Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

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How patents stifle innovation, Honeywell edition

February 7, 2012

Lynne Kiesling

In the comments on Mike’s post yesterday about the Honeywell patent lawsuit against Nest, Ed asks in the comments how it is that patents stifle innovation rather than promote it. The theoretical answer is that, as a government-granted monopoly, patents embed both incentives — at the margin they increase the incentive to create new patentable knowledge while also slowing or stifling the dissemination of that knowledge, and/or knowledge deemed too close to it. The fine balance of managing the tradeoff between those two effects is the objective of a “good” patent law, because to get net benefits the breadth and duration of the allowed patents has to be enough to be stimulative, but not so much that it deters other innovative activity. A good patent law allows differentiation of breadth and depth for different types of inventions in different areas/industries, and holds diligently to the “non-obvious” requirement that is written into U.S. patent law and is part of any economic theory of intellectual property.

It’s increasingly clear, particularly in technology, that the U.S. patent law is not striking that balance, and is instead doing more of what Michele Boldrin characterizes as using the political and patent process to protect monopoly rents (as per a post I wrote on the topic in 2009, with links worth pursuing). At least to me, some of Honeywell’s patents don’t pass the common sense/non-obvious test, such as their “natural language temperature range setting” patent.

In following up on their extensive reporting at Earth2Tech yesterday, which Mike linked to in his post, Katie Fehrenbacher today offers several reasons why she thinks this Honeywell lawsuit will in fact deter innovation. She agrees with me that the natural language patent does not pass the “non-obvious” test, and she also discusses the cost of a patent war, the David/Goliath nature of this lawsuit, and some other important reasons why this lawsuit may bode poorly for robust innovation in the home energy technology space.

Posted in Economics, Electricity, Technology | 3 Comments »

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Honeywell International Inc. claims Nest thermostat infringes on patents in federal court lawsuit

February 6, 2012

Michael Giberson

Economist Alex Tabarrok, author of Launching the Innovation Renaissance and Marginal Revolution blogger, worries that the proliferation of patents is stifling innovation, particularly patents for business processes. In an interview with Russ Roberts for EconTalk, Tabarrok remarked that large companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google building up massive numbers of patents mostly to insulate themselves from costly patent battles. One side effect of this defensive effort is that smaller innovators can themselves end up in costly patent battles when trying to innovate in the same product space.

Maybe Tabarrok has another example on his hands.

This morning Honeywell International, Inc. (market capitalization of more than $46 billion) filed a patent infringement lawsuit against little Nest Labs, Inc. (unknown capitalization, but backed by a number of venture capital firms). Honeywell is also suing retailer Best Buy which has a marketing arrangement with Nest Lab. (Prior link goes to the lawsuit. More: news release, reports by GigaOm, Mashable Tech, GreenWire, Dow Jones Newswires, and CNet.)

Honeywell asserts Nest infringed several patents: one for methods that use natural language to decrease the time and complexity of programming a thermostat, another for thermostats that indicate how long it will take to reach a desired temperature, another for a thermostat that relies on remotely stored data to manage energy costs, another three patents related to having a rotating portion of the thermostat set one or more parameters of the device, and finally, a patent for powering a thermostat by drawing power from one or more of the circuits controlled by the thermostat. All of the patents have been issued since 2005.

I have no insights into the workings of the intellectual property system, and I’ll spare you my unrefined attitudes on the matter. My only interest is in encouraging innovation that supports energy users.

RELATED, from Quora: What is it like to own a Nest thermostat?

BELOW, image of a Honeywell thermostat app running on a tablet computer.

Honeywell Total Connect Comfort Systems.

With a Honeywell Total Connect Comfort System you can sit in your dining room and adjust the room temperature settings for the master bedroom!

ALSO: Previously on KP, “Nest’s elegant learning thermostat — but is it transactive?“

Posted in Electricity, Energy markets, Law, Technology | Tagged , | 8 Comments »

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A Friday flash

January 27, 2012

Lynne Kiesling

I found a lot of interesting and insightful thoughts in my morning reading today; here’s a synopsis:

  • Election year linguistics 1: The New York Times has an analysis of the language used by Obama and the four presidential candidates; at Cato at Liberty, David Boaz points out how different Ron Paul’s emphasis is from all of the others. He speaks about the fundamentals of both economics and the American small-l-liberal political tradition, while the others focus on topics that are more matters of expediency.
  • Election year linguistics 2: Newt Gingrich is currently getting his panties in a twist about people calling his ideas and his rhetoric “grandiose”, claiming that grandiosity is a defining American characteristic. I encourage Mr. Gingrich to consult his dictionary. According to dictionary.com, the first two definitions of “grandiose” are (1) affectedly grand or important; pompous and (2) more complicated or elaborate than necessary; overblown. I submit that while these meanings fit Mr. Gingrich, they are not defining characteristics of American culture, historically or at present.
  • Speaking of rhetoric and meaning, the Wall Street Journal has an interview, The New Theories of Moral Sentiments, with Deirdre McCloskey. She is doing more than any one person I know to return the perspectives of political economy and economics as transcending “Max U” to the professional and policy conversations.
  • Adam Thierer has a review of Liars and Outliers, the new book from security expert Bruce Schneier. Schneier analyzes the social institutions and mechanisms that enable trust to evolve in societies, and it sounds like it will be a great read; I’ve been looking forward to it, and Adam’s review whets my appetite even further. Schneier is the preeminent voice of reason in the debate over the surveillance state, so this book is self-recommending.
  • Also in technology, Steven Titch unpacks Google’s consolidation of its privacy policies across its suite of applications, and discusses what information Google does and does not capture, and what they will and won’t do with it. Very useful corrective to some of the anti-Google hyperbole, although I have some remaining skepticism.

Happy Friday!

Posted in Economics, Liberty, Technology | 1 Comment »

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Does a public good argument justify subsidizing private energy production?

December 21, 2011

Michael Giberson

Yesterday I disputed the analysis by which the Breakthough Institute wanted to claim credit on behalf of the federal government for the shale gas boom; today I dispute their claimed broader implications for federal energy R&D policy.

Late in their op-ed, the Breakthrough folks shift emphasis from a narrow drilling technology story to a broader examination of energy R&D policy:

Giving the federal government credit where it is due takes nothing away from Mitchell, who was determined and tenacious. But the lesson of the shale gas revolution is that we should not be so quick to judge government investments in energy technology. Between 1978 and 2007, the Energy Department spent $24 billion on fossil energy research. Billions more were spent through the Gas Research Institute and non-conventional gas tax credits. Those investments were widely panned as a failure during the ’80s and early ’90s, when gas was plentiful and cheap.

Whatever one thinks about shale gas today — we worry about its environmental consequences — there’s no denying the extraordinary economic return on taxpayer investments.

This last point is interesting, but undeveloped in the article. If one were to calculate the “economic return on taxpayer investments,” would one have to conclude they were extraordinary?

The essay ultimately wants to argue against claims that the Solyndra episode proves governments can’t pick winners and the shale gas boom proves private enterprise can. Defenders of subsidies for solar power projects claim critics are too focused on a single failure, Solyndra, when reasonably critics should be assessing the overall portfolio of projects supported. It is a fair observation, but it may turn against their conclusion. If we are to consider the return on “taxpayer investments” in energy R&D, we’d reasonably need to survey the full portfolio of energy technology concepts funded by the federal government. We’d have to count the winners and losers both, based on the best current understanding, and again (as yesterday) we’d want to work out some idea of what would have happened in the energy technology space without federal government intervention. Further, we wouldn’t just worry about the environmental consequences, we’d have to compute some estimate of the costs and include it in the analysis.

The article goes nowhere close to presenting the relevant case. Near the end of the article they claim federal credit for “nuclear power, natural gas turbines, solar panels, and wind turbines — pretty much every significant energy technology since World War II.” Hmmm, notice they don’t mention the other big selectively-cited-by-critics failure: the Carter-era launch of an$88 billion effort to make oil from coal. Like the Solyndra and Synfuels Corp. complainers, the Breakthrough Institute wants to draw policy implications for an uncertain future based on a selective invocation of history.

It is further a kind of mistake to invoke Solyndra in an essay all about energy R&D policy. Much recent taxpayer-extracted support for energy shows up in the production tax credit, the investment tax credits, the Section 1603 Treasury grants and miscellaneous other subsidies that are directed to help promote the fortunes of companies building renewable power components or producing power via renewable sources. While some of these companies are pursuing technological developments, these subsidies are not tied to research in any substantial way and yield very little in the way of publicly available research results. Try gathering detailed data on production from a wind farm or solar power plant benefiting from millions of dollars in taxpayer-supported subsidies – their lawyers will likely tell you it is commercially-sensitive information and not publicly available. And by the way it isn’t just renewable energy, the lawyers for subsidized production from low-output oil and gas wells will likely say the same thing.

There is a respectable public good argument that can be made in support of subsidizing at least some research. The “extraordinary economic return” that the Breakthrough Institute wants to claim on behalf of government subsidized research into oil and gas drilling technology is this kind of an argument. If Breakthrough wants to drag Solyndra and the full range of energy production subsidies into this argument, an economist looking for a respectable public good argument has got to ask: where is the public good in subsidizing private energy production from projects that hide publicly useful information from public review?

Posted in Economic history, Economics, Energy markets, Technology | Tagged , , | Comments Off

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Did the federal government invent the shale gas boom?

December 20, 2011

Michael Giberson

In the Washington Post the folks at the Breakthrough Institute try to learn us some history about the shale gas boom. Maybe you think the shale gas boom was some big surprise suddenly made real after the decades-long work of a hard-headed oil and gas guy – George Mitchell – willing to spend millions of dollars on the crazy idea that hydrocarbons stuck in a rock could be produced economically, once the right mix of technologies could be brought to bear.

Wrong, says the Breakthrough Institute, credit the shale gas boom to the federal government.

They have their reasons:

  • “Slick-water fracking, the technology that Mitchell used to crack the shale gas code, was adapted from massive hydraulic fracturing, a technology first demonstrated by the Energy Department in 1977.”
  • “Mitchell learned of shale’s potential from the Eastern Gas Shales Project, a partnership begun in 1976 between the Energy Department’s Morgantown Energy Research Center and dozens of companies and universities ….”
  • “Mitchell’s success depended on a revolution in monitoring and mapping technologies driven largely by government labs.”
  • In 1991, Mitchell asked the publicly funded Gas Research Institute, then funded by a tax on gas production, and the Energy Department for help.”
  • “Sandia National Labs provided Mitchell with many critical microseismic tools.”
  • “Mitchell also benefited from 3-D imaging, which the Energy Department had long supported.”
  • “The third critical technology was horizontal drilling and well installation …. In 1976, two government engineers … patented an early-stage directional drilling technology that became the precursor to horizontal drilling.”
  • “A joint venture between the Energy Department and industry drilled the first horizontal Devonian shale well….

There are a few more similar points. The article pursues a larger goal – some statement concerning current energy policy support – but today I just want to consider how to assess the credit for technological advancement. (See tomorrow for part II.)

A fair analysis of credit and blame requires more than just a recounting of history, such as provided in the article, we need also to construct a counterfactual history for comparison. Should we reasonably believe that but-for the energy technology programs of the Department of Energy, we’d be unable to produce natural gas from shale? It would be difficult to do this analysis well, and the authors don’t attempt it here, but a full assessment calls for it.

A sketch of technology developments may be helpful. Note that fracturing as a well-stimulation technology started in Pennsylvania in the early 1860s. A few clever folk discovered dropping gunpowder down a well, later liquid nitroglycerin,  often brought marvelous returns. Edward A. L. Roberts submitted a patent application for the process in 1864. Hydraulic fracturing technology was first developed by Standard Oil (Indiana) in the late 1940s.  In the 1960s, Project Gasbuggy had the federal government collaborating with the oil and gas industry to test a nuclear-weapon based fracturing technology on federal land in New Mexico. The Breakthrough Institute’s story picks up in the 1970s, but what the backstory reveals is a history of efforts to develop fracturing technology, funded privately in some cases and publicly in others. Department of Energy involvement may have shaped the direction of research, but I suspect its pool of research funds was merely convenient to technological advancement and not necessary. (More recently, GasFrac Energy Services of Alberta has pioneered a propane-based fracturing technology.)

Directional drilling, a precursor to horizontal drilling, first became practiced in the industry in the 1920s – well before “two government engineers … patented an early-stage directional drilling technology” in 1976. (See “Slanted Oil Wells,” published in Popular Science magazine in 1931.) As with hydraulic fracturing,  the industry found the technology quite useful in application and companies pursued technological advancements. Taxpayer funding may have been convenient support for the oil and gas industry, government research involvement may have shaped the direction of directional-drilling research, but the industry would have pursued the technology in any case.

So possibly the federal government’s involvement advanced by a few years the technologies that were finally blended in a sufficiently promising mix by George Mitchell. Even if we grant as much, it isn’t the whole of the shale gas boom that federal involvement gains credit for, just the added value that comes from shifting shale gas production forward by a few years. Of course possibly the whole of the federal government’s involvement in the industry – tax policies, regulatory policies, antitrust policies, federal lands policy, and so on – could reasonably be counted as delaying technological advancement when compared against what would have happened under some more rational regime.

Admittedly, they were just writing an op-ed and I’m complaining that they didn’t do a dissertation’s worth of work to support it. Maybe my complaints are a little unfair.

Okay, here is an offer: I’ll admit my complaints are unfair if they admit that their analysis was insufficient to justify their conclusions.

Posted in Economic history, Economics, Technology | Tagged , , , | 20 Comments »

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Cost savings and value creation are different

November 28, 2011

Lynne Kiesling

The cost saving-focused mindset has prevailed in regulated industries for over a century, slowing innovation in the process. In electricity, regulation that bases firms’ profits on cost recovery erects market barriers by recognizing only a business model that involves providing a specified product (110v power to the home) transported over a monopoly network. Even in 2011, well into the third decade of the digital revolution, this narrow focus and cost-saving mindset persists, and it fetters smart grid-enabled economic growth by emphasizing cost recovery and ignoring value creation.

In fact, one of the main reasons why smart grid investments face regulatory and political opposition is that focus on cost recovery (among others). I think this Greentech Media article gets the story right: the ways that smart grid investments can lead to cost savings are limited. We’ve discussed this idea here at KP quite a bit — a limitation on the benefits of transactive technologies and dynamic pricing is the fact that for most people, electricity bills are not a large share of their annual expenses, so even saving 15% on the electricity bill may not be a salient enough benefit to induce a lot of people to make technology investments. In other words, smart grid may or may not lead to cost savings for a lot of residential customers.

But is that the right metric by which to evaluate smart grid investments? Of course not. The Greentech Media article linked above starts with a telecom metaphor that I use frequently. In nominal terms, most of us pay much more for our communication services today than we did when all we had was a single land line (and leased Western Electric phone!) back in the 1980s, and even in real terms we probably still pay more than we did then. But look at how much more value we get — mobility, Internet, automation, all of the services that have been created at the edge of the network. We are much richer and better off because of the change in communication technologies and services since the 1980s, even taking into account that we pay more for them. Apply this metaphor to the regulatory calculus today, and the mismatch of its cost recovery focus and the benefits arising from new value creation is apparent. Innovation in telecommunications didn’t occur and thrive and expand because of cost savings and cost recovery, but instead because of new value creation.

Those who argue that the business model for customer-facing smart grid investments has to be grounded only in cost savings are incorrect, and are looking too narrowly at consumer value propositions. This debate came up in the post I wrote in October about the new Nest thermostat, a gorgeous and beautifully designed piece of consumer-focused in-home technology from a group of former Apple engineers, and in other articles about Nest around the same time. Observers from this traditional cost savings mindset dismissed the Nest thermostat because of its $250 price tag, saying that consumers would not save enough money to make the payback period on it make sense, even with dynamic pricing. This criticism overlooks the additional features and capabilities of such a device — motion sensing, serving as a hub to integrate and manage and automate in-home digital devices, learning algorithms, extensibility to be able to bundle with other digital services in the home, and so on. It also overlooks the persistent pattern in the history of new technology adoption, from the Roman baths onward; there will always be consumers with strong “first adopter” preferences, who are willing to pay more to be the first ones to have the novelty, and in the case of digital devices, incur that cost fully aware that prices will fall in the future as the technology matures. They guinea pig new technologies for the rest of us.

Those two aspects — additional features and first adopter preferences — mean that a lot of the value proposition in consumer-facing smart grid technologies is new value creation, not cost savings. This means that the regulatory calculus and the traditional electricity cost-focused mindset misses the real action, the real opportunity, the real potential that the investments could unleash.

One data point supporting my claim is that, only one week after its commercial release, the Nest thermostat was sold out and is now only available on backorder. Such innovation is about value creation more than cost savings, and ignoring and stifling that process holds back the contribution of the electricity industry to economic growth and well-being.

Posted in Economics, Electricity, Technology | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

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A good non-technical introduction to shale gas

November 7, 2011

Michael Giberson

Paul M. Barrett, for Bloomberg, has written up a pretty good introduction to natural gas from shale. The article delves a bit into the history and geology of the subject, but focuses more on the business efforts that turned a modestly interesting rock into a significant economic resource and the environmental politics that have risen in response. Highly recommended if you want to know where the natural gas that is changing the world’s energy outlook has come from.

A few things are left out of this “introduction.” Of course we could dig deeper into each of the topics mentioned. The next step in the story is the international angle – shale gas is being developed in Argentina, the United Kingdom, Poland and elsewhere – with significant implications for national and international trade and public policy. Among other things, as examples, central and western Europe will likely become less reliant on Russian gas supplies, and the United States and Canada probably don’t build a natural gas pipeline from Alaska through Canada and into the Midwestern U.S. for at least thirty or forty years.

The complete story of shale gas would also delve a bit into the controversy over the size of the the resource, would go a little deeper into the particular efforts of Devon Energy, and talk about the spillover of the shale gas boom into a boost for unconventional oil. One might wrap up the story by casting it into the big picture “cornucopians vs. Malthusians” debate.

So Bloomberg doesn’t do everything in this introduction, but it is a pretty good introduction to the shale gas issue.

NOTE ALSO: For a bit more on the environmental politics of shale gas, in September the journal Nature carried a pair of articles under the heading “Should Fracking Stop?” The case for stopping was written by Robert Howarth and Anthony Ingraffea, both of Cornell University; the case for continuing was written by Terry Englander of Penn State University. Neither piece gets very close to a complete policy analysis, but both highlight a bunch of the relevant issues.

 

Posted in Energy markets, Environmental policy, Technology | Tagged | 1 Comment »

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Wherein the jobs jobs jobs rhetoric hampers solar power development

November 4, 2011

Michael Giberson

If you believed what politicians say about green energy and jobs, you probably think they fit together like peanut butter and jelly squished between layers of bread. Has there been a renewable power subsidy announcement or ribbon-cutting ceremony where the word “jobs” was not featured in the first two or three sentences uttered by politicians? When it comes to public policy, job counting is the new measure of policy.

So in the outer suburbs of Phoenix, Queen Creek town officials counted up the jobs associated with a couple of solar power projects proposed to occupy a large bit of their industrially-zoned property with the help of some town economic development funds. Turns out it doesn’t take a lot of people to maintain a large-scale PV power system, and they’re mostly low level maintenance workers. The jobs-counting is giving the town second thoughts about the projects.

Now, in some big-picture, overall costs-and-benefits, thorough and balanced look at energy technologies, that it doesn’t take a lot of highly paid professionals to operate a PV solar power facility is a good thing. It is one of the reason that PV power has such a low marginal cost of operation. But in the kookier world where local economic development, renewable power rhetoric, and taxpayer subsidies collide, jobs are counted as benefits and then the analysis stops.

Two comments: First, PV power remains more expensive than alternative sources of power even admitting the presence of larger external costs for fossil-fueled power plants. We likely would be better off if money currently being used to build solar projects now were spent on additional research instead. Queen Creek may be on the right track, even if for the wrong reason. Solar advocates are promising that grid-parity is just around the corner, so why are we wasting money building inefficient projects now instead of spending that money on getting us around that corner?

Second, the number of jobs a policy is expected to create has very little relevance to the evaluation of public policy proposals. Mostly what matters is whether the benefits of a policy proposal exceed the projected costs (plus, you know, those old-fashioned ideas about the proper scope of government and trying not to infringe on people’s rights).

Environmental economist John Whitehead is right to hope that environmental policy creates few jobs, because, as he explains, it would mean that businesses have found lower cost ways to get cleaner air and water.

Posted in Electricity, Energy markets, Environmental policy, Technology | Tagged , , | 3 Comments »

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Beacon Power files for bankruptcy; Boulder CO contemplates municipalization of power assets; other energy stories of note

November 2, 2011

Michael Giberson

Brief notes about other energy stories in the news.

  • Flywheel energy storage company Beacon Power has filed for bankruptcy. News stories have highlighted the point that Beacon was a recipient of federal energy technology loan guarantees, which will give an additional boost to Solyndra critics, but I predict the apparent lack of high-level political involvement will prevent Beacon from turning into a second scandal. I hope the problem wasn’t skepticism about the value of their flywheel patents.
  • In Boulder, Colorado, citizens are contemplating creation of a municipal power utility to displace Xcel in the city. Xcel’s problem is, apparently, not moving fast enough on renewable power and other environmental issues for some residents of the famously eco-aware college town. Boulder’s problem may be that their affinity for renewable power has heretofore been subsidized by less-enthusiastic Xcel customers elsewhere in the state.
  • Cheniere Energy, owner of an expensive and not too useful facility to import LNG into the gas saturated U.S. market (the modern natural gas equivalent of “carrying coal to Newcastle“) has entered into a long-term contract to export LNG, a seemingly more sensible goal at the moment. More sensible because currently world LNG prices are much higher than U.S. domestic gas prices, but I wonder whether that price difference will persist long enough to justify the time and expense of retooling the import facility?
  • In a related matter, Daniel Yergin sums up some changes in the world energy market for the folks that read the Washington Post. Readers here should be familiar with the pieces of his story: Improving drilling technologies and better data analysis have conspired to yield increasing oil production in Alberta, oil production growth in Texas and a real boom in North Dakota, and significant off-shore oil discoveries off of Brazil.
  • The wind power lobby is becoming concerned about the the forthcoming 12-31-2012 apocalypse (i.e., expiration of the production tax credit for new wind power projects), especially in a political environment in which some politicians are willing to pull the plug on all energy subsidies. Maybe it is just the issues that the reporter focuses on, but all of the wind lobby arguments in favor of the subsidy sound like no more than the obvious claim that the industry would grow more with the subsidy than without it. Of course existing projects with a PTC would continue to enjoy the subsidy for their first 10 years of operation, and the growing wind-on-wind competition in some of the better wind resource locations may tip existing wind project owners toward not being in favor of continued subsidies for new competitors.

Posted in Electricity, Energy markets, Environmental policy, Regulation, Technology | 4 Comments »

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WIRED UK profiles inventor James Dyson

October 29, 2011

Michael Giberson

Inventor James Dyson is a fan of Thomas Edison and making lots of mistakes. From the November 2011 WIRED UK:

Thomas Edison, the American inventor, is synonymous with trial-and-error innovating. He would build a prototype, test it, watch it go wrong, tweak the design and build another. Over and over again. … Dyson has volumes about Edison on his bookshelves at Dodington Park, his country house in Gloucestershire, and, over a century later, swears by his approach. (In the 1980s, Dyson’s Ahab-like quest to find out how to make a bagless vacuum cleaner involved 5,126 failures.) “At school, you’re not allowed to fail; the wrong answer is a bad thing,” Dyson says. “But all failures are valuable because they all teach you something. I have lots of them every day.” His company would later use this monomaniacal process to give heater manufacturing a shot in the arm.

One way Dyson tries to promote innovation is to avoid the well-educated industrial designer. As Dyson put it, “A non-hardened engineer is probably more likely to do ridiculous experiments,” and sometimes that is a very useful thing. More:

To calibrate the business to tackle design problems, Dyson has imposed a clearly defined corporate philosophy. Its core function is to encourage “outrageous suggestions”. Take recruiting. “I like naïvety,” he says. “We try to choose people without experience. And we don’t employ any [pure] industrial designers at all.” It means that his staff aren’t polluted by received wisdom, he says, helping them to think afresh. There are also a few artists, even furniture designers — people with no formal engineering training at all. Like Dyson himself.

“If you don’t understand why the sums don’t add up, and you make a suggestion, most of the time you’ll be wrong,” he says. “But just occasionally you’ll be suggesting something quite unusual. And a non-hardened engineer is probably more likely to do ridiculous experiments.”

Ridiculous can prove lucrative. In 2004 Dyson was working on a product that never saw the light of day. He won’t say exactly what it was, in case his company develops it in the future, but it involved water and powerful slivers of air. One day an engineer attempted to dry his wet hands with the airflow. “We all noticed, and suddenly said together, ‘Hand drier’.” In 2006 the company launched it as the Airblade, which uses cold air and dries hands in ten seconds, consuming, Dyson claims, 80 per cent less energy than a warm-air equivalent.

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , | Comments Off

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