IBM, Microsoft, Google, Verizon

The Elite Move in Small Circles: Microsoft, Ford Team on Electric Car Software

March 31, 2010

IDG News - Microsoft will expand its Hohm consumer energy management software to work with Ford Motor Company electric cars, the two companies announced Wednesday.

With Hohm, future owners of Ford's electric vehicles will be able to determine when the best times will be to recharge their vehicles at home, executives from the two companies said at a press conference in New York.

As consumers start using electric and hybrid electric vehicles en masse, electric companies will experience surges of power demand in the evenings when people come home from work and plug in their automobiles for recharging, explained Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, via satellite.

"The demand placed on the energy grid will be momentous," Ballmer said. "Addressing the challenge of how that demand is managed in a smart and affordable way is absolutely going to be critical. And information technology will be an essential part of supporting the energy ecosystem."

The two companies pledged to work with utilities and municipal power companies so the software can determine when the most affordable times will be for consumers to recharge their vehicles.

According to a survey from Accenture, 42 percent of consumers are considering purchasing electric or hybrid electric vehicles. Ford plans to introduce five electric or hybrid vehicles for the North American and European markets by 2013. Already, Ford and Mercury offer four hybrids and Lincoln will introduce a new hybrid later this year.

Hohm is a Microsoft service that analyzes home electricity usage, suggesting changes for power savings.

Ford already collaborates with Microsoft for its Sync in-car technology, which allows personal electronics such as MP3 players and mobile phones to be controlled by voice recognition. Sync is based on Microsoft's Windows Embedded Auto platform

Currently, over 2 million Ford vehicles use Sync, said Ford President and CEO Alan Mulally at the press conference.

Sprint to Support Google's Nexus One Smartphone

Mar 17, 2010

Reuters - ... Google has signed on another carrier to its plan of selling phones directly to the consumer, bypassing the carrier-owned retail stores that have traditionally been the primary mobile phone sales channel.

"It's a step in the process of ultimately having an efficient marketplace for users to go and buy phones and bandwidth, which will put the phones in the hands of more people and which will generate more searches," Gillis said.

The Nexus One is the first of a variety of smartphones that Google has said are in the pipeline as the company seeks to expand its reach from the PC to the mobile world and ensure its online products and ads get prominent placement on a new breed of wireless Internet devices.

Google, the world's No.1 Internet search engine with $23.7 billion in 2009 revenue, said on Monday that it expects the rates that companies pay for search ads on mobile phones to exceed the rates of its existing PC-based ad business in the future.

Google began selling the Nexus One in January, and sales in the first 74 days totaled 135,000 units, compared to the roughly 1 million units that handsets such as Motorola Inc's Droid and Apple Inc's iPhone sold during their initial rollouts, according to a recent report by analytics firm Flurry.

Unlike the iPhone and the Droid, which have been heavily promoted in television ads, Google has only advertised the Nexus One on the Web.

Sprint is the third largest wireless carrier in the U.S. with 48 million subscribers at the end of 2009. T-Mobile is the No.4 carrier in the United States with 33.8 million subscribers at the end of 2009.