Plug-and-Play Solar for the Home
Some exciting news from a clean-tech startup based in Seattle: Clarian Power has developed a plug-and-play solar array with a starting price tag of $799. Just plug the array into an outside electrical outlet, connect the solar panel (the array can handle up to five) and the system starts feeding power into your system and slowing your power meter down.
The New York Times has a great write-up on the Clarian Sunfish:
Today’s typical roof-mounted solar power systems start at $10,000 and go up from there depending on the amount of electricity generated and the home’s location. The bigger and more expensive systems can meet most of a house’s energy needs and even put electricity back on the utility grid, essentially turning the meter backwards.
A contractor usually installs the solar power system and turns it over to the homeowner in ready-to-use condition. An electrician will connect the system to the home’s electric panel through an inverter, a device that converts the DC power generated by the solar panels to the AC power used by lights and appliances.
Clarian is hoping to simplify this process through the use of its patented micro-inverter, which does not require a dedicated panel or circuit. In fact, they say that a handy homeowner can set up Sunfish in less than hour without the need for a contractor or electrician.
The company expects to retail a starter kit with one solar panel for $799. The system can handle up to five solar panels with the purchase of add-on kits, which would bring the retail price to $3,000 to $4,000.
Plug the Clarian micro-inverter, which they call the “power module,” into any electric socket in your house, typically an outdoor outlet. Connect up to five solar panels to the power module. The panels can be mounted anywhere on the house with the best sun exposure. Finally, plug in the kit’s circuit monitor into any outlet, and Sunfish will start feeding solar-generated power directly into the home’s electrical system.
It’s a challenge to make solar pencil right now. Even with a starting price point of $799, the return on investment for a Sunfish system will be long-term. But we’ve come a long way in the last fifteen years. Entrepreneurial innovation like this is the path to a clean energy future that makes energy more plentiful and less costly for all Americans.
Elvis Was Right
I just read a great column in Inc Magazine by Joel Spolsky on the subject of communication in the business world.
Joel argues that, in our zeal to create collaborative teams, we’ve actually created communication nightmares that block people from getting real work done.
Whether it’s Big Business or Big Government, Stifling Competition is Bad
There are far too many examples these days of the big trying to stamp out the small through the use of government regulation.
Whether it’s UPS lobbyists inserting language into transportation bills to try to make life harder for FedEx, or lobbyists who manage to make buying their company’s product a requirement by federal law, there are untold examples of stifling innovation and competition through government regulation.
The same applies to big government, as well.
The latest effort is here in California, where the public education lobby is trying to stamp out their chief source of competition, charter schools, by passing a hard cap on the number of charter schools that can be opened. The bill is AB 1982, and it will be heard in the Education Committee next week – you can make your voice heard on this issue by clicking here.
Never mind that charter schools provide parents with alternative choices for educating their kids. Never mind that many public schools are now performing much better, spurred on by the innovative ideas and competition that charter schools have delivered. Never mind the unsightly scene of government trying to stifle its own competition through the force of government.
At Sierra College, we have plenty of competition: not just four year schools, but also trade and technical schools like Heald and ITT. We provide superior value and higher quality education. Competition has driven us to be better and to develop innovative career and technical programs (a good example is the only Mechatronics training program west of the Mississippi river).
Public education is at its best when it has to compete. Stifling competition and innovation is wrong, whether it’s at the hand of big business or big government.
Why Blockbuster is Failing
Blockbuster is slowly dying. They just closed about half of their stores. Their business is shrinking constantly. They may be in “the death spiral.”
I think one of the key reasons is that they’ve consistently failed to build a positive relationship with their customers.
Their first real success came when they changed the economics of the video rental business. All the mom and pop stores would buy VHS tapes for $80 a pop and then rent them out for $4.99 a day. Blockbuster went and negotiated with the big studios and cut a different deal: sell us the tapes for $4 and we’ll give you a percentage of each rental.
That was the beginning of the end for the mom and pop video stores: Blockbuster simply made it easier for customers to conveniently get the product they wanted at the same price.
Having taken much of the new release business, Blockbuster then cut the prices on the old releases to as low as $1 a day. That left almost no revenue on the table for the mom and pop stores and they slowly went out of business.
The first customer relationship killer: as soon as they had little competition, Blockbuster turned around and raised all the prices back up to $5 a day.
Next up was Netflix. The concept of no late fees and a flat monthly fee to get movies delivered straight to your home was interesting. The only downside was not having the ability to be spontaneous: you really had to plan ahead. And it was tough at times to get the new releases, because Netflix had no special deals with the studios.
Blockbuster came up with an innovative response: their own DVDs-by-mail service that came with two coupons for free movies at the store. We signed up for that and it was great – if we planned ahead, we had the movies we wanted by mail. If we wanted to be spontaneous, we had a coupon. (We only watch 2-3 movies a month, anyway.)
It worked. Blockbuster’s DVD-by-mail service started growing like crazy, because of the innovative marriage of online with bricks-and-mortar.
But they couldn’t leave well enough alone. The next customer relationship killer: they sucked all of the benefits out of their service, at least for customers like us. They killed the coupons, and you had to take the DVD-by-mail into the store and exchange it (often sending back a movie you actually wanted to see in order to get the one you wanted to see tonight). They jacked up the pricing and dropped the number of DVDs-by-mail. We were, in effect, paying to watch movies we weren’t watching, so we cancelled.
And now, Redbox has come along. A simple Internet-connected vending machine with DVDs for $1 a day. Does it have the broad selection of Blockbuster or Netflix? No. But it’s cheap, convenient and easy. You can even “reserve” a movie from a particular machine on their web site so it isn’t sold out by the time you arrive. (Not to mention, there are other methods too: Hulu, iTunes, etc.)
Of course, Blockbuster has responded by lowering their prices again (now it’s 3 days for $3). Call me cynical, but I’ve been burned this way before. The minute Blockbuster gets the upper hand over their newfound competition, they’ll just jack up their prices and cut the value all over again. I really don’t want them to “win” this round.
So I’m not saying I’ll never rent movies from Blockbuster. When it’s in my interests to rent something from them, I will. But I almost smirk when I get asked to pay $10 to become a part of the Blockbuster Rewards loyalty program.
Loyalty is earned, not sold.
Congress Running Things it Doesn’t Understand
I started to open this post with “if the founding fathers could see Congress today, I’m not sure they’d give them responsibility for interstate commerce or not” but perhaps that’s a little too snarky. In any case, “Congress shall make no law” is looking like the best phrase in the whole Constitution these days.
The new “financial regulatory reform” bill making its way through Congress has several provisions that would be seriously devastating to the job creating engine that is the startup world.
I’m convinced that some of the congressional representatives supporting these new regulations fully understand them and are ideologically opposed to the creation of wealth that we’ve seen in Silicon Valley over the last thirty years. Others just have no clue that in their efforts to “protect” people, they could kill – or at least seriously hinder – one of the greatest job creation machines this country has ever had.
Netflix Founder Acquires Dreambox
I blogged before about Dreambox, a tech startup that makes interactive games to teach math to kids. They were acquired this past week by Charter School Growth Fund, and the acquisition was funded by Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings.
Mr. Hastings said that he thinks netbooks will be ubiquitous in schools in a few years, creating huge opportunities for online learning software.
“I think we’re on the edge of a real inflection point where the hardware becomes so cheap that Web learning is really throughout the schools,” he said. “But what I noticed is there’s really not that many people working on the software.”
DreamBox was started last year — I wrote about it at the time — and creates personalized lesson plans, hidden in games, based on which concepts children understand or need to work on.
“What makes their product so impressive is it adapts to each student’s learning, and that’s the Holy Grail of this field,” Mr. Hastings said.
There is major innovation on the horizon for public education. This is one of those quiet, early signals.
Government Getting in the Way of Opportunity
I think most common sense people, either to the right or left of center, are in favor of the same ends, for the most part. But what puts me to the right of center is constantly watching the government try to “protect” us from something, and kill the goose that was laying our golden eggs in the process.
The New York Times just ran a story on federal and state regulators who are losing sleep because they are worried that job-creating businesses may be getting free labor from interns, in exchange for giving those interns the important job skills and references they need to become employable.
Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers. Last year, M. Patricia Smith, then New York’s labor commissioner, ordered investigations into several firms’ internships. Now, as the federal Labor Department’s top law enforcement official, she and the wage and hour division are stepping up enforcement nationwide. …
Many students said they had held internships that involved noneducational menial work. To be sure, many internships involve some unskilled work, but when the jobs are mostly drudgery, regulators say, it is clearly illegal not to pay interns.
One Ivy League student said she spent an unpaid three-month internship at a magazine packaging and shipping 20 or 40 apparel samples a day back to fashion houses that had provided them for photo shoots.
Oh the horrors! Can you imagine how many nails that poor Ivy Leaguer must have broken doing a real job in the real world?
Here’s what I want to know: was she kidnapped and forced to work for this apparel company? Or did she graduate from her Ivy League university with no recognizable job skills, and this internship was her path to gaining them?
Either way, fining the company for giving her a chance to become an employable, productive citizen seems like the wrong approach.
You’ll recall that I blogged about Internships.com a few weeks ago. Their CEO, Robin D. Richards, just sent out an open letter making the point: paid vs. unpaid is not the question.
Access to opportunity is for some almost an entitlement, but for the vast majority of Americans access to opportunity results from hard work and ingenuity.
The harder you work, the more ingenious you are, the luckier you get. The view that the government needs to regulate and protect our college students from the possibility of corporations seeking to take unfair advantage, I believe, is based on good intentions. However, in this case these intentions may be misplaced.
The American college student is sufficiently sophisticated, strategic and ambitious. Upward mobility is a uniquely American ideal. Anything is possible with education, preparation, hard work, ambition and access.
This issue of paid vs. unpaid is not an issue of fairness as some want you to believe, it is an issue of choice and free will. Statistics from 2007/20081 show that two out of three students who secure internships are offered full-time employment from the very company that gave them the internship. The marketplace has always been the great equalizer. If a company posts an internship that is unpaid and another posts one that is paid, the student will vote with their application. Our students are very capable of making a free will choice. If they believe an unpaid internship will result in a better path toward their chosen profession, then America’s best and America’s most ambitious will have a chance to craft and execute their competitive strategy towards getting a full time job after college.
The way many of the students from the 3,900+ colleges and universities not considered elite compete with students from the elite institutions is not on paper but in the actual working environment. They show their value live. We as a country do not need to constrain ingenuity and hard work and free choice with legal roadblocks. The approach of reducing options and choice will hurt the very group this well intended position is trying to protect.
At the end of the day, choice is the foundation to both our economy and our great democracy. Students today are well equipped to make this choice without our collective intervention.
Robin D. Richards
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Internships.com1 National Association of Colleges and Employers 2009 Experiential Education Survey
Robin is right on.
What’s your take? Should unpaid internships be a legal opportunity for students to gain job skills, or are they being exploited? Use the comments below to share your thoughts.
Internships.com Levels the Playing Field for Community Colleges and Small Businesses
A lot of students in the community college world, and a lot of smaller businesses, aren’t a part of a powerful and often-lucrative tool that larger universities and businesses have used to benefit each other over the years: internships.
A relatively new web startup called Internships.com says its mission is to “democratize the opportunity and access for all students preparing to stand out and be hired as interns by organizations, worldwide, with a vested interest in the workforce of tomorrow.”
My own entrance into entrepreneurial business was sort of an internship story to a point. I went to work (in the afternoons after school) for my dad at the age of twelve. I didn’t start with an office or a VP title either – I started in the stock room packing boxes. But even today, I still have relationships – nearly 20 year old ones – that I developed in that industry. If I ever wanted to work in that industry again, I could be on the phone with VPs and CEOs there pretty quickly.
That’s what internships can help you develop – real-world work experience and relationships – which will serve you for the rest of your career. I love the idea of community college students and small businesses getting into the mix. This is a great idea!
Here’s the press release (h/t to ace PR guy Josh Morgan for the tip) and make sure you check out Internships.com.
Internships.com Prepares Students for Today’s Workplace With Training and Opens Doors With Access to Employers
Los Angeles, March 1, 2010 – Internships.com of Los Angeles today opened the doors of opportunity to college students looking to get their foot in the door of the working world with an internship.
At Internships.com, college students can search tens of thousands of internship opportunities, or use the Internships.com engine to find the right opportunity to meet their goals. Most importantly, Internships.com has created and brought together tools to prepare students to get hired in an extremely challenging employment market and help students thrive at these internships.
“Internships.com is democratizing the internship process by exposing all students to the skills necessary to set themselves apart from the competition,” said Robin Richards, CEO of Internships.com. “Whether it is our Internships Predictor™, QuickBuild Resume™ tool or video library of interviewing tips, we will ensure they have set themselves apart. Our interactive tools are second to none for preparing students to find, access and demonstrate the winning combination of attitude and skills coveted by all employers.”
Internships are an integral piece of the career ladder and can serve as a powerful first rung in building success in the workplace. These first steps have often been blocked by lack of direct connections with employers, or lack of knowledge by students on how to best present themselves on paper or in an interview. Challenging economic times have also made some students think they have to choose between work and college. With the right internship, they can and should have both.
Internships.com is an impactful online resource for students looking to gain experience with an internship and for companies to connect with quality interns. Some of the roadblocks to expanding the use of internships have been lack of understanding from companies about how to find and qualify interns, how to run an internship program, and from students about how to find an internship when all of the traditional existing online services are focused on job-placement.
Internships.com provides a comprehensive set of tools and services for the three groups involved in internships: employers, students and higher education institutions. These tool sets are built into our marketplace and include tools for:
Employers
• Post internships
• Search for candidates
• Manage your listings
• Manage your interns and internship program
Interns
• Identify the type of internship that meets your goals with the
Internship Predictor
• Build your resume
• Learn how to be effective in an interview and how to dress for success
• Search for internships
Higher Education
• Post internship opportunities that are exclusive to your students
• Customize and send materials about your students to prospective employers
• Review and track the success of your student interns
Internships.com brings together these must-have tools with both employers and students. The opening up of internship opportunities to students from schools of all sizes and statures truly democratizes internships for all.
Internship listings are free for employers on Internships.com. Additional services and features for students and employers will be introduced later this year.
Follow Internships.com at Twitter.com/Internships or join us at Facebook.com/Internships.
“Because Long Before He Changed the World, He Inspired our Company”
(Mobile, feed and e-mail readers: embedded video above.)
As you may remember, before he was President, Ronald Reagan was an ambassador for General Electric, touring the country and making speeches at their plants, as well as the host of the company’s weekly television show on CBS.
Today, GE is remembering President Reagan’s leadership by sponsoring the Ronald Reagan Centennial Celebration. I love the quote from the ad: “Because long before he changed the world, or led a nation, or governed a state, he inspired our company.”
On days like these, I sure miss President Reagan.
Software Patents Need to Go
The patent system in the United States was first adopted in 1790, and was designed to grant inventors a limited-time monopoly on the use of their inventions, in exchange for the public disclosure of those inventions to advance science and innovation.
But the patent system isn’t keeping up with the changing world, especially when it comes to new kinds of innovation. What worked well for protecting Thomas Edison’s ability to monetize his invention of the incandescent light bulb – giving him 20 years of revenue from the invention in exchange for opening up the details of his discovery to other inventors who could improve on the concept – isn’t working when it comes to software and business methods.
This is a common topic of discussion in the entrepreneurial community, and you’d think that software innovators might be in favor of software patents, right? No, quite the opposite.
Basic software concepts, like the best way to lay out a user interface, or a fundamental concept like tabs in a spreadsheet, are being patented, and the patent owners then sue software makers in an attempt to either (a) extract large sums of money, or (b) put them out of business.
The latest news is that Facebook has been granted a patent for the concept of “dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network.”
One commenter on venture capitalist Fred Wilson’s blog post said:
This is weird news. I run a small local social community and also use some kind of newsfeed system. Yet the earliest version of my newsfeed dates from 2003, way before facebook’s feed. If they wanted to, they could easily crush me with this patent as I dont have the judical knowledge and financial power to enter a legal battle with facebook. The could close me down, although everyone would know that it’s only because they have this patent, not because I copied the newsfeed from them.
What’s worse is, there are companies being founded for the sole purpose of buying up the rights to these patents, and filing piles of lawsuits against any new startups in the technology space that might possibly have a remote link to the patent. These brand new companies have no resources to fight back, so they often have to pay off the “patent troll” or just drop their idea and go out of business.
The pace of innovation and monetization in software far exceed the types of innovation that the patent system was designed to protect and nurture. The patent system can continue to be extremely valuable in these other areas, but It’s simply an outmoded and unnecessary structure for the arenas of software and business methods.
It hurts competition, hurts consumers, and hurts innovation far more than it helps.
Of course, we’ll continue to have copyright and trade secret protection. If I had invented Facebook, somebody couldn’t just copy my code and launch a clone the next day. They would have to outwork, out-innovate and out-execute me in the marketplace.
I think that’s the way it should be.
What do you think? Do patents belong in the software arena? How about hardware? Pharmaceuticals? What are the standards for deciding where they foster innovation and where they don’t? Use the comments below to share your thoughts.
