June 2009

Hohm, and Cloud Computing

Lynne Kiesling Last week I wrote about Microsoft’s Hohm energy management product announcement. Yesterday at earth2tech, Katie Fehrenbacher elaborated on the cloud computing angle, and how Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service might change energy data storage, computing, and business models. Microsoft, Google, and others are all exploring cloud computing, for good reason: The trend of …

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Transparency and Representation in the Waxman-Markey Vote

Lynne Kiesling In his usual trenchant way, Jonathan Adler has hit upon the two things to which I object the most in the Waxman-Markey bill and vote. The first is the one about which I wrote in May: despite all of the tooth-gnashing and knicker-twisting about the cap-and-trade portions of the bill, the really egregious …

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Is Either Google or Facebook the Model of the Internet’s Future?

Lynne Kiesling Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, claims that Google’s information and relationship model is top-down, Big Brother, while Facebook’s is bottom up and organic means of creating and gathering information based on social networks. He’s been making this claim quite vocally lately, and this Wired article provides a detailed discussion of the issues raised in …

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Sunday Recipe Post: Lynne’s Perfect Pancakes

Lynne Kiesling I’ve kind of gotten out of the habit of posting about non-economics things (except for the occasional concert report); a couple of years ago I probably paid too much attention to some reader’s snarky comment about it, so I’ve not shared much about cooking, cycling, triathlon, wine, house renovation, etc. since then. Like …

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Microsoft’s Hohm Joins the Smart Grid Fray

Lynne Kiesling Microsoft announces its new Hohm service: Called “Hohm” (presumably, a play on the combination of “home and “Ohm”), the product will take advantage of smart grid data on energy use when it’s available. Even when it’s not, however, Hohm will allow users to input their own details and share the results of their …

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Another Waxman-markey Blemish: Reinforcing the Obsolete Utility Business Model

Lynne Kiesling Over the past few days Josh Blonz at Common Tragedies had a couple of posts (here and here) about the permit allocation issues in the Waxman-Markey bill, and yesterday Tim Haab picked up the conversation thread. They are both focusing on the welfare and efficiency implications of the proposal to allocate permits to …

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