Honeywell's thermostat with Opower software

Honeywell, one of the world’s largest thermostat makers, tells me that twenty years ago it tested out thermostats that can learn the home owner’s behavior and adapt the heating and cooling accordingly, but ultimately decided that consumers didn’t take to them, and would rather control their thermostat themselves.

I asked Honeywell’s President of its Environmental and Combustion Controls division, Beth Wozniak, in an interview if Honeywell was interested in making learning thermostats, because there’s been so much discussion about the startup Nest, which has created what it calls the world’s first learning thermostat.

“We found that consumers prefer to control the thermostat, rather than being controlled by the thermostat,” said Wozniak. Instead of learning thermostats, Honeywell is focused on adding intelligence to digital and connected thermostats through simple UI, mobile apps, and partnerships like its one with Opower.

Opower will be providing the analytics and data to help Honeywell use home and building thermostats for demand response programs, where utilities can ask home owners to turn down their heating and cooling slightly during peak times of day. The Opower thermostats are being piloted with utilities right now, including at PG&E. The Opower software will also be used to create new ways for the home owner to save money on their energy bill, and Wozniak says by the end of the year the partnership will launch other products too.

For Honeywell, connected thermostats are still a small part of the company’s overall thermostat sales. While Wozniak declined to say what percent or what volume of Honeywell’s thermostat sales are connected thermostats, she said it’s the very early days of the connected thermostat market. Honeywell sells a whole host of other connected home products such as humidifiers and security systems, and a “total connected home system.”

Who knows if Nest and its learning thermostat will one day make a dent in the thermostat market, but Wozniak acknowledges that the startup has brought some much-needed attention to consumer thermostats in general. “Cell phones and tablets have set a whole new bar for how things can be connected.”

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Currently most online video services have a sort of hunt-and-peck approach to finding things you might want to watch. You pick a video, watch it and then when it’s done you have to hunt down something else that might be of interest. But the latest version of Remixation’s Showyou app attempts to simplify the discovery process by making discovering new videos easier and more enjoyable.

The latest version of Showyou includes new ways to navigate content by category or by the social network that they’re pulled in from. There’s also a way for users to search and see all content curated by hashtag on Showyou and via Twitter. Finally, the update provides more information about others that you follow and gives you the ability to see what they’ve been sharing b clicking on a user’s avatar.

The trick to what makes Showyou work is that videos play in-line, without users having to exit the app. That reduces the amount of time it takes between finding videos, and there’s always something interesting being shared in the grid. Showyou displays videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Break Media, some Viacom shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, as well as videos from The Verge, TED and other Internet publishers. Altogether, the Showyou app pulls in about 5 million videos a day, according to Remixation CEO Mark Hall, or about 150 to 200 each second during peak times.

That’s led to huge amounts of user engagement for its users. While session times on most video sites typically run less than 10 minutes, Showyou users watch about 35 to 40 minutes of video whenever they open the app, or about eight videos per session on average. Online video needs better discovery mechanisms for users, and apps like Showyou are helping to increase viewership and keep users tuned in.

(Disclosure: Remixation is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.)

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Voting Booth

Another presidential election year is a month away, and just as with every election cycle, technology will play a critical role in determining who the next President of the United States will be.

Have your doubts? Just look at the last two elections.

In 2004, the rise of blogs opened the door to an influential new source of political commentary outside the traditional press,while in 2008, we witnessed the rapid rise of social media (and the Obama campaign’s early embrace of it), which played a big role in dissemination of messaging as well as fundraising.

In both elections, the growth of online video proved important; 2004 saw mainly short-form political entertainment/commentary from the likes of JibJab, but by 2008 both parties saw online video as a real competitive weapon, and YouTube became the testing ground in efforts to find a “Daisy”-like message to sway voters.

Just how will technology be part of the story in the 2012 election?  Here are four possible ways:

Mobile

Since money is, for better and for worse, the lifeblood of American election politics, it seems there are always new ways to utilize technology to raise money.  Just a few years ago, it was novel to have a website as a central way to raise money for an election on the Internet, and more recently, social media has become an important part of fundraising for any campaign.

So what technology could play an important role in fundraising in 2012?  The simple answer is the mobile phone. We’ve already seen Square being used at political fundraisers and multipurpose mobile apps like Mobilecause for fundraising and communication, and as I’ve written previously,  there’s no reason in-app payments couldn’t be extended to apps such as enhanced e-books.  Expect all the major candidates to make mobile a big part of their fundraising and messaging efforts throughout the year.

Twitter Mistakes

If 2008 was the year Facebook wagged the dog in terms of social media’s impact on politics, 2012 might be the year in which Twitter could prove decisive.  Over the past few years, Twitter has become the new real-time newswire for influencers and the media, and it has emerged as a way for candidates to connect directly to constituents without the filter of campaign managers and media experts.

However, Twitter has also shown why a filter is sometimes necessary.  The unfortunately (and appropriately) named Congressman Anthony Weiner got his own “gate” as a result of accidentally tweeting lewd photos of himself, and other politicians in the States and elsewhere have shown it’s all too easy to hit that tweet button.

With more politicians tweeting and at greater frequency, there’s no doubt Twitter could play a big role in 2012, and in possibly unforeseen and unwanted ways.

Big Data Analytics

While Facebook proved significant in 2008 as a way to build a following for a candidate, it was early days for social media and big data analytics in general. Four years later, it is likely savvy use of analytics by a candidate to sift through the mountains of data made available through social, mobile and other types of profiling and behavioral data could give them a significant advantage over their opponent.  Political campaigns have already proven themselves to be  fairly advanced users of polling analytics and there is no doubt that campaigns will only double down this election cycle on data scientists to possibly squeeze more advantages out of the huge cache of new data available from a variety of new sources.

Internet activism

In 2010 and 2011, one of the biggest political stories of all had nothing to do with traditional political establishments, but instead was about the rise of a new form of political activism on the Internet.  Wikileaks showed how by releasing huge caches of documents about political actors online could destabilize traditional political establishments, while new groups such as Anonymous showed that the Internet is the new frontier for civil disobedience.

How will the use of Internet political activism take shape in 2012?  It’s impossible to predict at this point, other than to say there’s a high likelihood that new and existing groups will likely try to make their voices heard in new and unforeseen ways, making this new frontier of Internet activism perhaps the biggest x-factor of all in next year’s Presidential election.

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For the most part people are now connected, with 5.3 billion people having a mobile phone as of the end of 2010. That number should continue to rise, but most operators are focusing on the next lofty goal — connecting machines. Call it machine to machine, the Internet of Things, or a web that talks back, but once we start connecting devices and sensors, we’re adding complexity to a system that’s already highly complex.

There are companies trying to build better sensors, and those trying to make new ways of programming such sensor networks, but Axeda is trying to create the intelligence in the cloud to monitor and manage the sensors in real time. Axeda, a Foxboro, Mass.-based company that’s been around since 2000 and which has raised million from JMI Equity and MMV Financial, has built a software platform for sensor networks.

Today, the platform handles more transactions per day than Twitter handles tweets, according to Joseph Biron, a senior director, product innovation at Axeda. When pressed, he said it was about 10,000 per second, although he expects that number to quadruple in the next year as more and more devices are connected. In March, Twitter said it saw almost 7,000 tweets per second at its highest point so far.

To handle this, Brion says Axeda has built its own NoSQL data store that he doesn’t want to disclose too much about. But he did say the Axeda engineering team follows Twitter, Facebook and other webscale businesses carefully to understand how they are handling their large amounts of data. With Ericsson predicting there will be 50 billion connected devices by 2020, he’s pretty sure the Axeda cloud will end up processing far more transactions that some of these household names.

And this assumes that not every sensor will be connected to a monitoring cloud. “Think about a building” Brion said. “There will be sensors on the fire panels and doors and windows. That’s thousands of them and they will likely connect and centralize through a gateway.” However, that’s still a lot of data coming in from one building, so Axeda hopes it is building a system that will be able to scale exponentially with the number of new devices added to its service as opposed to linearly.

He explains that in addition to monitoring, a dashboard, and the ability to send out updates or actions to the sensors, the Axeda software service will soon add more automated reactions. So, for example, if a building’s sensors determine the building is too hot, the information from myriad sources can be analyzed in the Axeda cloud and then the Axeda software can tell the building’s air conditioner to lower the temperature.

That can happen today, but the cloud component becomes more compelling when you bring in a third-party such as a utility, that can send the Axeda cloud a signal asking for power conservation, which can then push out that information to the building so it lowers the temperature in response. Because most sensor networks run on proprietary software, as opposed to something standardized or open source, Axeda has created an overlay in its service to translate the proprietary signals from devices manufactured by Honeywell, Emerson, Johnson Controls or others, into something that different systems can understand.

We’re not there yet, but this is the future that Axeda has decided to bank on. That’s why it has moved from tracking wireless assets to creating a cloud-based platform for managing all connected network devices. In addition to energy management, Brion thinks connected advertising, coordinated traffic management and other areas will be improved by a sensor network that’s controlled in the clouds.

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From ‘smart’ pens to a smarter Siri, Apple’s always attempting to find new ways to improve the iPhone, and the company’s latest patent application wants to keep its crack-prone glass blemish free. Aptly named a “shock mounting cover glass in consumer electronic devices,” the invention claims a tunable shock mount sandwiched between the phone’s glass and other hardware. There’s also plans for a sensor that can distinguish a “drop event” from normal phone movements and an actuator to prepare the shock mount for impact. Given that it’s only at the application stage, we won’t be seeing bombproof iPhone displays any time soon, but here’s hoping it’ll become a product reality someday. Mostly so we can see just how much of a beating it can take.

Apple patent application aims to keep iPhones shatter-proof with shock mounted glass originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 20 Nov 2011 00:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As revolutionary as the mobile ecosystem is, it’s the interactions of more intelligent connected devices with people outside of the context of phones or computers that will drive more innovation, says Mark Rolston, chief creative officer at Frog Design. Rolston, speaking at the Mobile Future Forward conference Monday in Seattle described a future where devices become more contextually aware thanks to embedded and connected sensors.

Instead of thinking about the buttons on a phone or a laptop, manufacturers and designers need to think about what will happen when computers are embedded in everything and connected all the time. Instead of computing confined in a box on a desk or in the hand, computers will be everywhere pulling data from a variety of places. Understanding how those computers will pull information about their environment, relay that data to users and then interpret what users want them to do creates a web of interaction that will require new ways of thinking and design.

In fact, user interaction might be a very minimal part of the overall design. For example, Rolston described a wearable glucose monitor that has elements embedded in the body, a monitor interpreting the data from the user’s bloodstream and a wearable screen for the patient to interact with. Of those three elements the patient input screen is likely gathering the least important information and must convey complicated information simply.

In a conversation after his panel, Rolston explained the challenges inherent in designing interfaces in such a world will come from devices trying to understand a user’s intent, as we build out new ways to interact with them, such as motion. How will a machine know when someone waving their hands while they talk to a friend becomes someone trying to tell a computer to do something? Of course, when a device can watch us and interpret our movements and commands effectively it essentially gives computers the illusion of humanity. That’s the illusion Rolston apparently is trying to create.

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