Featured Pitch: TrickleStar
Web Site: www.tricklestar.com
Headquarters: Hong Kong
Year Founded: 2007
Founders: Bernard Emby and Thomas Joergensen
Investors: Self-funded
Employees: 2 full-time
By Bernard Emby, Co-Founder
TrickleStar has developed a range of energy-saving products with a strong focus on those which help to reduce the amount of standby power consumed by PC and TV accessory devices. These types of devices are in hundreds of millions of homes worldwide, and standby power is a big problem that can be alleviated with the use of TrickleStar’s products.
We want to get lots of people using our products and collectively making a big impact in reducing the amount of wasted standby power globally.TrickleStar products work by switching off TV and PC appliances when they are not in use, so that they do not consume any standby power. The savings are typically around $50 per device per year, depending on the number and type of appliance. By keeping the product cost affordable, our goal is to have everyone who has a PC or TV with accessories purchase one or more of our devices.
About Standby Power
A recent Gartner report notes that the ICT industry accounts for approximately two percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, which is equivalent to the emissions of the aviation industry.*Standby power is now a significant issue, given the number of products that use standby power.
*Measurements in many countries have estimated that standby power may be as high as 12 percent of residential electricity consumption in some economies.
*Many standby products are designed to draw standby power 24 hours-a-day, seven days-a-week, every month of the year in order that the appliances can act more quickly when the user turns the appliance “on.”
*A report in 2001 by the IEA (International Energy Agency) stated that “we can reduce standby power consumption by about 74 percent using cost-effective technologies and design changes.”
*Standby power, also known as “vampire power,” “phantom load,” “standby current” or “leaking electricity” refers to the electric power that is consumed by electronic appliances and devices whilst they are switched off or in “standby mode.”
*Most standby power that is consumed is considered wasted power as it is not being used to “power” any activity.*Most PC peripherals consume power in standby mode, such as monitors, speakers, sub-woofers, ADSL modems, routers, scanners, printers, external hard disk drives, power strips, chargers, etc.
*Other appliances that consume standby power are microwaves, televisions, stereos, video and DVD players, video games, cordless phones, air conditioners, washing machines, and clothes dryers.
*The amount of standby power wasted varies among electronic equipment, but overall, the cost to consumers and businesses for all electricity lost to “vampire power” in the U.S. alone is estimated to be $4 billion annually.
Founders’ Story
TrickleStar is a privately-held company based in Hong Kong and is a partnership between myself and Thomas Joergensen.I have a history of entrepreneurial ventures and served as a joint venture partner in Asia for 10 years with Clipsal, an Australian manufacturing company specializing in electrical and building automation products. Clipsal was recently acquired by Schneider Electric and I sold my equity in the business.
Thomas has a background in hardware development and most recently was the director of engineering in Asia for Zensys, the developer of the Z-Wave RF networking technology.A common desire to work in a flexible manner, as we both have young families, and to do something meaningful and make a contribution to help reduce carbon emissions united us. We decided to form a business together in late 2007. We both see reducing carbon emissions and learning to use less energy, in a smarter way, as two of the great challenges of our generation.
Business ModelOur goal to keep our costs low and have our products widely adopted has shaped our vision for the business. In order to keep the cost of the products as low as possible, we only have two employees—the founders—and we do not have offices. Instead, we have a community of partners who subcontract as and when required, and we use these partners on a regular basis. These partners provide a range of services ranging from industrial design, electronics design, tooling, right through to logistics and public relations.
We make extensive of use of technology such as Skype, video conferencing, hosted accounting, email and other collaborative tools.This strategy has helped us to keep our fixed costs low. The only drawback being that design and engineering flexibility is sometimes limited.
We expect the business to be profitable in mid 2009.Our current needs are to identify and appoint distribution partners who can work with us to take the products to market in the U.S. and Europe. The products are suited to retail sale as well as through professional IT equipment resellers, so we are looking to build relationships with retailers and IT distribution specialists. We are looking for assistance in understanding and penetrating the retail consumer electronics space in the U.S.Based upon sales forecasts received from potential distributors, we expect to start looking at options for raising capital for growth in mid 2009 as growth starts to accelerate.
