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7 Things That Spell Growing Pains for 2011 Greentech

Jeff St. John — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 16:00:08 +0000

The greentech industry’s 2010 showing wasn’t so bad, especially for a year that saw the world recovering from a once-in-a-generation economic meltdown. But despite this, venture capitalists won’t be investing in the sector like they used to, solar startups won’t see a great growth year in 2011 and a real home energy management market doesn’t really exist yet, despite the numerous companies and technologies blossoming in the space. Here are some predictions about what not to expect in next year’s greentech market.

New Sitcom Pilot to be Based Not-So-Loosely on Steve Jobs

Liam Cassidy — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:44:07 +0000

It was bound to happen, sooner or later. Steve Jobs is simply too important, too impressive, too easy a target not to base a character on him and turn it into a sitcom.

And that’s what might very well be happening, if the pilot currently in development in Hollywood gets optioned for a series. Yesterday, Media Rights Capital released a statement on its website describing how, working with cable channel EPIX, they have green-lit a pilot episode for a proposed sitcom series entitled — what else? – iCON.

From MRC’s website:

EPIX and Media Rights Capital have made a team for iCON, a comedy series pilot that will be developed by Larry Charles, the Emmy-winning TV writer/producer, and the director of the Sacha Baron Cohen features Borat and Bruno.

Charles will oversee development of the script and will direct the half-hour pilot of a series written by Dan Lyons. A technology consultant for Newsweek, Lyons created the Fake Steve Jobs blog and wrote the novel Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs—A Parody.

Yes, you read that right. Fake Steve himself is penning the script (it’s most likely he already has, given how sporadic the updates have been in recent weeks on the Fake Steve Jobs blog.) If you’re a fan of Fake Steve, this is exhilarating news; Lyons is not only an insightful author but is in possession of a Sahara-dry wit, to boot. In addition to his Fake Steve sideshow, Lyons is the author of Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs – A Parody. You might say he really knows the subject matter.

And then there’s Larry Charles. Directing Borat and Brüno might not be an accolade everyone everywhere agrees is worthy of celebration (I guess it depends on your sense of humor) but no one can argue with his other credentials; he directed the 2008 documentary Religulous starring Bill Maher, and was for many years a writer and producer on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. It all sounds like perfect past-experience for any producer charged with the task of bringing this project to life.

The partnership of Lyons/Charles is certain to culminate in a cutting (if not wickedly uncompromising) take on tech-celebrity culture.

A little more from MRC’s website on the subject matter of the show:

The show’s lead character, Tom Rhodes, is a composite of Jobs and other Silicon Valley titans, and the comedy is described as a savage satire, a study of ego, power and greed…

Jobs and other titans will certainly inspire iCON at its inception, but the show will lampoon the larger hi-tech world. [Larry] Charles will be swinging for the fences.

You may not have heard the name Media Rights Capital before. MRC is a studio owned by, amongst others, Goldman Sachs and (wait for it) AT&T. There’s something almost… poetic about that.

MRC will serve as the studio and financier. The company said it had several bidders for the property, but chose EPIX because Charles could be as edgy as he wanted to be.

“We are attempting to do nothing less than a modern Citizen Kane,” Charles said. “A scabrous satire of Silicon Valley and its most famous citizen.”

You know, at film school I heard time and time again that Citizen Kane was nothing less than the most perfect movie ever made. (I disagreed, favoring The Empire Strikes Back…) So for Charles to make a modern day Citizen Kane is, to put it mildly, an ambitious goal. But don’t forget, such bold statements are not uncommon for El Jobso when talking about music players or tablet devices, so I guess we can forgive this kind of hyperbole from a writer/producer described by the studio as “TV royalty.”

Apple has, naturally, remained silent on the matter. It’s fun to try to imagine what Steve Jobs might make of this. I think he’d probably find it amusing (and c’mon, it’s gotta be an ego boost?) but Macworld points out that Jobs has a less-than-stellar track record when it comes to this sort of thing:

Jobs is notoriously prickly about how he’s portrayed in the media. At one extreme, Apple infamously pulled all titles by publisher Wiley from its store shelves after the company released a book called iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business (no relation to the TV show).

Well, that was a book, and this is a (potential) TV show. Only Mac-heads and the most dedicated tech historians read books about Jobs. A sitcom from Larry Charles, on the other hand, will reach many millions of people otherwise entirely disinterested in the working of Silicon Valley’s executive elite.

This isn’t a series yet — the pilot has to prove there’s potential for that. But is there any serious doubt that Lyons/Charles can pull it off? And I wonder… a year from now, will we be laughing with Steve Jobs as he uses a clip from an episode to demo the next iPad… or rolling our eyes as his lawyers issue Cease & Desist orders to the studio?

Under $100 At Fry's: The PowerCost Monitor

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:45:57 +0000

Here’s the latest indicator that home energy management devices are going mainstream fast this year: Canadian Blue Line Innovations has started selling a $99 energy management device called the PowerCost Monitor at big box retailer Fry’s Electronics this week (check it out here).

The news comes on the heals of Apple reportedly filing patents suggesting its been eying energy management, and 3M’s new interest in energy management through its investment in Energy Inc, which makes The Energy Detective. Earlier this month at the Consumer Electronics Show there was a spate of home energy management announcements from both large electronics firms and startups.

The PowerCost Monitor is interesting because at under $100, it’s one of the lowest-cost home energy management devices we’ve seen yet that is widely available. The Energy Detective (TED), which was the first gadget partner of PowerMeter, has been sold out for months on the TED web site. And the device costs closer to $120 for the older TED models and at least $200 for the newer models. AlertMe has been selling a home energy management kit for months now that costs £69 ($112) plus a £30 annual subscription ($50) (they dropped the price from last year).

The PowerCost Monitor comes in two parts, a sensor and radio device which fits onto any electricity meter, and a display, which picks up the wireless signal of the home’s electricity data emitted by the sensor/radio. It can be so cheap because it’s so incredibly simple. Blue Line Innovations says the device can help users reduce their electricity consumption by 6-18 percent.

Will getting its price point below $100 put the PowerCost Monitor at the front of the consumer energy management pack? When I interviewed Savraj Singh, the founder of Y-Combinator startup Wattvision, which makes a gadget like the PowerCost Monitor, last year, he thought that a super cheap cost was the answer to winning in this market. According to a survey from Greentech Media last year consumers are likely to pay closer to $48 for such an energy management product.

But clearly distribution into the direct to consumer market will also hold a key for this market. That avenue has been tricky for small startups, which is why Blue Line Innovation’s deal with Fry’s is interesting.

Blue Line Innovations was founded back in 2003, and already has over 100,000 PowerCost Monitor’s in the field today mostly through utility installations. The company told me this morning that over the last months it has been shifting its primary focus to the consumer. Analysts like Gartner’s Zarco Sumic told us that in the long run “The vendors that will dominate will be the ones who know how to market, sell and meet the needs of the consumer space. It is a consumer technology play. It is not a utility play.” However in the short term, many analysts, like Pike Research’s Clint Wheelock, have maintained that the utility is still the dominant distribution channel.

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The Case of the Home Energy Boom: 3M Invests in The Energy Detective

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 05:18:54 +0000

Updated: Looks like this is the weekend for some unusual firms to dabble in the increasingly hot home energy management (my take on how Apple could jolt the energy management space here). Minnesota-based manufacturer 3M, which makes such disparate products as post-it notes and medical supplies, and more recently renewable energy and batteries, said it has invested in Energy Inc, the makers of the home energy management device The Energy Detective (TED), through its New Venture Business. Energy Inc. is well-known for being the first gadget partner to connect with Google’s online energy management tool PowerMeter.

Terms of the investment were not disclosed but 3M New Ventures, which is based in Seefeld, Germany, said it made the investment because of Energy Inc.’s “high speed of innovation and entrepreneurial approach to serving customers,” in the “fast-growing energy monitoring market.” When companies don’t disclose the size of the investment, most of the time it means it’s pretty small. Update: According to this filing the investment was $2 million.

It’s unclear to me just what 3M plans to do with the Energy Inc. investment. 3M sells both utility electrical transmission and distribution equipment as well as technologies for consumer electronics like touch screen systems and also communications products. But in a statement 3M said synergies with its other businesses would have a “high commercialization potential.”

The investment seems like a way for 3M to experiment in the increasingly hot market of home energy management products. Computing giants like Google, Microsoft and Intel have been developing energy management tools, startups have been building energy dashboards in droves, and smart grid players like Silver Spring Networks and GridPoint have recently bought their way in.

Energy Inc was actually founded back in 2001, before energy management was a hot topic anywhere. President and CEO of Energy Inc, Dolph Rodenberg told me in an interview in October that about 40 percent of its sales come from utilities, though declined to name its utility customers, while the majority of its sales come from the direct to consumer market.

Energy Inc.’s TED 5000 is the device that works via Google PowerMeter, and it costs abut $200. All the attention from Google’s partnership means that the TED5000 has been constantly sold out and on backorder for months. Rodenberg told us that the company was in the process of raising funds back in October, but not via the traditional venture capital route. I’d speculate that the PowerMeter link only helped with this financing deal.

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Welcome to the Era of Open Energy Information

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:12:52 +0000

The development of the smart grid is really about unleashing and managing a whole lot of data about energy — where, when, how and how much energy is produced, consumed and moved around the network. That data could come from deep within the power grid at sensor points called phasor measurement units (PMU), or could be collected at the edge of the network via a connected, smart appliance or dashboard, or at power generation facilities such as solar or wind farms.

While much of this kind of data (at least the limited amount that has been available from the unsophisticated power grid) has traditionally been housed in utility back offices, entrepreneurs and developers that helped build the Internet are increasingly leading the way on opening up access to what will be an explosion of energy information coming from the smart grid. By leveraging open APIs, and mirroring the creation of the web and computing, entrepreneurs and companies can create a flourishing ecosystem around energy information that can deliver innovative and game-changing energy applications.

The news that Google’s energy information web tool PowerMeter signed up its first device partner this week is the most recent example of how this energy information ecosystem is starting to develop. Google has long pledged to open up its API for PowerMeter, which will enable third party developers to make innovative applications based around the information. Energy Inc has also released its API for its PowerMeter compatible device the TED-5000, and as Google’s Tom Sly put it in an email to me, “Energy Inc deserves major kudos for making this API available to customers. The API will allow people to write Android (and iPhone) apps and a variety of other software to make the TED 5000 even more useful!”

In addition to having an open API, the TED-5000 was built around the open wireless standard Zigbee, which is fast becoming the defacto standard for home energy monitoring and can lower the cost of development and innovation compared to a proprietary wireless technology. As Freaklabs, an open-source zigbee blog, put it:

The exciting thing for me is that the first gadget partner is the TED 5000 (The Energy Detective) which runs a Zigbee stack. . . [T]he potential is there for a lot of new monitoring devices to start coming out and there’s a good chance that a lot of them will also be using Zigbee.. . . Nothing better than having an open hardware energy monitor running an open source Zigbee stack and sending the usage data to Google Powermeter.

Other energy dashboard makers like Tendril are also offering open APIs that will enable third-party developers to make innovative applications based around energy data. At the AlwaysOn Going Green conference in mid September Tendril CEO Adrian Tuck briefly discussed a computer game that was being built around Tendril’s API that will use a character whose powers will be based on how much energy the players saves in his/her daily life. An early stage startup with a similar idea launched its business plan at our Green:Net 2009 conference.

Of course, these are very early days for energy information. Utilities have just started working on smart grid deployments and big information technology players like Cisco have just begun moving into the utility space. And issues of privacy and security — like they are in the Internet world — will be front and center as the era of open energy information develops. But as Google’s Sly put it in reference to its new gadget partner: “Let’s hope that other device manufacturers and utilities are as forward-thinking when it comes to making it easy for customers to access their energy use information.”

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The Developer’s Guide to Home Energy Management Apps

Image courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.

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Google's PowerMeter Bypasses the Smart Meter, Signs Up First Gadget Partner

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:57:50 +0000

When Google started talking about its energy management web tool PowerMeter earlier this year, a big hurdle quickly became apparent: The search engine giant’s market for the device would be limited to consumers whose utilities are deploying smart meters (meters that have two-digital communication). That’s a small piece of a very small pie, given only a little over 6 percent of U.S. electricity meters are smart. But now Google says it’s able to bypass the smart meter and today the company tells us that it has signed up its first device partner, Energy Inc, which makes The Energy Detective (TED).

The good news for consumers is that we can start using Google’s free energy monitoring software that much sooner. People that own, or plan to buy, Energy Inc’s latest gadget, the TED 5000, can opt-in to use PowerMeter as its online interface and connect with their Google account and the iGoogle gadget. Google says no data will be sent to the customer’s Google account unless they decide to opt-in. The TED 5000 costs around $200 (up to $300 with additional features), can be bought online here and requires an electrician to install.

Google has been working on the strategy of partnering with device makers for PowerMeter for a while. Back in April Google’s Tom Sly told me that the company was actively talking to gadget makers to work with PowerMeter, and Sly told us today that they’ve been talking with Energy Inc for about a year.

The advantages of bypassing the smart meter aren’t just the quick deployment times of these energy management devices. The set-up could also offer the customer more detailed and quicker energy data than data coming off of smart meters. Devices like TED are connected to the user’s home broadband connection and, working with PowerMeter, can be quickly displayed to the customer in almost real-time. TED 5000 will show energy data via PowerMeter every 10 minutes.

In contrast, many utilities are building smart meter networks that can significantly delay the time it takes the energy information to reach the customer. As we pointed out in this article, utilities today are largely designing smart grid networks to collect data from smart meters in a time frame that ranges from between every 15 minutes to an hour, then bringing that data back to a collection point on the network. From that collection point, many utilities are only bringing data back to the utility back office where the numbers are processed and packaged for consumers once a day. So the info coming off of smart meters will often be from the previous day’s energy use.

Utilities say the delay comes from the fact that they have to bring the data back to the control center, process the information and connect it to the user’s billing account. Remember most utilities’ networks aren’t exactly robust given cost constraints and the fact that information technology hasn’t traditionally been their strong point (though hopefully that will change in the coming months and years). From the perspective of the utility, the data that goes directly from TED to PowerMeter and to the consumer (bypassing utilities’ networks) probably won’t be considered “revenue-grade,” predicted Google’s Sly, meaning the utility won’t likely run a billing program around it.

But Energy Inc and Google have both been working directly with utilities, and TED and PowerMeter can be incorporated into utility networks in a variety of ways. President and CEO of Energy Inc, Dolph Rodenberg tells us that about 40 percent of its sales come from utilities, but declined to name its utility customers. Energy Inc was actually founded back in 2001, before energy management was a hot topic anywhere.

Why is close to real-time energy data important? Carrie Armel, research associate at Stanford’s Precourt Energy Efficiency Center, told me back in June that the more frequently energy data is given to the consumer, the more engaged the consumer is likely to be. Changing energy consumption will come from a behavior change, and our brains are hardwired to respond to quick feedback, said Armel. In addition I think an ecosystem of innovation and new applications that can help change consumer behavior can more easily be built up around a robust network that delivers close to real-time information (for my comparison to GPS and real time information, read here).

The TED-PowerMeter combo only works for North American customers and the deal isn’t exclusive for either PowerMeter or TED. Google hopes TED will just be the first of many devices it will work with — and that this announcement will bring in more energy gadget makers (so reach out to them folks). But given TED is Google’s first gadget partner for PowerMeter, the device will give the company a sizable early platform for this early version of PowerMeter (there are already thousands of TED 5000′s on the market). In line with Google’s “no business model” strategy for PowerMeter, Google isn’t making money off of the TED devices that will use its web tool.

Google will be able to bring a lot of new users to Energy Inc, and Energy Inc’s Rodenberg called what Google can do for TED in terms of “public awareness” outstanding. PowerMeter will be able extend TED 5000′s functionality by linking its energy management service to computers or even mobile devices, and enable users to compare their energy management to the PowerMeter community (not large today, but could someday be sizable). The PowerMeter deal will also likely help with any financing deals — Rodenberg tells us the company is in the process of raising funds, but not via the traditional venture capital route.

At the end of the day I’m glad Google has finally bypassed the smart meter — it seems like a more fitting place for the disruptive web firm than being forced to develop its tool around slow-moving utility partners that sometimes don’t get the benefits of information networks. And we’re even more excited that PowerMeter is now available for anyone that wants to buy a TED 5000. You can bet I’ll be testing this out right away.

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Sun Will Soon Sell Its Own Cloud Services

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:01:31 +0000

Sun Microsystems, as has been widely expected in the technology world, has finally announced its own cloud computing platform. Sun will offer raw compute power as well as storage through its Sun Cloud Storage Service and Sun Cloud Compute Service. The services, while being announced today, will not be generally available until this summer.

Juan Carlos Soto, Sun’s V-P of cloud computing marketing, says Sun has built the cloud itself but will host it with Switch Communications in its Las Vegas data center. He declined to talk price until the cloud officially launches, but says it will be competitive with offerings from Amazon and other vendors.

Sun appears to be differentiating its cloud by touting its openness and interoperability with current enterprise IT systems and with other clouds. Sun has been a proponent of developing standards and governance ideals for the cloud world so data moves freely from one service provider to another. The openness and the ability to tie an enterprise computing system to Sun’s cloud will be welcomed by enterprises.

Sun intends to capitalize on this ability to move data from cloud to cloud with its Virtual Data Center management software. The software allows for an IT manager to provision the cloud by building up a virtual data center in a dashboard. Essentially it translates the cloud into units with which an enterprise IT person is already familiar, rather than having them focus on command line APIs. Much of the intellectual property and ideas behind the Virtual Data Center software and Sun’s multicloud management efforts come from its purchase of Q-Layer earlier this year.

“This is something that may have been controversial six months ago,” says Soto. “But combining public and enterprise clouds is an opportunity that is really coming into focus now and Sun is in a position to capture that with our data center expertise and open-source software.”

On the storage side, Sun’s cloud will have both object-oriented storage and file systems storage.

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