The panellists to join us are Didier Boivin who is the Vice President of Marketing for Watteco, Usman Haque who is the Founder and CEO of Pachube, Ozzie Diaz who is Vice President of Product Management at PeoplePower and Michael Einstein, the Vice President of Corporate Innovation for
Intermatic and a representative of the Z-Wave Alliance.
The moderator of this panel will be Christine Hertzog, founder and chief editor of
the Smart Grid Encyclopedia, which has become a must have reference book on the smart grid. Anyone who follows Christine’s articles and commentaries on the Web understands why we are delighted to have her as the Home Energy Management moderator.
Watteco has been one of the pioneers in bringing IPv6 to low bandwidth networks and the Grid. Through their 6LoWPAN home area networking solution and IP based PLC communications on the Grid, they offers a comprehensive end to end communications solution for utility connected homes. For a general sense of what to expect from Watteco at the Summit, read
this Q&A I had with Didier.
Z-Wave is currently the most popular 802.15.4 based standard for home automation, specially in the consumer electronics and residential sector. At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, I personally witnessed many home energy management solutions based on Z-Wave so it will be very interesting to see explore the potentials of Z-Wave and how they relate to their competition.
PeoplePower offers a novel Open Source Home Area Network platform, “OSHAN” and a community driven energy management social network. Their business model and product sound very novel and I’m looking forward to learning more about them at the summit.
Last and definitely not least on my list of favourites, is the very early stage start-up
Pachube, The reason we invited Pachube is because, in my opinion, it’s a glimpse into the future of home control. I don’t really believe that home control will be limited to only geography and the confines of a home, rather it will be about Smart Objects and their relationship to individuals and other Smart Objects as well, regardless of location. Smart objects and our home will be part of the cloud and Pachube is one of the companies looking at being the cloud operating system for the
Internet of Things. I touched on this topic in the following
article.
In addition to Usman’s talk, another speaker who I’m sure will talk about the Internet of Things, but on a different panel, is Arjun Roychowdhury, VP of Technology at
Hughes Systique.
I’m sure that there will be many rich insights to be gained on the topic of Home Energy Management and the relation between the Internet of Things and the smart grid at our summit. Hopefully, you can join us tomorrow in Miami.
Learn more about Smart Grid technology at the Smart Grid Summit, an event collocated with ITEXPO East 2010, to be held Jan. 20 to 22 in Miami. This is the event you need to attend if you want to understand the role that IP communications technologies will play in how the Smart Grid evolves – not just for making utilities more efficient, but also for enabling the Smart Home and a new generation of communications innovations. Register now.
Shidan Gouran is co-founder of Intelligent Communications Partners (ICP), a strategic advisory consultancy focused on the emerging Smart Grid opportunity. To read more of his Smart Grid articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by
Michael Dinan
