Hohm is the new Microsoft service which will come as an answer to Google’s PowerMeter and all the other similar services.

Hohm is about ‘Bringing people together to save energy and money’. They are trying to give us a better understanding about our home energy usage and about what we can do to conserve energy and save money.

Besides real time monitoring of the energy consumption through smart meters, Hohm will also provide users with data about their energy consumption even if their utilities are not online yet. In order to obtain this data the user will have to answer a set of basic questions and Hohm will estimate their energy consumption. Through this Microsoft wants to make Hohm available to all users straight away.

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UX Workshops provides workshops around “User Experience” with highly experienced experts.

May 18: ‘Enterprise Information Architecture’ – Louis Rosenfeld
May 19: ‘Commercial Ethnography’- James Kalbach
May 20: ‘Personas and Mental Models’ – James Kalbach

Early bird pricing is available until April 2, 2009. Space is limited.

For the detailed program of the workshops, please visit www.uxworkshops.com or have a look at http://tinyurl.com/7fhlf5

Location of the workshops:
EMPIRE RIVERSIDE HOTEL
Bernhard-Nocht-Straße 97
D-20359 Hamburg
www.empire-riverside.de

Last Tuesday I attended the BizSpark Innovation Accelerator in Dublin, an event organised by Microsoft Ireland in collaboration with Digital Media Forum.

The Event brought together over 200 attendees from different backgrounds but most of them  having a common goal for the day: gathering information about starting up a business.

In my opinion the event was a success as it covered everything from Licensing Agreements to HR, from Founding to PR, from research to product management to increase profitability. I firmly believe that even though the information was presented at a high level there wasn’t one person present that didn’t learn something new on the day. I know I returned with pages of notes.

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In an uncertain present who would dare to say they knew what the future held? Ireland played host last week to Bob Johansen from The Institute for the Future. The Institute is an independent, nonprofit research group specialising in ten year forecasts by integrating micro and macro trends. Big multinational companies and leading governments use the insights they get from Bob and his colleagues to shape strategy and investments. After all, with a 70% success rate over 40 years; these are the guys with the right pedigree and track record.

Bob holds that 2009 will be a “springboard year”, one of great opportunity. While clearly a lot of organisations are just doing everything that they can just to survive there are clear trends that smart companies and entrepreneurs are taking insight from that will pay off within the next 10 years. 2019 will be a much more connected time, your Bebo and Facebook friends will be there in real time helping you shop, keeping you planet friendly and talking you out of the fattening pizza that looks good but your friends know doesn’t fit the diet. It won’t be all busy bodies either, safety data, traffic info and statistics will all be available, local to you through the miracle of geo-positioning and in-vision displays. Start investing in those language lessons too, multi-linguists are going to be powerful people. All that connectivity isn’t going away and your multilingual Twitter feed is going to be part of the instant data river your life is going to swim in.  There is plenty of room for the small and nimble player to create value once Cyberspace disappears like a shadow and integrates with the everyday life.

Just a few weeks ago I was talking about “The age of speed” and how technology evolves so quickly in this century. I was talking about Microsoft Surface and being one step closer to teleportation. But technology evolves a lot faster than we can imagine.

A group of students from MIT Media Lab in Long Beach California, transformed the Internet into a ‘Sixth Human Sense’. They developed a wearable computing system which can turn any surface into an interactive display screen. The system relies on a webcam as an input device and a small projector with a mirror as the output device.

Here are only some of the functionalities of their system:

• Creating a frame by using your fingers tells the camera to take a photo.
• You can project the photos that you took on any surface and use your fingers to browse through them, rearrange them or resize them.
• You can browse through menus.
• You can search locations on a map.
• You can draw on a wall just by using your fingers.
• You can even call your friends by dialing their number on the palm of your hand.
• On the way to the airport you could check if your flight is delayed or not.
• You could know the time just by drawing a watch on your wrist.
• You could project information about any person you meet.
• And even watch a video of the news that interest you in the newspaper.

If you want to find out more and see how the system works, here are two videos that show its functionality:

Students transform the Internet into ‘The Sixth Human Sense’ – Video1

Students transform the Internet into ‘The Sixth Human Sense’ – Video2

The BizSpark Innovation Accelerator is an event organised by Microsoft Ireland in collaboration with Digital Media Forum, designed to help accelerate the Start-up businesses in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

The day-long event is scheduled to run on Tuesday, February 24th, in the Radisson SAS Royal Hotel in Dublin’s city centre. Entrance is free of charge.

The aim of the event is to provide business guidance for Start-ups and anyone in Ireland or Northern Ireland who thinks they might like to start-up a tech company. Topics will include stories from experienced Irish entrepreneurs, and practical advice from individuals and organisations who have been working with the local Tech Start-up community over the past few years.

If you are interested in the event you can register and find more information here.

In today’s world most managers face the same problems, which become more pressing since most of the countries are facing recession. The most common question in the current economical environment is: ‘How can we reduce costs?’ and it doesn’t take long for a company to realize that one powerful opportunity lies in improving their energy management strategies.

At this stage there are lots of software companies which provide Real Time Energy Monitoring Systems and there are a lot more which are planning to enter this market.

During the last months I’ve been researching software that allows a company to monitor their energy consumption and here is what I found:

• Most of the software provides real time monitoring and alert systems.
• In order for that to happen, the companies providing the software will install their own meters.
• They store historical data in a database which can be accessed at any time through their software.
• They send alarms every time the energy consumption rises over a certain value.

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Photo credit: Amy Tiemann and The Laptop Club

Not only are they paper-thin, but infinitely customisable by the user and recyclable to boot. You can even make one yourself. Alright, they may not be commercially available (yet) but clearly are some of the most innovative computers around.

Amy Tiemann, creator of MojoMom.com and c|net contributor blogged about The Laptop Club, where 7-9 year-olds at a local school were creating paper laptops for play. From a research perspective, this is serious stuff and reminiscent of one of my favourite research exercises, Draw The Experience. Looking for insights, particularly from young children? Crack open a box of Crayola crayons and have them draw what they are thinking. We recently used this approach with children travelling through Ireland West Airport to understand what they liked, disliked and wished for in the perfect airport.

Be sure to check out this interview with Amy Tiemann, which includes a gallery of the laptop designs.

Not getting your daily fill of user-centred insights? TMTBOX Media have pulled together a list of their Top 100 User-Centred Blogs. Though very heavy on the interface side of user-centred, you may find a few feeds to add to your own list of favourites.

via Work Matters

Bob Sutton uses Guy Kawasaki’s latest project, Truemors, as an illustration of the shift between the first dotcom boom where VCs opened up their wallets for a great idea in a Powerpoint, to today, where even the smallest team with an idea can launch an idea on the web to the masses. The big idea here is certainly real-time prototyping, done cheaply, and evolving quickly with user feedback online.

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