As the popularity of home automation and the cost of electricity grow around the world, energy conservation has become a higher priority for many consumers. With a number of smart meter devices available for your home, you can now measure and record overall household power draw, and then with the output of a machine learning model, accurately predict individual appliance behavior simply by analyzing meter data.

Today we are announcing the BigQuery sandbox, a credit-card free path to enable new users and students to experiment with BigQuery at no cost—without having to enter credit card information. As organizations begin to collect more and more data, many find that a serverless data warehouse like BigQuery is the only platform that can scale to meet their needs.

Since they emerged in 2009, cryptocurrencies have experienced their share of volatility—and are a continual source of fascination. In the past year, as part of the BigQuery Public Datasets program, Google Cloud released datasets consisting of the blockchain transaction history for Bitcoin and Ethereum, to help you better understand cryptocurrency. Today, we're releasing an additional six cryptocurrency blockchains.