Besides the Unspeakable Evil and Dead Clown in the Garden, the Schools are Very Good
At my firm, DC Interactive Group, we manage online marketing programs using Web 2.0 tools for many homebuilding clients, including Pulte/Del Webb, New West Realty and some smaller, local builders. As a part of our program, we’re always looking for opportunities to blog, comment and generally drive traffic back to our client’s minisites that are set up specifically to gather home buyer appointments for our clients and educate potential buyers about our client’s communities and developments.
The other day, one of our monitoring tools picked a very interesting video on YouTube. It’s an exerpt from the popular British comedy sketch show, Man Stroke Woman (yes, an odd name, I agree). I had thought about posting it on one of our client’s blogs, but honestly I figiured I’d have a hard time explaining the humor to sometimes humorless VPs of Marketing.
So, without further ado, here’s the sketch for your review:
Home of the Future: The Smart Garage
Forget the dirty, oily garage of the past -- soon it will be one of the most technologically-connected rooms in your home.
While oil — and gas — prices have been steadily falling over the past months, there’s no doubt that today’s consumers are demanding high-efficiency vehicles, such as gas-electric mix, fuel cell or even pure electric. Some are even calling hybrid sales a recession-defying phenomena, though recent sales have started to fall flat.
Nevertheless, the home of the future will certainly feature changes in one room that barely anyone could have foreseen even a couple of years ago. Soon, garages will become “smart.”
According to Michael Brylawski, cofounder and leader of the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Mobility + Vehicle Efficiency (MOVE) Team, “”This is where your car, the house, and the electricity system meet.”
Not too soon in the future, your electric-hyrbid car will plug into power and data stations at home, near the office and even parking garages for recharging. While the initial push of energy will be from the grid to the car’s batteries, it is expected that those same batteries will serve another purpose — to store energy for the overall grid and serve as a way for power companies to smooth out the naturally fluctuating supply of energy.
In addition, that same connection could interface with computers that monitor the “health” of your car and its systems, serve as a way to monitor diagnostics and driving history and even be a way to sync inhome and onboard systems like media libraries (music and video), an integrated phone’s address book and downloads to GPS-driven services like restaurant guides.
