This video from the their youtube channel shares one home owners Blu Home experience

Another exciting element about Blu Homes is their support of using innovative web technology to help the home owner. This video demonstrates Blu Homes’ online 3D configurator. This web3d application allows customers the ability to customize certain elements of a Blu Home while freely navigating the 3D model and see their choices in real time.

Last month the Bay area IDEAbuilder crew got a chance to visit the opening of fellow home builder Blu Homes’ new production factory. With their first factory in Massachusetts, this second 250,000-square-foot factory on Mare Island in Vallejo, California will serve their clients on the West Coast.

Blu Homes purchased the assets of Michelle Kaufmann in 2009 and they are well-funded with over $25 million of investment since its founding in 2007 by Bill Haney and Maura McCarthy.

We are excited to see more home builders embracing new construction techniques and technology tools to help the home building process and salute Blu Homes as another green building innovator.

From ETH in Switzerland
More information on the ongoing project here:

The team over at Go Wood is promoting this video on their website

Go Wood: "The World's Most Environmentally-Friendly Raw Material"

And here is Michael Green speaking about using wood in tall buildings at TEDx in Vancouver.

A great new report has been released by The Breakthrough Institute. The full report is available here and very much worth reading as a guide for how we can achieve smart, green growth by integrating advanced manufacturing technologies with software to create scalable green building systems.

Tedd discusses his open-built system at length and how this system is derivative of Andrea Palladio’s work in the 16th century.

Because he views the world from a builder/fabricator perspective, he defines building information modeling as pre-building a structures digitally (as opposed to a more common view of BIM as being a particular cad authoring application) and then fabricating them using CNC. I share his opinion (and frustration) that all other industries have been using an integrated design-optimize-fabricate-assemble process yet it remains largely unknown in the building sector.

Tedd uses a lot of European technologies including Cadwork design/manufacturing software and purchased one of the first Hundegger CNC lines to be used in the U.S.

He is working with researchers at MIT on the Open Prototype Initiative but does state at minute 4:25 of the video “I stopped doing research in this country in the late 1980s. Really in fact, to be honest with you, there is not much good going on in America in building technology.”

Quite a statement from one of the leading innovators in residential construction.

Full article on the Modular Home Coach website.

Startup Genome released the report. Registration required to download a copy or you can read about it elsewhere at websites like this one.

Taking money too early makes life difficult for any business, but even more so for cleantech. There haven’t been many successful cleantech exits for VCs and given how negative some investors are on the sector, one must be very careful indeed. Check out the Don of the Paypal Mafia, Peter Thiel, on VC investing in cleantech.