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Take our poll & share your views on AirBnB, other web-sharing startups

Michael Wolf — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:00:38 +0000

This year there’s been an explosion of interest in web-sharing services (aka collaborative consumption), a growing movement that utilizes the power of the web to share, lend and barter as a way to create more economical and sustainable methods of consumption. Nowhere was this more evident than at our own GreenNet conference this past April, where investor Sunil Paul, RelayRides CEO Shelby Clark and Airbnb Chief Product Officer Joe Gebbia were among the speakers discussing this fascinating topic.

Katie takes a look at this fast growing space in an analysis on GigaOM Pro, where she writes:

The ubiquity of the Internet itself and its unique ability to be able to connect people and help them organize goods and their daily lives has led to the rise of the web-sharing economy, which some call collaborative consumption and others call the Mesh. Older Internet pioneers like eBay and Amazon have paved the way for this movement by creating tools to maintain online trust and reputation — a key element of this movement. Feeling comfortable with allowing people in your neighborhood to share your car (like with RelayRides, Spride Share and Getaround) is a crucial part of the web-sharing economy.

While there’s no doubt that web-sharing is generating excitement, it’s also seen some growing pains, as evidenced by recent news about abuse and misuse by those using the service.

Here at GigaOM, we want to hear what our early-adopter audience thinks about this emerging opportunity. Take a few minutes to fill out our survey, and we will email you an executive summary of the results. You’ll also have a chance to win one of three free GigaOM Pro annual subscriptions or a free ticket to a GigaOM Pro event of your choice.

UPDATE: The survey has been closed. Keep an eye out for results soon!

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VIDEO: How Zipcar’s IPO Will Affect P2P Car Sharing

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 05 May 2011 23:04:21 +0000

Zipcar’s stock is still flying high after the car sharing company debuted on the Nasdaq last month. To the CEO of neighbor-to-neighbor car sharing startup RelayRides, Shelby Clark, Zipcar’s IPO has shown investors and businesses that there’s real money to be made in car sharing. And stay tuned to RelayRides over the next few weeks, says Clark, they’ve got some new things cooking. Watch our interview from the sidelines of Green:Net 2011:

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VIDEO: Making the Grid Smarter With Energy Finger Prints

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 16:24:44 +0000

While many smart grid networking technologies use wireless networks, a startup called Power Tagging has developed a way to fingerprint energy on the grid using digital signal processing. It’s basically a set of algorithms that hug the power line and help utilities with applications like voltage reduction, electric vehicle management, mapping the grid, and demand side management. At Green:Net last week, I interviewed John LoPorto, CEO of Power Tagging, which was one of our 10 Big Ideas winners. Check out my video interview:

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VIDEO: Making Money Off Of Capturing Waste Heat

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 20:00:33 +0000

Capturing waste heat from systems and turning it into usable power could be a way to capture big money. Phononic Devices — one of our Green:Net 10 Big Ideas winners — is developing thermoelectric devices, or semiconductors that can turn heat into electricity, or vice versa. Think devices for a refrigeration unit, or servers in data centers, that don’t need as much cooling and are more energy efficient. Below is a video interview from the sidelines of GreenNet last week with Phononic Devices founder, CEO and President, Anthony Atti.

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VIDEO: Energy Storage for the Off-Grid World

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 23:05:24 +0000

Big Ideas Winner Mike Lin of Fenix International

Fenix International — one of our 10 Green:Net Big Ideas winners– has designed a safe and simple battery that can be plugged into various power sources and uses smart software to manage the charge. The idea is to replace an ad hoc market that emerged in off-grid communities where village entrepreneurs are using car batteries to sell mobile phone charges and power lighting devices. Listen to Fenix International founder and CEO Mike Lin talk about Fenix’s ReadySet energy storage device for the off-grid world:

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VIDEO: Big Data Meets Connected Cars

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 21:03:27 +0000

On the sidelines of our Green:Net event last week, I did a series of video interviews with our 10 Big Ideas companies, which we chose to highlight for the innovations that they are bringing to digital energy. First up is a startup marrying big data and connected cars: Virtual Vehicle Company. Virtual Vehicle Company founder Laura Schewel tells me about the company’s mobile app, which pulls in various types of data and sells services to customers like auto makers. The first mobile app product is in beta now (contact them to be part of the beta testers).

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20 Photos From Green:Net 2011

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 07:00:22 +0000

In case you missed all the action at our third annual Green:Net event last week, we’ll be pulling together the photos, videos and presentations from the event over the coming week. Here are 20 of my favorite photos from the show:

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Tesla and Coda: There’s Space for Indie EV Car Makers

Janko Roettgers — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:42:24 +0000

With big companies like Nissan and Chevy embracing all-electric cars, how can independent EV makers compete? That question was at the heart of a the closing panel of GigaOM’s Green:Net conference, which featured Tesla’s Model S programs manager Jerome Guillen and Coda’s VP of BizDev Chris Paulson. Their answer? By abandoning the old ways of doing business. “Being independent allows you not to have any preconceived notions,” said Guillen. Paulson echoed this sentiment, saying that a small, independent company doesn’t have to follow the ways people built cars in the past, which also allows it to make smarter decisions faster. “We don’t have committees,” joked Paulson.

Still, both companies are facing an upwards battle. Tesla’s Model S is slated to launch in mid-2012 and will cost from $60,000 upwards. CODA’s Sedan will be priced more moderately at $45,000, but that’s still a significant premium over the prize of a Nissan Leaf, which costs consumers $33,000. However, both Paulson and Guillen said that they hope to have the advantage of being early, with Paulson saying that most of the big car makers have a “wait and see approach.”

What else will set the cars of both companies apart from the Leaf and other competing models from big manufacturers? Guillen said that the Model S will surprise customers with innovation, starting with trunk space under the hood and an entertainment system complete with a 17” screen. Paulson said that for his company, it’s all about battery innovation.

Both Tesla and CODA are looking to retail spaces to sell electric cars to consumers. Tesla has been experimenting with an Apple-like retail experience on Santana Row in San Jose, California, and CODA wants to open a store in Los Angeles this summer. However, on stage, Paulson said that there’s no direct competition going on between the two companies. “We are launching the industry together,” he said. Guillen agreed, and said that he’s welcoming even the big boys to the party. “The more electric vehicles there are on the road, there better it is for all of us,” he said.

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Cisco Wants Intelligent Networks to Become the Fourth Utility

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 22:32:53 +0000

Cities consume 75 percent of the world’s energy, said Cisco’s Marthin De Beer, SVP, Emerging Technologies and Consumer Business, on Thursday at GigaOM’s Green:Net conference in San Francisco. And cities are growing rapidly: 700 million people will be urbanized in the next decade, said De Beer. So how can we make cities greener and more sustainable?

By making a network that connects every house as a fourth utility, said De Beer, who told his audience that Sydney has seen energy savings and water consumption reduction of 50 percent with this approach. Cisco wants to be part of the solution, and De Beer demonstrated a few tools his company developed that can empower companies and individuals in connected cities to save energy. One of the tools showcased was an application that tells employees whether they should make the trip to the office or work from home through telepresence, depending on an analysis of traffic and weather conditions.

Cisco has of course been pushing telepresence solutions for a long time, and De Beer said that the company itself has saved $800 million in travel in the last five years through the use of telepresence. Teleconferencing tools also helped Cisco to reduce its carbon footprint by 10 percent. However, intelligent networks could also do things that aren’t even visible to the end user, like moving cloud-hosted work instances to data centers that require less cooling when a certain region gets hit by a heat wave.

Cisco has been partnering with cities like Amsterdam, Bangalore, Barcelona and San Francisco to develop solutions that are based on the idea of networks as the fourth utility. “It’s not the future,” said De Beers. “It’s being built right now, and that’s really exciting.”

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Google Green Czar: No Moore’s Law for Data Center Efficiency

Derrick Harris — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 21:24:41 +0000

In an afternoon chat today at Green:Net, Google Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl explained that the future of data center efficiency will not come from improved data center designs themselves, but from more-efficient hardware and cleaner sources of energy.

The reason is pretty simple: data centers like those Google is building are so much more efficient than previous generations’ data centers, that it’s difficult to improve much. It used to be, he explained, that every watt of computing within a data center correlated with a watt of energy used for cooling and other purposes, meaning that the overhead costs of computing were 100 percent of the cost of computing. Now, good data centers like Google’s and Yahoo’s are down to 20 percent overhead, and it doesn’t appear they can go much further, at least not in the near future.

That’s way, Weihl explained, it’s time to look at more-efficient hardware — a trend that has going on for years and where improvements are happening on more of Moore’s Law type of pace — as well as to green energy sources. Google, for example, just bought 100 megawatts of wind power from a location about 180 miles from an Oklahoma data center it operates. It did the same thing last year in Iowa. As long as the energy is on the same grid, it can be used, he explained, so data center operators don’t need to look for clean energy right next door. Going forward, Weihl thinks it will be up to large data center operators to do their part to stem clean energy by helping get more of it on the grid.

However, as Yahoo’s Director of Climate and Energy Christine Page pointed out, many organizations building data centers still can benefit from taking advantage of the new efficient designs pioneered by companies like Yahoo and Google. She points to Yahoo’s “chicken coop” data center near Buffalo, N.Y., as en example. Not only was the modular design cheap to build, but it was completed in less than six months and uses 40 percent less energy than standard data centers and 90 percent less water because it’s cooled using outside air 99 percent of the time. Data centers might not get much more efficient in design than this, but adoption of these designs can pick up.

Both panelists agreed on one thing for certain: efficient data centers are important because they will be asked to take on more responsibility as we rely more on cloud computing. Page said that data centers account for approximately 2.5 percent of energy consumption, but they help reduce far greater amounts of greenhouse gases than they emit because data centers enable smart grids and other energy-efficiency efforts. Or, as Weihl put it, it takes a lot less energy to do a video conference than it does for a handful of people to hop on a plane and fly to a meeting.

Weihl and Page also shared their thoughts on the limited effectiveness of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), a popular method of gauging data center efficiency. Both noted that while it’s a decent jumping off point, other considerations such as carbon emissions, water usage effectiveness and energy sources need to be considered when determining how green a data center really is.

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