The latest bright idea to come out of the Idealab incubator is a company that combines two growing trends: widespread Internet usage and utility deregulation. Utility.com, which is billing itself as the first Internet utility, is selling electricity on the Web at http://www.utility.com.
The 10 million Californians currently served by Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric are eligible to become the company’s first customers. Utility.com plans to sell electricity generated by wholesale providers in eight states by the end of the year, said Chris King, chief executive of the Albany, Calif., start-up. (Most people served by municipal utilities such as L.A.’s Department of Water & Power aren’t yet able to choose their electricity provider.)
Rhode Island's Market Has Changed. Developers, Builders, Investors and Sellers Must Change With It.
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Earlier this year, Southern California Gas launched Energy Marketplace (http://www.energymarketplace.com) to let Web surfers shop for electricity and natural gas online. Utility.com goes further, requiring customers to sign up, pay their bills and get customer service on the Web. That reduces the company’s costs and allows customers to save as much as 15 percent, King said.
To monitor customers’ energy consumption, Utility.com will install meters made by San Carlos, Calif.-based CellNet Data Systems that transmit readings using a wireless radio connection. Customers must pay $3.99 monthly for three years to use the meters.
King, a five-year veteran of PG&E and high school classmate of Idealab founder Bill Gross, said he expects Utility.com to sign up 80,000 customers by the end of the year. But Abhi Chaki, a Jupiter Communications analyst in New York, said it will probably take longer than that for online utilities to make money.
”Right now, I don’t think there’s enough customer interest in this to really be profitable,” Chaki said. “But as the energy sector gets deregulated over the next two to three years, we’ll see more progressive companies embracing the Web.”
— KAREN KAPLAN
The Webby Winners
Amazon.com (http://www.ama-zon.com) was the big winner at the 1999 Webby Awards, held recently in San Francisco. The Seattle-based online bookseller won spring-like steel statuettes in the Commerce and Technical Achievement categories. The judges’ selections matched up with the popular picks in five of the 22 categories: Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com) for the Film category; The Motley Fool (http://www.motleyfool.com) for Finance; The Onion (http://www.theonion.com) for Humor; CNN Interactive (http://www.cnn.com) for News; and PBS Online (http://www.pbs.org) for Television.
— KAREN KAPLAN
Latins and the Web
The Internet will shift from its decidedly U.S.-centric focus to a broader international one in the coming years, with Latin America being a major source of growth.
But that region faces significant challenges, an industry analyst told the LatinChannels seminar the other day in Newport Beach, Calif.
Currently, Latin America has 3 million Internet users, about half of whom get online at home, a rate that is somewhat lower than the U.S. rate of home Internet use, said Annika Alford, research manager at International Data Corp. of Framingham, Mass.
The area’s poor technological, financial and logistical infrastructures mean that electronic commerce may be slow to take off there, Alford said.
Electronic commerce currently depends on the ubiquity of credit cards, which are nowhere near as prevalent in developing nations. Also, delivery services such as United Parcel Service of America Inc. and Federal Express Corp. make selling on the Web a snap in the U.S. But in Latin America, shipping hassles and customs can make sending packages costly. And then there is the region’s faltering economy, which Alford characterized as a “short-term” issue.
Still, the nascency of the Internet and the possibility of leapfrogging older technologies by building from the ground up means that regions like Latin America are rife with opportunities that make the waters worth testing. — JONATHAN GAW
(c) 1999, Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate
