Betanews - Clean & Green

Gartner: SMS-based money transfer will be bigger than mobile browsing, search

Tim Conneally — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:36:41 -0500

Technology market research company Gartner Inc. has released a report which predicts what the top ten mobile applications will be in 2012 based on current activity in the smartphone field, including such factors as consumer and industry interest, potential revenue, and existing business models.

Based upon this information, Gartner predicts the number one "killer app" that everyone will have on their mobile device will be one that is currently uncommon in the United States, but available elsewhere in the world: Money Transfer.

More important than mobile communication or entertainment applications, Gartner predicts that SMS-based money transfer is the next big thing for smartphones. It already exists in a number of other markets, but Gartner says the regulatory kinks need to be worked out before it can truly flourish.

"Because of the fast growth of mobile money transfer, regulators in many markets are piling in to investigate the impact on consumer costs, security, fraud and money laundering," Gartner's announcement today said. "On the operational side, market conditions vary, as do the local resources of service providers, so providers need different market strategies when entering a new territory." The rest of Gartner's list, in descending order, included: Location-based services, mobile search, mobile browsing, mobile health monitoring, mobile payment, near field communication services, mobile advertising, mobile instant messaging, and mobile music.

Items six and seven on Gartner's list (mobile payment and near-field communication services) are issues related to one another and to the transfer of money. These two application classes have been closely linked since NTT DoCoMo debuted near-field "Wallet Phones" in 2004, which turn a user's phone into a sort of Speedpass dongle which can be "charged" with money or credits, and passed in front of a reader for instant transactions.

Gartner says the main difficulty in propagating any of these money-related technologies comes in uniting the mobile carriers with the banks.

"The increasing consumer interest in smartphones, the participation of Internet players in the mobile space, and the emergence of application stores and cross-industry services are reducing the dominance of mobile carriers," Sandy Shen, research director at Gartner said. "Each player will influence how the application is delivered and experienced by consumers, who ultimately vote with their attention and spending power."

The Internet can still be a positive force, World Wide Web Foundation says

Tim Conneally — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:27:28 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Former Senior Vice President of AOL and political activist Mark Walsh makes a convincing argument that the Internet is broken. He believes that as soon as people started making money on the Internet, things changed for the worse.

"We really thought that the Internet, or the 'interactive services business' as we called it back then, was going to change the world," Walsh said in a recent TED talk. "And we thought it was important that that sense of community, that sense of transparency, that sense of empowerment was really a set of core principles that all of us believed in...it really was a perfect time. But then the money showed up, and things changed...The internet is broken because of that money."

Fortunately, not all of the powers from the dawn of the Internet think it's a lost cause.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, widely regarded as the man who "invented the Internet," founded an international nonprofit group called the World Wide Web Foundation that officially launched global operations today. The Foundation's first projects focus on the very ideals Walsh believes were neglected when big money came into the Internet. Harnessing the Internet's power to create community, improve communication and empower individuals, the World Wide Web Foundation believes it can still be used as a force for positive change.

This week, the World Wide Web Foundation begins operations on two programs: The Web Alliance for Re-greening Africa (W4RA), and Empowering Youth in Inner Cities.

W4RA is a three-year project which will do work in Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali. The objective there is connect farmers with one another, so that they may quickly and continuously share innovative cultivation techniques to rehabilitate degraded land. Local farmers figured out how to turn barren, drought-ravaged land into fertile fields using available resources and simple techniques. But for farmers to share their techniques with others, they previously had to be bussed long distances and engage in face-to-face discussions. The Foundation looks to employ a "digital bus" to let these farmers teach their methods to one another and hopefully speed up the "re-greening" of northwest Africa.

The second project will go to economically-challenged inner cities in different continents and teach the youth how to develop mobile and Web applications on both mobile and desktop platforms. While there may not be opportunities in the community in which they reside, this sort of program could give kids the ability to turn to the Web for education and employment.

"We don't think the problems of the world can be solved by simply throwing tech at them," World Wide Web Foundation CEO Steven Bratt told Betanews. "We are looking to bring forth a better Web, which will help people develop business, medicine, agriculture, and health care."

DSL may be the key to holding down 'smart grid' costs

Tim Conneally — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:07:26 -0400

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

The US government is attaching new priority to the task of reducing nationwide energy waste, with one approach being to modernize the country's aging power grid. By creating a "Smart Grid," or a self-monitoring and balancing network of electricity, the US may be able to utilize all forms of power (solar, fossil fuel, hydroelectric, wind, nuclear) in a more efficient and less wasteful manner.

Because $4.5 billion of national stimulus funds have been allocated to the creation of such a smart grid, a host of companies have sprung up, ready to provide the technology. However, just as the forms of energy are coming from disparate sources, there are different communications networks, metering software and central management systems at play. Just one week ago, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released its first preliminary List of Smart Grid Interoperability Standards, and according to the group, it could take several hundred different standards to achieve a secure, end-to-end interoperability across a fully implemented smart grid.

Current Group, a company participating in the "gold rush" for smart grid technology announced today that it has partnered with national telecommunications company Qwest to release a framework for smart grid implementation based around Qwest's DSL network. The two companies have already tested the platform with power company Xcel Energy in the SmartGridCity consortium, which is a smart grid project being built in Boulder, Colorado.

Since DSL is relatively cheap and highly available, Current is hoping that energy companies will jump on its solution. CEO Tom Casey said, "We have further reduced the cost of a Smart Grid and today, we introduce an attractive option for utilities interested in using the stimulus funding to implement a Smart Grid and manage the two-way power flow of the future," in a statement today.

ZigBee aims to cut energy costs through IP-based metering

Tim Conneally — Mon, 18 May 2009 16:57:12 -0400

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is a non-profit international board which drafts and publishes standards for a huge range of electric and electronic technologies. Among the hundreds of standards put out by the IEC, some of the most notable include VHS/S-VHS video cassette technology (IEC 60774), digital audio based on compact discs (IEC 60908) and electromagnetic compatibility (IEC 61000).

You may not be familiar with ZigBee just yet, but if the IEC gets its hands on it, that could change. ZigBee is a low-power wireless protocol similar to Bluetooth that fits under the 802.15.4 personal area network standard. Its current largest deployments are in home utility wireless networks and smart meters, and because of its conservative use of electricity, the ZigBee Alliance is attempting to make it the preeminent standard for smart energy metering. Today, the group announced that it will be submitting its ZigBee Smart Energy profile to the IEC for as the basis of a new standard in smart grid technology.

Ideally, all your home appliances would be able to communicate their energy consumption to your wireless router, where you could track usage, and subsequently transmit that data to the utility company for more granular billing.

The IEC's Technical Committee 57 is dedicated to developing and maintaining the standards for an interoperable communication architecture for power systems and control equipment in such systems as Energy Management Systems (EMS) and Supervisory Control and Data Aquisition (SCADA).

Greg Robinson, of TC57's working group 14, said the ZigBee Smart Energy profile could, "improve data fidelity and minimize overall life cycle costs for exchanging information among home area networks, metering systems and utility back office systems."

Every UK home to get a smart meter

Tim Conneally — Tue, 12 May 2009 18:01:53 -0400

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

By 2020, every British household could be equipped with a smart meter -- a device that will allow for a higher level of granularity in tracking a home's energy consumption, and could lead to an overall reduction in carbon waste. Last October, the UK Government announced that intended to mandate smart meters for all households and small and medium-sized business sites.

Yesterday, the Department of Energy and Climate Change's (DECC) Ed Miliband announced the government has launched a public consultation (found here) on the implementation of smart meters which will be open until August 3.

"In short, smart meters will become a cornerstone of our efficient management of energy resources as a nation and as individuals in the future," the consultation reads, "The roll out of smart meters will be a major undertaking, involving visits to over 25 million households, to replace something approaching 50 million meters. The Government recognizes that many policy, technical, and operational issues will need to be worked through before a final timetable can be settled. However, we have set an indicative target of the end of 2020 for the completion of the rollout."

By the government's preliminary estimations, the rollout will reduce carbon emissions by 2.6 million tons and save between £2.5-£3.6 billion over the next 20 years.

"This is another part of our Great British refurb," said Miliband, "The meters most of us have in our homes were designed for a different age, before climate change. Now we need to get smarter with our energy."

Xerox rolls out pioneering ColorQube printer with crayon-like ink

Jacqueline Emigh — Thu, 07 May 2009 14:22:22 -0400

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews

Formerly codenamed Jupiter, the ColorQube 9200 series printers unveiled today will bring groundbreaking cost efficiencies to color printing through a combination of solid ink technology and per-click pricing plans, Xerox officials contended, in a series of press launches.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm pleased to announce that, for the first time, you can release your 'true colors' in the office," declared Xerox Corp. President Ursula Burns, touting ColorQube as the "most significant change in office printing in the past 30 years."

Of the roughly two trillion pages printed out in offices last year, almost all were printed on laser printers, but only 15% were done in color, Burns noted, during a launch event broadcast over the Web from Chicago.

"I know that the world is not black-and-white," she said. "[But] companies have put a lock on color printing."

"Price is the number one barrier to color printing," concurred David Bates, director of product marketing for the Xerox Office Group, during an earlier press preview in New York City.

Beyond saving money for businesses, the technology used in the ColorQube 9201/9202/9203 printers is "cleaner" than laser technology, and also much easier for office workers to deal with, the Xerox officials said.

Jim Rise, vice president and general manager of Xerox's Solid Ink Products Business Unit pointed to the "simplicity of the cartridge-free consumables."

In contrast to laser printers, which use cartridges containing powdered toner, Xerox' latest solid ink technology uses blocks of a crayon-like substance. Printing happens when the melts the waxy "ink sticks" and sprays the non-toxic substance on to a spinning color drum inside the machine. The printers contains 3,000 print heads apiece, with 900 ink nozzles each.

During a press demo in New York, Rise and Bates showed how office workers can quickly pop the ink sticks into the $20,000-or-so printers, without taking a chance on spilling toner anywhere. Solid ink printing also requires less energy power than laser technology, with no cartridges and less packaging to dispose of, according to Bates. The ColorQube printers power down when not in use.

The new printers from Xerox use only one customer-replaceable component. The long-life "Cleaning Unit," which yields an average of 200,000 prints, can be recycled through the Xerox Green World Alliance program.

Xerox' new ColorQube printers produce 90% less waste than laser printers, estimated Angela Boyd, an IDC analyst.

"We believe this is the easiest-to-use MFD in the industry," maintained Bates. In addition to printing, the network-ready ColorQube handles copying and faxing.

In Xerox' accompanying metered pricing plans, businesses can decide how much color they want to use on particular pages, and get charged accordingly. Choices range from full color, to spot color, to black-and-white only.

A business might opt to liven up the looks of a proposal by printing out its logo in color, while leaving the rest of the page in black-and-white. The use of spot color can also come in handy for printing out graphs and charts.

"Our mission is to make 'black-and-white only' printing obsolete," according to the product marketing director. The ColorQube's printing speeds are also "flexible," ranging up to 85 pages per minute, he added.

Industry analysts briefed on the announcement were largely highly impressed with the cost-saving capabilities of the ColorQube MFDs, in addition to their eco-friendliness and the quality of their print output. Asserted InfoTrends analyst Robert Palmer, "I believe that this product has a a disruptive capability."

EcoFocus: PCs and software meet bikes, paint, and other green goods

Jacqueline Emigh — Fri, 01 May 2009 13:17:44 -0400

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews

At Pepcom's EcoFocus press event this week, HP launched new notebooks featuring HP Smart AC Adapters for automatically making power adjustments when needed. Available preloaded with a choice of Microsoft Windows or Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11, the five new HP ProBook models also come with HP Mobile Broadband, a system combining an HP m2400 module with built-in Qualcomm Gobi technology to support wireless connectivity to multiple broadband networks and operators.

Priced starting at about $529, the ProBooks come in 14-, 15.6-, and 17.-3-inch widescreen flavors. All five ProBooks are also outfitted with a new keyboard design, in which the keys are raised in an attempt to prevent dust and dirt from settling underneath. The notebooks offer a mercury-free design and high-definition backlit displays. A compatible USB 2.0 docking station is slated to ship in June, Betanews was told.

Meanwhile, Lenovo highlighted its ThinkCentre M58e all-in-one desktop PC system, now shipping for the past couple of weeks. The all-in-one incorporates Lenovo Power Manager, a power management tool for reducing the PC's carbon footprint, noted Lenovo's Aimee Foskie, during a product demo.

Like HP and Lenovo, PC makers like Sony and Toshiba also showed off full line-ups of previously announced computers -- along with accessories such as displays and printers -- touted as compliant with specifications such as Energy Star and EPEAT. Even the netbooks were eco-friendly.

Also at EcoFocus, a first-time "green" show from Pepcom, Monster released two new Digital PowerCenters for home theater systems. Monster's HDP 850G (priced at $99.95) and HDP 900G ($129.95), each equipped with Monster GreenPower technology for shutting off home theater components when not in use.

A start-up named MakeMeSustainable introduced a Web-based software system, now in beta, aimed at letting consumers and companies calculate and track their own carbon footprints, get suggestions for cutting their energy costs, and share energy-related information online with friends and business partners.

But the PCs and software on hand at EcoFocus dotted a landscape also made up of a wide assortment of other "green" ware, including anti-pollution paints from Benjamin Moore and Pratt & Lambert; recycled paper goods from Marcal and Mohawk; PiSAT's "green" solar lantern/flashlight; Mariah Power's windspire vertical axis wind turbine; an electronic bike from Ultra Motors USA, and an alternative air conditioning system from CALMAC.

Unlike Schwinn's previously released Tailwind hybrid bike, Ultra Motors' A2B requires no peddling when its removable lithium ion battery is in use, said a company rep. If the A2B's battery power does run out, you can always peddle the vehicle like a regular bike. That scenario does seem kind of unlikely, though, since Ultra Motors also provides a built-in "realtime state-of-charge indicator."

For their part, CALMAC's IceBank Energy Storage Systems store energy from relatively cheap sources such as wind power and off-peak electricity overnight, in the form of ice. The ice is then used the next day to cool buildings like retail stores, schools, banks, and office buildings.

EcoFocus: PiSAT launches solar-powered 'green' lantern

Jacqueline Emigh — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:25:06 -0400

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews

PiSAT and its partner the Koinonia Foundation gave the K-Light its first big push at last night's EcoFocus show in Manhattan, demoing how the soda can-sized solar device can morph from a lantern to a flashlight in just a few seconds when you remove the side handles and the piece on top.

Like SunNight's solar flashlight, touted during the CEA's Greener Gadgets Expo last month, PiSAT's K-Light is set for distribution in a couple of different ways: through foundation subsidies in developing nations, and commercial sales in the US and elsewhere.

The K-Light gizmo currently for sale for $49.95 on PiSAT's Web site works great for both "recreational and emergency preparedness" uses, said Bennett Meyer, manager of PiSAT Solar, in a meeting with Betanews at Pepcom's EcoFocus press event. You might want to tote the solar lantern/flashlight along with you on a camping trip, or stash it inside a closet in readiness for the next electrical brownout to hit your neighborhood.

Through the Koinonia Foundation, though, PiSAT is also getting the solar devices out to African villages where people still rely mostly on air polluting and potentially dangerous kerosene lamps to light up their homes after dark.

Weighing in at 22 ounces, the K-Light is water-resistant, shatterproof, and mercury-free, according to Meyer. The side handles rotate 360 degrees, and can be locked into 12 different positions. Through the proverbial flick of a switch, you can set the 120-lumen LED for either maximum brightness, with a 10-hour runtime before solar recharging, or for less brightness, with a 20-hour runtime.

For purposes along the lines of economic sustainability, the Koinonia Foundation's Beacon Program is giving start-up "grants' of K-Lights to African women to sell in their villages. The K-Light recipients can then use 100 percent of the earnings from the initial sale to buy K-Lights at a vastly reduced price, thereby establishing local businesses that provide an "ongoing and sustainable source of income," Betanews was told.

For every K-Light sold on its Web site, PiSAT donates part of the proceeds toward the foundation's solar projects.

A bit similarly, SunNight now sells 30% of its own solar flashlights directly in Africa, while another 30% are distributed through humanitarian groups and the remainder go to other destinations, ranging from police forces around the world to US retail chains like Target.

Although SunNight's flashlights last a much longer 750 to 1,000 hours without recharging, the SunNight gadget uses a mixture of solar and nickel hydride battery power. In contrast, PiSAT's lantern/flashlights are "100 percent mercury-free," according to Meyer.

This week in ZigBee: The low-power wireless standard gets a boost

Tim Conneally — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:38:41 -0400

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

ZigBee is one of several brand name specs for the 802.15.4 wireless personal area network standard that concentrates on simple, low data rate connections. In the roughly five years it has existed, it has found its place in home automation, smart metering and remotely controllable embedded systems.

Openness: As carbon waste reduction becomes a greater interest to the public, ZigBee has enjoyed improved adoption, and this week the ZigBee Alliance announced its latest spec will be even more diverse. The next draft will include Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards, which will add native IP support to ZigBee and in turn open the low-power wireless technology to new potential uses.

Laurent Giai-Miniet, general manager of the Low-Power RF division of Texas Instruments (one of the premier members of the alliance) said, "The ZigBee Alliance decision to expand its leading wireless networking standard to incorporate IP standards will solidify and accelerate developments and innovation of rapidly growing smart grid applications."

Power: Ember, maker of ZigBee systems, chips, and software, announced this week that its soon-to-be-released next generation of ZigBee semiconductors will be based on the 32-bit ARM Cortex M3 processor, instead of the aging 16-bit XAP-2 that its former System on a Chip solution utilized.

This improvement was fueled by a recent surge in venture capital which, when combined with previous investments from Chevron, STMicroelectronics, Hitachi and MIT, brought Ember to a total of $89 million in funding.

"ZigBee standards extend the developing 'smart grid' out to the billions of devices, appliances and equipment where most energy efficiency goals will be achieved," said Ember Chairman Bob Metcalfe earlier this month.

Accessibility: British ZigBee solutions vendor Vesternet today unveiled a dedicated ZigBee shop, where consumers can assemble a home automation and smart metering system that utilizes the wireless standard.

The store carries many prefabricated home metering solutions such as the Plogg smart meter, but it also has a good number of development kits and tools from companies such as Digi, Atmel, and Freescale.

New Opteron EE processors attempt to carve out an 'ultra-low-power' niche

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:31:23 -0400

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Already, AMD has a low-power segment to its Opteron server processor line, the HE series. With Intel Xeon processors still holding a measurable performance lead -- especially with models that command a comfortable premium -- AMD needs to be able to compete efficiently and maintain that goal of 40% gross margin (it made 43% last quarter). And to do that, the company feels it needs a new product category for a certain segment of customers who may be willing to pay a bit extra for something particularly useful.

If that's not performance, then for now, maybe it can be very low power consumption. This afternoon, the company announced a new and exclusive segment of Opteron EE quad-core processors that are intentionally turned down, drawing 40 watts of average CPU power (ACP, which is AMD's own metric) versus 75 watts for the standard Opteron and 55 watts for the company's Opteron HEs -- which will continue to exist as an in-between choice.

"Some people's philosophy in the high-performance computing world is, I'm going to take a cluster and just run it as maxxed out as I can. If you go talk to people in the high-performance computing world, they rotate their clusters frequently. They're always going for new, fast parts. But if you talk to regular IT guys, they're actually looking to achieve an environment that's very predictable," remarked Margaret Lewis, AMD's long-time server product director, in an interview with Betanews. "Their goal would be to have servers where they could predict they're running between, let's say, 50 and 70% utilization, and they'd love to be able to predict what the draw of power is, and try to level it out so that you're not doing such peaks and valleys. Because if you peak with power, then you have to work your air conditioner harder; and if you peak that power to [the point where] you can't control it with an air conditioner, that's when all the warning bells go off. Things start clocking themselves down.

"So if I could design a cluster of these low-power, solid-performing but not top-of-the-line processors, and I clocked those over a period of time in terms of utility and performance, the curve is going to end up being better than if you're jumping from peak to peak."

The first two CPU models to bear the EE banner will be the 2.3 GHz Opteron 2377 EE, priced at $698 in 1,000-unit quantities (single-unit street prices will be higher) and the 2.1 GHz Opteron 2373 EE, priced at $377. For the 2373, that's nearly a 20% premium at current prices over AMD's standard 75W parts at 2.1 GHz. But for the 2377 -- at least today -- the price premium is a whopping seven bucks over the 2.3 GHz Shanghai series Opteron at 75W. That 75W price could come down soon, though, especially with all the other product lines AMD finds itself making room for, also announced this afternoon.

AMD is making a big bet that there are customers who are building their own cloud services, but who may not necessarily be building high-performance computing services on that cloud. For those customers, there's still going to be very tight deployments with hot CPUs running close to hot hard drives and hard cases, and if the opportunity arises to make those operations cooler yet, some customers may just take it. "What you're going to be looking at is, what are you trying to serve out?" Lewis told us.

"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that there's really many different use cases that fall under a cloud. The use case we all know and love is search, [which] is a computationally intensive activity. Now, you could also be doing [something] like Gmail or Yahoo Mail. Eh, e-mail is a different kind of activity. You're making a query and it's streaming a certain amount of data back to you -- that store/forward type of activity. You could be using a cloud for a consumer purpose, where you're streaming a movie over to a set-top box or an entertainment PC -- like Time Warner Cable. What the cloud is doing is going to dictate [your service load]. It might be when you're doing those searches, you might want an HE part, because you'd be looking at 2.5 GHz capabilities of that part and saying, I really want that realm of performance over the 2.3. But if you're just doing Web serving or free e-mail, you can come down and take an EE part, because it's an active transactional environment -- it isn't necessarily CPU demanding."

Lewis' background is in high-performance computing -- which is the big reason AMD employed her -- and she was all about virtualization when virtualization wasn't, well, cool. One big gain that virtualization has made possible in the data center, she reminded us, is boosting utilization rates for CPUs, specifically by enabling hypervisors to make better use of system idle time. Now, AMD had been responding to idle CPUs with a technology it just today rechristened AMD-P, enabling operating systems to detect when utilization goes down and to step down the power to compensate.

That's all very nice, except when your data centers are using more virtualization, those steps down happen less frequently. "It's great that we can make power go low for an idle server," argued Lewis, "but a lot of people will say, 'I don't want my servers idle. What good is an idle server?' Isn't the underutilized server the symptom of the problem? When we talk to customers, they like this idea of a 50 - 70% utilization range. If they can fall into that range, they're really happy because that gives them enough headroom to do a peak. But it keeps a constant amount of work coming out." Keeping CPUs moderately utilized creates an additional burden on small data centers that must also be kept cool. So as Lewis admitted to us, it's theoretically possible for a data center to deploy a hybrid of Opteron HE and EE server CPUs, and use management software that uses AMD-P to load-balance between the two, shifting to the HEs when data processing becomes more critical and back to the EEs for more general processing periods. This would bring back the types of cluster administration that took place in the high performance data centers that Lewis helped manage prior to her current assignment with AMD.

"If you know that you have a peak workload for two hours every day," she conjectured, "this is the beauty of virtualization. You could roll some of those virtual machines over to the HE server and have them run a little bit faster, then roll them back over to the EE for the rest of the day. This is that intelligent data center dynamic that everybody keeps alluding to."

Retrevo provides a survival guide to greener living with electronics

Angela Gunn — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:40:32 -0400

By Angela Gunn, Betanews

For your Earth Day reading enjoyment, the folks at Retrevo (that indispensable source for the product manual you were just sure you'd never need to open again -- you know, the one you tossed two days before you desperately needed page 47) have a nice PDF guide to greening your electronics usage without tearing your hair out.

And if 30 pages is too much greenery for you -- a real possibility according to a recent Retrevo survey -- we talked them out of one tip that everyone should be able to handle.

That recent survey undertaken by Retrevo found that while 75% of consumers claimed energy efficient products are important to them, less than half have actually "bought green" and only 35% would pay extra to do so. There's a lot of skepticism about "greenwashing," too -- 40% of those surveyed suspected that manufacturers and retailers are mostly just throwing the word "green" around.

And if you do nothing else, suggests Retrevo's Andrew Eisner, at least turn off your TV and other gear when you're not using it -- especially those game consoles. Eisner cites a NRDC study that found most game consoles are left powered on when the TV is turned off, and continue to use more than 100 watts while doing nothing at all. (A large plasma television, in comparison, uses about 400 watts.)

Moreover, game consoles use several times as much energy as comparable non-gaming gear -- e.g., Sony PlayStation 3 with built-in Blu-ray player compared to a stand-alone Sony Blu-ray DVD player. And don't feel too smug, Wii fans; your console uses a fraction of the juice the other major players do, but Eisner notes that the company itself has, according to Greenpeace studies, a dismal environmental record.

Seagate adopts the 'hybrid' theme for Earth Day with 5900 RPM HDD

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:55:41 -0400

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

On this Earth Day, a number of manufacturers are releasing their "green" product announcements, some believing they're either capitalizing upon, or trying to jump-start, a social trend in smarter engineering. But PC builders and OEMs don't need peace rallies and protest signs to tell them how important it is to make systems and data centers run cooler and with more energy efficiency.

For them, the news from Seagate today about a new class of lower-power Barracuda hard drives that makes an effort to squeeze out a little more performance than low-power drives have before, will make them skip over the whole Earth Day part and go straight to the details. The company's new Barracuda LP series will be unique in that it won't reduce drive rotation as much as other brands and as Seagate's own brands have in the past.

"The classic Barracuda family use 7200 RPM. These drives are 5900," Seagate product representative Anne Haggar told Betanews. "In the green, low-power class, our competitors' drives are 5400."

As a result, there should be much less of a performance sacrifice than you might expect. Here's a comparison: One of 2007's better-selling drives, which has since moved into the value segment of the Seagate product line, is the 3.5-inch Barracuda 7200.10. It's a 250 GB drive that draws about 9.3 watts of power at idle, and as high as 13.0 watts during everyday operation. After it was released, the German enthusiast site Hardware.info gave the standard-power 7200.10 an above-average PCMark05 score of 6045.

Typically, smaller drives should have faster performance scores. But recently, the performance curve on new 3 Gbps SATA drives has tipped the other way, giving builders new reasons to install high-capacity drives even as C:\, where the performance factor is most critical. The new low-power Barracuda LP series will be available in 1 TB, 1.5 TB, and 2 TB configurations. So if you have a system with a 7200.10 now, what would you be sacrificing by moving to an LP? First, you'll spend some money -- we're told there will be a premium for the lower-power edition, though exactly how much is yet to be announced.

But you'll be moving to a drive that draws as low as 3.0 watts at idle, and 5.6 watts at operating maximum. And its PCMark05 score is 8444 in Seagate tests, so you're actually gaining performance and capacity as you slow down rotation from 7200 to 5900 RPM.

As Seagate's Michael Hall admitted to Betanews, the big reason many builders will want to move to lower power has less to do with Earth than it does with space.

"If you look at a either a desktop or a notebook system, you only have so much airspace in there. But the more airspace you have within a system between the components, the more airflow you have," said Hall. "I think it stands to logic that, if the system components are running cooler, yes, you could actually place them in a smaller footprint. Heat, obviously, is the enemy of computer components, so you have to make sure they're running cool enough so that the system will reach its expected shelf life."

[CORRECTION: Barracuda LP series hard drives will not contain the SecureErase feature which enables users to wipe clean and re-deploy hard disks, contrary to what we reported earlier. Only notebook drives will contain this feature; Barracuda LPs are 3.5-inch desktop drives.]

Sun launches cost-conscious x86 servers for clouds

Jacqueline Emigh — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 22:18:27 -0400

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews

11:45 am ET April 20, 2009 - Sun Microsystems' announcement last week came before the business deal last weekend that led to the absorption of Sun by Oracle. Most noteworthy from Monday morning's joint conference call with Oracle and Sun management was that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison characterized the deal as a software acquisition. Though the fact that Sun makes servers was mentioned (Oracle does now as well), that fact wasn't high on anyone's list this morning. And because no questions were taken from the press, we don't actually know the fate of the Sun Fire server lineup that Jacqueline Emigh covered just late last week.

Sun's new x86 hardware is designed to bring speed, simplicity, and "obviously savings, [as we] deliver the same application performance as before," said Sun CTO John Fowler, in a rollout this week at Sun's North American Partner Summit in Las Vegas.

Sun's latest Fire servers and blade systems support not just the Sun Solaris OS but also Windows and Linux. The hardware also works with virtualization solutions from multiple vendors, including VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Sun's own xVM Ops Center and Solaris Containers.

The Xeon 5500-enabled hardware includes four Fire servers -- the X4170, X2270, and X4275 servers, for the enterprise and Web, and the X4270, for branches offices and horizontally scaled data centers -- along with two server modules: the virtualization-oriented X6270, and the quad data rate (QDR) InfiniBand-driven X6275, for high performance computing (HPC). The X6275 departs from tradition with a dual-node blade architecture, allowing two complete servers to share a single server module.

In addition to working with the OS and virtualization software that companies already have, the blade systems also support multi-vendor hardware, since the existing 6000 blade chassis is able to accommodate Sun Sparc processors as well as x86 processors from both Intel and AMD.

With the X6275, Sun is also introducing a new chassis, the 6048, which builds the chassis directly into the rack for higher density.

Analysts agreed on the cost-saving potential of Sun's latest servers. By supporting multiple virtualization technologies, Sun is giving customers a range of choice in the use of virtualization for reducing bottlenecks, consolidating servers, and gaining "better control of applications on a single server," suggested Kenneth Clayton, an IDC analyst.

"Systems that are underutilized are being looked at to understand how to better make use of server investments. One solution is to increase usage through virtualization and consolidation," according to Clayton. "This results in fewer systems with a smaller footprint and lower energy costs."

Also in the interests of lower energy costs, Sun unveiled a new local cooling option called the Sun Cooling Door, available in two flavors, noted Gordon Haff, an Illuminata analyst.

"One flavor, the Sun Cooling Door 5600, uses R134A refrigerant and is compatible with Liebert SD pumping and chiller units. In this case, water is still only piped to the datacenter chillers: refrigerant lines then connect to the rack," according to Haff. "The Sun Cooling Door 5200 is a straight chilled-water version. It connects to water sources in either the floor or the ceiling, and is intended primarily for data centers that can simply and cost effectively extend an existing chilled-water system."

For now, only Sun's 6048 rack/chassis supports the Sun Cooling Door. But Sun also plans to extend the new cooling system to other blade enclosures.

Sun also expects to offer its Netra systems with Xeon 5500 processors later this year, Sun officials said during the launch.

Tesla rakes in over $2.6 million from Model S reservations

Nate Mook — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:56:21 -0400

By Nate Mook, Betanews

In a slight modification to the old mantra, "If you promise to build it, they will come" seems to be the order of the day at Tesla Motors, which has become a darling of Silicon Valley with its $100,000 electric roadster built atop the Lotus Elise platform.

The company announced Wednesday that it has taken over 520 pre-orders for its recently-unveiled fully-electric Model S Sedan, which is expected to cost $50,000 after a $7,000 federal tax credit. Tesla doesn't actually take orders, since the vehicles won't enter production until late 2011 at the earliest, but is instead selling "reservations" for $5,000 each. And some buyers surely plopped down $40,000 to reserve the first editions of the car to roll off the line.

But $3 million isn't enough to get the car built. Tesla is seeking a $350 million loan from the US Department of Energy to build the production plant that will manufacture the Model S. The company intends to have the capacity to build 20,000 electric sedans by mid-2012, an audacious plan considering Tesla has only delivered just over 300 roadsters since reservations went on sale in 2006 -- and another 1,000 people are on the waiting list.

If things go as planned and the Model S does go into production, it will be the first mass-produced all-electric highway-capable passenger car (say that 5 times fast). The specs are as impressive as the vehicle's looks: 0-60 in 5.6 seconds, top speed of 130mph, two LCD touch screens, 45-minute fast-charge capability, and battery packs that provide ranges of 160, 230 and 300 miles depending on how much you want to pay.

The Model S is a bold endeavor that left many Tesla critics questioning how it could ever be accomplished, especially in the current economic environment and as the future of the three big US automakers remains in question. But there seems to be enough interest that potential buyers are willing to risk that $5,000 or $40,000 (it helps when your customers are Internet moguls).

Tesla will show off the Model S tonight at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, where it will likely take even more ~~orders~~ reservations.

'Earth Hour' looks for public show of support for Kyoto Protocol U-turn

Scott M. Fulton, III — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:38:15 -0400

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

In December 1997, 37 industrialized nations entered into an agreement signed in Kyoto, Japan, to begin reducing carbon emissions into the Earth's atmosphere by five-percent increments beginning in 2005. Since that time, 181 nations and the European Union have ratified the Kyoto Accord. But the United States -- at the beginning, one of its driving forces, and still believed to be the world's principal emitter of carbon pollution -- never ratified or endorsed the treaty.

It was a fact cited frequently during the campaign of then-US Presidential candidate Joe Biden, now Vice President: After the US turned its back on Kyoto, in a manner that could not be construed as anything other than intentional and a vote against climate change measures, much of the rest of the world perceived the US' move as an implied endorsement of coal-burning plants. As described by Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria in his 2008 book The Post-American World:

Demand for electricity is projected to rise over 4 percent a year for decades. And that electricity will come mostly from the dirtiest fuel available -- coal. Coal is cheap and plentiful, so the world relies on it to produce most of its electricity. To understand the impact on global warming, consider this fact: Between 2006 and 2012, China and India will build eight hundred new coal-fired power plants -- with combined CO₂ emissions five times the total savings of the Kyoto accords...

The Kyoto accord (now treated as sacred because of President Bush's cavalier rejection of [it]) is in fact a treaty marked by its adherence to the old worldview. Kyoto assumed that if the West came together and settled on a plan, the Third World would adopt the new framework and the problem would be solved. That may be the way things have been done in international affairs for decades, but it makes little sense today. China, India, Brazil, and other emerging powers will not follow along with a Western-led process in which they have not participated. What's more, governments on their own can do only so much to tackle a problem like climate change. A real solution requires creating a much broader coalition that includes the private sector, nongovernmental groups, cities and localities, and the media. In a globalized, democratized, and decentralized world, we need to get to individuals to alter their behavior.

In an effort to visibly show that at least the raw materials for such a coalition do exist in the United States and around the world, the World Wildlife Fund is encouraging individuals to shut off their electric light switches for one hour tomorrow -- Saturday, March 28 -- between 8:30 and 9:30 pm local time. Supporters of the effort are encouraging individuals to also shut off their PCs, TVs, and other entertainment devices for that hour, creating an interval during which individuals may not only alter their behavior but become compelled to speak to one another.

"Unlike any election in history, it is not about what country you're from, but instead, what planet you're from," reads the WWF's Web site for the Earth Hour project. "VOTE EARTH is a global call to action for every individual, every business, and every community. A call to stand up and take control over the future of our planet. Over 74 countries and territories have pledged their support to VOTE EARTH during Earth Hour 2009, and this number is growing every day."

The reason tomorrow will be such an important day is because it's the day the United States returns to the bargaining table in climate change negotiations brokered by the UN, for the first time since Kyoto. Representing the US at that meeting will be the State Dept.'s newly appointed Special Envoy on Climate Change, Todd Stern.

During a press conference in Berlin earlier today, according to the Associated Press, Stern didn't hold back any feelings at all with regard to the US' position on Kyoto: "We do not have any interest in the United States in having a repeat of the Kyoto experience," remarked Stern, "where we signed an agreement that is dead on arrival when we brought it back home. We need to be guided on this internationally by a combination of science and pragmatism. It does not serve anyone to do a week-kneed compromise that doesn't move us in the direction that the science is telling us we need to go. By the same token, it doesn't serve anybody to have an agreement that is scientifically pristine and perfect and which cannot be supported by our public back home."