Ideas, Rule

Last week I met Sandeep Ayyappan, editor of You and Your Energy. It’s this awesome, neat looking, well organized content (edited / aggregated) around Energy sector.

I thought of putting up few thoughts of what more can be done. Really don’t know the complete business model and roadmap what Sandeep wants to take up for YAYE, but here is what I feel can be done.

# 1. Get a mobile app

This is like the simplest task. There are tons of DIY solutions which you can use and get a branded YAYE Iphone/ Android application. I have listed few below (Disclaimer : I am not affiliated with any of them)

AppMakr

Swebapps

Seattleclouds

#2. Community, Community, Community

You need to involve people. Getsatisfaction, Quora or as simple as putting up your own user driven community portal may help.

#3. Have a dedicated video section

Video section would make a lot of sense where instead of reading, I can also see stuff.

#4. Personalization using Facebook/ Twitter

There is a lot of news one can get. YAYE also offers a lot of news in Energy sector. Do you think you can ask users to login using their Facebook so that they can “subscribe” to specific topics and follow them – less clutter, no?

#5. Company database (Think Crunchbase)

Big fan of Crunch base. Or think of Angel.co. If you can create and maintain an exhaustive Company database around energy sector, that will be so valuable. All the financial updates, new announcements, gossip, investments, diversification news, board changes can be done on this platform.

#6. Follow Companies/ Exclusive Research material

A small extension of #4 and #5. You can also start letting people follow companies, bookmark particular activities around companies.

#7. Stock Track

I don’t think you need any explanation on this. Can you run Ticker of Energy related companies, their financial news, a particular news affecting all these companies, past trends etc.

#8. Infographics, Timeline story

So I noticed there is a special story. However, you can build some cool, useful Infographics around several such news.

#9. Bit.ly and Twitter Integration

Get Twitter feeds of all these famous companies or people who write on Energy related topics.

#10. Give it back to society

Tie up with services like Change.org. When I say tie up, it can really be a mashup. There are several such niche community driven sites as change.org

#11. Pitch more and harder

Promote your blog and site on

http://alltop.com

http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-way-to-promote-my-new-blog

Several other news promotional platforms

#12. Education

Tie up with TED. Or environmentalist. Let them blog, talk, refer you. May be you can have sections talking about saving energy. Invite guest writers to come and write on YAYE

#13. Misc

A. Special feature : http://youandyourenergy.com/~youandyo/gulfoilspillfeature/

I see this. It’s quite good but can I get a PDF of it? Out of 15 pages, give 5 and ask to sign up/ pay/ tweet for the rest of 10 pages. (or you may as well just give it)

B. Use platforms like Storify to write about events which are going around Energy or atleast controversies going on. They will at least bring you more readers!

 

Hope this is helpful.

I often go to the mall near my apartment in Jersey City and see several escalators there. One thing which always amazed me is why at 2:00 AM in the night the escalators are running continuosly? And all of them just going up and down .. all alone. You will find similar scenario all over the place. Every town, every public place which has escalators. 

So I started to read up on energy required to run an escalator. I came across this article from Treehugger.

 ”The national energy use of escalators is estimated at 2.6 billion kilowatt hours per year, equivalent to powering 375,000 houses; its cost is roughly $260 million.”

Can’t there be some logic to auto-start the escalators? Well, in the same article you will see that frequent start and stop might cost more energy. Well in that case, there should be some intelligence in the logic — which will check if its day time, or if the time gap between people riding is very less then don’t auto stop and start — it should run continuously. However if there are fewer people coming on-board it means that either its night time or slack time. So it should automatically switch in some auto-start/stop mode.

In addition, the logic for upward escalator should be different than downwards. Well downward escalator should start only if there are minimum say 5 people riding .. else it should be in stop mode only. In addition there can be a switch like we have in elevator which we press if we want to ride it.

And yes, this should be done to all existing escalators … please don’t say that we cannot do this for existing escalators. 

So this is what can be done:

1. Have a sensor for Auto ON and OFF — to the existing and new escalators

2. ON and OFF logic for downwards and upward escalators should be different.

3. There should be a start escalator button for people which can be used to start an escalator if it’s stopped (meaning one can skip to start the escalator)