Electronics and liquids don’t mix, unless you’re Iceotope. At this week’s Supercomputing 2009 conference in Portland, Ore., the 3-year-old startup from Sheffield, UK is demonstrating a liquid-cooled server setup that has the potential to cut data center cooling costs by up to 93 percent. The firm just came out of stealth mode, 18 months after a round of financing in early 2008 from EV Group. Plans call for Iceotope to begin manufacturing this year with an eye toward getting the system to early access participants by Q1 2010, general availability sometime in the second half of 2010.
Considering that cooling IT systems is responsible for 40-60 percent of a typical data center’s yearly spending on electricity, the company is clearly betting that the energy savings alone will be enough to drum up business. Instead of supplying rack doors with chilled water to cool servers like IBM, or affixing “water blocks” to processors and other heat-generating components of a server to siphon off heat, Iceotope dunks entire server motherboards into modules that are filled with an “inert liquid” that doesn’t short out the delicate electronics.

Since its founding last year, Porifera has been focusing on applications using carbon nanotube membranes — tiny, ultra-slippery, hollow arrangements of carbon atoms that allow gases and liquids to flow through at a rapid pace, while blocking larger molecules — for desalination. And just last week, 
Louisiana offered up a hefty incentive package in order to bring the Kleiner Perkins and T. Boone Pickens-backed auto startup V-Vehicle Company to the state. And over the next few weeks, businesses in the state will be racing to secure some of the direct benefits of that move.
One thing is sure: The hybrid, tandem-seat 3-wheeler in the works at Oregon-based startup Green Lite Motors is no Prius. Less certain is whether there’s a market for the 4-feet-by-8-feet vehicle, which features “smart standup” technology that Green Lite President and CEO Tim Miller says will let the vehicle lean smoothly into turns and automatically right itself when it comes to a stop. But Green Lite just snagged one of the coveted regional finalist slots for the national 
