The Wall Street Journal’s “Venture Capital Dispatch” blog has a brief piece about some of the venture investment being directed towards the efficient lighting sector, which is currently dominated by Light Emitting Diode (LED) technologies.

The article quotes some enticing numbers, with Marc van den Berg of VantagePoint Venture Partners estimating that the LED market will grow from its 2008 size of $5 billion to reach around ten times that by 2020.

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You may have read earlier this year that the search giant Google  has launched a $100 million venture capital fund called, appropriately enough, Google Ventures.

The part of the announcement that caught our eye related to how they’re planning to do the technical due diligence on the investment opportunities that they identify:

“The company will look to its employees to help evaluate both specific start-ups and investment areas in general”

From the outside, this sounds like a risky strategy; in our experience, using internal expertise for technical due diligence is often a mistake. Pulling an engineer from his or her day job to consult on an investment opportunity has a lot of potential to cause problems.

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There’s more fallout from the Cello Energy case that we commented on last week, with suggestions from The New Republic journal that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) may have been guilty of neglecting their technical due diligence too.

Perhaps Cello’s investors had difficulty finding the right experts to assess the company (we’re right here chaps!), but surely that’s not a problem for the EPA?

We quite often see cases where investors could have saved a great deal of money by applying more thorough technical due diligence, but the recent Cello Energy fraud case is one of the most clear-cut and dramatic examples that anyone here has ever come across. From Reuters:

Jurors in a federal court have ordered Cello Energy, a biofuel startup run by Alabama’s former ethics chairman, Jack Boykin, and backed by both Silicon Valley cleantech investors Khosla Ventures and pulp maker Parsons & Whittemore Enterprises, to pay more than $10.4 million in a fraud case.

Cello agreed to use discounted wood waste from [Parsons & Whittemore] as feedstock, but “a string of witnesses testified that samples of the fuel allegedly produced at Cello’s facility…were derived entirely from fossil and not renewable sources”

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