On December 13, the company filed a trademark application for the wordmark “Kindle” with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office with a curious description of the associated goods and services:

“Maintenance, repair, updating and installation services for computer hardware, computer peripherals, computer networks and consumer electronic devices; consulting services in the field of physical maintenance of computer hardware, computer peripherals, computer networks and consumer electronic devices; technical support services, namely, troubleshooting in the nature of the repair of computer hardware.”

The funny thing about that description is that it’s essentially a copy of Apple’s AppleCare trademark, which covers the “maintenance, repair, updating and installation services for computer hardware, computer peripherals, computer networks and consumer electronic devices,” and so forth. You get the idea.

Amazon also filed for an associated trademark for “insurance and warranty services” to underwrite warranty and extended warranty contracts for these kinds of repair and maintenance services, which again is more or less a copy of an AppleCare trademark filed by Apple.

Extended warranties: A billion-dollar business

Amazon didn’t respond to our requests for comment, and the copy and paste job on the trademark may just be one of those funny things lawyers do to keep their line of work interesting. But the mere fact that Amazon is thinking about applying the AppleCare model of extended warranties is intriguing.

We all hate extended warranties – except for AppleCare.

After all, let’s face it: We all hate it when the sales folks at Best Buy try to sweet-talk us into paying those extra $30 or $50 bucks for an extended warranty for a gadget that we are going to replace in a year or two anyway. However, many of us also have no problem with paying for AppleCare, which is essentially the same thing, just done right.

And extended warranties are big business. Some estimate that consumers spend up to $25 billion a year on these kinds of warranty deals, even though it’s unclear how much of that is spent on consumer electronics.

Amazon is currently offering Kindle customers an extended warranty program from Service Net, a third-party warranty provider that is owned by AIG. Cutting out that middleman could potentially add some nice revenue to Amazon’s bottom line, especially considering that the company’s Kindle Fire tablets are sold more or less at cost.

Wait… PCs, networking equipment, CE devices?

However, there’s something else that’s interesting about this trademark: the breadth of devices and services mentioned. That kind of wording makes more sense for a company like Apple. Up until now, Amazon has only produced Kindle ebook readers and tablets.

Amazon’s Lab126 may be working on a lot more than just tablets and ebook readers.

But the trademark filings suggest that it might consider selling warranties for computers, networking gear and other CE devices as well. Offering this under the Kindle brand really only makes sense if the company also started to make its own line of Kindle computers, networking gear and CE devices.

There have been persistent rumors in the past that Amazon is working on its own mobile phone, and we reported in September that the company has been snapping up developers with a background in Android-based TV development. Amazon has been working on a number of secret R&D projects at its Bay Area-based Lab126 subsidiary. A few of them might be getting to a point where Amazon is thinking about how to monetize them – and extended warranties could be part of that puzzle.

With additional reporting by Laura Hazard Owen.

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Facebook’s data center in North Carolina.

RTG may never reach its goal of reaching all 14.3 million people in both states, but it has gotten started thanks to an undisclosed, “multimillion-dollar” investment from the three founders. The company says it has designed a network, a deployment model and is using a new twist on old ways of drilling to install cable to reduce the cost of deploying fiber to the home.

Old tech with new, cheaper functionality.

Randy Revels, the CTO of RST, explains that the network uses GPON technology like Verizon does in its fiber network, but that it isn’t spliced in as many places like the FIOS network is. In the Verizon network, fiber is spliced together multiple times between the Internet exchange point and the customer’s home. In the RST network, a continuous fused fiber network connected back to the Internet backbone is laid along the routes. When a customer calls and wants to be added to the network, a technician comes out, digs the trenches to the home or business and connect the building to the main fiber line. That means there are fewer connectors and splices in the fiber, which means less gear.

A customer may have to wait two weeks after calling before they get hooked into the network, but this way RST, like Google, only incurs the expense of building out a home when someone is ready to subscribe to the service. For a traditional telco network, the deployment goal was to pass all of the homes in one-go and then install the last few feet and gear when the customer called, but at the back end the network had to be provisioned for all the customers to sign up. That decision has influenced the network design and cost, resulting in more gear costs up front.

But the biggest reduction in cost is new technology put to use on drills used to run the fiber underground. Using a chip and camera inside the drill head, an operator can maneuver the drill underground to avoid obstacles. Because that tech has improved so much and is cheaper, RST has chosen to dig the entire network that way, bypassing aerial fiber strung from telephone poles. This adds security and makes it less repair-prone, but it also helps RST avoid deals with potential competitors and municipalities in order to get on the telephone poles. Even Google’s fiber network in Kansas City hit a bit of a snag when it came to getting its fiber on poles.

Fiber is the future, for real.

Limerick says the cost of homes passed for RST is much less than $1,500 per home averaged across both rural and urban areas, which is about half of what some analysts think Google spent and in line with what analysts estimated that Verizon spent. But that’s still $30 million when you multiply it by the 20,000 homes the network reaches. But Limerick and his co-founders Revels and Doug Brown, are convinced the Carolinas need it.

“Imagine if you have full-blown uncompressed HD TV on three screens, and have home monitoring cameras, and home automation data and smart grid and everything else. Telemedicine and robotic surgery that can already be done today and when you add that up you can’t get it through a cable modem. You need fiber,” Revels said.

Thus, he and his partners are taking their money and putting it 10 feet underground, building out an all-fiber network that stretches from the last mile to the middle mile and meets the places where the internet backbone begins. “This has to be built in the U.S. sooner or later and we are starting with this footprint so we can show a test model so people can see how versatile and all encompassing this is compared to networks today,” Limerick said.

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Just looking around last week’s IFA event in Berlin, you’ll see what I mean — a whopping great 4K television set from Sony that comes in at 84 inches across; a Windows handsets from Samsung that’s a “crazy thin” “powerhouse”.

But is there anything else out there? Are there any other ways to understand what’s happening?

Unpicking was the idea behind an IFA fringe event I spoke at called The Zeitgeist Project. Over the course of an evening, a group of speakers — including Richard Seymour of design firm Seymourpowell; Tom Uglow of Google’s Creative Lab in Australia; and Michael Wolff, co-founder of legendary branding company Wolff Olins — discussed new ideas in design, unpicked new trends, and found hero products that we thought represented a new future.

My trend was intimacy, something I explained through a short polemic you can see on The Zeitgeist Project site, but that’s worth elucidating here, too. I think it’s one of the driving trends of innovation right now, even if we can’t always see it.

Basically, I think product designers are becoming much more aware of the need to foster intimacy between the things they make and the people who use them — and we’re seeing a new vocabulary of ideas and services emerging that do precisely that.

Why? We often feel ambivalent and distanced about mass manufactured goods, and try to find different ways to make them feel special, intimate and personal. Now we’re developing new methods (both in terms of design and manufacture) to capitalize on that desire.

There are obvious, little ways that we can forge a closer bond with products — the way we use them, the small things we do to customize or personalize them, the memories and personalities we imbue them with. But those are all after the fact, and not really designed into the product itself. Consumer electronics are not like a chef’s pan, which is expected to improve as it become battered and bruised with age — the most desirable state for most electronics is fresh out of the box.

At a design level, I think we’re learning lots of new ways to foster intimacy before customers can even get their hands on the end result. We’re finding new ways to involve people.

That’s one reason Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms have been successful — they create a level of intimacy between the product and the customer. Partly people are buying into a dream, supporting people they are fans of, or just paying for the entertainment value of being part of a movement — but they’re also joining in because they want to have a personal relationship with a product (and the product’s creators). They want to imbue it with a story.

Crowdfunding is really about a method of service design that creates intimacy while the product is still on the drawing board.

But we’re also learning new ways to make things in ways that can foster intimacy. The craft and artisan movement has had a big impact across lots of areas — food and drink, for example — but it’s now starting to move, in a fashion, into the way we manufacture some more complex goods. And not in a hokey way either!

At one end, you have small batch manufacturing. The way that web platforms like Alibaba have helped democratize access to the resources for building products, particularly from the Chinese manufacturing base, is helping change the economics of many products. Not long ago, it would take huge capex and big teams. Now you can outsource it as easily as emailing a design.

I think the zenith of this trend may be something that’s been around for a little while, 3D printing. What started out as a way of producing rapid prototypes and three-dimensional models is now starting to bleed into the world of real products. It’s the ultimate small batch, because each product is made individually, automatically and so can be built in a fashion that is both crafted and manufactured at the same time. It’s opening the door to a level of intimacy and personalization that we haven’t seen before in products like this.

Now, I’m not claiming 3D printing will save the world. There are plenty of people who seem to be doing that, and they’re overestimating it. 3D printing, as it is, won’t change everything. But if you agree with me that fostering intimacy is a way of making better products, then you may be able to understand why, in the right circumstances, I’d encourage a product printed individually, personalized to your needs and tailored to your requirements. Imagine a pair of glasses designed to fit you and nobody else, or a handset that was actually made to fit the dimensions of your hand.

I think the combination of those things — being able to make people part of the product before it ever goes on sale, and being able to develop and produce goods that are individually tailored and made in the smallest possible batches at the right price — is the herald of a new sort of storytelling in products, an intimacy that could change the way we think about what we do.

The product I picked that best explained that trend was the Makie doll, a 3D printed doll that I’ve written about before. It’s one of the first applications of this technology in a real way, and it is all about the story — all about the relationship between you and your personalized product.

I wasn’t alone in thinking along this road: some of the other suggestions from were about ways to feel closer to products; through sound or manipulating our brains (Oxford neuroscientist Charles Spence had a great presentation); through the act of making; through emotional resonance. If you want to hear more about their ideas, you could turn to Adam Tinworth’s comprehensive liveblog or this post by the organizers, Freestate.

Will we see more of it? Perhaps not on the show floors of trade shows, at least not very soon. But in the sheds, the garages and the dreams of people all over the world, I think there’s a quest for intimacy that we should all take notice of.

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The Big Three and their overseas rivals all converged at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show and Detroit Auto Show to show off their efforts, as GigaOM reported at the time.

The U.S. Department of Transportation, which hosted a distracted driving summit in 2009 and 2010, did not hold the event last year, a sign that the issue is not a priority, which has emboldened automakers to forge ahead, according to the Journal. Update: A DOT spokeswoman said it is too early to say if the agency will host the summit, which has taken place in the fall, this year. But she said the agency remains focused on the problem of distracted driving.

This in-car infotainment deluge comes despite the fact that a driver who texts (or is otherwise distracted) is 23 times more likely to crash, according to the National Transportation Board, which posts such data to its distraction.gov website. Other distractions include reading onboard GPS systems, adjusting the radio or watching a video.

While the consumer electronics and software companies at these events were careful to stress their reliance on hands-free operation, the fact remains that the automobile is looking more and more like a home entertainment center. The Journal said the automakers have used these hands-free features to say that using in-dash systems is safer than manipulating their cell phones to make calls or text.

As Michael Sprague, the marketing director at Kia Motors’ North American division, told the Journal: 

Consumers are going to continue to drive with phones and all we can do as a manufacturer is to provide what the consumers are asking for and make it as safe as possible.

This contention between infotainment and safety will not go away anytime soon. Critics complain that what the automakers and their consumer electronics allies are doing is making it easier to drive while distracted. If the federal government won’t act, the states may. Massachusetts, for example, is getting closer to banning all use of handheld cell phones by drivers. New York is also pondering such a move. Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia have already banned texting while driving. Thirty states (and Washington, D.C.) ban all cell phone use by new drivers. The Governors Highway Safety Association keeps a list of distracted driving statutes by state. And New York state is about to hold a hearing on distracted driving.

It doesn’t take a huge leap to see that as these new gizmo-packed cars hit the road, the potential for more distracted drivers will rise. Look for more scrutiny from safety advocacy groups and the states, if not the federal government, going forward.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user mroach

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Apple was the only brand in the top five in the U.S. to see an increase in sales, which was 36 percent more than the company’s U.S. sales in 2010. And in the fourth quarter — which you may remember was Apple’s biggest quarter in the history of the company — Apple “accounted for 19 percent of all sales dollars” of consumer gadgets sold, according to the NPD report. Or, for comparison, twice as many in that quarter as the world’s largest PC maker, Hewlett-Packard.

The report goes on to say that there are fewer and fewer categories of devices that U.S. consumers are spending their money on. And part of what’s working in Apple’s favor is that Apple makes products in most of those select categories:

• NPD says 60 percent of consumer electronics sales last year were PCs, TVs, tablets or e-readers, phones or video game hardware. Apple is a leading brand name in three of those categories, and you could say they operate in another (video game hardware) if you wanted to be a bit liberal with how you categorize the iPod touch or iPhone, which are used to play a lot of games.
• Specifically, the tablet/e-reader category saw the best growth during 2011, with sales doubling to $15 billion. As we know from previous reports, Apple is a main reason those sales doubled — the iPad, which sold 40 million units in 2011, accounted for nearly 60 percent of all tablet sales last year.

So are consumers being more narrow about the types of gadgets they’re interested in purchasing? Or are the smartphones with 8 megapixel cameras and video games, tablets with productivity apps and video streaming reducing our need for additional devices? Perhaps both. Either way, Apple — with its obsessive tendency to focus on only a few products — is reaping the benefits.

Image source: Flickr user edvvc

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However, I’m interested in what seems to be a growing number of startups and entrepreneurs at the event, and that seems to be a sign that real innovation and new business models are actually starting to happen when it comes to adding digital intelligence to the power grid and managing energy data.

Here are the top 10 trends that I took away from the event:

1. Managing big data. Managing large streams of energy data is fundamental to the future of the grid, as well as for helping consumers reduce their energy consumption. What methods the software companies use will also determine how well they’ll do in the industry. Startups like Opower and Tendril are essentially big-data plays, using cloud computing tools and sophisticated analytics, and both companies released interesting news at the show. Oracle, touting its software and data management, had a huge booth on the floor. I chatted with both the newly acquired Ecologic Analytics (bought by Landis+Gyr) and eMeter (acquired by Siemens), and these companies manage the massive amounts of data that flow off of meters for utilities. Cloud computing is no longer a dirty word for utilities; in fact, it’s likely the future of this business.

Cisco's connected grid router, ruggedized, inside

2. The Internet of Things. Beyond connecting meters and grid devices, the smart grid really extends to create the Internet of Things, connecting cars, home batteries, solar panels, light bulbs, thermostats, and consumer electronics like televisions and cell phones. The term the Internet of Things is oft-used in IT circles, but hasn’t really caught on in the smart grid and utility industries. But it will, and it will also provide new lines of business for the power grid vendors.

3. Prepaid electricity. Prepaid meters and electricity might not catch on in the U.S. all that quickly, but throughout the world it’s becoming a phenomenon — particularly in countries with low rates of credit card holders, and high percentages of populations that don’t have a steady income stream, like farmers. There were a couple of startups at the show selling these meters and software systems, like PayGo, but I’m not sure this is a startup play at this point. I’d expect the big meter companies to create their own solutions.

Prepaid energy and meters via PayGo

4. The year of the smart thermostat. I already did a slide show on this, but it seems like 2012 is the year utilities, consumers and device makers are starting to really pay attention to smart thermostats. As one show attendee explained to me, it’s the low-hanging fruit and the area where utilities can see the most “bang for buck.” Smart thermostats, which can be controlled by utilities, can help utilities shave off consumer power consumption when they need it (called demand response). Other players like Nest (which I didn’t see at the show) are looking to sell a coveted connected thermostat straight to consumers.

5. Energy storage batteries moving into commercial deployments. Battery makers made an appearance at the show, touting batteries that could provide energy storage and frequency regulation for the grid. Some are even selling batteries for homes, to connect with solar panels, and I could see many homes having their own batteries one day. Batteries for energy storage have long been discussed, but the problem has always been that they are one of the most expensive forms of energy storage. However, some power producers and utilities now have commercial battery farm deployments in place, so we’ll see this year how popular batteries for energy storage become.

6. Ditch the hardware; focus on software. After talking with a variety of home energy management startups, it feels like there has been an acknowledgement that focusing on the hardware piece of home energy management hasn’t worked out all that well, and that software is a much better bet for most companies. EnergyHub did a slight pivot to focus more on software to manage smart thermostats, and the company tells me it’s having its best financial year to date. Tendril also doesn’t focus at all on hardware anymore, and is only focusing on creating an open platform for connecting devices. However, Nest is the outlier in this, and is basing its business around its device.

7. The pivot. Constant reinvention is common in Silicon Valley and for startups. I feel like there’s a perception that it’s not that acceptable in the utility and power worlds. However, it’s becoming increasingly O.K. to openly discuss changing strategies and working out various business models. As the smart grid industry matures, the pivot is going to become a more common maneuver. Embrace change!

8. Cellular coming on strong. A few years ago, the cellphone companies were charging utilities way too much to use their networks for the backbone of the smart grid. But today, phone companies like Verizon have changed their pricing strategy and are actively working with utilities on strategies around a per meter basis. As I wrote earlier this week, there’s no longer a big debate about what type of wireless to use, from cellular, to mesh, to Wi-Fi to WiMAX. The network companies are offering them all to be flexible to the utility.

9. M&A still rolling. The smart grid is still one of the best places across the cleantech sector to sell a startup. Since the IPO market is pretty crappy right now, who could buy who was a topic of conversation at the show.

10. Go big or go home. This one comes courtesy of Tendril’s CEO Adrian Tuck who says he sees a lot of potential consolidation in the energy data management space this year, and he sees companies going big or going home. What do you think?

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