Google's PowerMeter to boost energy efficiency

Los Angeles: Google is partnering with privately held firm Energy, to provide households with free energy management software called PowerMeter, which will boost energy efficiency, the company said on its blog.

Google had launched PowerMeter, which is a web tool, in February to let consumers monitor how much electricity they use at home. But in order to use PowerMeter consumers needed a smart meter installed. Many customers have already tested and used this application. Now, consumers can buy Energy's power-usage measuring device called TED 5000 which costs around $200, and use Google's software on top of it, without ever needing a smart meter. 

Even though many companies are now trying to propagate smart meters they still account for a small percentage of all U.S. electricity meters. Technology giants like Google and IBM are shifting into the world of building a smart grid, envisioning a more efficient electricity grid that uses more renewable energy and powers up 'smart' appliances.

Google's partnership with Energy does not include any financial terms. Google is already working with Sempra Energy's San Diego Gas and Electric and Germany's Yello Strom. Google is also trying to develop clean technology. Some of its projects include ways to write software to connect plug-in hybrid vehicles to the power grid and a mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by more than a quarter.

 

Source - siliconindia news bureau

 

 

Gmail Messages with Enhanced Content

Gmail added a feature that lets you interact with the messages sent by some companies without opening a new page. It's called "sponsored mail with enhanced content" and here's the description:

If you're subscribed to receive email from certain senders, the messages you receive from them will be enhanced with an interactive gadget that has up-to-date content from their website (you'll also see an icon in your inbox identifying these messages).

For example, if you receive a Pregnancy Bulletin newsletter from Babycenter, you'll be able to view up-to-date content, including the baby name of the day, and browse though the current top 100 baby names within the message. Aside from the convenience of being able to interact with certain websites from inside Gmail, the branded content will help identify that your messages are legitimate and not spoofed (we'll only show branded content when the sender authenticates their mail). We're currently testing this with a small number of senders and will decide whether to make it widely available based on user and partner feedback

Courtesy – Google Blog  

Google has Done it Again !!! A Very Smart Innovation

Check out this device ...

Guess what you can do with a touch screen, camera, scanner, WiFi, and google maps ...

View a building through it, and it gives you all the information about that building....

Choose a building and touch a floor and it tells you more details of the building. You can use it when you want to know a car model, an insect name, what kind of food is served at a restaurant and how much, who built a bridge, etc. etc. 

It’s got a scanner built in. 

so you can use it this way when you want to check the meaning of a word in the newspaper, book, magazine, etc. It would be much easier to read a real book. You can use the dictionary, wikipedia, thesaurus and anything else available on the web. What do you think? 

Indoor guide: Works in a building, airport, station, hospital, etc.

Automatic simultaneous translation: here Latin to English. 

Search keyword: Helpful when you want to find out a word from a lot of text in newspaper/book

Nutrition: This kind of function would be helpful for health freaks..