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Technology Stocks : Echelon Corporation (ELON) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: r.edwards who wrote (1976)	5/2/2000 9:22:00 AM
From: spiral3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3076

re: Vattenfall & Utilities. per elon's 10-K . A number of utitlity and telecommunications companies located throughout the world, including GTE in the United States and Vattenfall in Europe have announced residential projects involving LonWorks networks. http://search.echelon.com/query.html?col=echelon&col=ni&qp=&qt=Vattenfall&qs=&qc=&pw=100%25&ws=1&qm=0&st=1&nh=25&lk=1&rf=0&rq=0 Vattenfall's site: vattenfall.se why utilities.....they already have an "in" to our homes and will offer additional services to differentiate themselves in a deregulated market....ie it's a new way for them to make money...and to also save money via power management....the two best corporate carrots I know of. Also, an emerging trend, as noted in the article you quoted, seems to be that power companies are becoming increasingly involved with provision of telecom services. Power management aside, this will imo lead to lead to service consolidations and a substantial marketing effort promoting control networking. New technologies promise home automation capabilities at lower costs than ever before. Busy families and those with physical limitations represent a fertile market for the new technologies. Utilities, faced with fierce competition in a rapidly changing, deregulated business environment, are looking to deliver new customer services. The confluence of these three trends presents a short term window of opportunity for utilities, consumer electronics companies and appliance manufacturers to gain early entry to a field about to explode with possibilities. .......With the coming of a competitive environment, utilities are seeking to diversify their product offerings beyond energy. Value-added services, extending to home automation, represent the chief means for utilities to differentiate themselves. ...........electric utilities are experimenting with providing services and capabilities such as automatic meter reading, monitoring of power quality and delivery, detailed billing data, staggered power restoration, tamper detection, appliance diagnosis, telemetry services. Gas utilities are covere too, with such services as monitoring gas flow and quality, monitoring pipe corrosion, determining load profiles, distribution safety improvements, detection of meter tampering, monitoring indoor air quality, and coordination of fuel switching....That's where Home Automation and Utility Customer Services comes in. if you're so inclined you can buy the whole report: Home Automation and Utility Customer Services cutter.com here's more from Forbes peeking into the future in 1997 Utilities are discovering sensors. Your refrigerator, say, senses at 8:30 p.m. that its temperature has crept half a degree too high even though no one has opened the door for two hours. Guessing that you are either away or no longer noshing, a computer in your basement decides to hold off running the compressor until 9 p.m., when off-peak electric rates go into effect. Do that often enough, and the local utility can put off building a new plant and the money can be spent on something else. forbes.com It seems that the 'players' are also focusing initially on getting service providers up and running. I know it's fluff PR, but fwiw, re: service providers,here is how Cisco, Sun and GTE see things. From this yrs CES. Cisco's Internet Home Gateway technology and Internet infrastructure builds on the company's vision of providing high-speed Internet access and data, voice and video services to the home. "Together, Cisco, GTE and Sun are creating a truly networked home by building the first end-to-end home networking solution for service providers that will enable consumers to receive high-speed Internet access and services in their home," said Don Listwin, Cisco executive vice president, consumer and service provider lines of business. "By making it easy for multiple devices in the home to connect to the Internet and with each other via Cisco's home networking technology, consumers will enjoy a richer Internet experience at home. http:/ www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2000-01/sunflash.20000106.2.html Also from CES in january this yr, here is an interesting look at Sun's vision of the Dot Com Home, featuring, amongst others, Echelon technology sun.com