Green Plug: Power Should Be Universal

Company:

Headquarters: San Ramon, Calif.

Technology Sector: Hardware

Key Product: Green Plug Universal Power Protocol

Year Founded: 2006

Number of Channel Partners: None (One manufacturing partner in North America)

Ideal Channel Partner: Volume-oriented resellers

Why You Should Care: Because we're all tired of having to deal with multiple incompatible external power supplies.

The Lowdown: Green Plug may not directly touch the typical IT reseller's business, but this developer of universal connectors for power supplies thinks the channel can benefit from widespread adoption of its technology.

"We think that the power model is broken," said Seth Socolow, vice president of corporate marketing at Green Plug. "Now, the consumers are the ones who feel the pain, but I think the resellers play a huge part here. The pull is there from the consumer, but if the push can come from the resellers, we could meet in the middle to the benefit of all."

What sort of pain is Socolow describing? Consumer electronics devices, PCs and other computing tools generally come with an external power transformer that converts between

90V and 254V wall power to device-specific DC power. The cables and connectors that link the DC power supply are a mess of different types, meaning once a device is replaced, they get tossed in the trash.

The power conversion game as it stands is both wasteful and inconvenient, especially for travelers lugging around assorted cables and power supplies that may not work in the country they're visiting, Socolow said.

Green Plug wants to change all that.

"Look, there were 3.2 billion new power supplies manufactured last year and about two billion older ones that went into landfill," Socolow said, citing a recent Gartner study. "Today, there is a standard for AC power but there isn't a standard for DC power, and that's what we're working on bringing to the world."

The company's first manufacturing partner is Bangkok, Thailand-based Innergie, which makes the mCube90G power adapter based on Green Plug's programmable microcontroller and Greentalk protocol for electronic devices. The upshot is that the mCube90G acts as a smart hub for powering a device, using the Greentalk protocol to automatically tune the power supply to the device's power demands and even turn it off when not in use.

Green Plug has been in talks with even larger manufacturers, Socolow said, and the company "encourages all electronic device manufacturers to adopt a common connector and the dynamic programmability model for powering their products."

Is Green Plug new to the game? Yes, but Socolow is hoping solution providers and other influencers will see a commercial edge in providing some relief for a long-standing end-user pain point with universal power adapters.