That’s why I really want a concerned and passionate developer to build a carbon emissions viewer for Google Glass. The concept could be pretty simple. The app would take objects — from cars to buildings to cell phones — that use electricity or oil and overlay them with data or imagery about how much carbon, or greenhouse gases, they are emitting.

Depending on how the developer wanted to visualize the data, the app could show an infographic, graphics that look like smoke clouds, or just a couple of basic data points. Most of this type of data is out there and being collected by energy software companies, government institutions, nonprofits utilities and others.

Companies that collect such data have long tried to figure out creative ways to make data about carbon emissions interesting, provocative, compelling and cool. Grist’s David Roberts blogged about the rare non-sucky infographic on climate change this week. The Victorian Government created this video campaign to illustrate carbon emissions as black balloons a few years ago.

If there was a super compelling visual rendering of greenhouse gas emissions, perhaps that would help more people galvanize around carbon emissions reducing projects and technologies, like lower emissions cars, and energy efficient buildings. These types of projects and technologies are pretty boring, and unless there’s some way that they can be made more compelling, they’ll continued to be under investigated and under funded.

Another inherent problem with climate change and carbon emissions is that emissions can’t be seen by the human eye, so they are easy for people to dismiss. Pollutants that produce smog, or smoke, or make water dirty, are far easier to get people to rally behind, because there’s constant visual proof. There’s proof for carbon emissions, of course too, but you need instruments like Picarro’s emissions detecting sensors.

There’s already some websites and smart phone apps that are trying to make a similar idea to this carbon emissions viewer. There’s CO2GO, a mobile app that calculates in real-time the carbon emissions of a user while you’re on the go. And there’s 3D visualizations like the carbon emissions globe. But placing this data over the eye, so that it becomes ingrained in daily life, could be even more powerful.

O.K., so such a carbon emissions app wouldn’t be something you’d want to use or wear all the time. Or very often. It’d be more like an educational tool or a art project. But I think it would be important.

So calling all developers. There’s some data sourcing and UI work you’d need to figure out, but anyone up for a carbon emissions viewer Google Glass app?

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

• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• The next generation of battery technology

The company wants to bring in industrial customers such as gas distribution companies and utilities — until recently, the company’s customers were mostly academic and government organizations, CEO Mike Woelk said in an interview. The company’s investors include Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, Focus Ventures and Mingxin China Growth Fund.

The U.S. has seen a boom in shale natural gas development, delivering cheap, domestic and abundant natural gas resources. But with that emergence has come thorny questions about the impact of natural gas development on nearby residents (both air and water), as well as the overall affect of natural gas electricity generation on greenhouse gas emissions. Natural gas is a fossil fuel, but is cleaner burning than coal for electricity.

The natural gas industry could be interested in buying natural gas detection equipment, like Picarro’s, to put next to pipelines, because leaking pipes can reduce both industry profits and could lead to disasters. In 2010, PG&E’s pipeline in San Bruno, south of San Francisco, exploded and killed eight people and hurt another 58.

PG&E has since spent billions of dollars to test and strengthen its gas pipelines. Woelk said leaks at a much smaller scale happen often throughout the country, but they don’t usually make national news. “I have a Google filter with natural gas (news) that I’ve stopped paying attention to – leaks happen at a fairly high frequency across the country. In aggregate, it’s a big issue,” Woelk said.

The analyzer

The company’s gas analyzer is the size of two desktop computers and it breathes in air to determine the content of a particular gas, say, methane, and sends that data to the cloud for processing. The instrument can detect molecules at one part per billion per second, a much more sensitive reading than equipment used by many gas utilities, Woelk said. Instead of being a handheld system that a utility worker would use to survey on foot, Picarro’s analyzer could be driven around in a car and cover more areas quickly, he added.

Picarro’s technology is based on its own patents and those it licensed from Stanford University. Many of its customers are research institutions, including Harvard University, Beijing University, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and China Meteorological Agency. Picarro has sold instruments to businesses as well, including PG&E, Waste Management and Rio Tinto Alcan.

The academic world is usually a niche market for scientific instrument makers because research institutions don’t typically need to buy expensive lab equipment in large quantities. Picarro prices its analyzers from $50,000 to $130,000. For industrial customers, however, the company wants to sell both equipment and data processing and access services. It’s negotiating such service contracts with some gas companies, but Woelk declined to disclose their names.

Before the latest, $7 million round, the company had raised $44 million in private equity. Picarro has changed its business model a few times since its initial founding in 1998. It wanted to sell breath diagnostic tools initially, but that didn’t take off. Then it went into the laser equipment business to serve the telecom industry, and that didn’t work well either.

In 2007, it focused on developing gas analyzers and hired Woelk as its CEO. The company has about 90 full time employees and sale offices in Beijing and The Hague. It manufactures its products at its headquarters in Santa Clara.

Photo courtesy of Picarro

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

• Locating data centers in an energy-constrained world
• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Such a state greenhouse gas network would collect massive amounts of real-time emissions data about atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane emissions (greenhouse gases that are contributing to climate change) from locations throughout California. The data would enable researchers to monitor specific areas that are contributing a high amount of emissions, and watch those areas over time for growth or improvement.

Earth Network’s stations will use gas-detecting sensor boxes from Picarro, a startup in Santa Clara Sunnyvale, Calif. The boxes cost about $50,000, are about the size of a desktop PC, and work by firing laser beams into the air to determine concentrations of greenhouse gases, then measuring the changes in wavelength signals. While the technology has existed in labs for decades, Picarro has stuffed all this measuring capability into a portable, 58-pound box of sensors that requires little maintenance.

The stations will be linked via data connections, and the data will be compiled centrally so researchers can use tools to analyze the data and draw trends and info from it. Earth Networks plans to use $25 million to build out its first 100 greenhouse gas monitoring stations throughout the U.S.

These types of greenhouse gas monitoring stations aren’t new; the first was deployed by Scripps at the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii in 1958. (Check out this excellent article in the New York Times  last month on the Mauna Loa tracking station). But thanks to cheap data connections, and the lowering costs of the sensor technology, more and more stations can be built and networked together.

Most greenhouse gas emissions management comes from bottom-up reporting, in which a company reports its energy use and other resource consumption metrics and maps out its carbon footprint. But greenhouse gas sensor networks can provide another layer of top-down data that can confirm, supplement or contradict reporting from companies.

California is one of a few states that have pledged to reduce greenhouse emissions to certain levels — in this case 1990 levels by the year 2020.

The global sensor network will be an important tool for fighting climate change, but how commercially successful the operation will be, I’m not sure. No doubt if the U.S. ever passes carbon legislation, and if the U.N.’s greenhouse gas negotiations make progress in the next few years, more governments and companies will want to pay Earth Networks to access its greenhouse gas data.

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

• The case for low-power servers in the data center
• Data center, meet the smart grid
• Locating data centers in an energy-constrained world

Yeah, it’s not exactly what I expected from the almost two-decade-old firm which has, until now, built a business around its 8,000 weather tracking stations. But Earth Networks has already partnered with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and has launched the first green house gas observation station in the network at Scripps.

There are a handful of these types of green house gas emissions observation stations in the world today, and the first was deployed by Scripps at the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii in 1958. (Check out this excellent article in the New York Times last month on the Mauna Loa tracking station). But Earth Networks says these observation stations aren’t networked together and don’t provide a global picture of emissions in enough detail and in real time.

The Earth Network will track both carbon and methane emissions and many of the observation stations will be built on tall towers and high up locations. The data that comes out of the sensor network will be used to provide detailed reports and will also be integrated into the WeatherBug app, so companies, governments, municipalities and consumers can check out the data. You can also observe some of it live online.

Earth Networks is initially working with Picarro, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup that sells $50,000 greenhouse gas-detecting sensor boxes. The analyzers are about the size of a desktop PC, and they work by firing laser beams into the air to determine concentrations of green house gases, and then measure the changes in wavelength signals. While the technology has existed in labs for decades, Picarro has stuffed all this measuring capability into a portable, 58-pound box of sensors that requires little maintenance.

The global sensor network will be an important tool for fighting climate change, but how commercially successful the operation will be, I’m not sure. No doubt if the U.S. ever passes carbon legislation, and if the U.N.’s green house gas negotiations make progress in the next few years, more governments and companies will want to pay Earth Networks to access its green house gas data.

Earth Networks did manage to build up weather-based services around its weather tracking stations, and the same type of products and applications will be needed for green house gas emissions data. In recent years, as AWS, Earth Networks started to sell its weather data to smart grid companies and utilities. The barrier to entry for Earth Network’s competitors is the $25 million worth of observation stations, but the intelligence of the network will come from the algorithms that sort through the emissions data.

To learn more about tools and companies that are hard at work crunching this type of so-called “big data,” come check out our Big Data conference in New York on March 23. I’ll be there.

Related GigaOM Pro content:

• New Opportunities in the Smart Grid
• Report: IT and Networking Issues for the Electric Vehicle Market
• Home Energy Management: Consumer Attitudes and Preferences

Conceptually, there’s a lot that doesn’t really work here. After all, the joy of a show like Project Runway (to which Reinvent the Wheels compares itself) is that those competing have trained hard in their chosen professions, and you know that each week, you’ll get a glimpse into talented people executing their craft under extreme circumstances.

However, the “creatives” who pitched their ideas in the hopes of winning $30,000 and a brand-new car were comprised of two DJs, two filmmakers, a make-up artist and a pastry chef. Not only do these professions have nothing to do with the automotive industry, they don’t even have anything to do with design (the one possible exception being the make-up artist). Frankly, the idea invokes memories of that Simpsons episode where Homer’s long-lost half-brother gives him a chance to design a car and Homer designs the worst car in the history of the universe. I wonder what real automotive designers, especially those currently looking for work thanks to the collapse of the American auto industry, think when they watch this.

Of course, the point is that the cars being proposed by the creatives aren’t meant for popular consumption — they’re meant to reflect “their personal vision” (as well as assist in their careers). And they’re not building the cars all by themselves: Each creative selected to create their dream-mobile is paired with a “builder” who represents a well-respected custom auto shop. The bulk of the show’s tension, based on the second episode, seems likely to come from the relationship between the creatives and builders, as the builders do have some veto power over the stupider ideas.

So I suppose that there’s some fun to the fish-out-of-water element. Plus, while on a production level the show doesn’t reinvent any of competitive reality’s trappings, it does execute them perfectly — talking head interviews, blathering host, dramatic music — and the approximately 10-minute episodes were nicely paced, never feeling overly padded.

However, the show’s inclusion of outsiders to the car world feels like an attempt to appeal to non-car nuts, which is a big misstep if you ask me, at least when you consider the success of car-focused shows like Top Gear. Targeting a niche audience never hurt anyone online.

One final note. Each episode of Reinvent the Wheel begins not with a welcoming theme song, but something I don’t believe I have EVER seen before on a web series: A five-second copyright notice. “The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright, including infringement without monetary gain is investigated by the FBI and punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.”

Seriously, dudes, you are not a VHS copy of The Little Mermaid that cost my parents $20 in 1990; you’re branded content for the web. It’s the in-show partnerships that are making you money, not whatever banner ads you have running on the site. And thus, eyeballs are eyeballs, and so making a huge deal about copyright infringement on a show you don’t even know people are going to watch? SERIOUSLY?

Related GigaOM Pro content (subscription required): Fact or Fiction: Where Is Branded Online Video Going?

CEO Michael Woelk told us last November that his grand vision for the company’s $50,000 gas analyzers was to have them deployed as part of vast networks to monitor changes in global carbon emissions. While this project will be limited to California, it still puts Picarro one step closer to that goal and could serve as an important validation for the startup’s technology.

California’s AB32 law requires the state to reduce key greenhouse gases by 25 percent within a decade. As part of that effort, seven Picarro devices will be placed in regions of the state where methane emissions are believed to be highest, such as landfills in Los Angeles and farm fields in the Sacramento valley, to help produce a clearer picture of those gasses generated across California. The California Air Resources Board, the state agency managing the emissions-monitoring program, reportedly spent $400,000 on the devices and software modeling to analyze the data.

Picarro’s gas analyzers, which are about the size of a desktop PC, fire laser beams into the air to determine concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases by measuring the changes in wavelength signals. While the technology has existed in labs for decades to make these measurements, Picarro says it’s the first to have stuffed all this measuring capability into a portable, 58-pound box of sensors that requires little maintenance.

So far Picarro’s customers are research and regulatory groups, like the California Air Resources Board and World Meteorological Organization. But the startup believes its technology will become increasingly valuable as governments look to ways to accurately measure carbon emissions, rather than relying solely on estimating them based on the amount of fuel consumed. Under programs like cap-and-trade, verifiable reductions in emissions will become a valuable asset, and Woelk said he sees a day in the near future when companies operating refineries or managing landfills will seek out technologies like Picarro’s to get an accurate measure of their emissions.

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

• Key technologies for the smart city
• Sustainability Reporting Software: An Overview
• California Rules Show Opportunities in EV Charging

“Thanksgiving is a day when family and friends come together to celebrate and catch up across the U.S.”, said Geraldine Wilson, CEO of Truphone. “For those people who can’t get home for the holidays, often because distance is too much, a telephone call to let them know how they are is the next best thing. With this initiative, we are allowing people who can’t be together to catch up on this special day.”

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

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• How to deliver the next-generation web experience
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in mobile

Woelk told us that the deal will bring “terrific exposure” to his company’s analyzers, but the chief executive has bigger aspirations than the WMO’s program. He says the current methods used by governments (and companies) to calculate GHG emissions are often based on the amount of fuel consumed and can thus be inaccurate. Governments and companies could also be tempted to provide fraudulent data about their reductions, especially as carbon credit trading becomes a bigger and more lucrative business. Woelk think his sensors can help bring more transparency to carbon emissions calculations.

So Woelk has been shuttling to Washington, D.C., to argue his case to legislators (he’s talked to staffers of Sens. Boxer, Kerry and others) that if the U.S. is going to regulate carbon either through the Environmental Protection Agency, a cap and trade system, or some other means, then the country needs to have an accurate way of measuring changes in emissions. His idea: a nationwide network of 500 sites outfitted with Picarro sensors with a price tag of $300 million that could accurately measure in real time tiny changes in GHG emissions for the entire country.

So far scientists have been the main supporters of Picarro’s gas analyzers. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Penn State University and other research outfits have been using Picarro’s technology in their labs and out in the field. The device, a 58-pound box of sensors that’s about the size of a desktop PC, fires laser beams into the air to determine concentrations of carbon dioxide and other gases by measuring the changes in wavelength signals.

While technology has existed in labs for decades to make these measurements, Woelk says Picarro’s achievement is that they’ve stuffed all this measuring capability into a highly portable device that requires very little maintenance. “You don’t need PhD’s to run these instruments,” Woelk said.

While other systems have to be re-calibrated by technical experts as often as once a day, clients have reported to Woelk that they’re able to let Picarro’s gas analyzer go untouched for up to six months. That translates into big savings for users over competing technology, Woelk said. Other companies developing gas-analyzing technology include LI-COR Biosciences, Agilent Technologies, and Thermo Scientific.

But Picarro’s largest long-term opportunity could come from companies operating refineries or managing landfills that are required under cap and trade or some other rule to monitor and reduce their emissions. Picarro’s technology could measure emissions in the downwind plume. “If you start to apply a value to those assets, in this case emissions, than fundamentally you will want an accurate measurement of those assets,” Woelk said.  So far, however, Picarro, which was founded in 1998 and is profitable, hasn’t inked any deals with companies. But Woelk expects that to change once the “simplicity, low cost and high return becomes apparent” compared with other options.

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

• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• The next generation of battery technology