Webware

I talked this week with Adrian Tuck, CEO of Tendril, about interesting ways the U.S. power delivery grid could be modernized. Tendril, it needs to be said, could gain a lot from the nationwide adoption of smart grid technologies, since it makes software and designs hardware that collects electricity use data from appliances and then processes that data for utility companies and consumers.

The big idea that Tuck and I discussed is a concept that's only now boring its way through the thick bureaucracies of the utility companies: what if, instead of power companies charging for electricity at the power meter, which is the point of where it leaves their power lines, they instead were able to charge individual appliances and other devices for the power they used, regardless of where they used it?

Adrian Tuck, CEO, Tendril

(Credit: Tendril)

What's the difference? It's this: suppose I have a Tesla Roadster, and I drive 240 miles (the Tesla's range) from my house to yours, to see you. I need to recharge my car to get back home. If I plug it in at your place, that will cost you about $4, Tesla says. A small price to pay for the pleasure of my company, but nonetheless isn't it unfair for you to pay for my car's fuel? And if you're talking about parking lots full of cars at businesses, this cost could add up. If cars and power companies could communicate directly, that charge could go to the cars' owners, not the owner of the building where they plug in.

Other devices that use a lot of energy--refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners--could give their owners some control over whose energy they use and when they use it. Tuck says that the idea of energy that's billed to devices instead of homes is "the equivalent of number portability" for electricity. It would allow manufacturers to build devices that let their owners choose which electricity producer they want to use to power their devices. Want cheap but polluting coal power right now? Go ahead and dial that in. Want green wind power instead (and the carbon credits with it)? Set your washer to run only when there's "wind on the grid," and let the provider who generates that power send you a bill for the electricity you use.

Tuck even talked about the idea of appliances with pre-paid kilowatt-hours. You could go to Home Depot, buy a window-mount air conditioner with a summer's worth of cooling already built in to it. Such a device would certainly make consumers more aware of the power they're using. (It's also a great gift idea, if you ask me.)

Tilting at windmills

This vision is, for the most part, a fantasy right now. Except in Texas, power generation, delivery, and sales are not deregulated enough to allow such services, much less encourage utility companies to push for this kind of a re-think of their businesses.

But there's real consumer value in putting a little electricity meter in every appliance or electric car. Tuck says that consumers who get better information on their energy consumption than the current monthly bills use less power--up to 15 percent less, depending on the quality and timeliness of the data.

Appliances with energy-reporting chips will start coming out in 2011, he says. They'll just offer reporting capabilities to the utility and the consumer; the idea of allowing users to select different energy supplies for individual appliances is still a long way off.

But the idea of charging devices' registered owners for the services they use is powerful and interesting. This is how cellular phones work. You can get phones where you pay for exactly what you use, no more and no less, because the phones and their service providers know what services you're using. Drive that kind of granular service data into the appliances that consume the majority or our electricity and there's no telling what kind of innovation we'd get--and with it, presumably, smarter use of the limited energy resources we have.

See also: Gridpoint, Comverge, Greenbox, Wattvision, and more stories about Tendril.

Gmail can now open up PowerPoint presentations as well as .TIFF-formatted images that have been received as attachments in its HTML, multi-page document viewer.

The service has been able to open up .PPT-formatted presentations in its presentations viewer since mid-2007. Under the new system, however, the presentations are displayed in the service's recently renovated PDF viewer that forgoes the need for Adobe Flash in place of basic HTML, and gives users the option to zoom, print, see page previews, and search within it. On some files it also gives users the option to send the presentation straight to Google Docs.

The preview of .TIFF-formatted files is also a new thing and works just like it does on JPEGs, PNGs, and others. Previously you'd just see a little attachment icon.

Also worth noting is that the company is taking the liberty of automatically sending over some viewed attachments to users' Google Docs accounts, then sending out follow-up e-mails that say it can be edited in Google Docs. However, this isn't happening for all users. The e-mail looks like this:

"You used Gmail's "Open as a Google document" link to view the attachment called "Overall CFI 04162009".

By doing this you saved an editable copy online at Google Docs: http://docs.google.com/XXXXX

Google Docs allows you to:
Create and edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online, from anywhere you have Internet access.
Share documents with others, even collaborating on the same document at once, in real time.
Know that your documents are safe. Since your content is stored on Google's secure servers, even if something happens to your hard drive, your documents are protected.


You can always get back to Google Docs directly at http://docs.google.com

Thanks, The Google Docs Team"

Google continues to build in more ways for users to view and access links and files within Gmail, keeping them within the service or using it inside of another Google product. Last month the company released Gmail Labs add-ons that provided previews to Flickr photos, Yelp reviews, and YouTube videos if links to those places had been included inside of a message.

The new Google PPT viewer is the same one (powered by Google Docs) that reads PDF and Doc files.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Tendril shows off its iPhone app for monitoring home power use.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)

PALM DESERT, Calif.--At Demo 09, new conference honcho Matt Marshall led a panel where three companies showcased their new technologies to save power, and with it, they hope, the planet.

Google's Thomas Sly started by comparing buying power to what it would be like if you bought groceries without an itemized receipt--just one bill when you left the store. Google's goal is to collect and help distribute the data on power use, which, Sly says, will encourage people to consume less.

Google is currently in a test with about 100 devices that track power use, and that should grow to about 200 soon, Sly said.

The goal is to get 50 percent of households to cut 10 percent of their power. Sly said that would be as much as all the solar and wind power now produced in the U.S., or the equivalent of taking eight million cars off the road.

Tendril's CEO, Adrian Tuck, showed off hardware devices that monitor and control AC power. Small devices plug in between an outlet and an appliance or lamp, and transmit power use to a home device that then puts the data on a Web service where consumers can see what they're using. The devices also control power (turning off lights, for example). Tuck showed an iPhone interface that told the user not just how much power they were using but that also let him turn on and off outlets, or change his whole house to a different power-using profile.

AMEE, "the world's energy meter," sent Vice President Robin Baker to pitch his company's goal to create the global platform for tracking energy used (and thus carbon consumed or emitted) "for everything on the planet."

The overarching theme of this panel is that these companies are all working on the same thing: collecting information about power consumption. It appears that they are also moving to shared data, so that, for example, data from Tendril devices can feed both Google and AMEE databases.

However, the picture from Washington, D.C., is not so rosy. As we reported earlier today, our power grid isn't currently set up to collect and distribute this information.

Dropio has launched a new applet called Playlistio that allows users to post music to the cloud in just three clicks. According to the company, users can find the file, upload it to the cloud, and stream it anywhere they can find a Web hookup and connect to Dropio. And with the help of the company's new Apple App store application, Droppler, users can even stream their Playlistio songs through their iPhone. The free applet is available now.

Google announced Tuesday that it has launched a new skills qualification program. Dubbed Google Analytics Individual Qualification, the new feature will allow users to demonstrate proficiency in Google Analytics.

According to the company, it will provide a free online course that covers Web analytics techniques, as well as Google Analytics implementation and administration. The company hopes that businesses will require their IT professionals to take the course and become more skilled in Web analytics. And in the process, Google is hoping that its qualification will join a laundry list of others that IT professionals are encouraged to have.

Shoeboxed, an online receipt depository, has partnered with FreshBooks that will allow users to export their receipts directly to the online invoicing company. Any Shoeboxed customer can have their receipts scanned into the service and export them to FreshBooks. No fee will be charged, but to use the new Shoeboxed feature, users will need to register for both sites.

Online customer review site PowerReviews announced Monday that it has moved from a subsidized pricing model to a paid subscription model with monthly subscription fees. The company also announced that it has launched a new service called AnswerBox, which is a question and answer tool that allows knowledgeable customers and staff to address questions posed by shoppers. The new tool and revenue model, which was designed to help it survive the economic downturn, are live now on the company's site.

In other PowerReviews news, the company has also announced that it's working with eBay's ProStores, a customizable online store service, to provide access to its customer ratings for ProStores' merchants. The service will be available for free for 30 days and after that period, the customer will be given a limited-time 15 percent discount off the standard $80 per month charge.

"Yay."

That's one of the colorful and energetic buzzwords that Moo.com, a U.K. company mostly known for its whimsical user-generated business cards, has used to get people excited about its products.

And now, it might well be the grateful word coming out of the mouths of its American customers--who make up about half of the company's sales--because Moo.com has finally decided to open a U.S. operations center.

Later this year, Moo.com plans to open a U.S. operations center, a move that will allow it to serve its American customers much more quickly.

(Credit: Moo.com)

Until now, those of us on the western side of the Atlantic ordering Moo cards, as they're known, have had to wait, sometimes for up to two weeks, to take delivery. That's fine if you don't have any kind of time crunch, but one way that many people use Moo cards is to quickly order up a set to take with them to an event. If, like me and a few people I know, you're not always on top of your to-do list, this often didn't work because the cards wouldn't arrive from Moo's London facility until it was too late.

With the opening of its operations center in Providence, R.I., however, Moo should be able to get cards into U.S. customers' hands much quicker, something that should help keep customers happy and returning again and again.

The decision is also a good sign for Moo--and perhaps for other companies that focus on so-called "people-powered" products--since putting resources into a U.S. expansion shows that it is doing well enough during the recession to warrant crossing the ocean.

The company said it will open the center sometime during the first half of 2009. Until that happens, however, plan well ahead for any kind of Moo cards you might want to order. And if you want some for South by Southwest, which is coming up in less than three weeks, you'd better move fast.

Facebook is suing Power.com, a Brazilian start-up that lets users access a number of social networks through one portal.

Facebook filed a lawsuit on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., for copyright and trademark infringement; unlawful competition; and violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, CAN-SPAM Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, among other charges.

Power.com signs users into their various social networks and messaging clients and delivers the data from those sites and services to one page. For example, you can see all of your friends, their status updates, visit their profile pages, and even send a message to multiple friends on multiple social networks--all in one place. Last month, Webware editor Rafe Needleman described it as Meebo for social networks, and it's obviously a big convenience for people who have profiles and friends spread across Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Hi5, and the AOL, Yahoo, and MSN instant messaging clients.

But Facebook would rather users go through them. It has requested that Power.com use Facebook Connect instead of asking users for their log-in information and has been in discussions with the start-up for a month, according to The New York Times. But the Times reports the two failed to come to any resolution, and so Facebook decided to file suit. Power removed access to Facebook after the claim was filed.

It's true that Power.com does its thing without consent from the sites and services it taps into. But a month ago, when the company was making its first big push into the U.S., CEO Steve Vachani told the Times that Power.com was in fine legal standing because it only accesses other sites' content when a user voluntarily logs in. He likened Power.com's actions to the way social networks import contact lists from e-mail services or the way Meebo accesses users' instant message accounts.

Facebook seems to be feeling the pressure from FriendFeed, Twitter, and other social sites du jour--doing its own compiling of third-party sites. In May, it added feeds from Google Reader, Hulu, Last.fm, Pandora, StumbleUpon, and YouTube into its Mini Feed service, which had already included Delicious, Digg, Flickr, Picasa, and Yelp. And in August it launched Live Feed, a real-time stream of everything your Facebook friends are doing on the site, giving users a more centralized way to track their contacts' activity.

A screenshot of Power.com before Facebook was removed from the site's offerings.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET Networks)

Power.com is an ambitious social utility that brings together all the networks you have on social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut, as well as on instant-messaging networks like AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger.

If you have have a presence on more than one network, it's worth a look, though it has its own interface that awkwardly sits on top of your existing services when you use it.

The biggest draw of Power is that it really does bring everyone in your networks together for you. On the Power start page, you can see all your contacts from all your networks, and all their status updates, and then quickly jump to user profile pages on whatever network they're on, or drop users messages. What Meebo does for instant messaging, Power does for social networks as well.

Power.com gives you one dashboard for all your social-network activity.

Meebo for social networks
Like Meebo, Power lets you connect to users without bothering with which network they're from. From the Send Message window in Power, you can select any number of your friends, from any of your networks, and send the same message to all of them. You don't even need a new login for Power; you can use one from one of your existing social networks.

One feature I was unable to test is the utility of updating all your social-network profiles when you update just one. So if, for example, you change your profile picture or a photo album on Facebook, you can have it changed for you on MySpace and Hi5. Or if you add an OpenSocial-compliant app on one service, you can also have it show up on the others.

The service puts its own interface on top of social networks like Facebook when you use it as your control center.

I see the utility, but I can't say that I enjoyed using the service. It works by placing a navigation bar on top of your social networks. The look and feel is different from your social networks, and I found switching between the Power interface and the native interface on my networks a little jarring. The options available in the bar change depending on which network you're using. And Power doesn't blend your contacts together; if a friend of yours is on Facebook as well as MySpace, the system doesn't offer any utility that leverages the fact that they are the same person.

If you're using Power to access pages inside your social network, you will also see Power features injected into your sites. For example, when viewing a Facebook profile, a tool to message multiple users at once (across all your networks) will show up underneath the usual entry box to post on another user's wall. If you go to Facebook directly, you don't get the new link.

The system will appear to embed new features inside existing social-network pages (Facebook shown).

When I used the service, I did find it cool to be able to see all my social-network friends in one place, on my Power dashboard, and to see my personal data feeds from all my networks aggregated into one.

I tried a version of Power that's become popular in Brazil and India over the past few months (Power is a Brazillian company). It has over 5 million users, Power execs told me. A new version of Power, targeted at U.S. users, is due to open up today. Support for services LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, GMail, AOL Instant Messenger and Skype should arrive shortly, the company says.

Features still to come include useful mobile phone support; the current mobile version is very limited. The company is pitching Power as not just an end-user tool but a platform for building sites that enable "social Internetworking," or the linking of profiles and networks.

Useful, but not pretty
I like what Power is about. Like the products that bridge instant-messaging networks (Trillian, Meebo, Adium, Digsby, Pidgin, etc.), Power performs the very useful service of bridging social networks. However, I did find Power's approach to bridge building intrusive and confusing. I find managing my social networks baffling enough. Power gave me more capabilities, but it did not make things easier.

See also: FriendFeed.

This story has been corrected from the original, which stated that PowerReviews Express collects reviews from other sites that use PowerReviews on behalf of its customers. It does not.

PowerReviews user reviews show up on popular sites like ToysRUs.com

Citing research showing that customers are more likely to buy items online after they've read a few user reviews, both PowerReviews and BaazarVoice are expanding their services that collect and distribute user reviews.

PowerReviews, which I've covered favorably in the past, is taking its user reviews service and making it available to smaller retailers. As before, the company makes a module that retailers can plug into their stores to collect reviews from buyers. Unlike the big-site version of PowerReviews, which collects all PowerReviews user reviews on a product from all the sites that use the service, PowerReviews Express sites only display reviews left by the site's own users.

PowerReviews also runs an aggregation site Buzzillions where users can see all reviews left by users of the service.

The new Express program goes live on November 26 at $80 a month (for the smallest retailer).

Meanwhile, BazaarVoice is launching a program, BrandVoice, in which manufacturers can collect user reviews on their sites and then syndicate those reviews out to their retailers. This service, like PowerReviews', increases the number of user reviews that a potential customer sees on a retailer's site.

BazaarVoice has its marquee clients, too, such as BestBuy.com

The issue with both services, though, is trust. Since the user reviews a browser reads can now be coming from anywhere, how does a customer know that the reviews are honest?

PowerReviews has a "Verified Buyer" program that guarantees that reviews come from actual purchasers of a product. BazaarVoice lets reader flag fishy reviews, and employs a team of moderators and automated procedures to ensure that inflammatory of off-topic reviews don't get posted for a product, but a fake review could, theoretically, be posted. BazaarVoice CMO Sam Decker told me that they could link the ability to write a review into a site's login system, but that "70 percent of reviews come from people who've bought offline," and neither he nor his company's customers want to shut the door on valuable feedback from users who just don't happen to buy the products on the Web.

The companies have different business models: PowerReviews' Buzzillions site can be seen as competitive to the site where the reviews come from; BazaarVoice serves only manufacturers and retailers. But both companies are engaging in a very interesting new trend: they're amplifying the consciousness of the consumer by spreading reviews around.

Almost one year ago to the day, a start-up called SlideRocket began a private beta of its Web-based presentation creation service. With the company opening up its beta test to the public today, legions of frustrated PowerPoint users around the world must wonder whether their digital deliverance is not far away.

At first blush, the odds are against these guys having much impact. It's a young company, after all, and who has the spare cash to pay for Jerry Seinfeld television spots. (Though judging from Microsoft's uneven success with its latest batch of TV ads, that's hardly any guarantee of rave success.

But here's what I like about SlideRocket: This very Web-friendly application offers quite a creative alternative to PowerPoint, a steadfast albeit boring product that inspires more moans than a porn flick. If I've insulted any die-hard PowerPoint fans--all twenty seven of you--sorry, but the application reminds me of liver and onions: a dish which dutifully serves the purpose, but you wouldn't be caught dead serving it at a dinner party.

SlideRocket's designers have done a nice job with the graphics options and special effects that users can add to their slide show images. The support for multimedia (including video) is an additional nice touch. You can also include slides from a media pool shared by people you include as collaborators on the presentation. For an in-depth look at the product, check out the review turned in by my colleague, Josh Lowensohn.

I don't need to remind anyone that things are tough out there, and wouldn't it be a shame if this company didn't get a fair shake? As a user, I'm ready for something with a bit more sizzle. With enough time, I think SlideRocket could give Microsoft a serious run in the presentations software business. The wild card is capital. So it is that I have to wonder how long before the folks from Adobe start sniffing around. No secret that Adobe has big ambitions and increasingly bumps heads with Microsoft. What with its flashy (Flexy) Web-based tools, SlideRocket already speaks a common language with Adobe.

Bottom line: This one bears close watching.