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Green bits and bytes for Dec 16 2010

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Green bits & bytes

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Some of the Green announcements which passed by my desk this week:

  1. We have written previously about the savings made possible by rolling out Digital Lumens Intelligent Lighting System (ILS) in a high-bay environment – well they have done it again! Their latest sale is to United States Cold Storage Inc., who deployed the ILS in its Hazelton Pa facility.

    USCS installed the lighting system in their recently built, 88,000-square-foot addition, and they can now light their facility for 3.5? per square foot per year, compared to 46? per square foot with traditional alternatives. USCS expects a return on investment of 14.6 months.

  2. SAP and PlaNet Finance’s joint project to help improve the incomes and living conditions for rural Ghanian women engaged in the Shea nut harvesting and Shea nut butter business posted a nice piece of good news during the week. Stanford University published a case study [PDF] which uncovered significant improvements in nut and butter quality. It also mentions how the women involved have organised into a network so they have a stronger negotiating position and they are achieving higher prices for their produce.
  3. JouleX is a company which helps organisations to monitor, analyse and manage the energy use and waste of IT systems connected to its internal network. JouleX announced this week that its JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) software has been accepted into the Cisco EnergyWise partner program – this enables Cisco to offer JEM as an energy management solution to its customers.
  4. Viridity, a data centre energy resource management software solution provider announced the appointment of Arun Oberoi to the position of President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), effective immediately.
  5. According to a news release from Tropos Networks, Silicon Valley Power (SVP), the City of Santa Clara?s municipal electric utility, has selected Tropos? GridCom as the distribution area communications network for its smart grid program, SVP Meter Connect. SVP serves over 50,000 customers and it expects the SVP Meter Connect project to increase reliability of the utility?s distribution system and finally
  6. ERP software company Epicor announced [PDF] the release of their on-demand carbon accounting solution, Carbon Connect. Carbon Connect is a SaaS delivered carbon accounting solution which allows companies to identify, analyze, audit, track, manage, benchmark and report on their carbon emissions /environmental impact and energy consumption.

Photo credit .faramarz

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Friday Green Numbers round-up 04/30/2010

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Green numbers

Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

And here is this week’s Green numbers:

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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What are your top tips for helping RedMonk/GreenMonk become carbon neutral?

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Global Warming
Photo Credit azrainman

My colleague in RedMonk, Stephen O’Grady wrote a great post a few weeks back on his blog titled RedMonk: We’re Not Perfect, But We Try.

The post was about how we realised in RedMonk that there was a flaw in the way we licence our content as Open Source, something we had criticised other companies for. We addressed this flaw by hiring another company to write an Open Source WordPress plugin called Progressive Licence so that our content is now truly Open Source.

In a similar vein, we here in GreenMonk have criticised other companies efforts to be carbon neutral without having any concerted effort to become carbon neutral ourselves.

So we have decided to try to make RedMonk a carbon neutral company

This won’t be easy, we are a company of 5 people split across 3 countries (US, UK and Spain) with varying office set-ups and all doing crazy amounts of travel. I know that in my own case, my travel footprint will likely far exceed all my other activities and unfortunately, this is not travel which can be avoided.

It will be further complicated by the lack of standards in this area. Still we are determined to do it and we will post progress updates on this site.

As a first step, I’d like to enrol the help of the readers of this blog – what are your top tips for helping us become carbon neutral?

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Carbon accounting software starting to take off?

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Carbonetworks Carbon Balance Sheet Screenshot credit Carbonetworks

We in GreenMonk have written previously about carbon accounting software and the huge opportunities which are about to open up in this space.

Carbon footprint reporting is increasingly becoming part of the purchasing process with purchasers seeking carbon footprint data from their vendors. It will in time be mandatory and when that happens, every company will have a requirement for this kind of software. Companies establishing a name for themselves at this early stage will be well placed when that requirement comes to pass.

No surprise then to see the announcement on Cnet today that software company Carbonetworks received $5 in series A funding for its online carbon calculator from clean-tech venture firm NGEN Partners.


Climate Earth is another player in this space, to my knowledge hasn’t announced any funding yet and their website could stand some work but their Team is impressive.

These companies should be working with AMEE so that everyone can benefit from the data.

Watch this space, more companies and more offerings are likely to spring up and don’t be surprised if some of these early players become attractive acquisition targets for more established software houses.

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Carbon accounting meet lifestreaming II

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Dopplr calculates my travel Carbon footprint

In my last post I postulated that social software could be used to capture people’s lifestream information and that this could be used by companies to help calculate their carbon footprint.

The case I put forward was more suited for the increasing numbers of people working from home. However, I neglected to point out another painfully obvious example – Dopplr.

Dopplr markets itself as the travel serendipity engine –

Dopplr lets you share your future travel plans privately with friends and colleagues. The service then highlights coincidence, for example, telling you that three people you know will be in Paris when you will be there too. You can use Dopplr on your personal computer and mobile phone. It links with online calendars and social networks.

However, potentially far more useful is how Dopplr have teamed up with AMEE (the world’s energy meter) to produce a chart of your travel-related carbon footprint (see the chart above of my travel footprint).

This ties in completely with my earlier post about the potential synergies attainable from combining lifestreaming software and the requirements of carbon accounting.

Can you think of any other use cases for the intersection of lifestreaming and carbon accounting?