“The average resident nationwide pays $1,200 a year in utility costs. My cost of acquiring that consumer may be $2,000, and that would be cheap. It’ll be 10 years before anyone can extract money out of that thing. It’s a really hard market to crack,” said Kevin Surace, CEO of energy efficiency building product provider Serious Materials during a panel at the SolarTech conference last week.

Although steps such as insulating the roof, sealing air ducts and installing windows that minimize heat loss usually cost less than, say, erecting a solar electric system on the roof, they are still pricey enough to give homeowners pause, especially when the economy is recovering.

San Francisco-based Recurve, which raised at least $14 million in venture capital, has moved out of the energy auditing business to focus on developing and selling software to help energy auditors determine the most cost-efficient energy efficiency measures for their customers.

Federal Help

Federal, state and even local incentive programs are available for home energy retrofits, but consumers still need to fork over a big chunk of the cost. A solid energy audit should include a blower door test to gauge how airtight a home is. But the test costs from $800 to $1,000, which prolongs the time it will take the homeowners to recoup the investment, if they do at all, Surace noted.

A financing model called Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE), which allows homeowners to pay their retrofits as part of their property tax payments over time, promised to make energy efficiency measures more affordable. But Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac opposed such a financing model because tax payment becomes senior to home mortgages. That means if a homeowner defaults, the homeowner will have to pay back the PACE debt first before the mortgage.

The White House and the Department of Energy promised to work on alternative plans and proposed last November to work with banks to come up with low-interest loans to help finance energy retrofits. The DOE also launched a pilot project called Home Energy Score to standardize how energy auditors do their work and present data to consumers. The idea is to make it easier for consumers to understand the energy audit process and pick credible companies to do the audits and upgrades. The inspiration for Home Energy Score came from the Energy Star program for appliances or fuel economy labels for cars.

The Commercial Market

The commercial sector might be a more lucrative space for energy retrofit providers, Surace said. Businesses tend to use energy more intensely and pay more attention to ways to cut energy costs and reduce their carbon footprint. Their retrofit projects also can be larger, and that could attract more lenders.

Until now, a bulk of energy retrofit projects in the commercial space take place in public facilities, such as government buildings, colleges and hospitals, Peter Larsen, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told me. The lab has tracked the energy service market for over 15 years and built up a database of about 3,500 projects.

Public agencies tend to have buildings with outdated wiring and other equipment that could use some modernization, and they have the money to do it. Private businesses, however, are much more tight-fisted with their money and tend to carry out smaller retrofit projects and expect a much quicker payback to please their shareholders, Larsen said.

The commercial market has been dominated by long-time players such as Johnson Controls and Honeywell, which guarantee energy savings and line up banks to finance the projects, or pay for the projects themselves. New entrants have come in to compete for this market; Metrus Energy, founded in 2009 and based in San Francisco, won BAE Systems as its first customer and is doing a second project for the defense contractor.

Surace and others on the panel said commercial energy retrofits currently can take a few years to plan and finance. New business models that can deliver the projects more quickly and efficiently are needed to lure more business customers. During the panel discussion at SolarTech, Matt Cheney, CEO of Cleanpath Ventures, which finances renewable energy projects, said he saw a good fit between real estate companies and energy efficiency services. Derrick Rebello, CEO of Quantum Energy Services & Technologies, would like to see utilities involved to help finance energy retrofits. Some states have regulations that reward utilities for energy conservation efforts.

Photo courtesy of Bryn Pinzgauer via Flickr.

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“No one in cleantech is worth (billions). Yet you can create this small online team that creates billions of dollars in market cap,” said Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials, an energy efficiency product and service provider in Sunnyvale, Calif., at the SolarTech summit in nearby Santa Clara, Calif. on Wednesday. “John Doerr said it was about energy, energy, energy, and now they do anything they can to get back to the online space.”

Comparing cleantech to Internet companies might be a futile exercise in self-loathing. Internet startups have always been the darlings of Silicon Valley and will remain so for a long time (until we get that Netscape cleantech moment). But the fast rise of Groupon, which found a smart method to help consumers “clip” coupons, highlights the slow uphill climb of many cleantech firms for investors and Internet veterans who switched to cleantech. A similar reference to Groupon and cleantech showed up in this Cnet story on Thursday.

Surace and fellow panel speakers were brainstorming new business models that might make solar and energy efficiency more attractive to consumers and business owners when the subject of Groupon and investment in cleantech came up. Private equity investors and cleantech startups have talked more and more about the difficulties of raising money and making money from cleantech in the past year.

The term “cleantech” covers a broad swath of companies, but in general, it’s used to describe technologies as diverse as renewable energy, smart grid, energy efficiency and electric car tech and batteries. Investors in solar, in particularly, have spoken loudly about how they’ve piled on hundreds of millions of dollars only to have to wait ever longer to get their money back. Even though solar fetched the most private investment dollars in 2010, the bulk of the money went to a handful of companies that had gotten loan guarantee offers from the federal government to build factories or power plants.

“What you’ve seen in the past year is degradation in new startup funding,” Surace said. “Venture capitalists are still doing follow-up rounds, but this space is collapsing from four to five years ago.”

It’s not just new entrants having trouble getting funding. Even some startups that have been around for a while and should have already been generating decent revenues and thinking about exits are struggling to reach those milestones.

“We were waiting for the batons from the venture guys, and they ran past us because they couldn’t figure out how to get out of their own deals,” said Ed Feo, managing director of USRG Renewable Finance, which provides debt financing to renewable energy projects.

The world of energy efficiency technologies, from LED lighting to power management chips and software, has actually experienced a big growth in terms of deal numbers and values over the past year, according to reports by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Peachtree Capital Advisors. Investors typically like to talk about how energy efficiency technologies are an easier sell because they tend to be a lot cheaper and piggyback on big, existing markets such as IT.

The merger-and-acquisition deals for smart grid is certainly hopping. We’ve tallied at least nine new deals so far this year. Those buyers are among the well-known players in the space, including GE, IBM, EnerNOC and Johnson Controls.

Some would argue investing in cleantech is a much more worthwhile cause than online coupon brokers.

“If you look out 30 years, it will be obvious that we should have put money in this,” said Derrick Rebello, CEO of Quantum Energy Services & Technologies, an energy efficiency service company in Berkeley, Calif. “China has a government who knows they should be putting money in energy and energy efficiency. They aren’t putting money in social networking, because they think it’s bad for them. History will show that they’ve made the right choice.”

Still, with some Silicon Valley investors re-focusing their efforts on Internet companies, it’s no wonder those in the cleantech world are feeling less love these days.

“Cleantech and renewable energy have become less glamorous,” said Matt Cheney, CEO of San Francisco-based Cleanpath Ventures, which finances renewable energy projects. “Efficiency was marginally glamorous. But you don’t talk about it at a cocktail party unless you have a LEED platinum building.”

Photo courtesy of SDC2027 via Flickr

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Serious Materials CEO Kevin Surace told me in an interview last week that the advantages of the company’s software, dubbed Serious Energy Manager and Serious Insight, are that it can plug into a variety of building automation and energy management systems already in use, including Cisco’s building automation system. That means it’s not necessarily competing head to head with the building automation and control players like Honeywell, or Echelon. In that respect I can also imagine that it’s a bit similar to BuildingIQ’s energy software, but with less of a focus on control.

Surace says that the software product, which can monitor many of the building’s energy draws, like lighting and heating and cooling, is a lot lower cost than competitors on the market. One of the reasons for that is because it’s a software as a service product that’s hosted on the web. Another, I would speculate, is because as a new player in the space, and with two other product lines to bring in revenue, Serious is probably pricing its software to undercut the competition.

Serious Materials already has dozens of customers using the software tool, which can also be sold with sensors, says Surace. Some of the customers that it’s sold its building materials to, have opted for the software. “You can imagine the synergy across the products,” says Surace. At the end of the day building energy management software is a sizable market opportunity for Serious Materials, but an increasingly crowded space.

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We all want to keep up with the latest news and trends in our industry along with learning more about other areas of interest, like our hobbies. With only so many hours in the day, people often struggle with finding the information they need to be successful while not spending too much time sorting through massive quantities of data. Here are a few tips to help you whittle the information down from a fire hose to a trickle of only the most relevant content.

RSS Readers

If you don’t already use an RSS reader, you should find one, since this is the best way to get only the information that you want pushed to you while being able to easily see which posts you have read and which you have not. Google Reader and Netvibes are good places to start. For the rest of you who already use RSS, there are many ways to make it more effective.

Firstly, change the way you think about RSS; it’s more like a newspaper than email. If you fall behind on the daily newspaper, you aren’t going to keep trying to catch up and read papers that are months old. RSS is just like a newspaper, so don’t worry if you don’t get to everything, and don’t feel like you need to catch up. Right now, I have thousands of unread items in Google Reader, but I am OK with it. If that big number of unread items bothers you, simply take advantage of the “mark all as read” feature once a week if it makes you feel better or, better yet, use an RSS readers that lets you hide the number of unread items.

Secondly, do some pruning and get rid of the dead wood. Spend a couple of hours looking at which feeds give you the most value and get rid of the rest. If you are feeling overwhelmed and overloaded, you are probably oversubscribed. Some RSS readers even have tools to help you find feeds that you rarely read or are rarely updated.

Third, spend as little time as possible in your RSS reader by prioritizing your feeds. I use folders in Google Reader to group my feeds, and I put the most critical feeds right at the top. I make sure that I read through those high priority feeds first to spend more time on what I need to know while hopefully having some time left over to read a little extra. I also encourage you to learn the keyboard shortcuts for your RSS reader, since this can shorten your RSS reading time.

News Aggregation

While RSS readers are great for the things you know you want to read, they are not the best way to find new sources of information or news from unexpected sources; this is where news aggregators really excel. My favorite aggregator is Twitter Tim.es, since it takes the links from the people that I follow on Twitter and displays them in newspaper-like format, with the links that have been posted by more of my friends appearing as headlines on my Twitter Tim.es page. I also use Techmeme to find the topics that people are discussing online. Depending on your interests, you might be able to find other news aggregation sources focused on your areas of expertise.

Filtering

Filtering RSS feeds takes a little work, but it is worth it in the long run if it helps you find only the information on the topics that you want to see. While there are many filtering tools, my tool of choice is Yahoo Pipes. I use Yahoo Pipes to find out when people are talking about me or the topics that I am most interested in. For example, I have Pipes that comb through industry analyst feeds looking for a few specific keywords, which allows me to find the reports from analysts on those topics while ignoring the rest.

The best thing you can do to avoid overload is to stay focused on the most important information while not worrying about what you might be missing. If you can become more efficient at finding and consuming the right information for your needs, you can easily stay informed while minimizing the feeling of being overwhelmed. Read what you can and don’t stress about what you don’t have time to read.

What are your tips for managing content information overload?

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Photo by Flickr user See-ming Lee 李思明 SML, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

2.0

I wrote a review of GroceryIQ just over a year ago and I have continued to use it frequently. The new GroceryIQ 2 expands on the original concept by taking advantage of the power of a connected mobile device that can tap into the cloud. These significant improvements have pushed the app from “frequently used” to “indispensable” on my own iPhone. I’ll run down the features for you and then share some comments from the developer on how the cloud and the iPhone have come together to create great software.

What’s New in Version 2

The big update in version 2 is list syncing between multiple iPhones. In practice, this feature is incredibly valuable. Whenever my wife updates the list with something that we need, I get a push notification that something has been added to GroceryIQ. When I get to the store, I open the app and it quickly syncs my lists so that I am sure to not miss something we need. In addition, my wife instantly benefited from the effort I had put in to organize the aisles to match the layout of our store as well as the history and favorite items that I use to quickly build shopping lists.

GroceryIQ 2 also adds some features related to its acquisition by Coupons.com. You can find coupons on your iPhone and print them straight from the phone to a supported HP printer. I have a Canon printer so I use the email option to send the list of coupons I selected on the iPhone and print them from my computer. The list categories show logos for items that have coupons available as another reminder.

The gee-whiz feature in this release is barcode scanning to add items to your shopping list. You take a picture of the barcode using the iPhone camera and it will look up the item and add it to your list.

Frankly, I love this app because it actually makes shopping easier than using pencil and paper.

Jason Boehle from Coupons.com

I spent a little time catching up Jason Boehle from Coupons.com to talk about how the 2.0 release came about and how technology has made the simple task of making a shopping list even better.

Tell me about how you decided on the feature list for Version 2.

List sharing between devices has been a big request by users and was part of the original vision for Grocery iQ 1.0. We’re pleased to finally deliver it to our loyal customers. The new couponing features are another exciting addition to Grocery iQ and allow our customers to easily find coupons and savings directly related to what they’re shopping for. Barcode scanning is an incredibly useful feature for list building that many customers have requested, and we delivered one of the best barcode scanning experiences on the iPhone.

How is list sharing implemented?

List sharing is implemented using secure web services on the proven Coupons.com high-availability infrastructure. Apple’s push notification service is used to get list updates to your phone in real-time, while still taking it easy on device battery life. In addition to sharing a list between multiple devices, single devices can use the service as an online “backup” of their Grocery iQ data. One of the coolest things about doing all of the list sharing in the cloud is that we’re able to leverage this work to implement web-based list editing and sharing to devices as well as sync lists between other versions of Grocery iQ on other mobile platforms like Android, etc.

How does printing direct from the iPhone work?

We worked closely with HP to enable coupon printing directly from the iPhone to HP printers connected to wireless networks. In addition to loading coupons directly to your store savings cards, this is another feature that enables our customers who are away from their PC to still save money using Grocery iQ. The coupon printing feature is another example of highly leveraged work that is available in our Coupons.com iPhone app in addition to Grocery iQ. It also makes use of cloud-based services for all of the imaging and assembly of the retail-ready coupons.

How did the trend towards using cloud services impact the development of GroceryIQ 2?

The “cloud” has helped to enable all these new features in Grocery iQ 2.0. List sharing, coupon display, printing, and even barcode scanning all benefit from the power of a very sophisticated web service infrastructure. For example, we have an incredibly rich on-device product database which we use for barcode scanning and lookup. However, if we don’t find the product you just scanned in our on-device database we have the full power and extensibility of a web service that will search many other online databases to locate the item.

A cloud-connected device enables a whole host of scenarios. For example, your significant other can add items to your shared shopping list, load coupons to your savings card, and then send you to the store on your way home from work—and even make changes while you are there by scanning a snack box because the kids just finished it off. The built-in database enables a detailed shopping list, so you can be sure you’re getting the right items, and when you checkout, and the coupons are automatically applied when you swipe your savings card. Welcome to the digital age of grocery shopping!

Grocery Shopping Made Better

I know some of you may be wondering why I spilled this much digital ink on a grocery list app. Let me tell you, I use this app at least once a week and the list sharing features have really helped my wife and I keep up with the shopping demands of our large family. It really is better than keeping a paper list at home.

I also think that Jason’s comments about the cloud services that are leveraged in the iPhone app are important for the future of the platform. I think the next wave of iPhone development will show a lot of innovation in taking simple concepts that worked great in software and improving them by reexamining what is possible with a mobile device that is always connected to the cloud with push notifications. GroceryIQ is a great example of a cloud-connected app done right.

These results may not be that surprising, but the set-up of the study is fascinating — and a little frightening at the same time. Will the future of video advertising be based on labs with subjects wired to all kinds of sensors? Or will advertisers even one day be able to gather this type of data in the field, with biometric sensors becoming more and more a part of the video game experience?

Maybe it’s worth it to first take a look at the results in a nutshell: Microsoft and Mediabrands tested two ad campaigns from Kia and Hyundai with both traditional TV advertising and Xbox Live ad content, and the respondents in both cases spent far more time interacting with the Xbox Live content than with the TV spot. In the case of the Hyundai campaign, people clicked for more than six minutes on average through the Xbox Live ad content. The Hyundai TV ad, on the other hand, was just 30 seconds long. The interactive ads also caused far higher emotional responses from participants than the traditional TV ad.

Figuring our how people react to ad content on different platforms has always been a little tricky, especially since different types of media offer various ways to measure responses. Web advertisers like to look at click-through rates. The effectiveness of video ads are measured by the number of people sticking around to watch the whole thing, and TV advertising has long been a bit of a black box, at least until TiVo came around to offer some hints about what kind of clips we skip and which ones we elect to watch. Try to compare all this data, and it quickly gets fuzzy.

Microsoft now believes it has found the holy grail of cross-platform ad response measurement. “This is a big step forward for publishers and advertisers alike,” Mark Kroese, Microsoft’s Advertising Business Group GM, wrote yesterday, explaining the results on the company’s advertising blog. Of course, Kroese is biased. Other advertisers may be scared by the prospects of not only having to show their work to focus groups, but actually read through their biometric signals to see how bored they were.

However, the kicker for me is that these types of measurements may not be confined to labs forever. Biometric sensor devices like the ones used by Microsoft and Mediabrands are rooted in neuroscience, but they’re quickly crossing over to the world of entertainment. The Star Wars Force Trainer, one of the hottest geek kids toys this holiday season, lets players move objects just by the power of their mind, and it uses sensors similar to the ones used in the Microsoft study. The Emotiv headset also measures pretty much the same data, and it can be used to control video games with your thoughts. Kinda makes you wonder when Microsoft will start to sell its own biometrics headset to control Xbox games and measure the response to its Xbox Live ads at the same time, doesn’t it?

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There’s been a proliferation of new state-level policies enacted in recent years that promote energy efficiency, the report found.  These policies include energy efficiency portfolio standards, requirements that utilities adopt cost-effective energy efficiency programs, and regulatory incentive mechanisms to better align utility financial interests with improvements in customer energy efficiency. These programs are funded through rate increases on the sale of electricity and gas (as opposed to federally funded initiatives like the Weatherization Assistance Program), hence the “ratepayer-funded” focus of the report. 

Support for energy efficiency has grown in recent years as a result of widespread recognition that it’s less expensive to save a kilowatt-hour than to build a plant to produce that same unit of energy. While the new funding described in the report will ultimately come from ratepayers, the alternative would have been to build more plants to meet growing demand for power, the cost of which would have also been passed to those same consumers.

State-level energy efficiency programs have so far been concentrated in a handful of regions, with the top 10 states accounting for about 80 percent of the total spending last year. Among the leaders, California is the heavyweight, having spent about $1 billion in 2008 on ratepayer-funded energy efficiency programs.

But much of the projected increase in spending will be centered in populous states that have historically been minor players on the energy efficiency stage, the report predicts. Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania, which together represented less than 4 percent of energy efficiency program spending in 2008, could account for more than 60 percent of the projected increase in total U.S. spending through 2020. The cumulative electricity savings from these programs is expected to be between 4.7 percent and 8.6 percent of total U.S. retail electricity sales by 2020.  

Companies offering services or products for the energy efficiency market will of course benefit from these trends, according to a research note by financial services firm Canaccord Adams. The firm breaks the sector into three segments: energy efficiency program administrators like ICF International, energy efficiency program implementers like Johnson Controls, and energy efficiency product suppliers like Baldor Electric. We’ll add to that list startups like hi-tech insulation maker Aspen Aerogels, home energy retrofitter Sustainable Spaces and green building products developer Serious Materials. There might also be opportunities for startups in the building energy management sector, such as Powerit Solutions.  

Charts courtesy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

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“Be there, be behind the screen,” says Strauss, meaning that you need to be present, you need to be engaged yourself, and you need to care. “Who you are is who you are, all the way down to the cells of your body.”

According to Strauss, some ways to enhance your authenticity — beyond simply being yourself — include:

1. Pay attention. “Be the consummate observer. Be the listener.”

2. Be positive. “Be as positive on the back channel intercom of the Internet as you are on the front channel intercom.” Strauss emphasized that even “private” communications can be quickly made public so, in a way, there really isn’t a back channel online.

3. Use “Thank you.” “If you can’t get to thank someone, you walk around the room until you can,” said Strauss. Even if someone says something terrible, just say “Thank you” and let those two words hang in the room. People will get your point between the lines.

4. Own your passion. Still trying to identify your passion? “What are you always, always talking about? That’s your passion,” said Strauss. “Look where your friends come to you for help. The problems you are solving is what is most dear to you.”

5. Solve problems. Said Strauss, “If you end up solving problems for people, you end up solving it yourself. If you solve a problem for yourself first, be generous about solving that problem for others, too.”

6. Make connections. Strauss explained how much she loves connecting ideas, connecting people. By caring so much about connecting to other people, she has built a real community with conversation via her blog, not just a repository for comments.

7. Start a conversation. Strauss gave a few tips on how to build community on your blog: “Don’t blog too thoroughly. Leave some white space for people to comment…When people comment on your blog, don’t just reinforce what they said. Ask them a question back.”

8. Play for keeps. Strauss asked, “Why play a game if you’re not going to play for keeps?” adding, “Don’t ‘sorta blog’ for anything because no one will know you. You’ve got to own it.” Hearing this, I felt it was a key tenet of authenticity: to realize the commitment it takes to be yourself, be real and to be committed to your community.

How are you owning — and reinforcing — your authenticity?

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Investors include Mesirow Financial, which led the round, Enertech Capital, Cheyenne, Saints Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Foundation Capital, Rustic Canyon Partners, Navitas Capital and Staenberg. The Series C round brings Serious Materials’ total capital to more than $120 million. The company said it plans to use the cash to accelerate its growth and complete the development of new products.

It sounds like these new products will likely involve windows. “Windows offer the largest opportunity for improvement – fastest payback and highest energy savings,” CEO Kevin Surface said in a press release, adding that switching every building in the United States to super-insulated and highly efficient windows would cut carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 200 million metric tons annually.

Serious Materials bought a Kensington Windows factory back in January after launching its energy-efficient windows last October.

Government policies, notably stimulus dollars, have given the green building industry a boost, with McGraw-Hill Construction projecting that green buildings will represent 20-25 percent of annual new commercial and institutional construction by 2013, from about 10-12 percent today.

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