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.

There’s a lot of talk in the US and other countries about the moment about Health Reform and how Personal Health Records (PHR) aka Electronic Health Records (EHR) from the like of Microsoft (HealthVault), Google (Google Health) and others (e.g. Dossia) are going to make things more efficient.

Sadly in a lot of cases the people they seem to make more efficient for are the Hospital Administrators and Insurance companies who’ve done a good job of letting costs spiral out of control to improve their shareholder returns rather than providing good value healthcare at low cost to the consumer and the tax payer.

Maybe adopting PHR frameworks is going to help reduce costs and make Doctors lives easier but without a personal-centric view I’m not sure how it’s going to help the recipients of health-care – you and me.

What happens if I’ve chosen to put my data into HealthVault yet the hospital I get admitted to only has a Dossia based system. What happens if I change dentists from a Google Health affiliated provider to a HealthVault practitioner. Will my Chiropractor in the US who uses HealthVault be able to access the X-Rays taken at a Medical Center in Australia or the UK?

And will any of them be able to access personal data the should be taken into account as part of holistic health based approach to maybe stave off the need for medical attention – personal training, gym and other exercise?

I use an Omron pedometer which I track in HealthVault via the WalkMe service. My Polar FT80 HRM however stores data in their service. I use the equally isolated gtFtr to track random workouts and weigh-ins. Other people may use something like a Nike+, FitBit or a Philips DirectLife (with personal recommendations) to track their activity and a Withings scale that twitters your weight to your followers. Every time I go to the gym there’s no record of what I actually did there (hence the need for a Gym Buddy) so there’s no way my doctor knows I’m actually following their recommendations or my personal trainer to see the results of my latest checkup.

There are initiatives like Continua to come up with common standards for connected equipment but at the moment they seem to have some IP requirements standing in the way of getting more people to the table.

Without a way to put the focus on the individual and get people to buy into the concept adoption will be slow and painful but if there’s a way for people to connect and see the impact of their choices (or the benefit of their good behaviors – as sites like Dental Optimizer try to go) I think the impact of PHRs will be more far reaching than just helping a few administrators cut down on their paperwork

I buy a lot of stuff over the web. Mostly from places I know and trust and have formed a relationship with over the years. The obvious suspects like Amazon as well as less well known properties like Brando. One thing that keeps me coming back to them is the reliable and secure purchasing process.

Recently I’ve had a couple of experiences as I’ve branched out into a different market segment (thanks to my recent Mustang purchase) that reminded me just how important that process is.

I’m not going to name and shame the losers – they have lost on both the transaction as well as future business. But it does make me wonder if they’re making so much money they don’t need the business – in what case good luck to them.

So, I wanted to buy an upgrade component for the Mustang. It could just have easily been a part for a PC or a power tool – the process should be the same! I shopped around and found what I wanted on a couple of sites with similar prices. As I’m new to the whole auto DIY world I emailed both for some information. One replied promptly with some information. The other didn’t respond. Foolishly as it turns out I tried to purchase from the one who hadn’t responded as they were cheaper. All went well until I hit the “checkout” button where it processed my credit card details and then threw a meaningless error back at me.

The order hadn’t been processed, there was no confirmation email but… they’re put an authorization for the amount on my account. So I emailed them and asked them to confirm the order hadn’t gone through and waited. Nothing from them, but the authorization came off my account a couple of days later so the money wasn’t tied up. I really should have learned my lesson at this point but I tried again. Different – but still meaningless – error, authorization flagged on my account and no chance of getting the part for the weekend (sure, I could have spent the money elsewhere but I wanted the authorization backed out to be sure before I did that). So I emailed them again.

Still no response, but the other vendor I’d contacted sent a follow-up email. Nicely worded, hoped I’d found what I was looking for. They assumed as I’d not ordered from them I’d found it cheaper, but wanted to point out they do offer to match any advertised price (incl shipping). If I had got it from elsewhere did I have any questions about installation or usage they could help with.

I got the hint this time. When I followed their process through to the checkout it turned out they were cheaper. And shipping was free. And they offered my a bunch of choices for payment. Process worked a treat and 20 minutes later I had both the confirmation email from them and a correctly processes transaction showing at the bank.

It’s good to have a little reminder every now and then that great customer service counts for a lot. By making sure that folks had a reliable experience on the site, when making contact, and when making a purchase they have gained loyalty, trust and recommendations. The other supplier…. I went through my wishlist and replaced every link to them with links to American Muscle or Performance Center.

Never thought I’d write a blog post talking about anything but the technology that powers their business but hats off to these guys – they’ve both done a great job reminding me that it doesn’t matter what you’re selling over the web… customer service is that same as if the buyer walked into your store, and it should be just as smooth.

Update: The original supplier. The one who’s checkout process failed and didn’t respond to emails… well, the first (of what may end up as four if all the orders process) package has just arrived. I’ve contacted them to see if they’d like me to return it, pay for it or pass it on to another Mustang owner :)

Peer to peer technologies have a pretty bad name. The immediate association is with BitTorrent and pirated movies and ISP throttling but step back from that and you’ll discover that there are some interesting products turning up that take the old idea of the network being the computer and putting it to good use.

Probably one of the first peer to peer applications to get traction was SETI@Home which parceled out data from the Arecibo radio telescope for users to analyze in the hope of finding repeated patterns. They may still be searching for intelligent life in the universe, but the idea spread and a number of similar @Home projects developed their own architectures but all on the underlying premise – by getting users to donate CPU cycles they could contribute to the project – be it searching for aliens, a cure for cancer or the largest prime number.

Over time a number of these projects realized that having different runtimes and communications infrastructures was inefficient and didn’t help optimize the network effects of a peer to peer community and eventually BOINC evolved as an open source grid computing platform that in turn supported SETI@Home, Folding@Home, ClimatePrediction.Net and many others.

But searching for aliens isn’t the end of the platforms taking advantage of the power of peer to peer processing. There are two other platforms that have recently launched that are challenging the established thinking.

Search

Search itself has traditionally been the remit of the companies with the big pockets. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and others dedicate millions of dollars to building and running the server farms that crawl the web, build the indexes and serve up the queries to their visitors and unless you’re pretty sure of your business model that’s going to be a scary market to break into. Unless your business model doesn’t need you to deploy all those servers or storage because your uses will.

Faroo, a German start-up, have exactly that model. Users run a small, lightweight application on their machine which serves three functions. The first is that it runs using idle CPU and network bandwidth to crawl the web building up an index and distributing it around other connected peers for optimal search performance. The second function is that responds to search queries – both yours and, if suitably configured, other users to give results from your local cache, the distributed index and various 3rd party search solutions. The third function is that it monitors where users are going on the web and uses that to prioritize the search indexing, which enables it to react very quickly to trending topics while still maintaining the ongoing drive to build a bigger network.

While Faroo are not yet making revenue off their search engine they have a plan that will allow them to share the revenue with both the users who are contributing most to the network and a number of charitable causes. It will be interesting to see if this will scale and be able to remain relevant – ReadWriteWeb asked this question and others, but they, and much of the commentary seem quite positive on the ability for Faroo to do well.

Storage

The other technology that requires a fairly high investment in infrastructure is remote storage. Services like Microsoft’s SkyDrive obviously provide robust and reliable storage but at a cost that most startups would find hard to compete against. Wuala (another strange name, and from Switzerland this time) have taken the same concepts of peer to peer networking that underlie the storage requirements of Faroo and similar projects and use it to launch a scalable file storage and sharing platform in a way that enables them to minimize their bandwidth and storage costs. They do provide a copy of the data on their servers but by default they serve it from the peer network first and only refer back to their infrastructure if there isn’t a viable instance available.

To leverage the network effect best Wuala reward active, online participants who contribute storage to the pool (with a reliable, high availability connection earning you a higher reward) with additional storage options. Their business model doesn’t rely on serving advertisements (which seems to be the de facto Web 2.0 pitch) but allows users to also buy additional guaranteed availability storage without having to provide capacity to the network in return. In the short time since they launched they’ve gained quite an active user base.

Broadcast

While BitTorrent may be the first thing to spring to mind when you talk about p2p and video today, that not may be true in the future if the new LiveStation platform takes off (and having used it for a while I can see why it should!)

Using technology licensed from Microsoft Research, and Silverlight to deliver the user experience LiveStation uses a peer to peer network to deliver a scalable live video broadcast platform. In a traditional experience the more users viewing the content the more infrastructure was required (either for the broadcaster or the content distribution network) but with LiveStation the opposite is true – the more users the better the platform is able to distribute the loan between peers giving a better end user experience without having to worry about scalability of the backend solution. As long as there’s enough infrastructure to seed the network they should be able to cope with any number of viewers – and use their dedicated infrastructure to insert adverts or manage other aspects of ensuring the service is commercially viable.

Is Peer to Peer the answer?

It’s hard to know at the moment how well any of these services will take off.

BOINC and it’s predecessors appealed heavily to the more technical end of the spectrum so installing and configuring a download wasn’t too much of a barrier to entry (though as it becomes more mainstream and they continue to not evolve the user experience to that audience I wonder if that will harm their growth). Both Faroo and Wuala are aiming firmly at the typical end user though so they’re going to have to overcome trust issues to get their engine running on as many machines as possible as quickly as possible, and they’ll have to make the experience so easy that after the initial installation the nodes work as effectively as possible.

At first glance Faroo has done a good job of making a fairly simple installation experience with sensible defaults to provide maximum benefit to the user and the network without too much downside (as it’s developed in .Net on a Windows machine there’s no need for additional overhead such as the Java runtime) but the Wuala experience has a little way to go – not only does it require Java the configuration process and usage isn’t as intuitive – but both of these are in beta so I’d expect them to improve and evolve over the coming releases.

LiveStation seems to have a great platform and user experience but needs more varied content to make it a viable long term winner – partnerships with more networks and perhaps providers such as Netflix or Blockbuster would make them a winner.

I think in the  foreseeable future the traditional model of centrally hosted and managed solutions are going to continue apace but the viability of peer to peer solutions is going to allow more new competitors to enter the landscape and scale quickly and reliably. Perhaps we’ll even see a generic platform like BOINC evolve to provide a common services layer that handles the communication and security (and the initial install issue) and subsequent solutions simply deploy as add-ins with their own user interface, secure storage and networking / CPU asks of the user…

What those solutions look like… online time – and imagination – will tell…

FrankArr pointed out it was Star Wars day, and Clone Wars are coming soon… but watching it projected from R2D2s head would be just perfect

I so want one! Shame it doesn’t work as a Media Center Extender ;)

Check out Nikko America for more info.

Recently I managed to do some damage to a Vista install (note to self - while resizing a partition from a Linux app works it's best to follow the instructions EXACTLY) and needed to run a repair.

Being a lightweight and ultra modern machine the one thing that was lacking was any sort of removable spindle media... like a DVD drive. That meant I needed to be able to create a bootable USB thumbdrive that I could copy my Vista ISO onto in order to run the repair (originally I'd used an external DVD drive but I didn't have it and needed my machine quickly) so... on my other Vista machine (everyone should have two computers) I fired up a command prompt in adminstrator elevated mode (find Command Prompt in the programs list, right click, "run as administrator" then followed these easy steps:

Run Diskpart at the cmd prompt and then enter these commands

• Rescan
• List disk (will list all your disks)
• Select disk # (where # is what you found from the previous step for your usb key)
• Clean
• Create part pri
• Select part 1
• Format fs=ntfs quick
• Active
• Exit

You USB key is now bootable and you can copy the contents of the iso across, plug it into the other machine, reboot and ... voila - I'm trying this from the repaired machine.

Back in 1989 a very clever, and funny, man called Douglas Adams got very frustrated because it was difficult to keep documents in sync across multiple machines without jumping through hoops and even manage content from different sources within a document elegantly.

Luckily in the years since Office file formats (both Office Open XML and OpenDocument) and the various Office suites have become smarter and more flexible (and dare I say "open") but the problems of keeping things in sync so the user isn't concerned where he edited the document when he wants to print it are not quite solved just yet.

Things like Groove and FolderShare are making it easier, and hopefully the promises of computing in the cloud will continue to accelerate the pace of development.

Sadly Douglas is no longer with us, but memories of Frank the Vandal live on...

Have you ever come across a really cool site and wondered what technology they used to roll it? Does it support RSS, what do they use for Web Metrics, which Ajax library are they using, what server platform have the selected, DO they have a P3P policy?

Well, wonder no longer... just visit BuiltWith, tap in the URL and they'll deliver a wealth of information about the site you're interested in - along with a measure of what %age of their surveyed base is using the same technologies.

At the moment it's fairly new so the %age of people using a particular technology might be skewed but it's interesting to see how some of the apparently popular services are not scoring so well just yet... time will tell though.

Check out their blog for news of new releases and to discuss suggestions to improve it... though as it seems to do just what it says straight out of the can I can't think of anything I'd like to add at first glance (rare I know!)