And that turned me on to a subsequent thought: What value is Facebook getting from me that I don’t get in return?  I’m not a fan of Facebook’s privacy policies, and I’m essentially donating content and market data to Facebook for free.  Given that Facebook can index and analyze my information without even being able to provide a copy of everything they store about me, I thought it might be time to get a little bit of privacy back in my life.

For posts, the primary value is really just to “feel good” because other people are “liking” my posts and thoughts.  It really gets down to the central need that we humans have that makes us so conscious of getting approval from our fellow humans.  But when I thought about it, I realized that most of my posts don’t really have much content or value.  They’re generally just Tweets that have been pushed to Facebook automatically, so 130 characters or less of my mindless thoughts from that day.

I’ve always wanted my Facebook to be private, like my inner circle of friends when we hang out at a bar.  For this reason it took me almost 2 years to come to terms with accepting my mom’s friend request — you really don’t want your mom around every time you’re hanging out with your friends.  I don’t understand “liking” companies on Facebook, nor do I want applications like “What song was popular when you were conceived” to now have access to all of my personal information.  I had to accept the truth of the matter — Facebook is not a private forum to interact with my friends.  I could either accept that all my personal information and content would now be owned by Facebook, or choose to divest myself of Facebook instead.

I haven’t totally given up on Facebook, and likely won’t go the extra step of deleting my account.  I still participate in 2 ways:

1. Private messages.  If you don’t have someone’s email address, sending a Facebook private message is the easiest way to contact people you don’t talk to on a regular basis.  Let’s say I’m traveling to Sydney and want to meet up with people I know in Sydney, then I send them a Facebook message.
2. Commenting on other people’s posts.  Just because I’m not posting doesn’t mean I can’t be lurker!  Although I am doing this less and less it seems.

And look at the brightside — now maybe I’ll have a few extra hours per day of productivity, world exploration, or just plan fun that I would have spent on Facebook.  Not a bad tradeoff.

If you want to keep following Joe, he still actively posts on Twitter, checks in FourSquare, and uses this blog and Tumblr.

Read this article, and related articles, in their full glory at polastre.com.

Read this article, and related articles, in their full glory at polastre.com.

First, the results.  I travel quite a bit, and that means most of my energy savings is actually from finding the optimum configuration of my appliances while I’m away.  I was averaging about 500 Watts when I started using TED.  But now my steady state “away” power consumption is 150 Watts.  That’s a savings of $30 per month if I’m traveling the whole time.  Not groundbreaking, but enough to pay for my monitoring devices in less than a year.  Add to that the fact that PG&E keeps giving me rebates for “cutting consumption during peak winter periods.”  In the last 6 months, that’s resulted in a $25 Visa gift card and a $30 bill rebate.  Not bad, about $80 in PG&E bill savings plus $55 in incentives, or $135 savings over a 6 month period.

Despite these fine results, why hasn’t home energy management and monitoring taken off?  Why has Google PowerMeter shut its doors? Why was Microsoft Hohm shut down last month?

Tips to Transition Home Energy Management into a Sustainable Business

Integrate with the services I already use today.

Ultimately I think there needs to be a mint.com equivalent website for home health and management.  But it needs to integrate with my existing home.  That means logging into PG&E for me and pulling my utility bills for the last 2 years.  Connecting to my TED and Ploggs.  Allowing me to see if my TV, DVR, DSL, Playstation, or Xbox are on.  After all, ALL of these things have a network port!  I even have a UPS because the power is so flaky (thanks PG&E).

Just a crazy idea: why not access the current health of my house from my DirecTV or Netflix or Playstation Network websites?  Okay, maybe not that last one.

Bottom line: Give me a fairly complete picture on day 1 without having to install a sensor.

Don’t expect the consumer to pay money.

Consumers are fickle buyers.  Getting them to sign up for a free website — not too hard.  Getting them to come back or pay money, now that’s a challenge.

Idea #1: provide the service platform to existing providers. Companies like ADT don’t actually build any of their own hardware or software, a little known fact.  And everyone is dying to occupy the space under, around, or in your TV.  From Netflix to Microsoft to Comcast and AT&T U-verse, they’re all vying to be the one place you go and steal your eyeballs (we can argue about Netflix, but I secretly believe they do want to own your home experience).  If you can provide the service “cloud” platform to these providers, you can help them differentiate their offerings and encourage their customers to stay in their interfaces and websites for control of the home.

Idea #2: monitize the platform. If you can recommend methods for saving energy, why not have some of those sponsored?  I’m sure that LG makes pretty much every brand of washing machine these days, so really the only difference is that the Kenmore brand at Sears has paid a small premium to be recommended first.

Improve the software technology.

I’ve been disappointed with the software available, such as Google PowerMeter, TED, and Hohm.  They all had promise, but seem to be an afterthought of those companies (as I predicted when they launched a couple years back).  Their fundamental failure: the only thing they provide is monitoring.  Raw data.  But only from certain utility companies or certain devices.  That’s really limited.

Monitoring software gets commoditized quickly, and ultimately customers lose interest because we don’t know what to do with the data. (Sidenote: All of the Google PowerMeter recommended replacements are monitoring tools, not management, analysis, or automation tools).  Instead you need analytics and automation.  From my smart meter, figure out which profiles are constructively and destructively summing together to make the total reading.  Determine the contribution of my refrigeration, for example as you can see in each “bump” in the graph below for my home.  Annotate unusual activate and ask the customer: Did you use the dryer yesterday between 3 and 4pm?  Why yes, I did.  Boom, we now have a profile for what that energy signature was.

Improve the monitoring technology.

The devices that I have purchased have just been absolutely horrible.  It was like they were built as part of high school science fair project.  My TED has already been replaced once, and periodically stops reporting for no reason.  Is it the wireless power sensor?  Is it the gateway?  Did Google PowerMeter go down?  I can’t tell and there’s no diagnostic info — see the graph below for a typical Google PowerMeter report with lots of missing data for no good reason.  Plogg wants me to set up a Bluetooth or Zigbee network and then write a script to upload the data to the service of my choice.  Huh?  Hardly consumer ready.

Improve the design of home appliances.

Let’s face it, I don’t need perfect information.  I just need “good enough” information — something I struggle to explain to technically-brilliant engineers.  So here’s two improvements:

Idea #1: Provide a basic SNMP MIB for home appliances with network or WiFi built-in.  Make it part of CE/UL/etc certification.  The fact that you can put a device on the network with no remote diagnostic ability drives me nuts!  There’s no remote network management interface on any of my appliances which are essentially computers — DVR, Playstation, Xbox, Wii, Apple Airport, etc.

Idea #2: Model out the power consumed by different devices, use the routing table, and ping them.  If I know the IP of my Playstation and I know its model (one of the old ones, not the new ones), I know that if it responds to pings then it is on and consuming 300 Watts.

Leave the utilities behind.

The approach of a whole different class of startups is to bundle services with the utility company.  This is what Tendril, for example, has done.  This means that their software is available to about 12 people nationwide (Okay, maybe half a million, but that’s a small portion of our population).  Focusing on utilities focuses your business, and everyone who has given money to the shrine of “Crossing the Chasm” will think that’s a good idea.  But utilities move slow, don’t know what they want, and fundamentally have a different vested interest than the consumer.

We’re in an age where startups need to move fast and gain a loyal consumer following.  That’s why I think there’s much easier and tremendously quicker software innovation that can go a long way to open home management up to the masses.  The challenge is marketing and monitization.

Achieving the Savings in My Home

With deficiencies in the technology, how did I get so much in savings?  I looked at my whole house energy profile. I used different temporal resolutions to identify the refrigerator.

Energy savings activities:

• Unplug Printer (amazing idle power hog)
• Unplug Microwave
• Unplug Toaster
• Unplug everything under my TV except for the DVR
• Put Desktops to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity
• Turn off H/VAC (I live in SF, so no worry of pipes freezing)

Here’s what I keep running 24/7:

• DSL modem and router to get to my media server
• Media server (I bought a ReadyNAS which consumes 60 Watts *with* disks)
• DVR (can’t miss American Idol)
• Refrigerator (this is the biggest power hog of them all, and really should be replaced by my landlord)

Summary

Fundamentally, I hate to admit it but the software technology in this market simply isn’t mature nor accessible to the common consumer.  There is no mint.com equivalent for what’s going in your home.  And as an entrepreneur, that means there’s opportunity here.

Image taken Sept 3, 2007 from the Mandarin Oriental, Tokyo.

Read this article, and related articles, in their full glory at polastre.com.

Read this article, and related articles, in their full glory at polastre.com.

Enter Android. A startup company started by the former founders of Danger. You may remember Danger from the Sidekick sold at T-Mobile. Or from Paris Hilton’s Sidekick being famously hacked (technically it was the T-Mobile instance of the Danger server that was hacked) and all of her contacts spilling out. It was an operating system built on Java, and had the equivalent of a Blackberry Enterprise Server years before Blackberry had thought of the idea.

Once Danger achieved some success, they got in a bit of hot water from Sun. Danger had not licensed Java for use in the Sidekick, despite the fact that Danger was using a new model for Java applications now called “Split VM” where only the necessary operations and bytecodes are evaluated on the device, with some pre-processing and pre-linking to minimize distributed code size and speed programs up. After a few years of back and forth, Danger finally passed the 10,000+ tests required for the Danger OS to be “Java powered”, and Danger paid their license fee to Sun.

The Sun-Danger debacle set the company back because they had to divert resources to achieve Java certification. So when the founders decided to start Android, they had a clever idea — let’s change the bytecode interpreter to NOT be the Java VM (using a register-based machine instead of a stack-based machine). We can then write our own compiler, and compile Java (and other language) code to our new “Android” bytecode interpreter. Brilliant! (or so they thought.) They have just beat Sun at their own game, and now Android is free of pesky Java licensing. Despite their brilliance, Android fell on tough times with lack of funding and no handsets using the software. And just a few days before the company was to close its doors for good, Google swept in and purchased the company, technology, and team.

In the mean time, Microsoft acquired Danger for use in their Zune business unit. And they threw out all of the Danger code, especially the parts that had Java.

You may remember 10 years prior, Microsoft had their own scuffle with Java. Visual-J, a very cool Java IDE, had built in some “Microsoft-isms” as extensions to the VM and the language. They allowed you to access Windows-specific primitives. This was a no-no to the Java czars, who vowed that Java was to be a platform-independent language. These modified bytecodes violated the Java licensing agreement, violated the Java certification and use of the Java mark, and a lawsuit ensued. Microsoft paid $1.6 billion in a settlement in 2004. Microsoft did not have a shipping product that used Java.

Which gets me to the point of this article: Why does Google have such hubris, arrogance, or stupidity that they think they’re immune from the legal issues that plagued Microsoft a decade earlier? Microsoft had a similar arrogance at the time of the Sun lawsuit. I worked there, and they hired 3 people for every 1 job just because they could — they didn’t want such talented people going to IBM (for example). Then Google came along and ate their lunch, became arrogant, hired people just to lock them up without any compelling work to do, and the cycle repeats itself (Facebook?).

The news and blog outlets talk about the fact that Google doesn’t have any IP to defend itself with in this lawsuit. And if the only defense is “You’re a meanie!”, “No, YOU’re a meanie!”, then there’s something seriously wrong with our patent system. The reality is that Google knows they’ve infringed on Java’s IP. They’ve even blatantly copied Java copyrighted code. And there’s legal precedent. I look forward to seeing how much this costs Google for their arrogance.

“Broken Android” image courtesy of Gizmodo.

Read this article, and related articles, in their full glory at polastre.com.

Read this article, and related articles, in their full glory at polastre.com.

Read this article, and related articles, in their full glory at polastre.com.

Read this article, and related articles, in their full glory at polastre.com.

Read this article, and related articles, in their full glory at polastre.com.

Read this article, and related articles, in their full glory at polastre.com.