How much energy does your house use?Ask Google

How much does it cost to leave your TV on all day? What about turning your air conditioning 1 degree cooler? Which uses more power every month — your fridge or your dishwasher? Is your household more or less energy efficient than similar homes in your neighborhood? Studies show that access to your household's personal energy information is likely to save you between 5–15% on your monthly bill, and the potential impact of large numbers of people achieving similar efficiencies is even more exciting.
Google promises to solve these issues with their new beta project dedicated to home energy monitoring. They are working on a tool called Google PowerMeter which will show consumers their electricity consumption in near real-time in a secure iGoogle Gadget. Google PowerMeter, now in prototype, will receive information from utility smart meters and energy management devices and provide anyone who signs up access to their home electricity consumption right on their iGoogle homepage. The graph below shows how someone could use this information to figure out how much energy is used by different household activites.

Source: http://www.google.org/powermeter/smarterpower.html

Google Bus: Ready, Steady, Go!

Though most of the Western world now breathes online oxygen as freely as the elemental kind, that's not true in other parts of the globe. Recognizing that fact, Google has launched an effort to demonstrate the Internet to citizens of India who may not otherwise have access to it.

Launched just last week, Google's Internet Bus aims to educate Indian people about what the Internet is and how it can benefit them in multiple ways. To do that, the customized, Internet-enabled vehicle is bringing the online experience to where people live, visiting several towns and cities across India's Tamil Nadu region with demonstrations of the Internet's uses in education, information, communication and entertainment. Content is provided both in English and in Tamil to familiarize people with services including search, email, social networking, online maps and others. Since beginning in Chennai, the bus has already travelled to Vellore, Krishnagiri, Salem, Erode and Pollachi; on Saturday, it will arrive in Coimbatore. Twelve cities will follow before the effort wraps up in mid-March; in the meantime, photos, videos and updates are available on the project's website.

The Internet Bus initiative is part of Google's overall strategy of "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful," the company says—its efforts have also included localizing and translating multiple Google applications. Prasad Ram, head of R&D for Google India, explains: "We are passionate about empowering users with information, and the Internet democratizes access to information. With this initiative we want to take the power of this medium to people who will really benefit from it. We believe that if we can get people to experience the Internet even briefly they will find the means to go back again."

And that, of course, is the ultimate goal. If people do go back again, it will bring benefits not only for them, but for Google too—and for the legions of advertisers dying to reach new markets. That sound you hear is the global online marketplace getting even bigger!

Source: http://springwise.com/
Links: http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/landing/internetbus/

Google Recipe : 20% pure Innovation...

As IT budgets threaten to follow the same trend lines as financial markets, it's a natural impulse for managers to circle the wagons, concentrate on core projects and put off innovation for another day. Natural, but wrong.

One important policy has increased both employee satisfaction and innovation at Google: the "20% rule," which allows engineers to spend one-fifth of their time on corporate projects of their choosing -- creating something new or making something work better -- even if the project isn't part of their job descriptions.
For one day each week, Google's engineering staffers get to work on projects they think are important for the business, not what management has prioritized for them.

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