Ed Schmit and his team at the AT&T Developer Program were busy this week at CES. Not only did they run an innovative Hackathon, but they also announced the winner of their $20,000 Power the Future competition, a six month quest to find the best sustainability app to help us improve the quality of our environment.
The winner of the Power the Future competition was People Power, a Palo Alto based start-up run by the serial entrepreneur CEO Gene Wang and CTO David Moss. And after they got their award, I caught up with Wang and Moss to find out what, exactly, People Power were doing. I have to admit that Wang and Moss – who also worked together at the HP acquired Bitfone – really impressed me. Having raised $5 million in Series A investment, they’ve developed an app which is essentially a remote control for controlling all the electricity in our homes. With the People Power app, there are no more excuses to waste energy; and as you can see from the demo, turning lights on and off couldn’t be easier.
Keep your eyes on People Power. With a dozen full-timers, thirty other staff and a hardware partnership with Monster, they are now raising Series B funding. I’m particularly excited about what Wang calls People Power 2.0, an app which will enable us to remotely control the power in our homes. Hopefully, this product will be available for CES 2013 when I will, no doubt, once again forget to turn off my heating before getting on the plane to Vegas.
Home owners want to use less energy, but how? Building and facility managers want to cut energy costs, but where to start? How can anyone use less of something they cannot measure or control? The number of energy-using devices connected to the internet is expected to double from 9 billion to 24 billion in 2020 (GSMA, October 2011). With so many connected, energy-using devices in use, where to start? Enter People Power with its open source technology, which allows...
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