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Build carbon software efficiently (practice what you preach!)

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motion gears -team force
Photo Credit ralphbijker

I have been having some very interesting conversations with people in the carbon software sector these last couple of weeks.

The first was with Michael Meehan of Carbonetworks (which I blogged about here) and we discussed their offering which is a “carbon strategy platform”. From my blog post about Carbonetworks:

The app at its most basic helps companies understand what their carbon footprint is, and then helps the companies translate that into a financial bottom line. The app helps companies see what options they have to reduce their carbon footprint and helps them create a carbon strategy from a managerial perspective on how to proceed in the carbon market.

Then I talked to Stefan Guertzgen, Marketing Director for Chemicals and Franz Hero, vp, chemical industry business unit both at SAP. They were talking about the SAP Environmental Compliance application which, in their words:

enables companies to gather information on the use of energy, in all its forms, throughout the enterprise, identify areas for energy reduction, monitor the implementation of energy excellence projects, and make the results available throughout the enterprise

Earlier this week I was talking to Kevin Leahy, who is a director in IBM’s IT Optimization Business Unit about IBM’s House of Carbon for which they have also developed carbon reporting software for their client base.

Finally, yesterday I was speaking to Gavin Starks, founder and CEO of AMEE. We have talked about AMEE several times before on this blog. AMEE is an open-source, neutral, platform for

measuring the Energy Consumption of everything… aggregates “official” energy metrics, conversion factors and CO2 data from over 150 countries… is a common platform for profiling and transactions (there’s a transaction engine at the core of AMEE)

Noticing a common thread here? Guys, stop re-inventing the wheel.

IBM and SAP (and anyone else thinking of embarking on carbon software) STOP NOW! It has already been done and done well by companies with open api’s (and open data in AMEE’s case).

Get on the phone to Carbonetworks and AMEE, and instead of building another carbon app, use their already comprehensive infrastructures and api’s to get a jump-start and bring best-of-breed carbon software to market efficiently!

Comments

  1. says

    I was curious about how AMEE is handling their Terms of use, Privacy policies etc. to see how I can learn from this open-source, neutral, platform. The AMEE Terms and Conditions are password protected and the AMEE Data Provider Contract is a one pager that didn’t say anything without the TnCs. So I didn’t manage to learn much.

    Who runs open source/open data online services with end-user provided shared data (not a wiki) where one can do mashups of the end-result or create new end-results from the data. I am looking for Terms of use, Privacy policies, Open Data licenses etc.

    I have found http://www.opendatacommons.org/ through a discussion entry at AMEE. Any other pointers would be most helpful.

    Thanks, Thomas, from Akvo.org

  2. says

    Hi, thanks for the question. You’ve just happened to catch me while I was in the middle of editing them to make them more complete (and a web page rather than a PDF file). I’ll unlock them when finished, but in the interim, we have a basic summary on the wiki:

    http://wiki.amee.cc/index.php/AMEE:Privacy_policy

    If you want a copy of the old PDF version drop me a mail and I’ll send it over to you – the old Services Contract was Creative Commons licenced as well.