The state has 1.8 million school children and has agreed to buy Ncomputing machines for more than 5,000 schools.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based company is making good headway with its machines, which are connected via Ethernet cables to a central desktop that functions like a server. With virtualization hardware, the server allows each client to run a full suite of Windows or Linux applications.

The thin clients themselves don’t have any CPU or main memory chips, so they’re much cheaper than standard PCs but offer much the same functionality. (The $70 cost does not include mouse, keyboard or monitor).

The Indian deal will include the purchase of 50,000 clients in the coming months, making it the biggest deal for NComputing in India. The total value of the agreement is $80 million, but that amount is shared by all of the hardware and software partners involved.

The government will save an estimated $20 million in costs compared to a traditional PC solution and cut its electricty costs by 90 percent, said Jim Jones, a board member of NComputing and partner at venture firm Scale Ventures, which led the company’s first-round funding.

The technology is based on the insight that today’s PCs are so powerful that the vast majority of applications only use a small fraction of the computer’s capacity. NComputing creates multiple virtual desktops on a single PC — effectively slicing up a machine’s computing power — so that many users can tap the unused capacity. Up to seven users can simultaneously share one Windows-based computer for the version of NComputing’s product line-up that Andhra Pradesh is adopting. Other versions of the NComputing product can connect up to 31 thin clients to a desktop. The thin clients use about a watt of power, compared to 85 watts for a typical computer. 

So far, the company has more than 20,000 customers in 90 countries, including 4,000 school districts in the U.S. NComputing has shipped more than a million units overall, with 180,000 in schools in Macedonia. That’s more than One Laptop Per Child, the cheap Linux-based laptop from the team headed by former MIT Media Lab creator Nicholas Negroponte. NComputing also competes with Intel’s Classmate PC and Asus’ eePC. On the thin-client side, the company competes with Wyse and Hewlett-Packard’s Neoware.

Ncomputing was founded in 2004 by a team in Germany and South Korea. Stephen Dukker, the former chief executive of PC maker eMachines (bought by Gateway), is the CEO. Besides the $8 million first round led by Scale Ventures, the company also raised $28 million in a second round led by Menlo Ventures earlier this year. It has 160 employees. Jones said that the company’s financial performance is strong and that it is not raising a new round of funding now. Here’s a link to a video description and a green computing white paper.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company makes 10-gigabit Ethernet switches that compete with the likes of Cisco, Foundry Networks and Force10 Networks. These products solve a fundamental problem: as the number of servers in a data center skyrockets, so do the bandwidth needs. Today’s servers are also more dense: they can fit multiple quad-core processors in a single machine. And each one of those processors needs bandwidth. These trends are changing the networking infrastucture that is needed inside the data center.

The company is interesting because you don’t expect to see someone take on these big companies inside the core of the data center, which should be the domain of billion-dollar companies, not start-ups. It’s been a long time since anyone had a chance to challenge Cisco in this space. But Woven’s first round of products got traction and this one should be interesting to watch.

Woven is addressing the problem with the new TRX 200 family of 10-gigabit Ethernet switches with 24 ports. It fits in the same networking infrsatructure as Woven’s existing product, the EFX 1000. The company has been working on this new product line for some time since it had to design its own custom chips.

It’s boxes like these that speed up the links between racks of servers in data centers and makes them more energy efficient. Woven Systems is in an arms race with Cisco and others to constantly lower the costs of data center computing. The TRX 200 goes for $11,995 and is available now.

Startups in this area aren’t all that plentiful. But this one is interesting because it’s headed by Jeff Thermond, who has had a Midas touch in the field of networking. He founded Epigram, a maker of phoneline networking chips for homes, and, during its pre-revenue stage, sold it for $316 million to Broadcom in 1999 during the height of the Internet bubble. He then ran Broadcom’s Wi-Fi networking chip division for five years and helped it take the leadership in a market full of dozens of rivals.

Woven Systems was founded in 2003 by networking veterans Dan Maltby and Burt Tanaka. They got a $10 million first round of funding from Palomar ventures and Goldman Sachs. The company raised a total of $25 million more in two subsequent rounds, giving it a grand total of $35 million raised. Thermond, who spent time as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures, joined when the company launched its first products in the fall of 2007. Woven Systems has 75 employees.

The Internet has become “a big honkin’ billboard,” Cowan says, where hyperlinks on popular websites are all self-serving — they’re either paid links or links to other parts of the site. As a result, users have stopped trusting links, and use Google and other search engines as their primary tool for navigating between sites.

Now, I’m not completely on-board with Cowan’s analysis — you can find plenty of links on VentureBeat, for example, that don’t fall into the paid-link or self-link camps. But VentureBeat writers definitely think about these issues, and I certainly prefer linking a VentureBeat story rather than a competing site’s. Plus, I hope we’re one of the good guys; I’ve been to plenty of sites where the links are virtually useless.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based MashLogic tackles the problem by supplementing and replacing useless links with better ones. For example, users can tell the plugin to include links to Wikipedia entries or to LinkedIn profiles. A piece of text can link to multiple sites, which are previewed in a pop-up windows. MashLogic can also block ads, and it even provides a “nuclear option” of stripping all the existing links from the page. Overall, it’s a more user-oriented approach than something like Snap or Adaptive Blue’s SmartLinks, which are installed by publishers.

MashLogic does face some obstacles, since users have to download it. But the company will actually have an unlikely distribution partners — the publishers whose links it will potentially erase. That’s because publishers will can their own “mashes,” too. For example, we could create a VentureBeat mash. Once our fans (I know you’re out there) downloaded the mash, it would add links to relevant VentureBeat articles from anywhere on the web. Even if they’re unhappy about what MashLogic is doign to their own links, publishers will have a real incentive to push those mashes onto their readers, unless they want to be left behind by the competition.

So it’s a smart approach to a real problem, but can it make money? That seems like a particularly big challenge now, when consumers and businesses are cutting back their spending. Cowan says the main business opportunity comes from charging affiliate fees for MashLogic links that go to ecommerce sites.

“If we’re successful, all that [search] traffic will instead flow through MashLogic links,” he says. “Then all the people who want that traffic should be interested in helping to pay us.”

Cowan also says that Bessemer is in this for “the long haul.” It helps that with just a small team of engineers — everything else is handled by Bessemer staff — MashLogic is burning through cash pretty slowly. The venture firm has also backed MashLogic for “less than $1 million,” Cowan says.

Today, MySpace is providing new details about the progress of its existing self-serve advertising program, called myAds. More than 3,500 advertisers of various sizes have already signed up, including musicians and small businesses in various industries, according to the News Corp.-owned social network.

MySpace launched myAds in late July, and it left beta testing in September; it has been expected since last year.

The service’s revenue goals were passed in the first week that it went live, MySpace says, with a client base has been growing 200 percent since it left beta. I don’t have any hard numbers, but it all sounds quite promising.

MyAds uses existing MySpace’s ad targeting technology, called “HyperTargeting,” where the company matches user information to automatically decide which ads will appear next to which users. This helps advertisers reach the right consumers more efficiently than an untargeted banner ad. An advertiser sets a cost-per-click (CPC) price based on its desired targeting from among 1,100 “interest” categories. Pricing is set at a minimum of $0.25 per click.

Ad campaigns cost between $25 and $10,000, and use standard ad units as specified by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Advertisers can create ads using pre-built templates or upload their own. MyAds includes an analytics service that shows ad impressions, number of clickthroughs and current cost of a campaign.

For example, one interest category is “videogame,” — if MySpace data shows a user is into video games, a video game creator’s ad might run next to them. These interest categories are matched with more general information about users, like age and location.

While young, this is another promising way for MySpace to make money. The social networking site is already among the brighter lights in News Corp.’s traditional-media-heavy portfolio. “MySpace is one of their BEST-performing assets right now…MySpace is doing great,” says one analyst. The company didn’t quite meet its $1 billion revenue target last year, but the word on the street is it came relatively close — making it the highest-earning social network (that I’m aware of) by far.

[Extra credit: Find the image of Borat in the screenshot, above.]

Kidzui online services include links to more than 1.5 million parent- and teacher-approved web sites, games, pictures and videos. And now, when kids log in, they can see a live mini-feed with status updates from their friends, although all friend requests have to be approved by parents.

When sending status updates, kids can choose from a menu of moods or activities, such as “doing homework” or “energetic.”  And they can create their own Zui avatars, or animated characters, to use when communicating with each other. Instead of “poking” others as on Facebook, they “ping” each other.

The move to incorporate social networking into kids’ sites is becoming common. Glubble announced a couple of weeks ago that it has built social networking into its web-safe browser. Zookazoo, launched earlier this year, is also a kids’ game site with social networking features.

In general, these sites are like looking at the world through a kid’s eyes. The KidZui site has a new political page, where children can befriend the presidential and vice presidential candidates. So far, Barack Obama has more friends than John McCain.

“We designed this to be like MySpace and Facebook but in a way that works for kids,” said Cliff Boro, chief executive of KidZui.

The site tries to offer a balance of entertainment, education and community. On the education front, the company is launching Homework Helper, a teacher-designed system that gives kids access to a range of subjects from kindergarten to eight grade.

KidZui has about twice as much traffic as Glubble, according to Compete.com. But it has a long way to go before it gets anywhere near the traffic of the more game-oriented Club Penguin, Disney’s site for kids. The company also competes with Ask Kids, NetNanny, Cyber Patrol and Cybersitter, which filter out adult-oriented sites.

It will be interesting to see if the redesign helps KidZui. The company originally launched a subscription site in March but made it free in June to reach a wider audience. It shifted to a model where it makes money off ads for the free visitors. The company still offers a subscription of $4.95 a month for enhanced online reports for parents, Homework Helper, and other extras. It also has a virtual goods model, where kids can earn points if they discover new sites within the KidZui universe. They can use those points to buy a variety of virtual goods for their avatars.

To date, users have rated two million pieces of content and shared a million pieces of content. Kids use the site an average of three times a week. KidZui is backed by Maveron, Emergence Capital Partners and First Round Capital. It has raised $10 million in funding since 2006.

European leaders agree on financial rescue plan — The move will involve the injection of billions of Euros into banks in Germany, France and other countries. It was spurred by a similar British plan announced last week.

Memeorandum Colors visualizes political bias — The new Firefox extension/Greasemonkey script identifies the bias of the different publications on political news aggregator site Memeorandum.

Microsoft to release Silverlight 2 on Monday? — The company says it has “a significant announcement related to Microsoft Silverlight” coming at 9am Pacific time. Most likely, that means Microsoft has completed version 2 of its platform for web applications and media, according to All About Microsoft.

Oracle eyes more acquisitions — Chief executive Larry Ellison says he plans to take advantage of the slowing economy to snatch up other software companies at bargain rates.

Will open source companies flourish in a recession? — They sure will, according to O’Reilly Radar’s Nat Torkington and The Open Road’s Matt Asay.

Mahalo gets more news-oriented — The new design of the “human-powered search engine” includes a way to liveblog the headlines as well as a “top news” box on the home page.

Seesmic cuts seven employees — The video messaging company say it’s preparing for the economic downturn by eliminating staff. Expect other startups to follow suit.

Mark Zuckerberg on “opening up” — Facebook’s chief executive says the social network is rolling out its data portability technology Facebook Connect more cautiously than Facebook Platform. Earlier this week, Zuckerberg raised some eyebrows by saying Facebook’s focus is on growth, not on making money.

Bush signs broadband data collection bill — Most of the actions required by the law have already been accomplished by federal regulators, however.

In a kind of marketing gimmick for his online game, the flight dovetails with the storyline of Garriot’s Tabula Rasa game,  which begins when aliens wipe out Earth. He’s taking the DNA of a variety of celebrities in a bid to preserve a “copy of the human race” at the space station. Garriott previously made an appearance on The Colbert Report after he promised to take Colbert’s DNA up into space. That’s pretty good publicity for NCSoft, the publisher of the game, but Garriott is paying for the $30 million trip from his own riches.

Garriott is the sixth space tourist to fly a rocket into space, but his mission is likely draw a lot of attention from around the globe. As the son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, he’s the first second generation astronaut. You can track his progress on a web site.

Garriott will join NASA astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Lonchakove aboard the International Space Station. 

To prepare for the flight, Garriott went through cosmonaut training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia. The company that put him in orbit, Space Adventures, started launching privately funded spacecraft in 2001, when Dennis Tito went up. It has since become the ultimate vanity adventure.

But Garriott also plans on doing some research up in the space station, including taking pictures of the earth that can be compared to the pictures that his father took 35 years ago. The Nature Conservancy will analyze the pictures on its site to determine how much Earth’s landscape has changed in a generation.

A company named Olo Computer has a new product coming soon that is basically a netbook (a small laptop) with a built-in dock for the iPhone. The dock, which resides where a trackpad would be on a regular laptop, apparently allows you to run what is on your iPhone on the netbook’s larger screen. With its small camera above the screen, keyboard with small spaces in between the keys and pure white case Olo’s device even looks like a MacBook (at least until the new ones come out on Tuesday).

But the picture of the device on Olo’s site is deceiving. The image on the screen shows the computer running Apple’s OS X operating system — the real version, not the version that runs on the iPhone, as iTWire points out. So unless Olo is planning to install OS X on its systems (which Apple doesn’t allow), there is no way the netbook could pull information from the iPhone to run full OS X.

It’s not really clear what the Olo system will be able to pull from the iPhone. If it can completely recreate the iPhone user experience on a larger screen while you use the iPhone’s touchscreen itself to control everything, that would be pretty cool. But how would the system know to use the full-sized keyboard of the device rather than the iPhone’s keyboard if you’re using that to control other aspects on screen?

It would seem that Olo will have some kind of customized application for the iPhone to handle the transition to the netbook screen, but would Apple allow such an application in its App Store? Maybe, or maybe not. Apple has come under fire for rejecting some applications that compete with its own apps. Apple also might not like one that changes the way the iPhone is used.

If it works, such a device could be very useful — especially for heavy travelers. Or it could be another Palm Foleo — a similar device for Palm that was cancelled shortly after it was introduced in 2007.

The obvious danger is a slowdown in venture funding, as pointed out in a leaked Sequoia Capital presentation and this contributor piece from Advanced Technology Ventures’ Todd Kimmel. Companies without large funding rounds to draw from will struggle to commercialize their products, especially mid-stage cleantech outfits, who need a lot of capital to move from pilot demonstrations to commercial installations.

More broadly, it’s questionable whether even the biggest companies will be able to tap into debt markets for ambitious projects like massive solar power plants in California’s Mojave Desert and San Luis Obispo County. Those look like safe investments that will be able to attract capital. But wind, which is a more proven technology than solar, is already having trouble getting enough capital, according to the WSJ Environmental Capital blog.

Another looming question is the price of oil. When oil was spiking upward, renewable energy looked like the obvious beneficiary. But a reaction was brewing in response to high pump prices: Falling demand. That promised to keep oil prices stable, but the fright in the markets appears to be causing a more serious contraction in oil prices. Today, oil fell below $80, marking a 13-month low.

As always, it’s impossible to predict with any certainty which way oil prices will head. But given a recession, continued low demand seems likely, and oil prices are set at the margin of supply and demand. While low prices are probably not permanent, consumers are notorious for their short memories. That means that in the interim, products like electric cars could lose some of their heroic aura. Biofuels like cellulosic ethanol, which look fine right now, could also suffer.

There are several other sectors that could be troubled, including green building materials — who would start construction now? — and water, which almost always requires a lot of money. But the final area that deserves special mention is carbon trading and emissions caps. The Associated Press reports that the Kyoto Protocol, which attempts to limit emissions worldwide, could be ignored as developing countries move to protect their assets.

At home, that could also be true. Take the Chicago Climate Exchange, for instance, which recently started up. Prices were higher than expected for its initial round of carbon offsets, but such commodities are likely to be viewed as luxury items in a recession. And for those who need excuses not to buy offsets, there are plenty of good ones, as Grist points out.