World’s first standard hybrid yacht launches — but may be more style than substance

Cecilia Aronsson | May 18th, 2008

On a fast cruise under the Golden Gate Bridge, Austrian boat manufacturer Frauscher just launched the world’s first luxury motor yacht with a hybrid engine, developed together with Austrian engine manufacturer Steyr Motors.

Hybrid cars have already established themselves as the modern fuel-efficient alternative to petrol cars. But on a warm day, many people will leave their car behind for a much less efficient vessel on the water: Most boats today are powered by dirty diesel engines. Pure electric boats have been around since the late 19th century, but will rarely go faster than 5 or 6 knots (about 10 km/h). Frauscher and Steyr combined the two to offer high speed with a claim to environmental friendliness. I went for a test ride to see how it works.

The Frauscher hybrid has a traditional diesel engine connected to an electric engine. The combustion engine can be started with the electric motor, so there’s no need for a conventional starter motor. With the electric start, the boat will also save every seventh liter of fuel that a normal combustion engine burns during cold starts, according to Steyr.

The boat can drive “zero emission” on the electric engine in speeds up to 5 knots, with several lead-acid batteries supplying the energy. But with a turn of the key, the boat switches to diesel drive mode. At low speeds (the boat reaches 38 knots maximum), the electric engine works in the same way as a starter engine and boosts the diesel engine to create faster acceleration while lowering fuel consumption, although it wasn’t clear how much diesel is saved by the “boost”.

The batteries are recharged whenever the diesel engine is being used. It takes about an hour for the batteries to recharge completely.

Frauscher is a family-owned company with a turnover of $15 million in 2007. Prices start at $150,000 for the 5.6 meter tall St. Tropez-style hybrid yacht, like the one displayed at St. Francis Yacht Club on Friday. The hybrid costs about $20,000 more than a traditional engine.

Last year the company shipped about 150 boats out of its production base in Gschwandt, Austria. Managing Director Michael Frauscher, grandson of company founder Engelbert Frauscher, wouldn’t give an exact forecast of how many hybrids he expects to sell. “But for us this marks a very big thing. There are no boats like this in the American market,” he said.

The Frauscher yachts sell in 14 nations, including the USA, Russia and Korea. California Chris-Craft, a dealer of fine leisure boats with five outlets along the American West Coast, will be the first distributor in the world to offer the new Frauscher/Steyr hybrids. The hybrid electric motor will be available for all Frauscher’s motor yacht styles.

At start, the ride was completeley noiseless. But once out of the marina Frauscher turned the key to switch to the diesel engine, and as the boat jumped its way through the waves it began to burn as much fuel as any other motor yacht.

In the end, the Frauscher yacht gave me the impression of being more stylish than environmentally friendly. Like many technologies touted as “green”, the part-electric system could just serve as an excuse — giving serial over-consumers a green light to go out and burn even more fuel on sunny days.

Top 10 tech trends: Smart phones, alternative energies, Boomer technologies

Cecilia Aronsson | May 14th, 2008

Where is technology headed?

The Churchill Club of Silicon Valley just wrapped up one of its most anticipated events: the Annual Top Ten Tech Trends Debate. Five well-known and opinionated venture capitalists weighed in on what trends will take flight and what trends will fizzle out in the months ahead.

(The VCs are pictured, from left to right: Steve Jurvetson, Vinod Khosla, Josh Kopelman, Roger McNamee, Joe Schoendorf.)

The audience of around 300 people was asked whether it agreed or disagreed with the VCs’ predictions. I’ve ranked them below, according to how well they were accepted by the audience.

Last year’s predicted trends included a shakeout of Web 2.0 companies and the rising economic power of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Trend 1: Customer data stored by different service providers will be combined to create more intelligent services. Josh Kopelman, managing partner at First Round Capital, a seed-stage venture fund, who founded online retailer Half.com (sold to eBay after a year for $300 million) said such customer data includes your financial records, dinner reservations, preferences in the iTunes store, random searches on Google and much more. In this way the Internet goes from satisfying explicit user needs (like searching for a friend to add on Facebook) to satisfying implicit needs (like telling who you should add and why adding them would be helpful to you).
Audience: 95 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend 2: Oil will have increasing difficulty competing with biofuels made from cheap non-food crops for transportation. Vinod Khosla (pictured left below, beside Kopelman), founder of Khosla Ventures, which focuses on alternative fuels and green technologies, said coal will become less competitive compared to reliable solar thermal and other alternative energy sources.
Audience: 90 percent voted “Yes”.

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Sulekha merges Facebook and Craigslist in India

Cecilia Aronsson | May 6th, 2008 | View Comments

A merger between Facebook and Craigslist may seem like a pipe dream — but in India it’s already happening. The web community Sulekha has quickly grown to become India’s largest user-generated content site with 6 million users, a number set to double this year. Social networking features and classified ads take up equally big parts of the site.

The site targets Indians worldwide. India holds 60 percent of the users. Another 30 percent live in North America, which is gathering pace in many cities (more on that later). Almost every person online in India is fluent in English, so Sulekha knew from the start that competition from other social networks would be tough. There is no pure social network based in India that competes favorably with American social networks Myspace, Facebook or LinkedIn.

But Sulekha decided to expand beyond personal social networking. The network part of the site is divided in vertical sections like travel, news, sport and food. The idea is to provide useful content to anyone with interest in Indian culture and news. The Indian Premium League in cricket, IPL, attracts particularly strong interest with hundreds of people writing comments about it under a special “cricket caption”. Satya Prabhakar, CEO of Sulekha, says that the aggregation of social network content in vertical sub-sections makes it easier to attract advertisers who want to know their audience’s interests. General purpose social networks like Facebook and Myspace are all struggling to find a sustainable advertisement solution.

Sulekha will not disclose its revenue but says it’s growing by 75 percent this year, making the company profitable at the operational level. Half of the revenue comes from advertising on the social network part of the site. The other half comes from classified ads, where currently about 20,000 small businesses have paid for search words. In the U.S. a majority of such small businesses have their own websites and many would use Google’s Adwords advertising tool. In India, online advertising is a brand new world.

The major share of Sulekha’s 450 staff work in sales and visit the Indian companies to give them their first introduction to online advertising. It has apparently paid off, since Sulekha now claims to be the largest online classified site in India’s eight biggest cities — Mumbai, Kolkata, New Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmadabad and Pune. About three quarters of visitors use the classified ads section of the site.
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Travel startup UpTake set to launch opinions super-site

Cecilia Aronsson | May 6th, 2008 | View Comments

With so many online travel sites crowding the market, you’d think we were nearing a Web 2.0 travel bubble. But according to travel information search engine UpTake, which is launching May 14, there’s still an untapped niche in the market: a travel-opinions supersite.

The market is extremely fragmented with thousands of micro-sites for individual hotels, beaches, airlines and leisure activities. UpTake’s goal is to gather opinions from all of those sites together and become the most comprehensive research tool used by travelers.

“The booking sites are good when you know that you’re going to Maui on May 17 and want to stay in a Hilton Hotel. But if you don’t even know whether to go to Maui or Kauai, it’s not that easy,” said CEO Yen Lee, who was General Manager of Yahoo Travel before he left to start UpTake in late 2006.

The site features a personalized filter that, unlike traditional search engines, lets you customize your search according to profiles such as “kid friendly”, “beach”, “romantic” or “adventurous”. These keywords are matched againt a database of more than 20 million traveler opinions from more than 1,000 review sites across the web, including WAYN, TripSay, IgoUgo and, potentially, another newcomer by the name of Tripwolf (more on them later). The ratings collection now spans about half a million places to go, things to do and places to stay. The database will expand rapidly, according to Lee. Searches will be matched with search word ads displayed along with non-commercial search results.

A traveler with unclear travel plans visits, on average, 22 sites before booking a flight or hotel, according to a recent study by Google and Comscore. UpTake wants to turn these 22 jumps into one smooth stop. “We’re like Google, but we’ll only do travel”, said Lee. But he added that unlike Google , UpTake’s database is prepared to ask travellers the big questions: why they’re travelling and who they’re travelling with.

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Boom for travel sites -- Can they make money?

Cecilia Aronsson | April 22nd, 2008 | Add Comment »

Travel sites are in fashion this spring, with new sites adding at a steady pace. Finnish travel site TripSay is just the latest to emerge, for example, with ways to share tips about travel. It’s still in closed testing, but it plans to open to the public in a few months.

With hundreds of travel sites now existing — ranging from the big ones like Expedia to the small, single-author blogs dedicated to travel — how are they all going to make money?

Well, enter Travel Ad Network, TAN, which wants to help place ads at all these sites. It just raised $15 million from Rho Ventures, Village Ventures and individuals. The money will be used to increase advertising across travel websites. The company says it is serving 50 sites already. This could mean that some of these flavor-of-the-times sites may eventually make some money.

But being a traveler online is not always glamorous. While testing the basic features of TripSay, I was met with: “Cecilia has been to 5 places and is thus described as “Random tourist”. Next level at 10 ratings.”

Huh? It’s early days still for TripSay, so let’s cut it some slack. It works as a social community where as a member, you create and personalize your profile. You’re asked to list places you have been and rate them with a five-point smiley system. The ratings appear as icons on a world map. Only placing a few ratings will result in being dubbed the “Random tourist” — not a very admirable introduction for someone who has traveled the world. If you’re patient, and add a couple of hundred places, you’ll eventually earn a nickname like “Columbus.” However, quality of ratings might suffer if new users feel rushed to fill in information to avoid that initial rude description.
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Britain’s best and brightest startups hit Silicon Valley next week for funding

Cecilia Aronsson | April 16th, 2008 | Add Comment »

If you’ve never heard of Dragon’s Den, it’s a popular British TV reality series, where entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to get funding from business experts — the “Dragons”. One of those Dragons, Doug Richard, a UK-based Californian and founder of investment research firm Library House got a name for himself as a particularly fastidious investor on the show. And now he’s selected 20 of the UK’s most promising web application start-ups to go and try their luck in Silicon Valley.

The initiative is called Web Mission 2008, and it offers subsidized participation in a one-week tour of the Valley, which begins next week. The program includes visits to Oracle, Bebo and the Web 2.0 Expo. For these British web start-ups, many with CEOs in their twenties, it’s a pretty alluring opportunity. The jury, led by Doug Richard, describe the selected companies as highly promising businesses that are well prepared to attract American investors and customers. “Some of these companies are as good as anything coming out of the Valley”, Richard said in a statement.

More than 100 British web companies applied for the 20 available slots, and the winners were announced the first week of March. The program is sponsored by the UK Trade & Investment Organisation, along with some companies from the private sector. The idea is that British web companies in their early stage have a lot to learn — and earn — from entering the US.

The companies span a broad range of web applications (see full list here). Most were founded a year or two ago. Here’s a quick taste of who’s coming:

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The iPhone in Europe: A patchy success

Cecilia Aronsson, a Swedish business reporter, is a fellow at the Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford University. Through July, she’ll write columns for VentureBeat.com about her experiences in Silicon Valley. Here’s her first column.

The European business press is speculating that the next market Apple plans to target with its iPhone is Sweden, a hotbed of mobile innovation and the home of rival mobile phone maker Ericsson. But I was tagging along with 15 leaders of the Swedish telecom and computer industry yesterday as they visited several Bay Area technology companies, and from what I heard, it sounds as if Apple may not understand the Swedish market.

While US customers are used to choosing a carrier and accepting that not all phones will be available through that carrier, Swedish customers are used to having whatever phone they want with any carrier.

Apple’s strategy so far has been to hook up exclusively with one mobile operator per country (AT&T in the US). The iPhone only works with AT&T’s SIM card (the card that contains the user’s data).

In Scandinavia, though, things are different. Read more here.