The Next Net

Disruptors Video: Tomorrow's Light (Cree)

If there ever was a disruptive technology, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) certainly fit the bill.  They are slowly but surely taking over more and more lighting applications, from cell phones and signs to street lamps and indoor lighting.  Only in recent years, though, have LEDs that produce white light come into their own.  Since LEDs are semiconductors, they are still climbing a technology curve that will make them brighter, cheaper, and more energy-efficient.  One day, they may even replace the lowly light bulb.  And that would be a good thing, snce lighting consumes about 22 percent of all of our energy.

In this week's episode of The New Disruptors, I visit John Edmond and John Palmour, the co-founders of LED-maker Cree in Raleigh, NC (see earlier post here) to find out how far these little lights can go.  I also talk to the mayor of Raleigh, which is replacing all of its outdoor municipal lighting with LEDs to save on the city's energy bills (Toronto is following suit).  Watch the video.  Full transcript after the break.

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Disruptors Video: Eco-condos of the Future (Greenbridge)

This August, ground will break for what will be one of the most eco-friendly residential buildings in the country: Chapel Hill, North Carolina's Greenbridge Developments.  When I was in Chapel Hill this spring, I caught up with the managing partner Tim Toben, and shot this video, which just went up on CNNMoney. (Full transcript after the break).

Greenbridge is a 99-unit building that is LEED-certified. Solar thermal heaters will heat its water, roof gardens will provide insulation to keep the whole building cool, runoff rainwater will be captured for irrigation, hybrid Zipcars will be available for residents in the garage (to offset the one-parking-spot-per-family rule).  Designed by architect William McDonough, whose Cradle to Cradle philosophy eschews using materials that might end up in a landfill, the building uses locally-sourced and recyclable materials instead and is expected to consume half as much energy as a more conventional building. 

Residential buildings consume one fifth of all the energy in this country.  If more of them go green, we could reduce our dependence on foreign fossil fuels, lower our electricity bills, and help fight global warming.

Meraki Introduces Solar-Powered WiFi

WiFi mesh networks are now going solar.  Meraki Networks, a startup funded by Google and Sequoia Capital, today announced a $99 solar-powered wireless router/repeater that can create a mesh network with other similar routers.  (The $99 is only for the weatherproof router. The solar panel has not yet been priced.  Both should be available by August).

You can think of mesh networks as the next step after WiFi.  Today, there are tens of thousands of WiFi hotspots around the world.  But each one extends broadband Internet access no more than a few hundred feet.  A mesh network ties these WiFi routers to each other to create a bigger network that can cover a neighborhood or even an entire city.  I met up with CEO Sanjit Biswas when he was in New York a couple weeks ago.  He told me:

Meraki is a service, like municipal WiFi.  The economics of access changes when you create a big network.

One Meraki-powered mesh network in Slovakia, where DSl lines cost $100 a month, supports 350 people.  Another in San Diego, the So Cal Free Net, is serves 600 low-income residents with only three business-class DSL lines.   And Meraki itself is bringing a free WiFi mesh network to parts of San Francisco (this is separate from Google's project to cover the entire city with free WiFi hotspots). 

Currently there are 1,000 Meraki mesh netwoks worldwide with about 40,000 users.  Normally, each of these routers would have to be plugged into an electrcial outlet.  But now they can be solar-powered, which should help Meraki with it's stated goal of trying to bring "Internet acces to the next billion people."  Meraki's mesh technology is also being incorporated into each One Laptop Per Child computer (as students, Meraki's founders had previously created MIT Roofnet in Boston).

Once a wireless mesh network is set up, it can either be free to consumers and supported by ads—which might make sense in dense cities, although Biswas says there is too little local ad inventory to support that business model at this point—or whoever sets up the network can charge access fees ($10 a month is typical).   Meraki's software takes care of managing the network traffic as well as billing, whether by credit card or prepaid card.  Operators can choose to charge whatever they want or offer it for free and put up ads.  Meraki takes a 20 percent cut.  Says Biswas:

You probably have a better idea of what you should charge in Zimbabwe than I do.

Meraki's biggest weakness is that it fails to link, or at least give the option to link, the separate networks being built out on its technology. Contrast that approach to that of Fon or other WiFi communities where if you are a member you can log on anywhere in the world there happens to be a network.  With Meraki's mesh networks, people are building 1,000 standalone islands.

What would really be disruptive would be to connect them all together.

The Greenest Laptop on the Planet

  Closeup of keyboard 
  Originally uploaded by curiouslee.

The One Laptop Per Child non-profit headed up by MIT's Nicholas Negroponte is coming up against its self-imposed deadline of May 31 to secure three million orders for its little green computers.  Lots of developing countries have shown interest, but none have yet signed on the dotted line.  In a 60 Minutes segment, Negroponte accuses Intel of trying to scuttle One Laptop Per Child's chances of success by pushing its own $400 Classmate laptop to the same education ministries around the globe.

Even at $176 per laptop, government officials in places like Brazil or Cambodia are understandably wary of spending scarce funds on an unproven technology.  Maybe Negroponte should pound the drum harder not just on the affordability of his laptops, but on how they are also much more environmentally friendly than the alternatives.

One Laptop Per Child's chief technology officer Mary Lou Jepsen attended a Disruptors roundtable I held three weeks ago at MIT, where she pulled out a $5 flexible solar panel her team had designed to help power up the laptops.  The day before I had visited her at One Laptop's offices, where she took me through many of the features of the computer. 

If every computer on the planet were replaced with one of these, she calculates it would save at least $11 $8.5 billion in electricity costs alone.  These little laptops are so energy efficient that they are designed to run for 8 to 10 hours on a single charge.  They can do that in part because they are so stripped down—with no hard drives and screens that can use the sun as their light source—and in part because the computer shuts down anything that is not being used at that moment.  So there is no idling, which drains the battery.

In addition to the solar panel, Jepsen's team is also exploring other accessories for charging the laptops off the grid in a pinch, including hand cranks, foot pedals, car-battery chargers, and a pull-string device that looks like a giant yo-yo.  (Sadly, I accidentally broke one of the yo-yo prototypes by yanking it too hard. Yes, I do feel like a total jerk who is now depriving some kids in Cambodia of a way to keep their laptops running.  But, in my defense, that string was pretty flimsy).

So how green is this computer?  In comparison to a typical laptop, the One Laptop design is:

—Half the weight
—Half the size
—Free of any mercury, cadmium, lead, or other hazardous substances
—Easily recyclable
—Uses one third as many parts
—Consumes one-tenth as much power
—Promises four times more total battery life

Take that Intel (and Apple, for that matter).

Cleantech By The Numbers

A new report by Lux Research tallies up the growing interest and investment in clean and green technologies.  Some highlights:

There were 29,874 scientific publications on cleantech topics in 2006.

There were 4,093 cleantech patents issued last year:

And articles in the general press have spiked since 2004, rising 70 percent a year to 3,485 articles in 2006:

Total funding of cleantech R&D from government, corporate, and venture capital sources was $48 billion last year.  Of that, venture capital was the smallest ($2 billion), but the fastest-growing (double 2005's $985 million). The majority of dollars from all sources went into clean energy projects and startups.