Connected Urban Development

“Connected Urban Development (CUD) demonstrates how to reduce carbon emissions by introducing fundamental improvements in the efficiency of the urban infrastructure through information and communications technology (ICT)”
Examples
Connected Bus in San Francisco
Smart Work Centers in Amsterdam
Personal Travel Assistance in Amsterdam and Soeul
EcoMap in San Francisco

SAP Acquires Sustainability Software Company

According to the Financial Times (subs. req.), SAP is moving into the sustainability software space:

Regardless of compliance, organisations should be moving to a more sophisticated definition of what green IT entails, one that acknowledges the role IT can play in curbing emissions across the business, says Peter Graf, chief sustainability officer of enterprise software giant [...]

Q: Do I trust Google or Microsoft with my energy data?

A: Neither.
(But if the value I receive is greater than the privacy risks, then sign me up).
In the “I can do anything you can do better” home energy monitoring sweepstakes, enter Microsoft “Hohm” (beta).
Full review coming soon…

UbiGreen: Positive Feedback for Low Carbon Travel

I’ve noticed growing innovation in the “track your greenness using our hip new digital tool” space.
 

UbiGreen, presented at CHI 2009 in Boston last week, uses a small belt-mounted sensor (more gear!) for acceleration etc. This data, combined with GSM location data, is used to “semi-automatically infer transportation mode.” Greener modes yield more points, which appear [...]

ZigBee

The ZigBee Alliance is doing interesting things with a new low-power wireless standard based on the mesh concept. One use is for capturing real-time energy consumption patterns, transmitting it wirelessly to databases, and using the information about real-time consumption to enable better energy management. Here’s a deck for more details on ZigBee. Will this take [...]