Cloud computing: the carbon footprint

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In an astute move, Greenpeace is capitalising on iPad frenzy by launching a new report into the carbon footprint of cloud computing.

Make IT Green: Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change shows how the launch of quintessential cloud computing devices like the Apple iPad, which offer users access to the ‘cloud’ of online services like social networks and video streaming, can contribute to a much larger carbon footprint of the Information Technology (IT) sector than previously estimated.

To be clear: We are not picking on Apple. We are not dissing the iPad. But maybe someone can come up with an app that calculates the carbon footprint of using different web sites based on their location and energy deals. Apple is the master of promotion, and while we marvel at the sleek unpolluted design of the iPad, we need to think about where this is all leading and how like all good surfers we can make sure our environment stays clean and green.

The report builds on previous industry research and shows that at current growth rates data centers and telecommunication networks will consume about 1,963 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2020. That is more than triple their current consumption and more than the current electricity consumption of France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined. However, the report also shows how IT can avert climate chaos by becoming a transformative force advocating for solutions that increase the use of renewable energy.

The Register has a helpful summary of the report which also highlights an interesting difference between Apple and Google as cloud proprietors:

Apple’s $1bn data center in Catawba County, North Carolina, currently under construction, will get its energy from a local electrical grid that contains only 3.8 per cent renewable energy, and a full 50.5 per cent from dirty ol’ coal and 38.7 per cent from nasty nukes. Google’s data center in The Dalles, Oregon, by contrast, gets 50.9 per cent of its juice from renewable sources, according to Greenpeace.

Greenpeace is also pretty critical of Facebook’s carbon footprint.

The only thing you really need to know about the iPad

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From David Pogue’s Review.

The iPad is not a laptop. It’s not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it — books, music, video, photos, Web, e-mail and so on. For most people, manipulating these digital materials directly by touching them is a completely new experience — and a deeply satisfying one.

His iPad ran for twelve hours playing continuous video.

Kleiner Perkins doubles its bets on Apps

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The thing that convinced me that the iPhone was a game-changer was the announcement in 2008 by John Doerr, the world’s smartest venture capitalist, that his firm was setting up a $100 million investment fund for Apps developers. Now, with the iPad looming, his firm has announced that it’s doubling its bets on Apps technology.

MENLO PARK, California, March 31, 2010 – Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) today announced the doubling of its iFund to $200 million of venture capital for applications for Apple’s revolutionary iPhone OS family of products, including iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Established in 2008 as a $100 million investment pool, the original iFund is now fully committed across 14 companies. iFund companies have been supported by an additional $330 million from follow-on investors.

KPCB also announced iFund-supported companies have more than 20 applications in development for the soon-to-be-released iPad, with 11 available at first ship on April 3. KPCB noted the iPhone has created an inflection in mobile content consumption and the iPad will lead the next wave of innovation in mobile computing. The iFund is increasing its investment dollars to back entrepreneurs and build companies that focus on these areas. Particular areas of interest on iPad include entertainment, communication, social networking, commerce, health care, and education.

“Welcome to the brave new post-PC era where a swoosh of fluidity replaces the traditional mouse-bound GUI. A new, truly revolutionary platform is rare, and a prize for entrepreneurs,” said John Doerr, KPCB Partner. “We expect all ventures to have an iPad strategy. We will fund many more ventures for iPad, and the iFund will accelerate their success.”

The firm thinks that the first $100 million was well spent. The claimed results for companies it has backed include:

  • Over $100 million of 2010 mobile revenue
  • Over 100 million aggregate mobile downloads
  • 18 titles by investees reached the Top 10 on the App Store.

    • Gene ‘patents’ — a glimmer of light?

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    Early days, but still encouraging.

    A Utah biotech outfit called Myriad Genetics has a test that can tell women if they carry mutations of two genes linked to a predisposition to breast and ovarian cancer. But if a woman wants that test, she can get it only from Myriad, at a cost of more than $3,000. No other company or lab is allowed to provide the test because Myriad holds patents on the very genes themselves, under an exclusive license from the University of Utah Research Foundation. Or it did until Monday.

    In deciding a lawsuit led by the ACLU and the Public Patent Foundation at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, U.S. District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet shot down seven of Myriad’s patents, ruling that as a product of nature, DNA could not be patented. And in concluding that the essence of DNA is not in the chemicals but in the information encoded therein, he rejected Myriad’s contention that DNA became patentable once it is isolated outside the body. As ACLU staff lawyer Chris Hansen said, “The human genome, like the structure of blood, air or water, was discovered, not created. There is an endless amount of information on genes that begs for further discovery, and gene patents put up unacceptable barriers to the free exchange of ideas.”

    For people who object to the commercialization of any private data, gene patents are the ultimate intrusion. Having an assortment of companies own the legal rights to 20 percent of your unique self, as they do now, just feels creepy and wrong. And it’s all the more stinging to know that in Canada, where Myriad’s patents are not recognized, women worried about a family history of cancer can have a lab do that test for under $1,000. “The idea that our ability to look at [genes], to analyze them, to utilize them would be constrained by the issue of a patent strikes many people viscerally,” said James Evans, chairman of a federal task force on the effect of gene patents on diagnostics and patient care. “Genes represent something we see as quite fundamental to who we are. … If this decision is upheld, it in the end is a win for patients and providers.”

    Steady on, boy, steady on

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    The CEO of salesforce.com has been drinking the Kool-Aid:

    The future of our industry now looks totally different than the past. It looks like a sheet of paper, and it’s called the iPad. It’s not about typing or clicking; it’s about touching. It’s not about text, or even animation, it’s about video. It’s not about a local disk, or even a desktop, it’s about the cloud. It’s not about pulling information; it’s about push. It’s not about repurposing old software, it’s about writing everything from scratch (because you want to take advantage of the awesome potential of the new computers and the new cloud—and because you have to reach this pinnacle). Finally, the industry is fun again.

    Last week I gave presentations to more than 60 CIOs in various meetings throughout America’s heartland. My message to them: We are moving from Cloud 1 to Cloud 2, and the iPad is the accelerator. Many of them haven’t even made it to Cloud 1—some are still on mainframes. They are working on MVS/CICS, or Lotus Notes, and they have never heard of Cocoa, or even that there is now HTML 5. This is unacceptable. The next generation is here. The iPad that shows us what now is really possible—and that we all need to go faster. Unfortunately, some CIOs would rather retire than go faster.

    Cloud 1 ————————————->Cloud 2

    Type/Click———————————->Touch
    Yahoo/Amazon—————————–>Facebook
    Tabs——————————————>Feeds
    Chat——————————————>Video
    Pull——————————————->Push
    Create—————————————->Consume
    Location Unknown————————->Location Known
    Desktop/notebook————————->Smart phone/Tablet
    Windows/Mac——————————>Cocoa/HTML 5

    What’s most exciting is that this fundamental transformation—cloud + social + iPad—will inspire a new generation of wildly innovative new apps that will change entire industries. Take health. We have all been waiting for the health application that will revolutionize how we share and communicate with our doctors, and help us make better health care decisions. The apps we have seen as first generation EHR/PHR just have not cut it, and now with ObamaCare there is no killer app to accelerate through the new EHR reimbursement program. The shift ignited by the iPad will allow the proliferation of these new missing apps, and automate the industries and professionals left behind by the last generation of technology. Now, no industry will be left behind.

    Why philanthrophy won’t fund online news

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    Sad, but true. From Reflections of a Newsosaur.

    Rick Edmonds, the estimable media economics expert at the Poynter Institute, calculated that American newspapers are spending $4.4 billion today on news-gathering, or about 29% less than the $6.2 billion that funded newsrooms as recently as 2006. That’s a drop of $1.8 billion.

    If you wanted to sustain the current level of newspaper coverage by replacing for-profit funding with non-profit dollars, the typical approach would be to raise an endowment that would be invested conservatively to produce an annual return of 5%. The investment income would be distributed each year to provide the operating budgets for non-profit news organizations.

    The endowment necessary to provide $4.4 billion in annual newsroom funding would be $88 billion. This happens to be 29% of the entire $307.7 billion contributed to charity in 2008, according to data published by the Giving USA Foundation, the non-profit arm of an organization of professional fund-raisers.

    Given the downturn in the economy since 2008, it is a safe bet that charitable donations dropped in 2009 and probably will be less than $307 billion in this year, too.

    Bill Gates gets patent on Guardian Angel

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    Hah! You think I jest? Well, look ye here at this quote from US Patent #7,689,524, granted this morning.

    An intelligent personalized agent (e.g., guardian angel) monitors and evaluates a user's environment to assist in decision-making processes on behalf of the user. Such implementation may be presented in the form of a software assisted mind amplifier. The amplifier analyzes preferences and predicts future actions based on the analysis. For example, if a user is at a shopping mall, the guardian angel can evaluate the surrounding environment with respect to the user's own attributes and preferences and determine or infer that the time of day is noon, the user has not eaten lunch, and there are no pending appointments at the moment. The guardian angel with knowledge of the user's favorite foods, last time frames for consumption of such favorite foods, and available restaurants in proximity to the user can provide directions to the nearest positively rated restaurant that serves such favorite food as well as (in the background) check for seating availability, and make a reservation (if needed). Thus, the guardian angel can, based on environment, user state, preferences, and available resources, take automated action on behalf of the user for various purposes (e.g., to compensate for memory loss, to remind a user to take medicine, to assist in social interactions by indicating whether the user has met an individual before, to gauge the appropriateness of jokes or comments given the demographics of the audience, etc.).

    Ray Ozzie and Billg are the lead patentees. The patent is, needless to say, assigned to Microsoft.

    Don’t you just love that idea of a “mind amplifier”? Boy, could I use one of them.

    Is China blowing bubbles?

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    Willem Buiter was one of my favourite bloggers. But then he left his LSE Chair to become Chief Economist at Citigroup, and disappeared behind a wall of corporate discretion. But excerpts from his Citigrou analysis reports seem to leak to the FT — as in this summary.

    The reason we [i.e. Citigroup] are quite confident that a boom, bubble and bust sequence will take place in China is simple: whenever credit conditions like those seen since late 2008 in China have presented themselves in countries where the fundamentals are strong (as they are in China today), where structural change, including financial innovation, is occurring at a frenetic pace (as it is in China today), and where the monetary, regulatory and fiscal authorities are untried and untested (as they are in China today), a boom, bubble and bust sequence has occurred. This time is unlikely to be different unless the authorities in China act differently from the authorities in China and elsewhere in the past.

    Given that experienced monetary policymakers and financial regulators in the West have failed to spot and prevent asset bubbles, the Chinese are, he argues, unlikely to be any different:

    A bubble is a manifestation of out-of-control or over-the-top economic success; you find bubbles in countries with strong fundamentals. In no major country are the fundamentals stronger, the structural change more dazzling or the policy authorities less experienced at managing a market economy than in China. We recognize that experience and familiarity with the modus operandi of a financial market economy are no guarantor of good policy. Even highly experienced monetary policymakers and financial regulators, heading institutions with a track record of decades, like the current and previous Federal Reserve Chairmen, failed to identify and prevent excessive credit growth and asset bubbles, and may indeed have contributed through their regulatory and monetary policy actions (or inaction) to the financial boom, bubble and bust that severely damaged the financial system of the US. Even so, the fact that those in charge of monetary, financial and credit management in China are operating in terra incognita increases the risk of policy errors.

    So? Expect a Chinese bust in a couple of years. Wonder what that means for the rest of us?