I have never tried them, but they seem pricey, and I get the feeling that when you try to get technical support in this very big providers you deal with some intern or temporary worker who has been there for 6 months, not the people who set up the datacenter from the ground up.
Also small companies know their only chance is to never loose a customer.
I work for a living doing research on solar cells.
I downloaded the technical paper and had a quick look. It would have taken me days of hard study to understand what this undoubtedly clever people have done, even though I have a PhD in physics. From how excited they seem to be about their own work, I would guess its probably a very nice piece of theoretical physics. But a few things are clear, from their own words:
- They have not actually fabricated a solar cell, their most optimistic expectation based on this technology is 10% efficiency. With efficiencies bellow 14% you cant compete with other energy sources (you can not reach grid parity), even if your solar cells are so cheap that they are free. That is because the solar cell itself is only a fraction of the costs of solar energy. Think of land, maintenance, support structures, cabling, power electronics, and so on. That means that this concept, as it is, is useless for solar energy production, just like "organic" and other fashionable solar cell technologies.
- The effects they are talking about happen when light has an intensity, in their own words "as low as 10^7 W/cm2" that is a hundred million times more intense than the light from the sun. You need a big, expensive laser to observe the effects they are talking about.
- This is just one more case of people trying to spin their work as a revolution in solar energy, just because it is fashionable and it gives you publicity and funding for your research. They are probably fooling themselves in the first place, but that is no excuse. This type of thing is terribly detrimental for all of us, as it takes funding and attention from the solar cell technologies that actually work. This is a shame for the people involved, and for the University of Michigan.
- If you want to make a bet on solar cells, bet for III-V concentrator solar cells. These are the most efficient ones, by far, (above 40%), and can be used under optical concentration (up to a thousand suns) making the cost of the cell itself almost irrelevant.
From my not-still-incomplete engineering education I came to understand that "solar panels" are huge photodiodes.
Doesn't sound exiting at all. I get to the point of having a PhD like you, I guess nothing will excite me on the mass media when it comes to technology.
I have been working for more than 3 years on a similar thing. I have to admit that you nailed it focusing on a simple interface with just the essential features. I still like mine better of course ;) but I am overloading mine (notepub.com) with features very few people use, just because I am having fun at it. And I do not have the capacity to expand to mobile apps, so I am kind of stuck.
Congratulations! I hope you the best for you.
WOW! This is the most powerful and inspiring thing I have seen in a while. I really hope this catches on. Thank you, it is refreshing to see a webapp that is innovative at this stage of things. Your enthusiasm is contagious, it would be wonderful if it went viral.
Problems:
I can imagine a lot of CEOs laughingly dismissing this. They are not going to let some software take over. It has to be clear how this is beneficial for CEOs, and you make a point that CEOs are overburdened but still.
The overall feeling is that you are giving up control of the corporation. I think it would be better to market it as an enabling complement to traditional organizational structures. An evolution rather than a revolution. Make it clear that your product is a tool with which organizations decide the pace at which they want to move towards open governance, rather than a new set of rigid rules to be used from the start.
For the past 3 years in have been thinking and working in something somewhat related, but chose to focus on the enabling tools, rather than on the organizational ideas.
Mostly a hacker with enthusiasm for the project. Useful skills: php, mysql, html, javascript, linux admin, graphical design... This is a one man project not in the position to hire, the offer is to join as a co-founder.
I have never tried them, but they seem pricey, and I get the feeling that when you try to get technical support in this very big providers you deal with some intern or temporary worker who has been there for 6 months, not the people who set up the datacenter from the ground up.
Also small companies know their only chance is to never loose a customer.