Coming back from the library this morning I found the present that was left at my  backdoor.

Back door present - overview

More detail for those of you who are strangely curious.

Back door present - detail

Looks like whatever it is has been eating some grass along with the sunflower seeds from the bird feeder.

Thinking that this wasn’t your everyday dog poop, I headed to the internet to verify a guess.

Bear scat ID pic

I found other pics here.  So it certainly appears that my sample is within the bear effluent continuum.

The next time someone asks you, “Do bears $#!T in the woods?”  You can safely say,”Yeah, and on decks, too!”

[Update Feb 26, 2010]

John Trontis and Tom Sheppard of the Hunterdon County Dept of Parks and Rec have confirmed that a bear dropped a deuce at the foot of my back door.

Best emailed jokes to come in (so far):

• “You’re lucky he didn’t light it up, ring the doorbell and run”
• “Yeah, but was the bear Catholic?”

My personal brain virus is the Charmin TV commercial where the young bear with personal hygiene issues is sitting on a tree branch.

Note:  Updated on Dec 6, 2009 – Found a bug in the code.  I’ve updated the code below and have a notation where the bug was.

A while ago, I needed to figure out how to search for database entries that were within a specified distance from a central point.  The code was needed for the search function at CrossroadsAngel.com where you can search for members by location.  I found many pages that had a similar goal of calculating great circle distance between any two points on a sphere, but that’s not quite the same problem.  I found a few web pages that described how to convert linear distance to delta latitude and longitude, but I didn’t find any complete code examples that worked across all border conditions.

The key equation for translating linear distance to latitude and longitude on a sphere is the Haversine formula.  Latitude boundary conditions for this formula occur at the  north and south poles and the equator.  For longitude, the boundary conditions occur at the prime and 180th degree meridians. For distance, the boundary condition is the circumference of the Earth.

I made a simplifying assumption that the earth is a perfect sphere.  To make the database search easier I used a rectangular bounding box rather than a circular one.  The rectangle used encloses the circle and therefore increases the distance from the centerpoint at any angles other than 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees (0, PI/2, PI, 3PI/2 radians).

I thought it would also be handy to be able to use either kilometers or miles in the function, so I’ve included a flag where miles are true and kilometers are false

In PHP the code is as follows:

class diGeoBox
{

public $LatN;
public  $LatS;
public  $LonE;a
public  $LonW;

public function __construct($Lat1, $Lon1, $Distance, $boolMiles)
{

$RadCalcConst=M_PI/180;
$InvRadCalcConst=180/M_PI;

// Convert degrees to radians
$Lat1 = $Lat1 * $RadCalcConst;
$Lon1Rad = $Lon1 * $RadCalcConst;

// Miles or kilometers?

if ($boolMiles)
      $DistRad = $Distance * 2.52780586e-4; // 1/3956 radius of the earth in miles
else
      $DistRad = $Distance * 1.57070574e-4; // inverse radius of the earth in km

if ($DistRad >= 2*M_PI)
{

$this->LatN = 90;
$this->LatS = -90;
$this->LonE = 180;
$this->LonW = -180;
return;

}

//     North Latitude boundary
$this->LatN = $Lat1 + $DistRad;
// Convert back to degrees
$this->LatN = $this->LatN * $InvRadCalcConst;
// check for wrapping
if ($this->LatN > 90.0)
      $this->LatN = 90.0 – fmod($LatN,90.0);

// South Latitude
$this->LatS  = $Lat1 – $DistRad;
// Convert back to degrees
$this->LatS = $this->LatS * $InvRadCalcConst;
// check for wrapping
if ($this->LatS < -90.0)
      $this->LatS = -90.0;

// if at a pole, Longititude goes from -180 to 180
if ( abs($Lat1) == M_PI/2)
{

$this->LonE = 180;
$this->LonW = -180;

}
else
{

$tmp=sin($Lat1);
$tmp=$tmp*$tmp;

// calculate East Longitude boundary
$dLon = abs(atan2(sin($DistRad) * cos($Lat1), cos($DistRad)- $tmp));
$this->LonE = fmod( $Lon1Rad + $dLon +M_PI,2*M_PI )-M_PI;
// convert back to degrees
$this->LonE = $this->LonE * $InvRadCalcConst;
//check to see if wrapped around 180 longitude
//**  There was a bug here in the original version where
//**  Lon1 used to be Lon1Rad
if ($this->LonE < $Lon1)
{

// LonW is an equal amount on the other side of $Lon1 as $LonE
$this->LonW = $Lon1-($this->LonE + 180);

}
else
{

// LonW is an equal amount on the other side of $Lon1 as $LonE
$this->LonW = 2*$Lon1 – $this->LonE;
// See if it wrapped
if ($this->LonW < -180)
      $this->LonW = $this->LonW + 360;

}

}

}     //__construct()

}         //diGeoBox

Example php code using the diGeoBox function and tests the 180 degree meridian and the polar conditions is below.

$BoundingBox = new diGeoBox( 0, -170, 15000, 1);
echo ‘LonE = ‘.$BoundingBox->LonE. “\n”;
echo ‘LonW = ‘.$BoundingBox->LonW. “\n”;
echo ‘LatN = ‘.$BoundingBox->LatN. “\n”;
echo ‘LatS = ‘.$BoundingBox->LatS. “\n”;

Using this function at CrossroadsAngel.com requires that street address and zip codes be converted into latitude and longitude coordinates (geocoding).  Because CrossroadsAngel.com is a commercial website, and because I need to store converted locations in a local database for performance reasons, I am using the NAC Geographic Products webservice for stored conversion, and Google Maps API for geocoding the “search center” location.  The Google Maps API is accessed using JavaScript from the client browser and the converted coordinates are sent to the server for query execution.

Another long pause between blogs. < sigh… >

I’ve been very busy working towards launch at CrossroadsAngel.com, with our first live event on July 9th at the Black Potatoe Music Festival in Clinton, NJ. It looks like (barring a meltdown of the development process) we’ll be ready to sign up our initial batch of members at the festival, and give away some branded merch.

I’d like to describe CrossroadsAngel.com a bit more, but it’s not in me to try to hype something that I can’t show you. Instead, I’ll just repeat the basic description that CrossroadsAngel.com is a B2B social network for the performing arts industry. There is an emphasis on B2B that I believe is lacking in our potential competitors, and that is where our opportunity lies. Mining the aggregated network activity will be the basis for providing marketing services to businesses in that industry. Member privacy and “trust” are extremely important to the social business model, so anonymized / aggregated data will be the basis for quantitative methods.

I’ll be back to blogging regularly soon. I have somethings to say about how the OASIS Blue Initiative is driving the home energy applications of the future, and how the energy service providers want to control your fridge. What next, we rent our appliances from the power company? Remind you of anything? Hmm?

If I don’t post earlier, I’ll definitely be back on the blog patrol when CrossroadsAngel.com goes live in the next couple of weeks.

Working for yourself often means having an a&$#*ole as a boss, but one benefit of this arrangement is that I have acquired “Scheduling Flexibility”.  I’m thinking of trademarking that phrase as it seems to be a popular euphemism amongst those recently unemployed with whom I’ve been networking.  However, having such flexibility is worthless if you use it just to take afternoon naps.  I’ve been using it to volunteer at various events and organizations.   I recently mentioned my work with LaidOffCampNY (May 1 & 2 in NYC, pre-registration is recommended), but I’ve also taken the time to volunteer with a local public radio station pledge drive, and a river clean-up, among others.

This period of Karma rebuilding feels good, and detracts little from my work in getting Crossroads Angel to launch (the open beta launch date currently looks to be late May). In the greater schedule of my life, I don’t spend much time on these activities, but I try to be in the right place when it helps most.

Being that my current project involves social networking in the performing arts, I thought I’d write a little about being a volunteer at the WNTI fund raising drive. WNTI is a local college radio station out of Hackettstown, NJ. They provide NPR news at the top of the hour, Car Talk on Saturday mornings, and free-form music the rest of the time. I listen to hear new artists that I haven’t discovered yet, and I like the mix of music genres that don’t fit into the normal commercial radio formats. They regularly surprise me, and I like that.

When WNTI announced their call for volunteers, I emailed Mel Thiel and we setup two morning shifts where I’d man the phones. I showed up on Monday morning a little before 7AM, almost an hour into Johnny D’s shift and just in time to hear Carl Kasell.  Mel and Johnny quickly settled me into the job.

Before I got involved, I thought that being a pledge drive volunteer would keep me hopping from one call to the next. That may be the case for Jerry Lewis’s Labor Day gig, but the calls came in slowly during my shift. The lack of activity emphasizes how important each pledge is, and the precarious balance some of these local treasures exist in.

The first call came in 30 minutes after I settled in. This caller is excited, as are all of the callers in my experience. Many of the callers want me to pass on messages to the DJs and station management about how much they enjoy listening. Being an active part of something that many enjoy passively is definitely good for the psyche.

Elizabeth, a long time volunteer, shows up with bagels to complement my date bars. That’s another thing that volunteer activities have in common, food is usually plentiful. Elizabeth is not microphone shy, as I am, and gets engaged in the promotion chatter. I stare at the phone and will it to ring.

The off-radio conversation drifts to the question of whether or not there are certain songs that drive calls. The consensus opinion is that it’s the anthems from our later teen years that drives that feeling of being on the team, and results in the most calls. Given that a free-form station has a varied audience age distribution, that makes it tough to figure out which songs to play. Being an analytical guy, I want to dive in with a multi-station analysis to define the ultimate pledge-drive playlist. That question may turn into a Crossroads Angel market research project this fall pledge-drive season.

Without the hard number data, Johnny tries the consensus selection of a Jimmy Hendrix standard. No luck this time, but it’s hard to say if it influenced any commuters to call in once they’ve reached their office.

Mel takes over with a shift at 9AM, and Elizabeth has to leave a bit after. Mel shows me a little of how the DJ operates the panel and gets the next songs and canned announcements going. It’s a very clock-driven job, and occasionally results in frenzied activity that I’m wary of interrupting with questions. I stay on the phones until the next shift change at noon. It was an uneventful day for me and the pledges were lighter than hoped for.

At 7AM the next morning I show up without food. I feel like I let the station down, but I have the excuse of a late night at another regular volunteer gig and didn’t pick up any prepackaged goods on my early morning, backroads, deer-dodging, rush into the station. Johnny D is dialing tech support with a problem in the audio server. It’s jumped ahead an hour when the GPS sync went haywire, and didn’t return to sanity when the GPS receiver returned to normalcy. This is the second time it’s happened recently, and the top-of-the hour NPR news has already overlapped a few seconds with the prior station promo. In such a clock-driven environment, this is a major failure.

Johnny alternates between his calm radio voice and his highly charged interactions with the support tech. It’s an amazing behind the scenes look at what it means to be a professional in this job. Things settle down in about 15 minutes, but then the hour jumps again causing another flurry of activity.

By 8AM Scott Acton, a volunteer DJ, shows up to help out. He mentions hearing the news overlap on his drive in and wondered what was behind it. Johnny fills him in, and we soon settle into a warm groove. Phone activity is light today, too. I wish I could do something more to drive callers, so we try playing a couple more anthems targeting various age groups, between Johnny’s normal mix of new music and station favorites (Depeche Mode anyone?).

Mel can’t make it in today, so Scott subs during her normal shift. Scott normally does a Beatles focused show, so this gives him the opportunity to show a bit more of his collection. He likes to add in interesting trivia between sets, something that I always enjoy learning from. Still, the calls are slow. The donuts someone provided this morning are decimated, and I’m getting on air a bit more.  I start thinking about playlists I’d use if I were to become a volunteer DJ, and before I realize it my shift is over and another set of volunteers arrives to ride the Karma train.

Many of the callers I heard from are station regulars. Dave the plumber, Paul from Washington, Crazy Sue, and so on. They’re virtual community members and the station folks often know them by voice. Hard to think that such minimal interactions as calling in for the occasional request, to debate the best live version of a Bruce song (Bruce?… Bruce Springsteen? C’mon, I already mentioned in a previous blog that I lived in New Jersey), or to call in a pledge every six months can create such a strong feeling of community.

A radio station and it’s audience are an obvious social network.  The strength of the network is driven by the activities of the station.  The community bonds to the station are linked to station formats and activities.  It’s a very centralized network, as opposed to enterprise networks with many local clusters of activity and inflence, with mostly radial lines connecting to the community from the core.   In the case of WNTI, Mel is likely the highest value connector, and Spider Glenn, the Music Director, is the key influencer.

Within that network, how do listeners turn into pledgers?  Is it spontaneous, or do localized influencers often play a part?  Can that information be used to optimize the network to improve the number of pledgers.

Please, take some time to vounteer with community groups.  You’ll feel good about it and it does make a difference.

You can hear me regularly every Spring and Fall on WNTI, 91.9 FM and streaming at www.wnti.org

It’s been longer that I expected since my last post. Sorry, life got busy. One of the things I’m busy with is LaidOffCampNY, a free two day conference happening this Friday and Saturday (May 1 & 2). Come see me and network with the New York metro area’s best un-, under-, and non-traditionally employed. Pre-registration is suggested.

To recap what I last posted: What are the areas where social networking methods can beneficially impact enterprise voice and video communications? At a high level, they’re the common motherhood and apple pie issues familiar to most organizations.

* Improved customer experience
* Increase employee productivity
* Improve the product
* Grow organizational heath

I provided examples for the first two points in the last post, now I’ll do the last two.

3.  Improve the product

The obvious example here is the monitoring of Twitter as an early detection mechanism for product or services breakdown.

Another example:  Hold a YouTube contest to identify innovative uses for your products.

Another example, one that is more speculative as to its reliability, is to use social network analysis to identify the hidden and public thought leaders in your product consumer networks and directly engage them to assist in product design.

Yeah, many folks already know of these examples.  Please, let me compensate for the lack of more innovative examples with a link to a lolmonkey picture.

4.  Grow organizational health

Heard about eTelemetry’s MetronEBA yet?  This product monitors an organization’s voice calls to map out your organization’s social graph.  For extra punch, couple it with one of the many email and messaging analysis tools.  Sure, it feels a little big-brotherish, but it will definitely provide new insight into your organization and allow monitoring of efforts to improve organization communications and break down intra-organizational barriers.

Today’s bonus link:  Intro to Dunbar’s Rule (a best-of restrospective from my corporate past) Read it to understand why we need contact lists, and why all such lists should have rating fields.

This post is a big change from the topic of the previous two posts, to one of adapting common enterprise communications services and usage models to incorporate Social Networking and Web 2.0 methods. As my introductory post on this topic I’ll be resurrecting some ideas from old presentations.  I’ll also try to not dig too deep into technical details, so as to avoid audience whiplash.

What are the areas where social networking methods can beneficially impact enterprise voice and video communications?  At a high level, they’re the common motherhood and apple pie issues familiar to most organizations.

• Improved customer experience
• Increase employee productivity
• Improve the product
• Grow organizational heath

If I were to take off from that list in the normal direction, this blog would be as bad as those bland articles that keep the ads from running together in many industry fishwraps (not you Internet Telephony mag!).  So where does the master of the obvious take this blog now?  How about I pick one feature or product representing each of the above four points and describe what’s cool about it.  To keep this blog to a manageable size, I’ll do the first two points in this entry, and the next two in a future entry.

1. Improved customer experience

Have you, as a jedi-level geek, ever called a support line and gotten someone who  started by asking you to reboot your system and see if that helped?

Or…

Have you, as a tech-noob, ever been asked to verify that your subnet mask is appropriate for your LAN segment?  Or has someone called you a tech-noob and you didn’t know what that meant, but you did feel somewhat insulted?

In either case you’ve run into the dreaded support skill level mismatch.  It’s a common issue that I’ve seen repeated on many service quality surveys, yet it has a relatively simple fix.

After many support interactions, the support caller often has the opportunity to rate the support agent.  Why not allow the support agent to rate the caller?  Agents rating callers  should provide feedback on customer temperament, willingness to follow directions and technical skill level.  The next time that caller needs support, that information can be incorporated into Automated Call Distribution (ACD) system logic and an agent with complementary skills and temperament can be selected.

I’ve heard from others that this type of logic is already being incorporated into call center products, but I can’t claim first-hand knowledge of it.

2. Increase employee productivity

For this example, I’ll focus on employees who work remotely.  When you finish installing your mobility solution that provides employees with all the features of the enterprise PBX while they’re on the road, you might want to start thinking about how you can replicate all of the back-channel communications paths you find in an office environment.  How do you replicate a team going into a conference room together, where all can hear and contribute to the discussion equally?  How do you replicate the conversational snippet heard over the cubicle wall that drives you to jump onto another agent’s call and provide the solution you figured out last week?

Appropriate social networking and Web 2.0 tools that can be applied to these situations are Instant Messaging (IM), Twitter, tag clouds, and social groups.  Tag clouds?  Review this and meet me below.

Let’s say that you’re a call center agent working from home. How do you hear something happening over the metaphorical cubicle wall? One method would be to define a common set of tags (keywords) appropriate for the types of issues the call center handles, and then incorporate as tags the companies and contact names from the corporate CRM system. Live conversations can be monitored for matching tags using Voice Recognition for voice calls, and a keyword text search that does the same thing for emails and text chat sessions.

A tag cloud display can be moved to the side of an agent’s screen and is observable without  too much distraction from the agent’s focus of attention.  In a tag cloud, the tag size, position, typeface and/or color can be made dependent on the number of times the tag is found in the monitored content.  The “value” of the tag is its count.  When using tag clouds to monitor call center conversations, the tag value should be calculated based on additional factors.  Potential value factors may be:

• Customer weight – high/med/low revenue, high/med/low influence, etc
• Emotion – using contextual analysis and voice stress, higher emotional levels should raise the tag value
• Agent experience – an inexperienced agent may need more assistance so tags associated with that agent’s conversations should be weighted more.

Different tag attributes, like color, position, size and font can also be mapped to represent any of the individual value factors.  For example, color can be related to emotional level and the tag can be bolded for passing a threshold of the number of times the tag appears in a context involving important customers.

Tag value should change quickly to reflect current conversations, so a decay factor should be added.  I like to use a standard half-life decay factor of 2 ^(t/thl) (2 with the exponent of t/thl where t is the current elapsed time and thl is the half life time).  I’d suggest a thl of 400 to 600 seconds to start.

That’s enough for one sitting.  Feel free to pick your own example of social networking or web 2.0 techniques that can be used in communications and add it to the comments.

In my last post I included the qualifier “with the possible exception of Princeton.” I’m going to upgrade that qualifier to, “with the certainty that Princeton…” After a networking meeting I went to last week, my thoughts on the whole suburban entrepreneur issue in NJ are starting to change.

Last week I went to a NJ Entrepreneurial Network (NJEN) meeting at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab(PPPL). The meeting was advertised as having a panel of different players in the Clean Tech field, and, if that weren’t enough of a draw, attendees got a tour of the lab.

The 50, or so, event attendees were from a wide variety of occupations. From the recently laid-off project manager to the insurance salesmen, the occupations traversed through angel investors and venture capitalists, energy technologists, investment advisors, a former COO, software consultants, HR people, start-up founders and several others. I swear that if a chimpanzee had shown up on skates, it would have had at least one of everything I wanted to see that day.

The meeting started with an open networking session and lunch. Getting over the initial awkwardness of introducing oneself to someone new is something I overcame a while ago, but I still have to switch mental gears before I can turn it on. These types of events are almost like speed dating without the structure and rejection issue. Everyone I walked up to was ready for a conversation, and had a good story. I made a couple of contacts for later follow-up, and then the panel started.

The only thing to say about the panel was that the organizers had a great idea, but it was a miss for me.

After the panel there was a little more time for networking and then the tour started. For those of you unfamiliar with the PPPL, it houses a large experimental tokamak fusion reactor and a smaller reactor based on incremental technology that hopes to reduce the size and cost of experimental units. The large reactor was in operation, so for safety reasons we couldn’t see it. Instead, we got a tour of the control room.

Walking through the control room, I expected to hear a klaxon and see red strobes start up at any time. That is the way it always happens in the movies, isn’t it? After the control room, we headed upstairs to the small reactor. After a description of the technology and goals of this reactor, I asked how long it would be before it was small enough to integrate into a DeLorean. The answer was, “Never.” I think Doc Brown may have a little something to say about that type of defeatist attitude. He’s probably just about ready to show up back then.

Getting back on topic… This meeting had all the players I was looking for in my recent cruising of the networking meetups. Obviously, I hadn’t been giving the NJ entrepreneurial scene enough credit. But does it take a PPPL to gather this type of audience? To expand on that, I need to provide a little background for those of you who don’t live in New Jersey.

I am not a native Jerseyan, I moved here from Idaho in 1986. Yeah, it was not an easy transition. My views on things-Jersey may not be those of a true son of the Garden State, so when I think I’m onto something I run it past my friends and my wife’s family to see if it holds water. After the NJEN event, I asked my panel of experts what they thought of Princeton. Their thoughts matched reasonably well to mine, so I’ll go forward describing them

To Jerseyans, Princeton is a source of pride. A top Ivy league school and the home of Einstein, John Nash (see “A Beautiful Mind“), James Madison and Bill Bradley. The “Princeton” brand is applied to buildings and businesses far away from the actual city. And yet, there is a barrier that makes one think twice about going there. It’s in Jersey, but not really “of Jersey”. It’s placed on a metaphorical plateau somewhere in the mile high range. It’s seen as insular, unapproachable by normal folk, high-falutin’ even.

Some Princetonians encourage this attitude with an elitist demeanor toward those who live in the Jersey below the plateau. But I’ve found that most Princetonians belie this image. Take the PPPL tour as an example. The PPPL is one of the greatest geek cathedrals in the world. In the geek pantheon, it’s placed just below the Kennedy & Houston space centers, and Disney World. Yet our tour guides, and the people whose work we interrupted, were enthusiastic, welcoming and expansive about the place. They were “just” good people, who happen to be very intelligent and have some very expensive toys to play with.

Princeton has “it”, and I got to get me some of that. The Princeton Rt 1 corridor stretching north toward New Brunswick and south toward Trenton, is an extension of Princeton that still has the same emotional barriers as the borough. Sarnoff, numerous drug companies, and various technical start-ups can be found there in high density. Can a ramp be built from that plateau to spread that environment to the rest of New Jersey? Should it?

This blog is stretching into short story territory, so I’ll summarize:

1) The NJEN events are must-attend meetings for NJ Entrepreneurs.

2) Princeton could be as big a player as New York City in spreading the entrepreneurial spirit in New Jersey

I need to think about this issue for a while longer, and I’m sure my ideas will continue to change as I do.

This first blog entry is a repeat of a recent comment I made on my friend Carl Ford’s blog.   I want to start a conversation about moving from technical fields that are shrinking (at least locally) into those that are growing.  Specifically, from the world of communications into Clean Technology.

Stealing a quote I once heard: “On the east coast, when it looks like you’ll lose your job, you prepare your resume. On the west coast, you prepare your business plan.”

Why? Why aren’t we seen as entrepreneurial here on the east coast. There’s plenty of evidence that NYC has entrepreneurs galore, but in the cities and suburbs of NJ, we just don’t seem to be able to get that critical mass going.

In NJ there are programs like the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, the NJ Entrepreneurial Network, Einstein’s Alley, and a limited number of Meetup groups (like businessnetwork.meetup.com) working to change things. They are likely having an effect, especially around the Princeton area, but success is nowhere close to being assured at this time. It’s an especially challenging environment for the bootstrap startup relying on savings that have lost much of their value in the last few months.

The question is, what can be done to better develop NJ as an entrepreneurial zone? I have a hypothesis that the one thing NJ lacks are natural gathering places. I’ll write about that hypothesis and how it relates to the development of both entrepreneurial activities and the indie performing arts scene soon. However, with the possible exception of Princeton, where do you go in NJ to find ideas, potential partners and money? You go to New York, of course!

While the trip into the city from NJ is not a “big deal”, it is still a “deal” for most of NJ, being both expensive and time consuming for someone trying to bootstrap a new business. So I’ve decided to try a hybrid approach. I’m using NYC-based activities to build momentum that I will then try to transfer across the Hudson. One of those activities that I think will bear fruit is LaidOffCampNY.

LaidOffCampNY is a free two-day event (May 1st and 2nd) for people in a career transition who are looking to gain perspective, discover new passions, or reinvent their careers. It is run BarCamp style, meaning that there are no set speakers. Speakers will self-nominate at the beginning of the day and attendees are expected to be “participants” rather than “audience”.

One of the ideas I’m trying to line up for discussion at LaidOffCampNY is how technical skills gained in the world of voice and video communications infrastructure can readily transfer to “Clean Technology”. Think about the SmartGrid for a second. Time’s up. The SmartGrid requires monitor and control protocols similar to the SS7 and IMS networks. I’m still learning, but it seems like the big money interests in the SmartGrid don’t think any further than the Smart Meter. Limiting the SmartGrid to that domain makes as little sense as having value-add VoIP services end at public side of the enterprise gateway. We tried that dumb phone idea before, and I want something better now. I want an Asterisk-like power management server that interfaces to a Smart Meter gateway functionality.

Inside the enterprise, small or medium business, and even the home, there’s a need for a peer to peer network where additional power monitoring and management services can be added. Why do I want my exterior wall mounted meter to be the only thing in my house that understands peak hour rates? I want that information to be shared and acted upon individually by every electrical switch and outlet, and all of the major appliances.

X10 and Zigbee protocols and products have made some inroads into home and business power management, but I haven’t yet found information on where they interface into the Smart Meter. If that information is available, please send me a link! If that info is not available, we’ve got a problem.

I’ve mixed two topics that each deserve a focused post of their own, so I’ll stop here. If developing an entrepreneurial environment in NJ, or transitioning communications service and infrastructure skills to Clean Tech are of interest to you, please look me up at LaidOffCampNY on May 1st or 2nd and help me make something happen.