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.

Providing customer service costs money. Providing good customer service takes commitment and money. Money to hire the right people, commitment to provide a good level of service and learn from what your customers are telling you, and more money to actually do something about it.

What does indifferent customer support cost? While it doesn’t hit your bottom line today it’s going to have an impact when the customer doesn’t come back or shares a negative opinion and you lose business.

I know how tough it can be to provide good service. I spent some time running a support team for a software company as well as making sure we had support in place for premium services on some web properties. In every case there was a cost associated with creating service levels that made the customer feel you were on their side, and a cost associated with resolving the issue (sometimes engineering costs, sometimes time, sometimes smiling and giving a refund and hoping we’d do better next time) – from this I learned a simple lesson.

I learned that you don’t treat support as a necessary evil, you treat it as a pre-sales and marketing exercise and you focus on making happy people who are more likely to engage with you and your brand again. If you focus on getting them off the phone as quickly as possible with as little fuss as possible then you’ve already lost the battle.

As technology improves providing good service shouldn’t be hard. Companies like Starbucks, Comcast, HP and Polar all have multiple ways to talk to them – Live Chat, Twitter, Forums, Email, support systems like FogBugz – all of which allow tracking and continuity of engagement and potentially very public resolutions.

How they approach the task is very different and varies from ignoring negative comments and promoting positive ones through to active outreach and open communication. Sadly though even where individuals do a good job the process and attitude of the company lets them down (I’m looking at you HP – does it really take weeks to find out you don’t know how to change the assignments of buttons on a PC you make?!)

With a current issue with another company they have been great. Lots of communication and I’m sure we’ll resolve the issue and I’ll say nice things about them in the future.

The opportunity cost to HP of providing ineffective support is that I bought a new Acer machine at the weekend for home, so for want of a simple software fix they lost at least one machine.

In our house we have way too many cables (just ask my wife!). While a lot of the cables are just regular mains leads (though we try to optimize the way we use those) there’s quite a few wall warts for charging cellphones and the like.

While it’s not going to solve every problem there are a couple of mains chargers that also provide USB power – from iGo and Belkin for instance – but they still require cables. Well, I think my wife would approve of this idea – a mains outlet with built-in USB connectors (that only draw power when something is plugged in).

The TruePower UCS is available pre-order for only $10 – due in early 2010 as soon as it gets final UL approval.

It can be installed to replace any standard dual wall socket and provides standard mains power as well as 5V DC 600mA power to both the USB outputs.

This should help with some of the clutter though it doesn’t help with all the other transformers for the cableTV set-top box etc it’s a start.

Of course cable free power charging like the PowerMat is the real answer to the cable crunch but I suspect it’s a while before we can cut all the cords.

This isn’t a Craigslist personal ad, or a plea for someone to beat me into shape (I have one already, though sometimes I think he despairs of me!)

What I’m looking for is a handy bit of technology that can come with me to the gym and help keep me on track and motivated by recording what I do, telling me where I’m improving, suggesting ways to improve where I’m losing ground and – for those long hours on the elliptical – keep me entertained.

There are a new generation of small tablet devices coming on the market. Better battery life and performance than my rather lackluster Samsung Q1U. Some running Windows 7, others running embedded operating systems such as Android. Hopefully they will spur the development of niche variations (though an important factor for a Gym Buddy would be resilience ... perhaps Panasonic need another model in their ToughBook range!)

The other thing we’ll need is folks like Life Fitness, Nautilus, Precor etc to be happy to agree a standard for two way communications between equipment and Gym Buddies and accessories like Polar heart monitors and pedometers etc need to get in on the game as well. Something like ANT or another low cost, low power radio and a simple pairing mechanism is all that’s needed.

Once paired the Gym Buddy can share your personal details (weight, age, gender) and required program parameters with the device and during the exercise record your performance (both from the machine but also accessories such as your pedometer or heart rate monitor).

While you’re exercising your Gym Buddy could keep you entertained – don’t forget it’s a fully fledged computing device. Your music (tempo synchronized to your exercise routine of course) or a video (both could be sourced via a service like Zune Pass so there’s always a mix of fresh and familiar content). Email, an RSS reader, the Web, New York Times or an eBook reader or simple mind games so you can multi-task… exercise your brain at the same time as your body. As long as they have simple on-screen controls (or voice command assuming you’re not huffing and puffing too much) – much like an in-car GPS or the Origami / Centrafuse type of interface. If you have wifi and a VoIP client I guess you could even take calls… but is that socially acceptable (fine if you’re working out at home of course)

Sure, there’s a lot of equipment in a gym that doesn’t have a brain in it that can talk wirelessly to the Gym Buddy but a Tag or a QR code on the device to identify it and a camera on the Gym Buddy and we’re all set… wave the camera at the Leg Curl machine, load up the suggested weight, watch the technique video and then record reps and sets (or confirm you hit the suggested goals).

Some exercise you won’t want to lug even a rugged ultra portable with you so the ability to sync devices (eg Polar FT80 Heart Rate Monitor watch, S1 pedometer or G1 GPS) back to the Gym Buddy when you finish would be a must. It could even create opportunities for new devices – swim lap timers etc. that can communicate wirelessly to the Gym Buddy.

For gyms and personal trainers there’s a business model here – they would be able to deliver personalized programs that their clients subscribe to. By getting better information about exercise and eating habits etc they would be able to further optimize those programs and add more value.

All this data needs to go somewhere… luckily with services like Health Vault it’s now possible to upload and store your exercise history just in case you drop a 20Lb weight on your Gym Buddy for suggesting just one more set of sit-ups and one less frosty beverage after your workout.

On a small scale I’ve been doing this for a while. My pedometer records steps to Health Vault, and I record my Elliptical sessions via Twitter to GtFtr.com but these are all discrete systems and require me to keep motivated.

Isn’t that a pretty important job for a Gym Buddy…. (oh, and if anyone is developing something like this and wants a willing victim to try it out please get in touch!)

Meantime… can someone tell me why my pedometer has a battery? Surely these things could be self winding from the kinetic motion I generate during the day?!

Not a notebook or a netbook or a UMPC (or any of the other variants). I’ve come to realize over the years that the current classifications and niche computing devices are missing out on one form factor and the current attempts to fill it are pretty horrible.

Current devices like the iPhone or the Touch Pro are limited – they are too small to be “computer” replacements yet they don’t work really well as phones either. They are a compromise and perhaps the solution is to pair a more basic featurephone with a very portable device that’s actually useful.

What I want is something the size of an A5 notepad with a touch screen covering the whole of the front of the device – no need for a keyboard or extraneous buttons (they would be flush in the bevel or on the edges along with any ports) that I can interface with using a pen (similar to my UMPC) but with enough battery power to easily last a full day and enough processing power to deal with handwriting recognition and speech recognition.

This device would need WiFi and Bluetooth to enable it to pair seamlessly with my Cellphone and a headset. The headset would ideally be able to connect to both the notepad and the phone – so I can dictate to the device, break off and answer a call and the continue to control the notepad while listening to music from it, all seamlessly.

The connection to the phone would be ideally be more synergistic than just being available as a modem. Ideally transition from WiFi to the phones 3G data would be seamless (let me set preferences but it should be smart enough to take the optimal data path) so I can always stay connected. Beyond that the phone and the notepad should be aware of each others status so when the phone rings my music pauses, caller ID information is displayed on the device and I can hit and answer button on the screen or the phone and route the call to my headset, the phone or speakerphone on the notepad, and text/MMS messages could be composed and read on either. The notepad should be able to access the phones camera to record images or video (as well as having a built in one) and via a standard USB connection they should be able to share power as needed.

There’s no reason the phone shouldn’t have limited internet capabilities (web browsing, email, a social networking client, GPS mapping) and, of course, some games so it’s a useful device in it’s own right but it’s primarily a phone. At the weekend for instance people might not want to take both devices but a smart-enough phone to keep them in contact would be the right balance.

Using software that has learnt lessons from the iPhone UI and Microsoft’s Origami Project and InkSeine the device would need to work with pen (both for tapping as well as handwriting recognition), finger (gesture control) and spoken input. Applications like Outlook and OneNote would need optimizing for maximum usability on a screen this size and layout with these input methods but simpler cut down versions would help performance and battery life.

Accelerometer, light sensor and on-board GPS would open up other possibilities for control, and of course being able to use a dedicated Bluetooth keyboard (or the phone keypad or an on-screen keypad) to extend the ways you can interact with the device.

Not only would this device offer a more practical replacement to the iPhone and N80x type devices it would also be a platform for Amazon to extend the eBook capabilities to – much like they have extended the Kindle Reader to the iPhone.

Coupling a device like this with a service like Mesh and Exchange Active Sync to ensure your data is always available (and offload processing of things like search indexing to the cloud) and live updates (weather, stocks, traffic for mapping etc) and you have an ideal personal companion device.

In fact, with a standardized mount / connector architecture you could check your schedule on it over breakfast, slot it into you car and use the GPS to route you to your appointment (with live traffic updates) and via the connector have it monitor ODB-II information to remind you you’re running low on fuel and suggest the cheapest gas station or remind you that you’re due a service soon (maybe add a task to your to-do- list!)

In William Gibson’s Virtual Light Yamazaki takes his notebook for granted. I just want one now ;) Maybe it’ll need a kinetic charger to keep going as long as I want, but the rest shouldn’t be too hard…

I've been using PortableApps for a while as a way to keep a copy of FileZilla and Firefox close to hand with my preferred settings.

Like most PortableApps users I used to use a USB key to carry them around - but recently I've been less attached to that dongle and started relying on the cloud storage and synchronization capabilities of Live Mesh to make sure the utilities are always to hand.

Because PortableApps doesn't install anything on the host PC (it's more like an OSX or Linux app in that regard - no registry changes, no INI files squirreled away in user directories) it's a perfect fit for a Mesh folder... and really easy to set up.

I created a new Mesh folder on my test machine and called it PortableApps (imaginative I know, but I wanted to be able to find it easily!). I then installed the base PortableApps version ("Platform Only") into that folder to get everything initialized. Once that was installed I added the three apps I wanted - Filezilla, Firefox and the PortableApps updater (useful to keep things at the latest version - no Windows Update for these apps sadly!) and tested they were working.

Just for good measure I added a shortcut for the Portable Apps launcher to my Windows start folder so it would run automatically when I logged in.

I then sync'd the folder to machines where I knew I wanted to run those apps (my Windows Home Server and my laptop) and also shared the folder with my wifes Mesh so that I would always have the apps there if I was using her machine for anything.

Now my settings follow me around, and if I update something on one machine a sync later it's everywhere I need it.

... is this the start of everything living in the cloud and being available on every connected device I can authenticate on?

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…

Although I have terrible handwriting I often prefer the free-format nature of taking notes with pen and paper. The problem in today’s electronic age is that they are hard to share, index, archive and search unless you go through an obsessive process of scanning everything – time consuming and pretty painful.

I have tried using tablet PCs and UMPCs with software such as OneNote, InkSeine and Evernote but never found anything that felt natural and didn’t require a compromised way of working.

My latest attempt to solve the problem is the Pulse Smartpen from Livescribe.

The smartpen is deceptively simple. It is about the same size and weight as a good fountain pen (in fact it feels very similar in the hand to my Mont Blanc) but it contains an embedded computer, an OLED screen, memory (1GB and 2GB options), microphone, speaker and a camera.

All that technology allows it to monitor what you are hearing, track what you are writing or drawing and, by using the camera to recognize codes embedded in the paper, perform functions and execute small applications (eg calculator or currency conversion)

At the end of a “session” you simply connect the pen to it’s USB docking/charging station and everything you wrote and the audio you recorded along with it gets synchronized back to the desktop application where you can then chose to upload and share.

It’s not perfect yet, though this is the first release of the device so hopefully they’ll address some of these as time goes on.

The physical form factor is great, but it uses special ink cartridges and the method of swapping them (and to insert a stylus) is a bit clumsy. Ideally it would have an option to swap from ink to stylus and back again easily – as you need to “double tap” on your work to replay audio or perform certain functions you can end up with weird marks on the page.

The reliance on the paper embedded with the Dot Positioning System means you can’t just grab any notebook and write. Though they do supply both notepad and journal sizes (lined and unlined) so it’s not that big a restriction.

No OCR support. Although you can search documents within their desktop application it doesn’t support full OCR or export to OneNote or Word. They do say that 3rd party tools are coming to extend the platform (they have a developer program if you want to explore) but to my mind this is a pretty important piece of functionality I was surprised to find missing.

It’s not 100% reliable. Unless there’s a good light source and you write carefully enough it does sometimes miss letters or parts of them. It also doesn’t cope very well with shading – once you’ve drawn over the Dot on the paper it’s not very good in picking up when you shade over the area. There’s also no pressure sensitivity which also limits the usefulness for sketching (though block diagrams etc are easy)

It’ll be interesting to see if I can get by without my laptop – just using the Pulse Smartpen to take notes in meetings this week… could it be the beginning of the electronic office ;)

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.