PowerCost Monitor = Great Idea

I always love the “why didn’t I think of that” product. A good example is Blue Line Innovations’ PowerCost Monitor. The PowerCost Monitor allows home owners to quickly gauge cost of power consumption at a glance. Think about going outside and reading the meter (spinning quickly or slowly) vs. looking at a digital display of cost/hr and total cost.

Products like this are inspirational because aside from coming up with the idea there’s a significant amount of funding and R&D involved. There’s always the hurdle of coming up with the idea vs. actually implementing it. I can’t count the number of ideas I’ve come up with and felt were decent, but I didn’t either have the funds or time or knowledge to implement.  I believe that’s one essential characteristic that separates entrepreneurs from everyone else.  It’s the “just do it” attitude once they get on board with an idea.

Yet there are those ideas that are brilliant and easy to implement, which means it’s easier for competion to mimic what’s being done. In BLI’s case there’s a barrier of entry for most companies to jump into the marketplace. But since we’re talking about power consumption and the multi-million dollar corporations in this market maybe a few million dollar investment is nothing at all.  Maybe BLI’s path to the top is some sort of patent.  We will see.

What’s most appealing to me about this product is the technical approach of hooking up a component to the meter outside the home and then broadcasting data wirelessly to the display inside.  Click here to read how it works.  I LOVE this kind of stuff and the next step will be to hook this up to SensorLogic’s Platform and get your usage remotely.  Yes that was a shameless plug for the company I’m currently working for