Peter Cheney, the Globe & Mail
April 15, 2011
In a downtown Toronto industrial loft, engineer Michael Glenn is demonstrating what looks like the ultimate light switch: He taps a key on his laptop computer, and a lamp on the other side of the building obediently clicks on, then off again. It doesn’t seem like that big a deal until he explains that he could control that same lamp from the other side of the world.
Even if Mr. Glenn were on another continent, he could not only control the lamp over the Internet, but also check how much power it was consuming. While he was at it, Mr. Glenn could also see whether his refrigerator was working properly, turn off the lights in his office or compare his home’s power consumption to the houses around it.
Behind this wizardry is a Canadian-made device called the TalkingPlug that promises to revolutionize the way we use electrical power by connecting appliances to a wireless network that lets you track and control them from anywhere.
“It will completely transform our world when plugs talk to each other and interact with each other,” says Ron Dembo, CEO of Zerofootprint, one of the companies behind the TalkingPlug. Mr. Glenn is the firm’s vice-president of products.
Read the entire article in the online edition of The Globe & Mail.