“Delivering on Sustainability’s Transformational Potential”

VERGE conferences bring together senior executives and thought leaders at the intersection of technologies and services related to energy, information, buildings, and transportation. VERGE explores how sustainability initiatives and converging technologies enable radical efficiencies, break down silos, accelerate innovation, and create systemic change.

“VERGE is about what happens when technologies collide
to create a vast playing field for potentially game-changing innovation.”

I was struck by similar patterns I remember from the 1990s, when we were trying to work out what the point of the web might be, how to build it, and how people might use it (before Google, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter…). Hindsight is always 20-20, but before those answers emerged, a million ideas were born, tried, and failed.

But, however you cut it, the opportunity is here and now: we face massive threats to our sustainability. More than one delegate talked to me about impending “systems collapse” (and not only in developing countries). We also see new data, systems and networks emerging, and the people-on-the-ground are actively engaging with it at scale.

Ranging from U.S. Department of Defense “search and destroy” sessions on energy efficiency, to David Pogue, Global Director CBRE talking frankly about the current state of play and the scale of the challenges we face:

“Every building is managed to the capabilities of the LEAST capable engineer
[and] to the demand of the most demanding occupant”

Amory Lovins called for “DNS for the energy grids” (an idea I’ve been keen to see realized for years), and Code for America’s Jennifer Pahlka stated that “government is actually what we do together” (which is something we all seem to have forgotten).

Linking trends in social responsibility, sustainability and networked data led neatly into Tim O’Reilly’s “Building a global brain to solve sustainability puzzles” – but ensuring that the code behind the brain has the “right moral [code]".

As we know from watching all new innovations unfold, substantial patience is required - Steve Case reminded us how long it's taken from the Web to start to really unlock its potential (decades) - and we are still learning: things unfold in unexpected ways, and as most founders I've spoken to acknowledge : you don't really know where you're going until you get there. From my perspective;

"the Internet of Things is a technology looking for purpose:
and sustainability is that purpose."

I was delighted that my own contribution,"Shaping supply chain sustainability with the Internet of things" was so well received - I've never imagined being high-fived by audience members after a talk!

Immediately afterwards, I’ll be speaking at the Verge conference in Washington DC from 14-16 March, on Revolutionizing Emissions and Supply Chain Management.

Verge focuses on a new wave of change revolutionizing sustainability: a convergence of energy, buildings, information, and vehicles. 

Update: AMEE listed at “top innovator”

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 “I have described Carbon as one of the greatest threat to the ongoing prosperity of our planet; but we must also see it as one of the greatest wealth generating opportunities of our generation. Too often I hear commentators describe the battle against climate change as though there has to be a choice between growth and reducing our carbon output. This is wrong. Many of the fast growing businesses of the next decade will be in providing the fuels of the future and the technologies to clean up and power our economies.”

- Richard Branson, Founder, Carbon War Room

The Rushlight Awards showcase innovative cleantech for the future.

Against “very strong competition”, AMEE won the peer-reviewed, lead award for Environmental Analysis and Metrology (in case you don’t know Metrology is the science of measurement).

We were also shortlisted for the Group Award for Environmental Management (which ultimately went to waste-to-energy technology company, Plasma Power)

I was also delighted that one of AMEE’s original startup team was the keynote speaker – Bryony, now Baroness(!), Worthington said: “I like to quote Alan Kay – the man credited with the invention of the personal computer – he said ‘the best way to predict the future is to invent it’. And that is why everyone in this room is here tonight – you are all involved in inventing the future.”

Now in their 5th year, the RSA-accredited Rushlight Awards are a celebration and a promotion of new technology, innovation and best practice across the whole environment spectrum for organisations throughout UK and Ireland.

Designed to highlight innovation and the holistic environmental benefit of technologies that are most likely to or are already creating a stir in the market, they are a means of disseminating the successes to support further development.

The group and overall winners will be eligible to be considered to represent the UK in the European Business Awards for the Environment 2014.

To a non-programmer with a background in corporate software sales & marketing the word “hack” conjures up images of swarms of programmers attempting to break into closed government networks.

Definitions include: “A hackathon is a gathering of programmers to collaboratively code in an extreme manner over a short period of time” http://www.techopedia.com/definition/23193/hackathon “A hackathon is a collaborative event where programmers, designers, and creative people meet to build programs and applications.”  http://hack4reno.com/hackathon/  

The “extreme” side of our London Green Hackathon these events is that a handful of the really committed coders stay up all night to bring their ideas to fruition. Fortunately, with many seasoned hackers in AMEE it became clear I would not have to do that. As a non-techie my role would be to offer some business ideas and commercial feedback on the viability of ideas developed.

 A collaborative format. Aside from just over an hour upfront of presentations from our sponsors (who kindly paid for the event and put up the prizes) it was fixed that at 12 noon hacking would start.  This begun with the hackers standing up to pitch their hack to the room, share the tools and tech they had and outline what help they needed. 

Examples ranged from offers of database and design skills to individuals who could provide unique chunks of energy efficiency related data from buildings. This is an event focussed on the programmers – showing off what they can do in a fully focussed environment, with a free reign, supporting resources and an immovable deadline –in our case 5pm on the Sunday.  Many dedicated programmers stayed up through the night to execute on their ideas. 

Our sponsors got involved. We had fantastic support from industry, ranging from corporate software houses (check out this review from Autodesk) to SME start-ups making their tech tools and data available to government innovation teams putting up cash bounties for the best hacks. 

All the sponsors got involved, walking the room during the welcome coffees, engaging with developers and bringing data, tools and ideas to the day. The judges on day two also got amongst the attendees sniffing out talent and translating tech ideas and concepts into broader business value. 

Who was there?  We had no hard and fast rules on restricting attendance although we did make an effort to ensure as many developers as possible. However, our “Green Hackathon” included many types who did not fit the software developer mould but who often brought some unique and valuable input to the event:

The PHD student using the event to support her thesis.  She brought unique data and a load of passion to get involvement from others on her idea.  Those who attended the London Green Hackathon may recall who this was – she worked the room and got together a hit squad that hacked her data into a useful prototype app, which won the energy management hack category.  Nowhere else could this have happened

Businesses hunting for talent. Aside from some of our sponsor companies we had a few other business folk show up from start-ups. Whilst they stood out against the backdrop of T-shirts, cheque shirts / jeans developer brigade the event offered a unique chance for them to meet and witness first-hand the skills, enthusiasms and mind-sets of developers with a passion in the CleanTech / start-up sector.   What better way to ensure your next developer hire hits the mark than see them perform in a deadline driven, collaborative team based environment? Sponsors Trucost and ITOWorld both took this opportunity as did guest attendance coming in from Tendril

The entrepreneur with a cool tech idea but limited time and resources.  At a Hackathon they can rope in others, build a team and have a go at prototyping the idea.  “Mastadon” the winning hack at our event did just this by getting together a team who showed off how the web and mashed up available data can be used to source the greenest and cleanest cloud services

The curious venture capitalist – looking to get in early on any crazy ideas that could actually end up being disruptive.  We managed to rope in Jason Pinto from Amadeus

Developers came from far and wide – we had attendees from universities in Bristol, Scotland and London as well as representatives from the digital agency / tech start-up world across the UK

As a BusinessCat (the aficionado my colleagues bestow on me) what did I get from the Hackathon? Great insight into how a group of technically talented people thrown together with some creative ideas and a common purpose can get some really cool stuff done – fast! 

To paraphrase on the A-Team’s opening sequence if you are not a programmer if you are someone with an idea and if the data exists, if nobody else can help and if you can find the right one maybe you should attend a Hackathon…

For update son future London Green Hackathons  join our linkedingroup.  

“Awesome” was the word used by the judges to describe the winner of the Innovation prize.

Having attended many hack events, I was very impressed by the extremely high quality of the output.

Over 130 people registered for AMEE’s first Green Hackathon, and around 100 participated over the weekend (including a hard-core of all-night coders).

Interestingly, this Hackathon wasn’t just for coders. We put a lot of effort into creating themes and bringing together domain knowledge about enviornmental sustainability with developer skills: some participants simply turned up with an idea, and found a coder to help them build it!

As a result, almost all of the hacks focussed on business problems, not consumer problems, and all focussed on the notion of CleanTech-meets-Web (also coined as CleanWeb in the USA).

We are extremely happy with the energy and outcomes produced, and hope to see at least one of the projects attempt to build out into a business. We are obviously also delighted that many of the winners and projects used AMEE as part of their solutions – we know from experience that hackdays are extremely unpredictable (in fact our own James Smith added an API to AskAMEE during the weekend so that it could be used more easily in one of the projects!)

Watch the videos here

Thank you everyone for your time, effort and, for our financial supporters, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) and our sponsors:

• Gold: 

Autodesk, UCL Adances, and UK Department for Business Innovation & Skills (BIS)

• Silver:

Amadeus Capital Partners, European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT), Forum For the Future, ITOworld, Opower, Trucost, and 2degrees

 To read more about the event click here >>

The Winners

The Hack Day judging panel selected winners based on the following categories:

• Best Hack and Peoplefund.it Prize recipient: Mastodon
• Innovation Prize: Kindle Energy Dashboard
• Built Environment Prize: Energy Efficiency in Buildings
• Transparency Prize: Company Carbon Death Map
• Behaviour Change Prize: AMEE in Excel
• Visualisation Prize: One Tonne

Other Presentations

Everyone was excellent, but unfortunately not everyone can win! Here are the other hacks built over the weekend:

• Greensta
• Is your washing machine rinsing your wallet?
• Localista
• London’s Invisible Smog
• Nanode Ambient Energy Display
• njenje
• Play4Decades
• Real Time Carbon Emissions
• Realtime National Grid
• Retrofit

Over 120 participants

10 Fantastic Sponsors

Over 20 participating organizations

And Great prizes!

This will be the cleanweb London event of the year! Beyond the fun and learning our sponsors are also making it well worth your while by providing cash prizes!

• Best Hack – £500
• Innovation – £200
• Built Environment – £200
• Transparency – £200
• Behavior Change – £200
• Transport – £200
• Visualisation – £200
• PeopleFundIt – Free listing on crowdfunding site PeopleFundIt

If you haven’t grabbed you ticket yet get them while they last – only 29 left! We also have just released an additional 50 tickets for the presentation session only starting at 2:30 PM Sunday.

Make sure to visit the Hackathon website for more details and get ready for and exciting weekend of hacking for climate change, sustainability, energy and resources.

In the previous post I outlined how standards publish at present and how AMEE represents them. In this post I’ll concentrate more on how AMEE can be used and how we approach updating AMEE.

How can I access standards in AMEE?

AMEEconnect allows software to interact with the AMEE platform over the web using a secure connection. This can be used to extract data or text, store all kinds of information and retrieve calculation results, including time series data. This information can then be presented to the user on a variety of clients, from phones to tablets, from desktop applications to web pages.

AMEEapps also provides a number of web applications than you can use or customize and also open source tools to speed up development of software with AMEE.

AMEEdiscover provides a human readable interface for AMEEconnect, allowing any user to search, browse and even perform calculations with AMEE’s content. It also serves as a good source of documentation for all the world’s standards that AMEE represents, even if you have no need of AMEEconnect itself.

Behind the scenes, AMEEdiscover uses AMEEconnect, so all content that you can see including all text documentation, is available for extraction via the AMEE API.

How does AMEE decide what standards to include?

Ultimately, AMEE’s goal is to include all relevant standards, but this of course takes time, particularly to ensure quality. We choose to bring a standard into AMEE if one or more of the following is true:

• there is a clear demand from multiple AMEE users that it’s needed
• we feel the information is likely to be useful once AMEE gives it greater exposure
• the information will add unique value when combined with other standards AMEE holds
• a single user sees significant value in it

AMEE’s platform, through AMEEconnect and AMEEdiscover products, offers online services that help make environmental information and data more accessible. Many standards come from governments or NGOs and are available freely and no license is required for them. Because AMEE’s business model is centred on providing online services around data and not selling the data itself, we can readily accomodate proprietary data sets which require the purchase of a specific license, such as the vast ecoinvent database used for Life Cycle Analysis (LCA).

AMEE’s remit extends beyond greenhouse gas emissions data and closely related energy efficiency data. With the inclusion of ecoinvent and other datasets, AMEE covers all kinds of environmental information, including land use, air pollution, land and water contamination amongst many others.

I’m very excited to announce that this month AMEE surpassed 30 million calculations performed on our platform. What that means is that AMEE has provided 30 million answers to 30 Million environmental questions. That may seem like a big number to you. That may seem like a small number to others. Part of the significance is clear from the fact that we only recently surpassed the 25 million calculations — so we cruised by 30 million! What’s clear is:

Growth in calculation transactions on the AMEE platform and the underlying demand for environmental data that drives those calculations are both accelerating.

We anticipate that this growth will further accelerate for two main reasons:

1) The pressures on organisations to manage environmental information efficiently are evident and clearly increasing.

Recent regulation in the airline and shipping industries will create even more demand. Companies are also looking to become more resilient to resource security shocks both in their organisations and supply chains by improving intelligence, efficiency and performance. As consultancy McKinsey notes, a “Resource Revolution” is upon us.

2) We’re doing a number of things to deliver the intelligence businesses need — better, faster, cheaper.

• Better service: We are making a whole host of improvements to the AMEE service ranging from a new platform release (v3- stay tuned @ameedev) to user experience, interface design and simplifying our API
• More Demonstration: Late last year we launched AMEE Labs and its been a great success. Our integration with Minecraft, for example, has had over 28,000 views on Youtube since October. Labs are helping more users imagine solutions and engage with the data and platform.
• Increased Engagement: We’re aggressively engaging key partners and hosting events which all benefit from our open source policy that eases collaboration. Our upcoming Hack Day is sure to deliver some great new creations and insight!

The challenges ahead for businesses are daunting. One thing that is inevitable is that the better information businesses have the better they will perform. AMEE is delivering that information in a efficient and useful way. That is why 30 million matters.

How do you think we could improve our service to make environmental information more accessible and useful for you? Feel free to comment or contact us.

I want to thank all of AMEE’s users, customers and partners for their support over the past year, share some highlights, and key announcements.

AMEE is now free. We strongly believe Environmental Intelligence – Everywhere means being accessible and ubiquitous, lowering barriers to entry, and stimulating innovation. This means developers can build more great apps, consultants can help their clients, teachers can help their students, and everyone can engage in helping to footprint everything!

To aid this we have also launched Ask AMEE, our computational search engine, making it easy to do calculations and discover answers, are hosting our first hackathon in London January 28th – 29th at University College London.

Join us at this unique event to engage our sustainability and developer communities around innovation.

 2011 highlights

– BP’s 2012 Olympics Target Neutral initiative
— Sun Edison and Bergen Energi (embedding AMEE intelligence into energy efficiency technology)
— Siemens TTB (powering real-time emissions liabilities in manufacturing processes)
— The UK broadcast industry from BBC to Sky (footprinting every TV show in the UK)
— International Universities (joining our education programme)
— Innovative partnerships with IBM, Autodesk, Minecraft and Foursquare

AMEE Labs showcases continued innovation

– AskAMEE – Find answers to your questions easily >> read about it in Techcrunch
– AMEE Location Footprinter -  Try out ALF to link travel emissions data to your Foursquare account
– Autodesk – Watch the video of our Inventor demo: delivering Environmental Intelligence into product design.
– ClimateCraft – James Smith, our Platform Evangelist, integrated AMEE with Minecraft, the popular video game. The YouTube video we posted as had over 27,000 views so far!

Continued recognition for AMEE’s mission and our team

With your support, we have again been recognised as world-leaders in the CleanTech industry:
- Guardian CleanTech 100 (for the second year in succession), placing us in the top 2% globally
– Our team attended industry technology leadership summits at the White House, Number 10 and Buckingham Palace. 
– In October I joined the UK Government’s MiData Energy Sector Board – an open data initiative for energy information.

Adding to our exceptional leadership team, Tim Murphy has joined us as CEO. Tim brings a wealth of experience of growing and managing data and internet businesses, with board level tenure at Dun & Bradstreet, Alphyra, and Branded Payment Solutions. Stuart Coleman joined us as VP Sales & Marketing having grown and led early stage business models within start-ups and global technology businesses. I’m now Chairman. In recognition of this GP Bullhound CleanTech Connect ranked us in their top 10 and awarded us their Unique Leadership Award

We all know we have many challenges ahead: to address and accelerate our collective transition to a more environmentally efficient society. We promise to continue to deliver innovation and relevance and play our part in that journey.

Thank you again for your continued support.

(note you can follow AMEE on Twitter: @ameeHQ – @ameeDev – @agentGav)

Just type “10lb turkey” into AskAMEE, or use AMEEdiscover for more details.