Devlin Consulting, Inc.

Are Atoms Really the New Bits?

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of the books, The Long Tail and the soon-to-be-released book called Free: The Future of a Radical Price, used the expression, ‘atoms are the new bits’ in his Twitter stream. To clarify what he means, he’s referring to the phenomenon of Open Source Hardware (OSH), a relatively recent trend that follows similar principles to those of Open Source Software. Chris recently ran two open source hardware projects called the Ardupilot and the Blimpduino so he’s quite experienced with open source hardware. Chris also has a great writing style and if Free is as well written as The Long Tail, I expect it will meet with the same kind of success and fanfare as his previous book.

The term open source software can have different meanings depending on its particular open source licensing agreement, of which there are many. In its simplest form, open source software means openly sharing the underlying instructions on how to reproduce a software product. For software to be truly open source, not only should the source code be provided, but the tools needed to modify and re-compile the source should also be readily available. The requirements for providing the source code is often subject to interpretation, and many companies claim to abide by the the open source licensing agreement yet fail to deliver the ability to modify the source. This usually happens because they’ve left out some critical files that may not be bound by open source licensing requirements, and if those files are necessary for compiling, then without them the open source files are not very useful.

Source code for commercial software is usually kept secret to insure that customers will actually pay for the software and to prevent competitors from gaining access to a company’s intellectual property. To insure payment, a company usually needs to prevent others from simply copying the source, compiling it, and distributing it. Most companies selling closed source software will even lock down the compiled bits with digital rights management schemes that make sure the payment is made before supplying a unique passcode to unlock it. Otherwise, the compiled code could be copied and shared freely once the first copy of it was purchased. If a company locks down the compiled code, providing the source code would be like providing the keys to everyone.

There are many different open source licensing agreements and they usually fall into categories somewhere between “do anything you want with it” to “always include my name in the credits.” Some are more restrictive, for example, such as “if you make money with my source code, then you must pay me, otherwise, it’s free.”

Software is virtually free to reproduce and distribute. Hardware is a little different. Before you can do anything with hardware, you not only need the instructions to put it together, but you must also acquire the physical material, i.e., the atoms. And unlike a free software compiler, turning hardware into a usable product requires material and capital equipment that can be expensive. Providing instructions on how to make a hardware product has some value but it is much less of a proportion of the final product’s overall value than it is for software. People are often willing to give away information for free, but if a product includes atoms and if you give them away for free, you’ll go broke eventually. In other words, if I give you information, I can still keep my copy of it, but if I give you something made from atoms, then I no longer have them. This is a critical distinction between atoms and bits.

How much of the value of software is just information or bits? Software is primarily information so the instructions on how to create it would account to nearly 100% of its value. Some would argue this point and say that software always needs user support, basically education on how to use it, and that information also has value. In fact, this portion of the value is where open source software companies generally seek to make their money. For a fee, they will answer questions about the free software or customize it for you.

How about hardware? Where is its value stored? With products made of atoms, there is always some material cost, and the percentage of cost attributable to the atoms can vary considerably depending on the product. For basic commodity products, one can argue that the cost of the atoms is very close to 100% of their value. That’s why farmers have to remain competitive with the current market prices for commodities. Just a few percentage point change in the wrong direction and the farmer loses money. Energy commodities like oil, coal, and gas have similar economic constraints.

Manufactured goods may have a much wider range margins. Luxury goods, for example, have material costs that may be a very small percentage of the selling price. Perfume and jewelery come to mind. But the other costs of selling luxury goods such as demand generation and retailer margins usually make up for the low percentage of the actual material costs.

In the case of consumer electronics, it’s been my experience that the material costs are typically 30-70% of the selling price. There are a few exceptions, of course, such as integrated circuits where actual material costs are a very low percentage of their price. But integrated circuits have enormous capital costs for the manufacturing equipment along with a high development cost for the circuitry. There are even loss leaders, where retailers will sell certain products below cost just to get customers to visit their store. But for the most part, a retailer needs to maintain some margin to make money.

So far, open source hardware has been primarily confined to small circuit boards for hobbyists to build gadgets. The Arduino hardware platform is starting to give open source hardware some new momentum. I think that the Arduino has the potential to be a game-changer because its open source nature is all-encompassing. Not only is the software and hardware open sourced, but so are its development tools. Products based on the Arudino hardware platform are not your typical consumer electronic products. An Arduino-based product might remind you of a science project. Granted, it would be more sophisticated than what passed for a science project a few years ago, but still a far cry from a product that would sit on the shelf at a retailer like Best Buy. In addition to the software that goes inside these gadgets, the schematics, parts list, and artwork files to produce the circuit boards are included, thus helping them to earn a description of truly being ‘open source hardware’.

Providing schematics for electronic products is nothing new. Many electronics equipment manufacturers provided schematics up until the past few decades when they no longer had much value because electronic products became so highly integrated that is wasn’t possible to repair them in the field. Schematics were generally included primarily to help someone repair the product when it failed. The printed circuit files that are now part of open source hardware are a new twist and they have some value to the consumer, but only if one intended to produce multiple copies of a circuit board. Otherwise, it is more economical to purchase the board from someone who is already selling them, preferably with components already soldered to them, due to the economics of building multiple vs. one-off products. But supplying board files does have the effect of limiting the markup one might ask for raw board since with these files, anyone could have a board manufacturer produce the boards, and maybe even add some new features or improvements to it. This additional information, along with the Creative Commons license invites competitors to produce your design and that has been virtually unheard of in the world of manufacturing.

Soldering together a kit of parts was a common activity for electronics enthusiasts before surface mount technology largely replaced the easy-to-hand-solder electronic components. I took great delight in putting together many electronics kits from Heathkit in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Although it is possible with some practice to solder surface mount components to circuit boards by hand, most hobbyists tend to avoid it. It requires patience, steady hands, and some form of optical magnification to do it properly. In production environments, assembling surface mount boards can only be done economically by expensive robotic pick-and-place machines.

I’ve long thought that it would be great to have a manufacturing machine that could take basic raw materials and some downloaded information to assemble them into a finished product. There’s actually a name for this concept. It’s called a Santa Clause machine. I could imagine a machine that took in recycled aluminum, possibly empty beer cans, and produced car parts like the frame, body, wheels, and engine. After downloading the information, the rate at which you could produce a car would only be limited by your rate of beer consumption (or you could collect cans from along side the road to speed things up, of course). In reality, the machines needed to manufacture any product today are highly specialized and would not lend themselves to putting together products atom-by-atom. But this hypothetical machine is fun to contemplate and has been a topic of frequent conversation by those who have trouble differentiating between science fiction and the real world. Many people think that rapid prototyping technology like stereolithograpy has ushered in a Santa Claus machine era, but I’ve been having plastic parts made with stereolithography for more than 15 years and despite solid progress, it’s still nowhere close in terms of cost, speed, and functionality of plastic injected molded parts and doesn’t seem to be destined to ever close that gap. Laser cutters allow you to quickly make some interesting 2D parts, but it has limited applications when making 3D parts. And, of course, you almost always need some metal components and there are no Santa Claus machines for those parts. I am not holding my breath for the Santa Claus machine to arrive.

There’s also the issue of regulatory compliance requirements which is where you have to get the approvals from regulatory agencies like the UL, FCC, CSA, CE, etc.. which basically make sure you don’t:

1. burn down someone’s house
2. electrocute anyone
3. interfere with radio reception

You think that might be easy to pass these certifications, but it’s actually quite involved. That’s what is required for basic consumer electronics products. Some industries have many more additional regulatory requirements. Many open source hardware enthusiasts seem to be blissfully unaware of these testing requirements. Until you’ve actually shepherded a few products through these regulatory approval gauntlets, you haven’t really designed anything the general public could purchase in large quantities. Hobbiest products generally fall below the radar when it comes to regulatory agencies. And when you meet these requirements, it’s important that the end consumer does not make changes to a product that would jeopardize the test results that allowed the approvals to be granted. For those who want to sell products that can be modified by end customers, it’s a bit of a Catch-22.

So are atoms really the new bits? I think open source hardware has definite potential for growth, but like Linux, it will appeal primarily to individuals who thrive on knowing how things actually work, that is, learners and do-it-yourselfers who are technology enthusiasts, or, in other words, less than 10% of the population. The rest of the world just wants to purchase finished products, preferably those that are aesthetically pleasing and carry the brand of a well-recognized company and/or have the endorsement of some celebrity.

When you’re an engineer, designing products for other engineers is technically engaging and fun. You’re basically designing for people who think like you do. Designing for the masses can have an element of drudgery because you may have to intentionally limit products to make them acceptable to non-technical people so they will be mass marketable. Is it possible to do both? That is, can you make something that is technically elegant and capable of modification, yet acceptable as a mass-marketed product? I don’t know for sure, but it’s always fun to dream it is, and if a product like that does come to fruition, it will likely emerge from the open source hardware community. It should be interesting to see what innovations arise from this new trend.

Would you sell foo foo dust?

One definition of “foo foo dust” is a product or feature that really doesn’t do anything, but promises nearly magical properties. It can be used to differentiate one’s products from a competitor’s offerings.

I once worked at a place that made robotic optical libraries. These libraries worked somewhat like a jukebox where the data resided on optical cartridges that were pulled from slots and inserted into drives where their data could be retrieved. Data stored in this manner is called ‘near line’ storage. That is, data that could not be accessed instantly, but could be accessed in under a minute without any human intervention.

The libraries came in sizes from a small desktop model with 16 cartridges and a single drive to products larger than a refrigerator that held 300 cartridges along with 12 drives. One of the innovations of our library was a dual-cartridge picker. This feature saved time because the robot could grab a cartridge and take it to a drive and remove the cartridge that was in the drive and insert the new cartridge without having to store the old cartridge first. That cut the cartridge ’swap time’ down from about 20 seconds to about 12 seconds, and swap time was very easy to measure and explain to a customer. Thus, it was easy to describe the dual cartridge picker as a competitive advantage. Everyone was pleased.

However, after we’d begun selling this miraculous innovation, someone in the organization reported that the robot was idle about 95% of the time in a typical data room application. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just remove the cartridge from the drive after it was no longer being accessed thus allowing the drive to be empty when the next request to load a cartridge came in? After all, when you got a command to insert a new cartridge into a drive, you had to make the decision about which drive to use so why not empty it during the long periods that the robot was idle? However, if the library did that, it would make the dual-cartridge picker feature useless. This report went over like a ton of bricks. It was not welcomed by the marketing people using the dual-cartridge picker to help sell the product, nor by the engineers whose names were all over the patents. The report was quietly swept under the rug, never to be mentioned again.

We had been unwittingly selling foo foo dust. We had a feature that sounded cool, was easy to explain in a few words, but one that didn’t actually deliver real value. When you dig deep, it’s not hard to find differentiators that sound good when you first hear about them, but that don’t really deliver true value.

It can be very awkward to point out a foo foo dust feature when there is a reverence bordering on worship its perceived value. Sometimes, the head honcho may even have been placed on high because of his involvement in introducing the foo foo dust. So even broaching the subject that you’re selling foo foo dust can be a career limiting move.

What can you do when you suspect your organization is trafficking in foo foo dust? One thing you can do is to bring in an independent party to evaluate the features that are being touted as competitive advantages and, without prejudice, get an honest evaluation on whether what you’re selling really adds value, or if it just give the sales people something to talk about. An independent party can make an evaluation without fear of a reprisal from anyone who has a stake in any potential foo foo dust features. Then at least you’ll know where you stand. If you’ve got features that aren’t actually delivering value yet still costing the customer money, you must ask yourself whether it safe to remove them without losing sales revenue. This can certainly pose a moral dilemma. But in the end, you’re better off avoiding features that add little or no value. The problem with foo foo dust features is that although they can help you sell your products, they will often come back to bite you when your customers find out that they were sold useless features, or perhaps even paid extra because they had been upsold those features.

The long term viability of an organization is best served by avoiding features whose only benefit is that they sound cool. It would be better to ask yourself, ‘If this feature is so great, why don’t any of our competitors offer it?’ And it would also be beneficial to smoke out any foo foo dust in your competitor’s product lines. For example, I’m sure our competitors would have loved to have a copy of the aforementioned report that had been quietly swept under the rug.

Cloud Storage: A Drain for Money and Data

Cloud storage is getting a lot of attention these days, and not all of it is good. Over the years, lots of money has been plowed into building a business model in subscription-based on-line storage. Many of these companies have already gone bust or have been acquired. Just recently there was an article that Carbonite, a leader in online storage, is suing a hardware provider for losing customer data.

A good backup strategy requires a multi-pronged approach, not a single “silver bullet” solution as cloud storage is sometimes thought to be. People who do backup for a living understand this, yet many consumers are just beginning to become aware of a need to keep irreplaceable data like digital photos safe from hardware failures, fire, theft, and natural disasters. A major attraction of cloud storage is that presumably the data is stored on very reliable hardware and looked after by IT professionals and copied to redundant, geographically distributed data centers. But if you’re happily storing your data in some amorphous data cloud, if any data goes missing, you might be the only one likely to notice. That may happen quickly if it is data that is accessed frequently, such as data on an active website, but in the case of an archive of digital photos, if you don’t bother to check them periodically it could be a few years before you might notice some or all of the photos are gone (most likely while you’re attempting to do a restore). If that happens, what are the odds of getting your data back? I’d say not very good, since backup media like tape in data centers is frequently re-cycled and overwritten. Sure, there may be an archive copy off-site in a box of tapes, but I’ve been down that road and I know where it leads, and it’s usually not to your lost data.

What happens if the cloud storage company isn’t able to cover its expenses and turns into a money loser for its investors, as has happened several times already? Odds are, they will cut and run, telling you in a hasty email that your data is there for the downloading. You have a month to get it, otherwise it’s gone forever. That’s what HP’s Upline service told its customers recently.

I don’t think that cloud storage is necessarily a bad idea, it’s just that it’s hard to make money with it because people don’t like paying perpetual monthly fees for a benefit that is largely invisible to them. Companies offering a service love recurring revenue models, and will go to extreme measures to create one, not unlike a crack dealer giving away the first hit for free. People do crazy things for crack, and companies do crazy things when they hear those magic words as if sung by angels, ‘recurring revenue stream’.

I was comparing the price of Amazon’s S3 service to using a web hosting account like GoDaddy as one’s personal cloud storage. For 150GB of storage and 1.5 TB of monthly throughput, GoDaddy charges $7/month. There are many other providers with similar hosting plans. For Amazon’s S3, it costs $.15/GB per month of storage + .10/GB bandwidth charge for uploading and $.17/GB for bandwidth charge for downloading. It sounds cheap, but if you already have a hosted website you may have about 145 GB of storage left over, and thus the web host solution is free whereas the Amazon S3 solution would set you back another $22/month for 145 GB of storage. And you would need to spend about $40 extra for the bandwidth to upload and download the data just once.

Moving 145 GB of data on a typical broadband connection with a capped upload speed of 1 Mbps would take about 300 hours (~13 days) of continuous uploading. That’s another downside to cloud computing. The data transfer times are usually deal breakers, if one bothers to do the math. Would you wait 2 weeks for a backup to complete? I sure wouldn’t. Even to restore that amount of data on a respectable 3 Mbps download connection would take more than 4 days. Again, not a very compelling solution.

There is a place for cloud storage, but it’s probably best done in small amounts, perhaps a few GB of really important digital photos, and in those cases, a simple regularly-scheduled upload to a web host would be the most economical way to go.

Making Products like Hollywood Makes Movies

Designing products is not like making movies, although today it seems to be moving in that direction. My friend Don, who spent 30 years in Hollywood as a film editor, sometimes felt like he was abandoned at the end of each major project and left to his own to find his next gig. Fortunately for him, he has amazing talent, and it became easier each time a project finished to find his next position. Over the years, he eventually worked for every major Hollywood studio. His last job was on the popular, long running series, called “Murder, She Wrote”. When you work on a long-running series, you don’t have to worry so much about what will happen to you after the season is over. There will always be the next season.

Designing successful products, if it has anything in common with Hollywood, should be thought of more like a long-running and popular series as opposed to a blockbuster movie. Each successive generation needs to build on the last generation like a foundation and, if you continue to do things right, everyone will know about your product. You don’t simply design a product, promote it like it’s going to be a blockbuster, and then abandon it if it fails to meet expectations.

There have been instances where popular TV series, both Seinfeld and The Office come to mind, struggled to find their audiences before they took off. People often forget the first tentative steps a successful series may take prior to what appears to be its apparent ‘overnight success’. Had the people who created these series cut and run at the first sign of struggle, we may never had heard of them.

Each generation of product has an opportunity to build on the strengths of its predecessor, eliminate its weaknesses, and thereby establish a loyal following. You wouldn’t tell the people who worked on each season of a TV series that you won’t be needing them again and they’re now ‘on their own’ and then scramble to hire a new cast for the next season. Similarly, a product development company must give the cast of characters who work on a project some incentive to stick around to work on successive generations. You want to avoid starting from scratch with each product generation and having to relearn everything over. If the only thing in store for the team at the end of the design cycle is a pink slip, they may decide to beat you to the punch and jump ship midway through the project.

The reason I’m writing this is because I’ve noticed a trend in the industry where companies try to create blockbuster products and if they don’t catch on immediately, they lay off the participants and move on to the next big thing. But successful product design doesn’t work that way. If you create and then quickly abandon products, you also abandon its customers, and they will think twice before investing their time, energy, and trust in you again. Not only that, the knowledge accumulated in the design process is extremely valuable and it’s not written down neatly in some manual you can refer to next time. It’s in the heads of the people who poured their hearts and souls into creating the product.

If you want to be successful in creating products, you need to start with the expectation that your product will be around for a few generations before it hits its stride. It’s not a good idea to hastily throw something together and get it out to customers to ’see if it sticks’, because if you do, your lack of commitment will shine right through, and the only thing that ’sticks’ will be a damaged reputation and the foul taste you’ve left in the mouths of customers who were naive enough to trust you.

Picture Keeper Demo

I’ve been planning to do a demo of Picture Keeper using a video screen capture so I could upload it to YouTube. My business partner, Matt, was thinking the same thing because he asked me about it right when I was getting ready to do it. Picture Keeper is very easy to describe, almost too easy, and it’s rare that technology products live up to its ’simple to use’ hype but I think this demo will show that PictureKeeper is one of the easiest-to-use computer backup products you’ll ever see. The Picture Keeper is a flash device that you plug into your PC (or Mac) that automatically finds your digital pictures and backs them up for safe keeping.

After putting together a 2 minute demo, I uploaded it to YouTube so you can see for yourself how easy it is to use:

The demo is not intended to be a professional commercial, just a way to quickly show how the product works for someone who has never seen it.

In case you’re a geek and want to know how I made this demo, I captured the video screen shots with CamStudio, which is a free download. The video of the actual product was captured with a very simple camera called a Flip. And I am not just the voice over person in the video, but the cameraman and hand model too ;-).

The audio was captured in Goldwave, which allows you to edit and filter the recorded audio and store it as an mp3 file. The video was edited together with Arcsoft’s Showbiz DVD that came with the HP DVD Movie Writer. That’s one of the products I helped design when I worked for HP and for which I maintain a FAQ.

The price of the Picture Keeper is $39.99 for the 4 GB model and $59.99 for the 8 GB model. For a limited time, with the special discount code ‘lee10‘, you can get $10 off when you place your order at PictureKeeper.com.

Ecopolis and the eJeepney

I recently watched a series on the Discovery Science channel entitled Ecopolis. The premise behind each of the 6-part series was to showcase 4 promising technologies intended to solve the environmental problems of a hypothetical megacity of the future named, appropriately enough, Ecopolis. There were 5 episodes that each focused on a different issue, such as food production, transportation, energy, and waste disposal. In each episode, Dan Kammen, a Nobel prize winning scientist, would select the technology he thought held the most promise to solve the most critical issues that large cities face today and in the future. The 6th episode was a recap of the previous episodes and of the individual episode winners. Kammen also chose his overall favorite in the last episode.

The winner from the transportation episode was the eJeepney. The Jeepney, which is a portnamteau of Jeep and Jitney is used in the Philippines as a form of taxi-bus that carries about 16 passengers. It is a sort of cross between an Army Jeep and a Jitney. The original Jeepneys were built up from surplus Army Jeeps that the U.S. military had left in the Philippines after WWII. Subsequent models have been built on various Japanese vehicle frames usually in back lot operations, but the name ‘Jeepney’ remains. It’s an iconic vehicle of Philippine cities.

The eJeepney is an electric version of the Jeepney that was designed and built by Robert Puckett with the support of Greenpeace. These vehicles were designed from the ground up to be optimized for an electric motor drive. I was surprised to find that it used only a 5 HP (3.7 KW) motor and yet was able to carry as many as 17 passengers. Its top speed is 40 kph (26 mph). An 8-hour charge costs around 120 Philippine Pesos (PHP) and allows it to travel up to 120 km (75 miles). A PHP is worth about $US .0211, or just over 2 cents so 120 PHP comes out to around $2.50. An equivalent fill of diesel fuel, which is what most conventional Jeepneys require to travel a similar distance would cost about $6.50. The cost of riding a Jeepney is set at 8 PHP for the first 4 km (2.6 mi). This is about 17 cents. The e-Jeepney prototypes were built in China at a cost of around $8000 each.

The advantage of electric vehicles in congested cities can be significant. When an electric vehicle isn’t moving, it’s not using energy and even when it is moving, it is not polluting the air like the diesel powered Jeepneys. Considering there are 450,000 registered Jeepneys in the Philippines, the pollution caused by their diesel engines is a major health hazard.

I did some research and found that the price of electricity in the Philippines is about the same as the U.S. or $.010/kWh. So I can deduce that it takes about 25 kWh to charge an eJeepney. This is about the daily electricity use of an average U.S. household. Taking into consideration the inefficiencies of charging, I would estimate the batteries to be rated around 20 kWh. They are most likely to be lead acid which would weigh around 500 kg (1100 lbs) and cost in the neighborhood of $2000. The eJeepney has body panels made from fiberglass to save weight. One blogger mentioned that the eJeepney weighs 900 lbs. and I’m quite sure that is without the batteries. In looking at the heavy metal construction and ornaments on the traditional Jeepneys, weight savings were never an important consideration for these vehicles. Assuming that the passengers weigh about 150 lbs each, that mean the gross weight is about 4500 lbs, or about the empty weight of my Dodge Durango.

Accelerating a load of 4500 lbs with a 5 HP engine is likely to be quite slow, and I’m not sure how it would get up a hill at gross weight, so my guess is that the routes would of necessity need to be quite level for these vehicles to make sense.

Another proposal related to these vehicles was to generate the electricity for them with organic waste converted to methane by anaerobic digesters, similar what’s happening in some landfills in the U.S. With the combination of the electric drive and electricity from a renewable fuel source, the benefits of the eJeepney gave it the nod for the overall winner of the Ecopolis series as well.

Sometimes people think that better public transportation is the solution to all that ails modern society. There certainly are instances where taking public transit is more convenient than driving. But I have to admit, like many Americans, I have a love affair with the freedom provided by my personal vehicles. Public transportation is a hard sell once you’ve tasted the exhilaration of being in command of your own vehicle. However, I’ll be the first to admit that a personal vehicle in a congested city is a major pain and I’m grateful for an efficient public transportation whenever I visit a bustling city, but when you’re located anywhere else on the planet, it’s hard to get along without one’s own personal ride. So while I can appreciate the eJeepney’s value in a huge metropolis, we don’t all live in cities, so I’d also like to see some more effort expended on making personal transportation more environmentally friendly.

For example, if you can get me one of these at a reasonable price, I’ll be very interested.

LinkedIn for the iPhone

A few weeks ago I was a panelist at NoCoNet on the topic of LinkedIn. In addition to many excellent questions, the audience also provided numerous useful tips on LinkedIn. The tip I found most helpful was the availability of a LinkedIn iPhone application. Like many other iPhone apps, this one is free and can be downloaded in about a minute from App Store. If you have a smartphone with a web browser other than an iPhone, you can use LinkedIn from it simply by going to http://m.linkedin.com. It’s not quite as nice as the custom iPhone application, but it is still quite useful.

In my last tip posted about LinkedIn, I had recommended using an RSS feed to keep track of your network updates. LinkedIn has the Network Updates feature prominently displayed on your LinkedIn Home page, but the updates age off quickly, usually in a day or less, especially as your network grows larger. That makes it hard to keep up with them. Thus, one option is to use an RSS feed which can capture and store them until you have a chance to sit down and scroll through them. I have found that the iPhone application works even better than the web-based Network Updates feature, since it captures much more history, although not as much as history as the RSS feed. Still, the ability to scroll through your network updates during a spare moment using your iPhone is a good way to make use of what might otherwise be unproductive time.

The iPhone includes a Safari web browser and it works better than any web browser than I’ve tried on a 2.4″ screen, but browsing the web on a screen that small is something you’ll only do when you have to, sort of like driving around on a tiny “space saver” spare tire. As soon as you have access to a larger screen, the iPhone goes back in your pocket. However, if a web application is written specifically for a small screen, it can work very well, and the LinkedIn folks have done an excellent job at repurposing LinkedIn’s data for such a small screen. I’ve included a few screen shots from Jerry Luk’s blog posting where he introduced the application.

One of the best features is that you are able to contact anyone in your network from the iPhone, even if you haven’t stored their contact information, since it can send the email through LinkedIn’s email service. That way you don’t have to let your personal contact list swell to a size where it’s no longer very useful.

Keeping tabs on what’s going on with your network is part of why we network with others in the first place. When you have an awareness of who in your network is changing jobs, or connecting with a mutual long-lost friend, or just knowing what other people in your network are working on, you can be a much more engaged networker.

Will LED lighting replace CFL lighting?

One of the frustrating aspects about renewable energy is that it is a highly technical field but it is followed passionately (and sometimes written about) by people who don’t know the difference between a watt, a BTU, a volt, or any of the mathematical and technical terms that are critical to understanding energy.

I was reading an article on LED lighting yesterday that had been mentioned in one of my LinkedIn groups and found that it used one of my pet peeves, mentioning CO2 reductions in the same sentence as energy savings. We should not care what the CO2 savings are when it comes to fossil fuels. All we need to know is that if the fossil fuel consumption is reduced by x%, then its CO2 output will be reduced by a similar percentage. Yet percentage saving are almost never mentioned. Some fossil fuels generate a little more CO2 per BTU than others, but it’s not important in the grand scheme of things. The important thing is that fossil fuels produce CO2 from carbon that has not been in the atmosphere for millions of years and that has the effect of increasing the atmospheric CO2 concentration when they are mined and burned. This is something we should try to avoid, because its consequences could be dire should it change the climate to make our planet inhospitable for humanity. Burning any carbon-containing fuel, including biomass like wood, alcohol, or biodiesel also produces similar amounts of carbon dioxide per unit of energy; it’s just that it is carbon dioxide that was recently in the atmosphere, not ancient carbon hidden under the earth’s crust, so it doesn’t increase the overall atmospheric CO2 concentration. And that is a vital distinction.

Most people have no idea how much a ton of CO2 really is. We don’t think of gases in terms of how much they weigh. Here’s a hint: If you’re an American, your fossil fuel per capita allocation is one ton of CO2 into the atmosphere approximately every 2 weeks. A ton sounds like a lot, but it’s not as big as you think when you consider that we each put 24 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year. Yes, we need to reduce it, and the only way to do that is by decreasing our overall fossil fuel consumption. OK, enough about ranting about my pet peeve, let’s get on to the LED lighting claims made by the article.

The article claimed that LED lighting would save $1.8 trillion, or 1 billion barrels of oil, and 10 gigatons of CO2 over 10 years. I wondered if anyone else bothered to do some simple calculations about these claims, like the fact that $1.8 trillion for 1 billion barrels of oil comes out to $1800/barrel, which is about 40 times its current price. Also, a barrel of oil weighs about 290 lbs, and burning a barrel of oil results in about 900 lbs of CO2. If you multiply a liquid fossil fuel’s weight by 3, it gives you a pretty accurate estimate of the amount of CO2 it generates when burned. Yet the conversion factor for the 10 gigatons for 1 billion barrels implies a yield of 10 tons of CO2 per barrel, or 20,000 lbs per 290 lbs of oil. This is off by more than a factor of 20.

It’s hard to imagine LED lighting saving so much money. For now I’ll ignore the fact that oil isn’t used very much for generating electricity. I’ll assume that the author was thinking in terms of “barrels of oil equivalent”. But the money savings don’t seem to hold up to scrutiny either.

I wrote an article on CFLs and my findings were that about 9% of electric energy usage in the home is due to lighting. CFLs can cut that by 75%, which means that their overall impact on home electricity use would generate around a 7% savings. That takes the lighting load down to about 2.3% of the total electrical load in a house.

Now that the low hanging fruit has already been eaten, LED lighting can only affect 2% of a typical electric bill. Although the article implies it can reduce that by a factor of 5, I think it would be at most half. I’ve found that LEDs are about 2 or 3 times more efficient in a lumens/watt metric than CFLs, not 5 times. Here are some typical luminous efficacy ratings of incandescents, CFLs, and LEDs from that article’s source:

Incandescent                  16 lumens/watt
CFL                           64 lumens/watt
LED                          213 lumens/watt

A typical 60W incandescent bulb produces around 870 lumens of light. To get the equivalent amount of light, i.e., lumens, from LED bulbs it would cost over $100 compared to $1.50 for an equivalent CFL bulb. It would take a very long time to pay back that difference. A 60-watt equivalent CFL bulb uses about 13 watts, and using the more generous ratio given above (3.3), an equivalent set of LED bulbs would use 4 watts. This is a savings of 9 watts. Assuming a cost of $.10/kWh, it would take 110,000 hours or 12.5 years of continuous usage for the $100 of LED bulbs to break even with the CFL’s cost. Obviously, the cost of LED technology will need to come down significantly to make it competitive with CFLs.

LEDs have the benefit of using no mercury, unlike CFLs which do, but I covered the mercury issue in my CFL article so I won’t repeat it here. I also calculated the beneficial heat that is lost in the winter time when switching from incandescent bulbs. The extra heat generated by incandescent lights helps to reduce the furnace’s heating load, although not by much, just over 1%.

I think CFLs will be the heir apparent to incandescent bulbs for indoor applications for quite some time especially when you get above a hundred lumens. LEDs will reign supreme for battery powered applications where light output is less than 100 lumens and where the extra energy savings are vitally important. LEDs will also continue to find their way into applications where environmental ruggedness and long life are important.

Amish Heat Surge Miracle Heater Scam

I saw a two-page ad in the Rocky Mountain News this week about some new miracle heater called the ‘Amish Heat Surge‘ and it fell into the category of things that sounded to me to be ‘just a little fishy’. Later I saw a commercial for the same product. Sure enough, after doing some calculations, I figured out that this is just a scam to overcharge people for a cheap electric heater made in China. Searching the Internet, I found a few unhappy customers who fell for it. Even though the heaters are ‘free’, you pay $298 for the ‘Amish authentic wood mantles’ that enclose them. In reality, there’s no reason to wrap an electric heater with a wooden box or mantle. It also has some sort of fake fire effect. Oh, and shipping costs $50 EACH. And they’ll stick you with an extended warranty for $28 each. So for around $770, you’d get a pair of heaters that do the same thing as a pair of $21 electric heaters you can pick up at Wal-Mart. The people who run scams like this have no shame.

A 5,119 BTU/hr heater generates about 1/20th the heat produced by a household furnace. It will draw 1.5 kW. For every hour this thing runs, it will cost about $.15 in electricity, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but over a 730 hour month, that adds up to an extra $108 on your electric bill. Electric resistive heat is the most expensive way to heat a house. It costs about twice as much per BTU as natural gas heat. Just to put it in another perspective, a 2,100 sq. ft. house in my home state of Colorado uses about 6 therms of natural gas a day in the coldest winter months. At the current gas price of $1.20 per therm, a typical gas bill is $216/month during the winter months. To heat your house to the same temperature with this electric heater, you’d need to have 5 of these heaters operating at the high setting 24 hours a day. The additional monthly charges on your electric bill for just the heaters would be $540!

The ad talks about only using it to heat zones, which can save on your heating bill, of course, but only at the expense of having some of the rooms in your home being uncomfortably chilly. And you can’t really completely turn off your central furnace without the risk of pipes freezing. In other words, if you put a heater like this in the room that has your furnace’s thermostat, and thus your furnace never comes on, you may freeze pipes in a remote part of the house.

The ad is full of nonsense, such as requiring a special savings code that expires in 48 hours, or you’d otherwise pay $587 each! There is a limit of 2 per household and they need to ‘turn away dealers’ because they can’t keep up with demand.

If you’re one of the people reading this article who bought an Amish Heat Surge heater, please note that I mean no disrespect to you. I’m just tired of con artists using slick advertising to suck people into buying things that aren’t worth even 1/10 the sales price.

In Defense of the SUV

I’ve written a lot about renewable energy and so people might classify me as an environmentalist, a tree hugger, if you will. I thought it would be time to address the 4700 lb. elephant in the garage. That’s right, like many Americans, I own a Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV). It’s a 1999 Dodge Durango that I bought 10 years ago and I hope to be able to keep for at least another 10 years.

It seems that over the past few years, SUVs have been getting a black eye in the court of public opinion so I wanted to write a little about why I think they remain so popular in spite of their status as gas guzzlers.

There are those who think that anyone who drives an SUV is an enemy of the environment and deserves to be vilified for it. After all, most commuting is done solo, and it is wasteful to be carrying all the weight of an SUV simply to move a single person around. It’s almost as if SUV critics feel everyone should be required to use either public transportation or a compact vehicle that gets at least 40 mpg? My Durango gets 14.7 mpg average, 19 mpg highway. In warm weather, I ride a motorcycle which gets about 50 mpg and that helps to improve my annualized personal fuel economy. In the past few years, I’ve used the motorcycle for nearly half my annual miles driven. A small economy car could provide a similar fuel economy as my combination of SUV/motorcycle, but that solution doesn’t work for me. I prefer having an SUV and a motorcycle to having a small economy car.

Why are SUVs still outselling hybrids more than 10:1 and were doing so even when recent U.S. gas prices climbed to over $4/gallon? I’d say that much of the reason is because the SUV has fewer limitations than most other vehicles. They just seem to be able to ‘do it all’. For example, there have been several instances where the Durango has allowed me to get home in snow storms that would have been unthinkable in a 2-wheel drive vehicle. Each time that’s happened, the peace of mind that 4WD provided more than paid for its increased operating cost. Many critics of SUVs will point to the fact that SUV owners rarely, if ever, take them off the road. But if you live in any state that gets regular home delivery of snow, you will likely put your SUV in 4WD at least a few times per winter season. For a one-week period around Christmas a few years ago with well above average snowfall, SUVs were the only vehicles with enough ground clearance to make it out of our neighborhood. The Durango also can hold 7 adults, making it possible to leave an extra car in the parking lot when carpooling. I have carried 4′ x 8′ sheets of plywood in it and filled enough wood to rebuild a deck. I carried the fuselage of my airplane inside it as well as its 300 lb. engine and each of its wings, one at a time, of course. I’ve towed a camper with it. I’ve actually driven it off-road along with a 4 person crew to repair a ham radio repeater at the top of a mountain. It’s truly a versatile machine with its only limitation being its fuel economy when compared to a compact car.

When I was younger I was a boy scout. The boy scout motto is ‘be prepared’. An SUV helps its owner to be prepared for virtually anything. Sure, there are many missions where I could use a more fuel efficient vehicle, but I don’t want to own multiple cars, one for each potential mission. Our garage is only big enough for two cars and a motorcycle. And just owning a vehicle costs money, even if you don’t drive it. Each vehicle has a capital expense, which needs to be amortized over the miles driven in its lifetime, along with insurance, ownership taxes, and periodic maintenance. Sitting parked in your garage, a vehicle costs money whether it’s used or not. And the capital expense of owning a vehicle usually constitutes a larger per mile expense than its fuel bill.

My wife has a BMW 328i sedan that gets 28 mpg, about twice the fuel economy of the Durango. It’s a great car and a lot of fun to drive. When we go on long trips in nice weather, we often take it instead of the SUV. Recently, we flew to the east coast for a week and when contemplating which vehicle to leave at the airport, we both independently arrived at the same conclusion. Since it was winter, and we didn’t know what kind of weather to expect when we returned, we chose the Durango. Sure enough, when we returned we landed late at night in a blizzard. But it was no problem to get home in the Durango. It would have been a harrowing, white-knuckle, 2-hour drive if we had instead chosen the sedan, and it could have ended up in a ditch in need of a tow, like several others we saw on the way home.

The major costs of owning a car can be divided into the categories of purchase price and operating costs. Operating costs are comprised of items such as insurance, taxes, maintenance, and fuel. The annual fuel cost for most vehicles is surprisingly low in comparison to these other costs. Compared to the purchase price, fuel may be just a small percentage per mile. That’s why people who can afford to spend $60K on a 10-mpg Hummer H2 are not deterred by having to spend $5K per year for the fuel. They could instead have a 45-mpg hybrid along with a $1000 annual fuel bill but it’s a not an issue if they can afford the Hummer’s gas. Now I know there are some who think that fossil fuels belong to everyone and it’s not fair for someone to use more than their ‘fair share’. I have to wonder when a resource is finite and irreplaceable, what would constitute a reasonable ‘fair share’ per person. Because I use my motorcycle in the warmer months, my SUV has been averaging less than 5,000 miles a year, and so it’s actually burning less fuel annually than a compact car racking up 15,000 miles a year. A vehicle’s fuel economy isn’t the only factor that determines how much of an impact someone is having on the environment. A person’s transportation-related carbon footprint also includes the amount of travel one does annually.

If your job requires you to travel frequently by jet, you may be using large quantities of fossil fuels even if you don’t own a car. I’ve known people who fly more than 100,000 miles a year and don’t seem to realize that it also impacts their overall energy consumption and hence their carbon footprint. I find it particularly ironic when energy efficiency evangelists jet all over the world spreading the gospel about conserving energy as they themselves seem to be unaware that their air travel is generating a huge carbon impact. It’s a case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’. Sometimes they buy carbon credits, thinking it makes up for their ‘unavoidable’ energy use. That seems to me as nothing more than purchasing indulgences to assuage their guilt.

Public transportation vehicles use fossil fuels in large quantities, although many public transportation proponents don’t seem to realize it. Commercial jets typically average 50 miles per passenger per gallon, buses around 80, and trains around 200. These are typical values, not the maximum theoretical numb

ers, which would assume 100% seat utilization (source). Most public transportation vehicles need to have excess capacity and thus travel many miles with empty seats. A person who flies enough to make it to an airline’s annual 100K club uses more oil than a Hummer driver racking up 20,000 miles per year.

Sometimes when people talk about hybrid cars and public transportation, they seem to feel that if everyone would just start using these modes of transportation exclusively, both the fossil fuel depletion and global warming problems would be solved. They won’t. Better fuel economy just pushes the problem out a few years since those modes of transportation consume fuel too. And since these more efficient modes are often erroneously considered to be virtually carbon-free, people may be induced to travel more miles annually.

We all like to have our mobility. Our modern society is defined by it. If we had to travel exclusively by foot or on horseback, you can rest assured we’d do a lot less of it. I’ve certainly done my share of traveling and so I’m in no position to criticize others for their travel habits.

So if you own an SUV, I recommend you keep it. If you feel guilty about it, you can try to drive it fewer miles per year, if possible. You can augment your travel needs with a motorcycle, scooter, or bicycle. Or work from home when you can. Having an SUV will allow you to be prepared for anything and keep you from joining the ranks of those who smugly berate SUVs and their owners with adjectives like ‘revolting, insidious, and despicable’.