Has video conferencing finally come of age?

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

I spent yesterday morning with a company called LifeSize, whose CEO (Craig Malloy) was keen to suggest that 2010 would be the year when video conferencing became massive. (Strangely enough, LifeSize is a company that sells video conferencing products.)

He certainly gave the most impressive demonstration of video conferencing I’ve yet seen. We were in a small meeting room with room for around eight people, and sitting at one end was a 40in LCD TV.

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Can companies be trusted over green promises?

Friday, September 4th, 2009

I’ve just come out of an “Eco” briefing with Sony at IFA, and it should be no surprise at all that they’re banging their own eco drum pretty fiercely. But, in that, they’re absolutely no different from all the other manufacturers at this show.

Sharp, I’m told, declared themselves “world eco champions”, and Toshiba dedicated a number of slides in their press conference about the fact they were aiming to “improve our eco-efficiency by ten times” by 2050.

And there’s another thing all these companies have in common too. They not only want you to replace existing products, they want you to actually own more electronic products. Can these two competing demands ever live with each other?

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In praise of walkit.com

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

Anyone who’s read PC Pro over the last few years will know that we’re interested in green issues – occasionally indulging in a spirited argument with our friends over at Custom PC who are doing lots of good work by supporting the Folding@home scheme… but at the expense of energy consumption – and one of the ways we do this is by sponsoring the Sustain IT awards.

It’s through this that I happen to know about an excellent site called walkit.com, which describes itself as an urban route planner. The key difference, as it ever-so-subtly hints with its name, is that all its routes are for people who want to walk rather than drive or take public transport. (more…)

H.M.G. Gets a Life

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

According to this BBC news article our beloved Civil Service has splashed out the thick end of £20,000 on a virtual home inside Second Life. This is the online virtual world you may have seen cropping up in various odd places like CSI:New York or sundry other moving-picture sources. It’s not really hit the general public, possibly because we currently have no Raymond Baxter figure to tell us all about it with appropriate gravitas and a twinkle in the eye – but nonetheless, the Department of Work and Pensions seem to have got the idea, very quickly… whatever that idea might actually be.

The BBC report quotes the DWP as suggesting that the Second Life setup could help with carbon emissions reduction, presumably by allowing people to “meet” virtually and share sundry 3D structures. This was something I spotted when I first looked at it in 2006, though I must say I now regret the email I wrote saying it was clearly a step-change in technology and a strategic platform, a bit like the Global Positioning System, and it was a serious issue that Europe didn’t have one of these to ourselves.

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Green IT looking pale at CeBIT

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

One of the primary themes of CeBIT this year was supposed to be Green IT. Interest in the subject is “overwhelming” according to the CeBIT website.
And indeed there’s an entire hall dedicated to it this year, albeit one of the smaller ones. But still hall 8 – “Green IT World” – is sparsely occupied. The subdued ambience is a long way from the heaving mass of bodies in hall 21, where the likes of MSI and Gigabyte are showing off their shiny stuff amid loud music and pneumatic young ladies wearing shirts which appear, very regrettably, to have shrunk in the wash.

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5% of printed documents never collected

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

I heard this thoroughly depressing stat at a HP briefing this morning: one in 20 office printouts are simply left in the printer’s output tray, never to be seen by the eyes of the thoughtless drone who pressed Ctrl + P in the first place. 

I’m not a tree-hugging, environmental doom monger, but even my green-weary soul was alarmed at the amount of wasted paper, ink and energy such needless printing consumes. Let alone the money. 

HP has a solution to curb the printer fly-tippers called Pool Printing, which ensures the document doesn’t actually print until the person physically goes to the machine to collect it. They have to swipe a card or punch in a pin number before the printer spews out the goods.

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The planet will shortly be saved. Thank you for listening.

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

Spectacular news from the Verdiem corporation. It’s offering a free tool to help to save the planet!

“Today Verdiem is announcing the availability of Edison, a free energy monitoring  application that allows eco-conscious consumers to actively control their PC’s energy consumption. Verdiem helps Brits save money on their energy bills and fight climate change by reducing carbon dioxide emissions from homes across the UK.”

And how does this fabulous tool work? By, erm, changing your Windows power-management settings. It gives you a little slider that you can slide between ’save less’ and ’save more’. And it changes three – yes, three! – settings: display timeout, hard disk power-down, and suspend timeout.

It does offer one feature that Windows doesn’t – you can switch between work-time and non-work-time settings based on a schedule. But a moment’s thought will reveal that there’s no point. Set your computer to suspend after two hours and, well, it will suspend after two hours. And stay suspended all weekend. One lot of settings is all you need.

Before you can take advantage of the altruistic philanthropy of Verdiem, you’ll be needing to register so it can send you an activation email.

The cynic in you might think it was a data-gathering exercise rather than a gift bestowed upon the world by a concerned company. Who knows? Anyway, it’s quite pretty, it estimates how much energy you’re saving and some people might find it useful. You can download it from here.

Should regulators step in to “green” mobile phone industry

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

As PC Pro’s resident “Eco Warrior” – a term that’s used with more than a hint of sarcasm by the rest of the team – I was chosen to attend the recent Green IT conference in London.

All the speakers gave food for thought, but one stood out in particular; James Page has over a decade’s wireless engineering experience at Nokia, and is an active member of the Green Party, too. He was also speaking independently, so was probably free to be a little more forthcoming than those there under a corporate banner. (more…)

Going green – London Underground style

Friday, October 10th, 2008

Bustling through Victoria Tube station this morning, the ticket barriers seemed a little more crowded than usual. Which is to say, rammed to the rafters, rather than merely heaving. 

What caused this extra congestion? A bomb threat? Signal failure? No, London Underground has “decided to do its bit for the environment” by turning off “unnecessary” escalators to save energy.

The very same escalators that recently had their zero-watt poster slots replaced with dozens of energy-chomping LCD screens. Which lead down to the lobby containing another half dozen, six-foot LCD screens showing bigger versions of the same video adverts. Which leads to the platforms, with six newly-installed, ginormous projectors blasting video ads on to the platform walls.

If that’s London Underground “doing its bit”, Victoria’s going to be a seaside resort before we know it.  

Work out your carbon netprint

Friday, October 10th, 2008

IT accounts for a shocking 2% of worldwide carbon emissions – that’s the same as aviation. While your desktop might be relatively frugal, it’s just the tip of the slowly-melting iceberg. Right now I’m using GMail, Bloglines, my work email, a forum which lives on a server in London and Slashdot – I’m using power all over the world. Take into account all the networking gear sitting in the middle, and the true energy usage of my PC could be astronomical.

Maybe we need to start thinking about our carbon netprint (it seems like as good a phrase as any) when we look at our carbon footprint; do you really need that Facebook, MySpace or Bebo account? It’s not just actively using these services that consumes power; a MySpace account sitting idle, not accessed for months, still requires power to store – and more than you may think. (more…)