Whiskey Media, a company that has built websites around topics like comic books and computer games, has raised $2.5 million in funding.

The Sausalito, Calif. company was created by Shelby Bonnie, who previously co-founded online news network CNET. Whiskey Media sites are a mix of directories and online communities, and include ComicVine, AnimeVice, and GiantBomb (the topics of the first two sites should be self-evident, the third focuses on computer games).

When Bonnie launched Whiskey Media last year, he told The New York Times that he wanted to use a small staff to build popular sites: “If it is a place that people are passionate around, and you make it easy to be passionate, you find a very small group of people can make something extraordinary and make it comprehensive.

The funding was first reported on peHUB based on a regulatory filing, and the company has since confirmed the news on its blog, saying the money comes from “true family and close friends.”

And what can we expect as the subject Whiskey’s next site? Perhaps science fiction.

California is poised to meet its lofty renewable energy goals — at least on paper. Right now, 200 renewable energy products totaling 70 gigawatts of energy are under consideration in the state. Not all of them will pass muster — but their equivalent will need to be built in order to make the grade. That’s more than eight times the current 8,000 megawatts of renewable generation already in the works. Here’s the full list of projects that have been pitched so far.

Utilities are already scrambling to meet Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s mandate, requiring them to generate one-third of their energy from renewable sources by 2020. And not all the usual suspects qualify as renewable. For example, hydropower — accounting for 11.7 percent of California’s energy production — will not count toward these goals due to silting and environmental problems caused by damming rivers.

By the end of 2010, about 53 projects are expected to break ground — out of a pool of 250 that applied for grants under the U.S. stimulus package. The largest of this group is a 1,000-megawatt solar thermal development in Riverside County, Calif. Out of the top ten largest projects receiving government packing, eight are solar — indicative of the state’s preference for therm and photovoltaic solar generation. Only a handful of the 53 are wind plants, and only one is geothermal.

Of the projects not applying for recovery act funds, almost all of them are proposed to be build on land controlled by the federal Bureau of Land Management. Historically, the BLM has fewer regulations than other land management agencies. This could mean that more of these projects will actually get built, rather than getting bogged down in permitting disputes. Fortunately, this batch includes most of the larger projects, approaching a gigawatt in size.

Based on the sheer volume of proposals, and the impetus provided by state policy, it looks like California is getting ready for a big wave of renewable development in 2010. As the 2020 mandate looms, more projects will probably be pushed through that wouldn’t have typically made it by regulators.

As it stands, many utilities are looking to make power purchase agreements with out-of-state energy providers. In the next few years, this trend should shift — especially as well-funded solar projects spring up in California’s Central Valley and desert regions.

I typically use the Weather iPhone app maybe once a week, if not even ever. The only reason I would ever use the application is if a friend asked me the weather for a certain day of the week. Outside is trying to change the way we see weather applications on the iPhone with their new iPhone app developed by Robocat.

Outside combines current weather and local forecasts with custom push notifications on the iPhone. With Outside, you can setup push notifications to for various weather conditions and get alerts when the weather matches your criteria, even when the app isn’t running. To get the notifications, you have to sign up for a subscription service. You get 30 days of push notifications when you purchase Outside, and then for $1, you get another 90 days of notifications. A yearly plan is in works as well.

Read the rest of this post at MobileCrunch >>

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Business Standard has an article on the topic.Where Bajaj Finance hopes to make the real difference is in service: It wants to disburse loans faster than its peers, allow customers to pre-pay loans from their desktops and return documents on loans against property in less than five days — an industry record. Of course, customers have round-the-clock access to its call centres.The plan seems to be

What do Thomas Siebel, Condoleezza Rice and $26 million have in common? They are all connected to stealth energy startup C3, which may be entering the business of managing carbon cap-and-trade systems for corporations. In the past two weeks, C3 has filed three Form Ds with the SEC disclosing financings totaling almost $26M. Very little is known about the company publicly, and the company declines to comment on its future plans (or anything else). But from other publicly-available sources, an interesting story can be pieced together.

C3 is the brainchild of Thomas Siebel, former CEO of Siebel Systems which was bought by Siebel’s previous employer Oracle for $5.7 billion in 2005. Seibel has brought in a lot of familiar talent, including former Siebel Systems and Oracle executives Patricia House and Edward Abbo. House is a star, serving on a number of boards and in the past being named one of Fortune’s 50 most powerful women. Abbo is the former CTO of Seibel Systems, among other positions. The holdover team from Siebel, including its CTO, points towards enterprise software.

Also among the C3 board of directors are former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Senator and Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. Both are powerful Republicans, which comes as no surprise as Siebel played a role in introducing Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin to California. Far more interesting is the role each might play. C3 is focused on energy management and a former Secretary of Energy is a logical (and valuable) asset in that business. More interesting is the potential role of Rice. Rice’s most visible experience is as America’s lead representative to the world, suggesting that C3 is planning an international play.

Another key Director is Jay Dweck, a Managing Director and Global Head of Strategies and Technology for the Institutional Securities Group at Morgan Stanley. Mr. Dweck’s insider knowledge of institutional securities and the underlying technology at least raises the possibility that C3 will seek to securitize and/or create a market for some kind of carbon security.

So what does an enterprise-software, energy-management company with international ambitions, $26 million in capital, and sophisticated financial securities software do? Besides make a lot of money of course.

One logical answer is that the company is planning to create software/platforms for the management of carbon emissions. What makes the space potentially so valuable is cap and trade. These systems substitute a market for regulation; an enterprise’s carbon emissions are measured against a specific amount, the cap. Companies with emissions below the cap can sell their extra “space,” while companies whose emissions exceed their cap need to purchase permits for their overage. Cap and trade is not currently in use in the United States, although it has been proposed and is being pushed by the Obama Administration, but it is being used to reduce carbon emissions on a cost-efficient basis elsewhere, notably in the EU.

Two large and related problems plague cap and trade systems. One is measuring emissions (in an officially sanctioned manner) and the other is pricing them, and those two problems could very well be C3’s targets. The goal in this scenario would be to get licensed or approved to create and run cap-and-trade markets. If cap and trade is ultimately adopted as the way to control carbon emissions in the name of reducing global warming, it will be a multi-billion dollar market.

C3 bills itself as an “Energy and Emissions Management” company. Limited information about it is currently available at c3welcome.com, itself an unlikely website. The company also appears to own c3-carbon.com, and may be shopping for a more euphonious domain as it has chosen to remain at the welcome site as opposed to the longer term c3-carbon.com, which redirects.

There are other companies tackling this problem such as Greenstone Carbon Management, Carbon Hub, and Carbon Trust, but the glowing board/leadership pedigree on top of nearly limitless access to capital make C3 a diamond in the rough, so to speak.

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Earlier this evening Gizmodo published leaked images that apparently show off the pricing details for Google’s upcoming Nexus One phone. The Nexus One comes in at a hefty $530 for an unlocked device, or $180 with contract on T-Mobile — pricing that’s pretty standard for a smart phone. But even still, it’s a very big deal. It also looks like Gizmodo’s screenshots may have included clues hinting at a previously unannounced feature for Android: automatic backup of your data.

Under the section for Optional Accessories, the Nexus One will apparently have a docking station available (as did the Droid). The description for the dock is as follows: “Charge your phone while streaming music and backing up your data“.

Now, that text isn’t terribly specific. In the case of the streaming music, I think Google is probably referring to an app like Pandora. In the case of backups, Google could be referring to using one of the third party backup solutions available on Android Market, like the top rated MyBackup Pro. Or it might just be saying that you can manually back up your phone to your computer while it’s charging. Or, it could be referring to a natively supported backup option. I’m guessing it’s the latter.

Up until now Android hasn’t had a native backup solution. Unlike the iPhone, which backs up your data every time you plug the device into a computer, Android simply mounts your device as a USB drive. Granted, you could drag and drop these files to your computer’s desktop if you wanted to, but that’s hardly an intuitive solution and it doesn’t let you selectively update only the files that have changed.

But what would an Android backup service look like? Google obviously favors the cloud, so it seems logical that it could back up your essential data wirelessly. Then again, Android already does that for much of your data, like Gmail and Contacts, because it’s tied to your Google Account. The fact that this backup is done while the phone is docked seems to imply it’s more time consuming. Perhaps it’s something that involves a desktop client — something that Google has avoided until now and would be at odds with their cloud-based strategy.

We’ll likely know for sure by January 5th — the date that the Nexus One is rumored to make its public debut.

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Two weeks ago, Apple opened the floodgates for video recording apps on the iPhone, ending a longstanding ban. Nobody was waiting longer for the change than mobile video startup Qik, which tonight is further building out its collection of iPhone apps with the launch of the Qik VideoCamera. The new app allows the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G to locally capture video — something that only the 3GS has been able to do until recently.

Qik has, of course, made its name building live streaming apps that allow users to broadcast their video directly from their phones to the web. Their live streaming app, which is called Qik Live, was released less than a week ago.

You’re not exactly going to be grabbing high quality video with the the Qik VideoCamera, but it could be worse. The first application to enable video recording on the older iPhones was iVideoCamera, which captures a mere three frames per second at a 160×213 resolution. Qik claims to record at 7FPS and 352×288, which is obviously a big step up. But it still pales in comparison to the iPhone 3GS’s 30FPS and VGA (640×480) resolution.

Just to recap, Qik now has three applications available on the App Store. First, is Qik for 3GS, which was the company’s ‘workaround’ for Apple’s ban on video — it was for 3GS users only, and would upload videos after recordings were completed. Second is the live streaming app released last week that lets users broadcast from any model iPhone directly to the web. Today’s release is Qik’s third on the app store.

Here’s a demo of the video quality, recorded using an iPhone 3G:

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You remember OnLive, right? The service, which lets you play any game remotely on a distant server, has produced much skepticism and much interest, and is now in public beta. We got a good look at it back in March when we were at GDC, and it appears that things are much the same. However, the combination of crowd noise and my bad playing made for a less-than-optimal viewing experience. This video is much clearer and much longer (it's essentially a guest lecture at Columbia), so if you're still interested in the OnLive thing, it may be for you. This video deals with some of the technical issues that have been brought up. I haven't watched the whole thing (skipped around to get the interesting bits) but he does address some of the compression and packet loss issues they have to deal with.

How did you spend Christmas? Hitwise says it knows: The Internet traffic tracker says you spent at least part of the holiday visiting Facebook , making the social network the most popular U.S. site on the Web.

Pixtronix Inc. has picked up $19 million in a new round of equity and warrants, and may have brought in a major cell phone maker as a new strategic investor, according to a regulatory filing posted yesterday.