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December 1, 2009

The United States PV Market: Project Economics, Policy, Demand, and Strategy Through 2013

Demand for PV projects in the United States is rapidly expanding as a result of falling system prices, stimulus funding and new regulatory incentives. As the recession retreats, the U.S. is poised to become the largest global demand center for PV. Anticipating this trend, global solar market players from all parts of the value chain are seeking strategies to gain access to U.S. PV demand. Simultaneously, the market itself is evolving as utility-scale projects gain steam and innovations in project financing emerge.

However, the U.S. does not offer a singular demand market for PV. Rather, it is an amalgamation of 50 states, each of which has a unique set of incentives, regulations, electricity prices and political processes. Even within most states, these factors differ according to electric utility service territory and/or municipality. These factors ultimately impact PV demand and project economics differently based on project size, market segment, and end customer. Developing a downstream U.S. PV market strategy requires a deliberate, highly specified approach to each application, state market and market segment.

This report stands alone as the only analysis to provide the full range of tools necessary to develop a strategy to address each market. In addition to considering national trends in project financing, incentives and demand dynamics, it analyzes the 16 key state markets individually, accounting for each state’s unique incentive structure, solar availability, historical market size, barriers to adoption and electricity prices. It projects demand by market segment within each state, and uses these projections to develop a bottom-up forecast for the entire nation by state and by market segment. Finally, it contains competitive analysis of the project developers, integrators, and financiers that comprise today’s market, and the characteristics they will need in order to thrive as the market expands.

IN THIS REPORT:

• Demand projections by market segment for sixteen primary state markets, together comprising over 97 percent of national demand
• Analysis of demand drivers, incentive value, and subsidized grid parity for each market segment in each state
• National bottom-up demand forecast by state and market segment
• Competitive analysis of market players and development strategies
• Comprehensive listing of incentives and regulations that impact the PV market, including the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the stimulus package) and the potential for federal cap-and-trade
• Analysis of trends in project financing and comparison of financing structures
• Profiles of 31 residential, commercial and utility-scale project developers with U.S. operations

KEY FINDINGS:

U.S. PV Demand Grows in 2009 Despite the Recession: Grid-connected PV demand will reach 440 MW in 2009, up from 320 MW in 2008. In an upside economic scenario, demand could reach 544 MW in 2009. The residential sector and local/state government projects drive demand growth, thanks to stimulus funding and the recently uncapped residential Investment Tax Credit. California retains its dominant market share, accounting for 205 MW in the base case scenario, or 50 percent of national demand. Secondary markets in Arizona, Colorado and New Jersey support demand growth.

U.S. PV Market Becomes Global Demand Leader by 2012: Over the next four years, the U.S. will experience the most rapid demand growth of any major PV market. Base case U.S. PV demand grows to 1,515 MW in 2012, with annual growth from 2008 to 2012 averaging 48 percent. The upside scenario sees demand reaching 2,022 MW in 2012. During this period, the U.S. surpasses Spain, and potentially Germany, to become the leading global PV market.

Secondary Demand Markets Gain Increasing Importance: Although California’s market share remains relatively steady at around 50 percent of national capacity second-tier markets gain increasing value as their absolute size increases. By 2012, combined base case demand from leading secondary states Arizona, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Nevada and Massachusetts reaches 376 MW.

Price Convergence Between PV and Grid Electricity Already Reached in High-Demand Locations, 11 States to Follow by 2012: We model projects in 16 states to determine when post-incentive PV generation costs and grid electricity will converge. Each state offers an incentive package that favors some market segments over others. Price convergence in these markets is heavily sector-dependent. States with high levels of demand, such as New Jersey and California, have already experienced price convergence in particular market segments, while others stand on the precipice. By 2012, 11 of 16 states will have surpassed price convergence in the commercial sector, and ten will have done so in the residential sector.

New Financing Models Drive Residential Sector Growth: Financing models that obviate the need for direct ownership will drive residential market growth. Though we predict residential price convergence in a number of states, we maintain that up-front cost and simple payback are the two factors gating demand for residential projects. The expansion of residential solar financing through leases or power purchases agreements with little up-front cost will enable the residential sector to grow to 363 MW by 2012 in the base case.

Utility-Scale Demand Gains Market Share Through 2012: Utility-scale installations will be the fastest growing market segment, stealing market share from the commercial sector and reaching 466 MW in the 2012 regulatory scenario. This is a result partly of RPS requirements and a wave of new solar-specific RFPs in states with solar carve-outs. It is also a result of heightened interest in utility ownership of PV, for which there are numerous economic and operational benefits for utilities.

Successful Project Developers Build Adaptation Into Their Market Strategy: Unlike Germany, Spain or Japan, the U.S. is comprised of 50 differentiable PV markets. With changes occurring both over time and by location, addressable markets are in a constant state of flux. Successful project developers will build adaptation into their market strategy, rather than seeking to minimize its necessity. By doing so, they will turn the complexity of the U.S. market into an advantage, rather than a limitation.

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25 Blogs To Help You Stay Current With Social Media

Posted November 24, 2009 in How-To, Tools/Resources 87 Comments »

Most of us agree that social media is valuable — but keeping up with the latest trends can be difficult given the speed at which social media is growing and changing.

The big sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are easy to folllow, but there are many others that often get ignored such as Docstoc, Scribd, Slideshare. With all the different platforms, it’s hard to be able to keep up with everything that is new.

In this post we’ve listed 25 of the best social media blogs out there. Read through some of these blogs and you’ll quickly find yourself getting an edge in the social media world.

25 Social Media Blogs You Should Read

Here are 25 social media blogs that you should read. Some keep you current on new trends and others give you advice on how to leverage social media to your advantage.

I’ve included an excerpt from each blog’s about page to give you an idea as to what to expect from them. This list isn’t a ranking of social media blogs, so these are listed in no particular order.

1. Mashable – Founded in July 2005, Mashable is the world’s largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news. With more than 12.5 million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the most prolific blog reviewing new Web sites and services, publishing breaking news on what’s new on the web and offering social media resources and guides.
2. Social Media Explorer – Social Media Explorer is the online home and blog of Social Media Explorer LLC, of which Jason Falls serves as principal. Falls has established himself as one of the leading thinkers in the social media, public relations and communications industries.
3. Social Media Today – Social Media Today LLC helps global organizations create purpose-built B2B social communities designed to achieve specific, measurable corporate goals by engaging exactly the customers and prospects you most want to reach.
4. Chris Brogan – Chris Brogan is a ten year veteran of using social media and both web and mobile technologies to build digital relationships for businesses, organizations, and individuals. Chris speaks, blogs, writes articles, and makes media of all kinds on his blog. His blog is in the top 10 of the Advertising Age Power150, and in the top 100 on Technorati. He is co-author of the book Trust Agents.
5. Dosh Dosh – Dosh Dosh is a blog offering internet marketing and blogging tips, alongside social media strategies. Best consumed by bloggers, entrepreneurs, web publishers, marketers, freelancers and small business owners.
6. 10e20 – 10e20 is a New York-based Internet marketing company specializing in Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Optimization. Founded in 2002 in Brooklyn, NY by Chris Winfield and Danielle Lanzillo.
7. PR 2.0 – Brian Solis is Principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley. Solis is globally recognized for his views and insights on the convergence of PR, Traditional Media and Social Media. Considered one of the original thought leaders who paved the way for Social Media and PR 2.0, Solis is co-founder of the Social Media Club.
8. Conversation Agent – Valeria Maltoni is a professional marketer with 20 years of real-world corporate experience, 10 of which online, across a broad array of mid-to-large sized companies. Hands-on work at a Fortune 500 technology company, a technology start-up, in health care, chemical manufacturing, risk management consulting, and the non-profit sector have provided her with a wealth of experience and insights.
9. Scott Monty – Scott is a marketing and communications professional focused on the digital industry — specifically on social media. His career spans a number of industries such as healthcare, pharma, biotech, travel, automotive, tech, and communications, and includes a wide range of clients, from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies.
10. Chris G – Chrisg.com is where Chris posts daily (or thereabouts) thoughts and advice on the business of new media, blogging and online marketing. The aim is to teach you ways you can create compelling resources, provide your audience more value, build trust and loyalty, and generate more rewards for yourself.
11. Altitude Branding – Amber Naslund is a social media and marketing crackerjack and the Director of Community for Radian6, where she’s responsible for client engagement, community building, and helping companies tap the potential of online reputation management, customer engagement, and social media monitoring.
12. Successful-Blog – Liz is a social web strategist and community builder. Coming from a background of publishing, business, and instructional design, Liz understands how people perceive a blog, a product, and an experience — how the head and heart engage to make a fiercely loyal customer.
13. Techipedia – Tamar Weinberg is a freelance writer and author of The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web (O’Reilly, July 2009) who specializes in social media consulting and strategy, blogger outreach, reputation management, and search engine marketing (SEO, link building, and Pay Per Click Marketing).
14. Very Official Blog – Shannon Paul works as the communications manager for PEAK6 Online, parent company of OptionsHouse.com, OptionsNewsNetwork (ONN.tv), and WeSeed.com. Here she oversees the integration of social media communication into PR and marketing strategies for the company’s three brands, including an online retail stock and options broker, a web-based options news and education site, and an online community that allows people to learn about the stock market through investing in virtual stock portfolios.
15. Instigator Blog – Benjamin Yoskovitzis the CEO & co-Founder of Standout Jobs, a venture-backed startup founded in 2007. He is also a blog and social media consultant. This blog is where he expresses his thoughts on startups, entrepreneurship and business, as well as diving into social media, blogging and online communities.
16. All Facebook – AllFacebook.com is a blog that was started by Nick O’Neill. The purpose of the blog is to cover all issues pertaining to Facebook including new applications, general news, and analysis about the future of Facebook.
17. SmartBrief On SocialMedia – SmartBrief is a media company on a mission to save you time and keep you smart. The premise behind SmartBrief is simple: there’s too much information out there and too little time in the day to read it all. Their editors hand-pick the most relevant and important news from all over, summarize it, link to the original sources and deliver it — for FREE — in one-stop-shop e-newsletters.
18. Web-Strategist – As a Web Strategist Jerimiah Owyang strives to define and deliver user and community needs, business goals, and web technology to craft and deliver long term successful web programs for companies.
19. Collective Thoughts – Each member of Collective Thoughts are a known or rising star in their own field, but they also have a passion and unique understanding on social media. Together, they make up Collective Thoughts.
20. Dan Zarrella – Dan Zarrella is an award-winning social, search, and viral mar­ket­ing sci­en­tist and author of the upcom­ing O’Reilly media book “The Social Media Mar­ket­ing Book”. He has a back­ground in web devel­op­ment and com­bines his pro­gram­ming capa­bil­i­ties with a pas­sion for social mar­ket­ing to cre­ate appli­ca­tions.
21. Social Times – Social Times is founded by Nick O’ Neill. He is an industry expert on the social networking industry, providing no holds bar commentary and insightful analysis on social networking and social media. He speaks at conferences nationwide and has been written about in multiple national publications.
22. Brent Csutoras – Brent Csutoras is an Internet Marketing Consultant who specializes in Social Media, Viral linkbait and Search Engine Marketing.
23. Twitip – TwiTip is a blog all about Twitter. It covers Twitter Tips of all varieties including Writing for Twitter, Branding, Growing a Following, Corporate Tweeting and a lot more.
24. Danny Brown – Danny Brown has been providing business branding and emerging media consultancy services to the consumer and commercial markets for more than 15 years, from small start-ups to Fortune 500 businesses. Danny is the founder of the 12for12k Challenge.
25. The Viral Garden – Mack Collier is a social media consultant, trainer and speaker. He has been actively immersed in social media since 2005, and in that time, has helped advise, teach and consult with businesses of all shapes and sizes on how they can better connect with their customers via these amazing tools and sites

Your Turn to Share

The blogs mentioned above are some that I visit on a regular basis. If there are any that you would like to add to the list, feel free to do so in the comments section. And finally, what do you think of this list of some of the top social media blogs out there?

top image by striatic

About the author: Ritu is a freelance writer who has been involved in social media for several years. At the moment he is working on a variety of projects, but is always open to new ideas. Contact him at email(at)ritubpant(dot)com or follow @ritubpant on twitter.

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A blog is now as important to your agency as was your agency’s Website. The blog is becoming the “gate-way” and the face of the agency as its Website becomes more the agency’s brochure. Here’s some excellent resources to help your agency blog for new business.

Zemalf.com is the personal blog of Antti Kokkonen. He has assembled a great list of 42 most popular blog post about blogging in 2009. The posts on Antti’s list were picked from Digg, Delicious, Twitter and other social networks, based on the number of “votes” the posts have received in those services.

I perused through this list to find the top 10 that are most relevant  and helpful for your agency’s blog:

1. 25 Blogs To Help You Stay Current With Social Media
2. Starting Your First Blog? 29 Tips, Tutorials and Resources for New Bloggers
3. How to Build a High-Traffic Blog Without Killing Yourself
4. Write an Elevator Pitch for Your Blog
5. Do You Make These 10 Mistakes When You Blog?
6. 23 Essential Elements of Sharable Blog Posts
7. 50 Helpful Resources That Will Enhance Your Writing Skills
8. 73 Ways to Become a Better Writer
9. 100 Ways To Find Ideas For Your Blog Posts
10. The Art of Writing Great Twitter Headlines

Click on the following link for the entire list of the:  42 Most Popular Blog Posts About Blogging 2009

Four people that I read and  highly recommend as a resource for blogging:

• Jay Baer
• Edward Boches
• Mack Collier
• Jason Falls

Additional articles that may be of interest:

• How to Generate Traffic to Your Ad Agency’s Blog with Repeat Tweets
• 50 Blog Post Ideas to Fuel Your Ad Agency’s Blog
• Ad Agencies On Target Blogging for New Business
• Blogging Statistics of Importance to Ad Agencies
• Not every agency should have a blog
• Top Ten Reasons Your Ad Agency Should Blog
• Ad Agencies On Target Blogging for New Business

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Who’s Who? What’s What? What’s Real In An Internet world?

December 1, 2009 ·

The New Yorker published a cartoon in 1993 which shows a dog sitting at a computer terminal saying to another dog, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”  A few years ago, I went to a talk given by one of the computer graphics experts who worked on Jurassic Park.  He was describing how they created many of the dinosaurs in the movie completely by computer.  He went on to say that within a decade, they will be able to create human beings on film completely by computer without any need for actors.  The power of Photoshop to recreate photographic reality is seen as magazines are caught digitally manipulating photos to meet their needs.

Over 15 years after the original New Yorker cartoon, there is still no widely deployed mechanism for verifying the identity of anyone or authenticity of anything found on the web.  As the web becomes the primary source of information for more and more of the world’s populace, it becomes harder and harder to discern truth from fiction.  The question is, “How do you know who to trust?”

Over time, as technology has evolved, new trust models have been developed to keep up.

• Recommendations through friends – This is perhaps the oldest method of establishing trust.  You simply ask someone you trust for a recommendation, e.g. you move to a new city and ask a colleague to recommend a doctor or attorney.  You believe a story because someone you know and trust tells it to you.
• Recommendations through trusted third parties – Restaurant, movie, or wine reviews in a newspaper are examples of this model.  Because you trust the judgment of the reviewer you trust their recommendations.  Gartner reports on IT products and vendors, and their ratings of consulting firms are an example of how effective this can be.
• Process creates trust – Traditional journalism requires the validation of a story from more than one source.  You believe what you read in the New York Times because you trust the vetting process they use before they print a story.  Wikipedia is also an example of this trust model.  You trust the contents of Wikipedia because you believe that the “crowd sourcing” process used is effective.
• Community ratings – Zagat guides demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.   Rather than depending on a single trusted 3^rd party, you simply aggregate the opinions of a large number of people and use that as a recommendation.  Based on their success with restaurants, Zagat has extended their model to hotels, nightlife, movies, music and now even dating (& dumping).  This model has been dramatically extended on the Web to everything from local repair people to attorneys and doctors.
• Reputation systems – eBay’s trust model is perhaps the most novel.  With most eBay transactions, an auction winner sends payment to a completely unknown seller when the auction completes.  The seller then ships the product to the winner.  There is no formal recourse if the product does not meet the buyer’s expectations or even to complain if the seller never ships the product at all.  Within eBay, there is a system of community reputation in which buyers rate sellers.  For a prospective buyer, a seller with a high reputation score has lots of satisfied customers and therefore can be trusted.

However, as web information continues to explode and search engines now provide results which include Twitter and Facebook, clearly a new trust model is needed.  Recently David Pogue, the respected New York Times columnist, was accused of a conflict of interest by a number of Twitter posters.  One such Twitter post was from a Twitter user with the name “John C. Dvorak”, which also happens to be the name of another well respected computer journalist.  David Pogue gave an interview about the incident and took John Dvorak to task for his Twitter posts.  Unfortunately, the Twitter poster was not the computer journalist John C. Dvorak but someone else with the same name.  The journalist actually posts under the Twitter name “TheRealDvorak” and had made no comment at all about Pogue.  In this case even Pogue, an experienced New Times Reporter, didn’t realize he had mistakenly assumed he knew who the post was from.

Twitter has responded to the growing problem of mistaken identity by providing a program which tries to verify the identity of some Twitter users.   Unfortunately, the program is limited to a very small number of celebrities, and given the rate at which Twitter is growing and the company’s limited resources, this problem will likely grow as more and more people believe what they read on Twitter.

Solving this problem is one of the great challenges which will require significant new innovations to solve.  If you can’t tell who’s who, or what’s what on the internet, its value as an information repository will start to diminish.

Author: Sheldon Laube, Chief Innovation Officer

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DiVitas’s Mobile UC Now Available on the Latest Devices
November 2, 2009
By Ted Stevenson

Since mobile unified communications became a reality in earnest, two to two-and-a-half years ago, the number of dual mode handsets supported by any given provider’s technology has been a big bone of contention—or, more accurately, promotion. (‘We support 437 handsets; we’re better’—you get the idea.)

Mountain View, Calif.-based DiVitas Networks today made an announcement that pretty much sews up that competition for good (or perhaps makes it irrelevant going forward).

The flashy way to state what they’ve done would be something along the lines of: ‘DiVitas’s technology now works with the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android phone—not to mention the desktop PC.’ While those are the big attention-getters, in reality what they’ve done is to make their technology compatible with any device that runs a Web browser—a number that’s growing every day.

According to CEO Vivek Khuller, the market reality that set the company on the development path that ended with today’s announcement was the overwhelming predominance of what they are calling “Bring Your Own” phones.

“We [started with] the notion that the mobile devices would be bought by the enterprise and distributed to the employees,” Khuller told EnterpriseVoIPplanet. “The reality is that people pick their own phones. People pick their own plans, their own carriers.

“So for people like us, who are in the business of writing enterprise mobile applications, if we cannot put our applications on this wide variety of phones, we really lose the ability to drive true gains within the enterprise,” Khuller said.

This clearly called for a new approach: Rather than negotiating with owners of ‘closed,’ proprietary operating systems in order to gain the access necessary to write native applications for more devices, why not build a way to accomplish the same end using a piece of open technology that’s already on the device?

That is exactly what DiVitas has done.

“This is the approach we are taking to mobilizing the suite of enterprise applications that we’re focused on,” Khuller elaborated “—mobilizing the desk phone, corporate IM, and social apps like status and presence and location and network—and tying it all together in a single client and making that available on a phone that could be any phone that’s bought by an individual.”

Not only does this vastly enlarge the potential market universe that DiVitas can address (nice for them), it make the benefits of mobile unified communication (cost savings and enhanced communications efficiency), available to many kinds of organizations that would be unable (or simply unwilling) to try to impose on their end users the kind device uniformity that would have been required heretofore.

“If you want to distribute a client through a large population—say a student body at a school—and there are 10,000 or 20,000 students, and each student had a different device from a different service provider, it becomes a very difficult problem for the school,” Khuller observed by way of example. “But if you can make it Web enabled, it doesn’t matter which carrier or which phone these guys are using, as long as they have a Web browser on the device.”

Not only are enormous deployment hurdles swept away, participation quickly becomes essentially universal. And, of even greater importance from the IT department’s perspective, they’re fully in control of the technology—with little or no device management to attend to.

“The biggest problem we solve for the customer is not only giving them the application mobility around voice and social apps, but more importantly, delivering this functionality in a way that it can be sustained both by corporate IT or the service provider.” Khuller pointed out. “Since the application is Web driven, the amount of device management an enterprise would have to do is minimized; everything is managed at the server, so there is nothing to download or upgrade—or manage on an ongoing basis.”

Ron Hutchins, CTO of Georgia Institute of Technology, agrees. “Universities constitute one of the most diverse handset ecosystems, where IT has minimal control over selection of handsets or carriers by students,” he said. “With support for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry, DiVitas would be able to offer handset and carrier choice that would be very appealing in a college campus environment.”

Also because it is server based, the DiVitas Web interface can be easily customized. Colors and logos can be easily changed, for example. Moreover, custom applications can be integrated into the interface by means of the DiVitas API (DAPI).

Khuller cited a hypothetical example of an international financial organization customizing the DiVitas Web client with its logo other elements and creating a communications portal they could roll out to their employees, worldwide. “It doesn’t matter which phones these guys are using. As long as they have a Web browser on their phone, they’re basically connected to the enterprise communication services through that portal.”

Related Articles

• Avaya, DiVitas Partner for Dual-Mode Mobility
• DiVitas, Samsung Partner for Mobile UC
• Experiencing the Totally Connected Lifestyle

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I noted a while ago that the future of enterprise communications is in social networking. It’s easy to see why this should be: e-mail has become a vast wasteland of spam and other irritations, IM is increasingly in popularity among essentially all classes of enterprise users, and there’s a fundamental requirement for file (and many other forms of) sharing within the closed-user-group paradigm. Closing the user base keeps the riff-raff and especially spam and other distractions out, and also enhances integrity and expands the range of possible functions while maintaining security and enhancing ease-of-use and productivity.

And that’s where convergence/mobile unified communications pioneer is DiVitas Networks is going with their recent announcement, which also pursues one of my favorite directions (and a natural fit and requirement for social networking of any form regardless) – Web services. There’s no software to load here, and instant support of a broad range of key handsets. Client behavior is uniform across handsets, minimizing the training and support load and maximizing flexibility. No new apps need to be developed. And a single LDAP directory can be used for all enterprise communications functions, meaning everything works the same whether at one’s desk or out and about. This is a great addition to the overall power of mobility, and builds upon DiVitas’ previous convergence and mobile unified communications capabilities.

What we need, I’ve contended for some time, is an easy-to-use, extensible, multi-modal communications service for the enterprise. The Web is the platform, wireless is the transport, and the handset is the delivery vehicle. Add a small about of software (again, via the Web), and we’re just about there. After all these years, even for those who haven’t been paying attention, mobility is finally getting interesting!

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