Microsoft is building fast, low-power neural networks with FPGAs
FPGAs filling up data centers
Microsoft on Monday released a white paper explaining a current effort to run convolutional neural networks — the deep learning technique responsible…
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Microsoft on Monday released a white paper explaining a current effort to run convolutional neural networks — the deep learning technique responsible…
The two companies have developed a technology that idles a portion of the mobile network at night when demand is lowest. This won’t just save energy costs. It will create a better performing network.
… and proposes a standard metric to measure server CPU utilization and incentives to minimize the use of idling boxes. This metric, along with existing PUE scores, could help stop the bleeding.
Facebook’s custom load balancing controller, dubbed Autoscale, helps distribute network traffic to the servers in a manner that can save 10 to 15 percent in energy on an average day.
Large web companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon have been pushing the boundaries of IT for years, and now their problems — and solutions — are making their ways into the mainstream.
President Obama will tout a wide-sweeping series of commitments and pledges from federal agencies and companies to help get more solar on the grid in the U.S.
Cleantech appears to be turning the corner after some very difficult years. Positive acquisitions are occurring and public market performance of cleantech companies highlights growth prospects at market leaders like SolarCity, SunPower, and Tesla.
Facebook has open sourced the code it uses to measure the energy and water consumption of its data centers, as well as…
Facebook is building its second data center in Luleå, Sweden, using “rapid deployment data center” techniques that will speed construction and simplify design by prebuilding certain parts and creating standardized kits for others.
Google just made another major acquisition — clean tech and home device star Nest Labs. The $3.2 billion purchase of former Apple executive Tony Fadell’s new company comes at a time the search giant is expanding its activities in science, robotics and energy.
Despite the impression audiences may have gotten from a recent 60 Minutes segment, cleantech will make a return on investment to consumers, the environment and government loan programs.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/new-algorithms-reduce-the-carbon-cost-of-cloud-computing This article in IEEE Spectrum highlights some interesting research into making cloud computing more efficient by balancing the carbon footprints of…
Calxeda’s restructuring was a blow to the ARM-processor-based server market, but hardly a fatal one. While Calxeda started its life trying to build systems using 32-bit chips, there’s a whole new market shaping up around 64-bit versions set to debut in 2014.
Amazon Web Services VP and Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton explained during a session at the AWS re:Invent conference how the cloud provider keeps costs as low as possible and innovation as high as possible. It’s all about being the master of your infrastructure.
High-performance computing applications can help businesses take advantage of the lower energy costs a green data center offers, no matter where it’s located.
Cleantech continues to show slow but positive signs after a 2012 that saw a third drop in venture investing.
A new research project from Carnegie Mellon University, funded by a $2.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation, aims to make…
Modular data center manufacturer IO has filed a confidential S-1 form and plans to go public in the near future. The company has made a name for itself selling fully contained data centers that take up only 462 square feet of floor space.
Internet giants’ brands are much more vulnerable to attack from the environmental movement than other industries. That explains in part why many of them pursue green technologies.
We’re entering the brave new world of the internet of things, but what does that mean for cleantech? It means the possibility driving greater efficiencies in areas ranging from home appliances to the smart grid.
Facebook is blowing up the data center infrastructure management space by joining two kinds of data that typically lives in separate silos — information on the building and information about the hardware.
Power costs could go up for California data centers as utilities pay more for carbon emissions, and hardware and software improving energy efficiency might enjoy greater demand as a result.
If telcos want to compete with big cloud companies, they could learn from webscale companies’ innovations, but Sprint, for its part, is not interested in one approach that could lower overhead.
Here’s three ways that Intel Labs is looking to make cities better, from reducing allergies, to crowd-sourcing city programs to using LEDs to reduce traffic accident.
Data center operators want to bump up their computing capabilities to solve big-data problems, but energy efficiency is a major concern, according to a new survey.
Most connected vehicle technologies have focused squarely on the car, but BMW and Honda are working with the University of MIchigan and Cohda Wireless to develop autonomous driving technologies that work on two wheels.
Formula 1 cars make big tweaks to get little performance improvements, and with McLaren’s help, IO wants to do similar things to improve energy efficiency and performance inside its modular data centers.
AoTerra, a German company that’s shattering records for crowdfunding in that country, is a cloud provider with a difference. Its servers heat the air and water in buildings, saving everyone money and making the OpenStack-based AoCloud very green indeed.
Adam Lesser is lead IoT Analyst for Gigaom Research. Earlier he was lead researcher at Blueshift Research, a Wall Street market research firm…
After three years of investigation, the GreenTouch consortium issued its first recommendations for energy efficient telecom networks. GreenTouch claims the roadmap, if implemented, would cut the communications industry’s power needs to a fraction of current levels.
The leading energy data startups Nest and Opower have quietly started to look more like competitors, though with some significant differences.
Following on previous quarterly disclosures on energy and water efficiency, Facebook is unveiling dashboards showing its data centers’ near-real-time performance.
Although there has been a focus on energy efficiency in commercial buildings for some years, the BEMS market can still be considered nascent. The landscape of new entrants, new technologies, and new methodologies is expanding rapidly, and even well-established market leaders are finding new ways to present and market their businesses.
Facebook has developed a new data cache called McDipper that’s essentially memcached rewritten to run on flash memory instead of DRAM, thus saving money while still delivering higher performance than disk.
eBay has released a trove of information about the efficiency of its data centers, and plans to do so quarterly as part of a mission to continuously track computing resources and tie them to bigger business goals.
A new report from IHS says microserver shipments will triple this year. The question is, Who will emerge as the leading microserver providers?
The fourth quarter in cleantech saw attention paid to two prominent and publicly traded companies: EV maker Tesla and newly minted public listing SolarCity. It remains a transitional period for the sector as investment declines and investors look for value investments and give money to those companies able to scale with little additional capital.
Look for a new generation of mobile-centric data centers to arise over the next three years, with chips, servers, and power architectures customized for mobile workloads.
Dell’s Data Center Solutions group recently shipped its 1 millionth server just five years after coming into existence. It’s proof of how important webscale buyers have become to the server market, as well as how different their demand are than those of traditional IT buyers.
Dell is donating an ARM-based server to the Apache Software Foundation so contributors can test their projects on new, energy-efficient hardware architectures. Big data projects such as Hadoop and Cassandra are low-hanging fruit, but many webscale applications likely could use them to save power.
Rent prices are higher than ever, but a growing number of startups are working to analyze our homes’ energy use so we can save money by using less power. Their approaches might differ, but data and analytics are the ties that binds them all.
IO Data Centers has raised $90 million for its suite of offerings that rethink the way data centers are built and managed. Its IO.Anywhere units are fully contained data centers in a small package, and its OS software can manage a data center from a smartphone.
It’s not home to Google, Amazon or Facebook, but from plucky entrepreneurs to the world’s most-advanced computing systems, Europe has a lot more to offer the world of cloud computing and web infrastructure than might meet the eye. Here are seven reasons why it matters.
Much of the data center industry is upset about a recen report exposing some wasteful energy practices. However, eBay’s Dean Nelson says the data center industry isn’t perfect and it’s up to companies like his to lead the charge on bringing everyone else up to speed.
A handful of Intel servers just emerged from a yearlong bath in an oil-based coolant, and the results were remarkable. The servers ran at a PUE just above 1.0, and showed no ill effects from the oil. Is oil immersion coming to a rack near you?
Around the world, data centers consume around 1.5 percent of total electricity demand, a figure that’s expected to increase significantly. Greenpeace predicts power consumption will grow 19 percent by 2013 to 31 gigawatts. To cut power and, with it, costs, tech titans like Google, Apple, and Facebook are aggressively pursuing strategies to cut electricity use by greening their data centers. But do energy-efficiency gains justify huge capital outlays? This report attempts to answer that question by looking at the ways in which companies are greening their data centers and attempting to achieve social, economic, and environmental value.
Here is a new mission from Starbucks: how to make energy-efficient coffee. The retailer plans to launch tomorrow a competition that will pit 10 of its stores against one another to see who can cut electricity use the most in 30 days.
How do data-center-dependent companies like Google, Amazon or Facebook reduce their power bill and, with it, their carbon footprint? The server itself could now be designed to use less power. With that possibility looming, a number of players are jumping in, from startups trying to engineer power-efficient fabrics to established chip makers like Intel that are working on lower-power processors. The race is on to see if data-center hardware can be cost-effectively implemented with a residual lowering of overall power use.
How do you get homeowners to change their mindsets and behaviors and become more energy efficient? A new report on Wednesday says the best policies are to provide incentives at times when homeowners selling or renovating their houses.
Elliptical Mobile Solutions is hardly a household name in the data center world, but don’t bet against it. While bigger data centers seem to be better for webscale companies such as Google and Facebook, many are happy to grow about 105 cubic feet at a time.
It’s a tough economy out there. That’s why some figures from the new Uptime Institute’s 2012 Data Center Industry Survey might surprise those who would expect spending on data center infrastructure to be cut to the bone. Also, cloud is big, duh.
Intel Labs held an annual showcase in San Francisco on Tuesday and it showed off how it’s researching ways to use data to help curb energy consumption in residential homes, in offices, on factory floors and across smart cities.
By September the European Union may have a new energy efficiency strategy in place. On June 14 negotiators struck a provisional deal on the proposed new EU energy efficiency directive (the “Third Energy Efficiency Directive”). Final approval is likely.
California’s per-capita energy use has remained flat for 35 years and it wants to keep that way. That’s why state regulators are now targeting gadgets such as game consoles and event toilets in an effort to set standards that will require manufactures the reduce of rate of electricity and water their products consume.
eBay and Facebook are among the winners of this year’s Green Enterprise IT Awards, which the Uptime Institute doles out for advancements in the world of energy-efficient data centers. eBay won for its Project Mercury data center, while Facebook scored with its Open Compute Project.
While webscale data center operators such as eBay are deploying custom-built data center containers designed for maximum performance and efficiency, IO Data Centers is pushing modular data centers for the rest of us. Its IO.Anywhere modules aren’t designed for HPC, but do promise flexibility.
Industries like Internet search, genomics, climate research and business analytics are starting to create massive data sets — in the petabyte and exabyte range — that are requiring an entirely new set of big data tools to manage. The emergence of this so-called big data phenomenon is also fundamentally changing everything from the way companies operate to the way people interact to how the world deals with outbreaks of infectious diseases. On March 21 and 22, GigaOM is throwing an event about the future of this big data ecosystem in New York, and for the occasion, we have highlighted 10 case studies illustrating how big data is changing the world.
With its newest facility, Vantage Data Centers wants to prove that a low-power data center in Silicon Valley is not an oxymoron. Vantage’s new Santa Clara, Calif., V2 data center claims an impressive 1.12 PUE (power use efficiency) energy rating.
When HP CEO Meg Whitman addresses thousands of partners Wednesday, there will be a lot on the line. She has to convince them that the management snafus of the last two years are firmly in the past. The partners would love to believe that.
The White House sent its proposed budget for 2013 to Congress on Monday, and the plan calls for boosting funding for clean power and energy efficiency, seeks to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and doesn’t seek additional funds for the loan guarantee program.
Which stories dominated the green GigaOM clicks in 2011? This year was filled with smart thermostats, a dream of Apple getting into solar, the bankruptcy of Solyndra, the efficiency of cloud computing, Google’s green data centers and Tesla’s Model S.
The momentum right now in cleantech is as much about connectivity and how it can drive energy efficiency as it is about advancing sources of renewable energy. And as the web and mobile connectivity change our consumer experiences, the opportunities to redefine cleantech are rich, and they are already happening. This research note examines the cleantech space in that context and analyzes the car-sharing, home-energy-management and smart-grid sectors and their relevant companies to see how connectivity will play into their future endeavors. Companies mentioned in this report include RelayRides, Opower, Silver Spring Networks and Nest. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.
Energy efficiency measures both reduce consumption and slow the pace of building power plants. Utilities know that, but how much are they doing to promote the idea? A report looks at 50 U.S. utilities and ranked them by the investments they have made in energy efficiency.
Remaking office buildings with energy-efficient equipment can cut utility bills and give some green cred. But often, building owners don’t want to pay the large upfront cost. To help fix this problem, Serious Energy is launching a no-money-down program called SeriousCapital.
The iPod of thermostats is sold-out until 2012. Nest Labs, makers of the connected, smart, “learning” thermostat, say on their website that the hot thermostat is “sold out through early next year.” In the meantime, the company has closed its online store.
Both mobile and high performance computing are placing huge power efficiency and performance demands on chips, but the real $64,000 question is how long until such extreme computing use cases hit the server mainstream. Asked another way, how long till Amazon adopts ARM-based servers?
You might have heard of the SuperNAP data center before because of its military-grade security, more-than-400,000-square-foot footprint and roots as Enron’s attempt to build a bandwidth exchange, but the cutting-edge facility is also home to some very interesting customers.
My organization, The Carbon War Room, has put together a consortium to tackle, as was reported this week: “one of the nation’s biggest energy problems — waste in older buildings — without new money from Washington.”
Despite the seemingly downward short-term trend for cleantech investing, corporations and investors continue to back the green building sector. On Wednesday San Francisco–based energy-efficient building company Project Frog announced that it has raised $22 million from GE and a group of investors.
Getting to next generation systems in high performance computing has inspired technologies that we now use everyday in data centers, but as the drive for exascale computing continues, it seems ingenuity is coming to an end. But is power consumption the real hurdle for bigger systems?
Remember that whole debate over whether moving to cloud computing is a greener option? Well, data center monitoring startup Sentilla is introducing an analytics tool that can predict whether embracing cloud computing (both private and public) is a smart play from an energy bill perspective.
The latest idea from Facebook on how to revolutionize the data center is elegant in its simplicity: put a switch on hard-disk drives that slows their speed when their data is no longer hot. I wonder if Facebook will take up the cause and build it.
Achieving the ultimate in green building badges — the LEED platinum certification — is pretty rare and is particularly unusual for data centers. But on Thursday GE showed off its new LEED platinum-certified data center in Louisville, Ky. Here are some photos from the green facility.
Federal regulators canceled three ocean power project permits in California because the permit holder, located in Sonoma County, couldn’t come up with the money to carry out the projects.
Android cell phones are notoriously bad at battery drain. But recently I discovered the single app that has smartly and simply solved many of these battery life problems for me: the PowerMax Android app made by Volt-Up.
There has been a lot of talk about consolidation lately because federal agencies have until Oct. 7 to present their plans for slashing data center footprints by 38 percent by 2015. But how exactly the government will pull this off is still up for debate.
A report from data center energy expert Jonathan Koomey, published on Monday morning, gave a rare glimpse into some educated estimates for how many servers and how much electricity Google uses, and how energy-efficient those custom servers are.
There are several data-center-efficiency metrics you will need to know to figure out how to differentiate green-cloud-marketing hype from reality.
A report, created by research firm Verdantix and sponsored by AT&T, estimates that cloud computing could enable companies to save $12.3 billion off their energy bills. That translates into carbon emission savings of 85.7 million metric tons per year by 2020.
Initially, I was excited to see that someone else sees Las Vegas as the green data center hotspot it should be. But pair Networks’ new Las Vegas data center that runs entirely off the grid does so with relatively little solar power.
Dynamic windows are being manufactured by innovative companies like Soladigm and Sage. But what if you could get these smarter windows without buying a new one? A startup called US e-Chromic, which is a semi-finalist at the Cleantech Open 2011, has a plan cooking for that.
Fusing solar technology with buildings is an area that tends to invite creative ideas. An intriguing design caught our attention at Intersolar in San Francisco this week: It’s a solar panel with a honeycomb structure that replaces the glass facades of a building.
Set-top boxes aren’t energy-efficient, and cost U.S. residents more than $3 billion annually in energy bills, according to a new study. More importantly, about two-thirds of those energy costs come at times when no one is even watching TV or using the devices.
Cleantech investing may not have produced many big exits and returns so far, yet it keeps attracting investors who believe they can do better. Here comes the Cleantech Syndicate, a group of 11 families that plan to invest $1.4 billion over the next five years.
Calxeda, the startup building servers using the same kind of ARM chips used in cell phones, has launched its partner program. Companies such as Eucalyptus, Gluster, Canonical and Opscode lined up Tuesday behind the server company to show their willingness to work with its specialized hardware.
Online dating service eHarmony is using SeaMicro’s specialized Intel Atom-powered servers as the foundation of its Hadoop infrastructure, demonstrating that big data applications such as Hadoop might be a killer app for low-powered micro servers.
The world’s biggest Internet companies have dreamed up some innovative, high-profile ways to make their data centers greener, from Google’s piping in seawater to cool a data center in Finland to Yahoo’s designing data centers based on chicken coops that utilize the flow of outside air. But as it turns out, it’s not really the experimental, novel tech that’s going to make a big difference in terms of the overall energy-consumption reduction for the majority of the world’s data centers. It’s the low-cost, easy and just plain boring stuff that will be the most important.
Atlanta-based data-center-efficiency startup JouleX has raised $17 million from Sigma Partners, Flybridge Capital Partners, Intel Capital, Target Partners and TechOperators. As energy prices rise, energy generation facilities are stretched and hyperscale becomes normal, companies like JouleX should find it easy to spread their message.
California regulators on Thursday approved changes to residential electric rates for customers of Pacific Gas and Electric that could have a major impact on whether consumers will readily sign up for solar and energy efficiency products and services.
GoGrid CEO John Keagy wrote on his blog yesterday that when it comes cloud computing, things such as cheap hydroelectric power and massive-scale data centers are overrated. His theory doesn’t make sense for every cloud provider, but he does make some good points.
While Google has been at the forefront of cutting-edge green data center technology, with experimental projects like its seawater-cooled data center, Google’s big message at its second data center efficiency summit: There’s no magic involved with greener data centers.
The advent of Web 2.0 and its principles of scaling out and designing to fail have brought about something of a sea change in how companies buy servers. For evidence, one needn’t look any further than Dell, which is making a killing selling micro servers.
Facebook is being praised for openly sharing information about its energy-efficient data center in Oregon that is usually kept secret. One specific efficiency metric, power usage effectiveness (PUE), is worth noting for its potential to cut Facebook’s overall energy costs. But the data center’s ultra-low PUE number is only aspect of a larger — and far more complicated — story.
Greenpeace’s got a lot of press last week for its A-to-F grades for the green data center efforts of Facebook, Google, IBM and other IT giants of the world. But what’s behind the grades?
When it comes to clean-energy investing 2.0, venture capitalists are beyond looking for the silver bullet — or the magic battery –- they spent the last decade hunting and hoping for. Today, VCs are more likely to invest their dollars in slightly less ambitious energy-efficiency projects.
There’s a significant opportunity for companies that are looking to connect the often siloed systems that manage the energy used to run servers as well as the gear used to cool, ventilate, back up and convert power for data centers.
Cisco today took the covers off a new Allen, Texas, data center that will serve as the foundation for Cisco’s private cloud computing effort, which it calls Cisco Elastic IT Services. The new data center is designed for maximum efficiency and to withstand tornado winds.
It’s a cliché you inevitably hear in any discussion about building energy efficiency retrofits: It’s the “low-hanging fruit” of cleantech. But the market hasn’t taken off quickly, and good money to be made will come from the commercial, rather than the residential, market.
Cleantech is losing its mojo to upstarts peddling coupons. These days, it’s not hard to find tech companies, investors and market analysts comparing cleantech to Groupon, which generated a lot of buzz when it turned down a reportedly $5-6 billion offer from Google late last year.
According to a survey by AFCOM, cloud computing is on the rise among data center operators, more than doubling since last year and expected to reach 80-90 percent in the next five years. The survey also shows that energy efficiency is driving data center decisions.
Last week, Intel announced its plans to produce an Atom processor designed for use within servers, but company’s road map — which doesn’t have the server-ready Atom available until 2012 — raises the question of how serious Intel is about pushing an alternative to its flagship Xeon architecture.
OPower, the startup that gets homeowners to cut energy use with out in-home dashboards and gateways, is looking at home energy automation devices. What are the pros and cons of high-tech automation versus smart behavioral science?
President Obama, who laid out an ambitious clean energy agenda in his State of the Union speech, is spending Thursday in Pennsylvania touting a new energy efficiency plan: “Better Buildings Initiative” to save building owners $40 billion in energy costs by 2020.
In a year that kept industry watchers on edge until the very end, greentech ended up marking its best year ever. But the good news came unevenly across sectors and classes of investment, and for some areas, such as venture capital investment, 2010’s recovery wasn’t strong enough to break records.
Investors loved the wind energy sector, and they showed it by blowing the most investment dollars that way in 2010. They also were most busy with energy efficiency deals, the number of which surpassed other cleantech categories last year, according to a U.S. market report by Peachtree Capital Advisors.
Private businesses in London are bracing for power shortages during the 2012 Olympics, and it appears data centers located within the city won’t be spared, a turn of events that could have U.K. businesses turning to cloud computing.
General Electric is grabbing a piece of the booming data center energy business, with a $520 million offer for Lineage Power Holdings, a provider of gear for the $20 billion-per-year data center and telecom power conversion industry.
Will 2011 bring recovery or retrenchment for the greentech industry? We’re tracking both the leaders and up-and-comers in the solar power, smart grid, biofuel, green vehicle and energy efficiency sectors, to discover the role that old-school energy industries are going to play in the greentech evolution.
The broadband-enabled smart energy home has finally made some real progress and could be a crucial tool in helping consumers reduce their energy consumption and lower carbon emissions. As the market unfolds, expect service providers, from cable companies to telcos, to play a key role in helping energy management reach the masses.
Menlo Park-based nlyte Software has closed a $12 million round founded on the promise for nlyte’s data center infrastructure management (DCIM) product. In an IT world dominated by discussions about server virtualization and cloud computing, however, I wonder just who is buying into the DCIM vision.
It’s no secret that some energy retrofits can save consumers significant money, but how to conduct those retrofits and how much should they cost are two big questions. The government’s answer: standardize the process of getting home energy audits and loans.
Cost, scalability and instant access are all reasons for companies to embrace cloud computing services, but the argument that it’s a much greener option warrants further examination. Cloud computing, can deliver a more efficient use of computing power. But according to a report to be released later this month from University of Melbourne researcher Rod Tucker and his team, in some cases it consumes more energy than traditional in-office computing.
Massive electrical equipment giant ABB isn’t a name commonly associated with young startups. But this morning, the company said that it’s invested a small sum through its VC arm into Valley startup Power Assure, which makes an on demand data center power service.
There are many Mac applications which will sit on your desktop and display cover art as well as give some controls such as play/pause, next, etc. But since the recent release of iTunes 10, one application does this better than any other, and that’s iTunes itself.
Americans overestimate the energy savings of those actions and underestimate the energy consumption of other behaviors, such as using central air conditioning, according to a survey published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The first quarter of 2010 was all about established vendors making their plays in emerging fields like cloud computing, but the second quarter once again belonged to the little guys and the new guys. Almost across the board, from processors to virtualization to cloud services, relatively small vendors and startups had the market cornered on innovation and mindshare.
The latest twist in the road to comprehensive climate and energy legislation arrived on Wednesday, in the form of Sen. Dick Lugar’s (R-Ind.) proposal for what he calls the “Practical Energy and Climate Plan.”
While corporations can learn from web workers, I think that the reverse is also true. As someone who has worked recently on both sides of the fence, I thought it would be interesting to think about what web workers can learn from corporations.
Ah, April Fool’s Day. Other sites are covering the pranks pulled by the tech community extensively today — I like the fact…
[show=freezerburnsshow size=large]The host of Freezerburns, Gregory Ng, has no culinary skills — he’s a creative director for a Raleigh, N.C., marketing agency…
After spending the better part of the last two years scrambling to survive the recession, the discussion has shifted for cleantech firms…
EVO Electric, a U.K.-based startup developing a more efficient electric motor for hybrid and electric cars, will be getting a whole lotta…
Is the ice battery finally getting its day in the sun? Veolia Energy North America, a subsidiary of massive French energy and water…
The NewNet is beginning to take on more shape as companies’ further hone their strategies for the next generation internet and concepts become more integrated into real-world scenarios, applications and solutions. The concepts of social networks and real-time information are becoming more central to people’s lives. According to Adweek’s digital media hot list released in late October Facebook is the hottest internet site with Twitter following close behind at No. 3. Search was also well represented with Google and Bing both on the list in the No. 4 and No. 7 position respectively.
The struggle to stay hot in the NewNet era is spurring companies to continue to advance their social network and real-time search capabilities. Leading social network sites were very active in the fourth quarter, announcing both innovations within their sites and vast and various partnering relationships. Facebook has been particularly active, announcing a variety of new initiatives in the fourth quarter, including launching Facebook Chat, which will work with any kind of XMPP client; a Yahoo-Facebook Connect deal; and an upcoming site redesign. Such innovation has helped to propel the site to 350 million active users as of early December.
Twitter is also striving to stay current with a variety of proposed business model adaptations (including ads on the site and enterprise-oriented initiatives) and international expansion plans. Tweets were integrated on Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo search pages during the quarter as well. Despite all of this, however, U.S. Twitter traffic has slowed.
Google is still working to seek out its place in the NewNet. The company continues to be the center of much merger gossip, but is also actively launching initiatives independently. Google launched in mid-December an array of products intended to make search more relevant and convenient, the most significant being that the search engine will bring real-time results, including public updates from Twitter, Facebook Pages, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and identi.ca directly onto its Google.com results pages. However, despite initiatives such as these, Google has slid from a No. 1 position in Adweek’s ranking last year to its No. 4 position this year.
There was also a great deal of activity in the fourth quarter surrounding NewNet applications, ranging from social TV and music to smart metering and job search. NewNet functionality is increasingly being interwoven into a host of traditional online and offline activities. For instance, smart metering is the future of energy management and is a rapidly growing industry with an expected 250 million smart meter installations by 2015 according to Pike Research. The smart grid has the potential to be intimately tied with the NewNet as real-time energy usage monitoring allows for more effective response to energy consumption. On the social front, TV and music are increasingly incorporating social features with commentary tracks being integrated with video and music being shared via social networking sites.
2009 has been an explosive year for the NewNet as the concept was developed and integrated into all aspects of the web. It is anticipated that in 2010 the NewNet will be equally disruptive to the old way of doing things and evolutionary in creating a new path for the new Internet era.
Global venture capital flow into cleantech startups dropped significantly last year compared with a record-setting 2008, while Asia emerged as the dominant…
GE Chief Calls for Swift, Certain Climate Policy: “What’s most important for the U.S. is that we go from Copenhagen, go into…
My previous post “6 Tips for Using Google Wave on your First Project” was really about the initial experience a client and…
Texas Homebuyers Go for Efficiency: “Texas is a national leader in the number of Energy Star qualified homes in the United States,…
If you can efficiently separate tiny molecules of salt from seawater, you probably have the technology to filter out the larger bacteria,…
Just days after the White House outlined its strategy for bolstering the home energy retrofit market, a new report from research and…
The federal stimulus bill is allocating billions for energy efficiency projects, but a new report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab predicts…
Tgethr aspires to replace listservs, Google Groups (s goog) and Yahoo Groups (s yhoo) as a way of managing email groups. It…
[qi:gigaom_icon_hardware] What do the growth of cloud-based services, online video and an ever-increasing appetite for digital media have in common? They all…
Recently, Nancy Nally suggested that the newer members of the WWD team should share the gear that they take with them when…
As recently as two years ago, home energy retrofits might have been called esoteric territory best left to well-off eco-enthusiasts. But today,…
How does the U.S. spur 50 million energy retrofits (40 percent of homes) from the current low level of hundreds of thousands…
A section spanning just 29 pages of the 1,428-page Waxman-Markey climate bill could have an outsized impact on energy use in the…
Humans might not seem naturally energy efficient — after all, your teenage son’s only got three energy states: sleep, eat and Grand Theft Auto. But we humans have actually evolved to use energy only when we need it. When we’re running around, we burn a lot; when we’re kicking back, we burn very little. And, it turns out, that efficient use of energy is something that’s actually pretty difficult to replicate in the technology world, according to a new report from Google. But even without millenia of evolution under its belt, there are a few things the tech world can do to become more efficient.
Our pals over at Geek are peeking at a netbook that I haven’t had a chance to play with yet. After my…
Electric utilities are increasingly offering energy-efficiency programs, but there’s a good chance their customers don’t know about them. That’s according to a…
For green IT, this week started out with a bang, with the announcement that the stimulus package would provide $50 million in…
Score one for Michigan. The University of Michigan students behind Husk Insulation — an early stage startup developing high-grade insulation for refrigerators…
A “discussion draft” is what Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey called their initial proposal for a climate and energy bill last…
Over the past few months many execs at tech startups, utilities and analyst firms have asked me: Why is Silver Spring Networks…
Duke Energy Gets Go-Ahead For Save-A-Watt: North Carolina utility regulators have approved Duke Energy’s (s DUK) proposal to temporarily charge residential ratepayers…
Energy efficiency may be the low-hanging fruit of the cleantech industry, but it’s a hard sell in these tough economic times. A…
Energy use in buildings could be cut by as much as 60 percent by mid-century, but doing so would take more than…
Consumers and businesses are grabbing their movies, business software and computing when they want it, and storing it “in the cloud” when they don’t. Thanks to wireless networks and an increasing number of broadband-connected appliances, this means content can be accessed anywhere there’s a connection and a screen. That has led to large changes in the market for computers and cell phones, as well as in the devices themselves. However, just because data is no longer stored on a PC’s hard drive or a wall of DVDs, that doesn’t mean that it’s not stored somewhere.
Despite the renewal of energy tax credits and the election of a president dedicated to green jobs, first quarter cleantech investments plummeted in the face of the faltering economy. Total venture investment was down 48 percent from the previous year. By the end of the quarter, however, the stimulus package and an ambitious draft energy bill making its way through Congress appeared to be breathing a bit of life back into the sector, particularly in those areas championed by the administration: smart grid, energy and transportation.
Struggling to maintain relevancy in the shadows of web-giant brethren like Amazon (s amzn) and Google (s goog), Yahoo (s yhoo) has…
The power of cloud computing can offer web companies access to a massive amount of Internet infrastructure and services on demand. But can it also make computing and the Internet more energy efficient? Some analysts are starting to think so, due to the cloud’s fundamental use of shared infrastructure, multiple-user environments and economies of scale.
Clean energy, cap-and-trade, energy efficiency and green jobs — those are the four policy areas that the House Energy and Commerce Committee…
We hear a different version of the same story every day: The budgets of U.S. consumers and businesses are under massive strain,…
Place your iPhone on the floor and prepare to dance a merry jig, it’s the weekend and that means I’ve prepared a…
Many investors are seeing fund raising slow down, and the CalCEF Clean Energy Angel Fund is no exception. The fund, which in…
Startup SynapSense said today that it has pulled in $7 million in financing for its wireless energy-efficiency systems, designed to cut down…
Sometime between last night and this morning, Apple (s aapl) released a minor update to the Apple TV. The new software version…
Microsoft (s msft) will be going live with their press event at the Mobile World Congress in just a little while. We…
Energy harvesting has been getting interest from a number of different sectors for tiny, energy-saving applications, and now it’s making its way…
Start aiming for the potholes! Engineers on both sides of the Atlantic have come up with different ways to get the cars…
[show=tomandsam size=large]What is it about time travel that makes it such a fun plot device? Is it the way in which it…
Updated with comment from 3M: What 3M (s MMM) did for sticky notes, it now wants to do for efficiency-boosting add-ons for…
For years, energy-management technologies have played second fiddle to energy-generation technologies such as solar power, wind power and biofuels. But in an…
It’ll take more than just money to cut energy use and carbon dioxide emissions in the Canadian commercial building sector, according to…
New York Governor David Paterson set some lofty goals for energy efficiency and renewable power in his first state of the state…
Office buildings account for 17 percent of CO2 emissions in the U.S., or about 1-billion tons per year, according to the U.S.…
Energy management technology got a leg up with startup Sentilla announcing that it raised $7.5 million in a second round of funding.…
California chipmaker Sigma Designs (s SIGM) is getting into the smart device and energy management market. The company announced today that it…
Finland’s Kone, which makes elevators and escalators, announced a new line of elevators yesterday that will use LEDs and regenerative braking to…
With the global economy heading south, you might expect companies to scale back efforts aimed at reducing the environmental impact of computing…
Energy efficiency could get a boost in Eastern Canada with the creation of an independent agency in Nova Scotia tasked with overseeing…
A new report from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory touts the potential of combined heat and power systems for large and small…
While electronics maker Philips (s PHG) is working on getting its LEDs into homes, the company is also starting to focus on…
Greenfield Online, the parent company of Munich-based comparison shopping site Ciao, said this morning that Microsoft would spend $486 million to acquire…
On Monday the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) made its draft Strategic Plan for Energy Efficiency available for comment, which details a…
Smart To-Do List by Scott Karstetter is a new to-do list manager with a simple interface. It allows tagging, prioritizing, and filtering…
The U.S. isn’t taking aggressive enough action — or much action at all — on climate change, according to a report released…
When you’re building a virtual world paradise, does it help to do so from an actual one? That was my first thought…
YouTube is expanding its revenue-sharing partner program, the company said today. In the past, the dominant video-sharing site had hand-picked independent content…
Engadget Mobile has a nice screenshot of the new Google Mobile interface that appears specifically designed for the Apple iPhone. While I…
Great article in the New York Times today on how hotels & airports are starting to “get” the mobile tech needs of…
Today, with the release of OS X 10.4.11, Apple’s beloved Tiger took its last breath. This update to Tiger is to be…
Dan Ryan has a very intelligent and coherent analysis of the whole Tip Top issue. “Many comments miss the essential point that…
India’s Telecom Minister Dayanidhi Maran expects telecom firms to invest nearly $35.57 billionon expanding networks in the next two to three years.…