Responsibility Blog

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I recently spoke with the National League of Cities about how we help our communities around the country. We talked about our active employee volunteers — more than 730,000 hours last year — and our grants that support education, domestic violence prevention and family safety. But increasingly, we think that we can help communities large and small through what we do best: using our networks to connect people and devices.

For communities on a large scale, we can use our networks to enable intelligent remote automation. That’s a fancy way of saying that if we use our technology to network machines and information, we can save time, lower energy costs and give consumers more control over their lives.

Some of this is already happening behind the scenes, such as with power companies using remote transmitters to read electric meters. (When’s the last time you had to let a meter reader into your basement?) But that’s just the beginning. Increasingly, we can enable automation in a home so you can monitor and control your thermostat, lights and appliances remotely. And in Charlotte, North Carolina, we’re part of a pilot urban sustainability project with Duke Energy called “Envision Charlotte”. By providing real-time information on energy use to workers in commercial office buildings in downtown Charlotte, the project organizers hope to reduce energy consumption by 20%.

It’s a modest start, but we think that this is one of the ways we can make our interests as a business match those of the community at large, so that we can use our expertise to make a dent in tough issues facing our communities, and make the world in which we work better than it was yesterday.