June 18th, 2008
Westinghouse is plugged in. Green Plugged, that is.
Scrappy little power-supply start-up Green Plug, has scored a bit of a coup. Westinghouse Digital Electronics plans to use the company’s design for a smart power interface that can be used across MULTIPLE electronics products.
That means, yes, that you could use THE SAME charging hub or adapter to charge your digital picture frame OR your monitor OR your television interchangeably. That’s right, yes, you wouldn’t have a DIFFERENT power supply for EVERY different product. According to the simple math that Green Plug uses, there will be about 3.2 billion power supplies shipped in 2008 just based on the amount of tech products that will ship. Why does this have to be so? Isn’t there a way to create and consolidate power supplies much like everyone is doing with servers? Can you tell how annoyed this stuff makes me? Especially when I trip over the chords under my own desk.
Green Plug founder Frank Paniagua likes to call his plan for Green Plug the “open systems model” for powering electronics devices. The company has aligned itself with the Alliance for Universal Power Supplies, which held a conference last week to debate this issue and related ideas.
Aside from Westinghouse, Paniagua is trying to reach out to major high-tech systems OEMs, but nothing to report yet. He’s been more successful with some of the power companies, and you can expect to hear about some rebates in the future that will help inspire consumers to gravitate toward this approach.
Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist in the New York area with more than 20 years experience covering the high-tech industry. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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