Green IT

Today in Green IT: Design matters

The Nest thermostat — designed and created by the iPod architect Tony Fadell — stands out among the crowd of home energy products, says GigaOM Pro’s Green IT analyst Adam Lesser. Why? Design matters.

Today in Green IT: Honing the right cleantech message

Honing the right message about the benefits of clean power is harder than it looks. That’s the theme for Today in Green IT — our daily look at what the curator of our research service, Adam Lesser, has been reading and thinking about.

Solar crunch: Solon to close U.S. factory

Low solar prices and global competition continue to rock solar manufacturers. On the heels of Evergreen Solar filing for bankruptcy on Monday, on Tuesday, German solar maker Solon announced that it will shutter a Tucson panel factory and cut 60 jobs.

Bloom Energy attracts data center operators in Cali

Silicon Valley’s fuel cell maker Bloom Energy continues to add customers looking to power part of their data center operations with distributed, cleaner power in California. NTT America plans to install five Bloom fuel cells at one of its data center facilities in San Jose, Calif.

DuPont buys solar ink maker Innovalight

DuPont announced on Monday that it has bought Innovalight, a Silicon Valley startup that makes silicon ink that solar-cell makers can use to improve the amount of electricity that the cells can squeeze out of sunlight. DuPont declined to disclose the purchase price.

Adapteva Pitches A Supercomputer For Your Phone

The brains inside your smartphone are getting more power with the latest version of application processors having two processing cores to help speed up the delivery of web site load times and mobile gameplay. That’s awesome, but startup Adapteva, wants to take that number higher.

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10 Greentech Companies to Watch in 2011

Will 2011 bring recovery or retrenchment for the greentech industry? Following what certain companies do over the coming 12 months will help determine the answer to that question. We’re tracking both the leaders and up-and-comers in the solar power, smart grid, biofuel, green vehicle and energy efficiency sectors, and players from BrightSource to General Electric illustrate the role that old-school energy industries will have in the greentech evolution.

Green IT: Follow the Savings, Not the Jargon

When it comes to the jargon-laden “green IT” sector, companies have a common response: meh. But it’s the opportunity to save money via reduced energy costs that’s really driving companies to buy green IT products, or gear that can make IT more energy efficient.

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Is Software the Key to Green Data Centers?

A new aspect of data center energy use is getting increasing attention lately: software. If the code running on all the servers in a data center was inherently more energy-efficient and governed by its own energy-aware logic, IT managers could have another, less costly option to consider for reducing data center energy use: fewer servers. But how do developers code for energy efficiency when the impulse is to build programs that are ever bigger, better and faster?

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Why Freescale Sees Big Opportunity in Green Cars

Take a look at how many semiconductors go into the different types of vehicles on or headed for market — conventional gas-powered cars, hybrids and electric vehicles — and a simple fact about the transition to lower-emission vehicles becomes clear: As our cars get greener, they’ll be using more chips. The trend offers a business opportunity for chipmakers who want to get out ahead of the curve. As Steve Nelson, manager of global automotive marketing for Freescale, put it in a recent interview, “The key to green is going to be electronics.”

Who Owns Your Notes in e-Books?

A feature of e-book readers is the ability to take notes in books. Consumers who like to scribble notes in the margins of books can do so in the electronic versions. This brings to mind a question — who owns the notes you “write” in e-books?

Elastra Makes Its Cloud Even Greener

Elastra has incorporated energy efficiency intelligence into its Cloud Server solution, the latest example of a growing trend toward saving data center costs by using the least possible amount of power to accomplish any given task.

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Supercomputers and the Search for the Exascale Grail

The supercomputing industry strives to triple performance every 10 years, which means the industry needs to deliver an exaflop of performance (a billion billion calculations per second) by 2017. However, instead of doubling the number of transistors on a chip every 18 months, as Moore’s Law demands of semiconductor manufacturing firms hoping to increase performance in chips, building an exascale computer will require the industry to address challenges such as power consumption of the systems, basic software design and even the ways such systems are checked for failure and accuracy.

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Mobility on Demand Takes Aim at Transport Networks’ “Last Mile”

For a glimpse of transportation systems of the future, look to the trajectory of fleet management tools. Technologies used today for managing fleets of cars, trucks and even bicycles increasingly represent a key to new business models and an essential component of public transit projects now attracting government attention and investment. The sensors, GPS, advanced routing applications and other tools in these management systems are forming the foundation for a new generation of providers of mobility as a service — beyond the old iterations of buses, trains and taxis.

Daily Sprout

Toyota Details Plug-in Prius Range: Toyota says the Prius Plug-in Hybrid that it plans to unveil at the upcoming Frankfurt Motor Show…

Report

Home Energy Management: Consumer Attitudes and Preferences

Some of the largest unresolved questions within today’s nascent smart grid market are to what degree consumers would prefer to actively monitor and control energy usage in their homes, which user interfaces will be preferred for those purposes, and which business models and product capabilities will entice consumers to engage in home energy management while simultaneously assuaging their concerns about privacy, security and control. To investigate these questions and establish a framework for understanding demand dynamics within the EID and DR markets, Pike Research conducted a survey of 1,041 U.S. consumers in April 2009. The results of this survey are analyzed in this report.

Quarterly Wrap-up

Infrastructure Wrap-up: Q1 2009

The first quarter of 2009 went pretty much as planned in the cloud computing and web infrastructure market. The sector continued to mature, with new announcements by big players such as Sun, Google and Amazon, as well as new entrants to the space. Enterprise adoption of cloud services fueled interest in cloud standards, openness and security, while private cloud services took shape, with new offerings aimed at boosting utility and cutting costs. Hardware trends continued to focus on energy-efficient offerings, with non-x86 architectures gaining popularity for specialized offerings. Increased attention and adoption continued to boost the volume of data, supporting further efforts around MapReduce and data mining activities, as well as content delivery and storage. The quarter was capped by a proposed acquisition of Sun by IBM.

Qualcomm Saves Millions With Green IT

[qi:_earth2tech] Semiconductors are increasingly being designed to require less energy, but what are the chip makers themselves doing to reduce their power…

Samsung’s P207 Speaks Out

I’ve spent the last four days toying with the Samsung P207, and it has convinced me that soon I will never physically…