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Consumer-Facing Smart Grid: Too Many Gadgets?

27 Aug

Greentech Media

There are a few paths to the consumer-facing smart grid. You can go device-crazy and try to arm every appliance in the house and building with a sensor and radio to go along with a controller, an in-home display (IHD) and an internet gateway (that in some cases connects to your smart meter in cooperation with your utility). This will allow you to monitor and shut off your appliances remotely.
Tendril, Energy Hub, and apparently, People Power (and others) look to be going that route. Add Alarm.com, ControlPoint, Lucid Design, and Microsoft's Hohm to that list in varying degrees. That's going to be expensive and complicated for the consumer and utility.
The indications on the challenges with this type of solution are the small numbers of in-home displays and home area networks actually deployed by utilities. We've spoken to some industry experts who estimate that the total number of all IHDs deployed is probably less than 10,000 to 20,000 units. Leading utilities are only doing tests in the hundreds or low thousands of units. In any case, it's a relatively small number.
What price and level of difficulty are people and households willing to accept to deliver unknown levels of savings?

***
Let's take a quick look at People Power.
Gene Wang is the CEO and founder of "still in stealth" People Power, a startup focused on energy efficiency. It's Wang's fifth startup and he's been very successful in his previous companies which he sold to Agilent and HP (Photo Access and Bitfone, respectively), and with another, Computer Motion, that went public in 1997. Mr. Wang calls himself a serial-entrepreneur and he doesn't hesitate to say that he has made millions, if not tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for himself and his investors. Here's Wang's Hillary Clinton video and NY Times write-up.
Despite the stealth identity, Wang speaks at a lot of industry events. I've watched Gene speak on a number of panels, he's been on at least one panel that I've moderated, and I still have no clear idea of what his company actually does. The startup is VC-funded by New Cycle Capital along with angel investors and already has 70 employees, many from Wang's old team at Bitfone. Although I'm not sure if Gene has divulged the stealthy business plan to his VCs or employees yet.

This might be an example of investors betting on the rider, not the horse.
According to the website, People Power is helping consumers save money on their energy bills while helping to save the planet by reducing carbon pollution. Wang said, "We dedicate an entire coal-fired plant to power the nation's TVs while they are turned off."
People Power just received a $1 million SBIR grant. Their first SBIR money was to "enable automated energy management and conservation within the residential community." The Phase II Grant was to "empower the consumer with "actionable intelligence" using demand response services and simple, internet-enabled consumer dashboards and scorecards."
[Pop quiz time: Name an example of a workable residential demand-response business model -- other than a rolling blackout.]
Wang is looking for a Series B funding round and said that it's been very challenging to raise money despite the "capital efficiency of the firm" and the "great team." He mentioned that Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures chose to pass on this opportunity.
In a conversation I had with Wang in March, he said, "People Power is accessing the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency." He calls the firm "a multi-faceted energy efficiency and smart grid company," adding that "the smart grid starts in the home" and "the consumer has to be educated." Press releases mention that People Power will "monitor and control energy consumption at the appliance level."

The firm has not announced their consumer products, although they have announced their $150 developer's kit. According to the CEO, "We intend to create an ecosystem." Wang also said, "We needed to build this platform to enable our products." Wang hints at the consumer product by saying, "It needs to be drop-dead simple to let the house or building shut off devices, to learn the activity in the house and to dashboard the activity of the home."
The main idea seems to be a multi-mode 900MHz HAN that has extreme reliability and extended range. Wang claims that this network will have twice the range of the 2.4GHz ZigBee spectrum while consuming half the power, and will be the only HAN that directly connects orphan appliances like the dryer in the basement with the outdoor electric meter -- without repeaters. In Wang's view, ZigBee won't work well enough for intra-home communication (despite the fact that the firm joined the ZigBee Alliance in March).
People Power's SuRF (sensor ultra RF) set of open source developer's boards is based on OSHAN (Open Source Home Area Network), with wireless sensors enabled by TinyOS.
Wang claims that "energy management is just like device management," though I say that's debatable. Consumer entertainment devices have a different value proposition and behavioral profile than the world of energy usage. The cost and complexity of networking the home's "internet of things" may not be worth the cost savings.
***
You could go the minimalist route like OPower.
With more than $30 million in revenue, OPower is a successful energy efficiency company focused on customer engagement and behavior modification, currently providing millions of homes with in-home energy data and efficiency advice via paper reports or online. The platform is described as advanced customer engagement and the firm says that about 85 percent of its customers will cut power consumption by around 3.5 percent. The customized data lets people know how much energy they're using in comparison to their neighbors and then follows it up with a recommended course of action.
And OPower has done it without having to place any hardware in the home.
***
There might be a middle path, as well.
EcoFactor goes after the major energy-drawing culprits in the home, heating and cooling, with a smart thermostat and some software. That takes care of more than half of residential energy usage. Most of the company's value is in the software (as a service), not the thermostat itself. And they are working toward being agnostic with regard to hardware and protocol.
Powerhouse Dynamics tries to focus on power-hungry appliances by monitoring residential electrical circuits.
***
Which leaves us with the most pressing residential smart grid question:
How much hardware and attention is the consumer willing to devote to save ten percent or twenty percent on their electric bill? How long before those displays and devices wind up in the kitchen junk drawer?
And the uneasy conclusion:
Home energy monitoring motivations and energy usage pain-points are very different than those for smart phones or consumer entertainment gadgets. Many device-heavy consumer smartgrid startups with consumer-oriented entrepreneurs and their investors are going to learn that good and hard in the coming years.

Read more over at www.greentechmedia.com
LG Ally Android Smartphone for Verizon Review

27 Aug

The Gadgeteer

Android devices such as the Motorola Droid X and Droid 2 are super hot right now. The great thing about them is that unlike the Apple iPhone, there is more than one choice if you want a phone with the Android OS. We usually gravitate to the high end smartphones here on The Gadgeteer, but today Bryan and I want to show you Verizon’s least expensive Android phone for those of you that don’t want to spend a lot of bucks to dip your toe into the pond of little Green robots. It’s the LG Ally.
Julie’s comments are in Black and Bryan’s are in Blue.
… [visit site to read more]

Filed in categories: Android related, Reviews
Tagged: Android
LG Ally Android Smartphone for Verizon Review originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on August 27, 2010 at 10:30 am.
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Read more over at the-gadgeteer.com
New Apple A4 chip patent hints at smaller, sleeker devices

27 Aug

Macworld UK - News

A newly published patent application from Apple reveals systems and methods for providing a system-on-a-substrate related to the A4 processor, which could see the Mac maker introduce smaller gadgets and a 'iMac touch.'

Read more over at www.macworld.co.uk
Spycraft: A tide turns

27 Aug

The Economist - International

Technology used to help spies. Now it hinders them
DEPENDING on what kind of spy you are, you either love technology or hate it. For intelligence-gatherers whose work is based on bugging and eavesdropping, life has never been better. Finicky miniature cameras and tape recorders have given way to pinhead-sized gadgets, powered remotely (a big problem in the old days used to be changing the batteries on bugs).
Encrypted electronic communications are a splendid target for the huge computers at places such as America’s National Security Agency. Even a message that is impregnably encoded by today’s standards may be cracked in the future. That gives security-conscious officials the shivers. ...

Read more over at www.economist.com
Socket and see: Apple reinvents the audio jack

27 Aug

Short Sharp Science

Paul Marks, technology correspondent
Although Apple is known for filing patents on complex multi-touch algorithms, anti-piracy measures and advanced user interfaces, it still has a focus on basic hardware engineering. One US patent application filed this week shows the firm reinventing the humble audio jack socket. The reason? There are too many holes in today's gadgets.
Apple complains that building laptops and phones means drilling holes in the casing to allow microphones, headsets, USB plugs and switches to access the electronic innards. Each aperture, however, "breaches the barrier that protects components inside the housing" - allowing dust and liquids yet another way to get in where they can cause short circuits and overheating. And each gadget in each aperture needs circuitry behind it that eats up precious room on the circuit board, too.

Apple's answer is to reduce the hole count by making them multifunctional. It proposes removing the need for a separate microphone aperture by making it part of the socket the headphone jack plugs into. This adds only a couple of milllimetres to the socket length - the mic fits behind the tip of the jack plug. The result: "A microphone can be added to a mobile telephone without the need for an external aperture."
It's not clear, however, if the jack plug require a redesign too: will it need to be shot through with holes to provide an acoustic path to the mic? Quite probably.
If that doesn't tickle your fancy, the jack-socket mic could serve a different purpose. If the phone retains a standard built-in phone mic, that mic and a second one in the jack socket can work in concert, Apple says, to produce noise cancellation. To do that, you invert the sound signal from one mic and add it to the other - which has the effect of removing all noise apart from the sounds local to one mic - such as your voice.
Still another benefit of two mics is "beamforming": the mics can adjust the phase of input signals heard by each mic to listen in on sound from certain directions only. Handy for a spot of espionage at Starbucks, no doubt.

Read more over at www.newscientist.com
Gadget Freak Case #168: Gas Sensors Sniff Out Danger

27 Aug

Design News

Natanel Eizenberg built a sensor module that detects and measures carbon monoxide and...

Read more over at www.designnews.com
Real Shoe Cellphone Dock!

27 Aug

DeClubz

Want a fashionable cellphone dock that will bring out the woman in you? No worries, check out this Shoe Cellphone Dock that comes ready with a hole in the bottom so you can easily use it as a charging station and a place to hold your cellphone, available on Amazon for $19.
Post from: DeClubz - The Weird and Bizarre Blog
Real Shoe Cellphone Dock!
cellphone dock, shoe cellphone dock, Weird and Bizarre, Weird Gadgets

Read more over at declubz.com
Bookshops Push Custom Printing

27 Aug

WSJ.com - Technology

Even as people embrace Kindles and other gadgets for reading, bookstores and publishers are finding a market for titles printed in small custom batches.

Read more over at online.wsj.com
China Unicom pins hopes on i-gadgets

26 Aug

South China Morning Post - Business

China Unicom is pinning its hopes on the mainland launch of Apple's iPhone4 and the iPad to reverse its fortunes this year after reporting a 62 per cent slump in first-half profit owing to the high cost of introducing its 3G business.

Read more over at www.scmp.com
Broadcom Pitches Lingua Franca for PCs, TVs and Tablets

26 Aug

NYT - Technology

Via a new software platform, Broadcom looks to make it easier for software makers to link our gadgets and share files. Intel is working on a similar solution.

Read more over at www.nytimes.com