Rebecca Day

Netgear is repositioning the home router as a “platform” rather than just a hardware gateway into the home, Phil Pyo, director of product marketing, told Consumer Electronics Daily last week. “The role of the router is changing,” he said, because of the increasing number of Internet-based apps available and advanced features that the company is building into its products to address different consumer needs. “It’s not just about the router anymore,” he said. The home router of the future, he said, will have “different things” and be more of a hybrid network, to “give people choices about how they connect” with extenders, bridges and powerline options.

Reaching mainstream consumers is critical in the evolution of the smart grid ecosystem, said attendees at Parks Associates’ Smart Energy Summit in Austin, Texas, this week. “How do we get to mass?” said Kris Bowring, senior director of emerging business for Best Buy, who told us the retailer is testing “very basic” energy management products including thermostats, electronic locks, Internet gateways and cameras in 45 stores to gauge consumer interest and willingness to invest in energy management products. The trial stores were “picked for different reasons,” Bowring said, to determine how energy is consumed and generated and how advanced the utilities are in particular markets. “We mapped to stores that were already doing energy efficiencies and energy savings,” he said. Bowring wouldn’t say when the products will go national. “You're seeing the evolution of the technology now, and then we're trying to help the consumer understand how and why this is important, what’s available to them and how it can simplify their life,” he said. One of the biggest challenges for everybody in the smart grid chain is “making it simple and relevant through education and understanding,” Bowring said. For energy management to hit the mass market, “it must be independent of the smart meter but also able to work with the smart meter,” he said, so when consumers receive smart meters from the utility, they'll be able to understand their consumption in relationship to demand. “The meter has to be paired and information exchange needs to happen,” Bowring said, and when consumers can see how their choices affect energy use, “that will change their behavior,” he said. He described the expected progression as “peeling the onion": Once consumers understand what they can do with technology, “they'll want to know what else they can do.”

AUSTIN, Texas -- How to engage the consumer in energy and management was the main theme of the Parks Associates Smart Energy Summit this week, and utilities will have to learn a new way to communicate with consumers if they're going to navigate the transition successfully, participants said. Multiple issues stand in the way of broad consumer adoption of energy management products and services including reluctance to cede power to utilities in a demand-response smart meter program, cost -- if the return on investment isn’t enough to justify consumers to spend for energy management services -- lack of education about the benefits of energy management, and varying levels of consumer comfort with technology, said Ron Ambrosio, a staffer at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center. He’s also chairman emeritus of the U.S. Department of Energy’s GridWise Architecture Council.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Demand from electric vehicles and increasing use of solar panels will be major drivers of smart grids and residential energy management systems over the next few years, said Andres Carvallo, chief strategy officer of Grid Net, a Dallas-based company that’s developed what it calls a “universal smart grid operating system.” Carvallo keynoted Tuesday at the Parks Associate’s Smart Energy Summit.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Significant opportunities are said to await Internet service providers as smart grid deployment expands and consumers have the option to monitor and manage their home energy usage. While utilities wrestle with new models of interacting with consumers in a two-way environment, giving consumers control in what has been a decidedly one-way relationship, telcos and cable companies are hoping to grab a bit of the smart grid action.

AUSTIN, Tex. -- Finding ways to monetize residential energy management remains a key challenge facing utilities, technology and software companies, broadband providers and appliance makers, officials said, as consumers have pushed back on smart meter deployments from utilities in the home, where available, and shown a general unwillingness to translate concerns about energy usage to their wallets. A key thread for the residential energy world, said Stuart Sikes, president of Parks Associates at its Smart Energy Summit is, “We don’t know what consumer interest is."

With new home construction still in the doldrums and well off its peak of 1.8 million housing starts in 2006, according to the National Association of Home Builders, the smart grid is offering home automation company Control4 new life and a foot in the door to a segment of customers the company hasn’t typically reached, Control4 President Glen Mella told us. “We believe utilities represent one channel for deploying a technology footprint into a large number of homes,” he said, saying 80 percent of the company’s business goes through custom installation and retail channels.

The Comeback: How Innovation Will Restore the American Dream by CEA President Gary Shapiro reached No. 5 on the Wall Street Journal nonfiction bestseller list Thursday. The 224-page book, released Jan. 6 to coincide with the Consumer Electronics Show, has a $24.95 list price at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, but by last week, perhaps fittingly for a book coming out of the consumer electronics industry, had been discounted to $14.81 online at BN and Amazon. Barnes & Noble said last month (CED Dec 8 p5) that no version would be available for the Nook e-reader, but we bought a NOOKbook of The Comeback last week for $9.99. A Barnes & Noble spokeswoman told us that the publisher decides whether a book will be made available in e-book format. The Kindle e-book edition also was $9.99.

The installed base of Web-enabled stationary CE devices is expected to jump by a factor of six by 2014 to more than 230 million units, according to In-Stat. Analyst Keith Nissen said consumer adoption of online applications through Web-enabled CE devices -- including digital TVs, Blu-ray players, set-top boxes, videogame consoles, DVRs and network storage devices --is driving the growth, especially in the U.S. and Europe, where online video is readily available. He said consumer adoption of apps on Web-enabled TVs will be regional and sometimes country-specific. China, he noted, has “very little licensed video entertainment content available for delivery over the Internet."

Coby will decide this quarter whether to spin off V-Zon as a separate brand. The company has been testing the brand at P.C. Richard & Son stores to decide whether marketing a separate second brand “is a viable strategy,” Michael Troetti, president of Coby Electronics, told Consumer Electronics Daily. Coby V-Zon is the company’s sub-brand for portable DVD players and the company’s MPEG-4 video player, he noted.