On Thursday, I ventured out to the Colorado Green Tech Meetup, held every month at the Atlas Building on the University of Colorado Boulder Campus. This is a well organized (and timed) event, one I’ll attend more frequently. With the Obama administration just 10 days away, it appears that Colorado is in a terrific place in the green and clean-tech economies that should grow significantly under the next administration. Sure, the economy sucks, but innovations in green products and clean technologies hold much promise for the next big wave of real innovation in this country. Here in Colorado, we’ve got many forward-thinking entrepreneurs that are taking those early risks.

Three companies presented their pitches for investment plus showcase what they are doing to a pretty diverse audience – I spoke to lawyers, engineers, marketers, sales people – plus, there were clearly VC’s and other green tech representatives. Here’s my take on the three companies that presented.

Powermundo

These guys have put together a challenging and very innovative business. The basic idea is that there are millions of people around the world who have little to no access to electricity, and so use primitive, polluting and unhealthy means to light their homes and cook their food. Inexpensive and environmentally friendly products exist to replace these outdated modes (such as using firewood to cook inside the home, or kerosene lamps to light a room). Their customers benefit by eliminating unhealthy fumes and smoke from their homes, while reducing the weekly cost of basic living (a key element for PowerMundo’s success).

The biggest issue for success is distribution. Their pilot project is in rural parts of Peru, which makes a typical distribution scenario difficult (no big-box stores here). Instead, they have built their model more on a Mary Kay model, where local distributors sell products in their local area. They get exclusivity, make money and help their local community save money and create healthier environments in their local communities.

I’m impressed with how they’ve worked their business model – by coming up with distribution models that work for a developing nation. Plus, they’re really focused on building out the model slowly, focusing their market approach based on greatest need and their ability to work in those areas successfully.

Lightning Hybrids

Lightning Hybrids is a bio-diesel car company that is building 3- and 4-wheeled sports cars, with a hope of meeting the demands of the automotive X Prize by creating a car that gets 100 mpg and is production capable. This Tesla competitor has some interesting innovations, including:

• creating the body out of carbon fiber for lighter durability (1,750 lbs. dry weight)
• bio-diesel hybrid instead of electric hybrid
• regenerative hydraulic braking
• design that makes the drag coefficient incredibly low

The cars will be cheaper than a Tesla, but you are still talking about a very small vehicle with an expected cost of $40K and up.

The big flaw – and I could hear it in the crowd that night as well – is the design. Sure, it looks cool, but having a vehicle where you have to raise the roof to get out makes it highly impractical for anyone living in a rainy or snowy climate. I mean, do I really want to dump rain in my car when I drop off or pick someone up? Especially my fancy sports car?

I understand their possible thinking – if they can secure the X Prize for this model, they could build something else that perhaps gets worse mileage – say 75 or 85 – that is somewhat more practical and affordable. The design is what gives it such low drag which improves the mileage, but I think its really problematic. If I am going to buy a car that gets 100 mpg, wouldn’t I want to drive it all the time? No-can-do with this vehicle.

Infotility

This rather unfortunately-named company (Viagra, anyone?) provides intelligent agent software to utilities, which helps those utilities better utilize energy assets, among other things. They’ve positioned themselves smartly because they are a software provider and don’t require utilities to make hardware purchasing decisions. By avoiding that, they can really close a sales cycle, and in fact, reduced the negotiations with their two pilot projects from 15 months to 4 months – pretty impressive. I don’t think that would be possible if they required hardware (and, they are accessible to other hardware agent technologies that might seem competitive, like GridPoint).

The big concern I have for these folks is how thick and dense their business materials are. Frankly, it makes their model hard to understand, and when you are raising money, you don’t want that. A big symptom of this problem is their website, where they use many of my top offenders for meaningless corporate-speak, including “leading provider,” “market-leading,” etc. I’d actually be interested in getting a better understanding of what they do for utilities, but its hard to find that out from the web site. This was clear in the presentation too, as there were not too many questions from the audience for this presenter. The best presentations make people think so they have questions and are engaged with the presentation. I didn’t quite find that to be the case.