Thanks much to Eric W. for filling in while I was off the grid for over a week -- I hereby BOTH denounce AND reject his "snark"...  but hope everyone enjoyed it. Also regrettably missed the Cleantech Venture Forum out in San Francisco last week, which sounds like it was a pretty good one.   Some media coverage on major developments at the event:

•  WalMart and the Cleantech Group's new sourcing announcement
• Cleantech Group expansion into India with Vinod "Greentech" Khosla at the helm
• Discussions on investing in India and China cleantech
• Google, Masdar and Simbol Mining Corp winning awards
• Some photos from the event
• The winning VC firms for the DOE's new EIR program

Deals from the last week or so:

• GTM already discussed Southridge Enterprises, Miles Electric Vehicles, Ausra, 1-Solar, Solar Systems, Hoku, and Climos, as well as Mascoma, APX, PureSense, and ActaCell.  More on the PureSense round here.

• PurFresh (f/k/a Novazone) also closed their Series C, previously discussed back in December.

• Khosla Ventures is part of a reportedly $12mm Series A (in two $6mm tranches) into Pax Streamline.

• GE has so far put $20mm into A123 and $4mm into Think Global.

• SolarPower Israel has raised $1.1mm ("at a company value of a few million dollars") from Precede Technologies and Rosenram Development.

Investors in the news:

• Altira Group closed their fifth fund at $176mm (or $178mm, the linked article appears to have some confusion).

• The latest cleantech deal numbers -- from Dow Jones VentureSource and from New Energy Finance.

• An interview with Dave Ryan of GreenSpark Ventures

• An effort is launched to create a democratic pledge-fund-format cleantech venture fund for "average Joes"

Cleantech cluster-building updates:  Massachusetts thinking big, the Rice Business Plan Competition looks like it will be very strong, New York's renewable energy task force says the state should put $400mm into cleantech, and the Bay Area may enact a carbon tax (hope they checked out my last post on the topic). Finally, it's well worth checking out GTM's 9 big solar trends.