Tag: GreenMonkTV

Technology for Good – episode thirty four with Salesforce’s John Tascheck

Welcome to episode thirty four of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s episode our guest was SalesForce SVP of Strategy, John Taschek. John and I are both longtime members of the Enterprise Irregulars, but this was the first time John and I had had a conversation outside of email!

Some of the more fascinating stories we looked at on the show, included a very successful Kickstarter campaign for a small router which can completely anonymise your internet activity, Lockheed Martin announcing that they’ve made a breakthrough on nuclear fusion technology, and Satya Nadella’s response to his gaffe last week about women seeking a raise.

Here is the full list of stories that we covered in this week’s show:

 

Climate

Energy

Hardware

Internet of Things

Wearables

Mobility

Comms

Privacy

Open Source

Sustainability

(Cross-posted @ GreenMonk: the blog)

Technology for Good – episode thirty two with SAP’s Sameer Patel

Welcome to episode thirty two of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s episode we had SAP‘s Sameer Patel as the guest on our show. Sameer and I are members of the Enterprise Irregulars group – a loose group of analysts and vendors with an interest in enterprise software. Previous Enterprise Irregulars who have guested on the show include David Terrar, Craig Cmehil, and Jon Reed.

There was a problem which wasn’t apparent to us during the show and that was that the video from my side never showed up in the recording. I suspect that’s because I was using a beta version of Chrome, but anyway, the audio, and Sameer’s video feed was recorded, so all’s well.

This week we didn’t get through all the stories we had lined up, ‘cos we had such a good discussion around the ones we did manage to fit in!

Some of the more fascinating stories we looked at on the show, included the growing number of technology companies who are abandoning ALEC, IBM’s new concentrating solar array which can create clean water, as well as solar power, and a new smartphone app which will help visually challenged users to read.

Here is the full list of stories that we covered in this week’s show:

 

Climate

Renewables

Lighting

Transportation

Data Centres

Connectivity

Drones

Hardware

Apps

Education

(Cross-posted @ GreenMonk: the blog)

TrickleStar demo’s their energy saving devices

I attended the Smart Grids Europe Conference 2010 in Amsterdam last week. One of the people displaying there was Thomas Joergensen of TrickleStar.

TrickleStar are not a Smart Grid company per se, what they offer instead are devices to cut down on energy consumption in the home. As such, their clients are utility companies who want to help their customers cut their consumption as well as companies and individual homeowners interested in reducing their energy bills.

What kind of devices do they have? As can be seen from the video, the two main devices they were showcasing at the conference stand were ones which cut standby power to your peripherals (monitor, printer, ext hd, etc.) when you shut off your computer. Given I have already published some videos about the amount of electricity drawn by devices in standby mode (phantom load), I was delighted to see these great solutions.

I asked Thomas if there was any metering functionality in the devices and he said that was something they were working on.

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Smart Grid Heavy Hitter series – Kevin Meagher, CTO EDSA

EDSA are an interesting company. They are 25 years old, they are privately held and they focus on power analytics. I had an opportunity to have EDSA’s CTO, Kevin Meagher, on the show so I jumped at it to find out more about their smart grid solutions for micro-grid integration.

Kevin and I had a great chat, we talked about:

  • Kevin and EDSA’s definition of a Smart Grid
  • The importance of micro-grids to the smart grid
  • EDSA’s micro-grid management software and their target customers
  • The changing face of energy generation with the likelihood of community microgrids coming together to do energy arbitrage
  • Trends in energy storage systems and
  • Differences in roll outs of micro-grids in varying geographies and regulations and incentives affecting them
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Smart Grid Heavy Hitter series – Silver Springs Networks’ Raj Vaswani

This is the third of my Smart Grid Heavy Hitters’ interviews, and in it I talked to the CTO of Silver Springs Networks, Raj Vaswani.

It was a great interview – in it we talked about:

  • Raj’s definition and the benefits of a Smart Grid
  • The fact that, to-date Smart Grids are quite notional
  • How long it will be before home energy portals, vehicle to grid, and similar technologies will emerge and
  • The differences between Europe and the US in terms of Smart Grid rollouts

I wanted to go on for longer but unfortunately we ran out of time!

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