The Iris security kit, which includes sensor and motion detectors for doors, windows and cabinets, costs $179, and the home energy kit, which includes a smart thermostat and plugs, also costs $179. For $299 you can buy a combo Iris kit with both security and energy controls. There’s also an additional subscription service for $10 per month that will give the customer additional customization and remote control capacity.

All of the devices connect via AlertMe’s cloud-based home management system, and customers can digitally manage their home appliances and devices via a computer or mobile app. AlertMe, which raised $37 million in funding from Good Energies, Index Ventures, Vantage Point Capital and U.K. utility British Gas, sells its own smart home kits to utilities in the U.K., and recently signed up British Gas.

Iris won’t be Lowe’s first smart home product, but it’s the first that is being branded to be sold via Lowe’s, and the big box retailer says it will use Iris as a platform for other smart home products from companies like GE and First Alert. Retailer Best Buy also launched a modest push into home energy products last year.

Despite companies talking about the potentials for the smart home for years, these types of products are still in an early stage in the U.S. AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast recently launched connected home services. The emergence of the iPhone and Android created an ecosystem for cell phones to control these connected devices.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Green IT Q4: solar, subsidies and the outlook for EVs
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013

While the company doesn’t disclose sales volumes, a Nest spokesperson told me back in April that they’d done a survey of 10,000 of their customers (so they have at least that amount, and many more, the spokesperson said). The thermostat is also available at Lowe’s and through Nest’s online store.

There have been other digital thermostats out on the market for years, but Nest is looking to bring smart algorithms, nice design, and a cool brand to the normally boring world of thermostats. Nest’s learning thermostat learns your behavior over a couple weeks and starts helping you save energy by turning down heating and cooling when it isn’t necessary to your comfort (like when you leave the house, or during certain times of day).

Nest is attempting to turn the learning thermostat into a coveted device like Apple’s iPhone or iPad. Nest founder Tony Fadell was the former chief architect at Apple where he led the development of the iPod and the first three versions of the iPhone. He left Apple three years ago to start Nest.

Nest has — and will continue to have — battles to fight as a potentially disruptive startup in this space. For example thermostat giant Honeywell slapped Nest with a lawsuit for patent infringement, which Nest denies. Selling consumers thermostats — particularly a $250 thermostat — also might prove to be a difficult market, given a lot consumers currently don’t go out and buy (or even think about) thermostats.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Smart Grid Apps: Six Trends That Will Shape Grid Evolution

The lighting business, by contrast, is one of the slowest industries in the world.

Think about it for a moment. Consumers and businesses around the world spend over $100 billion on light bulbs and fixtures annually, and over $600 billion on electricity to power them.

Yet the lion’s share of that money gets thrown out the window. The incandescent bulb, still the most popular bulb with consumers in the U.S., typically only uses 10 percent of the power fed into them to create light. The rest gets turned into heat. That explains why you see them in Easy Bake Ovens and reptile terrariums. In all, 23 percent of the electricity in the U.S. gets gobbled up by lighting; 18 percent goes to power bulbs and the remaining 4 to 5 percent gets used to run air conditioners to eliminate the waste heat they generate.

This rampant consumption, moreover, isn’t easy to modulate. Only a small percentage of lights are connected to networks for dynamic dimming. If the lights above your head right now were dimmed by 40 percent to save power, you probably wouldn’t notice, but the capability probably doesn’t exist.

A digital future

Everything else has gone digital. Lighting is literally the last vestige of the vacuum tube era.

It wasn’t always this way. Lighting was once one of the most innovative industries on the planet. Thomas Edison’s bulb, unfurled on December 31, 1879, fundamentally changed human society. People could suddenly work and socialize around the clock. The midtown section of Broadway became known as the “The Great White Way” because of the blazing arc lights. A nighttime stroll was no longer a scary prospect reserved for emergencies. Neon and fluorescent lights soon followed.

But then complacency began to creep in. Manufacturers concentrated on driving down costs and boosting volumes. Innovation became an expensive luxury rather than a necessity. Consumers found it easier to replace bulbs all of the time rather than demand something different.

Luckily, the situation is now changing. Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) — which are semiconductors that emit light — only consume a fraction of the power of conventional bulbs. Car manufacturers, TV makers, street light manufacturers and makers of industrial equipment have already turned to LEDs to reduce power.

In the past few years, LED makers have also managed to cut the price and boost the performance of their products. Early LED bulbs emitted a cold light you could describe as Alien Autopsy White. But now you can go to Home Depot or Lowe’s and pick up LED bulbs that emit warm light — just like the light that comes from incandescent bulbs — for $25 or less. The bulbs will save you $10 or more a year and last for decades.

Networked lighting

Even more importantly, LED companies will soon demonstrate the latent intelligence of light. LEDs are chips, after all, which means they can be infinitely tuned or connected to networks.

Festival Hydro will soon give — as in for free — 100,000 LED bulbs equipped with wireless chips to residential and business customers in Stratford, Ontario that have smart meters. Through the smart meters and wireless connections, customers will essentially let Festival Hydro dim their lights during  peak periods or off-hours. (Bridgelux will provide the LED technology while Anycomm will provide the software for controlling the system for the pilot.)

If trials like these succeed, utilities will start giving out millions of free LEDs. The power consumption avoided will let them postpone investing millions into new fossil fuel power plants for years.

By integrating other chips and transistors, LED bulbs can be turned into security alarms, carbon monoxide sensors and motion detectors. Some stores want to deploy LEDs to monitor the length of checkout lines for better service.

You will even see bulbs that help you sleep better. Think of all this as a marriage between lighting design and Moore’s Law.

It has taken the electronics industry and the lighting industry years to get to this point. Consumers are attached to old fashioned bulbs and really don’t want to spent too much time thinking about light bulbs and most manufacturers have been happy to go along with the status quo. But high power prices, climate change and escalating air pollution demand changes. Fortunately, those changes will also open the door to indispensable applications and use case scenarios that we don’t even know about yet.

The future looks brighter every day.

Bill Watkins is the CEO of Bridgelux while Rob Praske is the CEO and founder of Anycomm.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The growth and promise of the LED market
• Opportunities in LED Solid-State Lighting
• Flash analysis: lessons from Solyndra’s fall

The new service from Time Warner Cable, called IntelligentHome, will provide customers with connected home management services, like security, with remote home-video viewing and window and door sensors, as well as wireless management of home heating, cooling and lighting. The service is already available in upstate New York and Southern California. (I will add pricing details when they send it to me).

IControl has worked with cable companies before: It is the company behind Comcast’s similar smart home service that was launched last summer. Comcast is also an investor in iControl. IControl provides the software layer while the cable companies provide the broadband connection, and third-party hardware providers make the dashboards and security gadgets. IControl has long had the strategy to white label its service and to avoid getting into the hardware market itself.

Cable operators as well as telcos are increasingly beginning to offer home management services as a way to try to avoid becoming a dumb pipe and also as a way to reduce churn and add extra subscription revenues. Verizon launched a similar service about a year ago, which included home security control and monitoring as well as energy reading devices, smart thermostats and smart appliance control devices, among other applications. Verizon worked with Motorola’s 4Home(a startup that it acquired a couple of years ago) as well as Ingersoll-Rand for the security applications.

At CES the big-box retailers Lowe’s and Best Buy are also both looking to have a presence and push new smart home devices and services. Lowe’s is working with UK smart energy company AlertMe, while Best Buy is selling a variety of devices like the smart thermostat Nest.

Connected devices that control home energy consumption can make homes more energy-efficient. The Nest smart thermostat can reduce home energy consumption by 20 to 30 percent.

IControl is backed by Comcast, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Charles River Ventures, Intel Capital, Cisco, GE and security firm ADT.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How energy data will impact the smart grid
• Green IT Q4: solar, subsidies and the outlook for EVs
• Want to watch TV? There’s an app for that

AlertMe says Lowe’s will use its cloud-based home management system as the backbone for a new service called Iris, which will enable Lowe’s customers to digitally manage their home appliances and devices via a computer or mobile app. Iris will be launched in the second quarter of 2012 in stores and online, according to AlertMe.

The partnership isn’t Lowe’s first, and the retailer already sells some home energy devices like the PowerCost Monitor, which is made by Canadian company Blue Line Innovations and which clips onto household electrical meters and beams data into a home dashboard via Wi-Fi.

These types of smart home services are still relatively new to consumers, but more and more vendors are offering them, including telcos like Verizon and AT&T, cable companies like Comcast, and startups like Nest with its learning thermostat. Digital home tools can help home owners remotely turn off and on heating and cooling systems, lock and unlock doors, monitor the home via video security cameras, and use a mobile app as a digital remote.

Other startups are focused on working with utilities as a distribution channel for energy-specific devices and services, and some of those companies include Opower, Tendril, and Control4.

The market for all these types of devices is pretty small right now. Microsoft, Google and Cisco all moved out of the home energy management market after a couple years of launching tools and seeing little take up.

AlertMe is backed by Good Energies, Index Ventures, SET Venture Partners, VantagePoint Capital Partners and British Gas.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1
• Green IT Q4: solar, subsidies and the outlook for EVs
• Cleantech, meet connectivity: a new era of energy efficiency

A recent survey by Enterprise Strategy Group found that more than a third of retailers surveyed deploy more than 200 production databases. Across the rest of the industries surveyed, only 15 percent could make that claim.

Steve Stone, former CIO of Lowe’s Home Improvement, can vouch for that abundance of data. Lowe’s processed “something like 46 million line items per week as well as 15 to 16 million unique invoices, he said. “Retailers [do] tremendous analysis around inventory. That isn’t as intuitive — with invoices you can see a sale or transaction but with inventory you need to track it over time to understand if you’re running out of stock. Inventory is probably the largest data set.”

A return of RFID?

Now, as more stores want to allow unattended check-outs a la Apple, they will need better loss prevention, which could mean a resurgence of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. RFID was one of those next-big things in IT that didn’t really pan out because the readers were expensive and the read-rate failure was high. (The reader had to be really close to the tag). But with stakes getting higher, that calculus might change as retailers revisit the idea of tagging merchandise to enable easy payment and inventory monitoring.

More RFID tags and readers mean even more data. Those tags contain information that can be incorporated into store analysis, said Stone, who is now SVP of cloud intelligence at MicroStrategy. The business intelligence company brought Stone, a former customer, aboard to build out its cloud infrastructure to enable analytics on big data.

Big-box stores may well mimic the Apple model to enable this frictionless commerce. A consumer could use her smartphone to find a leaf blower or washing machine at the store, scan it with the phone for payment and schlep it to the car — all without waiting in a checkout line (or an unpleasant encounter with store security).

Analyzing customer scans in real time, a store could make sure the customer found and accessed the product before leaving in frustration. “If you’re a big store with high racks, and they scan the item they want, you want the item to tell you ‘I’ve been scanned and paid for,’” Stone said. “There’s no other way to do it.”

That information also tells the retailer what products are selling in real time so they can be restocked.

More big data tricks for retailers

Most companies dip their toe into big data when they start analyzing traffic patterns and behaviors on their web sites, Stone said. The next step is usually to run text analytics against Twitter to find and interact with customers who had a bad experience with the business. But Facebook is the motherload of data for retailers.

Facebook gives a retailer all sorts of affinity information about Facebook users who like or follow the company. “You get real tokens for the likes/dislikes of your followers and their friends’ likes and dislikes,” Stone said. All that psychographic (likes and dislikes) and demographic data (location, age, etc.) is invaluable. (MicroStrategy fields a Facebook Gateway analytics tool that runs against that Facebook data.)

“If you know how many of those who like Lowe’s love music, or that 95 percent of them love NASCAR, that’s the kind of thing marketers love. They can use that to target advertising. If you spend your ad dollars on Everyone Loves Raymond and no one watches it, that’s wasted money,” he said.

Steve Stone, SVP of cloud intelligence for MicroStrategy

Jeff Bedell, CTO of MicroStrategy, also sees huge opportunity in Facebook for retail customers: “Twitter is fine for straight sentiment analysis, but what you get with Facebook is [things like] what colleges [your followers] were most likely to attend, the top books read by your people who read The New York Times … it’s very much about the network, analyzing the network versus analyzing the feed. The bulk of marketing activity now is happening through Facebook on the social networking side.”

Stone’s first Facebook promotion for Lowe’s was a huge success as gauged by customer reaction, although it wasn’t without problems. “We did it last year as a precursor to [Black] Friday [and] it nearly brought down our system.” But the net result was positive: Lowes.com business rose a whopping 600 to 700 percent compared to the previous year. That uptick gave it plenty more data to analyze and feed future promotions.

Featured photo courtesy of  Flickr user joiseyshowaa.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How data warehousing is now a cost-effective solution for businesses
• Health care and big data in 2012
• The importance of putting the U and I in visualization

The idea apparently took many people by surprise since there was no indication that Rakuten would move into the renewable energy field. Japan has long been an early adopter of solar energy and is home to large solar panel makers such as Sharp and Solar Frontier.

The move seems partly fueled by Mikitani’s distaste for nuclear power and by what he sees as a good business opportunity. He isn’t alone. Masayoshi Son, CEO of Softbank, has been critical of nuclear power since the Fukushima disaster in March and earlier this year embarked on an ambitious plan to build solar farms around Japan.

Son said Softbank, which invests heavily in Internet companies (Yahoo and Alibaba), will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build 10 solar power plants. The plan is to first build a demonstration plant in the northern island province of Hakkaido.

Rakuten’s Mikitani told reporters that promoting home solar installation through online sales is a more efficient way to popularize solar than through building solar power plants. He has said that because solar equipment is too expensive to be affordable for most consumers, he’s looking at offering low-interest loans or installment plans.

Rakuten still needs to work out the details of its plan to start selling solar panels. It’s unclear if it will match contractors with customers to install solar panels — the days of do-it-yourself solar installations aren’t here yet for most people.

In the U.S., consumers can find some solar panels on e-commerce sites, though the choices are scant. What we do have are home improvement giants such as Home Depot and Lowe’s that are testing the waters of selling solar panels and installation services.

Photo courtesy of CoCreatr via Flickr

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The opportunities for the Internet and clean power
• Why High-Speed Broadband Is a Cleantech Issue
• The growth and promise of the LED market

The idea behind the partnership is that the electric car owner can tap into the car’s navigation service to use GPS to show the driver the nearest charging station, enabling the driver to know how far the drive is until the car can charge up. The wireless network is thus used as a sort-of safety net, turning the car into a device on one edge of the network, connected to the nearest charger at another edge of the network.

Range anxiety is something the electric car industry is particularly worried about. Because electric vehicles rely on a battery that holds a certain amount of power, and charging the vehicle in standard outlets takes hours (anywhere from four to a dozen), there’s a dedicated range inherent in battery-powered vehicles. It’s the same kind of limit on the gas tank of a traditional car, but filling up a gas tank takes minutes, and gas stations are ubiquitous. For the series hybrid Volt, from GM, the electric range is 40 miles before a secondary engine kicks in after that to make its range “hundreds of miles,” and for the all-electric Nissan LEAF, the range is at most 100 miles (see our range comparison chart here).

A startup like Coulomb is smart to look to partner with navigation services companies. Electric car charging hardware will eventually be a commodity business, filled with large hardware players like GE, which will start selling its WattStation at 60 Lowe’s retailer locations later this year. Coulomb needs to grow its partnerships and network as large as possible in the early days of the EV market, before electric car charging becomes totally dominated by these types of large companies.

Having the ability to reserve charging stations on the fly, could be a useful service when/if a critical mass of electric cars ever hits the roads. Coulomb also offers this type of service via a mobile app for the iPhone and Android phones , which taps into the phone’s GPS to provide locator and reservation services.

Electric vehicle makers like Nissan and GM are using the GPS in the cell phone to offer similar range anxiety reducing tools. I tested the LEAF’s in-vehicle digital system, called EV-IT, that uses communication networks (via AT&T) and a dashboard to keep the driver constantly updated about the range of the vehicle and the closest charge point. The LEAF also has a dedicated iPhone application, and LEAF owners are able to remotely monitor the state of charge of the battery, and can pre-heat or pre-cool the car.

The Volt also has a smartphone app that will enable drivers to control certain vehicle functions through their smartphones, including scheduling battery charge times, viewing whether or not the vehicle is plugged in, checking voltage at a charger, and getting text notifications of interruption or completion of a battery charge. GM is relying on its connected OnStar system as the heart of the Volt’s digital services.

Images courtesy of Nissan, Coulomb Technologies and TomTom.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Solmentum uses data mining to identify customers who’ll find going solar financially attractive, and also to maintain a close connection with these customers, similar how a real estate broker acts. “The idea was to develop a secret sauce to identify the homes that are perfect and target those homeowners and not waste your marketing efforts on the rest of the 90 percent,” says Jason Brown, CEO of San Francisco-based Solmentum: “We have a technique to identify individual homes that are ideal.”

Exactly where Solmentum gets that data to mine is less clear. Brown was reluctant to discuss where the company gets its data to make the formula work; however, the types of customers and relationship-building efforts Brown talked about indicate the Solmentum probably makes use of public records, commercially-available satellite images and social networking sites.

Social networking sites are a treasure troves of personal data that, if used well, can translate into huge profits. Protecting that personal data has led to battles among Internet companies, like the most PR flap between Google and Facebook. At the same time it’s spearheading data mining, Solmentum also uses third-party software to do its sales and marketing.

So far, by using its data mining techniques, it has sold 5 MW of contracts to over 1,000 customers since its inception in 2009, Brown said. The company offers financing options from SunRun, which raises money from banks to pay for solar electric system installations and collects monthly fees from homeowners. Homeowners sign long-term contracts to pay for the solar electricity they use. Ownership of the equipment first goes to SunRun and then to the banks that can use it to reduce their federal income taxes. Solmentum hires installers such as PetersenDean to install the solar equipment on the roof.

Brown co-founded Solmentum the year he graduated from the University of Chicago’s business school two years ago. He and fellow business school grad and co-founder Jasper Platz lined up one of their professor and long-time solar industry observer, Travis Bradford, as an investor. Brown and Platz raised $325,000 to start the business, and their investors also include Ed Chandler, founder of Portage Venture Partners, as well as two general partners from Apex Venture Partners, Lon Chow and Armando Pauker.

Bradford told us that many marketing strategies center on a “shot-gun approach” in which marketers try to reach as many people in as little time as possible. That’s unfocused and doesn’t work well, particularly when you’re trying to convince people to either spend a lot of money upfront or commit to a long-term contract to buy solar electricity, Brown said. In general, people don’t feel compelled to change the source of their electricity overnight. “If you go for the shot-gun approach, then you scatter all those shots and hope you will hit something,” Bradford said. “We spend the time to get to know the customers in a way that most traditional marketing organizations wouldn’t be willing to spend.”

Cultivating and maintaining relationships involves doing things that a good real estate broker would do and they don’t have to be high-tech. Sending birthday wishes, stopping by to say hello and getting involved in the community are some of the things that can grease the relationship. Solmentum also hires people who make good teachers, Brown said, because a big part of the job is to educate consumers and get them to ask questions that will help Solmentum’s staff figure out how to make the sale.

Solmentum is doing business in three regions within California: San Jose, Bakersfield and Orange County. For San Jose, where people turn to air conditioning for relief in the summer, a homeowner who spends an average of $100 per month over a year would be a likely candidate to reach out to, Brown said. The much cooler climate of San Francisco, on the other hand, doesn’t produce as many good customer leads, he added.

Photo courtesy of Solmentum

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the Google-Facebook Battle Is Really About
• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry
• Locating data centers in an energy-constrained world

California-based Sungevity provides marketing, sales and solar system installation services to homeowners. It uses its own software and satellite images from other sources to develop an online process that it says serves customers more efficiently, from giving a price quote to designing an array of solar panels with the right orientation and other designs for a rooftop. Sungevity’s employees then follow up with phone calls to hopefully close the deal. The process differs from other installers that send sales people out for home visits, an approach that can prove expensive because those sales calls often don’t turn into signed contracts.

What sets Sungevity apart from some other solar service companies is its offer of financing options — leases of solar panels and related equipment. Solar electric systems are expensive purchases like cars are, even when factoring in state and federal incentives. Companies that can raise funds to finance leases and other options can attract more buyers than those that will require consumers to get loans on their own. A crop of solar service companies that have grown as a result of their financing muscle include SolarCity and SunRun. Some utilities also have gotten into the game, too, and Green Mountain Energy in Texas recently started a leasing program.

Financing options vary, of course. Some contracts require an upfront fee but set a monthly charge that is lower than the homeowners would pay for the same amount of electricity from the grid. Some companies use “zero down” to entice takers. All of them require long-term contracts in which the fees generally go up overtime. Whether consumers actually save money by going solar depends on their service agreements and how long they keep the equipment around.

Lowe’s wants to set up kiosks in its stores to provide that same online experience from Sungevity. The retailer will first offer the Sungevity services in 30 California stories in mid-July and then expand them to other states served by Sungevity later this year, said Danny Kennedy, Sungevity’s founder. Sungevity serves eight states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York.

The home improvement store also made an undisclosed investment in Sungevity. The startup raised a C round of $15 million late last year, and at the time Kennedy said he hadn’t closed the round yet. The company was to use that money to expand its services to the East Coast. It also added a few executives since then, including the chief financial officer and a chief marketing officer. The CMO, Patrick Crane, is responsible for using tools such as social media to promote the Sungevity brand and services.

Lowe’s will generate revenues from the Sungevity deal by getting a referral fee for each customer, Kennedy said. Perhaps Lowe’s also can make money by selling solar panels and other equipment and construction tools to installers contracted by Sungevity to erect the rooftop systems. Lowe’s arch rival, Home Depot, offers solar installation services through partnerships with companies such as BP Solar,  SolarCity and SunRun.

The deal isn’t the first in solar for Lowe’s, which announced a plan to sell solar electric systems from Akeena Solar in 2009. The pitch then was that Akeena had developed a partly-assembled system that would make installation faster and cheaper. A completely unassembled system would come with solar panels, cables, racks, inverters, fasteners and other little parts. Technicians would have to put them together and mount them on a rooftop. In recent years, equipment makers have been experimenting with designs that would pre-assemble an increasing number of parts.

The experiment with Akeena seemed to have fizzled for Lowe’s however. Lowe’s website doesn’t feature Akeena’s products (Akeena began doing business under the name Westinghouse Solar last year). The home improvement retailer does sell solar panels from companies such as Sharp and Sunforce.

Photo courtesy of Lowe’s

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry
• A 2011 Green IT Forecast
• Green IT Overview, Q2 2010