100 days ago, we fired up our solar panels from Sunrun, and started being an energy producer, instead of an energy hog. With a few bills under our belt, we’re saving as much money as we would have saved on gasoline had I bought two Toyota Priuses for our comings and goings. In the 99 days of records we have so far, PG&E tells us we produced more energy than we consumed in 82 of those days, and in the rare occasion where we’ve tapped the grid, it hasn’t been for much.

Living in Silicon Valley, home ownership is already expensive enough without having to worry about whether my kids left the TV on or if my wife left the lights on when she left the room. With young kids, we do more than our fair share of laundry and dishwashing, and as a geek, I know our place is probably in the 1% in terms of plugged in devices and screens throughout the house. So our electricity bills have always been high - in the three digits every month.


In talking with Sunrun, we were pretty sure we would be a good candidate for going solar, but I’ve never been more excited to take a look at our monthly, or even daily, statistics from a utility as we are now. Instead of paying more than $200 a month for electricity alone, well above the two tanks of gasoline I consume with commuting and bussing kids around each month, that bill has been taken down to Abraham Lincolns or Alexander Hamiltons instead of Benjamin Franklins.


As the season has warmed from spring to summer, and our air conditioning comes on earlier and stays on later, we’re no longer confronting the double to triple penalty rates we’d faced in years past. Last year, we’d be using between 25 and even 50 kilowatt hours of electricity per day. This year, we’re actually producing 20 kilowatt hours of power each day above what we’re using. Simply put, when the sun is out, I’m making money.


In my first post in March after getting panels on our roof, I said it was “ like getting caps on your teeth to show a little bling to the neighbors.” And now my kids notice other homes around town that have gone solar, and call them out to me as we walk or drive by. It’s a pretty obvious statement.


The next step, of course, is to consider ditching my gasoline-using car for a Tesla. I see them every day to and from work. I'd love to have one, and my kids already point out what they call “quiet cars”, like the Chevy Volt and Prius, and ask why we don’t have one yet. But they don’t realize the cost of a Tesla is five times what I paid Sunrun for 20 years of solar, with monetary benefits that trail solar. So until then, that part is a dream, but I’ve got two Teslas on my roof, and it’s a cool 70 degrees in the house. That will have to do.

It's been just over a year since I started my experiment with Fitbit, tracking not only my every step daily, but also my weight, learning how I measured up against my peers and against myself. The act of tracking my information, and keeping up with my peers, along with an irrational desire to stay atop virtual leaderboards, led me to lose thirty pounds at peak, and with little dramatic effort, I dropped 7 inches in my waist and have had to rebuy clothes more than once.

But Fitbit hasn't been the only data tracking app I've made part of my life, and I'm looking forward to more, for information truly is power, and as you start to quantify and measure that power, you get results.

If Fitbit is about tracking your activity, how much energy you burn, and how far you get with that effort, it's not too much of a stretch to see Nest's smart thermostat as Fitbit for your home. The attractive Nest dial not only is a small conversation piece in our home, but it has simplified our heating and cooling, letting us manage our home via smartphone and the web, all while getting regular reports on how much we've tasked our utilities.

I purchased our Nest thermostat in March of last year, and that means we've gotten through a full twelve months, giving us enough data to check usage year over year. Even with the usual caveats of weather variations, kids needing more laundry done due to more activities, or anything else, it's clear we routinely have saved anywhere from $40 to $100 a month in electricity and gas with Nest, which means we broke even on our $299 purchase within six months.


That catapults Nest from the "fun gadget" category to the "real benefits" category. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to say that you use less heat when things warm up, like my monthly Nest Energy statement from April reported, but it does take smart science to learn when my family is in the house, and how to cool or heat our home at the right time, so nothing is wasted.

Fitbit and the Nest aren't the only devices that urge you to be better with the delivery of data and smart analysis. Today, I got more excited about a new gadget than I've been in some time, when I stumbled upon the promise of Automatic.com, and their early stage smart driving assistant. The assistant, which you can read more about on their site, sucks down information from your driving behavior, sends it to your phone, and helps you learn how you can change your behavior to save money on gas, and generally be a better driver. It even promises to help diagnose mysterious issues that flare up with everyone's car now and again.

Obviously, living and breathing a world like Google, as I do, we're thinking about data and separating good information from bad all the time. But this isn't a story about Google. It's a story about how smart thinking and critical application of the right information can make your life a better one. You don't need ten posts from me that crow about how Fitbit has made me thinner, but it did. You don't need me to tell you I'm one of the cool kids who has Nest, but I did get one, and I'm very glad I did. In months, after my preorder of the Automatic driving assistant comes through, I bet my driving may change in the same way my walking has - and the same way we don't have our air conditioning and heater constantly blaring.

We're in an interesting time in technology, where we're moving from a counting data for data's sake, and posting it without filters, like the first passes with Last.fm and Foursquare, to a utlity-based model, where the machines and software are getting smarter, teaching us and guiding us to be better. It's really exciting when you think about it - as we move not just from quantitative data, but qualitative data, and present it in such a way that it's not just for the geeks, but for everyone. Bring on more gadgets like this, please.