In an interview last week, Microsoft’s Senior Research Project Manager, Sean James, described the new “Data Plant” project as “a symbiotic relationship between a water plant and data center.” Microsoft says the Data Plant is “the first zero carbon data center,” and is the first data center to use biogas directly for a fuel cell to power a data center.

Data Plant stats

So what exactly is this project? Microsoft’s Data Plant is a 200 kW data center — about 10 feet by 20 feet in size in a container — that is being built literally feet from the Dry Creek Wasterwater Reclamation Facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming. A system of pipes sequesters methane that is created by the waste water, cleans it, and then automatically pipes it into the data center’s fuel cell, which powers the entire container. The process is all automated, so it’s far more efficient than, say, manually taking the gas from the water facility to the fuel cells.

Waste water treatment plants produce biogas — which is gas that is produced by the breakdown of organic matter. In many cases at these treatment plants, the biogas is just burned away, because it’s usually uneconomical to collect, transport and use. The waste water needs to be put into anaerobic digesters, and over time the anaerobic bacteria in the digester digests the organic material at a warm temperature and emits the biogas.

Microsoft is using a 300 kW fuel cell from FuelCell Energy for the Data Plant. Fuel cells take a fuel — usually natural gas or biogas — and run it over plates covered in a catalyst, to chemically produce electricity. Fuel cells have long been under development, but only in recent years have started to be experimented with for data centers. eBay and Apple are building large fuel cell farms — using fuel cells from Bloom Energy — for their data centers.

While Apple and eBay are being more aggressive than Microsoft when it comes to using fuel cells for large data centers, the Data Plant is the first to use biogas directly for fuel cells. In contrast, Apple plans to use biogas for its fuel cells, but plans to inject biogas into a natural gas pipeline, which could be miles away from the actual fuel cell farm.

Brian Janous, Microsoft’s Utility Architect tells me that the entire system, including the fuel cell, the biogas system, the clean up process, the IT pack and the servers cost Microsoft $8 million (Updated: and Microsoft’s portion was $5.5 million). Since the project is an experiment, Microsoft is also not running any “mission critical” applications off of the mini data center.

Why the Data Plant?

Microsoft’s experiment will help the company work on alternative ways to power the rest of its data centers and enable its Internet architecture to rely less on grid power. Microsoft will use the knowledge it’s learned at this first Data Plant, to potentially build fuel cells and clean power at other larger sites.

The Data Plant is also an example of coupling distributed computing with a distributed power source. Microsoft is shrinking the computing and building it right next to the water plant, using sustainable power as the leading reason for the citing and building. This will become a growing trend for Internet companies across the globe as companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, eBay and Apple seek to lower their carbon emissions associated with their data center energy use. Microsoft had a plan to be carbon neutral by Summer 2012.

As more and more data centers need to be built throughout the world, Internet companies also want to become less beholden to the reliability issues of the power grid. Internet companies are turning to fuel cells namely as a way to add extra mission critical reliability in case the power grid fails.

If everything goes well with Data Plant, Microsoft might try to build micro data centers at other water treatment facilities. Janous says that water plants could make good sites for mini data centers because they are usually close to dense populations, so Microsoft can put the computing where there users are, and create a sustainable ecosystem off of the biogas.

Microsoft says it will soon start constructing the Data Plant, and will probably start running it next Spring. After running and testing it for 18 months, Microsoft says it will turn it over to the local university and the city so they can continue to run tests on it and learn how it could be used at a larger scale.

Images courtesy of FuelCell Energy (not of Microsoft’s Data Plant, but of Fuel Cell Energy’s other installations).

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While the Eye on Earth network has been under development since 2008, the group launched three services for different types of environmental data at COP 17, including WaterWatch, which uses the EEA’s water data; AirWatch, which uses the EEA’s air quality data; and NoiseWatch, which combines environmental data with user-generated info from citizens.

Microsoft isn’t the only one working on creating these types of eco big data networks. At last year’s U.N. climate meeting, COP 16, Google launched its own satellite and mapping service called Google Earth Engine, which combines an open API, a computing platform, and 25 years of satellite imagery available to researchers, scientists, organizations and government agencies. Google Earth Engine offers both tools and parallel processing computing power to groups to be able to use satellite imagery to analyze environmental conditions in order to make sustainability decisions.

If you can’t quite picture how these networks will be used for good, in the case of Google’s Earth Engine, the government of Mexico created the first comprehensive, high-resolution map of Mexico’s forests that incorporated 53,000 Landsat images to produce a 6 GB mapping product. The Mexican government and NGOs can use the map to make decisions about land use, sustainable agriculture, and species protection in combination with a growing population.

Cloud computing and big data analytics will be an increasingly important way to manage a limited number of resources — energy, water, and food — as the world population explodes. There are already 7 billion people on the planet, and there will be 9 billion by 2050. For more info on this, check out our eight ways big data and analytics are already helping manage resources for a booming population.

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But now, 12 to 24 months later, all three of these players have ultimately made the decision to abandon those projects. Cisco was the latest one to jump ship, and on Wednesday afternoon it penned a blog post announcing the choice. Cisco plans to move away from both its building-energy tools, which it purchased via Richards-Zeta back in 2009, as well as its Home Energy Controller, an energy dashboard it had developed.

Little effort, little reward

First off, all of these firms were really just dabbling in and experimenting with the energy-management field. Cisco’s energy dashboard was actually a device created by Open Peak and customized by Cisco, and it was meant to be tested out in its smart-grid pilot trials with utilities. In Cisco’s blog post this week, it said after testing out the tools in its pilots that it decided it needed to evolve its strategy.

If you look at Google’s and Microsoft’s entire business lines — and balance sheets — their PowerMeter and Hohm energy web tools were minor projects. Google even launched PowerMeter out of Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm, and actively said it had no business model for the software.

Lack of consumer interest

Ultimately Google and Microsoft shut down PowerMeter and Hohm, partly because not enough consumers signed up to use the service. The tools were free and easily available on their websites, but at this point consumers just lack the fundamental interest in spending time managing their home energy consumption.

Cisco was selling its home energy controller through utilities rather than to consumers, but it indirectly faced this problem, too. I’m not sure what Cisco found via its pilot projects, but it likely wasn’t overwhelming consumer interest in the dashboard.

High-end dashboards are toast

As I’ve reported before, creating an expensive energy dashboard with a lot of functions and trying to sell it via utilities or consumers hasn’t seemed like a good business model. Both utilities and consumers aren’t really willing to cover the high costs of these. The market for high-end home energy devices is more tied to new home sales, contractors selling renovations and tying devices to solar systems (basically tying the home energy device as an upgrade to a more expensive system).

Startup Tendril stopped selling its high-end device, and it shifted its strategy. GE did as well. I’m not sure of the price point of Cisco’s energy device, but it looked like it provided a significant amount of function and power.

Utilities and the smart grid are difficult markets

Beyond consumers, utilities are also tricky customers to get used to selling to. As you can see from Silver Spring Network’s S-1, the company has had negative gross margins for years. Part of this stems from the fact that utilities take years to go through the process of a long trial and then a deployment. Utilities are also oftentimes highly regulated, so that can hold up the process, too.

Google and Microsoft both struggled to sell to utilities. Cisco has seemed to have more success with smart-grid pilots than with utilities, but it clearly didn’t find selling building-management devices to utilities a solid-enough business.

Unlike with Google and Microsoft, Cisco says it will still sell to utilities and the smart-grid market in general. But we’ll see how many utility trials Cisco ends up pursuing.

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Apple made more than Microsoft during the last calendar quarter with a $20.34 billion quarter, as it announced last week, while Microsoft announced its total of only $16.20 billion just today. It’s still a record quarter for Microsoft, up 25 percent from last year, and Microsoft  has higher profit margins because it remains a software-focused company, but the achievement is noteworthy nonetheless.

It’s the first time since Steve Jobs’ return to the company that Apple has beaten Microsoft in revenue, so I’m sure Ballmer and Co. are taking note. The margin by which Apple won is a big one, too, and though many predicted Cupertino would make more than Redmond at some point this year, few anticipated such a large gap so early.

Will new products like Windows Phone 7 and Xbox Kinect help Microsoft regain some of that ground? Time will tell, but Apple’s lead may already be insurmountable.

UPDATE: This article originally stated that it was the first time Apple beat Microsoft in its history. In fact, Apple’s revenue exceeded that of Microsoft until around the mid-90s.

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Amidst reports from Om that AOL is close to buying TechCrunch, the web giant announced today that it has acquired online video-syndication specialist 5min Media. The purchase will help boost the amount of video AOL can serve on its sites, while also increasing the syndication and distribution possibilities for its own video assets. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, although some estimates place the value of the deal at around $50-$65 million.

5min runs a syndication platform that acts as a middleman between publishers who wish to share their videos with each other. It allows a publisher that doesn’t have a ton of video assets to bulk up its video pages with syndicated videos from other sources, and delivers them based on a semantic technology that matches up videos with the content of the web page that they run on. Participating publishers can then get a share of the advertising revenue, with 5min taking a cut as well.

The startup has had good traction in attracting partners, with more than 1,000 media companies and independent video producers syndicating videos into the platform, which are sorted into 21 different verticals to appear on more than 800 partner sites. Altogether, 5min has more than 200,000 video assets in its network, and served more than 130 million video streams in August, according to comScore.

The value proposition to AOL is clear — 5min gives it a fast and easy way to bulk up its video offerings without having to invest too much to produce its own original videos. Instead it can now automatically match up relevant video content to run alongside whatever text it has in its network. At the same time, it’ll open up the possibility for more broadly distributing and monetizing whatever original videos it has produced.

5min had raised a total of about $13 million in two rounds of funding, including a $7.5 million round last July. The company, which was founded in 2006, has offices in New York and Tel Aviv.

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“We weren’t to tell people or accept gifts or otherwise be persuaded to watch a certain show… We did make sure to watch Buffy and Angel in syndicated repeats, and made a special effort to watch the first season of the Venture Bros, which did need just another household or two to put it over the top. And it worked.”

iO9 writer Charlie Jane Anders makes a notes that Nielsen’s traditional TV ratings system is eventually going to be obsolete with the growing importance of online video, while at the same time putting things into perspective (people watch a lot of Hulu, but they still watch a whole lotta more broadcast and cable TV). What’s missing is the fact that online video measurement is in itself still an evolving science — something that became evident earlier this year when both CBS and ESPN3 claimed to have shown the Internet’s biggest sporting event.

Still, the article is a great read, if only for the fact that it really, really makes you want to have one of those slightly retro-futuristic looking black Nielsen measurement boxes in your living room.

Want to learn more about the future of media measurement in an online television world? Then make sure to check out our NewTeeVee Live conference, coming up on November 10, where we will have none other than Nielsen’s EVP of media audience measurement Matt O’Grady talking about these issues.

Telcos and satellite TV providers were able to pick up some of those customers, posting combined gains of 495,000 subscribers. That still leaves 216,000 subscribers who cut the cord entirely. Pay TV operators gained some 378,000 subscribers during the same quarter last year.

SNL Kagan analyst Mariam Rondeli was careful not to read too much into those numbers when I talked to her on the phone today, saying that much of those losses seem to be attributable to customers who subscribed to pay TV early last year due to the broadcast digital transition. Now these customers see the prices for their introductory packages going up, and quite a few of them have decided not to stick around.

She also said that the continuing recession and its impact on the job and housing market seem to make people rethink their subscriptions. However, she doesn’t believe all is lost for cable and other forms of pay TV. “We do think the second quarter was unique,” she told me. SNL Kagan expects the industry to gain a total of 900,000 subscribers in the third and fourth quarter.

Rondeli also said that she doesn’t see over-the-top video as a driving factor behind the current losses, but she cautioned not to ignore online video. The overall pay TV market is saturated, with around 100 million households in the U.S. paying for TV services. That also means that over-the-top services have could impact future growth, even if the overall numbers of users accessing programing exclusively over the Internet are small. “It can make a difference even if you don’t have a huge pie,” she said.

Earlier today, the New York Times published a piece that proclaimed “no shortage of demand” for pay TV. Our own Ryan Lawler shot back, saying that “(t)he $100 cable bill is dead; the cable industry just doesn’t know it yet.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user sfxeric.

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The phone sent to reviewers is a test phone from Samsung, and Microsoft says it will never be released to consumers. It sports a 1 GHz processor — the current superphone standard — and WP7 runs very fluidly. The entire interface is designed for smooth touch operation, and the WP7 interface seems to be a cross between the much lauded Zune HD, and the not-so-great Kin. The WP7 home screen is a set of user configurable “tiles.” There are tiles for email, contacts, music, photos and other similar functions. Tiles can be moved around at will, and as many of them as desired can be placed on this screen.

What the Web is Saying

Now, on to the reviewer roundup! Response to the new platform is cautiously optimistic, with a few exceptions.

ZDNet has the most comprehensive review of the lot, with fellow podcast host Matt Miller producing a big review of WP7 including several videos of it in action:

The current experience is amazingly stable and fluid and I am quite impressed with what they have done. It has taken some time and they were pretty much out of competing for customers for most of this year, but it looks like they will come out firing with all they have this coming holiday season.

Engadget also took a long look at WP7, and the reviewer is definitely impressed with how intuitive the interface is to operate:

Still, those issues aside, Windows Phone 7 is easily the most unique UI in the smartphone race right now, and the real perk here is that it doesn’t just seem like an arbitrary decision to make things look different than other OSs — there is real purpose and utility to a lot of what Microsoft has come up with.

GartenBlog is where analyst Michael Gartenberg posted a reasonable look at the new platform from a user’s standpoint. Overall he likes what he’s seen so far, but wants to see how the platform unfolds:

There’s a lot of questions that still need to be answered about Windows Phone 7. What will application support look like? Lack of apps for things such as Twitter or RSS reading make it hard to fairly judge the OS at this point. Likewise, final hardware and carrier partners, marketing and messaging all will help decide just how well Microsoft has done here with their efforts. That said, I like what I see so far and it looks like Windows Phone 7 has what it takes to silence many of Microsoft’s mobile critics.

Wired praised the interface, but questioned the reliance on the Zune Marketplace in its short review:

Major, major improvements here. Because the applications are laid out in what Microsoft calls “Tiles” (really, these are customizable icons that can be manipulated on the Start screen), navigating the OS is exponentially more simplistic than previous versions of Win-Mo. The focus on mining social networks and address books across platforms for contacts is definitely not a new idea (Palm OS hello!) but for Microsoft it’s a pretty big jump in the right direction. Still the lack of any kind of real app store is a major hindrance.

CNET mostly likes the WP7 user experience, although the reviewer found it inconsistent at times:

What’s interesting about Windows Phone 7, though, is, at times, it feels like you’re getting two completely different experiences on the phone. The Start screen/menu list, and some apps like the phone dialer, e-mail inbox and calendar, are completely minimalistic, while other aspects of the phone, like the aforementioned hubs and multimedia features, are more sophisticated and elegant. It doesn’t hurt the navigation, per se, but is [sic] doesn’t really make the phone feel like a cohesive unit either.

Slashgear used lots of photos, but the reviewer makes it clear the competition is already beyond this first version of WP7:

In other ways, though, while it differs significantly from Windows Mobile, it’s very much a v1.0 product; that might have been enough to compete strongly against early versions of Android, say, or iOS, but, by the time Windows Phone 7 devices reach the market, Android 2.2 will be mainstream and iOS4 firmly entrenched.  That’s strong competition, even for a company with the relative might of Microsoft.

BGR offers the most negative preview of the lot, although the reviewer found the music player to be very nice:

We liked using the OS in general, though the experience for us felt a little too much like our time using the Microsoft KIN 2. The tiled homescreen seems a little too constrained and boxed in for us, and the non-frills design approach actually left the handset menus and navigational elements feeling bare and unfinished, rather than pure and unaltered. Not having any sort of menu for hoping back and forth between applications hampers your every day usage, and the animated transitions also start to feel old pretty fast. For a phone that was made from scratch and started on after the first iPhone was introduced, and for a phone that’s not even in market yet, it unfortunately in our view falls short.

The one consistent sentiment coming through in these early looks at WP7 is that Microsoft has designed a thoroughly new interface that is easy to use. It is a very early version of the platform, so hopefully the overriding concern of reviewers over the lack of basic functionality (like Twitter) will be addressed prior to launch this fall. It is refreshing to see a smartphone platform provide a new way of doing things, much as Palm did with webOS. But the devil is in the details, so we’ll have to see how WP7 unfolds as launch date approaches.

Image credit ZDNet, BGR

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Foursquare is in talks with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft about deals involving the service’s location-based check-in data, founder and CEO Dennis Crowley told The Telegraph in an interview, saying the company’s data “generates hugely interesting trends which would enrich search.” None of the major search providers has confirmed any discussions with the startup, but such deals would make sense given all three players’  interest in making their search results more real-time. All have signed similar arrangements with Twitter for its real-time data feed.

Crowley said that Foursquare’s check-in data could be used to show what locations are trending at a particular time, in much the same way that Twitter results show what keywords are popular on the service. “Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people are talking about. Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of place people are going to – and where is trending – not what,” the Foursquare founder told The Telegraph. Twitter also recently added a location-based feature called Places, which aggregates messages about specific locations.

Foursquare — which recently crossed the 2-million-user mark — last month landed a $20 million Series B financing led by Andreessen Horowitz, and said that it will be using the money in part to finance an expansion of the company’s service into new areas, as well as a re-engineering of some of the social game-play involved. Foursquare is also expected to be involved in the eventual roll-out of Facebook’s location-based features, which could tie together many of the existing location services such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user schatz.

Unlike traditional investing, Intellectual Ventures focuses on creating the invention itself (like an incubator) and Myhrvold tells me that a third of its inventions are now in the area of greentech and energy innovation. Not all are as ambitious as TerraPower — it’ll take a decade and several billion dollars to build its nuclear reactor commercially — and Myhrvold says that he’s also excited about energy efficiency tech and electrical transmission. Just don’t expect to see ideas like TerraPower land first in the U.S., as the U.S. is “stuck in the mud,” by regulation and politics.

While you might think the innovations behind TerraPower and Microsoft are vastly different, when you put a software guy on an energy problem it becomes a software problem, says Myrvold, and TerraPower relies heavily on super computing. The problem with today’s nuclear plants is that they were designed using computers with the same amount of computing power as our current cell phones, he notes. Here’s an edited excerpt of 10 questions for Myhrvold on how to create energy innovation:

Earth2Tech: Intellectual Ventures is not a traditional investment or VC firm, and has been described as a Intellectual Property firm. Can you tell me about how and why you founded it back in 2000?

Nathan Myhrvold: I considered going into venture capital, but I would have been the 20,000^th venture capitalist in the world. I thought it would be better to be the first invention capitalist. Our idea is to invest in invention. Venture capitalists invest in companies, plans and teams to form organizations. We invest in the process of inventing something. Sometimes its an existing invention and other times we doing the inventions ourselves.

Earth2Tech: TerraPower was a company you brought in or you invented?

Myhrvold: We invented TerraPower. We had a series on energy and one on nuclear energy. Some of the people involved in that had worked on nuclear at government labs, including Lawrence Livermore Labs. We invented around this idea and we created TerraPower.

Earth2Tech: How much of Intellectual Venture’s projects have been focused on energy innovation?

Myhrvold: A good chunk. A third of our inventions are focused on energy and cleantech in someway. We try to look broadly, from conservation technologies, which aren’t as dramatic as nuclear, all the way up to TerraPower which is stunningly ambitious. One of the things we decided early on, was key to the energy problem is how to provide energy, in a carbon-free way to the billions of people in China, India and Brazil that are becoming way more prosperous, and raising their standard of living?

There is no existing technology that will not emit enormous amount of carbon emissions and can accommodate them. Renewables are great, but we don’t have the technology yet. Coal isn’t going to work. The one we like best is TerraPower, and it’s the only technology that could conceivably get you to this goal.

Earth2Tech: The TerraPower nuclear reactor will cost around $4 billion to commercially produce and take a decade to develop?

Myhrvold: Nuclear is like that. Any important technology is like that. Gigawatts of power needs giga-sized dollars.

Irrespective of the funding, we need to partner with others. Our organization doesn’t have the expertise, but there are a lot of companies that do. It is very likely that we will work with a commercial nuclear power plant company. We will also likely partner with some other part of the world to build  the new reactor in their country. One of the problems of any new type of energy, is that people don’t want this in their backyard. The U.S. isn’t particularly good and doing something ambitious and new. Once we were, but now we’re not hungry enough.

Earth2Tech: Given the difficult regulatory framework do you think TerraPower will ever build nuclear reactors here in the U.S.?

Myhrvold: Ever is a big term. The U.S. will not be the first. I love our country but we are not taking a leading role in developing new energy techniques. There are companies that are working at the forefront of solar and other renewables, but in terms of deployment we’re a stuck in the mud and very regulated. We’re a law suit kind of country. Are we moving quickly to solve our energy problems, and carbon emissions? The answer is no. A lot of people think we need to move faster, and I agree. But I wouldn’t bet the future of this project on it.

Earth2Tech: Have you been inspired by Bill Gates and his recent attention on energy innovation?

Myhrvold: Absolutely, I’ve discussed it quite a bit with Bill. In order for us to solve energy problem we need new ideas. It is an expensive proposition to fund it at every stage. But if we really want to have an energy future, we need to do some forward-looking work now. It’s that simple. It’s amazing how little the world has invested in energy given how big a problem is now. One reason is the price of energy fluctuates so much. When its cheap people care less, when it’s expensive they invest.

Earth2Tech: In terms of creating the needed energy innovation, there’s varying approaches from the VC model, to your model of creating invention, to the federal government. Do you think your model will work best?

Myhrvold: Ultimately we need all of them. The advantages for government funding is that the basic needed investigation is expensive. The government is the only one that can fund basic exploration. It’s not a smart thing for private investors to do. Venture is good, but the problem with the venture world, is that it assumes that there are enough ideas out there to latch onto. We actually help create the idea itself.

One approach you didn’t mention is that we need to raise money for new energy infrastructure. Most of the existing energy companies, whether its utilities or oil companies spend almost all of their money on the here and now. If we want to create new power plants, we need to develop new financing mechanisms.

Earth2Tech: What is the business model of your invention process?

Myhrvold: When you’re the founder, you own 100 percent of the company, at the beginning, then that percentage goes down, and the value goes up. The point of the business model is not to own larger percentages, its if you fund the creation of an idea, you can do that in a cost effective way. We invent for a living. In case of TerraPower we created it and hopefully get stock down the line. In other cases we might license the technology.

Earth2Tech: What’s next for your energy innovation after TerraPower?

Myhrvold: There’s a ton that we’re excited about but not a lot we are speaking about publicly. Most are generally not as far along as TerraPower, which we spun out as a separate company. We’ve got some striking energy efficiency, and electric transmission ideas.

Earth2Tech: Are there lessons from the software and computing world for energy?

Myhrvold: When you put a software guy on an energy project he turns it into a software project. One of the reasons were innovating around nuclear is that we put a huge amount of energy into computer modeling. We do very extensive computer modeling and have better computer modeling of reactor internals than anyone in the world. No one can touch us on software for designing the reactor. Nuclear is really expensive to do experiments on, so when you have good software it’s way more efficient and a shorter design cycle.

Computing is something that is very important for nuclear. The first fast reactors, which TerraPower is, were basically designed in the slide rule era. It was stunning to us that the guys back then did what they did. We have these incredibly accurate simulations of isotopes and these guys were all doing it with slide rules. My cell phone has more computing power than the computers that were used to design the world’s nuclear plants.