Consumer windpower products still have to prove their Return On Investment. However, after being bombarded with commercials about (local) windpower successes. You can’t blaim many consumers wondering what the potential of their backyard is.  Thanks to a new iPhone app, they know now.

One of the newest iPhone apps turns the phone  into an anemometer to clock wind speeds for those considering installing a backyard turbine.

Mariah Power is introducing a program that will let you measure the wind speed around your house by pointing your iPhone toward the sky.
The application uses the phone’s microphone to capture wind noise. It filters out ambient sound and an algorithm converts the result into a decibel rating that corresponds to wind speed.  The application was created by Create with Context, a Silicon Valley digital design company that developed the application for Mariah.

Mariah, based in Reno, Nev., makes residential turbines such as the  Windspire, a 1.2-kilowatt residential turbine with horizontal blades that looks more like a piece of modern art than a conventional windmill.

Customer education, a key for growth

It is a smart step to make all iphone users potential “Windmill Advisors”. By introducing this app they give many interested buyers the possibility to see for themselves if buying a vertical windmills such as the one Mariah is selling is a sensible thing to do. It shows how much electricity it could produce and how much CO2 it would save.

It is sensible thing to do in a market that gets a lot of attention, but where the customers are lacking the knowledge to understand if a certain product or solution is truly something for them. Mariah Power also takes this a step further by setting up its own ‘Learning Centre’. It is not Havard, yet. But education is a key part of market development that seldom is included in technology introduction classes.





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