Reading this you’re probably consuming electricity. Your computer, the lights, heating or air conditioning. If you’re in your offices there are probably one or two things plugged in that you’re not using at the moment. At home it’s probably even worse… and when the only real visibility you have is your monthly bill it’s pretty tough to actually do anything about it.

Luckily there are a number of solutions starting to ramp up that will help the typical homeowner to get a better understanding of what’s happening in their house in real time – both as an all-up number but with the more sophisticated solutions on a device by device basis.

Once you have the ability to monitor then you can start to make intelligent decisions – and see the impact of those decisions by tracking changes in real data.

At the macro level solutions like Microsoft Hohm and Google Powermeter can obtain billing data directly from your utility company and give you an overview of what’s happening to a bill by bill basis.  Hohm also has a number of wizards to let you provide more information about your dwelling and it then makes recommendations.

Earth Aid goes one step further by using the same data (already connected to more utilities than either Microsoft or Google) as well as performing analysis on local areas to indicate how well you’re doing compared to your neighbors. They identify appropriate offers and tax incentives that you can take advantage of and also let you earn points that you can trade for rewards.

If you want more realtime information Wattvision and the TED 5000 connect to your power meter and provide real time data. The TED product even uploads that data to the Google Powermeter site to give you a more granular dashboard.

Tracking down performance of individual items is a little harder at the moment. Most TVs and refrigerators don’t have a way to report energy usage but you can plug them in via an individual Kill-a-watt plug or power-strip and gather that data to help you understand what your microwave or DVD player are actually costing you in “standby” mode. 

It’s interesting to see devices like the Intel Intelligent Home Energy Management platform appearing – by using sensors embedded in devices around the home it can track and monitor everything from the external temperature to the power that your phone charger is drawing and help you make decisions based on the information in real time.

Imagine being able to optimize your use of the electricity grid based on the cost – automatically start your dishwasher at 3am so the dishes are ready for breakfast; monitor the temperature in rooms and make a decision based on occupancy patterns as to when to start warming them; flag an in-efficient household appliance as maybe being in need of replacement.

For now however you can start small and simple with solutions like the Conserve to control things at the click of a switch.

Apparently there are some people using Gmail and the Google Calendar service rather than Live Mail or an Exchange solution and they’re not sure if they can still get their email, calendar and contacts synced to their Windows Mobile phone or PDA.

Well luckily for them (and me, yes I use Gmail as well) there are solutions – and they are simple (and free or cheap).

Although connectivity is pretty good I like to make sure I have a local instantly available backup (and you can’t check your web calendar on a plane yet). Being able to store contacts, schedule and email in Pocket Outlook and work with them anywhere is one of the biggest reasons I’ve used a Windows Mobile device for quite some time.

Email

To get the most of out Gmail you’ll want to use IMAP to sync your mail – leaving the technical stuff aside (click here if you want that) it’s a two way sync so if you read a mail on the phone then Gmail knows about it when you go back to the website.

To use IMAP in Gmail you’ll need to enable it first. Once that is done you can access Gmail over IMAP in any mail client – Outlook, Thunderbird and, of course, Windows Mobile Outlook Mobile. To set it up for your device follow the steps for Windows Mobile5 or Windows Mobile6 (the instructions are slightly different because the default mail setup wizard for WM6 tries to use POP3 and you’ll want to work around that!)

Of course if you don’t want to do this there is always the Mobile optimized web version of the Gmail site but once you‘ve tried using the Outlook Mobile client you won’t want to go back

Contacts and Calendar

What use is email if you don’t have all your contact details available (and after all it probably makes sense to keep your contacts details in sync across web and the phone).

If you get an email inviting you to a meeting or a party you want to be able to put it in your calendar… but unless your phone and the online calendar are in sync how will you ever keep your schedule straight?

Well, for Live Mail users there’s always the Windows Live client which takes care of keeping that in sync for you, but for Google users there is OggSync.

OggSync supports both Outlook and Windows Mobile clients so you can choose one or both depending on what you need. Personally I usually use the web interface from a PC so just have the mobile client.

The free version supports basic calendar syncing and the (very reasonably priced) pro version adds a lot more flexibility/control to the calendar sync (including support for multiple calendars) and contact sync.

With the pro version you can synchronize multiple calendars (with mapping) to a time schedule so you never have to lift a finger.

All of the sync functionality (in either version) is bidirectional so you can update on the phone or via the web and, like using IMAP for email, know that everything will be only one sync away from being up-to-date.

Check out OggSync and … welcome to the world of Outlook Mobile

One of the biggest problems with using the Internet for crucial day-to-day applications is when you can’t get connected. On a plane, at a WiFi hotspot you don’t really trust, or even in a building with poor data network reception for your phone.

For most desktop applications the answer is simple… your data lives locally and you work with it there not rely on connectivity, and then sync what you need to. At MIX this year for instance we demonstrated a prototype of a Cirque du Soleil application that demonstrated exactly that.

For web applications it’s a little harder as they run inside the browser sandbox, and for mobile web applications… well, logic dictates that should be even harder.

Well… turns out it’s not that hard for developers to build an off-line version of their site that’s able to cache data locally and the really interesting thing for me was discovering how well it works on Windows Mobile. That solution is Google Gears.

I use Buxfer to try and make sense of my personal finances (a pretty major challenge). The reason I’m leaning more to this solution rather than, say, Mint (an otherwise excellent solution) is that they let me take my data offline and access it on my Windows Mobile phone.

Now they could have developed a native Windows Mobile application to do this, which would have given them a rich UI and dynamic synchronization and probably a whole load of other goodness, but they reasoned that they’re web developers, they don’t really “get” mobile app development and there’s probably a dozen different platforms they’ll want to support so… why not let someone else do the heavy lifting (and that someone is Google with their Gears API and javascript extensions) – all they have to do is develop the application using the Gears API and they get, for very little additional development overhead, a portable offline solution that runs anywhere Gears does (Windows Mobile, OSX, Windows XP/Vista and various flavors of Linux)

I think it’s pretty impressive that Windows Mobile is the first supported phone platform and a testament to how popular it is as a data access device.

Gears is only a 0.2 release so there’s probably lots of things that will be added over time. My wishlist for those additions is pretty simple:

• Ability to synchronize changes back to the web (MS SQL Sync Framework supports this
• Ability to auto synchronize – as a user I have to manually choose to go “offline”… if I don’t do that before disconnecting then I don’t have the latest copy of the data. It would be great if a Gears enabled app could detect it was running on an authorized device and in the background update me and then if I try to return to the site in (say) Flight mode it automatically switches to offline mode.

Native apps will always have a richer interface and more powerful capabilities because they operate outside the browser sandbox, they have access to the hardware (eg camera) and features like the network stack directly so they are ideal for more sophisticated users. But for simple look-up applications like mobile versions of Buxfer or Zoho this is a great solution

When Hotmail recently rolled out their new UI I liked it. It added value in a whole bunch of little ways that added up to a good experience. It's still not perfect and hopefully they'll continue to optimize the use of screen real-estate and layout, but their ajaxy-right-click goodness is great.

I used to like the Gmail interface because it was clean and simple and sparse but on one of my accounts I seem to be one of the lucky 1% who are part of the initial roll out of the new UI.

Now I don't like it as much. Stupid hovering things, more bold text highlighting stuff I don't care about, chat turned back on by default and a bunch of little tweaks that all take away from the reasons I liked it so much before.

I know it's a beta service and these tweaks may come and go, but this is the first upgrade that IMO had some retrograde features.