After the March 11, 2011 tsunami caused massive blackouts and a meltdown at a key nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan has now started to focus on smart grid technology, according to a report from Zpryme Research & Consulting.

The report, titled "Japan: Tsunami Wakens the Smart Grid," projects that the smart grid market will grow at an annual rate of 63.8 percent from 2011 to 2016 from this year's $1 billion to $7.4 billion, with electricity generation will grow from 1.04 billion kWh to 1.09 KWh.

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Lights consume about 22 percent of the electricity in commercial buildings and are a huge target for waste reduction. Just think of all the lights you see left on in downtown office buildings at night. But only about 7 percent of U.S. buildings have any kind of lighting controls, creating a wide-open market for wireless technology to come in with a solution.

Daintree Networks and Adura, two startups in the wireless lighting controls field, share a lot of similarities in the way they’re attacking the problem. Both use wireless gateways and lighting fixtures to enable energy-saving strategies like turning off lights after work hours, as well as more complex tasks like linking them to occupancy sensors or natural light monitors to subtly shift lighting over time.

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About a week ago we had the marvelous opportunity to teach a three-day outreach workshop in wireless sensor networking and environmental monitoring at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. Our 24 students were educators, scientists and engineers from Malawi, Nicaragua, India, Ecuador, Venezuela, West Gambia, Philippines, USA, South Africa, Tanzania, Jamaica, Columbia, Ukraine, Argentina and Albania. Marco Zennaro coordinated the workshops and was tremendously helpful and generous to us. Jordan Husney lectured and taught alongside me, both of us fueled by copious amounts of Italian espresso, administered under Marco’s watchful eye.

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SDK-Builder eliminates the need to use pre-built firmware binary images, but rather allows users to create custom firmware binary images on-demand tailored to their applications.  This new tool provides a baseline default configuration (essential wireless stack features, WPA/WPA-2 personal security and networking services) and then lets developers choose the additional software features and functionalities by selecting them on a menu. Features include host interfaces, security, provisioning methods, application layer protocols, and over-the-air firmware upgrade, using external flash and other test modes. 

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Machine-to-machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications benefit from the tried and true use of the Internet Protocol; the evolution of connectivity from IPv4 to IPv6 ensures that every connected device in the world can be identified by its own unique IP address. IPSO Alliance members speak regularly at conferences worldwide; we invite you to visit with IPSO members at the following events, starting tomorrow:

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As part of steps to help cut electricity consumption, Tokyo Electric Power Co. will start installing next-generation electricity meters called "smart meters" at homes around autumn next year, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned.

To lower production costs of smart meters, which will be passed on to consumers, TEPCO will select meter manufacturers through general competitive bidding, with tenders open to any bidders. This marks the first time for open bidding for electricity meter procurement, company sources said Saturday.

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Today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, French tech outfit TazTag, a company that specializes in NFC and similar contactless tech, unveiled a smartphone that integrates NFC, ZigBee, and Secure Element to create a very different kind of Android phone, called the TPH-ONE

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Antenova, the Cambridge-based integrated antenna and RF solutions specialist, has won an important deal in the smart energy arena which has already brought a follow-through deal.

The company’s 2.4GHz ZigBee antennas have been chosen by UK contemporary Telegesis for its latest range of ZigBee Smart Energy Modules.

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TE-CORE/RF – a new, modular, self-sustaining wireless sensor kit is announced by Micropelt, German vendor of chip thermogenerators and thermal energy harvesting micro power sources, and IMST, German specialist in low power wireless solutions.

An embedded Micropelt thermogenerator which converts heat from a warm surface into electricity, provides the system power. A difference of 10 °C (18 °F) or more between surface and air temperatures drives the ZigBee module iM222A, member of the family of WiMOD radio modules of IMST, to transmit data every 2 seconds. The pre-certified iM222A uses Texas Instrument’s Z-Stack protocol.

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The promised connected pajamas failed to make an appearance at Mobile World Congress, while many of the touted devices in GSMA’s Connected House exhibit — such as the vending machine you can interact with on Facebook — failed to impress. But beyond the gimmicks was an undercurrent of serious innovation around the Internet of things

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