Google your hair dryer

I hold the view and bare the philosophy that the lack of development in the third world is actually a good thing. Not to be insanely optimistic, but I think that the mistakes of the Western world when it comes to energy, education and infrastructure could actually be reversed on the plain canvas that is the third world.

I am obsessed with the development of a new electricity grid in the US. And now good is at it with PowerMeter. Currently, dishwashers have all this computing power that cannot be exploited, which could be exploited in this way:

- You could communicate with your dishwasher to run a cycle at 2am instead of 2pm. Or you could just check the power prices of the day and tell the dishwasher to run when electricity is at its lowest.

I am fawning over this and perhaps having a technological orgasm, but what I am more enthused by is that with smart grids, we will be able to communicate with our home on how it consumes electricity and this could also enable us to off load our homes from the grid when we least need electricity.

But more relevant is that this could be huge when new grids are being built in the developing world. Just the same way that mobile telephony by-passed landlines, smart grids need to be the new thing in the third world. The connectivity that people have already provides the data platform for this.

So far in my chain: Clean/Renewable Energy + Mobile Telephony + Smart Grid = ?