I really like the term “Human Cloud,” but I’m not entirely convinced — yet — of the green benefits, and if there are benefits, that they’re as great as some believe. To play devil’s advocate: What’s better, 100 people working out of a single space, or 100 people distributed and working in 100 different homes, each boiling water for coffee, using heat, electricity, etc… Obviously there’s an upside for reduced transportation emissions, assuming people ditch their cars and take transit or carshare, instead of hopping in their SUV and driving two blocks to get a pack of smokes or a coffee. I’m not down on the human cloud, I’d just like to see a more thorough study of its benefits based on real-life scenarios. I know many people who work from home but still travel quite frequently, and air travel statistic don’t indicate a drop in air travel. Before energy I covered telecommunications, where there’s been talk of telecommunicating and teleconferencing for 15 years, but it’s never had the predicted impact — same as the paperless office. I still need some more convincing…

Personnally, my bet is the future of email is making it easily embeddable in other apps: http://dokdok.com/email-api

Online shopping also seems like a very obvious way to be more efficient.