Conglomerate invests money – and its considerable resources – in young energy firms.

By Marc Gunther, contributing editor

GE's Urquhart offers startups cash and connections. Photo: GE

When A123 Systems (AONE), a startup company that makes advanced lithium-ion batteries, had a successful initial public offering last month, one of the big winners was General Electric (GE).

That’s because A123 Systems is by far the biggest holding of a venture capital fund run by GE that invests in energy startups. Over six rounds of funding, GE had invested $69 million in A123, which makes batteries for cars, trucks, buses, utilities and consumer products, like Black & Decker tools.

Today, GE is A123’s biggest shareholder and its stake in the company is worth about $190 million.

With little fanfare, GE’s venture fund has been investing in a broad variety of energy startups since 2006. Most of the investments are small—so far, GE has invested about $160 million in 20 companies. More

Live from New York, it's Sam Palmisano.

Palmisano is spending almost two days talking about smart stuff. Photo: IBM

The business strategy made possible by $50 billion in acquisitions, hundreds of millions on marketing, and various forms of ecological disaster, is taking the show on the road–to Manhattan's Lincoln Center.

For the next day and a half, IBM's (IBM) Smarter Planet initiative will occupy New York City's Lincoln Center in the form of a conference on developing smarter cities. IBM CEO Sam Palmisano and Mayor Michael Bloomberg will kick off the event this afternoon with a discussion about the steps New York City has taken to employ a combination of data-gathering and analytics software to reduce crime, minimize risk for firefighters, and monitor water conditions.

The remainder of the sweeping agenda will cover everything form education, healthcare, energy, and transportation, to government services. Weighing in on such heady topics will be political heavyweights–including the governors of Vermont and Georgia as well as the mayors of Atlanta, Charlotte, Phoenix, and San Jose.  Business leaders, including the chairs and CEOs of ABB, Mayo Clinic, National Football League, and Verizon Communications (VZ), among many others, will offer their perspectives. More

Can smarter networks save the planet?

Unlike many technology confabs the upcoming Brainstorm Tech event is produced by journalists with the aim of creating a conference that is an informative, lively and multifaceted as a feature article in a magazine. Fortune writers and editors always get good story ideas from Brainstorm Tech. But sometimes the conference anels and discussions evolve from stories we've already run in the magazine or online.

One such panel, taking place on the second afternoon of the conference, is Fear of a Dumb Planet, featuring Doug Eberhard, senior director and industry evangelist at Autodesk, Rick Hutley, Vice President Global Innovations, Cisco, and Bill Pulleyblank, Vice President, Center for Business Optimization, IBM's Global Business Services.  The conversation owes a big debt to a story that senior editor Jeff O'Brien wrote for our annual FORTUNE 500 issue. IBM's Grand Plan to Save the Planet is a sweeping look inside IBM's "Smarter Planet" effort to make the world a better place by bringing intelligence to dumb networks. Jeff, who is moderating the panel at Brainstorm, acknowledges in his story that IBM's Smarter Planet campaign is in many ways a not-so-veiled effort to secure federal stimulus money. But he also shows places where smarter networks are making a real difference in quality of life.