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.

From what I’ve seen so far they are really committed to this idea and even though the website is not yet up and running, you can find them on facebook. You can follow and interact with them on twitter or you can take their advice on how to save energy from their videos on youtube.

As I already mentioned, Google already released an energy monitoring system called PowerMeter, which is for now available only to a limited group of customers, but they plan to expand later this year. According to their announcement on the Google Blog: ‘Our software relies on “smart meters” (or other metering devices) as a data source. Over the past several months we’ve been looking to partner with utilities that are installing (or have already installed) this equipment in their customers’ homes.’ They truly believe that in order to create a path to Smarter Power it will take a lot of different groups working together.

In my opinion caring about the energy and our planet should be one of our priorities at the moment. The more big companies are concerned and are trying to find solutions to this problem the better. I don’t know if they are doing it for Marketing or because they really care but at least they are giving an example and are giving us a chance to become more aware about our impact on the planet: our home.

Let me know your thoughts and ideas about this and for the next few days lets take our first step into saving energy by turning off the lights every time we exit a room.

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

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.

One of the best presentations I attended, even though it is pretty hard to differentiate as they were all really good, was ‘Are you too nice for your own good? The dangers of bad HR.’

Sheena Clohessy’s message to all the starting companies was: ‘keep the HR management in your own hands’. She explained that a wrong choice of an employee will cost you over 60% of his yearly wage.

The 3 rules of HR that Sheena underlined are:

• Rule1 – Selection:
  • getting into your company needs to be a challenge. When someone comes for an interview don’t be afraid to ask them the tough questions like: ‘what is your biggest failure?’ or ‘What is the best/worst team you worked in?’
  • have a job description
  • do a reference check BEFORE hiring the person
  • use the 6 month probation period
  • Ask yourself these 3 questions:
    • Can they do it? = Their Ability
    • Will they do it? = Their Motivation
    • Will they fit in? = Their Attitude
• Rule2 – Fair Procedures:
  • When you hire someone you have to tell them how they can get fired – give them the reasons for dismissal
  • Have a disciplinary procedure
  • Get everything in writing – document everything
  • Don’t be overly tolerant
  • Be consistent
• Rule3 – Decide to lead:
  • Motivate people – the two key words here are ‘Achievement’ and ‘Recognition’

Another interesting and useful talk was Anton Mannering’s presentation about ‘The Power of Networking’.

Here are some of the points he addressed and that I added to my ‘Keep in Mind’ list:

- Use peoples’ names - I really think this, depending of your culture, might be easy or hard to get used to. Coming to Ireland from Romania, I always thought it was an Irish thing but I found out that there is more to it. By using a person’s name in the conversation you give them recognition; you are acknowledging them; and you show them that they are important to you.

- Listen – the other day I heard a story about the wise old owl living in an oak. The more he saw, the less he spoke. The less he spoke, the more he heard.

- Ask Questions – by asking questions you show interest and you also learn a lot.

- Nobody is a nobody – give your time to everybody. I could associate this to ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’

- Empower the others – share your knowledge! A friend of mine used this in a presentation also. She said that you have to go through life with one hand up and one hand down. You will find people in life that will be willing to help you and pull you up, genuine people like Anton for example; but don’t forget about the people behind you also, and give them a hand when they will need it.

- And finally, Focus on making Connections and not Sales.

There were a lot of other informative and eye opening presentations at this event, like Siofra Flood’s presentation about ‘What to put in the small print – top tips for end user licensing’ or ‘PR on a shoestring’ by Pat Phelan. Unfortunately I can’t cover them all here but I have good news. They were all recorded and they will be soon made available on the BizSpark website. I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I did.

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.

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 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.

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.

These sound like really good systems that can help any company save some money from monitoring their energy consumption. At the same time they are a step forward from where we were 10 years ago, but here are some questions that I think deserve a little bit of attention:

Why can’t these companies use the existing meters and monitoring systems from a plant? We live in a world where technology evolves really fast and companies shouldn’t have to change their meters/hardware every time new software is released on the market. Imagine changing your computer each time a new version of Windows is released.

What is the software doing with all the data that has gathered throughout the years?In today’s society holding data is not that important any more. The most important thing is what you do with that data. Having access to information doesn’t make you better or stronger, but how you use that information does.

And most importantly why haven’t we evolved in the last 2, 3 or 4 years?At this stage the functionality diagram of each company that provides this kind of systems should look like this:

I found this by mistake today and it put a smile on my face because it includes all the functionality that I would expect from an Energy Monitoring System and all the functionality I was talking about in the last few months.

It looks like there still is some hope left and finally a system was developed which will challenge the other companies to rethink their products and evolve.

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.

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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