Once we have a home full of connected devices do we really want to individually manage all of them? Mike Kuniavsky, a principal in the Innovation Services Group at PARC, explains in this weeks podcast how we’re going to have to think differently about programming devices for the internet of things. Devices will need to know what they contain and how those elements might contribute to a certain scenario in the home.

For example when you want to watch a movie, you shouldn’t have to program 6 different devices in your home to tell them what they should do when you toggle on your movie setting, your devices should have some sense of what they are capable of and how to enter a set mode. As he did in his chat in February at our San Francisco Internet of Things meetup, Kuniavsky, likened this device behavior to video games like Minecraft or Lemmings, where preset general behaviors determines how the game unfolded as opposed to rigid and specific actions. He explains all this and more in the podcast. Check it out.

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When it comes to managing energy consumption, safety conditions and other building processes across your company’s real estate portfolio, which scenario sounds more efficient?

Option A: responding to alarms and maintenance crises reactively after they happen. Or Option B: monitoring systems continuously in real time to anticipate and address potential problems or incidents.

Yes, the question is largely rhetorical, but the reality is most facility managers currently operate somewhere in between these two extremes. Many have access to building systems that collect data about operating conditions, but far fewer have the tools to parse that information for insights into future conditions or inefficiencies.

That’s about to change. Intelligent, machine-to-machine, or M2M, applications that use sensors to collect information about operating conditions combined with cloud-hosted analytics software that makes sense of disparate data points will help facility managers become far more proactive about managing buildings at peak efficiency, said experts participating in the GreenBiz webcast, “Sensors, Buildings and the Coming Internet of Things.”

visualoop:

By SMACK.

Photovoltaics (PVs) based on tiny colloidal quantum dots have several potential advantages over other approaches to making solar cells: They can be manufactured in a room-temperature process, saving energy and avoiding complications associated with high-temperature processing of silicon and other PV materials.

They can be made from abundant, inexpensive materials that do not require extensive purification, as silicon does. And they can be applied to a variety of inexpensive and even flexible substrate materials, such as lightweight plastics.

But there’s a tradeoff in designing such devices, because of two contradictory needs for an effective PV: A solar cell’s absorbing layer needs to be thin to allow charges to pass readily from the sites where solar energy is absorbed to the wires that carry current away — but it also needs to be thick enough to absorb light efficiently.

That’s where the addition of zinc oxide nanowires can play a useful role, says Joel Jean, a doctoral student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the lead author of a paper to be published in the journal Advanced Materials.

These nanowires are conductive enough to extract charges easily, but long enough to provide the depth needed for light absorption, Jean says. Using a bottom-up growth process to grow these nanowires and infiltrating them with lead-sulfide quantum dots produces a 50 percent boost in the current generated by the solar cell, and a 35 percent increase in overall efficiency, Jean says.

The process produces a vertical array of these nanowires, which are transparent to visible light, interspersed with quantum dots.