It’s unclear how Home Depot wants to use Redbeacon, which allows users to get bids on home projects by contractors using Redbeacon’s marketplace. The start-up, which first launched in 2008 and won a number of start-up competitions, said today that it would remain open for business for its users. It was generally well regarded for its ability to bring together consumers who needed services from contractors. Redbeacon uses algorithms that even look at Facebook connections to find the right contractors for a job.

Home Depot didn’t disclose the purchase price but said that the Redbeacon leadership team would remain in place in San Mateo, CA. The company was founded by former Google workers Ethan Anderson, Aaron Lee and Yaron Binur. It has raised .4 million from Mayfield Fund and Venrock.

Redbeacon co-founders Aaron Lee, Ethan Anderson and Yaron Binur

The deal though shows that big retailers are increasingly looking toward Silicon Valley for ideas and inspiration about how to grow their business. By buying Redbeacon, Home Depot can get some lessons on how to tap users through online and mobile channels. And it helps them become more of a resource for people looking to remodel and improve their homes. Home Depot is not simply about being a physical store to sell goods and services but being a brand that people turn to for all their needs, including labor.

Home Depot has also been working closely on PayPal’s first trial of its in-store payment system. PayPal just said today that it expects to roll that out to all of Home Depot’s more than 2,200 stores by March. That’s another example of Home Depot getting with the times. Increasingly, retailers have to think about how to handle the changing needs of consumers, who are buying online and through mobile devices. Partnering with PayPal gives Home Depot a chance to be first with a new form of payment, but it also means it will likely get first crack at many of the other services PayPal plans to roll out, such location-based offers, in-aisle purchases, scanning products for inventory checks and other in-store services.

Big retailers are being forced to look this way. Walmart bought Kosmix and established Walmart Labs to help it evolve as mobile and social change the way people shop. Walmart Labs has turned around and started acquiring start-ups to help it get up to speed. The Gap has done a bunch of deals with mobile and social start-ups to try and get ahead of new buying patterns. Rival Lowe’s equipped its workers with iPhones last year, in response to Home Depot’s deployment of Motorola devices to help answer consumer questions.

As Venky Harinarayan, SVP Wal-Mart Global eCommerce and Head of WalmartLabs told me the RoadMap conference last year that retailers are still trying to understand the implications of social and mobile on commerce. But it’s clear companies need to move forward and embrace the changes in commerce. And that means increasingly partnering with technology companies and sometimes buying them up.

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The latest examples came to me from online design store Fab.com, which just launched in June and then pushed out its first mobile apps for iOS and Android in October. In just three months, it said that 30 percent of its traffic is now on mobile. MyYearbook, a social networking site that was bought by Quepasa last year, said, thanks to a big holiday push, it now has 54 percent of its traffic coming in on mobile.

Now, these are just two examples, but it shows that though they both got their start on the web, they’re increasingly running mobile services. Twitter’s mobile traffic is up to 55 percent while Pandora is up to 60 percent according to Mary Meeker, of Kleiner Perkins. That’s happening quickly with Facebook as well, which has 350 million of its 800 million users actively accessing the social network through mobile channels.

Meeker highlighted this at the Web 2.0 summit in October, showing how mobile search, payments and shopping has taken off in the last two years. Online shopping destinations like eBay are seeing more and more sales via mobile devices. IBM said that 18.3 percent of all online sessions on retailers’ sites on Christmas were initiated from a mobile device, compared to 8.4 percent in 2010.

Meanwhile, Google is increasingly capitalizing on the growth of mobile searches by encouraging businesses to think mobile first. It has said that 44 percent of last minute holiday shopping searches was expected to be by mobile and 79 percent of smartphone users currently utilize their phones to help with price comparison, product searches and locating a retailer.

The fact is, thanks to smartphones and tablets, the way people are going to services and destinations is changing. People are accessing stuff all the time on the go and that requires developers and publishers to think mobile first.

Om Malik touched on this last month when he talked about the redesign of his personal website Om.co. Here’s what he wrote:

When mulling over these changes, I began to wonder how a blog designed primarily for a mobile-first experience might fare. Of course, there would be a web-based version, too, but it would be not the primary focus. Mobile first meant — a great reading experience that allows readers to focus on things that matter — words, photos and videos — not the design flourishes and other elements such as social sharing icons.

Mobile first meant that the layouts would adapt themselves to the display. The iPad version would adapt to that device’s screen size while the iPhone/smartphone version would be even more barebones. The beauty of thinking about “mobile first” is that you get to use the latest in browsers, forget about backward compatibility and at the sometime are able to deploy newest technologies and hacks.

This is increasingly how publishers and developers need to prepare their services. There is still an obvious need for a traditional website but the shifting habits of consumption mean you can’t make mobile an afterthought. People notice if you’re not optimizing for mobile and ignoring mobile users and their experiences can cost publishers. Google quoted a study last year that found that 61 percent of mobile users won’t return to a site if they have trouble accessing it from their phone.

It also means you can’t just water down a site or gin up a simple app. It still needs to have robust functionality because people want to do a lot of things on mobile. And they look to developers to also leverage the unique capabilities of devices, which are location aware and have cameras and other sensors. Some developers may want to think twice about how they implement some web-only features if it can’t be enjoyed by mobile users.

We’re already seeing more mobile apps and start-ups that are beginning on mobile and then looking toward online. But there’s still a ways to go for traditional websites, businesses and services to embrace mobile. With smartphone penetration expected to cross over 50 percent soon in the U.S. and adoption unlikely to slow down, it’s going to mean people going online through the small screen. Those who prepare for a mobile first world are going have the jump when it comes to attracting those consumers.

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Do these struggles represent the beginning of the end for green technology?

Overall, it looks like business as usual for Silicon Valley, which, of course, is good. Only one in ten start-ups ever make it, VCs like to say. Failure makes you stronger. Some CEOs are visionaries and others are professional managers geared toward scaling up companies, etc. etc.

Remember all of those articles with journalists yammering about how green technology needs a Netscape moment? Well, this is it. But it’s not the moment when Netscape zoomed in its IPO. It’s the moment when it got absorbed into the gaping maw of AOL. Netscape became irrelevant, but life went on. The Internet, in fact, became even larger. Netscape’s demise simply proved that the so-called First Mover Advantage is vastly overrated.

Computing didn’t die with Sperry Rand either.

The analogy between green and computing isn’t perfect. Green technologies often require far more capital and time to get to market. Many also have to compete against existing technologies — like coal and incandescent light bulbs — that have spent decades winnowing out costs and building up manufacturing infrastructure. But VCs have thrown away large amounts of capital on companies serving the web, too. Anyone remember Akimbo? @Home? AltaVista?

Green technologies tend to get subjected to a higher level of scrutiny. Some critics seem emotionally dead set against the industry. Incumbents want to undermine it. Many entrepreneurs also grossly underestimated the technological challenges. Still, the reaction seems to go over the top. The founder of Friendster didn’t have to commit the public equivalent of self-immolation because Facebook succeeded and Friendster didn’t. But the public seems to want blood from every green company that fails to achieve corporate immortality.

Case Studies

Examine the two prominent collapses. Aptera wanted to make three-wheeled cars. Both Google and NRG Energy invested in it while Darrell Issa, the Republican Congressional Representative that championed investigations into Solyndra, sought to get federal loan guarantees for the company.

The Aptera 2e was a blast to drive. After emerging from the car during a test drive in San Francisco in 2009, individuals on the sidewalk stopped to take my picture and ask me questions. I felt like the Man of the Future: if only I had worn my silver skin suit.

But buy it? Three-wheeled cars have been nonstarters for years. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion crashed during its public debut. Sidecars as a fashion statement went out with the Third Reich. The only truly successful three-wheeled vehicle has been the wheelbarrow. Aptera had one really interesting aspect to it: the body was made from a high-tech composite that is stronger than metal but far lighter.

Range Fuels, meanwhile, wanted to produce cellulosic biofuel with a variant of the Fischer-Tropsch process. FT, however, has only been popular with countries and regimes — Apartheid-era South Africa and again the Third Reich — cut off from oil imports. Companies with arguably more advanced processes leveraging biology — Solazyme, Gevo, and Amyris — all pulled off IPOs.

Range Fuel’s success in landing VC fund and government loans was to some degree due to its fortunate timing. It emerged at the dawn of green tech investing, when VCs and others were optimistic and desperate for new ideas to fund. At the time, many also mistakenly believed that the same skills required to succeed in computers would directly map to green. Mitch Mandich, a former Apple exec, served as CEO. Few people would now think, “Fuel additives, all-in-one desktops that come in five designer colors. It’s all just sales. Hire him.”

Now look at Google terminating the RE<C Program, an initiative to develop technologies that could produce electricity at cheaper prices than coal. A noble ambition, but not one for a software company. Google was building heliostats, or mirrors, for solar thermal power plants. Imagine being an engineer on that project. You’re in the company cafeteria where everyone is talking about deep linking and you’re trying to steer the conversation to reflective surfaces. All of your closest peers are at Brightsource Energy, 3M and DuPont. You might as well have a hairy mole on your upper lip.

Google, however, is not giving up on green energy. It desperately needs to get a handle on its energy consumption. It will continue to invest in solar farms, as well as use Google Ventures to get an early look at technologies like the AC-DC converters from Transphorm. In other words, it will begin to act more like Intel Capital than a nonprofit.

China’s trade war? Things will get cheaper and the case will drag out until everyone has forgotten it.

Only a few hit it big

And now for the positive news: Siemens will buy eMeter. For years, eMeter has been one of the most promising and successful start-ups in smart grid. If eMeter were a cloud company, it might have been able to stay independent for a longer time.

But the smart grid is an unusual market with a very, circumscribed client base. Only around 3,000 utilities exist in North America versus the hundreds of thousands of customers that want cloud services. Utilities also tend to be quite conservative. An acquisition was the logical, inevitable outcome.

Expect more to follow. Conglomerates like Siemens, Areva, Schneider, Toshiba and ABB have been on an extended shopping spree in the U.S.

So cheer up. This is par for the course.

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Tuesday was no different. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus — a mouthful …

Wired Top Stories

Demand for power generation in the US (Y/Y growth in demand, excluding weather-related usage) has historically tracked closely with GDP growth and declines over the past several months suggest that GDP growth will remain muted, at least over the near term.

Similarly,

FedEx and UPS shipment trends represent another indicator of consumer purchasing behavior. Shipping volume fell off dramatically in both shippers’ largest segments during the last downturn in ’08-’09 (with a more rapid and deeper impact at FDX); domestic express volume growth turned negative at FedEx in the firm’s fiscal fourth quarter ’11 (ended April ’11) and continued to decelerate through the August quarter.

More importantly, FedEx cited a more cautious outlook for volume trends through the holiday season and into early 2012. Underpinning the weakening volume trends is a slowdown in consumer demand, particularly related to consumer electronics items manufactured in Asia and shipped to U.S. consumers. FedEx CEO Fred Smith’s quote from the call (on this year’s holiday shipping season): “We don’t anticipate a significant peak this year.”

FedEx/UPS data portends bad news in particular for e-commerce companies, which in turn can have reverberations through the rest of the tech ecosystem.

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That’s pretty significant. It means that new subscribers are hard to come by, so gains for providers will come from the competition — and so far cable and fiber products are the winners there. For every consumer that added service from a telecoms provider, cable providers added three. The top cable broadband providers have a 56 percent share of the overall market, with 8.9 million more subscribers than the top telephone companies – compared to 7.85 million this time a year ago.

But all is not lost for telecom companies — at least those that are upgrading to fiber. AT&T and Verizon added 628,000 fiber subscribers in the quarter (via U-verse and FiOS), while losing 578,000 net DSL subscribers. No wonder Time Warner Cable’s CEO thinks broadband is his company’s future and AT&T’s CEO says DSL is obsolete.

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All photos courtesy of Kuo Design

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Most people saw Dish’s purchase of the Terrestar and DBSD assets, which he now wants to combine with this FCC waiver, as a way for Ergen to diversify the company’s TV service with a broadband component. Unlike competitors in the cable or IPTV business, Dish doesn’t have its own Internet offering to bundle with video or to fall back on if subscribers decide they don’t want to pay for satellite TV anymore. This speculation has become even more rampant, as Dish reported its worst-ever subscriber losses in the second quarter, with 135,000 customers leaving the service.

Spectrum speculation rides again.

But by floating this planned 4G network — and LTE-Advanced is truly 4G by the ITU’s original standards — Ergen sees an opportunity to turn Dish’s satellite network into an asset. This is similar to how Harbinger Capital Partners saw its chance to turn its satellite spectrum into a proposed network able to sign customers, raise billions and even act as a an example of competition for the wireless industry! If Phil Falcone at Harbinger can turn a small satellite business into a wholesale mobile broadband network with only an FCC waiver and find investors, why shouldn’t Ergen try the same stunt. Heck, sometimes these spectrum speculation ploys even work out. Just look at how well Craig McCaw has done.

But I simply look at this pitch and wonder how far LightSquared and Dish will have to push their wholesale network facade in order to find a willing buyer for their airwaves and networks (both have satellites). Analyst Tim Farrar, who covers companies operating in the MSS satellite band, writes that the FCC may be inclined to give Dish a chance over on his blog:

As I’ve pointed out previously, DISH is now in a perfect position to replace LightSquared as the FCC’s favored option for providing additional wireless competition. Indeed DISH highlights specifically in the TerreStar application that “use of the [2GHz] band also does not give rise to the GPS interference issues that have hampered the use of the L-band” which is one of the factors meaning that the “promise of MSS/ATC has yet to be fully realized”. DISH also notes pointedly that it is “a well-financed, capable, and recognized innovator in communications technology [with] unique experience in developing an innovative and competitive retail operation and growing it from zero to approximately 14 million subscribers.”

Are LTE-Advanced and build out plans a red herring?

Maybe the FCC will grant Dish a waiver and see if it can build a network without interference, but another story at Fierce Wireless points out that Dish isn’t promising much with its network buildout. The story says that while LightSquared promised to cover a third of the population by the end of 2012, Dish appears to be promising far less. To me, its use of LTE-Advanced is also somewhat suspicious, given that there is a lack of commercial gear and chips out for the standard since it was only recently set in March. Clearwire is using LTE-Advanced … eventually. And Dish explains that such services would be a commercial option until 2014 anyhow.

The only phone that would currently work on the satellite network.

I will credit Dish with trying to make its spectrum play as attractive as possible with this filing. It is asking the FCC for several things, including the ability to sell devices that don’t require a satellite-capable chip, which is basically a backdoor to turning its satellite spectrum in the 2 GHz band into terrestrial spectrum. The FCC granted this same waiver to LightSquared earlier this year. It’s also asking to avoid having a spare satellite (those things are expensive and frankly, useless, since they don’t provide fast mobile broadband without sucking the battery life of a handheld device). Finally, it wants the FCC to extend all the rules that Dish abides by to the Terrestar spectrum so it can treat the two blocks as one, which turns the 40 GHz of spectrum it has into something it can use to deploy LTE-Advanced in two 20 MHz bands to reap the maximum efficiencies.

However, as Dish points out in its filing, 40 Mhz isn’t much spectrum when compared to the amount held by the nation’s largest wireless carriers. That mean efforts to build out a network would likely involve partners that also need spectrum. I imagine it would be nice if those partners also had a wireless network and a desire to keep building out a business even as AT&T swallows T-Mobile to create a near-duopoly in the wireless space.

It’d be even nicer if they could also take advantage of Dish’s TV and broadband businesses to perhaps create a quadruple play that could rival plans AT&T, Verizon and maybe even cable companies could soon offer. So this filing isn’t so much about Dish wanting to build a wireless network, as Dish realizing that having some contiguous spectrum for mobile broadband adds a lot more value to Ergen’s company than his 14 million pay TV subscribers.

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