Interview with co-founder of Tenrate  Jennifer Indovina. Tenrehte (pronounced TEN-rate) is “Ethernet” spelled backwards. We decided to call it that because the whole crux of the company is to rethink new applications for wireless technology and Internet connectivity. And the third idea was green technology: energy management, energy efficiency. So our team started making prototypes, and one of the prototypes was an outlet adapter that could communicate with the Internet. From your smartphone, you could tell the outlet to shut on and off devices from anywhere in the world. So if you’re traveling, and you can’t remember if you turned off your light, you could turn it off. We called the product the PICOwattTM. It’s an outlet-based device, which means it’s retrofit, so you don’t have to rip open your whole house or whole office just to make your appliances smart. We thought it was a very fundamental, simple solution. PICO stands for Portable Intelligent Communicator – portraying a sense of a vision for the future of sensors. The “watt” part of the name reminds us that solutions need to be practical, with applications for affecting change now. Right now we’re in the process of making sales to corporate customers, governments, and institutions. They are trying to understand the energy use of buildings, and understand how energy efficiency really is the catalyst for the green movement. Without saving energy, we will never get to the point of being 100% renewable. We just don’t have the infrastructure to support full solar, full wind, off-grid, without energy efficiency. Right now we’re in the process of making sales to corporate customers, governments, and institutions. They are trying to understand the energy use of buildings, and understand how energy efficiency really is the catalyst for the green movement. Without saving energy, we will never get to the point of being 100% renewable. We just don’t have the infrastructure to support full solar, full wind, off-grid, without energy efficiency. One of the big concerns are blackouts. In countries such as South Africa blackouts can be life threatening and more expensive to fix. Because PICOwattTM is Internet-enabled, it can give a real-time alert of an outage or peak power usage. I do thoroughly believe that the change that happens in Africa is going to come from local solutions to local problems. Key point here is we take energy useage for granted in North America and many parts of Europe so there is a massive amount of wasted expended energy that we just pay for without having to think about it. Our way of life just expects to turn on a switch and have unlimited electricity so all those who have grown up with this sense of entitlement will be hard pressed to make any drastic changes to their current habits. Not so for those countries who do not have much in the way of power generation in mass quantities so they rely on whatever their local village can supply through technologies such as Solar and Wind. Wheny you have this small amount of power being produced then everyone must participate in smart usage and conservation. Our current mindset is not one of conservation but of simple use and pay for it however the children when shown how this can be more effecient will buy into energy conservation and allow it to become part of their lifestyle without a second thought.