The emergence of cloud computing has forced companies to re-think about where their data is stored, as well as which technologies are best to support a distributed data storage model. The ideal scenario is storage that’s cheap and quickly scalable — just keep on adding storage in the cloud as your data needs grow. Facebook’s Avinash Lakshman says that over the past year the social networking company has tripled its storage nodes. Cloudera’s Chief Scientist Jeff Hammerbacher says he’s seen systems as large as 4,000 nodes in the cloud. Continue »

As Earth2Tech pointed out earlier this week, everyone and their mother is building home energy management tools these days, including Google. Today, Microsoft unveiled its new home energy management software: Hohm (not to be confused with Sprint’s WiMAX network, Xohm). Announced this morning by Microsoft Chief Strategy and Research Officer Craig Mundie at the Edison Electric Institute conference in San Francisco, the online software will enable consumers to monitor and manage home energy consumption.
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The recent lawsuit filed last month by Tesla founder Martin Eberhard alleging the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, is trying to appropriate the legacy of being the electric car startup’s founder, might be the equivalent of Silicon Valley’s version of the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit, but it raises some interesting questions: What does it mean to be a founder, and why is the status of a founder so important to entrepreneurs?

A founder isn’t just a concept — someone who created or invented a company — it’s also a title that can be negotiated. It’s not so uncommon for someone who joins a company shortly after the original founder to request a co-founder title. Companies are often created by groups of co-founders who have agreed to share the title, regardless of whether one of them pulled more weight with the kernel of the idea. But if there ends up being bad blood among original team members, then the odds naturally increase that there will be a debate over who are considered to be founders.

That’s because the status of a founder carries all sorts of weight financially — for both increased equity and the person’s future ability to start more companies and generate wealth — and socially, in terms of reputation and the notion of how much the person has contributed to society. Founding companies is attached to creating progress (either in a niche market or on a larger scale), and that’s something that is highly valued, particularly in U.S. culture — going as far back as the Founding Fathers. While we won’t pretend to know the technicalities of the Tesla lawsuit, the passion behind founder status is something a lot of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley can understand. Read the full story on Earth2Tech.com.

If you thought the consumer portion of the smart grid would look a lot like the Internet — a real-time, two-way network with innovative services and applications — think again. Most of the utilities’ smart meter rollouts are designed around networks that collect smart meter data in 15-60 minute intervals, and then can only deliver energy consumption information back to the customer a good 24 hours later. That’s not exactly a smart network, and even worse, without real-time functionality (whereby a consumer can see the cost of energy rise, in real time, during peak use hours, or how much energy an appliance consumes, in real time) it will be more difficult to change consumption behavior, which defeats the purpose of installing the smart meter systems in the first place. Sure there will be home energy management products that bypass the utility systems, but without utility support, they’ll be a long time coming.

If you’ve been wondering what Google’s online energy management tool PowerMeter will look like, then we’ve got a treat for you: The company showed off PowerMeter as an iGoogle gadget that manages home energy data this afternoon to participants of a demo call, including what the gadget looks like embedded on the iGoogle home page, as well as in a more expanded version. Notably, Google exec Tom Sly said on the call that Google has no intention of charging utilities, customers and third-party vendors for it — in other words, it has no business model for PowerMeter.

Back when municipal Wi-Fi was all the rage, EarthLink still had its shirt and Kelly Clarkson was leading the charts. Companies like Tropos, Skypilot Networks and Strix were providing gear for high-profile city networks that promised to disrupt the established telecom paradigm and free us from the chains of the phone company/cable duopoly. Well, as we know now, it didn’t work out that way, and as Om declared two years ago, muni Wi-Fi turned out not to be “the third pipe.” So what’s become of these former municipal Wi-Fi gear makers? Continue »

WiMAX might be losing broadband mindshare in the U.S., but when it comes to adding digital intelligence to the power grid, it’s suddenly emerging as an early contender. WiMAX gear maker Alvarion, which is one of the top three manufacturers in the industry, along with Alcatel-Lucent and Motorola, told Earth2Tech that it has been doing a couple of pilot projects using WiMAX gear to connect energy data in smart meter deployments. Alvarion wouldn’t disclose its partners, but said it plans to do so shortly. Continue »