A few smaller news items

It's been quiet on the cleantech deal front so far this week (at least as far as any official announcements go), but here are some news tidbits you may have missed:

• PolyFuel, a manufacturer of membranes for fuel cells, has been named one of the two hundred Finalists for the Red Herring 100 Private Companies of North America award program. Not a huge announcement, but it does serve as a useful opportunity to point out that some of the better investment opportunities may be in components for various distributed generation (DG) technologies, rather than in the DG OEMs themselves.

• When the March Venture Capital Journal mentioned that Kleiner has added Bill Joy as a full-time partner, they noted that he will be "focusing his attention partly on energy efficiency -- a major interest of Doerr, too..." Look for even more cleantech activity by KP in the near future, then. One of the more interesting bay area fuel cell startups remains the stealth SOFC company Doerr and others have backed...

• VC fundraising in the first quarter of the year was about double of what it was in 2004, according to Venture Economics, although the number of funds which closed was about the same (so: the funds that closed were much larger). But on the flip side, the number of US VC firms fell 21% in 2004. Fewer, bigger investors? The larger generalist funds will increasingly need to partner with smaller, sector-focused players with better knowledge of particular markets.