"energy" entries

Four short links: 20 Feb 2009

Four short links: 20 Feb 2009

Accessibility, trails, Pacman, and power today. Have a fun weekend!

  1. Social Accessibility Project — clever IBM approach to solving web accessibility problems: a sidebar for Firefox that lets people with assistive devices like screenreaders say “hey, I had this problem with this page”, and a crowd will help fix it. (via Derek Featherstone‘s Webstock talk, notes here)
  2. Why I Want a Million Quid (mySociety) — Tom’s onto something. I am hooked by this vision of “systems where each person who is helped to solve a problem leaves a trail of advice, contacts, insider information and new user-friendly web services behind them”. We’re used to the data people leave behind being discrete and implicit (another purchase for the recommendation engine) rather than longitudinal and explicit (people who looked at this item eventually went on to find their answer here).
  3. The PacMan Dossier — everything there is to know about Pacman, from designer Toru Iwatani’s inspiration and design process, through to the logic errors behind bugs and why it’s better to move the joystick before you reach the turn. (via Grand Text Auto)
  4. Two Stanford Students Rethink the Light Switch — a power switch with a network connection and tactile feedback: teh awesome.

Google's PowerMeter. It's Cool, but don't Bogart My Meter Data

Google, love what you are doing with Smart Meter energy consumption visualization, but don't Bogart my meter data!

Four short links: 21 Jan 2009

Four short links: 21 Jan 2009

In today’s edition: the spread of fake news, keeping track of your real power use, a Javascript library
and a less-than-impressed take on mobile location apps.

  1. Echo Chamber – the British tabloid The Sun posted a story that turned out to be fabricated. This site tracked that story’s spread and uncritical acceptance by other news outlets and web sites.
  2. Real Time Web-Based Power Charting – build the software and hardware to get a live chart in a web page that updates every 10 seconds with the instantaneous power usage for your entire house.
  3. ActiveRecordJS – just what it sounds like, ActiveRecord for Javascript. AR is a complex subsystem of Rails, and it’s interesting to see the functionality ported to Javascript.
  4. I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment with the Location-Aware Lifestyle – a reporter tries all the location apps, and discovers the future isn’t all here yet. Interesting: only three paragraphs of this long story are about the good bits of location services, the rest question its implementation, privacy, and utility.

O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures Invests in Amee

I'm pleased to announce that on Wednesday, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, our VC affiliate, closed an investment in UK-based Amee, which bills itself as "the world's energy meter." Here's their description of what they do: AMEE’s aim is to map, measure and track all the energy data on Earth. This includes aggregating every emission factor and methodology related to CO2 and…

Data Center Power Efficiency

James Hamilton is one of the smartest and most accomplished engineers I know. He now leads Microsoft’s Data Center Futures Team, and has been pushing the opportunities in data center efficiency and internet scale services both inside & outside Microsoft. His most recent post explores misconceptions about the Cost of Power in Large-Scale Data Centers: I’m not sure how many…

DIY Appliances on the Web?

Or, My Enterprise is Appliancized, Why Isn't Your Web? I wrote a couple of posts a while back that covered task-optimized hardware. This one was about a system that combined Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA's) with a commodity CPU platform to provide the sheer number crunching performance needed to break GSM encryption. This one looked at using task-appropriate efficient processors…

Radar Theme: Clean Energy Tech

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly] All civilization depends on energy, and always has done so. Oil is rising rapidly in price and alternative energy and energy consumption management have become viable businesses. We're interested in the IT use of energy technology (green data centers) and…

Energy Savings, Strange Attractors, …

… the Intrinsic Cost of State Change, Orbiting Alien Voyeurs, and 200 Square Kilometers of Solar Panels Somewhere in Texas The Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Berkeley National Labs recently published the results of their first Data Center Demonstration Project (pdf). (Disclosure: My colleague Teresa Tung of Accenture R+D labs was the report's principal author). The study follows up on…

Bill Coleman to keynote Velocity

Bill Coleman has twice transformed our industry, and I'm excited to announce that he will keynote Velocity later this month. Bill is most famous for being the "B" in BEA and for leading the creation of Solaris while at Sun. He is now the CEO of his new startup, Cassatt, which "makes Data Centers more efficient". Bill is awesome and…

Africa's Energy Deficit: Energy Hacks Can Make A Difference

About six weeks ago I came across this quote from a Wall Street Journal article and I have been pondering it ever since: Africa has the capacity to generate about 63 gigawatts of power for roughly 770 million people — about what Spain produces for its population of 40 million. For most African countries, the World Bank estimates that universal…