see a puffin eat a fish

After moving to the hidden hills, I lost interest in RunKeeper since there just isn’t a great place to run around here. I’m surrounded by steep, rolling hills. But I recently started using the RunKeeper app again for my rides to the office and a) the mobile software/server side has come a long way and b) the data it generates is awesome and more importantly really useful. Here’s my ride from this morning.

You can see max speeds, where the elevation is, trends, really useful stuff. I’m going to be using this information on the ride home. It’s rare that things are so useful so quickly. The full activity log can be viewed here.

Here’s what is going on here. The lamp has a Smart Plug connected to it. The plug can be controller from any WebKit compatible interface. Demetrie, out in Santa Cruz, is toggling the lights remotely. The laptop is pointed at the light with Skype Video so that he can see that the lights are in fact being toggled.

Hello:

Thanks in advance.

On top of landing some really cool and interesting clients, GroundedPower was in CNET last week along such heavy hitters as Tendril, Microsoft and Google. Our unique mix of designers, psychologists and ITP world view is really getting noticed!

You can read more here and make sure to check out the image gallery.

Last week I had the privilege of attending my first ever Yahoo! Open Hack event based in Manhattan’s midtown. So many highlights to mention, here are some: Gabe in a spacesuit, Tikva running Ignite, learning about YQL, Clay’s talk and winning the ‘Hack for Good’ prize with my teammates @ramblezeus and @hsbakshi! Go power trio, maker of Powertrends.

We put two concepts out there. One was technology that aggregated real time energy consumption data and presented the data in a town against town contest. The town that saves the most energy gets money to fix potholes. The towns that lose and save less energy know exactly who didn’t pull their weight Secondly, we posed the question, can utilities use social media to predict future consumption trends? We already use Twitter to get our news, can we use indicators of future activity (shows people will watch, events they will attend) to predict electric load? Utilities have an energy storage problem so the more they are right about future load the less dirty plants need to be fired up.