by David Heyerman on August 24, 2009
- Since Google started hyping up its home energy management tool, PowerMeter, people have started to get really excited about having the ability to personally control their energy consumption. Even further, companies are developing ways in which consumers can manage their energy when they’re not even in their house. Here are 6 iPhone energy management apps in development or currently available that you should definitely check out.
- Tendril Vantage Mobile: Based out of Boulder, CO, the company’s already brought in $30 million in funding. Although the app won’t be available until 2010, the company is promising to offer real-time consumption stats and the ability to remotely control your appliances and thermostat.
- Energy UFO: Developed by Palo Alto based company, Visible Energy, the Energy UFO is already free on the app store. Visible Energy produces energy management gadgets and power strips upon which the Energy UFO interfaces with. Unfortunately, the app isn’t of much use yet considering their hardware won’t start shipping until Christmas this year.
- Ecobee’s Smart Thermostat: Ecobee, out of Toronto, already developed a thermostat that communicates through WiFi. The company is planning to launch an iPhone app allowing consumers to remotely turn their thermostats up and down.
- My House UI: Developed by digital home startup, Control4, the My House UI app allows users to control heat, lighting, and air conditioning. The iPhone app, however, is useless unless you own Control4’s in-home devices. The company’s already raised $17.3 million.
- Meter Readings, MeterRead, and Wattulator : All three are $0.99 apps allowing consumers to manually enter electricity, water, and gas data. Although they don’t directly communicate with your system at home, they’re good for finding out how much energy specific appliances in your home are using.
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by Jason Wilk on February 19, 2009
- Yelp, the massively popular, ‘cult’ driven community built around local business reviews and recommendations has hit another bump in the negative PR road. Yelp was first criticized after their launch after it was discovered their own employees were writing fake reviews to fill the site without ever attending the business. Since then, there has been criticism and even lawsuits over negative consumer reviews on Yelp significantly hurting small business owners.
- If you thought that was bad, get ready for this. The East Bay Express outed the San Francisco based company today for soliciting local businesses to pay a fee to remove bad reviews from their Yelp page. The going price is $299 a month to keep anything but positive reviews off your page. The sales pitch goes as follows:
“Hi, this is Mike from Yelp,” the voice would say. “You’ve had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You’ve had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those.”
- Small business owners have been complaining that they have been receiving calls from a notorious 415 area code number that has a Yelp representative on the other line. The report says that right around the time of the month when calls come in, the negative reviews seem to be more present on their page. Many think Yelp is purposely putting bad reviews on business owner’s pages before they solicit them to make their sales pitch that much stronger. According to the small business owners, the salesman starts off the pitch by trying to sell a sponsored listing on the site, a feature that will feature your restaurant or business listing in search results or on similar competitor’s pages. This is what the $299 is for, and alternatively it rids your bad reviews. Some owners claimed that once they denied Yelp for advertising help, they were subsequently hit with more mysterious negative reviews.
- I’m still hoping that this is some rogue employee who has the ability to delete bad reviews and is trying to become a top salesman, but until Yelp comes clean, I am off to CitySearch (sounds so boring, I know).
Trying to kill some time? Check out these other important issues:
Pandora Inches Closer To The Deadpool Over Royalty Fees
Blackberry Executives Caught In Options Scandal
Going Green With A Universal Phone Charger
by Jason Wilk on October 29, 2008
- Bommerator is a Yahoo Answers type site aimed at the baby boomer crowd (44-62)
- @ Boomerator. The chances of this succeeding on its own are slim to nil.
- Meet Eons.com, a social network for baby boomers that is slowly starting to fail.
- Its possible they may have a home for this service, so move quick and try and partner with them (or just drop off the admin password
- This idea deserves about as much credit as the picture above.
TC
by Jason Wilk on October 21, 2008
- Wikia is letting go 30% of its current 43-person workforce that work on the ‘for profit’ Wikia Search and Wiki software projects.
- The revenue nor traffic is there yet to support Jimmy Wale’s attempt to make money on a project outside of donations.
- The company has raised $14M to date from Marc Andreessen, Joi Ito, and Ron Conway, as well as Bessemer Venture Partners, the Omidyar Network and Amazon.’
Update: Mr. Wales confirmed to me that the Valleywag story about his layoffs was false. He said he is in the process of hiring still and not firing. This may have been in an effort to throw off TechCrunch’s scrutinized LayOff Tracker.
Webware.com, WebProNews, TC, ValleyWag
by Jason Wilk on October 9, 2008
- Wikinvest Wire takes high traffic financial blogs and syndicates their headlines across a network of related WikiInvest articles, other blog posts, and potentially mainstream media sites writing on similar topics.
- WikiInvest is the Wikipedia for financial news, giving readers an in depth look at topics and news not found in everyday mainstream financial sources.
- With their ‘blogwire’, they hope to help content creators come together on related topics to help investors make rash markket decisions in the bad weather.
- Two Questions:
- By having relative links to other sites at the bottom of my blog, won’t I stand to lose readers?
- Thanks for the potential traffic help, but will the traffic I send out to other blogs ever have a chance to be monetized?
I dont think it is relative info that everday investors need help with, its intelligent stock picks in this bad market. Places like Covestor need to become more mainstream (if their site was easier to use), so that we don’t have 2M viewers a day watching Mad Money. Its better to pay attention to multiple people’s portfolios who aren’t on television, because those are about as reliable as ESPN’s pick of the week.
TC
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