".

This is Jonathan Koomey's third essay in a series of four this week that highlights, and excerpts from, his upcoming book, "Cold Cash, Cool Climate," which discusses how entrepreneurs and investors can profit from tackling climate change, one of this century’s greatest challenges.

Today The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 3.5, dubbed "the best free office suite ever." The announcement contained nuggets of goodies that might please even the most casual of user. One of these is an online update checker. This checks for updated version of LibreOffice and informs users when a new version is available. Next step, an actual updater. Developers and planners see an automatic updater as the brass ring. It's high on their wish lists, but most blamed the old code base and say it will come someday. Interestingly, Caolán McNamara, founder and developer, said We inherited a 15 years old code base, where features were not implemented and bugs were not solved in order to avoid creating problems, and this - with time - was the origin of a large technical debt. We had two options: a conservative strategy, which would immediately please all users, leaving the code basically unchanged, and our more aggressive feature development and code renovation path,...

After a year of LightSquared fighting GPS industry and government agencies over whether its network would interfere with GPS receivers, the Federal Communications Commission dropped the hammer Tuesday evening, saying it would revoke the would-be carrier’s terrestrial network waiver.

HTC one of the earliest champions of smartphones seems to have fallen on hard times. But the Taiwanese phone maker isn't ready to call it quits and is said to be working on a slew of new products including a music streaming service - relatively soon!

Apple has once again cut prices on its iAd system for rich in-app advertising on iOS applications, as ad buyers continue to balk at the up-front cost of participating in Apple’s vision of how mobile advertising should work.

Tesla's flashy unveiling of its Model X electric SUV/minivan last week looks like it's paid off in reservations. The car company announced on Tuesday that just a day after the launch, Tesla had accumulated reservations for more than $40 million worth of Model X sales.

Zynga the newly public company behind the games played by gazillions of people, is relying far less on Amazon's(s amzn) public cloud than it has in the past: 80 percent of its daily average users now run on Z Cloud -- not on that other cloud.

In comments before the financial community at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook held forth on a number of mobile-related topics, including whether the iPad is a PC. He called the iPad the fastest-growing product launch in Apple’s history.