The 10 Best Digital Innovators Of The Year: 2009 Netexplorateur Awards

by Myra Per-Lee

**4. Netexplorateur: Edison Smart Connect, Richard Schomberg, USA**

Category: Environment & Sustainable Development

ImageThe Edison SmartConnect™, by Southern California Edison® provides customers with real time meter-reader ability for home appliances that can be networked to a central thermostat in their homes. It will enable the consumer to control costs, to use energy during non-peak times, and to save approximately 365,000 metric tons per year in Southern California alone.

**5. Netexplorateur: Google Flu Trends, Mats Carduner, USA**

Category: Health, Solidarity, & Citizenship

The Google Flu Trends analyses come from data gathered from individual web searches for flu-related topics, such as "flu medicine" or "symptoms of flu." The data is broken up by region or state or locality and published on the Google Flu Trends site. The advantage? The data, which has been tested in retrospect, seems to appear two weeks before the Center for Disease Control knows about it.

**6. Netexplorateur: New Songdo City IBD, Heekyung Jo Min, South Korea**

Category: Environment & Sustainable Development

A master-planned city to open in 2014, developed on 1,500 acres of land along waterfront about 40 miles south of Seoul. A joint venture between Gale International and Posco Steel, this city will showcase an all-digital lifestyle, becoming a mecca of interconnected, interactive objects. And though technology will replace gambling as its feature, New Songdo will nevertheless have replicas of known landmarks like Venetian canals, Central Park, and the 1st World Towers. New Songdo City nicknames: Synergy City, Utopia.