Inovonics Blog

In the quest for being green, simply buying a Prius and an eco-friendly bumper sticker just might not be enough. An entire industry of eco-consultants has sprung up to say just that. Everything from lighting, water usage, composting to environmentally conscious clothing is weighed against your environmental score. It turns out that it can take a bit of commitment...

From The New York Times:

George Bryson and Alina Sanchez flunked the test on water consumption. They had hired a consultant to tell them how they could do better at home in helping the environment, and although they did very well on energy use, water was another matter.

“I do a lot of thinking in the shower,” Ms. Sanchez offered as a possible explanation. (The culprit turned out to be the sprinklers.)

Read more...

A two part article that looks at how wireless can be used to increase energy efficiency in industrial environments.  The first installment discusses the energy costs of wired solutions and the second installment focuses on the processes involved in switching to a wireless solution, include a case study that exemplifies how to make the decision on whether is right for you.   

If you are like me, images of The Karate Kid and Joe Esposito's 1984 power song, "You're the Best Around", were the first things that came to mind when you read this title.  If you didn't think of the pop culture references first, relax - that probably just means you are more well suited than I to implement the best practices outlined in the article.

From Security Dealer & Integrator:

It's not easy being a security integrator today. New technologies and project requirements ranging from IP video and high-resolution cameras to video analytics and IT integration are enough to overwhelm even the savviest and most technology-saturated integrator . . . Here are a few ways to make sure your business rises above. 

Keep reading. 

An Israli company has developed a technology that may help prevent diseases from spreading from livestock to humans. Do you think there will still be demand once the current swine flu crisis has passed?   

From Reuters:

CartaSense has been selling its technology -- a tag that integrates a sensor, battery, micro controller,
non-volatile memory and a radio frequency circuit that transmits to a control unit -- for three years through other companies. It targets farmers who have large herds and need to instantly monitor each animal's vital statistics.

The "tag" with the sensor is placed in the ear of the animal and sends information like temperature and heart rate to the farmer's computer or mobile phone in real time. "If the herd gets sick, you know from where in the herd and you can isolate the sick group and prevent an epidemic from breaking out."

Keep reading. 

From gizmag.com:

Imagine being able to pinpoint an enemy shooter in difficult terrain with such deadly accuracy that you can see whether they are kneeling or standing and not only what kind of weapon they are firing but the caliber too.  Well, engineers at Vanderbilt University's Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) have developed such a system by turning soldiers' combat helmets into "smart nodes" in a wireless sensor network.

Keep reading. 

Green apartments are no longer optional for some. 

From MSNBC: 

An Apartments.com survey this month showed that 60 percent of renters said they specifically search for environmentally friendly apartments, and a quarter are willing to pay more for those amenities. Seventeen percent said they wouldn't rent a non-green apartment.

Keep reading. 

Apparently, the only real problem sodding your roof was the weight - now that is fixed, who are you going to get to mow it?

From The Green Issue

When built correctly, a roof garden acts as natural insulation, keeping a building warm in winter and cool in summer. In urban settings, green roofs help mitigate runoff problems, absorbing, cleaning and straining rainwater and reducing the load on city sewers.

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Kermit has been saying for years that "its not easy being green."  But it looks like the Empire State Building has a plan to prove him wrong.  Plans for making the iconic building a model for green commercial buildings include HVAC system upgrades and utlity submetering.    

From Center for American Progress:

According the Times, over three-quarters of New York City’s carbon emissions (78 percent) come from supplying energy for commercial and residential buildings. The Empire State Building’s retrofit aims to prevent the release of 105,000 metric tons of CO2 annually—the same amount Washington, D.C puts out in nearly 10 days.

Keep reading. 

It seems like we inch closer and closer to the developments you always see in the futuristic movies. Fancy glass cities all powered by the sun where I would bet that (cough) they use some type of submetering (cough) to make the best of their resources.

From Green Inc.

Last week, Sydney Kitson, a Florida developer, announced his plans to construct the nation’s first 100 percent solar-powered, all-smart grid, sustainable city.

...construction at the 17,000-acre community, called Babcock Ranch, is expected to begin next year. Mr. Kitson, a former professional football player for the Green Bay Packers and the chief executive of Kitson & Partners, says the ranch will create 19,500 homes and 20,000 permanent jobs.

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Watchdogs beware! The huge selection of sophisticated and aesthetically pleasing security products available to guard homes may put Rover out of business.

From The Telegraph

Planning a vacation and worried about the safety of your home? With the hi-tech gizmos — closed circuit cameras resembling mirrors, webcams, electronic alarm devices, intercepting intercom systems, digital recorders, wireless systems and surveillance cameras — now available to guard your house, you can rest in peace.  

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What a wonderful motion detector!

From AVING USA

Inovonics presented its four element motion detector 'EN1261HT' at ISC West in Las Vegas from April 1-3, 2009, that solves the battery limitation problems of motion sensors through an intelligent sleep timer and superior battery technology.

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What About Trade Shows in a Recession?

Published in GSN Magazine, April, 2009.

You wouldn't know that a deep recession was gripping the country by the size and enthusiasm of the crowds attending the opening day of the ISC West and Public Security & Safety expositions in Las Vegas on April 1st. Exhibit booths were...

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Even schools are facing the difficult choice between investments to reduce long-term operating expenses or keeping staff.  With levys increasingly being voted down, some schools are hopeful that the stimulus may be their saving grace to make such long-term investments.   

From Forbes

The candy machine at Henry Sibley High School knows when students roam the halls and automatically powers down when they've gone home. The basketball court still shines, but under the glow of fluorescent tubes that suck up a fraction of the juice the old lights used.

Thanks to such measures, energy costs across the school district in this Twin Cities suburb already are down by nearly a third. Officials want to trim the expenses even more, but that will require investment in upgrades.
 
Keep reading. 

Start your wireless cost saving engines! 

From CNET News

Wireless in the healthcare industry was a big highlight at last week's CTIA Wireless 2009 trade show in Las Vegas, where Dr. Eric Topol, chief academic officer of Scripps Health, gave a speech and demonstrated how wireless operations can benefit health care.

"We simply can't afford to continue the escalation of costs associated with health care as it relates to the percentage of GDP (or gross domestic product), we need to lower costs. And wireless technology, especially those built on low-cost consumer products, can go a long way to reducing costs."

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Deborah O'Mara of Security Dealer & Integrator Magazine lists the trends she saw at ISC West here.

Now your pill bottle can do all the nagging itself.  I like it.      

From The New York Times

Hey, your medicine called and wants to know why you haven’t taken it.  At least that is the idea behind GlowCap Connect, a wi-fi pill bottle that links to the Internet.

The GlowCap is a screw-on cap for a standard prescription medicine bottle, but it has a sensor and transmitter embedded. You program when the pills need to be taken using your computer, then at the appointed time, a light on the cap flashes. After a half hour, a three-tone alert sounds, then a five-tone alert. If the bottle still has not been opened, the system makes an automated reminder phone call to the patient or a caregiver.

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Estimating water bills in the City of New York will be a thing of the past by 2011.  The Big Apple is turning to wireless submetering technology to produce accurate water bills for businesses and residents throughout the city and the installation has already started.   

From The New York Times

Once the system is fully installed by 2011, New York will be the largest city in the world to use such wireless water metering, according to the mayor’s office.

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There is mild annoyance that comes with the touting of the CFL as the great environmental hero. (Especially when it invades into corporate logos as they state their wonderful green initiative.) It's just a simple bulb, but the little thing is leading a pale greenish-white lit attack on the warmly lit room. The European Commission has fallen to its appeal as it announced to phase out the incandescent bulb by 2012. I would expect to see more of this rather non-hostile takeover to happen soon.

From The New York Times

The switch to energy-efficient lamps for homes, offices, streets and factories, officials said, would generate energy savings equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of Belgium – or the yearly output of 20 power stations of 500 megawatts.

For their part, consumers would save 11 billion euros — or $14 billion — each year that they otherwise would have spent on energy bills.

Read more...

What would it be like to walk out your front door in the morning without having to reach up and unlock it?  Or have your vital signs logged to your medical chart while sitting in the doctor's waiting room?  How about going to a vending machine for a soda and not having to rummage through your pocket for change?  Sounds like a scene straight from that movie, Minority Report, right?  Well if human body communication technology (sometimes called BAN - Body Area Networks) continues to advance at its current pace, this scenario could become reality long before the Hollywood-predicted date of 2054.   

NASA and Cisco are teaming up to create a network of sensors and satellites around the world to monitor and report environmental status information in "real-time".  The network, called "Planetary Skin," will help governments and businesses monitor carbon buildup around the world to help make better decisions about use of energy resources. 

From the New York Times

Climate science isn't exactly sexy, but the name of the U.S. space agency's latest project has some sizzle.

NASA and Cisco Systems Inc. are developing "Planetary Skin" -- a marriage of satellites, land sensors and the Internet -- to capture, analyze and interpret global environmental data. Under terms of an agreement announced during a Capitol Hill climate summit today, NASA and Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) will develop the online collaborative platform to process data from satellite, airborne and sea- and land-based sensors around the globe.

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Bruce Schneier has a good piece up on his blog, noting some of the more absurd ways that bad security decisions can be arrived at as a result of non-security incentives.

An employee of Whole Foods in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was fired in 2007 for apprehending a shoplifter. More specifically, he was fired for touching a customer, even though that customer had a backpack filled with stolen groceries and was running away with them.

I regularly see security decisions that, like the Whole Foods incident, seem to make absolutely no sense. However, in every case, the decisions actually make perfect sense once you understand the underlying incentives driving the decision. All security decisions are trade-offs, but the motivations behind them are not always obvious: They're often subjective, and driven by external incentives. And often security trade-offs are made for nonsecurity reasons.

Almost certainly, Whole Foods has a no-touching-the-customer policy because its attorneys recommended it. "No touching" is a security measure as well, but it's security against customer lawsuits. The cost of these lawsuits would be much, much greater than the $346 worth of groceries stolen in this instance. Even applied to suspected shoplifters, the policy makes sense: The cost of a lawsuit resulting from tackling an innocent shopper by mistake would be far greater than the cost of letting actual shoplifters get away. As perverse it may seem, the result is completely reasonable given the corporate incentives — Whole Foods wrote a corporate policy that benefited itself.

At least, it works as long as the police and other factors keep society's shoplifter population down to a reasonable level.

Incentives explain much that is perplexing about security trade-offs. Why does King County, Washington, require one form of ID to get a concealed-carry permit, but two forms of ID to pay for the permit by check? Making a mistake on a gun permit is an abstract problem, but a bad check actually costs some department money.

In the decades before 9/11, why did the airlines fight every security measure except the photo-ID check? Increased security annoys their customers, but the photo-ID check solved a security problem of a different kind: the resale of nonrefundable tickets. So the airlines were on board for that one.

And why does the TSA confiscate liquids at airport security, on the off chance that a terrorist will try to make a liquid explosive instead of using the more common solid ones? Because the officials in charge of the decision used CYA security measures to prevent specific, known tactics rather than broad, general ones.

The same misplaced incentives explain the ongoing problem of innocent prisoners spending years in places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. The solution might seem obvious: Release the innocent ones, keep the guilty ones, and figure out whether the ones we aren't sure about are innocent or guilty. But the incentives are more perverse than that. Who is going to sign the order releasing one of those prisoners? Which military officer is going to accept the risk, no matter how small, of being wrong?

I read almost five years ago that prisoners were being held by the United States far longer than they should, because ''no one wanted to be responsible for releasing the next Osama bin Laden.'' That incentive to do nothing hasn't changed. It might have even gotten stronger, as these innocents languish in prison.

Keep reading. 

Public safety necessity or privacy violation?  You decide.

From The NY Times

At first glance, Chicago’s latest crime-fighting strategy seems to be plucked from a Hollywood screenplay. Someone sees a thief dipping into a Salvation Army kettle in a crowd of shoppers on State Street and dials 911 from a cellphone. Within seconds, a video image of the caller’s location is beamed onto a dispatcher’s computer screen. An officer arrives and by police radio is directed to the suspect, whose description and precise location are conveyed by the dispatcher watching the video, leading to a quick arrest.

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There's a great article in this month's Building Operating Management about justifying the cost of security projects when executives are engaged in cutting budgets.

In today’s economy, many organizations are looking for ways to save money. In light of the current economic situation, company executives have the unenviable task of deciding which programs to downsize and which projects to delay or eliminate. Security programs are not immune to these cost-cutting decisions and in many instances are among the first programs considered for cost-saving.

There are myriad reasons why security programs are so often targets of cost-cutting efforts. In the past seven years, billions of dollars have been spent in the United States on increased security programs, from federal, state and local governments to large and small businesses. This investment has included installation of security technology, changes in policies and procedures, and training. Although there is always a potential for a major security event to occur, most Americans feel safer now than a few years ago. The mindset is no different in corporations.

As a result, the sense of urgency to improve security has also begun to diminish. But the challenge that most facility executives and security directors have is not guarding against some catastrophic event; rather, it is the day-to-day challenge of providing a safe environment for employees and keeping property and company information secure. The focus of concern is usually not a terrorist plot; instead, it is the events in their communities and the specific security challenges of their working environments or businesses. It is often the difficult task of the facility executive or security director to articulate this point to decision-makers when trying to justify security budgets, especially those that include upgrades and improvements. The task is made more difficult because security is like insurance: No one likes to pay for it, but everyone is glad they have it when something does occur.

Keep reading.

Security Networds is adding weather updates to its security systems. Seems like a neat idea at first blush, but I wonder how many of us really want more spam text and email messages? Particularly when weather information is just about the easiest thing to access on the internet.

From Security Systems News.

Super-regional alarm company Security Networks announced Feb. 2 a new weather notification service that will offer valuable information to its customers and increase RMR.

What's going on outside, whether its another sunny day, or a record-breaking snowfall, is important to homeowners and businesses, said Rich Perry, CEO of Security Networks. "We protect our customers and this is another form of security," he said. "I'm always looking for value-added products to offer to existing and new customers to enhance our security offering and I thought this was a bulls-eye in terms of that goal."

The service is provided by Weather Decision Technologies, a weather forecasting company, which showcased its weather notification service at the ASIS show in September. The service is designed for residential alarm companies to sell to their customers and is built on the idea that today's consumers want more from their home security systems.

Security Networks' customers can sign up for two levels of alerts, a basic forecast or a more advanced warning system for severe weather. The alerts are sent via text or email.

Keep reading.

Traveling museum exhibits and artwork are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to taking security systems on the road.   

Keep reading   

Cars, cell phones, computers, and even video game systems have advanced over the years, but the electric grid in the U.S. has stayed relatively the same despite all the talk about green living and energy efficiency.  This dated system obviously can’t cut the mustard as evidenced by rolling blackouts to manage energy usage and unintentional blackouts when the grid fails.  Perhaps this is why approximately $11 billion of the recent economic stimulus package is earmarked specifically for technological upgrades to the electric grid.  Energy innovation is clearly a top priority and wireless sensor networks are at the core of it all.   

From www.triplepundit.com 

New regulations and the global energy crisis will drive spending on wireless sensor network technology for smart metering and demand response to $1.6 billion in 2011, according to an ON World forecast. While most of that will be devoted to advanced metering infrastructure, in-home “home area network” applications and devices that interoperate with smart meters for energy savings and conservation also have great developer potential, according to the San Diego-based emerging wireless technology research provider.

Moreover, “aligned with government’s top priorities, Wireless Sensor Networking (WSN) is attracting hundreds of millions of R&D funding in several recession-proof markets” according to a January ON World report. The authors forecast that overall public and private sector R&D spending on WSN will reach $1.3 billion in 2012, up from $522 million in 2007.

“With markets reeling, businesses and investors are relying on the public sector more than ever to set the priorities to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship that will lead to an economic recovery,” ON World’s research director Mareca Hatler said. “By providing needed solutions for energy, the environment, and health care, WSN continues to be a one of the fastest growing research and development areas.”

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The aging population is willing to invite wireless technology into their homes in exchange for independence and peace of mind.

From The New York Times

Increasingly, many older people who live alone are not truly alone. They are being watched by a flurry of new technologies designed to enable them to live independently and avoid expensive trips to the emergency room or nursing homes.

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Save the earth through... money. Focus on being "green" all you want, if a resident leaves the television on all day it will not mean a thing. This tells me that someone does not care if they leave the lights on unless it impacts their wallet. Everyone wants to save the planet - how is this not the perfect way?

From The New York Times

Tenants’ bills varied widely. For three-bedroom apartments, they ranged from $79.26 to $1,050.43, and for four-bedrooms from $147.97 to $974.11...

...Douglas F. Eisenberg, the chief operating officer for Urban American, which owns Roosevelt Landings, said the sample bills allowed residents to see how much electricity they were using and to make adjustments.

“I think that changing one’s habits is a difficult thing to do, and this really takes people being proactive about saving energy,” Mr. Eisenberg said. “A lot of these residents have lived in this building a long time. They haven’t been responsible for their electric bills. Now they are. I think at the end of the day, I feel pretty good that we’re doing the right thing here.”

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I am.  After yesterday's office scramble to find someone with a Motorola cell phone charger I could borrow, I hope wireless electricity, or "WiTricity", reaches consumers in the time this article says it will.

Keep reading. 

(Maybe.) 

And it's inevitable. 

(Maybe.) 

It turns out it really just depends on what you think the term means. 

From Security Magazine.

Many more executives see convergence progress. Still there are those that believe the convergence of physical and logical security may never happen.

Thirty-three percent of respondents to the Burton Group study said they envision convergence happening within their organizations in the next two to five years, while another 33 percent said convergence will never happen. The barriers associated with true convergence include: turf control; complexity and skills needed to handle multiple disciplines; budget conflicts; compatibility across groups; lack of technical platforms and expanding privacy laws.

It all gets back to definitions.

It’s important to first distinguish between security convergence and the convergence of IT and physical security, said Steve Hunt, CPP CISSP, Security Magazine columnist and creator of the SecurityDreamer blog.

“It might sound like word play, but the highest level of convergence is merely the use of IT (computers, software and networking) to do physical security better. That creates a new breed of physical security products, like IP cameras, DVRs, NVRs, IP-based access control and managed services or hosted services,” Hunt said. The next tier of convergence, according to Hunt, is the convergence of physical security with IT.

Mo Hess, global segment manager, security, at TAC/Schneider Electric, agreed. “We see convergence coming from business and IT systems with security. More and more of security will be IP-based and on a network. Video, intrusion and access control have already converged in most large system applications.”

Writing in a recent Securitydreamer.com e-newsletter, Hunt acknowledges the impact of the economy on purchasing plans. This year will be a year of redoubled efforts to achieve efficiency and effectiveness. COOs, business unit managers and security executives will implement creative measures to complete necessary projects without creating new costs. “Clever managers know how to find money. By coordinating projects and working together with other business unit managers, funds may be pooled and tasks completed collectively. My clients have been especially successful at this sort of budget dollar ‘end run.’”

Keep reading.

The Inovonics Blog features security, submetering, and sensor and control news and commentary.  We welcome your comments.