Facebook and Greenpeace smoke the peace pipe, and join forces for renewable energy

Greenpeace has a press release regarding the new partnership with Facebook for renewable energy.

Victory! Facebook Friends Renewable Energy

Blogpost by Greenpeace International - December 15, 2011 at 9:45

After 20 months of mobilizing, agitating and negotiating to green Facebook, the Internet giant has today announced its goal to run on clean, renewable energy. More than 700,000 people from all over the world joined to make this possible! Facebook's message to energy producers is clear: invest now in renewable energy, and move away from coal power.

Here is a new video that Greenpeace has created.

Facebook has been the target for Greenpeace for carbon impact of data centers, but now that the peace pipe has been smoked Greenpeace will move on to the next targets.  Like who?  Watch this video to see who is on the list.  But don't sigh in relief if your logo is not below.  Who knows who Greepeace will target next to change their ways and have a strategy for a Green (low carbon) Data Center.

Here is what else Facebook says in their press release to give you a hint this is just the beginning.

If all the Internet giants would unfriend coal, it would send a message to utilities and investors that couldn't be ignored. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has shown today what other IT leaders should be doing.

Energy efficiency is important, but for an energy revolution to save the planet we also need to upgrade to green energy. Who will be next?

Here is the full text of the Facebook and Greenpeace collaboration.  Note the use of Open Compute Project to support the collaboration.

Facebook and Greenpeace collaboration

on Clean and Renewable Energy 15 December, 2011

________________________________________________________________________

Facebook is committed to supporting the development of clean and renewable sources of energy, and our goal is to power all of our operations with clean and renewable energy. Building on our leadership in energy efficiency (through the Open Compute Project), we are working in partnership with
Greenpeace and others to create a world that is highly efficient and powered by clean and renewable energy. This effort will include a range of activities:

By Facebook

• Adopting a siting policy that states a preference for access to clean and renewable energy supply

• Ongoing research into energy efficiency and the open sharing of that technology through the Open Compute Project

• Ongoing research into clean energy solutions for our future data centers

• Engaging in a dialogue with our utility providers about increasing the supply of clean energy that

  power Facebook data centers

  By Greenpeace

• Active support for the Open Compute Project, including encouraging companies to join the effort, use the technology, and share their efficiency technology

• Encouraging utility providers to offer ways for customers to get their utility data, including by joining the partnership with Opower, Facebook, and NRDC

• Recognize company leadership in advancing best practices in efficiency or sustainability technology through the open source sharing of design and technology advances.

  Together

• Working together to develop and promote experiences on Facebook that help people and organizations connect with ways to save energy and engage their communities in clean energy issues.

• Co-hosting roundtables and discussions with experts on energy issues.

• Jointly engaging other large energy users and producers to address the energy choice they are facing and develop new clean energy rather than recommission coal plants or build new coal plants.

Tablet's are dominated by wifi only connections, interesting data for highest growth segment

MSNBC has a post referencing a study that shows the internet access for Tablets.

Wi-Fi beats cellular for tablet connections

The NPD Group's Connected Intelligence

By Suzanne Choney

Wireless carriers may be pricing themselves out of the tablet market; a new study shows that more tablet owners are choosing to use Wi-Fi only connections instead of cellular for their devices.

Myself all my tablet type of devices are wifi only as I connect them to my Verizon 4G wifi device.  If you look at the cost of cellular coverage for a tablet it is daunting for many.

Take the iPad, for example; AT&T's data plan for it is $14.99 for 250 MB of data a month, or $25 a month for 2 GB of data. Verizon Wireless charges $30 for 2 GB a month, $50 for 5 GB; and $80 for 10 GB. To boot, a Wi-Fi-only iPad, with 16 GB, costs $499, compared to $629 for a model that also has a cellular chip in it. The same is true for other tablets that come in both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi/cellular combinations; there's a premium to be paid for having both.

Honestly, my shared connection device is often less than 1GB a month, but can change when I travel more.

Data above gives you some ideas of what the general population dose.  But, I am amazed there is a percentage of people with None of connectivity.  I wonder how they use their devices?

Connecting with Great People at GigaOm Events, example CEO of Moprise David D'Souza

It has been a busy year, and I have cut tried to cut down on the number of data center conferences.  I am sure many of you are tired of seeing the presentations repeated, the same vendors slightly modify their pitches with little innovation, and you do get to run into people you know, but it is the same people too many times with too few end users.

This year I started to going GigaOm events, and went to Structure, Mobilize, RoadMap and Net:work.

The same presentations are not repeated, vendors are rotated through with quick 5 minutes to discuss their company (3 -5 during the day), and many of these companies are start-ups.  Yet, their will be CEOs, CTOs, and other executives presenting.

One of the pleasant surprises at GigaOm events are the people I have run into.  One of the people who I run into all the time is CEO of Moprise of David D’Souza.  I wrote a post about Moprise.

Turns out one of Mobile entrepreneurs I follow was at Mobilize and we hadn’t chatted for a year or so.  And guess what, his app iscalled the “FlipBoard for the Enterprise.”

Moprise Is Launching A

“Flipboard For The Enterprise”

SARAH PEREZ

posted on September 16th, 2011

4 Comments

Moprise is launching a new iPad application it’s calling a “Flipboard for the Enterprise.” The app is a tablet-optimized version of the company’s currently available Coaxion iPhone application. The Flipboard analogy isn’t quite right, however. Flipboard is about reading news and articles, browsing photos and viewing updates from your social networks in a magazine-like format. Coaxion and Flipboard are only similar in that they both have easy-to-browse, touchable, swipe-friendly user interfaces. But Coaxion’s content is corporate documents, not news or tweets.

Actually, I have know David D’Souza for way too long, back when we worked on his work on Win3.1, Win95, and IE.

Group Manager, Internet Explorer

Microsoft

Public Company; 10,001+ employees; MSFT; Computer Software industry

May 1995 – June 1998 (3 years 2 months)

Software engineer & lead on Internet Explorer 4.x and 5.x focused on performance, shell integration, Active Desktop & Channels, and “push content” web delivery systems. This work was integrated into Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows 2000. [Dates approximate]

Recommend David’s work at Microsoft

Software Architect & Lead, Windows 95

Microsoft

Public Company; 10,001+ employees; MSFT; Computer Software industry

September 1992 – April 1995 (2 years 8 months)

Performance architect & lead for Windows 95. Ensured Windows 95 and it feature set (32bit api, protected mode kernel & drivers, OLE32, new UI, Plug & Play etc) ran well on 4MB systems and scaled appropriately up to 16MB systems. Ensured the right scenarios were measured, the right tools were created, broader teams understood and lived performance, and targeted appropriate changes in the code base to meet goals. This position required multidisciplinary management and team creation across dev, test, and PM.

Recommend David’s work at Microsoft

Software Development Lead, Windows 3.1

Microsoft

Public Company; 10,001+ employees; MSFT; Computer Software industry

July 1990 – August 1992 (2 years 2 months)

Lead software engineering on Windows 3.1 responsible for user interface development, UI performance, and application compatibility. Key work included rationalizing internal versus external APIs, removing heap limitations for window objects, adding parameter validation to increase reliability and prevent corruption of OS state, and developing the application compatibility infrastructure within Windows. This work served to keep Windows the market leader despite heavy competition from IBM OS/2 Warp.

Many of our conversations are regarding entrepreneurial opportunities, enterprise, and mobile.  David was commenting on how many Macs he sees at GigaOm.  I snuck this shot in of the audience at one of the events.

Now this picture is not the media table which is of course Mac dominated, but the audience watching a presentation at RoadMap.  Can you spot the Windows Laptop?

Two ex-Microsoft guys hanging out where the Mac is the dominant computer, start-ups looking for how to grow, and the established players looking for innovation it makes so much sense to attend the GigaOm events if you are looking for thought leadership people. I attend often because I am a GigaOm Pro Analyst so I have lots of other conversations with GigaOm Pro, but I still attend mainly as a blogger.

I am an ex-Apple employee (1985-1992) so it is reasonable for me to be a Mac User again.  It turns out David D’Souza has an Apple developer background before his Microsoft days.

David has worked on productivity software since he had an Apple ][+ in junior high.

…

David received a BSc from MIT, experience with Unix, a startup on Route 128, and heavy use of an Apple Macintosh before becoming a PC and joining the Microsoft Windows team out of college.

…

…I purchased an Apple iPhone 3GS. That’s when I left to cofound Moprise and build scalable, mobile productivity software.

After discussion last week with David I suggested he get know the GigaOm Pro staff to discuss a research project, so I introduced him to a few of the executives. One of the people I mentioned David’s background to is Skip Hilton, VP and GM of GigaOm Pro.  What was quite surprising was Skip knew the complete employment history of David. Why? GigaOm Pro was studying some of its loyal users, and David was an example of someone who attends events often, subscribes to GIgaOm Pro, and is a thought leader.

David and I had coffee before  running into him at GigaOm events, but having conversations at the event, discussing presentations, and discussing new ideas works well.  I think it works before the GigaOm events setup interesting discussions.  For something different you may want to consider attending a GigaOm event.  I still go to a few data center events, and go to GigaOm for more innovative thinking.

Shared Office Space suppliers - Loosecubes and Liquidspace #workconf

Many of you travel and meet at the local Starbucks, but when you go to a city and need to spend days working and meeting the hotel and starbucks just doesn't work for many scenarios.

You have probably heard of AirBnB where you can rent a room.

The same idea can be applied to office space that can be rented.  Two options that I learned about at GigaOm Net:Work are Loosecubes and Liquidspace.

As you look at your data center projects and need an office in a city, these are two options.

It looks like Loosecubes has a bigger market (below are 4 of 10 properties) than Liquidspace (1).

There may be other options, but these are a good place to start thinking about renting a short term office space as you travel around in the US for data center projects.

LiquidSpaces Nearby Seattle, WA, USA

	OfficeXpats
	403 Madison Ave N Suite 240, Bainbridge island, WA 98110, US
	View Calendar

House tour of finished home

I can mix work with my home life which has its plusses and some inconveniences as work meetings can spill into my home.  I was recently chatting with some data center friends and they wanted to see the latest pictures of our house now that is done and has more furnishings.  They had both seen the house during construction.

Here are a bunch which saves me the time of arranging more work meetings at home. :-)

Here is the front of the house.

A view of the front door from inside the house.

Going up the attic you can see the front door.

To give you a range of the house here are the bathrooms.

My son's.

Daughter.

Master Bathroom

guest bathroom.

Coming down the stairs to the kitchen.

And of course my pizza oven. 2,500 lbs, 110,000 btu woodstone pizza oven. Which is part of the entertaining of work and friends, cooking a great meal.

My wife got her killer closet. below is a 1/4 view of the 12x12x12 closet.

Here is a picture that shows the height of the 12 1/2 ft ceilings.

The kitchen is wide open to the lake view.

Here is the backside of the house.  We have had numerous friends warn us that the kids will sneak out their windows as they get older. I have that problem taken care of as I have a security camera night vision system with a PVR 2 week recording capacity on an APC battery back-up, covering the front and back of the house.  Video recording is a cool way to document things, and easy to set up streams.  We've also put one of the cameras in the attic to document who hit who when the kids are playing. "do you really want dad to go through the video to see what happened upstairs?"

And, here is our first thanksgiving family dinner.  Christmas is coming up and we'll have 25 - 30 people for a Christmas eve party.

All these pictures except the family one are from building contractor, Lavallee Construction.

WE’RE COMMITTED TO QUALITY CUSTOM CONSTRUCTION

Lavallee Construction is an independently owned, full-service home builder providing general contracting and design/build services for residential clients throughout Greater Seattle. After more than 21 years in business, we have developed a reputation for intelligent design, creative problem solving and an uncompromising commitment to professionalism and integrity that has made us one of the area's most respected contractors. Whether we are constructing your new home, adding an addition or renovating parts of your existing structure, our mission is to work in partnership with you to bring your residential dreams to life.