Blake Burris

As we roll into 2012, I thought I should explain my fascination with Cleanweb, why it’s had my attention since early last year and what it means for my company, Dynamo.

Cleanweb broadly describes transformative opportunities for innovation at the intersection of IT and Energy. This description allows for everything from smartgrid companies like Silver Spring Networks, Efficiency vendors like ThinkEco and Nest to GetAround, Airbnb and OPower. 

Sunil Paul can be first credited with use of the term “Cleanweb” in his seminal blog post and his presentation at GreenNet (if not earlier). I was introduced to Sunil by a friend, Andrew Ng, who suggested we connect on my vision for transforming the consumer relationship with energy, efficiency and cleantech. It was in the process of reading up on his history and firm, Spring Ventures, that I discovered Cleanweb along with his work on Gigaton Throwdown - both pleasant discoveries .

You see, at the time (early 2011), we were just finding our way in clean energy - knowing we wanted to serve the user (real people) not the incumbents. We were promoting Dynamo as a Cleantech company and our prototype aggregated in-home usage data from disparate sources…sounded good to us. Cleantech really wasn’t a great conversation starter though and several people suggested we were more about “behavioral analytics” but we still didn’t have the bridge to connect the user with the things that would open up a dialog about energy or drastically change their consumption patterns.

Cleanweb helped us find our identity as a company and is increasingly defining our mission to solve the world’s energy problems by accelerating consumer adoption of cleantech and efficiency solutions. 

In my quest for success with Dynamo, I realized Cleanweb was something we needed to be widely recognized and promoted. I joined Sunil in an effort to recruit more people (innovators) who would also answer the Cleanweb call. Cleanweb Hackathon was established as the vehicle and the inaugural event was held in SF last September with great reception and results.  

The parade continues January 21-22 with a stop in NYC. Thanks to the help of an incredible volunteer team, I’m co-producing this event at NYU’s Tisch ITP. We’ve rolled out the carpet for participants to come out, join teams, and produce apps for prizes and exposure.

There’s also a Friday kick-off reception at the incredible New York Academy of Sciences. It’s going to be great event, so please join us, send friends, or tune in to the live stream.

Join the movement. Hit me up on twitter or tune into the #cleanweb chatter.