We have been  reading postings and briefings on all sorts of touch pads and e-Reader recently, be it the Amazon Kindle or much disputed Apple’s iPad. But apart from usability and innovation involved in developing the product one feature that inspired me to write this post is  its long term affect on existing Carbon Di Oxide emissions when adopted and accepted globally.

I still wonder if in a hypothetical scenario when every book and publication is digitized into an e-book and every reader only uses his gadgets to read the digital content instead of having a printed version on a paper. Will this be a much Greener situation to one we have right now? There are  views and opinions prevalent in media which are more of equivocal nature. E-readers aren’t typically marketed as environmentally sound, but their environmental impact is now becoming a topic of discussion and research.

Point of Views : Expert’s View on e-Readers

At least Don Carli doesn’t thinks so, according to him e-Readers aren’t Greener than print (which is a common view held by consumers who don’t know the backstory of evolution of an e-Reader ). Actually few days back I had an opportunity to read an interview with Don Carli on News Media Innovation, Convergence and Sustainability.

As far as print media is concerned it could do a better job of managing the sustainability of its supply chains and waste streams, but it’s a misguided notion to assume that digital media is categorically greener. Computers, eReaders and cell phones all have a cost of operation, cost of manufacturing and cost of disposal. When Compared directly to the book, a Kindle produces 168 kilograms of carbon dioxide compared to 7.46 kilograms for a book.

Making a computer typically requires the mining and refining of dozens of minerals and metals including gold, silver and palladium as well as extensive use of plastics and hydrocarbon solvents. To function, digital devices require a constant flow of electrons that predominately come from the combustion of coal, and at the end of their all-too-short useful lives electronics have become the single largest stream of toxic waste created by man. Until recently there was little if any voluntary disclosure of the lifecycle “backstory” of digital media.

Point of Views : CleanTech Research based on Scientific Evidences.

Another interesting survey report from CleanTech Group which published the report based on life cycle analysis of a Kindle e-Reader. The research and media company drew on existing studies to do a lifecycle analysis and found that the carbon emissions from electronic books are far lower than traditional book publishing.

As reported  in the analysis, “The roughly 168 kg of CO2 produced throughout the Kindle’s lifecycle is a clear winner against the potential savings: 1,074 kg of CO2 if replacing three books a month for four years; and up to 26,098 kg of CO2 when used to the fullest capacity of the Kindle DX. Less-frequent readers attracted by decreasing prices still can break even at 22.5 books over the life of the device,”.

Finding a conclusion to this article seems difficult:

eReaders are capturing media attention and there appears to be significant latent demand for gadgets that can replace printed media, but mainstream adoption still remains years away. E-reader device sales and eReader content revenues are still rounding error in relation to print media revenues. In a survey of attendees at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair 40% predicted digital book content sales would overtake traditional printed book sales by 2018, but over 30% said digital content would never surpass traditional books sales, and 66% said they expect traditional books to dominate the market for the next decade.

With universities like Princeton and six others already testing the technology in a pilot, I hope e-Readers will make their way to schools and workplaces  replacing traditional paper books. Ultimately, it comes down to how an e-reader is used. If a person continues to buy books and print periodicals and doesn’t recycle the product, the environmental impact could potentially be negative.

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This post is partially motivated by my colleague(I hope he is not reading this) who spent all his Christmas and New year Vacations at home with his PC still running next to my desk. I am amazed to calculate how much electricity he just wasted. Well, you wouldn’t leave your television ON for all day while you are at the office, and yet, across the world, millions of work PCs are left on all night—wasting energy, costing owners millions in utility costs, and contributing to global climate change.

Generating the electricity needed to power those computers requires hundreds of power plants that produce billions of tons of CO2 emissions. Many of those machines sit idle for 12 to 16 hours per day, burning electricity, but not doing any work, because businesses habitually leave their computers running overnight.So how much does this one click matters? Here is an awesome report published by Harris Interactive some time back.

Some Numbers Worth Understanding

A mid-sized company with nearly 10000 PCs,  wastes more than $165,000 a year in electricity costs for computers that have been left on overnight. By turning these computers off, an employer can keep more than 1,381 tons of carbon dioxide (C02) out of the atmosphere.  Across the nation(read USA), this adds up to more than $1.72 billion dollars and almost 15 million tons of CO2 . When calculated using EPA’s  Green House Calculator the emitted Carbon is equivalent to  Annual CO2 emissions of  4  coal fired power plants.

As of April 2007,  145,800,000 Americans have full-time jobs. 72 percent of all employed adults regularly use a PC for work purposes at their jobs. Combining these findings suggests that more than 104 million workers reach the end of the work day with a PC to shut off—or not to. Next most important things is to analyse the reason for this type of behavior from the office goers.

Workers Attitudes behind this Wastage:

In an enterprise like situation, when asked whose responsibility it should be to save energy in the workplace, 28 percent of PC users said it should be down to management or the IT department. More than half (53 percent) said they were not at all concerned about their companies’ carbon footprints, indicating that effecting change in “shut down” practices at the behavioral level might yield disappointing results.

Making Business Out of IT:

Almost all the industries (be it mid or large sized) are facing similar challenges of harnessing maximum output with minimum power and infrastructural expenditures. And with global recession the idea of Cost cuttings also include supervised use of Power and Infrastructures in the enterprises and commercial centers. No  company likes to waste money. On the surface, the financial impact of 24-hour computer power consumption may seem insignificant compared to traditional concerns such as payroll, supply, and rent—but the waste is actually substantial. A few important findings from enterprise point of view :

• Energy costs—typically 10 percent of the corporate technology budget—could rise to as much as 50 percent in the next few years.
• If not exaggerating, a good  Power management software can reduce a PC’s power consumption by 80 percent, allowing companies to save between $25 – $75 per desktop PC.
• Turning off PCs, with their heat-intensive power supplies, will also reduce the load on air conditioning equipment, leading to even more energy savings.

If you are working in/for an enterprise, its your responsibility to turn off/hibernate  your PC when you are not working. On the funnier side, Gary Hird, IT strategy manager at UK retailer, John Lewis, says “I joined the company in 1989 and one of the first things I noticed was that every light switch had a sticker next to it, reading ‘switch off, you’re burning my bonus” .

But on a Serious Note “It takes between 60 and 300 trees to absorb the yearly CO2 emissions generated by a single PC left on 24 hours a day. That means it would take between 1.24 and 6.24 billion trees to absorb the emissions caused by the nation’s office computers that are never shut down.”

Take one step towards being Green, try to hibernate the PC whenever possible.

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The European Commission’s  Joint Research Centre has developed a high resolution digital view of man-made green house gas (GHG) emissions for any 10 km x 10 km area in the world. Scientists from the JRC Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES) have made it possible to visualize the distribution of GHG emissions all over the world at local level through an add-on layer to Google Earth™.

This application brings environmental information closer to the world’s citizens. By simply entering a city name, the amount of greenhouse gases released since 1970 can be visualized. In addition, the main sources of GHG emissions in the year 2005 can be identified: industries (fuel combustion, process and waste emissions in energy and manufacturing industries); transport (road, rail, shipping); residential fuel combustion and waste handling; and agriculture.

As in my last post Jeremy pointed out  “the environmental footprint of their premises, logistics and supply chain, paper and ink consumption, utility consumptions (water, electricity,…), transportation and travels, waste, etc. must also be a point of concern”. Using this application we can definitely get a better view to the complete picture.

How to Use the Application:

• Install Google Earth

• Downloaded EDGAR GHG viewer 2005

Once you have installed Google Earth, install EDGAR GHG viewer and restart the application. Its just a matter of some clicks. I was really excited to see it for the first time. I am attaching a few snapshots that I took today morning. Try it yourself, you will understand how grave the scene is atleast in Europe, China, India  and USA.

Snapshot 1 – US of A.                                                           Snapshot 2 – Europe and Middle East with Africa

Snapshot 3 : Asia.

Representations : The data presented here covers carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorcarbons (HFCs), perfluorcarbons (PFCs) and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). In order to compare different greenhouse gas emissions the emissions of individual gases have to be converted into CO2-equivalents. The Green Areas of Map has 0.00 -0.10 G equivalent of CO2 and Black/Blue spots are worst affected areas with or more 250 G equivalent of CO2 .

Personally, I hope this modeled simulation of World Wide GHG emissions will help a lot of people involved in Carbon Foot printing or planning to join the Green movement world wide. Let me know your ideas and reviews about this. The data sets are also available for download (free ) at the link.

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“For those new to Tech IT Easy who could obviously not remember the initial announcement, Anand Kishore Raju is a new blogger on Tech IT Easy, who will focus on providing you with analyses of greening the internet, carbon footprints, energy and power figures of the internet and web2.0. Anand, the floor is now yours…”

The debate on climate change has moved beyond an argument about whether it is happening or not, to a discussion about what can be done to tackle its root causes. Pollution and energy savings are keywords that are becoming more and more of interest to people and to governments across the globe, and the research community is also becoming more sensible towards these topics.

McKinsey & Co. recently reported that the world’s 44 Million servers* consume about 0.5 percent of total electricity productions across the globe and emits about 80 megatons of Carbon Dioxide a year, which is nearly the emissions of entire countries like Argentina or the Netherlands (Data needs an Update ).

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Dear everyone,

I am extremely happy to start off this new year by introducing a fresh face on Tech IT Easy, Anand Kishore Raju, who will be blogging with us in 2010. His main areas of focus as a blogger will be greening the internet, carbon footprints, energy and power figures of the internet and web2.0.

Anand is currently working as a Research Engineer at Telecom ParisTech (ENST). His area of research focuses on the Energy aspects of the Internet, what the scientific community calls “Green Networking”. His efforts are directed towards making Computer Network Science aware that processing, moving and storing bits has a cost in terms of energy and in terms of the Carbon Emission Footprint.

In the past, Anand had also worked at Collaborative Systems Group (ColSys) at Bilkent University, Turkey, where he developed a taxonomy for user properties, influence factors for feedback quality in web 2.0, existing and novel models for deviation types and their detection. He also holds a degree in Computer Science and Engineering and aspires to join HEC in near future.

Anand joins a smart team of collaborators, some of which also work in green computing and many of which share an interest in this important topic for sure. As such, please join us in welcoming Anand to the team and I hope you enjoy reading his words on Tech IT Easy!

Happy New Year,

The Tech IT Easy team

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I’m always fascinated by business models, i.e. at how entrepreneurs and companies put together services in order to make money from them. I’d call it the source code of business if I hadn’t seen the other source code in Luxembourg —legal and accounting—but arguably that’s more like binary code, i.e. 99% unintelligible.

Sarah Lacy writes about SMSONE, a ultra-local news provider in India similar to Outside.IN, a Union Square Ventures funded US-only company that provides news updates via the web. SMSONE does it, as the name suggests, via SMS. And it spreads through a franchising model, working with local entrepreneurs that pay a franchise fee and also collect a share of the advertising revenue from locally focussed businesses. It is able to do this because of something that apparently doesn’t exist in the US (but does in Europe): receiving an SMS in India doesn’t cost the recipient anything.

When reading about this, I was immediately reminded of a similar business model employed by a Dutch entrepreneur in Russia, Ms. Annemarie van Gaal, founder of Independent Media, a company that distributed Russian versions of magazines like Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire en Good Housekeeping (source). When she spoke at the Star entrepreneurial seminar in Rotterdam a year ago, she told us about how she differentiated herself from the competition (paraphrased as I haven’t got my notes with me):

The trouble with getting your magazines distributed in Russia was that you had to pay quite a lot of money (some would call it bribes) to companies that would then take care of it… badly. Instead van Gaal decided to do it differently. She would hire street kids to distribute her magazines, similar to the gold days of newspapers: the newspaper boy.

If you read Sarah Lacy’s account on Techcrunch, you’ll see that SMSONE does it similarly, hiring local kids, often without much education, to take care of distribution. Doing it via official channels is likely a nightmare over there, and centralising distribution kind of defeats the purpose of micro-news.

It’s a different way of thinking, which many of us westerners don’t have. I mean, would you entrust your products to a beggar on the street or to a street musician? Not only is it probably against the law (except if the government does it), we pride ourselves on our super-organised infrastructure, where anything from temp-workers to interns are there to provide companies with a flexible workforce, and anything from printing presses to mobile internet exists to produce and distribute your stuff.

Of course, I wouldn’t just leave you with these two examples. In the beginning of 2008, Boston Consulting Group published a study of “local dynamos”— domestically focussed companies, which use creative business models to capture value from emerging markets that are filled with challenges, like lacking infrastructure and low-income consumers. The map below shows how widespread these companies are.

Some very interesting examples are mentioned, like:

• Shanda, a Chinese gaming-company, that, in order to combat software-piracy, focusses on providing interactive services through gaming, services that are impossible to pirate. And to overcome a lack of a financial infrastructure to pay for online services, they work with pre-paid cards.
• Indian CavinKare, which sells cheap sachets of shampoo through small local retailers, while using educational marketing to teach customers how to use their products.
• Goodbaby, which targets the many 1-child families in China, who are both willing to spend more on their child than multi-child families would, but are also in need of education.
• Amul, an Indian food-and-beverage-marketing-organisation, which collects and pays for milk locally, while tracking all operations via satellite and uses ERP solutions to make analysis based on the data and gauge whether future supply needs to be increased or decreased.
• Wimm-Bill-Dann Foods (Russia), which works extensively with local partners, and has devised leasing schemes for expensive machinery to boost their production and is able to serve 280 million consumers nation-wide.

The BCG, of course, takes the stance of its customers, Western companies, and the study is mainly aimed at how multinational companies (MNCs) can replicate 6 of these dynamo’s advantages, in order to compete with them. They are:

1. Customising to local needs – which involves first understanding these needs, and then meeting them.
2. Devising innovative business models that overcome local challenges – a logical follow-up to the last point, how to make money from the info you gained.
3. Leveraging the latest technologies – meaning that these emerging economies are less burdened with traditional infrastructure and quicker on the uptake of more affordable, newer, and easier-to-spread technology, e.g. mobiles.
4. Benefiting from low-cost labor and overcoming shortages of skilled labor – there’s two ways to look at this; a local workforce will be better equipped to interact on a local level, a highly-trained workforce will be better equipped to run a business. Tough call.
5. Scaling up fast – Russia, India, China, Brazil, etc. are all giants with the promise of huge rewards when you capture them. Many of these dynamos grow quickly through both through acquisitions and building up their network of suppliers and distributors.
6. Sustaining long-term hypergrowth without imploding – this kind of follows on to the last point

Some of the Western companies mentioned, which have managed to compete on a local level, include:

• General Motors, which has adapted its luxury-liners to meet the demands of its Chinese customers, who are usually sitting in the back;
• LG, in China, which has learned that the audio-quality of its televisions is more valued by its customers, who often reside in noisy environments;
• Carrefour, which has started to work with local municipal governments in China, as these don’t meddle in their operations like local dept. stores would, and are able to provide access to prime locations;
• Perfetti Van Melle, in India, a candle/chewing-gum manufacturer, which has found local means to advertise, interacts frequently with local partners, and has adapted its products to local tastes;
• and Yum! Brands, which owns Pizza Hut and KFC, and has adapted its menus to meet local Chinese tastes, started a new food-chain aimed specifically at the market, and uses its international expertise to integrate IT, lean supply chains, and a higher level of food standards into their offering.

It shows the value of out of the box thinking in terms of reaching people, and I believe that traditional “Western” thinking should long ago have been thrown out the door anyway, particularly in light of the troubles that media-, automotive, and financial industries are going through. We are in the flux of disruptive innovation and only those quickest to grasp new technologies and ways of thinking are able to survive another day.

No shortage of lessons on that from entrepreneurs in emerging economies…

Vincent out

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First of all, Paris was great! For three days, Jeremy (Fain, founder of Tech IT Easy & Verteego.com) drove me crazy in a good way, by mapping out every single minute of my life. Similarly to how we met up in Barcelona, it was a great way to get to know the city and at the same time realise that truly knowing Paris will require some further trips back.

Since Tech IT Easy was founded by a Parisian, I felt it was good to go to the source and have a “vision-refresher” as it were. At its peak, this group-blog featured 15 writers, the majority of which was from France or situated there at some point. Many are now spread across this planet and it’s sites like Tech IT Easy that represent a small node where we can occasionally brush against each other (in an intellectual way) and exchange the wisdom we have learned.

Meeting several Tech IT Easy authors, Steve Danino and Emmanuel Perez-Duarte, it reconfirmed to me the intellectual spirit in which this weblog was founded, as well as the search for something, anything, but probably tech- (and/or business!-) related. Many of our authors enjoy a solid educational background, which is both good and bad. Good, in the sense of the value it brings. Bad, because there are many opportunity costs in life and even more so for well-educated men and women. It is clear then that we all write when we can, but more often than not, we cannot.

It is all the more important then to get more (and more and more) fresh blood onto Tech IT Easy to replace those that have moved on, and to connect those who are “old” to those who are “new.” The vision, my vision for Tech IT Easy has always been that of building a community of talented people who directly and indirectly assist each other to make our world a (technological) marvel.

Does that work in practice? In my opinion, only if people work hard at making it happen and the effects are far from direct or instantaneous. Rather, if I need to speak to an interesting person in France (or anywhere really) or bounce a complicated idea of someone, I’ll often look up one of our Tech IT Easy members and vice versa.

A few blog posts that I thought were great and directly showed off the value of some of our members, were Remy Miralles’s posts about being a software developer, and Cecil Dijoux’s (who is incidentally also a musician by night) posts about High Availability Architecture. I have met neither of them yet, but I know the day will come. These posts are more the exception to the rule, which is that, on this weblog, we often do not market ourselves, but instead think out loud and whatever opportunities happen because or outside of it, are the individual’s own. The risk is that sometimes you of course do the opposite of marketing, but hey…

It is the nature of the beast that is blogging that its value is hard to determine. We host this weblog for a negligible amount and the 45 min. a day that I spend blogging on it is also negligible in terms of expense. We could value this blog by asking for money, but apart from some unobtrusive monetisation exercises on the horizon, we will not make a serious effort at that… because it would create a different kind of pressure and hence different kind of focus. But, who knows…

The value that Tech IT Easy has to me, remains to be that node, out of which occasionally there is some new strings that are formed, either intellectually or through building up a new relationship or venture. Everything else is… soft tissue.

In the words of the once great Arnold, I’ll be back!
Vincent

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It’s high time I came back to give Vincent a hand on making this blog very active as you people deserve.

I’ve been rather inconspicuous on Tech IT Easy ever since I started Verteego, 18 months ago. Initially, I found a hard time looking for economies of scale and synergies between being a tech blogger and a sustainability entrepreneur. I was wrong: the more our company grows, the more I realize how much what we do at Verteego actually leverages Technology.

I’ve got loads to tell and share on bootstrapping, product positionning, building a great team, going abroad, learning from your mistakes, closing sales deals, establishing partnerships, raising funds, getting Press coverage,…but most of all, our core business at Verteego really is enabling organizations, be they companies or local governments, to go green thanks to our software and services.

So, one topic I would like to discuss frequently here is Green IT, because Verteego definitely is a Green IT company.

According to the Gartner Group, Information Technology accounts for 2% of worldwide carbon emissions – about the same as the entire aviation industry. This figure is by and large correct. However, Information Technology has the power to lower the 98% remaining CO2 emissions. That is Green IT: use technology as an enabler.

And that is exactly what we do at Verteego: sustainability software. For instance, one of them, Verteego Carbon, is a carbon management software that enables organizations to collaboratively assess, analyse, and report the greenhouse gas emissions generated by their activity or products. Verteego Carbon is also a beautiful entrepreneurial story in itself: started as a side-project by one of my partners, the application now represents a significant chunk of our turnover and a truly global product. Verteego Carbon is indeed available in French, German, and English.

To make a long story short, I’m back on the Tech IT Easy tracks for good and more-than-ever willing to start amazingly interesting conversations about my experience as an entrepreneur in the Green IT business. You can expect one post per week from me on this exciting topic of Green IT.

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