Todd Biggs & The Biggs Family

LittleGreenBulb is a project I started to use Instant Messaging (IM) chat bots, or Agents, to encourage people to quickly replace one million traditional incandescent light bulbs with energy efficient CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) bulbs.

What would one million new CFL bulbs in use for a year do?

• Save people $13.6 million dollars on their utility bills
• Prevent the release of 221,000,000 pounds of CO2 greenhouse gas
• Reduces greenhouse gases (CO2) by the same amount as taking 19,217 cars off the road

So how big of a difference can you make?
We reduced our power consumption by 24% compared to the same period a year ago for our six bedroom, 3000 sqf home with two adults, two children, and a cat in just over just three months by slowly replacing a total of 44 bulbs.

How do you get started?

• Add little.green.bulb@hotmail.com to your Messenger contact list and start a conversation and pledge to replace a few light bulbs
• Visit www.littlegreenbulb.com and learn more.

Having recently read 'Salt a World History' I was intrigued to see how hard it was to make this stuff, which according to Kurlansky was a vital part of trade and commerce for thousands of years.  The picture below shows both the starting and finished product (2 liters of sea water and approx. 1/2 cup of finished sea salt).
Start with 1 two liter bottle of genuine salt water.  Simmer in a large pot over low heat for 3-4 hours, allowing evaporation.  Scrap crystals from the side back to the bottom of the pot.  Eventually you're left with a layer of moist crystals on the bottom of the pot.  Scrape this out, spreading it out on a tray or plate which you'll put in the oven to bake off the final water (hour @ 200F).

Viola! 2 liters of salt water should yield about 1/2 cup of your very own and very tasty sea salt (geniue Puget Sound water & resulting sea salt pictured at the left).

The history of salt really is worth a read.

I never posted about Alerts, but having been planning/product management on the service for a couple years and driving our acquistion of MessageCast (Dave, Mike, Royal & Co.) there have been a number of significant events recently.

Branding Options for Messenger Alerts
A feature that the team refers to as "super toast" was recently enabled.  It's a great feature that enables the publisher of content using the Alerts service to brand the IM end-point, in ways that ad value to the user.  Expect more interesting applicaitons of this in the future.

Release of Windows Live Alerts SDK
This SDK is built on our hosted service (what had been MessageCast) and completely repaces the former SDK, that went by many different names .NET Alerts, Microsoft Alerts, and MSN Alerts.  Follow the link for details, but needless to say it enables 1:1 or 1:many scenairos across IM, e-mail and mobile (SMS) while maintaining the opt-in and user controlled nature of Windows Live Alerts.

Alerts Integration with Windows Live Spaces
Now you can now sign-up to receive updates in real time for blogs, photos, lists and comments from your favorite Spaces. Simply click on the “Sign up for alerts” link in the Visitor tools module (sample below) of your favorite Spaces and start receiving your updates right away.  This was a feature we almost implemented serval times with Spaces, but along the way we acquired MessageCast, Spaces became massive, moved datacenters, etc.  Needless to say, we're all glad it's arrived.

Perhaps it was having watched An Inconvient Truth and wanting to be doing my part prevent global warming, or perhaps it was the $1.08 for a super efficent CFL bulbs--that payback in 3-4 months, but we decided to swap out most of our house.  A couple weekends, serveral hours of work, and 38 bulbs later we're there we're saving an avergage of 20 KwH/day, which for our house results in almost a 30% reduction in our electric bill.  That should save $1.75/day on average with an annual estimate of 10,500 pounds of CO2 reduced.

They look good too.  Visit OneBillionbulbs.com and calculate your savings.

This Sunday Scott and I took the ferry to Whidbey Island and saw Brett off as he headed out to Iraq for a six month tour (a few Christmas gifts were exchanged including the pirate pumpkin

He's headed to camp Scania, a base that is roughly 100KM south of Baghdad (see Point #1 on the map below) If you'd like to get in touch with Brett, send him some mail or cookies @ Brett Biggs, US Navy EOD, CSC Scania, Iraq APO AE 09331 (this was updated 11/28).

If you haven't had a chance yet, you should go talk with Ms. Dewey, the latest clever idea from the people in Windows Live Search.  She's saucy, she's sexy, and she even poses provocatively.  So what is Ms. Dewey?  She's an interactive agent (aka bot).

Instead of a fully automated and animated avatar front end, the team that created her brute forced the front end by combining video's of the actor in response to hundreds of questions.  The agent back end meshes those together,  and provides the most appropriate ... or seemigly random response based on what you request along with the occasional surprise for the user.

The resulting application is something people find very entertaining, or just over the top.  Pick your camp, but I find her pretty entertaining.  My brother Brett and I spent at least an hour  asking her stupid quesitons.

An obvious question might be if this uses the newly acquired Colloquis platform?  Nope... but it is the types of scenarios that could be enabled via the platform.  Ideally agents should be end-point agnostic, although with unique features based on the end-points (clients) where they're surfaced.  If Ms. Dewey didn't take the whole page, would remember my previous searches so she'd be quicker and more effective at finding information for me, I think she'd be even more useful.