Google's Powermeter

This is a pretty exciting Google project I've come across:

http://www.google.org/powermeter/.

Google has built a web application that queries and displays your electric usage directly from your utility. You can view this from any Internet connected location via a web browser and it can evolve to to do much more than just monitor your usage to include, for example, control.

Google's new initiative shows a glimpse of where we are heading. It's not just your homes power system which is becoming communications enabled, we are on the brink of a new horizon; a horizon enabled by homes where virtually every device and appliance will be mashable and universally controllable. In the coming weeks, I'll be writing a series of articles for TMCNET which describe what the connected digital home is all about, the emerging mass market for home automation, smart power and why every service provider should be excited.

SoCComm

I've just returned from a business trip in New York and I had the lucky chance of being able to attend Jeff's new conference, SoCComm. This was a very different conference than VON or any other communications technology conference I've attended. I assumed that it would be a typical conference where entrepreneurs, CEOs, CTOs and the like gather to talk about how wonderful their new technologies are, give pitches on how they will disrupt markets and so on. But SoCComm was actually the exact opposite. It wasn't a showcase of social media technologies, but instead it was a gathering of the users; users that successfully reached the masses though new media, or as we concluded at SoCComm, "now media". These people were an actual emerging market enabled by new technologies and for me listening to their stories was much more valuable than a gathering of technology entrepreneurs pitching ideas, because it gave me new ideas on where to take the technology.

More often than not disruptive technologies are tools used in ways and for reasons that was never intended, they are unexpected solutions to problems we didn't even know existed. I'm not going to go into the details, but this is the hint I saw of what SoCComm has the potential of maturing into. If you're an entrepreneur or executive in the communications technology space, do yourself a favour, come to SoCComm this summer and instead of speaking and pitching, just listen.

Here is a pic of Skyline I took from a place close to a friends condo in Brooklyn from my IPhone.