Replace Laptop battery in NZ Friendly, Reliable Professional Distributor!

12May/110

Google wants to control your house with Android

Google wants Android to move into people's homes with the open-source software powering everything from smart light bulbs to sound systems.

More than 5,000 software savants at Google's annual developers conference in San Francisco on Tuesday were shown an "Android@Home" software platform for making dumb devices smart and robots manageable.

Among the innovations on display were light bulbs that can be controlled by Android-powered gadgets and a Tungsten sound system that could be synced to Google's freshly-launched internet "cloud" music storage service.

Android light bulbs are to hit the market by the end of the year and developers were invited to turn them into smartphone-controlled alarm clocks for waking people up in the mornings.

"We are extending the Android platform into the home," said Google senior vice president of mobile Andy Rubin.

"It's a lot of fun," he continued. "The power of Android is that it can be used by a lot of people in a lot of different ways. We are going to see some pretty interesting stuff."

The technology has the potential to turn Android smartphones or tablets into remote controls for lights, appliances, irrigation systems, thermostats and more, according to Google.

"It is basically connecting lots of things together that inherently weren't designed that way," Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney said of Android@Home.

"So many devices are becoming smart and connected, and Android is looking to become the technology to do that."

While Microsoft has talked for decades about software giving brains to dumb devices in homes without bringing the vision to the masses, Google could succeed due to its open-source model, according to the analyst.

Android is free, as compared to proprietary Microsoft software, and developers can customize it to devices as they wish.

The growth of Android@Home could depend on the availability of tiny, low-cost chips so that innovations are practical to make and affordable to buy, according to Dulaney.

"Android is so strong that it could come together," the analyst said.

Android was intended from the outset to go beyond powering smartphones, according to Google product manager Hugo Barra.

A display area at the conference was devoted to robots powered by Android software.

"We think there are a crazy number of new opportunities for developers to create new software," Google engineering director Joe Britt said after demonstrating Android@Home.

"There is a hydroponic grow system being controlled by an Android device," he continued with a chuckle. "We never would have thought of that."

3May/110

Google Puts $100M into Shepherds Flat Wind Farm

Google upped its total clean energy spend to $350 million after pumping $100 million into the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm April 18.

Spanning over 30 square miles in Arlington, Ore., Shepherds Flat is expected to cost $2 billion to build and should produce 845 megawatts of electricity, or enough to fuel more than 235,000 homes, when it is completed by developer Caithness Energy in 2012.

That would make it the largest wind farm in the world, said Rick Needham, Google's director of Green Business Operations, in a blog post.

Clean or renewable energy includes hydroelectricity, solar energy, wind energy, wave power, geothermal energy, bioenergy and tidal power.

Google, a massive consumer of energy to power the thousands of computers that fuel its search and Web services, has pumped more than $350 million into clean energy, coming mostly in wind and/or tidal energy.

Google last October invested in the Atlantic Wind Connection backbone to power offshore windmills by connecting undersea cables along the Atlantic coast. Google last May seeded two NextEra wind farms in North Dakota with $38.8 million.

The Shepherds Flat development, easily Google's biggest wind power fund to date, is the first commercial wind farm in the United States to leverage turbines that use permanent magnet generators to boost the efficiency of wind power generation. Such generators are also called alternatives because they generate alternating current.

General Electric, a co-investor in Shepherds Flat along with Google, Japan's Sumitomo Corp. and a unit of Itochu, manufactured the turbines and is the operations and maintenance supplier.

The electricity produced at Shepherds Flat will be sold under long-term agreements to Southern California Edison. This will help Google endear itself to its home state of California, as Needham said the project will help California meet its renewable energy goals.

Google's funding for Shepherds Flat comes less than a week after the company invested $168 million for Brightsource's Ivanpah solar power tower in the Mojave Desert and $5 million for a solar photovoltaic plant near Berlin.

< News From Notebookbattery.co.nz >