Want to Know What's Happening in a Building? Listen in at the Breaker Box, Says Startup Verdigris

Mark Chung was a chip guy. He spent nearly 15 years in the semiconductor industry since getting his master's and bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering at Stanford in 1999. He'd been an engineer at AMD for nearly six years designing chips like the Athlon and Opteron, then at startup PA Semi working on microprocessors that, he anticipated, would go into Apple computers (Apple later purchased the company and the designs would end up in iPhones). In 2008 Chung was a principal engineer at RMI, a company that later merged with Netlogic and was acquired by Broadcom. One month that year--a month he and his family had mostly spent out of town, he received a surprisingly large electrical bill: $560, when his typical bill was around $100.