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Technology for Good – episode thirty seven with Mike Maney

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Welcome to episode thirty seven of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s show our guest is independent spin doctor Mike Maney. Mike is a regular attendee, and supporter of our annual Monktoberfest conference, and an all-round good guy!

Some of the more fascinating stories we looked at on the show, included a look into the latest developments in mobile payments, Microsoft making Office free on all mobile platforms, and Facebook launched it’s own Tor site.

Here is the full list of stories that we covered in this week’s show:

Climate

Energy

Hardware

ePayments

Apps

Security

Wearables

3d Printing

Transport

Sustainability

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Technology for Good – episode twenty seven with SalesForce’s Peter Coffee

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Welcome to episode twenty seven of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s episode we had SalesForce‘s Vice President of Strategic Research, Peter Coffee as the guest on our show.

We have met a talked with Peter a couple of times, and have always been impressed by the breadth of his knowledge, as well as his thoughts on things environmental. Also having seen that, when asked to come up with a challenge for the Cap Gemini Super Techies Show, he went with…

Present a technology vision for taking an existing bicycle manufacturer and retailer to the next level as a transportation option

 

… we were very keen to have Peter as a guest on the show.

We covered some fascinating stories on the show, including the White House’s plan to use technology to unleash data to help America’s agriculture sector, how Facebook’s Internet.org is helping people get online in Zambia, and a new initiative to help parents do simple science experiments at home with their kids.

Here is the full list of stories that we covered in this week’s show:

Climate

 

Transport

Apps/Mobile

Apps/Cloud

Crowdsourcing

Security

Open technologies

Moore’s Law

Diversity

Education

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Technology for Good – episode twenty three with Theo Priestley

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Welcome to episode twenty three of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s episode we had  Software AG‘s Chief Technology Evangelist Theo Priestley as our guest on the show. Theo is one of those guys who I have come across online, but this was the first time we had ever talked, so I wasn’t sure how the hangout would go. As it was, I needn’t have been concerned, it went really well. Last week was July 4th, Independence Day in the US, so there was less Tech news to discuss, but despite that, we had plenty to talk about, especially in the Wearables and Comms categories.

Here are the stories that we discussed in this week’s show:

Climate

Internet of Things

Apps

Comms

Wearables

Transport

Sustainability

Misc

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Technology for Good – episode eighteen with Chris Adams

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Welcome to episode eighteen of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s episode we had Loco2 product and UX manager Chris Adams as a guest on the show. Chris is an old friend, and semi-regular co-host, so we had a lot of fun discussing this week’s crop of stories. Though I tried to whittle them down to a manageable number we still had quite a things to talk about, particularly in the energy, transport, and health spaces.

Here are the stories that we discussed in this week’s show:

Climate

Transport

Energy

Wearables

Apps

Sustainability

Health

Misc

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Technology for Good – Episode five

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This is episode five of our weekly GreenMonk TV Technology for Good Hangout – a show where we discuss news of technology solutions that work to benefit people’s lives. This week we discussed stories to do with Climate, energy/utilities, transportation, health, the internet of Things, and Data Centre’s amongst others.

Here’s a list of links to the stories we discussed today:

Climate news

Energy/Utilities

Transportation/Electric Vehicles

Health

Internet of Things

Data Centre’s

Miscellaneous

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Public transportation, smartphones and economic development – a winning combination for Miami-Dade

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It is hard to make public transport interesting, but Miami-Dade Transit in Florida is certainly giving it a go!

Their Metromover automated people mover is the most successful downtown people mover in the United States, and it is free!

Their Metrorail and some of their Metrobus services have on-board wifi (based on cellular service), and it is free.

They have smartphone Transit Tracker apps for iOS and Android devices allowing passengers to get realtime information on arrival times, station information and trip planning.

And they plan to make more improvements still. One of the ideas I particularly liked is outlined by Carmen Suarez, an Enterprise Architect with Miami-Dade Enterprise Technology Services Department at 01:30 in the video above.

The idea is to send push notifications to the smartphones of people who have the Transit Tracker app on their phone. The notifications would advise people of special offers/discounts from local businesses near their destination. It sounds simple enough, but as Carmen points out in the video it gives people yet another reason to use public transport, it helps reduce traffic congestion, and it promotes economic development in those areas. Win, win, win.

What cool public transport and smartphone-related stories have you come across?

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Employee engagement helps SAP’s carpooling initiative

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I spoke with SAP’s Chief Sustainability Officer Peter Graf recently about some of SAP’s internal initiatives around reducing their carbon footprint. One of their biggest sources of emissions is company cars (22% of emissions in Q2 2012 – the only higher was business flights at 42%).

So SAP started a program to encourage car sharing called TwoGo. The program has an app which matches people who are driving to work, with those looking for a lift. It matches people based on common interests (and allows you to block people you don’t like!).

It allows you to track who’s the Greenest of your friends and it incentivises people by having allotted parking spots for car-poolers. Another nice incentive was that the money you saved from your carpooling could be donated to a charity of your choice – as Peter put it – “You could car pool for a cause”.

The slogan used within the company to promote carpooling wasn’t about saving the company money, or about saving the planet, it was “Make New Friends – Know the Gossip.” Even the CEO joined in.

At the time of the video above, SAP had created 20,000 car pools. It will be interesting to see how getting the employees engaged in this project will affect the 22% of emissions in Q2 that SAP had from company cars.

Full disclosure – SAP is an occasional client of GreenMonk’s video services.