Google just announced a new project called “PowerMeter” to monitor electricity usage within your household. This sounds really familiar to me since at WaveStorm we’ve been working on a similar project with an energy company. The app shows as a widget in both iGoogle and on mobile web optimized for Android.

Google PowerMeter receives information from utility smart meters and in-home energy management devices and visualizes this information for you on iGoogle (your personalized Google homepage). Google PowerMeter is free to both utilities and consumers.

To get the usage data, Google aims at partnering with providers of devices to meter and send the information to Google’s servers first one being the TED 5000 starting at 200USD. The device connects to the router through BPL.

I love to see project going forward in the right direction. Quite a few people were skeptical about Android, I wasn’t, and every month since the first ADP1 Android device was released has proven me I’m right to believe in this OS as it has got one step closer to what the perfect mobile OS should be.
The latest 1.6 release brings a few novelties amongst which:

• Mutlitouch through “gesture API”
• Fine battery management (i.e. now you can track which process slow down your droid and are eating up the battery)
• Improved Android Market now getting closer to the best-in-class Apple appstore
• Quick serch on both local content and the Internet

All those come with dedicated APIs enabling apps to really take advantage of every new feature the OS is proposing. This is the kind of open approach I love and which will make Android a market leader. We’re now just missing the gorgeous piece of hardware that can compete with the iPhone in terms of design and we’ll get the next-gen mass market phone !

Pretty funny service from AT&T called Video Share that lets you share during a phone call video either live from your mobile or stored in its memory, some kind of half-duplex 3G visio … only works on 4 handsets yet I love the thought!

Finally got the Palm Pre SDK (hurray) and got to play with the emulator and write the first hello world, this device really looks promising and it’s so exciting to see Palm back in the business. For the record, my first handheld device was a Palm III in 1998, and since then Palm devices have progressively lost their appeal… But now it seems i cant’ wait for the Pre to reach us in Europe with its GSM version !
On the left a screenshot of the emulator with browser pointed to this blog.

I’ve been a pretty big fan of Second Life since its release. Have had a sim that we used at WaveStorm for demo purposes, vr-wear developed mods to the SL viewer with unique head facial analysis abilities and I am an active contributor to Erica Driver’s Thinkbalm focus group on the professional use of immersive Internet.
Although I’m obviously a virtual worlds enthusiast, I feel the change of management and objectives at Linden Labs destroyed the dynamism of the community surrounding the project.
Indeed, SL is definitely a work in progress, we all know that, and the full virtual world thing is only at its premises, as such the community has alway been very supportive on the efforts made by LL in delivering the vision and developing the use cases. Nevertheless, since LL changed management, the whole system has been stalling pretty badly, and when a system stops evolving its defects start being really annoying. For instance the clumsiness of the viewer, the lack of shaders, the poorness of the environment, the lack of goals and the little life in there just cream out loud “I’m a useless proof of concept”. And while I’ve been quite a lot in touch with active developers and builders, most of them are leaving the arena as time goes because the whole world is just not going forward anymore.

Linden Labs, it’s time to react fast and give a new pulse to this initiative or it will get buried and dead for the end users…

After the announces of OnLive and David Perry’s Gaikai, there seem to be another player in the game called OTOY. Techcrunch got the opportunity to test-drive an alpha of the service and let’s face it it’s stunningly realistic in terms of playability.