Picture this: You’re at work, and you want to check on your kid or pet. You pull up your Skype account on your smartphone and dial in to activate your video camera. There you are: You can now watch what is going on in real time.

Skycam, a crowdfunded prototype project, is a standalone wireless video surveillance camera that uses Skype to monitor your home, or office while you are away. Its makers plan to sell the hardware at a flat fee of $99 per unit; because it runs on Skype, there are no additional software costs. You’ll be able to monitor the feed from a smartphone, tablet, or a PC.

Powered by a DC power adapter, the camera is easy to install, Skycam says, and delivers up to 30 frames per second. Other features include a two-way voice communication via the built-in microphone and audio output, night vision, and instant video recording. It can record up to 144 hours of video with an 8 GB memory card.

Roger Yiu, the creator of the product says, “I wanted to bring the next generation of video monitoring to everyone.” Yiu also started a campaign to crowdfund his project on Indiegogo.

“I knew my wireless video camera needed to be affordable, easy to use, yet still high quality. That’s why I hope to crowdfund the money necessary for SKYCAM,” he said in a statement.

Yiu, a UC San Diego graduate, needs to raise $50,000 to mass produce his camera and figure out other manufacturing logistics. The campaign will run on Indiegogo until Tuesday, May 28.

Dropcam, another video surveillance startup, has raised about $18 million in venture capital to bring live and recorded videos to users with a connected device of its own.

Drool now or drool later, but LG just announced more details about its 2013 TV lineup, which it will unveil at CES in a week.

For 2013 the Korean company is focusing on smart TV enhancements like Smart Home, melding TV and web with quick access to apps, content, news sites, and weather; and Magic Remote, which enables you to control your TV by pointing, Nintendo Wii-style, or scrolling, or gesturing, or simply talking to your TV to change the channel or search for programming.

LG is also enhancing what it calls Smart Sharing, which enables owners to transfer, mirror, or share content to and from smartphones, tablets, and other devices; and LG Cloud, which enables streaming content from just about anywhere.

All of which is interesting. But the real lust-worthy item on display is its 84-inch Ultra HD television, which just launched in late October.

This TV isn’t just room-dwarfingly gargantuan — it’s also got four times the resolution of standard high-definition TVs, with 3,840 horizontal pixels combining with 2,160 vertical pixels to provide a very sweet 8,294,400 pixels of silky-smooth video pleasure. That’s 3.1 million pixels more than in an Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display (although, of course, on a much bigger screen).

But get ready to hit up the boss for a raise — that 84-inch Ultra HD TV will set you back a budget-busting $20,000.

To drive all this wealth of pixels and new intelligence, LG is updating the brains of their TVs, boosting CPU speeds by 120 percent and GPUs by 300 percent, which it says will translate to clearer images.

You’ll need that extra power, since the new Ultra HD resolution is completely unsupported by any content recorded at such high quality, so the TV depends on upconverting to provide a semblance of what higher high-def would look like.

A couple other welcome notes: LG’s new “Cinema Screen” design ethos means smaller bezels, providing more TV with less frame, and a better 3D experience with less flicker.

We’ll have more on all the latest CES announcement as the VentureBeat team CES team hits the road for Las Vegas shortly.

Whenever I write about smart grid gadgetry, much of it is probably quite boring for the average consumer. Meters, protocols, wireless networks, software — who cares?

But just as utility-side smart grid products have grown, so has technology tailored to the consumer. Some of the early offerings have struggled to engage users: Industry executives like Opower’s Dan Yates and Ecobee’s Stuart Lombard have all said the flaws with the first generation of home energy dashboards and smart thermostats is that they’ve been — well, boring, often to the point that no one has wanted to use them.

But as major companies and startups alike look to grab opportunities in the home energy management sector, a new generation of products is taking on that issue with gusto, and it will be interesting to watch which ones sink or swim. There’s some promising-looking stuff out there.

Take Intel’s home energy dashboard (right), a sleek display that not only helps you monitor energy use but offers other neat applications like video memos, traffic and mass transit monitoring and yellow page searches. Killer apps on home dashboards may well win over consumers where smart grid products have failed in the past.

Price is a question on fancier consoles. Some have suggested that utilities might provide cheap or free energy mangement gadgetery, similar to how AT&T might offer a free or discounted cell phone with a service contract. Others, like Schneider Electric, have opted for middle-of-the-road-ish pricing, with backlighting that shows you something akin to an “alert level” of your energy usage — an interesting approach that just might work.

I got to see this traffic light-esque design in action recently at a smart grid demonstration at the Austin offices of Texas transmission utility Oncor. The product on display, a device by Landis+Gyr, is similar to what others like Schneider Electric are offering: the traffic-light approach to saving energy and money (both are pictured below).

It seems this approach is a simple but effective way to get to the vast majority of users who aren’t terribly interested in raw energy usage data. These devices use different colors to indicate your energy usage level — way simpler than foraging through numbers and bar graphs. And in demand-response and peak load management scenarios, they can motivate you to shift your energy use to off-peak times. In a home enabled with smart appliances like programmable thermostats and water heaters, these devices makes even more sense.

In an Oncor demonstration, the device started out showing a chill yellow backlight (middle image, below), with energy costing three cents per kilowatt-hour. Then an Oncor spokeswoman flipped on energy-sucking floodlights in the conference room. Suddenly, the display turned red and rates jumped to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour (below, left).

Easy, accessible knowledge like this is power for utilities that want to launch a broader menu of offerings, from ones that offer financial incentives for peak-time consumption cuts (called demand response) to adjustable-rate plans. In those scenarios, devices like this make sense. That’s the mindset behind the Ecotality and Cisco partnership, which displays utility rates and charging history on a Cisco home energy controller that will help guide homeowners to the best times to charge, then program their Ecotality electric car charger to charge at cheap-rate times.

Home energy tech hopefuls have had to toe the line when designing their wares: Is the answer to create opt-out programs that automate energy management and adjustments so that consumers don’t need to think about it — just kick back and enjoy the savings on their energy bill? Or is the answer to make a module engaging and fun, so that residents actually want to monitor and adapt to their home energy use day to day? These simple traffic light-type devices seem to sit nicely between two extremes.

Update: This story has been corrected to indicate that Landis+Gyr is the maker of the device on display at Oncor.]

[Top image via Flickr/Horia Varlan]

The Department of Defense must buy American-made solar panels — That’s according to a provision in an appropriations act signed into law this week, Greentech Media reports. It requires all photovoltaic devices purchased by the DoD to comply with the Buy American Act; that is, they must be purchased from U.S. manufacturers — but the provisions could potentially threaten the U.S.’s net exporter status in solar.

Mercedes-Benz runs hydrogen and electric car plays — The company plans to lease 200 of its F-Cell hydrogen cars (pictured) around the globe (customers began receiving them in December), which offer fast refueling times and longer driving ranges. It will also market its SLS AMG E-Cell in 2013, the all-electric version of its hot sports car that the company says will equal the original in distance, speed and performance.

Dupont bids $5.8 billion for Danisco — The chemicals giant is betting big on biofuels and food additives, Reuters writes. The two companies have a cellulosic ethanol joint venture.

Duke Energy to be largest utility in the US? – Duke offered $13.7 billion to buy out its rival, Progress Energy. Combined, the two would create the largest utility in the country. Duke has been experimenting with cleantech, with an energy efficiency pilot in Charlotte, N.C., wind farms and smart meters.

Green manufacturing stocks took a hit in 2010 — Some of the year’s biggest losers in renewable energy were manufacturers, including Q-Cells, A123, Broadwind Energy and Energy Conversion Devices, said an Earth2Tech article citing Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Energy efficiency companies did better, with the biggest movers including LED companies Universal Display, Zhejiang Yankon Group and motor company Baldor Electric.

Warren Buffet’s MidAmerican Energy to install wind power in Iowa — The company, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, plans to install 593 megawatts of wind power in Iowa, enough to power 190,000 homes, CNET reports.. The project will consist of 258 wind turbines supplied by Siemens Energy, to be installed throughout the state by the end of next year.

China defends cutting rare metal exports, boosting Molycorp stock — Rare metals are used in wind turbines and hybrid cars, so it’s bad news for both that prices for those metals have been soaring since this summer, when China slashed its exports by 40 percent. The country, which produces about 97 percent of the world’s metals for high-tech products, is defending its decision to the global community, which is calling the move a potential World Trade Organization violation, Reuters reports. On the other hand, U.S. rare earth mining company Molycorp’s stock is soaring, Earth2Tech notes. The company plans to start mining again in California next year and was also bolstered by a joint venture with Japanese mining firm Hitachi Metals.

India to quadruple renewable energy capacity – The country plans to reach the goal of 72,400 megawatts of power generation capacity from clean energy by 2022, the Wall Street Journal reports. India is expected to be the second-largest cause of global energy demand rising by 2035, with its consumption more than doubling by that time.

Verizon launches home monitoring and controls — The company announced a trial phase to become available in the first half of 2011. The service lets you lock doors remotely and set, adjust and control lights, smart thermostats and smart appliances using Fios, Verizon’s fiber-optic network.