This morning’s Video Rights Roundtable was, as we hoped, a rare opportunity for online video industry players to talk about their conflicts and collaborations in the wild — not in a courtroom or conference room.  In a (more than) two-hour discussion, the nearly 50 attendees shared their perspectives on the increasingly complex world of rights, responsibility and opportunities surrounding online video content. Complete liveblog coverage is available at GigaOM Pro (subscription required), and Ryan Lawler was on-site with some additional event coverage at NewTeeVee. More links below the fold (and full event video coming soon!).  

• In Round One, Ethan Applen, director of technology and business strategy for Warner Bros., talked about copyright enforcement as video content shifts online. While the DVD business was threatened by the emergence of digital piracy, he said that online distribution is even more vulnerable. To approach the problem, he said, the first line of defense is to make illegal consumption of content online more difficult. “That’s what we need to tackle,” he added (subscription required).

• In Round Two, Liz Gannes brought Michael Seibel, CEO of Justin.TV, and Yangbin Wang, from Vobile, up to discuss rights issues specific to real-time/live-streaming video content (subscription required). The two companies are partnering to automate unauthorized content detection and takedown. Ryan has the full scoop at NewTeeVee.

• In Round Three, Betsy Zedek, content protection counsel, Fox Group Legal, fielded questions about the future of copyright law in the digital age (sub. required), and the audience discussed the sticky issue of fair use. Paul Sweeting takes a deeper look at these issues at GigaOM Pro.

• The final section of the event was an open discussion among the audience (sub. required), which touched on the challenges posed by BitTorrent (Ryan recaps this discussion over at NewTeeVee), opportunities to monetize online content in new ways, and the future of medium-budget movies.

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As we saw at last week’s “What’s Next for the Web?” Bunker Series event, we’re pushing the boundaries of the web. The NewNet, as we call it, is blurring the lines between what’s online and what’s real life. From augmented reality apps to location-based services and speech-activated mobile tools, technology is increasingly working to leverage everyday human interaction as its interface with the world. This morning, we have two pieces on our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro, looking at this very trend.

First, Ed Gubbins takes a look at how this shift is impacting the search market, in “How Search Is Evolving Beyond Text.” We wrote a lot last week about the move toward real-time search, but audio, video and image search are growing up, too. Whether its matching input sounds and images with indexed sounds and images or leveraging crowd-sourced metadata on video clips, new tools are helping seekers get the content they’re looking for without relying on the simple text query.

Liz Shannon Miller flips the question on its head to show how web analytics can act as a road map to success for real-world events. As we interact with online content, we leave dozens of digital footprints about who we are, what we like, and where we live.  In “New Use For Web Stats: Finding Hot Markets, Offline,” Liz looks at how everyone from indie films and big-name bands is tapping into this rich data source to build an audience.

Sign up with GigaOM Pro today to read these and dozens of other detailed research briefings and in-depth articles in each of five areas: NewNet, Mobile, Connected Consumer, Infrastructure and Green IT. Today’s also the last day to take advantage of our Bunker event discount code for GigaOM Pro.  Sign up using this discount code “BUNKER1019″ and get $20 off the regular one-year subscription price of $79.

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Google’s announcement that it will launch Google Editions, its e-book publishing platform, next year, may have gotten a lot of attention among publishers and e-book enthusiasts, but it’s more than just a Kindle killer. While Google’s plan to offer readers access to 400,000-600,000 books on any device adds to the growing list of challenges to Amazon’s Kindle empire, the search giant’s browser-based strategy makes clear its attempts to keep its primary money-making engine front and center, writes Paul Sweeting (GigaOM Pro, subscription required).

Indeed, if there’s one thing the success of the Kindle has shown — much as Apple demonstrated with iTunes and the iPod — is how important it is to control the platform in a digital distribution market. Controlling the platform gives the operator control of the user experience, which, in turn, gives it control of the value chain. It also cuts out the need for the browser to act as the middleman between users and online content. Given that Google made $22 billion a year providing ads as that middleman, devices like the Kindle represent a threat to its primary revenue stream.

From a preference for web-based mobile apps (sub reqd) to its Chrome OS, Google’s big bet is that the browser — not the device on which it operates — is the best way to reach consumers. So protecting the browser is Google’s goal here. If it happens to kill off the e-reader market or hurt Amazon, well, that’s just gravy.

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Tags: Amazon, AMZN, GOOG, google, Kindle

Nike’s Shambhala initiative, which kicked off in 1999, aimed to transform Nike’s approach to social and environmental issues. A series of workshops brought together sustainability gurus, speakers and more than 50 managers from across Nike’s many divisions to discuss ways to push the envelope on internal and product-focused sustainability. The events were hugely successful, but the challenge, says Justin Yuen, a former intranet developer turned corporate social responsibility manager at Nike, was finding a way to keep that sense of community and engagement among individual participants after they returned to their teams.

Traditionally, employees had two methods of communicating with one another: email and the company intranet. The former, while dynamic enough to support actual work, lacked transparency, longevity and opportunities for collaboration. The intranet, on the other hand, was great for sharing static information across teams and individuals. Neither, however, reflected how people actually worked together. So in 2004, Yuen left his position in Nike’s corporate social responsibility team, and set out on his own to develop a product that could do better. The result was fmyi — as in, “for my information” — and it’s a rare success story in the web 2.0 landscape: a social-media-infused enterprise collaboration tool that’s been profitable since two years after its founding.

Fmyi, which is billed as an “online social workspace,” blends elements of Basecamp, Highrise Facebook and Friendfeed to create a remarkably flexible, natural system for enterprise collaboration. Unlike Basecamp, for example, which creates rigid buckets for projects and teams, fmyi recognizes that users belong to multiple groups, and not only need different access to different individual projects, but may also need to share discussions across parallel projects. The site’s organization and architecture support this (see screenshot below), with filters for how information is shared, profile pages, featured content items controlled by the site admin, and different ways of sorting and organizing the same pieces of content. The system also indexes documents uploaded to the site so the content — not just file names and associated messages — are easily searchable.

As a long-time Facebook user and Basecamp advocate, I was impressed with fmyi’s toolset, which seems to reflect the way many of my friends and colleagues have become used to collaborating — in an ad hoc, dynamic way, with an emphasis on transparency. At the same time, it’s devoid of some of the weaknesses other systems I’ve tried often share, such as a lack of security or robust permissions and a constant tug-of-war between information overload from a firehose-like stream of content and overly segmented pockets that restrict sharing. The question of social context for content is one that Facebook has been trying to answer with new privacy filters — perhaps the team should ask Yuen for some pointers. (The two sites speak a similar design language already, and fmyi users can expect a new UI even more reminiscent of Facebook later this summer.)

In some ways, it’s this relationship to consumer social networking tools that’s driving growth for fmyi. Yuen says he’s seen an uptick of interest in the social media-like aspects of fmyi’s solution, and the company is tweaking its marketing and development priorities in response. The $275 million enterprise social media space (GigaOM Pro subscription required) is growing rapidly, as the success of consumer social networking sites has begun to filter into the business world, with heavyweights like Microsoft SharePoint and smaller companies like Jive all angling for a piece of the pie. But Yuen says he’s not feeling pressure from the influx of new competitors: the company’s revenues for the first half of 2009 have already exceed all of those from 2008, despite the economic downturn.

While the market’s growth has helped make potential customers more aware of the ways such solutions can improve productivity and solve workflow problems, Yuen’s quick to point out that it’s not just overall market growth driving fmyi’s success. There are many solutions on the market, but “no one has really done it well and cracked the code,” says Yuen. From his perspective, fmyi’s main selling point is that its social tools are all organized within workflow, allowing companies to reap significant productivity benefits. (For example, MTV show “Room Raiders,” which uses the system for casting and production schedule management, was reportedly able to cut the length of an average workday to 9 hours from 14 hours after adopting the tool.)

Yuen is also experimenting with using social media as a way to launch and monitor sustainability projects. Through a partnership with the Northwest Earth Institute, fmyi will offer an online discussion course around workplace sustainability within its platform and offer tools for tracking sustainability projects that emerge from the course. Yuen says the company will begin a pilot with two companies “soon” and launch the template for more widespread use later this summer.

The Portland, Ore.-based company, which has been profitable since 2006 without any external investment, currently hosts 6,000 sites. Clients include HBO, Sony, Nike (although it’s using fmyi for product groups, not sustainability efforts these days) and AFLAC (field agents use it for tracking customer relationships). Hyatt is one large company leveraging the company’s sustainability expertise; the hotel chain uses fmyi to coordinate its Global Sustainability Initiative. As far as Yuen is concerned, fmyi’s roots in the sustainability movement may help it work with clients more successfully than its competitors: “Social media and sustainability are both about culture change,” he says.

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Tags: Basecamp, Collaboration Software, content management, enterprise 2.0, facebook, fmyi, FriendFeed, Google Sites, highrise, hyatt, Jive, justin yuen, nike, northwest earth institute, Sharepoint, social media, sustainability management, the natural step

While it may seem that everyone and their mother is moving to the cloud, the truth is that many enterprises are still wary about moving into public, shared infrastructures. But there are undeniable business benefits to cloud computing, and enterprises are beginning to ask: How can we get the cost of IT operations and application delivery down? That’s where private clouds come into play.

George Gilbert, co-founder and partner for analyst firm TechAlpha, moderated a discussion among representatives from infrastructure/hardware, the infrastructure management layer, and public clouds — including James Urquhart, technology strategist for Cisco (@jamesurquhart), Chuck Hollis, VP and CTO of Global Marketing for EMC (@chuckhollis), Stephen Herrod, CTO and SVP R&D of VMware; Scott Morrison (@kscottmorrison), chief architect of Layer 7; Kia Behnia, CTO of BMC; and Brandon Watson, director of Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform (@brandonwatson) — to discuss the question: What are the pieces that have to come together to make private clouds a reality?

The hardware side has long been the subject of much discussion about the cloud, so the panel started there. But even the hardware vendors agreed: The key shift occurring around private cloud adoption is understanding that it’s not about IT anymore — it’s about the services that IT provides. In the case of Cisco’s recently unveiled Unified Computing System, that means the ability to begin to work with abstractions, rather than actual physical resources, said Urquhart.

Private enterprises have adopted some kinds of virtualization, but UCS allows them to converge server, computer and network virtualization into a single layer. That, in turn, boosts manageability of the application workload. “The ability to know that your workload can choose from a very large pool of resources to run on is a very critical element,” said Urquhart. VMware’s Herrod agreed that this kind of deeper level of virtualization, which further separates the logical view of a process from its physical implementation, makes it easier for companies to innovate. Urquhart stressed, though, that UCS isn’t just about virtualization — it is about a way to leverage fixed components in a very dynamic way.

Dynamic management of workloads, ultimately, was another reason many of the panelists agreed private clouds have emerged, and systems that enable companies to implement workloads based on actual needs will be important. Hollis of EMC said companies need to create use cases for each workload — do it all at the server layer, or all in the network, or in some cases leveraging a homogenous storage array. “You ought to be having a discussion about the functionality and less about where in the stack it happens,” he said.

That’s the key issue for most IT professionals today — BMC’s Behnia said currently, the majority of IT shops are not managing services; they’re managing servers. “That’s not going to go away, but it’s going to change in a virtualized environment,” he said. The solution is for management to become much more top down and service-oriented.

Traditionally, IT has focused on service-level agreements that established “5 9s,” as opposed to application response times and other things that matter to the business. With private clouds, IT has to care more about the relevance of their services to the business: “Business doesn’t care about 5 9s,” Behnia said. EMC’s Hollis later reiterated the point that business decision makers care more about the value provided by services — including how quickly they can be deployed and revised — than about how they’re deployed.

In terms of architecting private clouds, the management layer — which TechAlpha’s Gilbert suggested is the least understood today — is critical for delivering the efficiencies most businesses are after: just enough hardware, power and computing to achieved desired goals. VMware’s Herrod said that separating implementation from policy allows businesses to fine-tune the kind of SLA they need — e.g., availability or performance.

Morrison, of Layer 7,  said that management itself is becoming a service. “We have to remind ourselves all the time, it’s about the services: small, compact pieces of functionality. The mechanism for doing that is management policy and enforcement policy.” While the big discussion is about the virtualization layer, big chunky things — app server, OS, application, all that — we have to focus on that application and what it’s about.

Morrison gave the example of a stock app that might have different services — delivering quotes, buying stock, or some other “strange Madoff app, no one knows what it does” — that would require different levels of security and monitoring. Providing management in the communications layer, where services are talking to each other, allows for better visibility and security across the application. “It’s about the services, stupid,” he quipped.

That approach has implications for IT professionals’ skills: “In true cloud fashion, you need your knowledge to scale out, not up,” said Cisco’s James. Cloud computing also puts pressure on IT teams to compete with outside service providers, Hollis said. Fortunately, that will force IT to change faster and become more innovative. “There are new barabarians at the gate, and they’re knocking at the CEO’s door, promising faster, better, cheaper.”

One impact, Behnia said, is that IT is becoming more amenable to adopting best practices and standards, rather than make everything different and specialized — ultimately, that cuts costs and time.

But private clouds still face the question of scale — and many turn to public clouds to serve at least a portion of those needs. In terms of which workloads will migrate to the cloud, VMware’s Herrod said the question should be how quickly you can migrate. “On-premise may be more efficient — allowing for self-provisioning, chargeback models — but you shouldn’t have to rewrite your model of programming to work in the cloud,” he said. Which workloads move to the cloud will depend on the data: “Mission critical data is not going to move to the cloud unless a company feels comfortable.” Meanwhile, test and development are very likely to move to the cloud.

The panelists agreed that for enterprise, their private cloud services are designed to give companies more room to push forward, not to tell them what they have to stop doing. Cloud services enable that kind of decision making, based on new needs that emerge. According to Microsoft’s Brandon, workloads will move to the cloud, when it enables customers to accomplish their other goals.”Get out of their way,” he said.

Video of the panel is here:

Photo by James Duncan Davidson (@kscottmorrison

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Tags: cloud, private clouds, Structure 09, structure structureconf structure09, structureconf

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., like many semiconductor companies, is on the lookout for new markets, and according to some reports, the company thinks it could generate more than $2 billion in revenue from opportunities that include solar and LEDs. The company’s not alone. The semiconductor business is struggling in the face of a long recession and the success of less powerful, smaller-margin chips like Intel’s Atom; but demand for green technologies is going strong, and innovative products in this area could help semiconductor companies bolster their margins.

A new GigaOM Pro report out today looks more closely at one green opportunity: LED solid-state lighting. It’s the first research note in a three-part series from the GigaOM Analyst Network’s Katherine Austin looking at how semiconductor companies can capitalize on opportunities in the green market. Among her findings, Austin says the market for LEDs in general lighting applications could reach $10 billion by 2012, up more than 40 percent from today’s total LED market (which also includes LEDs for cars, cell phones, etc.) Get the full analysis here (subscription required).

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With both NetApp and EMC eager to acquire Data Domain, the leading storage-efficiency company appears certain to be facing a future in the arms of a larger firm. Om in a post last week <a href=”http://gigaom.com/2009/06/02/why-both-emc-netapp-want-data-domain/”">laid out some of the reasons why both companies are interested in acquiring Data Domain and its de-deduplication expertise, and suggested that the deal could be a bellwether event for the storage business.

The analysts at TechAlpha agree, and in a new research note for GigaOM Pro, they take a look at the strategic rationale behind the offers made by both EMC and NetApp, why Data Domain is open to an acquisition, why other potential buyers are unlikely to emerge, and dig into what the deal reveals about the state of the storage business today. They’ve also tapped their contacts to provide the customer perspective on what the Data Domain acquisition — and further consolidation in the industry — would mean for them.

Get the full research note here (subscription required).

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Tags: Data Domain, data storage, de-duplication, emc, gigaom pro, NetApp, techalpha

We’d like to say thanks to this week’s GigaOM sponsors:

• PEER 1: Fully Scalable Hosting Solutions
• RackSpace: Experience fanatical support
• StrataScale: It’s your infrastructure – On Demand.

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Cisco this morning announced its official game plan for the smart grid market, which it believes represents a $20 billion-a-year opportunity as the systems are built out over the next five years. In typical Cisco fashion, the five-point plan hinges on new opportunities for its existing business lines: networking solutions for smart grid communications, security for the smart grid, gear for the coming utility data center buildout, and energy management systems for the home and enterprise.

As utilities become the next big purchasers of networking and data center gear, Cisco smells a ripe opportunity for its Unified Computing System, which it unveiled earlier this year. While Cisco competes for traditional data center customers with numerous competitors that have legacy relationships, to date the utility market is relatively small, and with its expertise in network security, Cisco could have a compelling pitch. But smart grid communications is the area in which Cisco is most likely to shine; the networking giant says it can play a critical role in helping automate how electrons move from supply to demand.

For now, the plan lacks a lot of specific detail, but it nonetheless is an example of how aggressively Cisco is moving into the space — and signals to some startups that there’s a powerful new competitor (or partner) on the scene.

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Tags: Cisco, Earth2Tech

This week, Cisco made its first official move into the smart grid space as a partner in the $200 million Energy Smart Miami project. While the smart grid, which some have called the “Internet of energy,” might seem like a perfect opportunity for the networking giant to court utilities’ needs, the announced project offers Cisco its best opportunity yet to leverage its recent acquisitions in the consumer space — by providing devices and networking that will help residential utility customers manage their energy use.

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Tags: Cisco Systems, Smart Grid

You can get wireless data access just about everywhere these days, from your bathtub to Barcelona’s city streets, so why not in your body?  Well, soon you will — or at least, that’s the vision of a handful of emerging biotech companies. As the Boomer generation ages, companies eyeing the overburdened U.S. medical systems see opportunities to extend the reach of existing medical care, free up health resources for those who need them most, and encourage long-term health and fitness using technology.  Here’s a look at a few of the high-tech devices aiming to revolutionize health care:

CardioNet In order to diagnose heart problems, patients are traditionally hooked to electrocardiogram (ECG) monitors and confined to bed while their heart rates are monitored. But without the triggers of daily life — stress, activity and other environmental issues — heart conditions are difficult to observe and diagnose. CardioNet, which went public in March 2008 and whose shares are still trading above their IPO price, has come up with a wireless solution that allows patients to wear ECG sensors that transmit information wirelessly to a handheld device. The CardioNet monitor, which is equipped with a CDMA 1X radio, sends data via the Sprint network back to doctors, who can monitor heart activity under real-world conditions.

According to Don Jones, V-P of business development for Qualcomm’s Health and Life Sciences division (a CardioNet investor and partner), the CardioNet system is 300 percent more effective than traditional in-patient monitoring. That means improved patient care, while also saving money for hospitals and insurance companies by freeing up hospital beds. All of which is good for CardioNet’s business, too. In its fourth-quarter earnings statement, the company said demand for its device is growing at greater than 40 percent a year, and revenues climbed 44 percent from the previous year, surpassing analyst expectations.

Smart Bandaids A host of other companies (like Triage Wireless, another Qualcomm partner) are developing “smart bandaid” technologies that can send data from patients bodies to doctors using wireless networks — Bluetooth and 3G networks among them. Like the wireless ECG monitors, smart bandaids stick to a patient’s skin, collect information and transmit it wireless to a medical monitoring system. Designed primarily for out-patient monitoring, these devices collect and transmit a surprising array of data from a single peel-and-stick sensor, including activity levels, heart rate, perspiration, body position, blood pressure, and more. Intel is also interested in the space:

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p style=”text-align: left;”> Intel Research: Wireless Sensors for Monitoring Health

Public Health for Pennies Proteus Biomedical is working on a companion technology to such “smart bandaids” as well — an edible microchip meant to signal to the skin-stuck sensor when it’s been ingested. Wonder why that might be useful? Here’s the gist: Patients don’t always take their pills. The company’s system, called “Raisin,” can be used to alert doctors, family members, or patients themselves when drugs have — or haven’t — been taken.

Proteus Biomedical's "Raisin" System

While the company has talked about the potential to use its technology for monitoring heart patient compliance with treatment, the first application (currently in clinical trials in Denver) could be tuberculosis treatment. According to Andrew Thompson, founder and CEO, 2 billion people in the world have tuberculosis. It’s a curable, but because it’s critical that patients complete their entire course of antibiotics (in order to prevent the development of drug-resistant strains), treatment requires that patients go to a physical location to receive their daily antibiotics under direct medical observation.

The “Raisin” system allows doctors to perform that same monitoring and verification remotely. “Tuberculosis is not a scourge in the U.S.,” Thompson says, but in the developing world, Proteus’ technology could bring medical treatment where it hasn’t been previously available.

Personal Care — and Fitness But if you’re not a heart patient, and you don’t suffer from an illness that needs to be closely monitored, how can high-tech health apps help you? Through fitness monitoring and social networking, of course. Proteus Biomedical says it hopes to see its technology adopted across a range of other applications. For example, individuals could use the devices to report beneficial activities (exercising, taking medications, sleeping) and receive incentives from partners (doctors, insurance companies, social networks) with whom they share that information. (Conversely, there’s also the possibility they would earn punishment for not doing so, depending on with whom they share that information!)

A larger array of companies are working in this space, as well, some with less invasive technologies. FitLynxx (the tech behind the Nike/iPod integration), G2 Wireless, Lifesource and others are developing scales, blood pressure monitors, refrigerators, fitness gear and other devices equipped with low-power Wi-Fi for monitoring health and fitness.

And of course, don’t forget your iPhone. With its acceleromater, Wi-Fi signal and GPS, it has lots of potential to join in the fun, and many apps exist that use those tools for health and fitness purposes. Don’t think that counts as a medical device? Try again. The FDA has recently hinted that it could start regulating health-related iPhone apps.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

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Tags: CardioNET, fitlynxx, proteus biomedical, triage wireless

• At TED*: How Far Can a Simulcast Go?
• NewTeeVee’s Liz Gannes attended the 2009 TED conference last week — but not in Long Beach. Instead, she attended a simulcast of the event held at a separate venue two hours away. As the famed conference expands, its organizers are trying to find ways to include more people in real time, a laudable effort that’s being enabled by live streaming video. Liz weighs in on some of the peaks and valleys.
• If Green Jobs Are So Hot, Where Are They?
• In the economic downturn, “green jobs” has become one of the hottest political catchphrases. But the cleantech industry hasn’t proved to be recession-proof, and layoffs and hiring freezes are leading would-be green employees to question just how soon the jobs will arrive, and what kind of cleantech companies will be hiring. Earth2Tech offers a look at what the future may hold.
• Comparing Apples & Volvos: User Maintenance Forgotten
• Apple computers have frequently been compared to Volvo automobiles, more due to the perceived political and ideological leanings of a prominent cohort of their respective users (ie: urban liberals) rather than commonality of design and engineering philosophy. there’s another Volvo-Apple similarity: a predilection of both firms to discourage user maintenance and tinkering. Charles Moore dismantles the problems with this way of thinking over at The Apple Blog.

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The Obama administration’s $825 billion economic recovery package, nicknamed the “Green New Deal,” is packed with references to doubling renewable energy generation, funding public transportation and energy-efficiency projects, and investing in clean water and environmental restoration. But it’s not just a present for the cleantech crowd — the tech world is getting some goodies, too.

Although the $6 billion broadband allocation seems puny to some, the bill pledges funding for computerizing the health care system, modernizing education delivery (including technology), and, yes, the green-hued “smart grid.” And many of the same items that have the cleantech crowd champing at the bit to see the bill passed offer hidden opportunities for tech firms, too. Today’s environmental innovations, from greener highway design to safer water delivery, depend heavily on data, data and more data, positioning tech firms to seize a substantial piece of one of the hottest markets in town. 

Smart grid? Try smart everything The smart grid is a huge opportunity that plenty of tech firms are already excited about. Smart meters have a long value chain, and Obama’s proposed $32 million investment into a smarter grid would have a ripple effect throughout the tech world, reaching everyone from large smart meter makers such as GE to startups like Silver Spring Networks, as well as semiconductor manufacturers and data management software companies. But the opportunity doesn’t end there.

Think of the smart grid as layering “metadata” into the electrical lines. Instead of just electrons, a smart grid transmits information about pricing, where energy was produced, where it was consumed, what it cost, and more. The same approach is being applied to other infrastructure systems as well.

For example, the bill earmarks $31 billion for transportation “modernization.” Congestion pricing, one interpretation of that phrase, would require the transportation equivalent of the smart grid. Instead of tracking electrons, however, the system would keep tabs on cars. That could require a host of high-tech tools, from traffic sensors and wireless networks to billing software and new protocols to anonymize and encrypt data. Water, which is slated to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in stimulus funding, offers similar opportunities, as well.

Wi-Fi gets busy The smart grid, the smart highway, and the smart water pipeline need lots of data, and most of that data is going to be collected in remote locations — say, wind farms and water reservoirs in Kansas — or from many, distributed users. Pulling that data in is going to require large networks of sensors, most of which will be based on some form of low-power wireless technology. While the big players, like Broadcom and Atheros, will likely corner the market on wireless consumer devices, there are a number of startups — including G2 Microsystems, Gainspan and ZeroG Wireless — that could be big winners in the remote sensor market.

Think data centers, not bridge building All the data collected by such sensor networks  — whether it’s information about electrons, cars, water, or a manufacturing supply chain (eligible for funding as part of a $100 million research earmark in the stimulus package) — isn’t useful unless it’s sorted, interpreted and put to good use. That’s great news for companies that provide the software, servers, and data centers that host and store that information. While physical infrastructure plays a smaller role in the Green New Deal than it did in FDR’s original New Deal, digital infrastructure is going to play a much more profound role in the Obama plan.

Make new friends, make more money Companies like IBM have been quick to spot many of these opportunities in the new, “smart” economy.  The IT giant recently launched its Smarter Planet campaign, with an eye toward bringing IT innovations to the energy, transportation, water and retail sectors of the economy. But the company isn’t going it alone. Drew Clark, director of strategy for the IBM Venture Capital Group, says Big Blue has been cultivating relationships with key startups in the space. “While we’re really great at the overall architecture and conceptual view and building it, there are many pieces of this…that we’ll want to plug in to,” he says.

In the current economic climate, strategic relationships between big tech and cleantech startups may become more common. It’s not because the big players are getting greener, though. These days, their best markets are.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

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Posted by Celeste LeCompte on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  10 Comments
Tags: green:net

According to research from Instat, ZigBee may be following in the footsteps of now-ubiquitous Wi-Fi, thanks to the growth of the “smart energy” marketplace. Earth2Tech reports that chips and nodes used to build wireless networks based on the leading standard, 802.15.4, (the one the ZigBee specification is based on) will grow to 292 million in 2012, up from 7 million in 2007 — that’s nearly 4,000 percent growth over a 5-year period.  Instat notes that wireless sensor networks and smart meters, both of which aim to improve building energy efficinecy, will play a critical role in spurring that growth.

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It was just over a year ago that small, low-cost netbooks hit the market, and since then they’ve become one of the hottest technology trends of 2008, with the top two vendors in the space — Asus and Acer — predicting they’ll sell 11 million devices this year. While the tiny laptops may be the computer equivalent of a second home for many of the early adopters, they also offer a greener alternative than most of the full-featured laptops available to on-the-go buyers, thanks to lower power demands, fewer toxic components, and a resource-efficient approach to computing.

Because netbooks are designed for ultraportability, they strive for both lower battery weight and longer battery life.  Often, lower power consumption has meant reduced performance — a big no-no for traditional laptop marketing. But for netbooks, which strip down the computer’s power needs with lightweight operating systems and software, performance trade-offs aren’t a significant problem. By including energy-efficient components, such as highly efficient processors and solid state drives, netbooks can make the most of smaller-sized batteries.

The vast majority of netbooks are powered by Intel’s Atom processor, an energy-efficient chip inside of the laptops listed with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program. How efficient is it? Atom sports a maximum thermal design point (TDP) of 2.5 watts; compare that with Intel’s Core 2 Duo chips, which have a TDP of 65 watts 25 watts. That not only makes the notebooks more efficient, it makes the machines using them cooler and quieter, a key feature for a netbook. Netbooks’ efficiency is likely to increase in the year ahead. More power-conscious ARM-based netbooks are coming in 2009 with chips that will use no more than 1 watt of power.

Energy efficiency can have other benefits as well. The reduced weight from a small battery can help shrink the carbon footprint involved in shipping them to stores and buyers. It also can help manufacturers meet environmental standards such as the U.S.-based EPEAT program, which certifies products that achieve a number of environmental performance metrics, from energy efficiency to end-of-life management. Lenovo’s ThinkPad SL400 and SL500 netbooks and ASUS’s N-series are EPEAT Gold, while the HP Mini-note line is EPEAT Silver.

EPEAT also evaluates the ingredients that make up a computers’ components. In the EU, electronic devices must comply with the Eurpean Restriction on Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive, which limits the use of heavy metals and other toxic compounds in electrionics. Some manufacturers, including Lenovo and Fujitsu, offer RoHS-compliant netbooks to the U.S. market. Many new, full-featured laptops are moving in this direction as well, but because the entire netbooks category is new, they’ve got the jump on eco-label compliance.

But perhaps netbooks’ greenest feature is their whole approach to personal computing. They don’t offer monster performance, but most of us don’t need monster performance. Netbooks are good enough for most of what I want to do most of the time, among them email, web browsing (including blogging), music, and some occasional online video. I suspect the same is true for many consumers, and because of their low price, they’re likely to become the computer of choice for consumers looking for nothing more than light-duty Internet machines.

This “take only what you need” approach is a fundamentally greener way of looking at resource use, whether the industry we’re talking about is forestry or computing. Just be sure to power down your home computer when you’re on the go, or the eco-boost from your efficient little netbook just might go up in a plume of coal-powered smoke.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com

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Posted by Celeste LeCompte on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  33 Comments
Tags: Acer, ARM, Asus, ATOM, Energy Star, EPEAT, EU, Intel, Lenovo, netbooks, RoHS

Like many folks, the ins and outs of the current economic situation are somewhat beyond the scope of my freshman year “Principles of Economics” class. Credit default swaps? Bailouts? I don’t seem to remember covering any of these things in Ec10. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways for me — and you — to get educated about what’s happening today, all thanks to the Internet.

Plain-English Economics While sites from CNBC and BusinessWeek to Slate offer news aggregators, sometimes you need help grokking what, exactly, is happening to the economy. This American Life’s “The Giant Pool of Money” episode, produced in collaboration with NPR’s David Kestenbaum, became the must-download podcast of the year when it first aired in May. The show’s popularity online also spurred Kestenbaum and co-creator Alex Blumberg to start the Planet Money blog, which aims to explain economic trends in plain English (and which both Om and I love). The same folks then returned to This American Life in early October with a follow-up to the May broadcast called “Another Frightening Show About The Economy.”

Other sources of plain-English economics include a what-just-happened tutorial put out by Steven Leavitt and some of his colleagues on the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog back in September, as well as a second, follow-up post in mid-October. Other picks: Paul Kedrosky’s blog, Dean Baker’s Beat The Press, and Om’s favorite, The Big Picture. Still need more background before diving in? Brush up on your finance terms and definitions at the Forbes-run Investopedia.

What Are You Doing With My Money?

Image courtesy The Big Money

The $700 billion bank bailout, now more commonly called TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), may have been what caught everyone’s attention, but the government spending didn’t start — or stop — there. Slate’s The Big Money blog put together an amazing infographic that shows, in eye-popping detail, the ever-growing tally of federal money being funneled into bailout packages. Open Congress can help show you what could be next.

And what are banks, insurers and auto companies doing with all that money? Well, actually, it’s kinda hard to tell, but the Government Accountability Office is at least trying to keep tabs; its efforts are available in the Problems in Financial Markets and Housing section of its web site. The TARP oversight committee, headed by Elizabeth Warren, issued its latest report on Dec. 10, which also sheds some light on the situation. (Felix Salmon at Portfolio’s Market Movers blog has some thoughts on what it says, and what he expected it to say, if you’re not up to reading the whole report yourself.)

A Rocky, Horrible Picture Show Some folks like to read their news, some folks like to listen, and some folks like to watch. If watching is your thing, there are plenty of places to get video online. YouTube is a veritable online university, with videos from Stanford and UCLA, among many others, all aimed at explaining the economic crisis. C-SPAN provides video coverage of congressional happenings, most of which is available online, including everything from Republican press conferences to the House hearing on TARP oversight.

Statistics to Watch If your first-year economics class did better by you than mine did — or if you’re a “just the facts, ma’am” type — you might be more interested in looking at some key indicator statistics for yourself. For that your best source is the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unemployment rates aren’t the only thing this agency tracks. A snapshot of the U.S. economy provides the big picture, while more obscures numbers provide additional insights.

Still, mass layoff events, defined as when companies ax 50 or more employees, are an excellent indicator of just how widespread the economic doom and gloom is. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports this data on a month-by-month basis. And how bad is it? Well, from April 1995 to October 2008 (the dataset that’s available), only five months saw more than 2,000 mass layoff events: September and October 2008, and September, October and November 2001.

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Tags: economic crisis