AlertMe.com news

Who to vote for? Single-issue voting for the world of 2020.

2010-04-22T17:57:00.002+01:00

This evening I’ll be joining millions of other Brits to watch the second of three televised debates between the major political parties. With Labour, Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats all neck-and-neck in the polls, having seen Obama achieve a radical victory in America, and with the country apparently emerging from bruising economic turmoil, there’s more than a whiff of change in the air and an increasing feeling that perhaps, just perhaps, our votes really can make a difference this time. But what really are the differences between the parties - what key deciding factors should we take into account? And once we’ve decided what we want the outcome to be, then how do we make it happen?

Picking a strategy

With New Labour having become arguably more right-wing than the Conservatives, and all parties increasingly trying to steal each others’ policies to appeal to a growing middle class, it’s hard to just go with a default decision based on old party-political beliefs and traditions.

The credit crunch continues to be the talking point of the moment, but given the need to reduce our public borrowing the parties all seem to be in rough consensus about the necessary economic “trajectory”, so no help in deciding there either.

We change our governing party twice a decade, so 2020 seems a suitable horizon to plan for. What do we want the United Kingdom to look like by then, and what strategy should we follow to get us there?

For me the overwhelming elephant in the room remains climate change. Given the lack of distinguishing features on other topics, in this election I’ve become a “single issue” voter. I’m going to cast my vote entirely on the basis of how I believe my vote will best influence our approach to climate change.

How our country reacts to climate change over the next decade will either see us playing our part as a world citizen, becoming a leader in the transition and reaping the benefits of creating new intellectual-property, revitalising manufacturing in a second industrial revolution of sustainability, and improving our quality of life ... or else it will see continued economic decline driven by less and less investment in engineering, a failure to capitalise on our inventiveness, and the country wracked by an increasingly expensive and unreliable energy supply.

So I’ve been looking at each party’s manifesto, to try to find a sliver of difference on attitudes to climate change on which to make my voting decision.

Labour

Labour's huge advantage – and disadvantage – as the incumbents is that rather than have to believe their promises, we can look at their actions. Over the last couple of Labour terms we’ve seen some great political progress on the environment in some areas, for example the creation of the Carbon Trust, the Energy Act and Climate Change Act legally committing us to reducing carbon, the Stern Review, feed-in tariffs, and the Carbon Reduction Commitment. But all of these initiatives still have something of a feeling of “promises, promises” rather than “action this day”, and have been accompanied by seeming foot-dragging in other important areas. One example is the apparent failure to plan substantial new clean generation to secure our energy supply - so not only is our economy increasingly at the mercy of foreign powers, but it looks increasingly likely that by 2015 we may be experiencing rolling blackouts (as David MacKay has warned for years).

From anecdotal reports from people closer than me, I get the strong impression that most of the progress on climate change in the UK has been driven by the people who really run the country (yes, our Civil Service) and that Gordon Brown has indeed been actively resisting some of these schemes. A particularly telling moment which greatly influenced my belief in whether he can grasp the big picture was when he responded to this winter’s heavy snowfalls with the comment that “no-one could have predicted them”. Will he be equally surprised when one day, out of the blue, a storm surge floods part of London, or a hurricane destroys some coastal towns?

Conservative

OK, it’s so easy to knock the incumbents, what about the Tories? Cameron started pretty well, with Zac Goldsmith and co., and many of the last decade’s political initiatives on climate change have either initiated, or at least supported, by Conservative policy. So, not a bad start, and there’s been some real leadership there – setting out a vision on climate change and working towards it. But there are valid concerns about whether Cameron has the party faithful completely behind him – within the party there is a faction of climate-change sceptics, and a good dose of “nimby” reactionaries to nuclear power and windfarms - plus a separate “market forces” faction that’s seems to want economic growth at any cost, e.g. the Heathrow expansion. So with an eye to a second term, will Cameron be forced to soft-pedal on sustainability?

Rather disappointingly, none of the major parties are currently majoring on climate change in their political posturing. I nurse a hope that this is because they just don’t want to frighten the voters (or trouble our tiny minds), and that once the election is over there’ll be sufficient clear water to really make some progress ... but we’ll see.

For what it’s worth, in March the Conservatives released a policy paper entitled “Rebuilding Security: Conservative Energy Policy for and Uncertain World”, which listed the following priorities:

· Maintaining the security of energy supplies.

· Sustaining the UK’s ecosystems.

· Improving the economics of energy usage for consumers and business.

· Generating opportunities for growth in the British industrial and commercial sectors

Liberal Democrat

During the expenses scandal it was notable that, given plenty of rope, plenty of Labour and Conservative politicians lined-up to hang themselves with it, whereas LibDem MP’s conspicuously failed to do so. That may just possibly be relevant to this debate because climate change requires actions today which may be unpopular, so a degree of moral fibre is required.

Of the three main parties, the LibDem’s have by far the most aggressive agenda in terms of the speed of reducing emissions and increasing clean supply, really focussing on the end-game of “Zero Carbon Britain”, and as a shorter term tactical example, aiming to roll-out smart meters in 5 years not 10. However, having had not much more than a whiff of power for a long time, do they have credibility? Is there a risk that, like Tony Blair in ’97, if they do suddenly find themselves with the reins of power they may be so surprised that they won’t really know what to do with it? I also find their (negative) attitude towards nuclear power a little surprising – personally I feel that it’s probably an essential part of the mix until (and indeed if) we can build enough reliable renewable such as massive-scale tidal generation.

Greens

The Greens - what possible relevance can they have? Well, one could have said the same about the Lib Dems only weeks ago. And just as parity between Labour and Conservative has boosted the fortunes of the LibDems, perhaps so hung parliaments or even major political shifts such as PR, might see the Greens (or at least their ideas) gain some real power, as everyone scrabbles to forge alliances and the Greens find themselves the holders of the ideas that everyone wants to claim, having been on the right side of history. In countries like Germany the Greens have of course become a real political force, capturing 10% of parliamentary seats (vs 0% in the UK so far!).

True, there have been major inconsistencies within the party faithful, with factions resisting the very actions necessary to combat climate change, such as wind, tidal and nuclear generation, because of their potential impact on flora & fauna. But as the potential effects of climate change have become clear, the Greens seem to have come around to a relatively coherent agenda, at least on the topic of climate change, which, if you’re still with me, you’ll remember is my single-issue!

Tactical voting

So, bearing all of the above in mind, how should I vote?

I could vote Green as a general “protest” vote on the environment. I know that it won’t affect the election of my MP, but maybe if enough people vote Green then it will influence my local MP when he seeks re-election.

Or I could vote Lib-Dem. Try to shake things up, increase the influence of their more ambitious environmental policies. But the results of stirring the pot are very unpredictable - a Lib-Lab pact might form, and - who knows – maybe Peter Mandelson will become our nation’s second consecutive unelected prime-minister.

But hang on, our local rag rather depressingly ran a story a few weeks ago entitled “your vote doesn’t count”, saying that the seats around Cambridge are all so "safe" that there’s very little chance of any change. Indeed in 2005 in South Cambs, our local Conservative MP won with 46% of the vote, the next closest being the Lib Dems with only 28%.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/election2010/results/constituency/e09.stm

My local MP is Andrew Lansley, Conservative. A nice-enough chap, I’ve even seen him in action locally on issues I care about, and his home page has a new lead story on it about how he thinks Cambridge should be Britain’s first “eco city”. But (and forgive me a little cynicism here!) it the kind of wonderful story which no-one could possibly disagree with - because there’s just no downside. It reminds me of the voting system in California which allows you not only to vote for particular candidates, but also to vote for particular policies. And of course the way that policies are described has a massive effect on the results: unsurprisingly policies were always described in terms like “vote for increasing education” rather than “vote for increasing taxes”.

Digging deeper into Lansley’s site, he does support the local council’s Cambridge Climate Change Strategy for climate change mitigation, based on the Nottingham Declaration on Climate change - but then so does everyone else!

The past being a good guide to the future, let’s look at his track-record on the excellent Publicwhip site. This allows me to see how my MP has voted on all votes on a particular topic. So if I look up the topic “Stop Climate Change”, I see that he has an impressive 97% agreement with votes on this subject.

Conclusion

So how am I going to vote? A radical green protest, a Lib-Dem stirring of the pot, a Labour vote to deliver on existing green policies, or a safe Conservative pat on the back? As Francis Urquhart said, “I couldn’t possibly comment”. But I can tell you one thing: as I sit down to watch them slug it out on TV tonight, I’ll be enjoying (and participating) on the excellent Slapometer site!

Earth Hour

2010-03-26T18:40:00.000Z

Tomorrow, Saturday 27^th March, at 8.30pm is Earth Hour.

Show that you care about climate change by switching your lights off for 1 hour.

Just a small change like switching off lights when you leave a room can make a difference. If you turn off two 60 watt light bulbs that you normally leave on around the clock you can save £120 a year.

If every household in the UK did this, we could save just over half a tonne of Co2.

Here at AlertMe we will be switching our lights off. Will you?

AlertMe named as New Energy Pioneer by Bloomberg

2010-03-18T11:40:00.002Z

We're delighted to be able to let you know that Bloomberg New Energy Finances has named AlertMe in the Top 5 New Energy Pioneers worldwide.

The Pioneers programme has recognised AlertMe as a highly promising company in the new energy technology field. Bloomberg believe AlertMe will play a vital part in the transition to a lower carbon, smart energy system.

Bloomberg were impressed that AlertMe can not only demonstrate new technology but also show it working in real-life in customers homes today, helping them to see how much energy they're using and lower their energy bills right now.

Click here to learn more about Bloomberg's New Energy Pioneers.

Mary Turner joins AlertMe as CEO

2010-03-12T09:00:00.003Z

We're all excited today to be able to share the news that Mary Turner has joined AlertMe as our new CEO (press-release here). AlertMe is now well into its commercial growth phase, and we've been seeking someone with the proven experience of leading consumer-focused businesses from entrepreneurial beginnings into massive commercial success. Mary is our dream candidate and I was over the moon when she said "Yes". As a founder, it's great to be able to mark this major "growing-up" milestone in the company's history, and to have found such an exceptional person to lead us forwards.

It's significant that Mary comes from the telecommunications world, where she played a major role in the telco revolution of the past 20 years or so. During that time telco has seen a) the freeing-up of the "local-loop" (you can now buy your broadband from anyone, not just BT), and b) increasingly rich, bundled services (you can now buy your fixed-line, your broadband, your TV and your mobile all from one service provider).

AlertMe is a key platform for driving a similar revolution in the Energy space - and indeed the gap between Energy and Telco is blurring fast. Increasingly, consumers are coming to see Energy less as a fixed, inevitable cost of owning/renting a home, and more as another household service just like broadband, mobile or TV - which can be understood, switched and bundled in the same way.

Vive la change!

Google Opens Up PowerMeter API

2010-03-10T17:21:00.002Z

In October AlertMe became the first European company to partner with Google PowerMeter. AlertMe gives consumers visibility and control of their energy consumption and enables consumers to view this information with Google PowerMeter. By providing the energy consumption data that PowerMeter relies on, AlertMe is one of the engines behind Google PowerMeter.

Last week, Google expanded the ecosystem around PowerMeter by introducing an API (application programming interface) which will allow developers to help people better understand their energy consumption and find additional ways to save energy. And of course all of these new add-on capabilities will be available to any AlertMe customers who opt into Google PowerMeter too.

We’re thrilled that Google released the API and hope that adoption of the API is widespread. This validates the importance of our partnership with Google and will help to increase adoption of online consumer home energy management. And we think that everyone should have access to their energy information to save money, avoid wasting energy and be good to the planet by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

If you’ve been waiting to try out AlertMe or Google PowerMeter, there’s no time like the present.

AlertMe Customer Survey Winter 2009/2010

2010-02-02T10:37:00.004Z

Is AlertMe good value for money?
We've just completed our Customer Survey. A big "thank you" to the hundreds of people who took the time to take part - giving us statistically meaningful results with which to guide the development of AlertMe as a service.

The graph on the left shows the answers to the question "Is AlertMe good value for money?". We also asked questions about usefulness, reliability, and (the acid test) - "Would you recommend us to a friend?" And to that, a whopping 96% of respondents said they either would or have done so - hooray!).

You'll find the answers to that and many more questions detailed in our summary of the results here.

Would you recommend AlertMe to your friends?

Close the Door!

2010-01-28T12:27:00.005Z

Close the Door is a Cambridge-based group that campaigns for shops to, as the name suggests, keep their doors closed to save energy. Many shops operate an 'open door' policy as they feel it is more welcoming for their customers. However during particularly hot or cold weather keeping the shop at a comfortable temperature with the doors open can lead to enormous energy waste.

Research by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution shows that retailers use almost double the amount of energy annually per square metre that factories and offices do, with retailers using on average 460 kilowatt hours (kWh) in comparison to only 292 kWh for factories and 252 kWh for commercial offices.

Making matters worse many retailers are in fact over-heating their premises. 18°C is the ideal shopping temperature, as recommended by the Chartered Institute for Building Services Engineers, but Make It Cheaper found that the average temperature in shops on London’s Oxford Street was a staggering 23.6°C. The research conducted in the freezing temperatures of December last year found that only 6 out of 100 shops surveyed had their doors closed in spite of the freezing weather.

AlertMe is being used to conduct some scientific research by Close the Door on the effects of leaving shop doors open. The research aims to identify just how much energy is wasted and how much extra money it costs to heat (or cool) a shop with the doors open compared with keeping them closed. The experiment began this month with two shops in Cambridge and we look forward to sharing the results with you soon.

Read more about the impact of closing the door and retailers can sign up for the Close the Door campaign now.

What if science is trying to save us?

2010-01-14T10:45:00.000Z

I'd like to tell you a joke:

The land was struck by a tremendous flood. Everyone escaped to higher ground, but a vicar found himself stuck on the roof of his house. A man in a boat came by and said "Come on Father, get in my boat and I'll row you to safety". "Oh, no thank you -- God will save me!" said the vicar. Next, a helicopter flew overhead and a rope ladder was lowered. "Climb up, and we'll fly you to safety". Again, the vicar declined: "No thanks. God will save me!"

Eventually, the waters rose above the roof of the vicar's house and he drowned. When he arrived in heaven he sought an audience with God and complained "Why didn't you save me?" God replied: "I sent a boat and a helicopter... What more did you want?

One of the responses that I often hear to the threat of climate change is "science will save us". Unfortunately, like the vicar on the roof of his house, I fear that these people are failing to notice that science is trying to help us right now: scientists are telling us that we must reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to below 350 parts per million, and we must keep the increase in global temperature to below 2 degrees.

We as consumers can contribute to this. We are each personally responsible for our own carbon footprint, and if we don't all reduce the amount of greenhouse gas we are responsible for emitting (by consuming electricity, gas, petrol and consumer goods), the science will not be able to save us.

One of the difficulties for us as consumers is that we just don't know how big our carbon footprint is, or how we can reduce it, and therefore what we can do to help. Systems like AlertMe provide people with a way to monitor and understand their own personal contribution to the impact on the environment, and thus what they can do to reduce that impact.

What's the antidote to being over-connected?

2010-01-06T15:58:00.005Z

I must be getting old and intolerant, or maybe I just got out of bed on the wrong side today, but I find the news that the UK National Grid (which distributes gas and electricity across the nation) has just issued its second ever "Gas Balancing Alert" rather depressing. Not so much about the immediate risks, but about what it implies about how we are organising ourselves.

We had a small amount of snow just before Christmas, and now it has snowed again. Not amazing amounts - just a foot or so. It's been slightly colder than normal, for slightly longer, in a "once every few years" kind of a way. Certainly not a "once in a lifetime" or "once in a millenium" kind of a way. And yet the nation's gas supplies have run low to the point where industrial users are told to stop consuming until we can import more gas from abroad, to preserve the gas for consumers - presumably so that grannies across the country don't die of hypothermia.

On the roads, there is concern about whether stores of grit and salt will last, and talk of whether "production will meet demand". Salt is just about the cheapest commodity there is. It doesn't go off. Why not stockpile mountains of the stuff in strategic locations around the country? Same with gas. I'm sure that building more gas storage would cost something, but as an insurance policy, surely a negligible amount per person compared to the human cost of running out - and probably the financial cost too.

It's almost as though it's a crime to save (sound familiar?). The "cost of capital" is king, and to hell with the risks. Put another way, we seem to be trying to run the country in a lean "just in time" kind of a way - which is no way to run a country, as the consequences of the whole nation's supply-chain failing are not just financial, they could be catastrophic for our society.

We're fortunate to live in a place and time where the three basic domestic services - electricity, gas and water - are extremely reliable. But that good-fortune has made us complacent. As individuals and communities, we expect and utterly depend on them, to the point of not thinking about them at all. Less than a hundred years ago, it was normal for local communities to have local stores of wood, coal, oil, and even acetylene (for lighting, before the electricity grid reached all parts of the country), and to plan ahead, managing those stores. But now, as a side-effect of nationalising our services, we have removed the local storage, and are dependent on whatever storage is available at a national level, on the grid. And that is a dangerous thing to do, because it makes the network very "brittle". If an event happens in just one part of the network, that's fine, the grid can rebalance. But if everyone across the national network experiences the same event (e.g. snow), then the entire network requires national-sized reserves to survive the shock. And the substantial failure of one network could quickly cause knock-on effects which bring down others, bringing civilisation to its knees. We now generate a lot of our electricity from gas, for example.

Stuart Kauffman, a founder of complexity theory, revealed how the "connectedness" of any network has profound effects on its overall behaviour. "Network" in this case can be any collection of things that work together: genes in an organism, computers on the internet - or individuals in a society. He found that although obviously a network needs some connectivity in order to function, there is such a thing as too much connectivity - with everything connected to everything else, everything starts behaving the same, and the network can "crystallise" into a single homogenous lump, losing many of the benefits that come from having looser connections. Our society has recently been increasing its connectivity at an amazing rate - and its time we thought about the consequences.

Buffering (local storage) is good. Diversity is good. Redundancy (having a spare) is good. These are qualities of an optimally-connected network, and they all contribute to the overall network's ability to survive adverse events. In an over-connected network you tend to lose these benefits, and that's where we seem to have got to today. We're all in the same boat, and we've carefully balanced it an inch above the water-line.

Energy security, like food security, is life-or-death stuff, it's not to be taken lightly. So what should we do to improve our resilience?

We should intentionally restore the qualities we have lost: Adding Buffering by placing sufficient storage, ideally spaced around the grid, and adding Diversity and Redundancy through moving to a mix of energy sources: wind, solar, hydro and (especially in the UK) tidal.

Another useful contribution (though not a panacea in its own right) is local generation, using domestic microCHP and solar PV to generate electricity. So it's interesting to see that feed-in tariffs are finally coming to the UK in April. The final terms are not yet public, but the government is going to guarantee that, for a fixed period (20 years?), all electricity generated will get paid-for at a rate which turns local generation into an attractive investment (e.g. 36p per unit instead of the current 5p) . "Better late than never" I say - we're more than a decade behind many other countries on this - even Iran already feed-in tariffs! This will certainly help accelerate the move towards grid-parity, which is where the cost of locally-generated electricity matches the cost of centrally-generated. And once we're there, then we'll be a lot more resilient against foreign oil prices, gas supply interruptions - and snow (free brush supplied with every installation!).

Another way to increase resilience is to devolve more of the responsibility for infrastructure out to local level, so that planning and storage is taken as a local responsibility, to avoid the "someone else's problem" effect. It's particularly interesting to see grass-roots examples of this springing-up, for example Transition Towns.

Christmas Energy

2010-01-05T13:40:00.017Z

At AlertMe, we were wondering what impact Christmas would have on the energy consumption of the nation with all that TV watching, Christmas tree lighting and turkey roasting. Luckily, the Swingometer lets us find out.

The Swingometer was firmly in the red leading up to Christmas with higher energy usage than usual, probably due to the cold weather and snow.

It was no surprise that Christmas day continued the trend, with the UK using significantly more energy than on a typical Thursday.

Looking at the animated heat-map below, you can see a huge decrease in energy consumption in London at Christmas (this is shown as London going green in the map). Presumably a lot of Londoners left the city to visit family over the festive season. Then, on the 3rd of January the usage in London leapt back into the orange, indicating that people had returned home ready to go back to work.

Happy New Year from all at AlertMe!

How are you doing?

2009-12-21T10:22:00.001Z

Recently AlertMe launched the Swingometer - an online device which shows a live display of how well the UK is doing at reducing its energy consumption. Today, we're pleased to announce that all AlertMe Energy customers can now view their own personal swingometer in the AlertMe user interface.

Your individual swingometer will show you how well you’re doing at reducing your personal energy consumption in the past 24 hours compared with your past behaviour. So if you've used a lot less energy recently than past experience suggests, the swingometer will swing into the green, and if you've used a lot more, it'll be in the red. Your swingometer is just for you and we’ll keep all your information private, but if you’d like to share it with friends and show them how you’re doing at reducing your carbon footprint and your energy bills then that’s great too. You can publish your personal swingometer anywhere you want, share the link on Twitter, post it on Facebook, send it around in an email or even embed it on your personal blog or website.

If you're an AlertMe Energy customer simply login to view the swingometer on your AlertMe home page. If you're an AlertMe security customer and have bought a meter reader, you'll be able to see your swingometer by going into the energy records page.

We believe in providing you, our customers, with as many ways as possible to visualise (and thus, hopefully, understand and reduce) your usage of energy. The swingometer is just one more way to help you do this. We’ve kept it really simple so we hope that anyone, even your kids, can begin to understand how their TV watching or kettle boiling can affect your energy bills and our environment.

We’re sure you can think of many cool and innovative ways to use the Swingometer and we’re looking forward to hearing your ideas.

DECC Smart Meter consultation - Part II

2009-12-15T10:49:00.000Z

Back in August we blogged our response to DECC's White Paper on Smart Meters. Now DECC has collected all the responses and published an update here.

The good news is that DECC agrees that it's vital that Smart Meters have a connection to an in-home network - not just to an in-home display but to other devices too. What we need next is clarity on the physical communications standard that will be chosen for that connection, so that the market can gear-up to deliver devices and services which connect to it. There are many contenders, but it's important that the government choose one (any one!) so that everyone can design around it - otherwise the uncertainty and diversity will act against consumer choice.

Homework

2009-12-11T14:17:00.004Z

Almost 18% of Britons work from home, which is presumably a good thing for the environment. That means 5 million less people travelling to workplaces. Surely that must be less carbon-intensive. But how do we know how much energy home workers are using? And who’s keeping track of their carbon footprint?

Recently we announced that we’re joining forces with AMEE to make it easier for companies to track the carbon footprint of their home workers. This will make life a lot easier for UK corporations that will need to track their entire carbon footprint in order to comply with the UK's CRC Energy Efficiency scheme which is due to begin in April 2010.

The Carbon Tracker service we’re introducing allows home-workers to use the AlertMe system to track their energy usage. AMEE convert the information about how much energy has been used into an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. The CO₂ information is provided to the home-workers’ company where it can be used to create reports on the company’s entire carbon footprint to comply with legislation such as the UK's Carbon Reduction Commitment.

We’re now looking for pilot customers for this innovative new service. If you’d like to be part of this pilot and find out how much carbon your home workers are using please contact us by email at homeworkers@alertme.com.

Energy on Display

2009-12-02T15:30:00.005Z

This morning the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) published its response to a consultation initiated earlier this year on smart metering. The response is based on comment from over 270 organisations (including AlertMe), and we’re delighted to see that the Government have firmed up their position on a number of key areas.

First, they have confirmed their view that the communication network (between smart meters and the rest of the world) should be centralised.

They stress the importance of data security, a subject we’re passionate about.

Also it’s great to see that DECC is recognising the importance of promoting local community engagement in the roll-out of smart meters.

The role of the consumer in combating climate change cannot be underestimated. If the UK is to achieve its targets for reducing CO₂ emissions, we all have a part to play. We as individuals account for around 40% of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions, and a large chunk of that is due to our use of energy in the home. With the old-fashioned meters that almost all UK houses currently have, it's very difficult for people to understand where they're using energy, making it hard to take confident steps towards reducing their energy usage and their carbon footprint. Giving consumers that information in a form that they can be easily understood and acted upon empowers them to do their part to help reduce the UK's carbon footprint. Without systems such as AlertMe Energy, or in the future smart meters connected to in-home displays, we're all just feeling our way in the dark.

Thankfully AlertMe Energy can allow even those with old-fashioned meters to view and reduce their energy usage (and the accompanying electricity bills of course) and their carbon footprint today. And of course in future we’ll be able to work directly with smart meters as they’re rolled out.

Of particular interest was the confirmation of the Government's position that smart meters should include a stand alone in-home display. At AlertMe, we take the view that the more ways consumers are given to visualise their energy usage, the better, and the in-home display is one of the most visible ways of achieving this. We’re always working on new ways for consumers to track their energy usage and monitor their progress in reducing their carbon footprint. And in keeping with this we’re already talking to existing providers of in-home displays about integration with AlertMe as well as crafting plans for the creation of an AlertMe display as part of our whole-home energy management system. Watch this space for more details.

Dow Jones, GreenBeat, ... and the final frontier!

2009-11-25T09:37:00.006Z

I spent last week in Silicon Valley (where I lived for six years in the 90's), and spoke at a couple of conferences: Dow Jones and GreenBeat. But of course I was mainly there to listen, and I was seeking answers to:
1) Has the US woken-up to climate change?
2) Does the consumer really matter in the US?
...and it was exciting to see that the answer to both questions is an emphatic "yes!"

The likes of Intel and Cisco, and indeed the venture-capital community which created the Silicon Valley phenomenon, are now very strongly focussed on Energy, and see in it an opportunity on the same scale as the internet boom. Veteran investors John Doerr and Vinod Khosla both gave passionate speeches (as did Al Gore). When you look at the amount of money we pay for Energy (far more than any other household service) and the extremely primitive way it is managed, it's not surprising that people are viewing it as a big opportunity. Now I do recognise that Silicon Valley is not America, but it does create much of the future for America. So while I suspect that a lot of people outside of the West and East Coast still remain to understand the profound effects that climate change, energy security and peak oil (and our reactions to adapt) are about to have on their lives, it's great to see that in places like Silicon Valley it is now a hot topic.

And does the consumer matter? As a totally consumer-centric company this question is very important to AlertMe. We know that the consumer does matter in countries like the UK which have a deregulated energy industry, because utilities have to compete for the consumer's business, so they need to compete not just on pricing, but on the quality of the consumer experience, in order to attract and retain customers.
That's not the case in the majority of US states, where utilities are still regulated, meaning that the consumer has no choice of supplier, and everything from rates to services is determined by legislation in the form of the all-powerful PUC (Public Utilities Commissioner). Sounds a bit 1950's, doesn't it - and indeed it is. And so are some of the plans for energy management which sound almost Soviet - for example, Demand Response, where a utility can pull a lever to turn off appliances in your home when there is insufficient supply. This might sound great from a utility perspective, but it's going to be a hard sell to consumers. So I was delighted to see that many of the various panels and discussions did focus on the consumer, the conclusion being that if the consumer - and their in-home devices - aren't engaged in the process by offering them services which are positively attractive to them, then there's a real danger that industry initiatives such as Smart Meters won't achieve anything like the scale of change that is needed.

Speaking of scale, that's something that Ed Lu of Google mentioned a lot in his talk (he mentions AlertMe at around 8 minutes in). Scalability of information is something that telco's and companies like Google understand very well, but utilities now have to play catch-up, moving from a world where historically they took at most one reading a month per consumer, to one where real-time energy information (and control) flows in real-time. Personally I believe that the AMI networks that have been built today, and are still being planned and rolled-out, designed primarily around carrying 15-minute metering data, will be completely inadequate to carry us into our energy future. We already have an effective real-time information network (it's called the Internet) so let's use it!

Having done a press-release with Ed a few weeks back it was great to actually meet him and spend some time with him discussing what we're doing with Google Powermeter. Ed is an astronaut who's been into space three times, spent a lot of time on the ISS, and indeed rode the first Shuttle after the Columbia disaster - so a brave man and a thoroughly nice one too. So (cheesy though it was to ask) I just couldn't resist getting a picture taken to show my children "Daddy with the Astronaut"! Which kind of made my day.

AlertMe Launch Party in Westminster

2009-11-12T18:04:00.001Z

AlertMe+Google Powermeter hosted a great Launch party last night in Westminster. About 80 people came, including MP’s, people from DECC, Carbon Trust, BRE, journalists, academics, not-for-profits, utility companies ... and even an energy anthropologist!

Guest speakers were David MacKay (Chief Scientist of DECC) and Jens Redmer (Business Development Director for Google EMEA). Great anecdotes from both speakers, I think we all had a lot of fun (saving the world should be fun!) and you can find a full transcript of the excellent talks right here.

Your home in your hand

2009-11-04T10:50:00.006Z

See what your home is doing in your hand with AlertMe Energy on your mobile phone. Now you can view and control the power consumption of your whole house on your trusty mobile, no matter where you are.

You can access your home’s energy data on any internet ready mobile phone by browsing to mobile.alertme.com. iPhone users can also see a graphical dial to show them exactly how much energy their home is using in a glance.

You can also see the consumption of individual appliances that are connected to Smart Plugs, see which appliances are on or off and even turn smart-plugs on and off directly from your mobile. Great when you’re away from home or on the move. Imagine you’re on your way home and in serious need of a coffee, just turn on the coffee-maker and your coffee could be ready the minute you walk in the door. It could also put an end to those return trips home to see if you left the iron on, simply pull out your mobile and check what’s on or off and if you have left the iron plugged in, just turn off the smart plug – easy!

Plus this also provides an easy way to walk around the house switching things on and off, to see exactly how much power different appliances consume and how much money you could be saving on your energy bills by making some simple changes and turning things off standby.

AlertMe Energy users can simply visit mobile.alertme.com from any mobile phone to view their home’s energy usage optimised for mobile. If you’re not an existing user, find out more about how AlertMe Energy can keep you in touch with your home, wherever you are.

Introducing AlertMe Energy with Google and British Gas

2009-10-27T18:35:00.005Z

Today we're pleased to announce the launch of AlertMe Energy, in partnership with Google and British Gas. AlertMe Energy allows you to monitor and control your home’s overall energy usage. It’s simple to use and install, providing an affordable way to keep track of your total electricity usage and make easy changes to save money and reduce your energy bills.

All you have to do is clip the AlertMe Meter Reader onto your electricity meter, and install the AlertMe hub. Your energy usage is then available on the AlertMe online dashboard so you always have access to up-to-the-minute information about your home's electricity usage from your mobile phone or internet browser.

We're really excited that AlertMe Energy is the first self-install device to work with Google PowerMeter to provide consumers with easy access to their energy data. This means that AlertMe Energy customers can keep an eye on their electricity usage directly from their iGoogle homepage, without logging into AlertMe, making it even simpler to monitor your electricity use and reduce your carbon footprint as well as your bills.

AlertMe Energy is available to buy right now from the AlertMe online store for just £69, plus a £2.99 monthly subscription. We’ve also teamed up with British Gas, and you can buy AlertMe Energy for just £99, including 12 months subscription for the price of 10, by calling 0800 1070187.

We’re really excited to be launching AlertMe Energy and we hope it’ll help you to save energy, save money and do your bit to help save the planet. Watch our videos on YouTube (www.alertme.com/youtube) to find out more about how AlertMe Energy can help you to connect with your house and manage your energy, or see how you can make a difference to climate change with AlertMe.

To learn more about Google PowerMeter, visit www.google.org/powermeter.

How to stop your electricity bill increasing

2009-10-21T11:38:00.009+01:00

With all the talk about recession and the credit crunch it’d be nice to know that your energy bills weren’t going to soar in the future, but unfortunately that’s not the case. According to a recent report published by Ofgem, the UK’s energy regulator, on energy security (whether the current infrastructure can continue to reliably supply the energy we need) and what the costs to consumers will be, energy prices are set to soar by up to 60%.

The report looked at four scenarios in which economic recovery and environmental action could be either rapid or slow. In all four scenarios, demand for electricity rose slightly, and by 2020 consumer bills rose by 16% to 40%. However if the economy recovers more slowly and environmental action is also slow, consumer bills could peak at more than 60% above their current levels in 2017.

In other words, whatever happens it looks as though our electricity (and gas) bills will rise in the coming years. So what can you do?

Well the Ofgem report assumes that demand will remain more or less constant, and of course you can control how much electricity you use so if you reduce your home’s electricity usage by 16%-40% over the next 10 years then in 2020 your bill should be lower than it is today.

For most households, reducing electricity consumption by 40% is a tough challenge, but reducing consumption by 20% or even more should not be hard to achieve. A report by Sarah Darby for DEFRA found from a range of studies that consumers were able to reduce their consumption by between 5 and 15% simply by having feedback on how much electricity they were consuming. Another study, that provided consumers with more detailed feedback on their electricity usage achieved savings of up to 55%.

AlertMe Energy can help you reduce your energy usage and therefore help to save money on your energy bills. The system not only provides feedback on how much energy you're using, but also offers personalised advice and detailed analysis to help you understand exactly what you could do to keep your electricity bills down. Our plans for AlertMe Energy are ambitious, and as each new feature rolls out over the coming months, we expect our customers to see their electricity bills fall more and more. And the more you reduce your electricity usage, the less CO2 is being pumped into the atmosphere, so you can do your bit for the environment as well as your wallet.

Pilgrim in the Sunday Times

2009-10-19T10:54:00.004+01:00

It was great to see AlertMe's founders in an article in yesterday's Sunday Times. It explains how customers can use AlertMe hardware and online services on their computer or mobile phone, to see exactly how much energy they are using — in pounds and pence, and then use this information to adjust the way they use their appliances. You can read the article here:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article6879357.ece

Not so Scilly

2009-10-08T13:57:00.007+01:00

The Isles of Scilly, off the coast of Cornwall, have an unusual property that made them perfect for an energy reduction experiment: they have just a single cable coming from the mainland that supplies all the electricity to the islands, having only been connected to the national grid in 1998. As a result, monitoring how much electricity the islands are using is relatively straightforward.

This led environmentalist Dr Matt Prescott to choose to use the islands in an experiment to see how far people could reduce their energy consumption. He created E-Day: a single day (October 6th, 2009) on which the people of the Scilly Islands would do their best to reduce their consumption of electricity.

After the event, the results seem rather underwhelming. The overall use of electricity by the islands was just 1.2% lower than expected. This can be partially explained by bad weather, but it does seem surprising that a concerted effort could not lead to a greater reduction.

In fact, however, there is more to it than this. One family, for example, managed to reduce their consumption (which was being separately measured) by a whopping 50.3%. What did they have that no-one else had? This family had a device measuring the consumption of their home, and a display so they could see how much they were consuming.

It's one thing to ask people to switch things off and save electricity, but if you provide them with direct feedback and a way to assess how much they're using and the impact of their actions, then they're much more likely to succeed. This is what AlertMe Energy is all about: empowering people with knowledge about the way they use electricity and giving them guidance about how to reduce it.

Tower of SmartPlugs!

2009-09-29T11:33:00.004+01:00

There's something about seeing a large quantity of objects, all the same, which just works for me ... so I have to share this picture of 79 AlertMe SmartPlugs in a stack, part of some stress-test our engineers did a while ago.

10:10

2009-09-04T09:03:00.003+01:00

One of AlertMe's main aims in the coming year is to help our customers reduce their energy consumption (and thus, the amount of money they spend on energy). We'll be doing this by monitoring electricity consumption, providing personalised feedback and advice and by providing smarter ways to control heating (by far the largest energy hog in most British homes).

It seems like a good idea for people to reduce how much energy they consume, and thus to reduce their carbon footprint. But what's a sensible target? One that seems to be gaining some popularity is the 10:10 campaign, which recommends aiming to cut our carbon footprints (individually as consumers and as businesses) by 10% during 2010.

Most of the targets that we hear about for emissions reductions have time-scales in decades, so setting a specific target for next year (and an ambitious one at that) is a great way to change it from an ethereal hard-to-grasp target into something we can all understand and start to work towards.

The campaign has received some amazing support recently, particularly as the entire cabinet signed up, not long after the entire Conservative front bench did the same.

As you might expect, AlertMe has signed up, and I'm now starting the process of figuring out what our carbon footprint is right now, and how we might reduce it next year. More importantly, we need to find ways to help you, our customers, to reduce your carbon footprints. So here's the deal, if you go along to the 10:10 site and sign up to the 10% reduction target we'll do our best to help you achieve it.

Watt is a pound a year?

2009-09-03T17:14:00.004+01:00

We're exhorted to turn off unused devices in our house to reduce their standby consumption, and thereby reduce CO2 emissions from power stations. So it's tempting to ask what the cash benefit is, and the answer is surprisingly high. And there's an easy rule-of-thumb for working it out.

The amount that devices consume in standby varies widely. Older devices often didn't really have a standby mode - they just turned-off their front panel and pretended to be asleep, while still consuming a lot of energy. Evil! For example, one of the AlertMe crew discovered that his old black-and-white laser printer was consuming 60Watts, day and night, keeping the toner fuser warm. And hi-fi's, set-top-boxes etc. can easily consume 20Watts or more.
Even the latest gizmos can have a surprisingly high standby consumption. The colour laser printer I just bought, which has an Energy Star 2009 rating, consumes 17Watts in standby. And of course, it's not just the things on standby that matter - quite a lot of consumer devices are designed to be "left on" permanently, for example oil-filled electric heaters, which can be rated at up to 200Watts.

So what is a Watt, in money?

Well, thanks to a numerical co-incidence, at current electricity prices it turns out that every Watt left switched on for a year costs around £1.00.

So for example my new laser printer, if left switched-on for a year, would cost me £17. It makes little difference how much I actually use it, since the amount of use is tiny compared to the drip, drip, drip of the standby power, day and night, 24 hours a day.

The power rating of devices is usually to be found printed on the device, so for devices that are left plugged-in all the time, without a true standby mode, the number printed on the bottom corresponds to "pounds per year", as well as to Watts.

Festival of Interactive Technology

2009-09-03T15:12:00.003+01:00

AlertMe attended the Festival of Interactive Technology in Cambridge yesterday. It's part of the HCI 2009 conference and was an opportunity for companies (mainly local ones) to show off their wares, with a particular emphasis on interactivity.

It was great to see how much interest the AlertMe stand attracted, and also to see some of the interesting (and often wacky) ways in which companies help people to interact with computers and the world. How was Alertme relevant to all this? Partly it's because AlertMe is all about enabling you to interact remotely with your home (controlling things, checking everything's ok, monitoring...) and partly also because as we extend our service and offer more enhanced ways of presenting useful data, it's important that we make our customers' interactive experience as positive and trouble-free as possible.

Our enjoyment of the event was not hindered by the rather excellent travelling Mexican restaurant right outside the front, of course...

Rebound to Utopia?

2009-08-24T11:57:00.001+01:00

Making our homes more energy-efficient should reduce the amount of energy we use, right? That seems obvious... but it may not be as simple as it first appears.

In the late 18th Century, James Watt‘s new high-pressure steam engine delivered much more usable work from each ton of coal burned than had previously been possible—in others words it was more efficient.

In 1865, an economist named William Jevons noticed that Watt’s efficiency improvements, far from reducing the use of coal, had actually increased it dramatically. This seems counter-intuitive, but is largely due to economies of scale: as coal became a more efficient source of energy, its usefulness increased, so it was used more, so costs fell, in a loop which led to a massive increase in its use. In fact, Watt’s engines were so efficient that they were used not just to replace older coal-powered engines, but also clean sources of power such as water and wind.

This so-called rebound effect is a well-understood phenomenon in economics. If a resource becomes cheaper, its use increases. If the use increases sufficiently, it can cancel out any gains from the increase in efficiency.

Fast-forward now a hundred years or so, and three more economists, Harry Saunders, Leonard Brookes and Daniel Khazzoom, separately applied Jevons’ finding to the idea of increasing energy efficiency in order to reduce overall consumption. This culminated in 1992 with Saunders proposing what he called the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate: as the efficiency of the equipment used in industry and in the home increased, the overall consumption of energy would increase, rather than decrease, as energy became cheaper and more accessible.

This was observed in the 1970s when the oil crisis caused the automtive industry to find ways to make their vehicles more efficient. In spite of this increase in efficiency, overall consumption of oil by cars increased.

However, from the perspective of an individual household, real savings are possible. If you insulate your loft, you’ll reduce the amount of energy you use for heating. You’ll probably then spend the money you've saved on other goods and services which have an energy impact, but not as energy-intensive as burning fuel directly. So by improving efficiency in your home, you can reduce your own overall consumption and improve your quality of life at the same time. AlertMe is about making consumption more intelligent, and because households consume so much, a small amount of intelligence invested in control of this energy monster can reap large benefits.

The rebound effect is hard to predict. So what if our efforts to improve energy efficiency do backfire?

Bob Metcalfe, the creator of the Ethernet standard which connects all our computers to the internet, recently claimed that increased consumption won’t matter once energy becomes "cheap and clean".

He suggests an analogy with the early days of the internet when much attention was focused on making communication efficient, because bandwidth was so limited. But this didn’t prevent us increasing the amount of bandwidth we use: "We made bandwidth cheap and clean. And now we use a million times more." His argument is that once we’ve made our energy supplies cheap and clean, we can increase our use of it too. But is Metcalfe’s utopian vision of cheap, clean energy realistic? And how do we get there from here?

One way that governments could avoid the danger of a rebound effect is to impose a green tax, to counteract the gains from energy efficiency increases. So even though you consume less energy, you still end up paying the same, meaning that you don’t have money "left over" to spend on more energy consumption. This may well be inevitable: if there’s one thing that Governments are good at, it’s raising taxes.

Green taxes work in two ways. First, they make energy more expensive (which could be seen as just making the cost a truer reflection of the true cost to society of generating it, given the carbon production) and consumers will then react to this rise in cost by reducing their consumption, simply out of self-interest. Second, the money raised can then be ploughed into renewable energy production, taking us a little closer to Bob Metcalfe’s vision.

So where does this leave us? Should we bother to make our homes more efficient? Or will this end up increasing the amount of energy we consume? It seems clear that in the short-term, we consumers can improve our quality of life by spending less on energy, leaving us with more money to spend on other things. The rebound effect from this is likely to be small and the overall effect will almost certainly be a reduction in consumption overall. Then it’s up to governments to find ways to make sure that this reduction in consumption is used as a driver to increase the use of renewable energy sources. Perhaps Bob Metcalfe’s vision isn’t so unrealistic after all!

Sense and Sustainability

2009-08-10T15:44:00.006+01:00

UK utility nPower recently sponsored the 2009 Energy Challenge, a student competition which sought answers to the question ‘What should a power generation company’s response be to climate change?’

First prize was won by a group of students from the MSC in Sustainable Energy Futures course under Professor Sandro Macchietto at Imperial College London The team did a fun presentation to government - and cited AlertMe as the ideal platform to use to bring their ideas to fruition.

Their idea is called Complete Energy Service Arrangements (CESA), and it sounds to me like a type of ESCO (Energy Services Company) . They describe it as follows: "Instead of selling kWhs like before, we enter into a contract with our customer. They pay a monthly flat rate. We assess properties for saving potential and make investments."

The video of the presentation is here (we're mentioned at 04:55) and the slide set is here (see notes on slide 6).

Response to DECC Smart Meter Consultation

2009-08-03T15:32:00.006+01:00

The government recently published a paper about Smart Meters, and asked for responses. Here's ours:

An architecture which is open to consumers - and their agents

We believe that smart meters are an important part – but only a part – of our low carbon future. To realise their true benefits they must interact fully with the rest of the Smart Energy home.

The typical consumer today has almost no information about where energy is consumed within their home, and has no convenient way of optimising it. Smart Meters can be a great source of information, but they do not – on their own – cause any carbon reduction. To achieve actual reductions, the information they produce needs to be delivered to:

1) The consumer, as meaningful, engaging information
2) Home appliances, which can act on the information

Information technology, in the form of increased connectivity and intelligence, can dramatically reduce home energy consumption in two ways: 1) by delivering meaningful information to the consumer, and 2) by automatically reducing consumption by making all appliances aware of the changing cost of energy in conjunction with other important information such as lifestyle patterns and preferences.

We are moving into a future in which, for a large and growing number of UK consumers, “if information is not online, then it might as well not exist”. As evidence of this, it is the government’s stated intention to provide universal broadband within the UK by 2012, providing a permanent data connection to every home.

The UK Smart Meter roll out can take advantage of this expansion in connectivity by implementing meters and metering infrastructure with real-time, open interfaces throughout – both in the home and online. If real-time electricity and gas consumption data is made available to consumers and their agents – not just as “closed”, proprietary displays and pre-digested information, but as live accessible data – then it can be used by devices and services both inside the home and online to help the consumer drive down consumption.

In short, we believe that consumers and the environment will not derive anything close to the maximum achievable benefit from a fixed, closed architecture, where the consumer is just passively delivered “packaged” information:

Instead, we believe that the smart meter architecture should be open and future-proof, so that third-parties like Google Power Meter, AlertMe.com and many other providers can offer the consumer devices and services which leverage live metering data to deliver greater energy savings:

Answers to specific questions

1. Do you have any comments on the Government’s preference for the Central Communications model?

We agree that the Central Communications model is the right way to deliver and manage the wide area communications infrastructure and data carriage.

However, we note that under this model the Central Communications provider will collect and store detailed energy consumption data from smart meters. We believe that both consumers and suppliers should be able to analyse/visualise this data and identify the most appropriate actions to take that would reduce energy consumption.

Therefore we recommend that consumers should be recognised as co-owners, with their energy supplier, of their own live and historical energy consumption data and the associated tariff and pricing data. This data should be available to download, simply and free of charge, from a secure internet site. The data itself should be made available in an open, industry standard electronic format.

Furthermore, consumers should have the right to delegate to third parties the right to securely download, store and process their data for the purposes of data analysis and visualisation. By allowing third parties to access this data, as well as individual consumers and their suppliers, the Government will enable the market to deliver innovative new products that enable consumers to recognise energy saving opportunities and take appropriate action.

An analogy here is retail banking, where most high street banks have internet sites that allow customers to view their recent transactions and manage their accounts. However, these sites also allow their customers to download their banking data in industry standard formats, so that they can load it into third party programs which give access to a wider range of features than typical bank websites. In the energy sphere the Alertme.com energy products produce data that can be analysed on the Alertme.com website, but can also be downloaded for analysis in third party programs and on other websites. Google are working on a service known as PowerMeter, currently in private testing, that will allow users to upload and analyse data about their energy consumption. These are examples of the benefits that accrue to consumers when data about their daily activities – whether financial or energy related – is made available in open, industry standard electronic formats.

7. Do you agree with the functionality proposed for electricity meters?

Our key recommendation with regard to the proposed functionality for electricity meters is that a consumer should be able to purchase an in-home device and be confident that it can securely access real-time data from their smart meter without being restricted by the need to gain authorisation from their energy supplier.

It is important that consumers are both able to analyse/visualise their real-time energy load and consumption, and take appropriate action to reduce energy consumption, without being dependent on their energy supplier to provide this service. In-home displays are the most well known means of engaging consumers with their energy consumption. However, “home hubs” (for home area networks or HANs) will have an important role in alerting consumers to energy saving opportunities in real time, whether through in-home displays or by alerting the consumer through email, text messages, mobile phone applications and websites, and also in automatically co-ordinating (and therefore reducing) home energy consumption. The Alertme.com energy monitoring product is a good example of a third party product that can engage consumers in energy saving, using real time energy load and consumption data to power email and text message alerts, and allowing them to monitor and review the consumption using in-home displays, mobile phones and the Alertme.com website.

The Government has an opportunity to create a dynamic market for products and services that let consumers analyse their consumption data and suggest energy saving options. In practice, this means that in-home devices such as displays and “home hubs” should be able to securely access real-time data from electricity and gas meters using an open industry standard such as the ZigBee Smart Energy profile. Such data would include real-time electricity load, recent electricity and gas consumption, tariff and pricing information, and other information originating from suppliers such as demand-response requests and meter-functionality updates.

Consumers who purchase an in-home device to measure and manage their energy consumption, such as a display or an Internet-connected home hub, will expect their new device to easily interface with the smart meter. However, consumers should also be confident that their energy consumption data will not be available to unauthorised third parties. Therefore it is important to create a security scheme for access to real time smart meter data that balances the requirement for data security with an open market for innovative in-home devices.

Giving suppliers the right to arbitrarily block in-home devices from accessing real-time data generated by their customers’ smart meters would allow them to impose unreasonable barriers to market entry for innovative in-home devices. Although suppliers have an important role to play in the deployment of in-home devices, we strongly believe that consumers should be able to purchase and self install an in-home device that can access real time energy consumption data without having to obtain permission from their supplier.

There may therefore be a need for a security accreditation process for in-home devices to be allowed to securely access this real-time data. This process should be run by the Central Communications provider, who should mandate an open, industry standard security scheme to be supported by smart meters and in-home devices, such the ZigBee Smart Energy profile. If it becomes necessary to create a central, Internet-connected authorisation service for consumers to “pair” in-home devices with their smart meter then the Central Communications provider should be responsible for operating this service.

9. Do you agree with the functionality proposed for gas meters? Please explain your reasons and if possible give reasons for your comments.

We believe that the same principles of allowing in-home devices open access to real-time data should apply to gas meters and electricity meters. It is clearly also important that the same wireless protocols and security scheme that governs the interaction between in-home devices and electricity smart meters should be implemented on gas smart meters. This will reduce the cost of in-home devices, by allowing the same chipset and software stack to be used for access to both meters in a typical house, and enable consumers to engage with an integrated, whole-house view of their energy consumption.

12. Do you agree with the Government’s position that a standalone display should be provided with a smart meter?

We fully support the Governments intention that consumers who have a smart meter installed are able to better understand their energy consumption and take steps to reduce their energy consumption, save money and save carbon. We agree that one way to engage consumers is to bundle a real-time in-home display with each newly installed smart meter. However, we are concerned that by choosing to mandate a real-time display, at the suppliers’ expense, the Government may actually be preventing suppliers from installing other types of in-home device, such as smart-meter enabled “home hubs”, that would enable more sophisticated and long-term energy saving strategies. This is underlined by the eight year roll out timetable – in that time, entire new categories of energy saving products and services are likely to emerge, but their adoption in the UK could be significantly impaired if suppliers are required to install simple, in-home displays with an obsolete, out of date specification.

We believe that Government should require suppliers to drive consumer engagement by offering in-home devices to consumers when a smart meter is installed, but that the suppliers should be allowed to offer a range of options to consumers that have been proven to enable energy savings. These options might include simple and advanced real-time displays, but also “home hubs” that monitor energy consumption and engage consumers through website, mobile phones or indeed in-home displays, and other technologies that are not yet widely available. Government may choose to require suppliers to submit such devices or products for certification, whether through CERT or a similar process. Crucially, this would allow innovative new energy saving products to be introduced to the market by suppliers, giving consumers the benefit of new technology as it emerges, and avoiding inappropriate technology lock-in.

The Alertme.com energy monitoring product is a good example of a third party product that can engage consumers in energy saving, using real time energy load and consumption data to power email and text message alerts, and allowing them to monitor and review the consumption using any combination of in-home displays, mobile phones and the Alertme.com website.

13. Do you have any comments on what sort of data should be provided to consumers as a minimum to help them best act to save energy (e.g. information on energy use, money, CO2)?

As we have outlined in our answers to questions 1 and 7, we firmly believe that consumers should be recognised as co-owners, with their energy supplier, of their own historical energy consumption data and the associated tariff and pricing data. This data should be available for consumers to easily download in electronic format from a secure internet site. Furthermore, consumers should have the right to delegate to third parties the right to securely download, store and process their data for the purposes of data analysis and visualisation. The same principle should apply to real-time energy data generated by smart meters.

We believe that the Government should specify the items of data that smart meters should capture and make available, both in real-time locally, and to the Communication Provider. However, we do not believe that the Government should mandate the specific data that consumers should receive. As we have explained in our answer to question 12, we believe that suppliers should be required to drive consumer engagement by offering in-home devices to consumers when a smart meter is installed, but that the suppliers should be allowed to offer a range of options to consumers that have been proven to enable energy savings. These options might include simple and advanced real-time displays, but also “home hubs” that monitor energy consumption and engage consumers through website, mobile phones or indeed in-home displays, and other technologies that are not yet widely available. Specifying the “correct” set of data that is presented to consumers would limit the scope of innovative devices and products that might lead to new methods of enabling energy saving by consumers.

We did mean to go to sea

2009-07-07T13:42:00.012+01:00

Recently at bedtime I've been reading my son Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series, in particular the excellent "We didn't mean to go to sea". The four children go on a sailing trip in the care of Jim, an experienced sailor aged 17. Jim moors them in the mouth of the River Orwell, rows off to get some petrol for the engine ... and doesn't come back. Fog descends, the anchor starts to drag, and before they know it the children are fighting to get the yacht under control as they drift past "Beach End Buoy" into the North Sea with a storm rising. Exciting stuff!

I was lucky enough to spend last weekend sailing in the North Sea, and around the Rivers Orwell and Stour, which is the setting of the book. We saw the buoy and we even saw Arthur Ransome's yacht "Nancy Blackett", which inspired the story, sailing past us - it's now owned by a trust.

The mouth of the river is bracketed by the busy container port of Felixstowe and the old port of Harwich, and on Felixstowe docks I was intrigued to see a pile of wind farm pillars and turbine blades stacked ready for installation. We then sailed south down the coast close to the Gunfleet Sands Offshore Wind Farm, where 48 turbines are being installed.

The process is fascinating to watch. A massive floating platform called the Titan 2 is used to ferry the parts out to sea and then fix them to the sea bed. Self-powered, it can manoeuvre in any direction, and when it reaches the destination it lowers its legs onto the sea floor, raising it up into a stable platform, from which its cranes can lower the parts and assemble them. I was told that a sister ship capsized and sunk in high seas a few years ago - it must be extremely unstable with the legs all lifted - although I admit I haven't been able to verify this story!

These turbines are HUGE - and when the entire farm of 48 turbines is fully operational (summer of 2010), they will deliver enough power for 120,000 homes. It's at once very exciting to see some real action on delivering renewables, and yet also puts it into perspective that this will provide less than 0.5% of our domestic requirements. Still, it's a start, and it shows leadership. More please!

How much can AlertMe save you?

2009-06-23T12:52:00.009+01:00

When I joined AlertMe a few months ago, it didn't take long for me to realise that the company's plans with regard to energy were truly impressive. One thing I couldn't help wondering, though, was how much money could a system like this really save me? Of course many people are motivated by the environment or energy security, but for most people it's pleasing to see a real cash saving from energy monitoring and management.

Recently, I found the answer to this question, and it came as a big surprise.

I've been monitoring my house's electricity consumption using technology that AlertMe will be launching later this year. I was able to see most of the big loads such as washing machine, tumble drier and fridge, but there were two mysterious loads: one that came on every hour like clockwork and used 2kW for about a minute, and another that came on less frequently (a few times a day) but used a lot more energy. By a process of elimination and experimentation I eventually found the culprits: an immersion heater (which we really don't need since the gas heated water is more than enough for our needs) and a small electric water heater in the out-building in our garden.

So, on 26th May, I turned off the first of these, and on the 27th, I turned off the second. The effect has been dramatic. The average electricity consumption of our house before the 26th was around 28kWh, or over £4 per day. After the 27th, average consumption has dropped to around 17kWh, or just £2.50 per day. This equates to a saving of about 40% or an annual saving of over £500! All from just turning off two water heaters that we don't need.

This may well be a fairly unusual case, but it makes the point that most people have no idea how much energy they're using or where the energy is going. As you can see from the picture, the immersion heater is huge, and hard to miss, but frankly I'd never really considered what it was or what it did, and it certainly didn't occur to me that it was costing me hundreds of pounds a year to run!

Do you know how much it costs you to run your washing machine or dishwasher? Or your lighting? And how do you make a decision about whether it's more important to stop leaving your TV on standby or to just buy a new one?

AlertMe's Smart Energy and Monitoring solution provides you with information which you can use to make real savings, and the wealth of new features we have planned for the coming months will make it even easier to understand and control your energy consumption.

Funded!

2009-06-10T14:37:00.000+01:00

What a wonderful word. It is great to able to spread the excellent news that AlertMe has succeeded in raising a big chunk of cash - £8m ($13m) - from the world’s top clean-tech investors, which sets us up for our next strong phase of commercial growth.

With all the recent crises of war, food, oil and finance it’s clear the next few years are going to be quite challenging for the world. And since investment tends to be a lead indicator for bad news, the last 9 months have been a tough time to be raising money. OK, that’s English understatement - if you remember, just a few months ago the headlines were full of talk about the possible collapse of the Western banking system, with banks defaulting almost daily. So it’s been tougher than tough.

But humans, for all our faults, have one redeeming quality which shines out in tough times – we rise to a challenge. And the biggest challenge facing all of us on this planet right now is that we’re living beyond our means when it comes to energy consumption – whether its concern about Putin turning-off the pipelines, or declining oil reserves, or climate change, we can’t continue with business as usual.

However, the great thing about challenging times is that they create opportunities for inventive solutions. It’s interesting that way back in 1916 Thomas Edison could forsee change:

“You see, we should make use of the forces of nature and should obtain all our power in this way. Sunshine is a form of energy. Wind and sea currents are manifestations of this energy. Do we make use of them? Oh no! We burn forests and coal, like tenants burning down our front door for heating. We live like wild settlers and not as though these resources belong to us. “

When our grandchildren look back in 100 years time, I believe they’ll mark sometime about now as the time that we finally faced-up to the big responsibility of being the dominant species on Earth. We’ve got someone in the White House who is showing leadership - and hopefully we’ll soon be able to say the same in the UK. The tides are changing, the winds of change are blowing … and although we can generate electricity from both, we’re going to need to get the consumption side of the equation under control to have a hope of true sustainability. So when our grandchildren ask what we personally did about it … well, I think that AlertMe Smart Energy can make a big difference.

We’re not the only player in town – many companies are looking at this space. Some are focussed on the “Smart Grid”, working to provide utilities with ways to get energy from the power stations to the meter outside the home. And some are, like us, saying “hey, don’t forget the consumer!” The fact that our platform has already had more than a year and a half of real-world testing by paying customers, and that we’ve shipped more than 15,000 ZigBee units, gives us something of a lead, but we’re going to have to keep moving really fast to keep ahead of our followers.

The huge raft of new features we’ve added for AlertMe 2.0 takes us a long way towards our goals – and the early feedback is that they are features that the world clearly wants. In our customer satisfaction surveys, and in our daily interactions with customers, the clear message is that consumers are adopting AlertMe as an integral part of their daily lives.

As I said, it’s been a “tough” time to be going out raising money. We went out to the market in July last year, and as we took our road show around the European and US venture capital market, the financial situation got worse and worse. Then Lehmann Brothers collapsed, and no-one wanted to do anything anymore, particularly anything involving consumers.

Well, almost.

Luckily inside the storm cloud of climate change there was a silver lining for us. There are some truly humungous Cleantech venture funds out there, keen to seize the massive opportunity that this energy revolution represents.

In August we started talking to the biggest of them all – Good Energies, a global fund who invest many hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Until now they’ve mainly invested in big supply-side renewable investments like Solar and Wind, but they were one of the first funds to realize that managing the demand side (i.e. consumption) is just as big an opportunity. They are fans of the statement that “the cheapest kilowatt-hour is the one you don’t have to generate in the first place”. So they geared-up their significant team and network to the task of doing “due diligence” on this whole new consumer-oriented energy-saving space – and understanding our role in it.

We took our road-show to Silicon Valley. I lived there for 6 years in the 1990’s, and I appreciate the straight-talking can-do attitude of Northern California. For several years I’ve been boring my English friends with the prediction that one day, when the Americans finally get around to paying attention to climate-change, then almost overnight they’ll step-up and take a leading role in solving it. I think we’re witnessing this change right now, and it’s great to see. The leading clean-tech investor in the Valley is VantagePoint, and the more time they spent looking at us, the more they liked us. Their decision to invest gives us a vital connection to this key part of the world. I was lucky-enough to spend some time recently at their annual “ResourcePoint” conference where we learned about the effects of the Obama stimulus package from leading lights in the US energy ecosystem.

Meanwhile, back in our home continent of Europe the leading consumer venture capital company is Index. They have nurtured massive consumer startup hits like Skype and LoveFilm and we wanted some of that magic, so we were delighted when they said they’d invest too. They are almost unique in understanding just how important it is (and how much focus it takes) to really engage effectively with consumers.

And finally – but perhaps I should have mentioned them first of all – we also have a Dutch Cleantech VC called SetVP on board. They were in fact the first investors to track us down last summer, and since then they have been unswervingly supportive. Like us, they understand that speed and agility are vital, and it’s no overstatement to say that without them this just wouldn’t have happened.

Originally we were looking to close this funding round in October. You’ll notice that it’s taken a bit longer than that, for understandable reasons. To keep us going at maximum speed through this period has taken strong support from our Angels and investors - and of course most importantly our customers, whose increasing numbers have helped drive our revenue upward even through these tough times.

Throughout it all, I had great faith that we’d succeed, even in a competitive space, even at a challenging time, because quality generally wins-out in the end. And speaking of quality, a phrase we have heard from every single investor we talked to is “you have a very high quality team”. And we do! Not just in terms of the specialist skills in the team, but also in the way everyone gets on, trusts each other to do their job, greets adversity with humour, and looks-out for each other. So huge thanks to everyone at Team AlertMe. Funding is always a bit of rollercoaster ride at startups, and the last few months have felt at times like the kind of rollercoaster you see in an Indiana Jones movie. But through all of this, our wonderful team has continued to focus single-mindedly on continuing to build AlertMe into a world-class player – delivering the major new AlertMe 2.0 service upgrade, closing deals, keeping our customers happy and generally getting us to the point where we can now rightly claim to be THE world’s leading Smart Home Energy company.

It seems that we’re very lucky to find ourselves at the centre of such an exciting and important space at just the right time. There’s a huge wave to ride and we find ourselves out in front of it, paddling hard. But as Thomas Jefferson said: “I'm a great believer in luck. And I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”

Earth Hour - a day early

2009-04-02T17:40:00.006+01:00

So there I was on the evening of March 27th, putting the children to bed, and vaguely thinking that the WWF's "Earth Hour" was due to happen tomorrow (where everyone turns off their lights for an hour to show awareness of climate change) when suddenly...

The lights went out! In fact, everything went out. Had I got the date wrong? Was this some kind of government-enforced black-out to make sure we got the point?

We got the flashlights and candles out, and looked outside into a dark street - it was a village-wide outage at least. Quite fun really, once we'd reassured the children that it was only temporary, to be reading books by candlelight.

And then to bed. The children like to have a little nightlight on, but of course the nightlights weren't working, and I wasn't too keen on the idea of candles in their bedrooms. Then I realised that since our AlertMe system was still working unaffected I could just set our AlertMe lamps to "White" and give them one each for the night to keep the spooks away. They were a little bit too bright (I've asked the guys at AlertMe to add a new "dim white" option) but they worked like a charm.

During the night I was vaguely aware of the power coming back on then going off again a few times - and indeed when I checked the log from work the next day, I saw that after the first major outage the power failed another 6 times that night for short periods.

Certainly makes you appreciate how reliable the grid normally is.

Google PowerMeter - data wants to be free

2009-02-10T11:31:00.005Z

The folks at Google.org have gone public with a prototype project they've had in skunkworks for a while called the Google PowerMeter. The idea is to help people understand their energy usage better by providing visualisation and analysis tools, in much the same way that Google already does for advertisers with its Adwords/Analytics tools.

Of course to visualise your energy consumption you first have to measure it. As they quote William Thompson, Lord Kelvin: "If you can not measure it, you can not improve it."And Google have spotted that although many of the Smart Meters currently being rolled-out in the USA do measure it, they don't then give consumers access to their own data. So Google are campaigning to change this, saying: "We believe that detailed data on your personal energy use belongs to you, and should be available in a standard, non-proprietary format."

We couldn't have said it better ourselves - AlertMe passionately believes that data wants to be free, and from the start our customers have been able to export their data manually, into a spreadsheet. Now we're exploring ways to integrate seamlessly with new online tools like PowerMeter so that our customers can ever-more easily engage with their energy usage.

(on an almost entirely unrelated note, but on the general theme of doing a great job of visualising data, if you haven't already seen it do check-out Hans Rosling's 2006 talk at TED - he does a fantastic job of making dry statistics leap out and dance - a real delight.)

Joys of 2.0

2009-01-12T14:09:00.008Z

I've been using AlertMe 2.0 in my home for a few weeks now. I'm always keen to be a guinea-pig for our new features and accessories, partly just to help out with beta testing (real-world testing beats lab testing, any day) but also as a sanity-check that what we're about to bring to market really does do a useful job in a useful way.

Our engineers will tell you that it normally takes me all of 5 seconds from seeing the first demo of a new feature to coming up with 10 things that need improving about it (but I do try to wait that 5 seconds - or 10 if I'm really blown away). So I try to be our harshest critic. But I have to say that 2.0 is really working for me.

Just before Christmas I grabbed two SmartPlugs from the very limited pre-production run to play with at home. One has ended-up on our media centre, where it is reducing its standby consumption, and the other is being used to measure power consumption of our kettle, for no good reason than I wondered if kettle consumption was significant.

AlertMe 2.0 is a major upgrade of the AlertMe service. It supports not just the features required for our new Energy accessories, but a whole load of new functionality that is generally useful. The charting has been significantly improved - you can now look at data on a timeline instead of a chart. For example, from the chart left you can see when we boil the kettle (a national UK pasttime!), top, and when we watch TV, bottom, over the course of a week or so.

You can also see totals for how much energy you've consumed over a period of time:

From the individual SmartPlug icons, you can also see consumption at a glance, and even turn the appliances on and off by clicking on the 0/1 button.

We now also have whole-household electricity monitoring working too, so as well as this appliance-by-appliance SmartPlug view, you can look at, and log, your overall household consumption. As with temperature charts, it can get surprisingly addictive!

And now for the real joy of 2.0. We've had very cold weather in the UK over the past couple of weeks - temperatures have stayed well below freezing throughout the day. The trouble with this is that by around 2 o'clock in the morning, my 3-year-old's bedroom has been getting pretty cold, and she'd wake up and come and wake us up too, to cuddle in. After the third such night, I decided it was time for action! We have a small portable oil-filled electric radiator, with a thermostat which does a great job of regulating its own temperature, but an awful job of regulating the overall room temperature, because of course the thermostat is right next to the source of heat (I've seen the same problem with the Thermostatic Radiator Valves on all our radiators, but that's another story).

I though "Aha!". AlertMe does a fantastic job of measuring room temperature, so now I should be able to use a SmartPlug to control the heater, et voila. And indeed using one of the new "do more" buttons which reveal a lot of the power in the 2.0 release, with literally 5 minutes of effort, total, it worked first time. A few clicks on the website (about 15, to be honest, and we need to work on getting this down) and moving the Smart Plug from my Media Centre to the radiatior, and it was all set up to turn the radiator on if my daughter's room fell below 14C (and off again if it exceeded 16C). The "Do more" button drills down to an action chooser, so you can use any cause (e.g. temperature) to cause any action (e.g. turning a Smart plug on and off). The idea is that people who want to do advanced things can do them, but the interface stays clean and simple for everyone else.

And that night ... peace!

Now that really is worth something.

Alertme gets fibre to the door

2008-12-30T13:17:00.001Z

Back in the summer we had fibre-optic cable run to our offices in central Cambridge. Optical fibre can carry more data than any other kind of connection, so this is great for us as a web services company. In the UK our services are actually hosted at a decomissioned nuclear bunker in Kent, which has several fibre connections backing each other up, but having our own fibre connection lets us manage them better.

In Britain many ADSL broadband users will soon be getting their own fibre connections, as BT starts upgrading from copper wire. Fibre-to-the-door is already standard in parts of the US and South Korea, and can be expected to elevate the connected home to a whole new level.

Sorting through the year's photos I found some of Alertme's fibre being installed. In the top two it is being blown down the hill to us and in the bottom two it is being carefully run under the pavement to our front door.

20/20/20 by 2020

2008-12-30T09:37:00.003Z

Earlier this month the 10,000-strong United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznań, Poland didn't appear to achieve much, managing to remove a colon. However, it certainly advanced the intensely political process of agreeing what to do about climate change, and the EU affirmed previously set climate goals in the teeth of bad economic weather.

Those goals form the famous 20/20/20 by 2020 policy, first proposed by the European Commission in January 2007, approved by European Councils of first Environment, then Prime Ministers in February and March 2007, drawn up into a legislative package by the European Commission in January 2008, and now voted into effect by the European Parliament on December 17th, directly after the Poznań conference. Apart from providing an insight into the EU at work, what this means is that Europe has now legislated measures intended to let us meet three goals by the year 2020:

cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20% over 1990 levels; 30% if other countries act similarly
supply 20% of total energy (heat and transport as well as electricity) from renewables such as wind and sunshine
make efficiency savings of 20% over forecast consumption

Doing this in only eleven years will be no mean feat. The scale of investment needed in new, clean electricity generation is unprecedented. In 2005, the latest year for which Energy.eu has statistics, Europe supplied only 8.5% of its total energy needs from renewables, and of that a full 89% was supplied by biomass and hydropower. Biomass may be able to grow, but it tends to come with other environmental costs; hydropower has rather limited potential for further growth. Whichever renewable technology we use, building this much of it by 2020 means we have to start now, which means we can't wait and see what clever new technologies can do for us. It's a safe bet that we'll be seeing a lot more wind turbines and solar installations.

But energy production is only one arrow in the EU's quiver. The other is cheaper, easier, faster and more likely to hit it's '20% by 2020' target: efficiency. Efficiency gets a lot less press than glamorous energy production technologies, but it is something everyone can have a hand in, not just industry and government: 26% of the EU's total energy consumption is consumed at home. What's more, saving energy saves money as well as the environment - the cheapest kilowatt is the one you never use.

There are hundreds of ways to use less energy at home, by using it more efficiently, or by just not using it in the first place! According to the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology, most households in the UK could cut their energy consumption by a third just by using it more efficiently. Alertme's energy management service will soon be able to help by showing you how you use energy - including whether you were at home at the time - and by suggesting how you could save it. By optimising your heating programme, which in the UK (and across the EU) accounts for about 70% of household energy consumption, we'll be able to save you even more energy without you having to lift a finger.

We'll talk about energy saving in more detail in future posts. For now, we should note that Poznań is an important half-way mark in a two-year negotiating process to reach a post-Kyoto climate change deal; the world's best hope for coordinating a response to climate change. The next UN Climate Change Conference is in Copenhagen in December 2009. It is expected to be make-or-break time for an effective successor to the Kyoto Treaty, and if incoming US President Barack Obama follows up on his promises, this time it it may well be led by the US.

Happiness is...

2008-11-19T17:14:00.016Z

...having great customers who love us!

We've completed the first ever AlertMe customer survey. Twenty-nine percent of our customers made the effort to take part, giving us heaps of feedback on what we're doing right and how to make AlertMe even better.

We wanted to learn so rather than forcing tick-box answers, we asked mainly for free-form written responses, to hear from the heart as well as the head. We then trawled through the written answers, categorizing them into sensible categories. Here are the results, illuminated with a sprinkling of representative comments.

Overall
First we asked whether AlertMe is good value. A whopping 94% said "Yes!"
We then asked about overall satisfaction with AlertMe, and were delighted to hear that more than 30% of our customers think we are wonderful (OK, we did pre-pick the 5 categories for this one):

We asked "why?" - and here are some of the answers:

“Originally spouse was cynical of system and thought it was toys for the boys, but has been pleasantly surprised with the support and service provision”
“The ease of use, my girlfriend is a complete technophobe. All you have to press is one button or the other. I have yet to explain the online side of thing”
“A useful boy's toy according to my girlfriend….”
“Excellent, but sometimes has problems (e.g. sensors dropping off, keyfobs not always working). Reliability seems to increase with each firmware update”
“The booster lamp doesn't need to be a lamp...I'm not a student, I don't need a colour changing flashing lamp going 24hrs a day....”
“One battery fits all – brilliant”
“I think AlertMe type services are a very smart way of defending property, and are the way of the future”

Likes and Dislikes
We asked what you liked most, and least...

The six aspects of AlertMe that were liked most were (best first): Simplicity, Web interface, SMS/Email/Voice notification, Expandability, Customer Service and Style. It is really great to see that simplicity is valued so highly by our customers, because it takes a lot extra work "under the hood" to make a technical product simple - which is probably why so many technology companies just don't bother.

But before we get too big-headed, you were equally frank about the areas where you think we still have some way to go. The six aspects of AlertMe that were liked least were (worst first): Hub too quiet, keyfob too big, false alarms, bell box, hub light/volume control, no cameras. There were also several comments about gremlins and teething troubles. The good news is that we're already working to address all of these - except for bell-boxes which we hate almost as much as your neighbours do! If you'd like more window-stickers to use as a deterrent, please ask.

Would you recommend AlertMe?
We asked whether you'd recommend AlertMe to others. 63% of our customers have already recommended us, and to an average of 5 other people. In marketing-speak, this is "viral growth". Sounds horrible doesn't it, but it's a Good Thing!

Slide 14
Unexpected Features
It's fascinating to hear what surprises people had when they first installed and used AlertMe:

Temperature-measurement
Night mode
How big the keyfobs are …. and how small the hub is
Presence
Energy coming
Packaging ("wow" Apple-like experience)
The upgradability of it
That you can add so many accessories
GPRS and battery backup
Being able to control it via SMS
The phone-in feature
Didn't realise hub would play a message when alarm was triggered
Barking dog doorbell
Uploadable audio for doorbell sounds

(and my favourite...)

How fun it is!

Conclusion
We are driven by a passion to create a company which gives its customers a truly excellent experience. Our great team has put in a lot of hard work to try to achieve that, and it makes me very happy to see that, by and large, we are achieving it. Thank you so much for all your support, and sometimes your patience when things don't quite go according to plan.

Please keep the comments coming - we always love to hear from you - in the forums, by email, IM or phone.

The Bubbles of Radio

2008-11-04T10:08:00.002Z

I wanted to share this wonderful image which my colleague Amyas found - a beautiful visualisation of different radio technologies. Click on the picture to find out more...

Can we avoid a "lights out" scenario?

2008-10-08T13:57:00.007+01:00

I went to a fascinating Cambridge Energy Forum meeting last week – around 100 people in the Cambridge Union debating chambers. Great mix of entrepreneurs, academics and energy businesspeople present, and the debate was chaired by Prof Ian Fells. The purpose of the evening was to kick-off of a 6-month project to thrash out an energy policy to present to the government. This will be tracked online with a wiki.

There were 3 short talks followed by debate:

1) Prof Fells has just co-authored a paper called “A Pragmatic Energy Policy for the UK”, with Candida Whitmill, who used to work for the DTI on energy. The thrust of the paper is that the lights will go out in the UK in 2014 (specifically, electricity supply will no-longer be able to meet demand), such is the huge hole we have got into due to the lack of new power station build over the past 10 years. It’s too late now even to build new power stations. Therefore forget climate change, energy security is a much more pressing problem.

2) The Financial Times' environmental correspondent Fiona Harvey then countered, saying that some of the assumptions were pessimistic, and that it is still possible to address energy security and climate change together.

3) Then Prof David Mackay, a well-known Cambridge mathematician (and founder of startups including MetaFAQ), presented his plan for getting the UK to carbon neutrality by 2050, avoiding an energy crisis along the way. This was really fun, gazillions of numbers, and he’s written a book which is free online called “Sustainable Energy, without the Hot Air”. From memory:

a. Total energy requirements of the UK now 250GW

b. Convert all transport to electric

c. Knock down majority of old houses, since they are impossible to make energy efficient

d. Convert all home heating to airsource heatpumps (driven by electricity)

e. Build lots of nuclear, and lots of diverse electricity generation sources, from tidal and wind, and massive PV plants covering most of Libya and Algeria, delivering electricity into Europe (you lose 10% per 1000km in high voltage distribution).

f. Avoid all microgeneration. Wind turbines are ineffectual, CHP is much less carbon-efficient than heat-pumps, and even if we covered every rooftop in the UK, PV could only supply 5% (?) of our needs

g. To sustain a home’s energy need using wood burning, each home would need an area 20 times the size of the home’s footprint.

h. Prof MacKay lives in a Victorian home, and he has already reduced his energy consumption by more than 50%, by becoming very aware of where energy is going.

i. 4m people in UK are in fuel poverty today, defined as spending more than 10% of household income on energy. Will be 6m by 2010.

Everything I heard reinforces the view that we need to tackle the energy crisis in many ways simultaneously, and in particular that better management of domestic energy consumption can make a real difference, quickly.

Solar Air Heating in the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

2008-09-26T15:10:00.006+01:00

We’ve considered installing a solar-thermal hot water heating system at home - the rear roof of our house faces south-west which would be ideal. But we’ve been put-off by the capital cost and disruption, and also by the realisation that hot-water-heating is only a relatively small part of our total energy bill – which is dominated, in winter at least, by space-heating.

Because we have small children, our house is usually occupied even during the daytime, so in the Winter we have to set our “programmer” (timer) so that our central-heating is “on” for most of the day. In Summer we can of course turn our central-heating off completely. But Spring and Autumn are interesting seasons, because the outside air temperature varies unpredictably from balmy to freezing (so sometimes the heating is needed and sometimes not), and yet it is often sunny.

On the rear of our house we have a conservatory, which gets very warm when the sun shines. My wife realised that throwing-open the doors between the house and the conservatory on warm days provides a very effective way to air-heat the house – with no capital outlay.

AlertMe makes this effect very visible, and shows us how to optimise it. The chart below shows a week earlier this month. All the inside rooms are averaged-together, and on 4 of the 7 days there is a significant proportion of the day when the conservatory is considerably hotter than the house.

If we zoom-in and display the "typical day" from this data, we see that for about 6 hours of the day our conservatory can on average provide useful heating of our home, and we should open the doors at 11am and close them at 5pm.

EZDC

2008-08-04T16:23:00.002+01:00

Back in June we presented two talks at the second European ZigBee Developers Conference, in Munich. The two talks were on our experiences developing the first consumer ZigBee product and on how designers can make their ZigBee products easy to set up, without sacrificing security or interoperability.

It was exciting to see so many people working on ZigBee products - there were some great new enhancements on display including super-low-power designs, polarisation diversity antennae, and 868MHz modules, and we spoke to lots of people using ZigBee in new applications, including agricultural monitors, a lift manufacturer, and domestic energy monitors.

We're always happy to tell people how happy we are with ZigBee - the more companies we can persuade to ZigBify their products, the more devices we'll potentially be able to talk to!

Automated Home podcast out

2008-06-24T23:23:00.005+01:00

Automated Home blogger Mark McCall has published an interview with AlertMe co-founder and director Pilgrim Beart and design engineer Amyas Phillips. In it he asks about how AlertMe came to be, our experiences with ZigBee and our plans for the future, plus we both get to recommend favourite pieces of gadgetry at the end.

You can listen online or get the podcast on itunes.

If you enjoy that (or maybe if you want to listen to someone else!) check out Mark's Top 10 Tech Podcasts as well.

Alertme more secure than banks

2008-06-17T15:09:00.017+01:00

Our web security guru Steve has been getting all excited about a new website called TLS Report. Its already a massive hit amongst web administrators, now we think its time to share it with our blog readers too!

TLS Report tests the security of supposedly secure web services and gives them a grade and a score. The kind of security it tests is cryptographic, basically how hard it would be for an evesdropper to get hold of confidential information passing between your web browser and a website. That's different to other kinds of security, like not using the same password everywhere and not telling everyone that you collect diamonds as a hobby, but it is the basis for providing secure web services where you know that the website on the other end is the real deal, and that nobody in between you and the website can read what you're saying to each other.

TLS is actually the name of a protocol (Transport Layer Security) which browsers use to set up secure connections to websites. The first part of the protocol's job is to check that the website is really who it claims to be, and not a fraudulent phishing site (what's phishing?). This is done by checking the sites' certificates. To properly understand certificates, you need to understand something about how public key cryptography works, but basically they're digitally-signed documents from people we definitely trust saying "I know this website, and I say you can trust them too". If they check out, your browser can be sure this site is who it says it is. It is good practice to renew certificates regularly.

The next part of the protocol lets your browser agree with the secure website's server what kind of security to use - specifically what cryptographic cipher to use (what's a cipher?) and how to exchange keys (what's a key?). Most browsers support a variety of different ciphers and key exchange mechanisms, often including old and out of date ones which are no longer considered secure. Properly secure websites shouldn't offer to use these antiquated methods.

TLS Report checks the freshness and security of a sites' certificates, how up-to-date the ciphers and key exchange mechanisms are, whether the version of the TLS protocol itself is up to date, and whether the site meets the minimum requirements for some payments-related security standards. Then it gives the site a score.

Secure.alertme.com, where Alertme customers log in to their systems, ranks joint 3rd in the roll of honour with a grade A and a score of 82. Shop.alertme.com does equally well.

Is that good? Yes it is! Compare our score with some online banking web sites:

LloydsTSB (online.lloydstsb.co.uk) - score B 78
HSBC (www.hsbc.co.uk) - score C 64
Barclays (ibank.barclays.co.uk) - score C 67
Natwest (www.nwolb.com) - score C 61
RBS (www.rbs.co.uk) - score D 54

According to TLS Report, Alertme is better than all of them! (as of June 17th 2008 anyway)

There's some debate as to how TLS Report awards its grades, and the banks are sure to improve - that's really the point of TLS Report - but congratulations to Steve and his team!

June newsletter out today!

2008-06-05T14:38:00.006+01:00

If you're not on our mailing list already, read the latest AlertMe newsletter online here.

To subscribe, just send a blank email to friends@whenineedtoknow.com with the word 'subscribe' in the subject line.

Alertme comes out top in MSN.com review

2008-06-05T14:37:00.006+01:00

MSN technology columnist Rob Clymo reviewed AlertMe against another system, and handed the laurels to us!

We've worked very hard on good design and ease of use, so we were especially pleased that Rob picked out those features for special praise:

"AlertMe wins the prize for idiot-proof set-up and installation."

"The component parts have been fabulously designed and look like a family of iPod peripherals in their brilliant white plastic finish."

Read the full review Beating the Burglars on MSN.com.

New features now available!

2008-06-05T14:36:00.017+01:00

We've been working hard since our launch to bring you new features and a better AlertMe experience. Now we're delighted to announce that version 1.2 of the Alertme software is ready, and available as a free upgrade to all our customers.

So what's new?

'At Home' and 'Away' are now joined by 'Night Mode', a new mode for you to use when you're at home but want to protect unoccupied parts of your home. A new Lamp service lets you choose what you want each lamp to do when you are At Home, Away or in Night Mode. Keyfobs are now automatically detected when they leave or come back home, and you can set up Presence alerts to let you know by SMS or email when someone comes home, goes out or both. There is a new Voice of AlertMe to welcome you back to your home (and tell your intruders to go away).

We've also made lots of useful improvements:

Battery Life of battery-powered accessories is improved to between 18 months and 3 years, depending on the accessory. We now tell you the Causes of Alerts - when an Alarm goes off, we tell you why. The window/door sensor icons on the Accessories page now show you whether the corresponding door or window is open or closed. When an intruder alert has occurred, the hub now continues to sound the alarm until the alert is cleared by a keyfob or remotely via SMS or the website. myHistory now contains more information and events for you to browse and enjoy, and if you click on any accessory in the Accessories page a detailed information pane will appear. You can now delete sensors from your system. Finally, SMS control allows you to control and monitor your home via SMS text message on your mobile phone.

You can download a PDF of the full release notes here.

Changing faces

2008-05-28T17:30:00.000+01:00

Laura James has left AlertMe. Laura's contributed a huge amount to AlertMe, and we all wish her luck in her new job.

You'll now find QA engineer Charles and the Customer Services team manning the forums, and various of us updating the blog. For AlertMe technology issues, including ZigBee and connected homes, please contact :

Dr Amyas Phillips
email : amyas@alertme.com
direct line +44 (0) 1223 222 157

For non-AlertMe things, Laura can be reached at lbjames /at/ gmail.com

Crowdsourcing - for security?

2008-05-22T16:39:00.002+01:00

AlertMe is always keen to spot other home security projects, even "hobbyist" ones that we know most of our customers wouldn't be able to do for themselves, because sometimes they embody interesting ideas.

The BUGLabs team, who produce an open source consumer electronics development platform, blogged this week about their home (well, office) security system. They've connected motion sensors and cameras, via a BUG system, to twitter and twitxr, so that friends of the company who follow these data feeds can spot people coming in to their office. You can keep an eye on their office with the rest of the crowd here; this is an example of crowdsourcing (what's crowd-sourcing?).

I think AlertMe disproves the statement "the static/automatic nature of an off-the-shelf consumer electronics device [means that it is] designed to do its task very specifically" - we show that consumer electronics can be a platform and can have new services deployed on it. But the general idea of crowd-sourcing security raises some interesting issues. Would you trust your twitter, or facebook, friends to monitor your home, or assess whether a picture was of an intruder or not? Does having information about your home's security online - either for anyone to read, or just for your online friends - is a security risk? Do you think they are more able to take action to help you and your home than other friends, family and neighbours? Or is AlertMe in fact already crowd-sourcing security, by keeping you and your nominated contacts in the loop via text and email? (Feel free to discuss this on our forum)

Nonetheless, the idea of a "Social Gadget Network" discussed in the post is an interesting one, and with AlertMe already producing text and email notifications from the home, we're part of it (along with Andy's house, the botanicalls potplants, and more).

European ZigBee developers conference

2008-05-21T13:34:00.003+01:00

For all the ZigBee fans out there, AlertMe has had two talks accepted for the EuroZDC next month.

Amyas will be talking about the elephant in the room: commissioning, which is how you set up a ZigBee network from a bunch of disparate devices each with a ZigBee radio, and how you make it secure and functional for a range of applications. My talk is about AlertMe's experiences with ZigBee, how we choose it and tested its suitability for our application, and the challenges of going from prototype to product.

Hope to meet some of our readers in Munich! We're looking forward to getting more involved in the ZigBee community.

Gadget Show success!

2008-05-05T19:49:00.003+01:00

AlertMe is enjoying the holiday weekend here in the UK, after a great week following our appearance on Channel 5's Gadget Show.

You can read what the show said about us here - we detected the burglars and informed the householder in seconds - just the way we intended :)

Set your recording devices!

2008-04-23T16:22:00.003+01:00

AlertMe will be on the Gadget Show, Monday 28th April, Channel 5, 8pm.

All the staff will be poised with popcorn to see our kit starring on the small screen. We've not seen the footage yet, so we're waiting with baited breath...

Fighting crime, Web2.0 style

2008-04-18T12:40:00.002+01:00

Greater Manchester Police now have a Facebook application, to alert users to local crime! Users get crime news items in their Facebook feed, and can post items of their own too.

There are even videos to raise awareness of crime issues.

Chief Constable Rob Taylor says “Facebook has 59 million users, seven million of which live in the UK, so we realised that this was an excellent way of spreading our messages to people on a more personal basis.”

(Thanks to Techcrunch UK for the link!)

PIR-based Marauders Map

2008-04-10T16:23:00.010+01:00

When we tell technically-minded people about Alertme, often their first question is "where are the cameras?" Well, there aren't any! For most situations, we think motion sensors do a better job.

There's a great illustration of the ways motion sensors are actually better than CCTV in this article on New Scientist's website. Its about how engineers at Mitsubishi's research labs in Cambridge, MA, used a network of simple Zigbee motion sensors to make a Marauder's Map, letting them monitor how people use and move around their building.

In the video, you can see how the PIRs let a single researcher monitor the whole building, with no need to intrude on everyone's privacy by blanketing the whole place with CCTV. In the locations where there is a CCTV record, the PIR data lets them search it much more effectively than they could otherwise.

CCTV often seems like the obvious choice for this sort of thing, but the problem with video is that machines find it difficult to understand and search, and it needs lots of costly equipment. PIRs on the other hand give an easy to understand 'someone's here' / 'nobody's here' message, are able to monitor a wider area, are very small and far more cost effective.

Of course, there are times when a picture is worth a thousand words, and being able to see whats going on in your home is exactly what you want. If you participated in our video survey, you'll already know we've been thinking about this. The consensus so far seems to be that you want a camera that works at night, doesn't have any wires, is easy to use, and is nice to look at. That's a tough specification, but we'll see what we can do!

feeling secure?

2008-04-08T16:21:00.003+01:00

Bruce Schneier often has something worth reading about security. Today he blogs about how people confuse feeling secure, and being secure. I quote: "If someone tries to convince us to spend money on a new type of home burglar alarm, we as society will know pretty quickly if he's got a clever security device or if he's a charlatan; we can monitor crime rates. But if that same person advocates a new national antiterrorism system, and there weren't any terrorist attacks before it was implemented, and there weren't any after it was implemented, how do we know if his system was effective?"

Well, a company may not be able to change crime rates overnight, but one thing we know is that with AlertMe, if you haven't heard from us, your home is safe and secure. So that's one less thing to worry about :)

I've got something new

2008-04-07T11:27:00.000+01:00

Chill out with the girls on AlertMe's new video:

Now, where's that cocktail...

IBM Master Inventor visits AlertMe

2008-03-20T16:42:00.017Z

Just before Easter we had a visit from IBM Master Inventor Andy Stanford-Clark, who runs the Pervasive and Advanced Messaging Technologies team at Hursley Park. Hursley is home to several IBM products including Websphere MQ, which is middleware.

Middleware (which is also an interest of our friends in the Opera group) is software designed to move information around organisations, especially between other software applications. There are lots of ways software programs can talk to each other, but because organisations get things done by taking in raw materials - including information - and processing them into a final product, the movement of information through an organisation is extremely important. In fact, it is often their main reason for existing! When those information flows become very complex, and they usually do, it is hard for managers to know what's going on. Its even harder for them to change how things work. That's dangerous, because efficiency and being able to adapt quickly are vital survival skills for many businesses.

Middleware makes it easy to manage those information flows. It gets its name from where it sits, between the parts of the organisation that generate information and the parts that need information. It automates processes, makes sure applications can get information when they need it, translates between different applications' languages, keeps track of who's allowed to do what, and delivers messages reliably. That leaves application designers free to concentrate on doing what they need to do, instead of reinventing the wheel. Also, having all the business applications that share information talk to MQ and not directly to eachother makes it much easier to integrate new features and streamline the way things work. That gives business leaders more freedom to try things out and respond to change.

MQ was originally designed for corporate intranets, running on relatively powerful computers which could talk to each other via high speed links, but Andy and his team are busy extending it to work with lower bandwidth connections and less powerful devices. They're doing this with an MQ extension called Telemetry Transport (see MQTT.org). In the world of small and cheap connected devices, information flows are often very local - around a home, say, rather than around a corporation - and are often considered an integral part of a larger application, rather than simply connecting distinct applications together. But middleware still offers the same advantages of transparent design and easy reconfigurability.

Being an IBM Master Inventor, a big part of Andy's job is exploring how how his technology can be used. He's already demonstrated many applications using things like embedded linux computers connected by GPRS, and now he's interested in really tiny microprocessors connected by ZigBee.

We first read about his work in Eureka Magazine, which recently featured his Power Orb. The Orb reacts to his rate of electricity usage by changing colour from cool blue to hot red as it increases. Andy showed us how he can also get this information on his mobile phone (using a Java MIDlet) and even publish it to a Twitter account (what's Twitter?) via Twitter's API (what's an API?). In fact, if you look at his Twitter feed, you'll see that electricity is only a small part of the information Andy collects from his house - there are also updates on lighting, heating, temperature, phone and water usage. Each update comes from a simple sensor, via MQTT. The system works both ways too - it is possible to turn the fountain, lights and heaters on and off by flicking switches on a web page.

We got a lot of good ideas from Andy's visit, including a bunch of cool things AlertMe could do in the future. The Power Orb is a particularly interesting one, because we already have a Lamp accessory that glows pretty colours according to whatever rules we build for it. Twitter feeds excite us too, because they seem like such a great idea and the world is still figuring out what to do with them. We'd love to hear what you think! Sign up to our forums and let us know. How would you feel about your house having a Twitter feed? Would it be amazingly useful or scarily public? Would you prefer it to use IM? (what's IM?), or email? What would you want it to say to you?

Linux FTW!

2008-03-20T10:30:00.008Z

The lovely folks over at Linuxdevices.com have featured AlertMe in their latest newsletter, and there is an interview with me posted here.

The article uses one of our splendid new kit photos:

What do we want? Energy!

2008-03-13T16:29:00.003Z

Our first survey is complete, and the results show that ways of monitoring and controlling energy usage at home were popular, so now we are drilling down to find out more detail about what you would like. Do you want to be green? Would you get an AlertMe kit that could help you check that granny was OK? Are you concerned about your utility bills? Let us know - AlertMe can help!

Try out our new Energy survey here.

A lucky winner

2008-03-13T16:21:00.002Z

Our first online survey of customers, and potential customers, is now complete. This investigated a number of concepts which AlertMe could pursue now that we've launched Peace Of Mind. You can see the results here. The lucky winner of our Prize Draw was David Ely, pictured right. David says "It was fun taking part and learning more about where AlertMe is going. I'm looking forward to the next survey and another chance to win £200!"

It's official - AlertMe is ZigBee!

2008-02-25T12:04:00.004Z

AlertMe's shipping product, our home security and monitoring kit, is now the first security system to obtain ZigBee product certification from the ZigBee Alliance! We are thrilled that our people-friendly smart home security system has been certified, which is the culmination of a lot of hard work to make sure that not only is our system great for users, but it meets the standards of the tech community too.

You can read the press release here.

Here's the ZigBee team celebrating - Laura James, Chris Holgate, and Amyas Phillips. We would like to thank Ant Skelton and all the people at Ember who have helped us, without whose sterling work this would not have been possible.

Will Hutton says "China needs AlertMe"

2008-02-01T09:28:00.000Z

I went to the Cambridge Network Open meeting last night, and gave a short pitch about AlertMe before the meeting started, since Cambridge has been so supportive in our Beta test phase.

The well-known journalist Will Hutton was the guest speaker and gave a fascinating talk on his topic "China and the West in the 21st century". During the panel session after his talk, when asked what he thought China might need from the UK, Will responded that Cambridge in particular had two things that China values: academic excellence and the kind of enterprise and intellectual property creation represented by AlertMe.

Thanks for the quote, Will. I'm looking forward to reading your new book on China, The Writing on the Wall.

Special launch edition - up for auction!

2008-01-24T10:13:00.000Z

AlertMe is now offering our SPECIAL LAUNCH EDITION - only 10 limited edition kits, signed by the team, and including an AlertMe logo T-shirt and 1 Gb USB memory stick!

It's up for auction on eBay - CLICK HERE TO BID.

ZigBee at the Consumer Electronics Show

2008-01-08T16:18:00.000Z

The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas gets quite a lot of mainstream press these days, as well as being thoroughly covered in the "techie" media.

TechwebTV have a video interview about ZigBee, in which they talk to the ZigBee Alliance's head of marketing, Brent Hodges. Brent talks about the ways in which ZigBee can help people have more energy efficient homes, by connecting thermostats, appliances, lighting, and electricity meters together. He also mentions ZigBee being used for home security, and around 5 minutes 10 seconds into the clip, you'll spot AlertMe's demo!

If you're at CES this year, you will find our very own VP Marketing, Nik Rouda, at the Ember booth, and demos of our kit at both Ember and Control4's booths.

Solar Hot Water

2008-01-07T16:34:00.000Z

Just before Christmas we had an interesting meeting with folks from Viridian Concepts. With high oil prices and global warming, there's lots of interest in domestic solar water heating solutions but it can take a long time for such systems to pay back their install costs. Viridian's novel approach is to avoid chasing every last percent of operating efficiency and focus instead on keeping the initial cost low, so payback time is short. Their "Solar House" report is a model example of how to gather and present data clearly, and a real treat for a graph-nut like me. They also taught us the important concept of Embodied Energy - the energy used to make a product, including all of its constituent parts.

If and when AlertMe integrates with domestic Heating controls, maybe we'll end-up working together - of course we plugged the benefits of ZigBee to them!

Ember powers AlertMe

2008-01-03T13:31:00.001Z

News from AlertMe and Ember:

Read the press release here.

A great start to the New Year!

Take our survey!

2007-12-07T17:53:00.000Z

We want to know what our customers, and potential customers, would like in an AlertMe system. You can now take part in our survey and let us know! We're keen to hear your thoughts so we can make our service the best it can be.

There's also a prize draw to encourage you - if you are the lucky one out of the hat, you will win £200 cash.

Click now!

2008 International CES

2007-11-30T11:20:00.000Z

Come see AlertMe at the 2008 International CES in Las Vegas, January 7-10, 2008!!

We'll be exhibiting along with our partners in two locations: with Ember in the ZigBee Alliance area and in the Control4 Partner Pavilion.

Special thanks to Ember and Control4 for inviting us!

Mobile Phone crime

2007-10-25T11:16:00.000+01:00

Last week I went to a talk about mobile phone theft and misuse of electronic services, given by Shaun Whitehead from the Criminology and Criminal Justice centre at Loughborough University. There were lots of questions so he only managed to get through the mobile phone part of his research, but I thought some of his points were really interesting for Alertme customers.

You may know that there is a staggering amount of mobile phone theft in the UK - the most recent British Crime Survey (reported here by Halifax building society) reported that two MILLION mobile phones were stolen last year. Shaun and his colleague Jen Mailley have investigated ways of reducing this crime wave, by combining traditional criminology with modern technology.

One of the first things they did was to interview convicted phone thieves. Although most thefts are opportunistic, it turns out that thieves are keenly aware of risk and reward, just like everyone else. When they see an opportunity, they judge carefully whether it is worth the risk. Increase the risk to them, and the reward becomes less attractive. Another thing Shaun and Jen did was to look at ways of reducing those opportunities - if no opportunity presents itself, most thieves won't risk trying to create one.

Alertme helps protect your home in both ways. We give you some easy-to-spot (and rather smart) window stickers, so that potential thieves will have to factor in an increased risk to themselves. We can also warn you as you leave your house if you have left windows or doors open, helping you avoid giving thieves a chance.

Shaun's closing point put a great twist on the story. Phone insurance policies tend not to cover accidental damage or loss. That means that when someone has a problem with their phone, they've got to stump up for a new one, even though they've been paying to insure it. Although nobody can be sure, people who've studied the problem think that a lot of those 'stolen' phones actually went in the bin!

What's going through the front door?

2007-10-01T10:06:00.000+01:00

Our first kits!

AlertMe is now shipping our first controlled release to eager customers. It's fantastic to see the kits going out, and we've already had some fantastic feedback. Home security is entering the 21st century at last.

Of course, there are always some rough edges with a new technology, but that's why we're so excited to get the product into the real world and keep improving it. AlertMe's culture includes an emphasis on co-production - a fancy term for working with our customers to build exactly what they want in their homes.

This is only the beginning....

For more information, see www.alertme.com.

Who's hot in wireless automation?

2007-09-24T15:33:00.000+01:00

Just back from Boston, USA, where AlertMe participated in the first ever Ember Customer Forum. The event focused on who was using ZigBee and how they might work together to offer world class solutions in wireless automation.

AlertMe showed off a new Corporate Video, to the great amusement of the audience, and will soon post it live on our website - check back soon and look for the dude in the cowboy hat!

Some of the best consumer oriented companies there included Control 4, Colorado vNet, and the Radio Thermostat Company of America. There were also some great commercial solutions from Indesign, LS Research, Saflok, Sensorswitch, Twisthink, and Trane.

Whether you want to control your lights, entertainment, heating and airconditioning, or monitor your energy consumption, ZigBee seems to be an essential ingredient.

BarCamb 2007

2007-09-03T12:04:00.000+01:00

A week ago, I was at BarCamb, the first BarCamp to be held in Cambridge! It was a good event, with a really interesting bunch of people from the local science and technology community talking about aspects of their work (and other interests). I spoke about AlertMe, describing our platform and some of the home awareness and other applications and services it enables. Everyone was really interested and had plenty of good ideas for future features (I wrote them all down!). Several of the people who blogged the event mentioned us, including Jim Downing, Michael Dales from Ndiyo, Rob Hulme and Ian Mulvany from Nature, who even links to a picture of our wonderfully tiny ZigBee tile!

Many thanks to Matt Wood, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, for organising everything; and hopefully I'll see you all at the next BarCamb!

Crime maps and home security

2007-08-21T13:52:00.000+01:00

This post will be more speculation than announcement. I've recently been alerted to a number of new initiatives that mashup crime with maps. This isn't a totally new idea, my hometown of Berkeley, CA has had an interactive crime map for a few years now, and in the USA at least, newspapers have been reporting police blotters forever, but it does seem to have a new life.

Blog posts like this one from O'Reilly also look at the concept.

Taking it a step further are businesses like the exciting Terabitz are combining this information with real estate listing and other local detail.

What I wonder is how much that will influence people's decisions on how and where they live. I'm guessing it depends, but I've always felt you take the good with the bad. Living in NYC or London may occasionally pose risks, but that hasn't stopped people wanting to live in such vibrant cities.

I would think the best approach is to use these tools to be informed, but follow your heart (or job or school or friends) and live where you like. Better to take a few steps to protect yourself where you want to be, than to be afraid.

So I'm hoping these tools deliver the information as just that - information. People shouldn't live in fear, they should have peace of mind about their homes. And I guess AlertMe might just be a useful tool in this respect.

For more information, see www.alertme.com

Home security and AlertMe computing security

2007-08-14T08:49:00.000+01:00

AlertMe.com takes security seriously.

Our revolutionary approach to intelligent home security will be backed by a hardened approach to datacenter server and network security. We've spent the last six months designing a robust and resilient infrastructure to deliver our service without interruption.

Our computer wizard says:

"The AlertMe system utilizes techniques and technologies developed by the military and the banking industry. A resilient, multiple layer firewall system combined with a military designed datacentre, manned by ex-military personnel, ensures the continued security of your personal data."

And given his spotless track record defending a leading internet-based payment processing company, he should know how it's done.

Our email and webservers are migrating into the nuclear bunkers now, and our full application will also be hosted there.

AlertMe manufacturing goes live!

2007-08-14T01:04:00.000+01:00

AlertMe.com is now bringing online our state of the art manufacturing operation.

We have completed build out of the pilot manufacturing facility in our Cambridge headquarters and produced the first run of beta kits here already. All of the kits for the first controlled release will also be hand built in Cambridge by our own crack team of hardware experts. As they assemble the components, they are conducting extensive quality control testing and looking for future improvements and efficiencies.

At the same, we’re also spinning up activity for full scale production with a truly world class consumer electronics manufacturing partner. We’ve had their first samples back and they look really spectacular – just can’t wait to show them off! Even the packaging itself has received rave reviews from those who’ve seen sneak previews of the kit.

FUN FACT: there are over 300 unique parts in a single AlertMe home security kit.

For more information, visit www.alertme.com

AlertMe first controlled release - taking pre-orders now!

2007-07-23T08:05:00.000+01:00

As we're now getting very close to our first controlled release, we've decided to open the gates.

We’re now taking pre-orders for a limited release, exclusively to friends and family of the AlertMe team in the UK. If you are interested in hearing more about this, please send a note to "sales at alertme.com" and tell me who you know here and I’ll tell them you’ve said “hi!” Then I can also share more details about our service and the coming release. The response has been great so far, and supplies are limited, so act quickly if you want to be one of the first to enjoy intelligent home security, control, and monitoring.

If you don’t happen to know us personally, but want to learn more, let me know the nature of your interest. We would be happy to have a chat on a variety of topics once we know a bit more about you. To misquote Bogart: I think this may be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Cheers.

AlertMe website relaunching

2007-07-22T10:10:00.000+01:00

Is "relaunching" a word? Oh well.

Just a quick note to let you know we'll be relaunching our website sometime in the next couple of weeks. This is the big moment, when we'll open the curtains and show you just what it is we've built. It's been a major effort in developing comprehensive content and a friendly, intuitive design. We're hoping you'll like it!

Sections will include:

"Why AlertMe?"
"What is it?"
"Who is it for?"
"How does it work?"

and the ever popular "FAQ" for things that just didn't seem to fit elsewhere.

I won't spoil the surprise, but be sure to check back often at www.alertme.com and be the first to know.

Home trials of AlertMe

2007-07-21T12:48:00.000+01:00

Over the last few weeks, AlertMe has been busy with a number of home trials of our home security, control, and monitoring service. A range of people with a variety of homes and living situations have been able to set up the kit, show it off to their friends and family, and find out what's it really like.

The trials have gone very well so far. People outside the company have been appreciative of the design elements and interested to learn more. Perhaps more importantly, we've collected a ton of feedback on areas for improvement and future enhancements.

The trials will be ongoing right up through sign off of our first controlled release, and we plan to never stop learning from our customers. When you get your kit, be sure to drop us a line and let us know what you love about AlertMe, and where we might do better.

Cheers.

Business Weekly reports on AlertMe.com

2007-07-03T19:51:00.000+01:00

Business Weekly covers news, feature and analysis on business issues for senior decision makers in companies across the East of England. It has reported on our business this week.

US investors alert to home security venture

By Lautaro Vargas, 07 March 2007

Two of the region's top entrepreneurs are promising to revolutionise the home security market by launching a new generation of internet and mobile-enabled monitored alarm systems.

Backed with £5 million from entities affiliated to one of the USA's biggest hedge funds, Tudor Investment Group, Pilgrim Beart and Adrian Critchlow will trial AlertMe's first products in Cambridge this summer prior to a national roll-out before the year's end.

The Series A financing follows initial seed funding from the co-founders and business angels and will be used to complete the final stage of development and testing, build brand partnerships and bring the product to market.

Details of the technologies that will be used to underpin the new products, as well as the actual products themselves, will not be released until after the trials, though Beart insists that the AlertMe system will produce a step change in home surveillance.

"In contrast to many older alarm systems that use a phone dialer, the AlertMe system architecture is bang up-to-date; however we are not releasing any details of it yet" said Beart."Suffice to say that a large US hedge fund has invested in us on the basis of its potential."

AlertMe's next generation home security offering will use internet and mobile technology to connect people with their homes and alert them immediately to any unauthorised entry or fire.

The company's intention is to provide a major challenge to traditional monitored alarms by using the latest technology to offer enhanced functionality at a fraction of the current cost.

Increased functionality will free users from a prickly relationship with alarm firms according to Critchlow.

He said: "Many people use alarm companies but are not happy with the service."

AlertMe's system is expected to provide significant savings to users over existing systems.

Critchlow added: "Over the lifetime of our products we would hope to strip a significant amount of cost off existing systems, up to 50 per cent. But the comparison is really chalk and cheese as the amount of functionality would be far beyond what you can get at the moment."

The teaming of Beart and Critchlow could prove to be the masterstroke behind the success of the new venture, bringing an expert in wireless and RF technology start-ups together with one experienced in the rapid exploitation of a highly successful internet firm.

Beart has 20 years exp-erience in establishing ground-breaking high-technology companies including ActiveRF (which was sold to US-based Gatekeeper) and Antenova, which is heading full-throttle towards its goal of becoming the global supplier of choice for integrated antennas.

Critchlow co-founded online reservation service Active Hotels in 1999, helping it become one of the UK's fastest growing companies before it was sold five years later to Priceline for £90 million.

"The intention is to get a leading edge product up fast and one of the reasons for taking this on is that the technology already exists," said Critchlow.

True to its word, AlertMe, which was founded in April 2006, not only has 12 employees working in Cambridge on hardware and software R & D and commercial, but it already has a team of five doing software R & D in India.

As it finalises its commercialisation strategy, AlertMe is now seeking to develop partnerships with a number of different sectors including Internet Service Providers, mobile operators and insurance companies.

Mythbusting - Home Security Myth #2: Effectiveness

2007-07-03T17:09:00.000+01:00

There was an interesting article about the effectiveness of home security a few weeks ago.

You can read the full version here.

The summary is that Britain has high rates of burglary because people don't take adequate steps to protect themselves (such as locking up and using their alarms) and that many steps they do take are ineffective (such as security lights and siren only alarms.)

They argue that some of these actually aid the burglar, like lights to work by, or are easily circumvented, like wearing a hoodie around a CCTV camera. And we all know that most alarm sounds are routinely ignored.

I would argue that the real reason all of these security measures fail is that they don't tell anyone who cares that there is a crime in progress. With our approach, a crafty burglar may still get in as none of us really wants to live in a concrete bunker, but if they do, you know instantly. You can then call the police and give them an opportunity to intervene WHILE it's still happening.

I'd much rather the police catch the bad guys in the act, than just take a crime report long afterward.

Effectiveness is based on deterrence and response. We can help with both.

A shout out to all Entrepreneurial Engineers

2007-06-06T09:52:00.000+01:00

Yesterday Amyas and I were at the IET's Entrepreneurial Engineer event in Cambridge. It was wonderful to see so many engineers keen to learn more about entrepreneurship, both in the true sense of starting new businesses, and within their current employing organisations. Everyone we spoke to was excited by the AlertMe proposition, and it was good to meet so many people who are already fans of ZigBee! There was a real buzz around new consumer technology ideas such as ours, and several people said how great it was to see a company using ZigBee for the purpose it was designed for, and getting a compelling new product out using it.

So a big Hi to everyone we met yesterday, especially the avid followers of this blog! Do sign up at www.AlertMe.com so we can keep you up to date with when AlertMe will be available in your area, and keep being entrepreneurial.

Mythbusting - Home Security Myth #1: Risk

2007-06-06T09:31:00.000+01:00

One of the most common misconceptions of home security is about RISK.

Generally, people are bad judges of risk. Whole industries exist for the management of risk in various forms, ranging from financial to personal. Business managers are kept up nights by their decisions around risk mitigation. And we all have to judge risk, reward, and consequences on a daily basis.

Can I park on the yellow line for 15 minutes or will I get a ticket?
Should I buy a house now or hope the property bubble will burst soon?
If I leave work early today will the boss think I'm being slack?
Do I need to replace the batteries in my smoke detector today or next week?

A good way to think about risk is to weigh the CHANCE of an event happening against the OUTCOMES if it does or does not.

Parking on the yellow line might conveniently saving me walking several blocks and circling around looking for a legal space, and the chance of a traffic warden coming by in the next 15 minutes is fairly low, but the consequence might be a 60 pound penalty citation and the minor hassle of paying it.

Interestingly there is also an emotional cost to all this. If I park in a legal space, then I don't have to worry about it - very nice benefit that should be factored in. If I get a ticket for illegal parking, it'll probably annoy me for the rest of the day, and again when I get around to paying it.

What does this have to do with home security? A lot actually.

Some decisions are made daily. Lock up the house, using one or more locks. Close some or all of the windows.

Some decisions we make once and then forget about. Getting an alarm system. Installing smoke detectors. Joining Neighbourhood Watch.

It's well worth re-evaluating the risks of home security now. The chance factor should reflect 733,000 reported home burlaries last year in the UK according to the Home Office Crimes Report, and the average cost is fairly high at an average theft claim of £2,250 (total home property loss claims were at £1.4 billion in the UK last year.)

Again, not least is the emotional cost of the risk. That same Home Office report says that 63% of people believe crime has increased in the UK, with 13% expressing very high levels of worry. The most significant issue may be the awful feeling of invasion if you do have the misfortune of being a victim.

This is all a personal decision, but now you have some of the facts, assumptions and myths around the risk of burglary. A similar decision can be made for smoke and fire detection, and a variety of other considerations.

Perhaps the strongest conclusion is that it is worth being informed and making an educated decision about risks to your home. I hope this helps you do that.

Usability in practice

2007-05-15T08:03:00.000+01:00

Last week I attended a three day intensive camp called "Usability in Practice." This was run by the world-renowned Nielsen Norman Group, a consultancy who work in the field of usability - making tools which are easy for people to use to accomplish their desired task. The group is made up of people who have been working on product design and thinking about the whole user experience for decades, and has the philosophy "to help companies enter the age of the consumer, designing human-centered products and services." That's AlertMe!

I've previously met Don Norman (co-founder of the group) at Intelligent Environments, a Microsoft Research event. He's a really inspiring guy, with a huge range of design and psychology expertise, as well as technical experience (amongst many other things, he was Vice President of the Advanced Technology Group at Apple). Norman recommends companies design the Total User Experience, going beyond just a few nifty features and good engineering to make a product, and we've followed that best practice whilst designing the AlertMe system.

The camp focussed on how to design and test for usability, which is something which has been critical to AlertMe from day one. It was great to build on my previous experience with some more detailed study at the camp, and I'm now planning the next round of user testing for our system.

Jakob Nielsen ran some of the sessions; he's one of the foremost advocates of easy to use websites and a top usability guru. He also founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces. This kind of rapid, responsive technique to create a highly usable, functional and fun-to-use system is at the heart of AlertMe's development.

I'm going to be looking for participants to help AlertMe refine our user interface and website during the summer. If you'd like to be considered, send me an email at usability @ alertme.com or sign up for more information at www.alertme.com. This is a great opportunity to help us make using the AlertMe system a truly straightforward and enjoyable experience.

Long weekend #4 - The morning after

2007-05-10T08:12:00.000+01:00

Again, absolutely true experience - I really am not making this up.

Ah it was nice to be back home. I love the cosy feel of our little English terrace house.

I woke up the morning after we got back, refreshed and ready to get back to work. Except, why was the house so cold this morning?

I wander downstairs for my usual glass of Ovaltine (the good stuff we bring over from the States.) I notice it's even colder down here. Ah, I see why!

The front door is wide open!

Apparently it has been wide open all night. The Yale lock must not have latched properly when we closed it, then the wind must have blown it back open. It does that sometimes. This is why I'm always wondering if I closed the front door. See, there is a perfectly good reason for my paranoia!

Um, wait a sec, the front door was wide open all night!

We live on fairly busy street, just off a major road through town. It's a mixed part of town, generally very nice, but some rough characters bumming around pretty often, too. Uh, oh.

Rush into the front room for a quick look around: yep, there is my laptop, my iPod, my wallet, my keys, my wife's purse, and all our passports, right there where we dropped them after the France trip.

I am very, very, very relieved no one wandered in last night.

We really do need to get one of them high tech new home monitoring systems....

Long weekend #3 - The Return Home

2007-05-10T08:00:00.000+01:00

The following is absolutely true. Sometimes life just hands you material.

Coming back from the ZigBee conference in Paris, I had the usual mild worries:

Did the cleaner come while we were gone?
Did we leave the heating on for five days with no one home?
And generally, was the house ok?

Interestingly, these worries increase the closer we get to home, which is compounded by the fact that the trains get exponentially slower as we approach home:

Paris to London - no stops - 2 hours 40 minutes - 280 miles - average 105 mph
London to Cambridge - 28 stops - 4 hours 20 minutes - 60 miles - average 14 mph

At last, we're home!

The house is still there, not a smoking pile of bricks!
The front is closed, not hanging off it's hinges!
The front door is locked, but we can't open it!

Err... apparently the cleaner did come, and she locked an extra deadbolt on the door, one for which I don't have a key. Whoops. Now what?

Time to break in to my own home!

Wife watches me vault the locked gate to the back alley, easy enough, this is kind of fun!
Slip around the neighbours', into our back garden.
Test the french doors to see if they're locked - yes, good, we remembered to lock them when we left. Now what?

Tug a bit harder on the back door... hmm... it seems to have a little play in it... I wonder.
Sharp yank on the handle of the french doors, and voila, quiet splintering and I'm in!

Locked out to broken in - 1 stop - 2 minutes - 40 yards - average 0.7 mph

That was really easy. Quick and quiet. No one saw me.

We'll need to fix the door though.

And perhaps we should get some sort of high tech home monitoring system....

Long weekend #2 - ZigBee in Paris

2007-05-08T12:14:00.000+01:00

The ZigBee Alliance held a conference and open house at the Hyatt by Charles De Gaulle Airport last week. It was an international event, with attendees coming from at least four continents.

Interesting to see the booths - a lot of developers and platforms and chipsets and everyone had some green circuit boards on display. What I didn't see was many consumer applications of the technology. It still seems very rooted in the industrial world. The technology is ready and solid, but we'll be one of the first to deploy it for a really cool home usage.

Even Eaton's presentation was about their electrical and automotive bits, not their geek-next-door home products. It just feels like this isn't the focus for their company.

The best customer oriented product was Control4 and they had a nice demo of their kit - we'd love to have a chat with them about the security aspects sometime. We also enjoyed the TSC Systems display.

It was great to see our friends from Ember and PRI.

All in all, a very interesting event, but it'll get better when we are ready to show our stuff!

Long weekend #1

2007-05-08T05:17:00.000+01:00

Wednesday last week, we left home for a long weekend in France. A conference in Paris requires some extra time on holiday. (Note to our Directors: this was not a boondoggle. Really.)

As always, I had to go back twenty steps from the front door, just to make sure it was closed tightly. I had a touch more worry than usual, after all we were going to be gone for five days. The neighbours were gone also (to Bristol, almost as glamourous.)

Worse, we had to put the trash bins out in front of the house two days early because we were going to miss the collection day otherwise. They only collect every two weeks here, which means if you miss once, it's an entire month of rubbish to stomp into the small bin, sort of a very sad man's grape stomping. But I digress. The non-political issue with the bins was that leaving them in front for five days on a semi-busy street seems to be a clear sign of "Nobody's Home - Come on in!" They even have the house number spraypainted on, just so your slower crook doesn't get confused about which house is empty. Sigh. My paranoia needs little encouragement.

The trains were fine: Cambridge to King's Cross, King's Cross to Leicester Square, Leicester Square to Waterloo, Waterloo to Gare Du Nord, enough trains already, taxi to hotel.

Ah, Paris in the spring. If you must know, the weather was absolutely perfect -- warm but not hot, blue sky sunny, with a cool, light breeze -- all day on Thursday. Of course, I spent the entire day in a windowless convention room in an airport hotel, but more about the ZigBee Open House in the next post....

(To Be Continued.)

AlertMe moments at the weekend: Freezers and Cats!

2007-04-24T11:13:00.000+01:00

Last week was my wife's birthday, so on Thursday we took the family up to London for a long weekend at my sister-in-law's house. On Friday I got a call from our cleaner, who'd arrived at our home that morning to find our freezer door ajar ... and most of the food inside spoiled.

"If only we already had AlertMe!" I thought - we'd have known about the problem and asked someone to come and close the door before any damage was done. This alone would have been worth the cost of a year's of AlertMe subscription, to say nothing of all the hassle.

This is a classic example of a device in the home knowing that there's a problem (our fridge-freezer beeps if either door is left open), but not having any way to tell its owner.

So we were house-sitting my sister-in-law’s house. They have a cat, and were reassured to know that we'd be around to check that it was getting in and out of the house OK, getting fed and watered. I wondered - could one of our AlertMe door/window sensors on the catflap give some peace of mind for cat users? In 2004, 4.5 million UK households owned 7.7 million cats.

Can't wait to get the system launched!

Happy Birthday to AlertMe.com!

2007-04-20T10:16:00.000+01:00

AlertMe had its first birthday this week -- turning the company into a jolly one year old.

We've achieved an amazing amount in one year:

incorporating as a "we're really going to do it" business
growing the team with many new superstars
moving into our new headquarters in the heart of Cambridge
defining and adopting our brand and identity
closing our first major round of venture funding
finding great partners to help us with design and development, manufacturing and marketing
and most importantly, prototyping and developing a revolutionary new home security and monitoring system

We look forward to moving from infancy to toddler-dom in the next year...watch us grow!

Hip-hip-hooray!

ZigBee: at home in Cambridge

2007-04-19T16:37:00.000+01:00

This month, AlertMe has performed a variety of tests using our own ZigBee hardware, to make sure that it performs well in real houses. Following on from previous test phases, we went out into a wide range of homes, of differing sizes and construction types, in the Cambridge area and beyond, and explored how our kit would work in these homes. As well as checking that ZigBee has the range to reach everywhere in these homes, we also tested the potential for interference with operating Bluetooth and WiFi networks in the home. I'd like to take this opportunity to say thanks on behalf of the technology team to Preethi Kalimuthu and Sean Warren, who joined AlertMe to help with this study, and who were rigorous and insightful.

We used our hardware to simulate real user installations of AlertMe equipment, and generated heavy network traffic on the other wireless networks present in the homes where they existed. From nineteenth century large family homes to new build townhouses, with all kinds of electronics already installed (microwaves, DECT and mobile phones, and even giant plasma TVs and huge fridges!), we found great performance using ZigBee. This is excellent news, confirming our previous conclusions. We're looking forward to getting real systems out into houses soon!

Champagne moment #4

2007-04-18T12:04:00.000+01:00

The champagne flowed at AlertMe last Thursday, as the team celebrated the major achievement of "System Alpha" - a demonstration of the integrated system working from end to end.

We're all thrilled to see our system working. We even exceeded our aims for this demo, so a very successful milestone passed!

A MySpace party and a wrecked home

2007-04-18T08:21:00.000+01:00

It's long been conventional wisdom that a major benefit of programming computers is that this allows you to do a task many times over with ease. It's also been noted that if this task isn't well thought through, any bug is repeated many times over. The computer does what it is told, and the result may be much less or much more than desired. Networking on the internet can probably be said to escalate this effect by distributing the result far and wide.

In this case, we have a simple task: "Invite people to a party", that contained a small error of judgment "the party was unsanctioned by the parents and uncontrolled by the teenage host", and led to a disastrous result of "more party than desired".

Web revellers wreck family home

About 200 youngsters caused damage put at £20,000 to a family home after a party organised on a website.

Police said a teenage girl used the social networking site MySpace to advertise the party while her parents were away from home on Easter Monday.

The full article is available here.

So what does this have to do with AlertMe?

Well, our service monitors activity in the home. It could easily be set to report unusual volumes of activity, for instance the front door opening 200 times in an evening and ceaseless motion in the lounge, kitchen, or any other room. If the parents were alerted of this unexpected and abnormal circumstance, perhaps they could have responded in time to avoid the result, even calling the police to break up the party if necessary.

ADT adds daily premium rate phone charges

2007-04-16T09:11:00.000+01:00

Another interesting news article, from the Guardian on Saturday:

'Phantom' calls raise the alarm

Premium rate lines: Patrick Collinson on a lucrative security mystery

(Saturday April 14, 2007, The Guardian)

Ben Whitney's father just could not work out why his phone bill was so high. He's retired and recovering from a stroke, so he asked his son to take a look at it. The thing puzzling him most was a 20p or 23p call every day, sometimes twice a day, to an 0906 number at 1.17am each morning. The calls had started months ago, and if they carried on were likely to add £100 a year to his bill.

The calls lasted only a few seconds, but the high cost alerted Mr Whitney to the fact that they must be premiumrate lines. Had some rogue dialler or trojan software hijacked his father's phone? He contacted industry regulator Icstis for help - and was astonished to discover that the premium rate calls were being auto-dialled from the family home's ADT burglar alarm as it made a daily registration contact with the ADT monitoring centre.

Mr Whitney and his father were flabbergasted. The alarm had cost more than £1,000 to install, plus monthly service charges . The last thing his father had expected was another £100 or so a year in premium rate phone calls. "I traced the number via the Icstis website to ADT alarms," says Mr Whitney. " I made some enquiries and was told that this type of ADT alarm has to 'check in' every day by calling in to their system. The units come with an expensive revenue-generating number as default but I was told they can be modified to call a cheaper 0870 number by an ADT engineer."

The ADT call centre assured him that on the next inspection visit by an ADT technician, the line would be changed.

"However, the engineer who called knew nothing about this or how to change it. I was astounded that this information had to be uncovered by me and was not something that the company tell their customers when the unit is fitted, " says Mr Whitney.

The article continues on, you can see the rest of the story here

It's well worth noting that AlertMe.com's service will continuously monitor its status through your home's broadband connection at no additional charge, not just once a day over a premium phone call as ADT's does.

"Police take action as burglary rate increases"

2007-04-16T07:23:00.000+01:00

I'm back from a two week holiday in the USA - not surprisingly I spent a fair amount of time there wishing I had a way to check in on our house in Cambridge....

I did return to find an interesting article in the Cambridge Evening News about local police efforts to stem burglaries. Seems to be a bit of good news/bad news - I'm very glad the police efforts are meeting some success, but it's a shame the burglary rate was almost triple last years' numbers.

Here's the first bit of the story:

SEVEN people were arrested and stolen property was recovered as police launched a bid to stem a sharp rise in burglaries.

The move, called Operation Onslaught, saw police swoop on the Arbury and King's Hedges areas of Cambridge in a crackdown on break-ins.

Between November 2 last year and February 23 this year there were a total of 128 burglaries in the two areas. In the same period the previous year 44 offences were reported.

It was also reassuring to hear that "All reports of burglary are taken extremely seriously and are fully investigated."

You can read the full article here.

Wireless control that simply works

2007-03-23T16:44:00.000Z

A core part of the AlertMe system is its use of ZigBee technology in the home. ZigBee is a wireless system that allows devices to communicate over short distances. It is straightforward enough to work on small, simple devices such as light switches, but can carry enough data to monitor and control a security system, to track energy usage around the home, and much more.

It uses a similar radio frequency to both Bluetooth and WiFi (2.4GHz), but is rather less well known! Unlike Bluetooth, ZigBee can communicate between many devices at once, and over greater distances (a single ZigBee network will connect together all parts of an average UK home). ZigBee doesn't need as much power, or computer processing ability, as a WiFi network.

AlertMe is a Participant member of the ZigBee Alliance, which is a global ecosystem of companies creating wireless solutions for use in residential, commercial and industrial applications. The ZigBee Alliance companies work together to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked products based on an open global standard.

AlertMe will be increasingly visible at ZigBee Alliance events (and in conference calls) over the next few months as Amyas and I start to participate in the development of the standard. If you are one of the many people involved in the ZigBee world, do say hello to us!

Blogs from the underground

2007-03-19T17:26:00.000Z

"Enough about the funding already," I hear you saying, and fair enough. The coverage has been very positive, but what have we done lately?

We're still in a pre-launch mode here at AlertMe.com. It's a stealth mode, not like a fully cloaked Romulan ship, nor like a ninja in the shadows, but very much like my two year old playing hide and seek in the closet. We secretly want you to know we're here, otherwise what's the point of hiding?

So there are some things we can talk about today: our business, industry, and open jobs. There are some things we won't reveal just yet, but soon: our products and services.

This blog will be often the very first place to hear the news. I'll be sharing more as we go, so stay tuned....

Keep the peace,
Nik

Tornado Insider tracks AlertMe.com on the Radar

2007-03-15T17:26:00.000Z

Looks like a Tornado is coming our way!

AlertMe.com closes £5 million financing round

AlertMe.com, the home security company for the internet generation, today announced the closing of a £5 million financing round from entities affiliated with the Tudor Group.

The funding will be used to help complete the final stage of development and testing, to build brand partnerships, and bring the product to market.

Adrian Critchlow, co-founder of AlertMe.com, commented, 'We are delighted to have Tudor as an investor. We feel this investment validates our product development efforts to date, and our planned approach to the home security market.'

AlertMe.com will be launching a next generation home security product using internet and mobile technology to connects people to their homes at all times, and alert users to unauthorized entry or fire. The product's increased functionality will be cost much less than the installation and monitoring costs of a conventional home alarm system.

Growth Business features AlertMe.com on the front page

2007-03-15T10:00:00.000Z

A much appreciated front page report from Growth Business:

Wednesday 14th March 2007

AlertMe bags £5 million
Cambridge-based start-up AlertMe has raised £5 million in its first round of funding from US hedge fund Tudor Investment. The money raised will be used on R&D, developing the company's brand and establishing partnership. The company has been founded by serial entrepreneurs Adrian Critchlow and Pilgrim Beart. Critchlow was behind Active Hotels, which was sold to Priceline for £90 million, and Beart has founded three start-ups and has 20 years' experience in building technology companies. AlertMe will be launching a home security offering, using internet and mobile technology to connect people with their homes and alert them immediately to any unauthorised entry or fire. It will begin trialing the offering with customers in the Cambridge area in the next few months, prior to a national roll-out in the second half of 2007. The company worked with Cambridge-based Green & Green on the legal side, while Deloitte provided financial advice.

alarm:clock euro picks up the AlertMe.com story

2007-03-13T03:00:00.000Z

Another report on our funding announcement. Thank you to the alarm:clock team.

Hedge Fund Tudor Makes Fifth Investment With AlertMe - A Zigbee Play The Latest

Zigbee sensor startup AlertMe has raised £5M from Tudor Investment Corp. It's a deal we missed and seems to have been announced in February.

AlertMe is a one-year old startup that's pitching a homeowner securtingy alerting system direct to the mobilephone. It has not released product yet but according to a report in Real Deals magazine, it will use the new low power Zigbee sensor technology as part of its home security alerting service. A typical application is a door sensor that triggers an alert to a homeowner's cellphone.

Library House says that this is Tudor's fifth transaction in recent months. The others are Plastic Logic (December 2006), Passado (December 2006), Netronome (November 2006) and Hotxt (July 2006), it said.

A couple of readers have written in to ask us for more info about Tudor and how it goes about sourcing dealflow and its interest in Europe. We do not have an answer yet. We know that GP Bullhound brokered the Passado deal. Maybe other a:c euro readers in the UK have some insight, if so, send us an email.

Back to AlertMe. It's too early to evaluate the product on offer, because there isn't one to look at yet, but the founders sound good.

The tech-oriented co-founder is Pilgrim Beart. This is his third wireless venture. His bio describes a career in the UK, then six years working in Silicon Valley in the 1990's for the likes of Atari and Chromatic Research (now AMD). Returned to Cambridge in '99 and founded activeRF Ltd., an early implementer of wireless asset-location systems and antenova Ltd., a VC-backed WiFi and Bluetooth antenna maker.

The other founder is Adrian Critchlow, whose most recent venture is an eco-hotel, a carbon-neutral hostelry for the wealthy tourist. But he's got some tech cred: founding ActiveHotels.com and Iota Software Ltd. and he was in marketing at Acorn Computer Group, at the time of the ARM spin out. ActiveHotels.com was acquired for £90 million giving its backers a "16 fold return".

My Home Security Pro blogs AlertMe.com

2007-03-12T15:21:00.001Z

We're happy to see an independent security expert commenting our business....

Home Security Revolution In UK

PILGRIM BEART: He's had more than 15 years of working in a number of high-technology companies (including ActiveRF, which was sold to Gatekeeper, and Antenova) in Cambridge, Oxford, and Silicon Valley. He has become and experienced technology entrepreneur with admirable skills in leadership and technical disciplines.

ADRIAN CRITCHLOW: He has a proven entrepreneurial track record and has worked big time in technology companies. In the 80's he worked for Acorn Computers and in the 90's became the founder of Iota Software Ltd., a UK software company that ranked in the top 10 software suppliers to education by RM PLC and won two DTI SMART awards.

Now what happens when these two technology entrepreneurs come together? Surely, it's the beginning of a new revolution!

Beart and Critchlow will be working together to revolutionize the home security systems market by launching a new generation of internet and mobile-enabled monitored alarm systems. They will lead AlertMe's products to the final stage of its development and testing. They'll also be building brand partnerships and introduce the product to the market.

Beart believes that the AlertMe system will bring about a great change in home surveillance. Though details have not yet been released about the product, it is said that AlertMe will be using the internet and mobile technology to connect people with their homes. The AlertMe main differentiation is that it uses the latest technology to offer enhanced functionality without costing too much. While offering increased functionality, the system will also be expected to provide significant savings to users.

Presently, AlertMe is developing partnerships with a couple of different sectors including Internet service providers, mobile operators, and insurance companies.

Real Deals reports on AlertMe.com

2007-03-08T13:25:00.000Z

Here is another story about our company, this time from Real Deals, a fortnightly magazine that covers European private equity and venture capital news, comment, features and analysis, aimed at venture capitalists, investment bankers, lawyers, accountants, directors, and entrepreneurs.

HEDGE FUND INVESTS IN ALERTME
08 March 2007

Cambridge-based start-up AlertMe has raised £5m ($7.4m) first round funding from Tudor Investment Group.

AlertMe is developing a next-generation home security product that will use broadband internet and mobile technology to connect people to their homes and alert them remotely to fire or unauthorised entry.

The company is due to start piloting the technology in the Cambridge area in summer 2007, with a national launch towards the end of the year.

"Interesting radio technologies such as Zigbee are really coming of age now, and enough people (45 per cent of the UK population) are using broadband to use this to update traditional alarm systems, said AlertMe co-founder Adrian Critchlow.

"Less than two per cent of households have monitored alarm systems, and even those that do rarely have a good word to say about their provider, suggesting this is an industry ripe for change."

AlertMe was seed funded by its founders, repeat entrepreneurs Critchlow and Pilgrim Beart. Critchlow is the founder of Active Hotels, which was sold to Priceline for £90m in 2004, generating a 16 times return for its seed investors. Beart has also founded three start-ups.

The pair had been talking with angel investors and VCs, but according to Critchlow, "none were as proactive as Tudor".

"They were prepared to seek us out and listen to our business plan. We got their term sheet in a few days and closed within weeks," he said.

"Some people have suggested that a hedge fund is just 'dumb money' but that isn't the case at all - they were very well informed, and asked all the right questions, digging into the technology and what we are doing."

AlertMe, which was founded in April 2006, has a team of 15, comprising software and network developers, and a commercial team, many of which were recruited from Cambridge University.