Monitoring your power

There are a number of power monitoring options starting to hit the market, but Wattvision has an approach that will work for more folks now vs. the approach that Google and others are offering as their solution can take advantage of digital meters vs. waiting for smart meters like Google and others require.

I will like to be able to give you a more detailed review; however, even with the "work now" approach being offered by Wattvision my house still uses an old analog meter so I cannot try it out directly. My electric provider, ComEd, is moving straight to SmartMeters, but have yet to reach my town with this project.

In the meantime, if you have a digital electric meter, you might want to check out Wattvision's solution. You can get a discount on a Wattvision sensor by using the discount code offered to Tech Crunch readers at this link. This offer reduces the sensor cost from the standard $199 to $149.

If you do take advantage of this service feel free to share your experience with your fellow Technology Plumbing readers.

Internet Radios, close but ...

The concept of Internet Radio is quite intriguing and appealing, but the challenge is to deliver Internet Radio and its companion services (Pandora etc) in a simple easy to digest manner.

With this in mind, the products from Livio Radio grabbed my attention as I read about their products. Thus far they have 2 products, NPR Radio and Pandora Radio.

The NPR Radio is designed primarily, as its name implies, to listen to NPR programs both live and those available as podcasts. It also has the ability to listen to the thousands of Internet Radio stations. The key to this product are the dedicated NPR buttons on the radio, which makes listening to NPR broadcasts about as easy as an appliance can make it.

The other product they offer is the Pandora Radio, designed to make using the Pandora music service (a Technology Plumbing favorite) as easy as possible. This model has dedicated Pandora buttons such as "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" which gives you a nice way to use Pandora without a computer. This model also gives you access to the thousands of the Internet Radio stations.

Both products give you the ability to connect external devices to the Livio products and send the sound output to an external device (speakers, stereo, etc).

Now here is the rub, if you want both the NPR and Pandora functions you are out of luck and you have to pick one or the other. Now they mention they are looking to bridge this gap, but given their approach to having dedicated buttons, my guess is this bridge is a new product, which does nothing for those who buy one of their products now.

So at this point, I am holding off on buying anything in this category and will wait and see how Livio progresses its products.

Will also continue to watch Livio's competitors like Logitech's Squeezebox products and keep everyone updated on how this space progress.