Describe your featured media and how it will enhance the user’s life and experience.

The Google PowerMeter will give the user a detailed description of the amount of energy each appliance uses. For example, you can find out how much money you will save on your utility bills when you turn down your air conditioning by one degree.   

This will enhance the user’s experience because it will help the user be more aware of the amount of energy they are using. This, in turn, will help the environment and help the user save their money and further stimulate the economy by investing that money somewhere else.

In terms of the entrepreneurial career, the PowerMeter will show the entrepreneur, in real time, how much power they are using right on their computer. It will change the amount of their profit that will be going towards utilities in any given month.

As Google accurately describes it, the current way of paying for our electricity bills is like going into a store with no prices on the items. The utility company sends you how much you owe for the month and virtually no other information. The PowerMeter will raise consciousness about how much energy we are using.

Outline the elements this invention retrieves from past technologies.

There are already “smart meters” on the market, but they do not show the amount of energy used to the consumer in real time. The consumer should be able to control who gets to see the information. It will also be given to 40 million U.S. homes by the Obama legislation. The device also retrieves the USB port compatibility of many other electronic devices, such as Apple's IPod or RIM's Blackberry.

State what this new media will obsolesce.

The new innovation will obsolesce the other smart meters that do not show how much energy is used by the appliance in real time. The fact that Google’s new innovation shows how much energy is used in real time is a very important and vital aspect to this tool.

The new tool will also obsolesce the old “1950s” era power grids, and will bring power grids to the digital age. This is important because so many other aspects of our lives are digital, and one as important as electricity should join this group.

Define what factors this invention will reverse when pushed to its outer limit.

If it is used to its outer limit, and is extended to have even more features, it may use more energy and therefore do more harm than good in terms of energy conservation. If it, in itself, is using absorbent amounts of power will defeat the purpose of saving energy and the environment. It may also end up using so much energy that it will cause the consumer to lose money. It may also harm the environment if people begin to both stop paying attention to the results and cut down on their energy conservation and leave it on for long periods of time.