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Green Bits for Nov 18th 2010

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Green bits

A few bits of Green News crossed my Inbox in the last couple of days so I thought I’d compile them into a short post –

  1. The Vodafone Americas Foundation and mHealth Alliance announced the last call for entries for the annual competition to identify and support promising wireless-related technologies to address critical social issues around the globe. Applications for the 2010 Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Project? and mHealth Alliance Award will be accepted through December 15, 2010, with the winners announced at the annual Global Philanthropy Forum in Redwood City, CA in April 2011.?Previous winners have produced extraordinary innovations that utilized the vast potential of mobile technology to help solve problems and enhance people?s lives,? said June Sugiyama, Director of Vodafone Americas Foundation, ?We look forward to this year?s applicants and their ground-breaking projects.?The Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Project? will award $300,000, $200,000 and $100,000, to the first, second and third-place winners, respectively.

    Information about eligibility and an application can be found at http://www.project.vodafone-us.com

  2. Trilliant has been has been selected by British Gas to provide the communications equipment for their Smart Meter deployment. The initial roll out to over 1,000,000 of British Gas? nearly 16 million customer accounts will be completed in 2012. Full story here
  3. SAP is selected as one of four companies to win German Magazine Computerwoche‘s “Green IT Best Practice Award 2010”. The company won for its comprehensive drive to reduce its CO2 emissions – if I understood Google Translate’s translation of the original article!
  4. IBM have teamed up with two Indian technology institutes to develop open system designs to make electricity grids smarter! The technologies will use predictive analytics to make power grids more efficient and therefore more resilient
  5. AMEE’s AMEE Explorersite was one of only six winners of the 2010 Best of What’s New award from the Popular Science magazine’s Green Tech section.

Photo credit aussiegall

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British Gas launch version 2 of their iPhone app – nice but non-inclusive!

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British Gas iPhone app

British Gas announced recently that they had updated their iPhone app to version 2.

The original application, which was downloaded over 100,000 times, helped customers monitor energy use and submit meter readings to avoid estimated bills. In June alone over 18,000 meter readings were submitted using the app.

With the new version customers can

  • view their account balance
  • see their last bill amount
  • check when payment is due and
  • view graphs of their personal energy consumption of the past 24 months
British Gas iPhone app - electricity

British Gas iPhone app - electricity

Benjamin Braun, Head of Online Services, at British Gas said:

More customers already contact us over the web than by telephone and with these new features, we expect that our App will quickly become the main way that many of our iPhone customers will manage their British Gas account.

When I read this I wondered why, if more people are contacting British Gas over the web than by phone, they decided to develop an application for the iPhone. Why not a mobile site which works across all devices. I reached out to their spokesperson David Outhwaite and I asked him if there were plans to develop a similar app for competing platforms like Android or better yet a mobile website which would work across all platforms.

David replied that

Our focus has been the iphone as that is the device from which we receive the vast majority of contact to our website. No current plans [to develop for other platforms]

The fact that this application has been so successful for British Gas shows that people have an appetite for interacting with their energy related information. Consequently, I found David’s response very disappointing.

Although I do own an iPhone, and I like what British Gas are doing with this app, I feel they are doing their non-iPhone owning customers a huge disservice by not providing them with similar functionality. Especially when you consider that the iPhone OS only commands 14% of the mobile operating system market share, what about the other 86% of British Gas’ customers?

It wouldn’t be hard to develop a mobile site which served iPhones, Android devices, and other smartphones equally well.

Hopefully British Gas will have a change of heart and produce a more inclusive mobile site soon.

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