Abstract: Smart Appliances are defined that assist in reducing energy consumption or cost. The Smart Appliances communicate with Smart Energy sources via the power lines and in particular by injecting communications signals between the live plus neutral power lines on the one hand and the ground line on the other hand, the communications protocol allowing a power source to identify the electrical circuit to which an appliance is connected and thereby to route a selected type of power to the appliance on the correct electrical circuit for that appliance. An addressable electrical outlet is also disclosed as one form of Smart Appliance.

Abstract: In one aspect of the invention, an improved messaging service is described comprising a server for receiving messages from a first subscriber addressed to one or more second subscribers and storing them in a scrambled form on the server along with security tokens specific to each message and recipient subscriber to facilitate unscrambling only by the intended recipient subscribers. In a second aspect of the invention, a subscriber terminal is described for precalculating security tokens corresponding to each of a number of yet-to-be received messages and transmitting the security tokens to a server for scrambling said messages even when the receiving subscriber terminal is offline. A new-message originating terminal also receives from the server a precalculated and prestored security token for each of a number of intended recipients of the new message and combines them with a locally generated security token to form header information included with the new message.

Abstract: In one aspect of the invention, a communications device is described to include novel software for aggregating voice and other messages from various communications media and presenting the user with a display of same, ordered by medium, date of receipt, source etc. The software also comprises a user-friendly man-machine interface for forwarding the messages from one medium to another, including making such messages available to members of social websites. In a second aspect of the invention, a server computer is described, including software to receive, organize and store said messages in digital form, with the participation of the user's communication device in one mode and automatically without the participation of the user's device in another mode. The server comprises software that generates links to selected stored messages that the user can post on the Web.