DatacenterKnowledge posts Poll on whether Renewable Energy is a factor now that Facebook and Greenpeace collaborate

DatacenterKnowledge has a poll post.

Poll: Green Power and Data Center Site Selection

• By: Rich Miller
• December 16th, 2011

Facebook said yesterday that its data center site location policy “now states a preference for access to clean and renewable energy.” The announcement ended a long-running feud between the social network and the environmental group Greenpeace, which had targeted Facebook in a social media and PR campaign because the company’s two data centers in Oregon and North Carolina each relied upon utility power that originated primarily from coal.

You find out the results when you take the poll.  I put my vote in and saw I was the first to vote. so, now 100% say renewable energy is a factor. :-)  But, of course I am biased thinking Green Data Centers are important.  Is there such a thing as an unbiased opinion?

Banning Cellphone use while driving, where is the data and who will fight the ban

WSJ has a post on the NHTSA's call to ban cellphone use while driving.

Next Up in the Distracted Driving Debate: Where’s the Data?

The National Transportation Safety Board’s call Tuesday to ban all cellphone use in cars will put a spotlight on the conflicting data about how common and dangerous such behavior is.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration earlier this month released the results of the “National Occupant Protection Use Survey” – conducted by researchers who watched drivers at intersections. This study concluded that about 5% of drivers were holding cell phones behind the wheel. That study also found that 0.9% of drivers were manipulating a hand-held device – a proxy for texting.

Part of this discussion is where the data is to support the conclusions.

The Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a separate study earlier this month – this one a telephone survey conducted in November and December of 2010 – that tracks closer to State Farm’s findings. http://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/traffic_tech/tt407.pdf This survey found that 80% of men and 73% of women will answer calls while driving, while 43% of men and 39% of women said they would make calls on the road. The NHTSA said its survey had 6,002 respondents.

Both the State Farm and NHTSA telephone use survey found that respondents were more tolerant of talking while driving than texting. In the State Farm survey, 74% said they strongly agreed with the idea of banning texting while driving, but only 36% strongly agreed with the notion of a ban on talking on the phone.

And, who do you think would argue most against this data?  Who has the most to lose if this goes into law?  The cell phone carriers.  You can imagine the carrier lobbyists in Washington maneuvering.

Maybe we should ban talking while driving as that is distracting.  Or ban kids from being in the car.

I wonder how many accidents are caused by children in the car vs. talking on the phone?  Of course this is silly, but if you are overly obsessed with making driving safer, you come up with silly ideas.

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.