Coming soon to a Verizon Wireless retailer near you, the Motorola Droid Bionic!!

Since this is supposed to be a tech blog and not just about Sustainability and Green IT, I have decided to give a review of the specs for the Motorola® Droid® Bionic® .


Eight long months I have waited for this thing. Amongst all of the leaks and rumors, patiently waiting for the official release doc, my patience seems to be paying off. According to the most recent leak about the product, it will be available on September 8th. Since this is my birthday, and I’m awesome, I can see good things in the Bionic’s future.

Sustainable Home Computing

Keep Your Home Computing Green

As a soon to be married guy, my fiancé and I try to cut down on waste any way we can. We try as hard as we can to live a sustainable lifestyle. I’m sure we could do better, but every little bit counts. We recycle, we get our food from a CSA, and use reusable shopping bags, and we walk as often as the distance and weather allow wherever we need to go. I spend a lot of time on the computer at home, so I try to follow these rules to keep my home computing green.

First and foremost, shut it down when you aren’t using it. There are bunch of people out there who just leave their computers on all day long. There are so many benefits to shutting these things down. I don’t know about you but I feel the heat coming off of my laptop as we speak. In the summer time, all of these little pieces of technology running all day not only consumes power just by being on, the heat they generate can increases the amount of time your AC runs to keep your house cool. With the last few summers filled with beleaguering heat waves, the AC units all over my neighborhood are screaming their condensing little hearts out trying to keep us cool, all the while sucking pennies out of your pockets and burning up all of our natural resources. This goes for Laptops, PC’s, Monitors, Printers, phone chargers, TV’s and game consoles too.

Print Both Sides. Rough drafts for school projects and papers, coloring pages for the little ones, that novel you’ve been working on when your wife is asleep, Google Maps® directions because your GPS on your cell phone stinks. All of these things can be printed double sided. Don’t waste costly ink and paper on something that is going to just get thrown out or destroyed. Make a re-usable paper pile on top of your new paper and use that one first if you can.

Refill Your Printer Cartridges. There are a few products out there that you can use to refill your printer cartridges. Some of them are tricky, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll save a bundle on printer ink and stop all that plastic and heavy metals from entering our nations overflowing landfills.

Maintain your computers. Okay, I know it’s probably pretty small in comparison to some of the other items on my list. But the logic is sound. A few little’s make a whole lot. All of those running processes on your computer cause your computer to use more electricity. When your computer is infected with malware or a virus, there are usually background processes utilizing your computer’s hardware to

Last but not least, this one is my personal favorite…

Get outside! Leave your house! Get some fresh air and a little exercise. Go take a walk with your kids, or just ride your bike around the block. Get away from the internet for a while. I promise, we’ll all be here blogging and twittering ourselves blind as soon as you get back. I’m willing to bet the videos of those Canadian fellas turning gluttonous portions of bacon and meats into YouTube gold will be here when you get back. Go rediscover the place you live. I bet it’s a lot nicer than you think. If not, move. America is pretty awesome when you know where to look.

5 Obvious Green IT Practices

Here is a starting point. Anyone who wants to take their technology and business Green should take a look a t these 5 Green IT Practices. While some of them may not apply to you or make sense due to the nature or size of your business, there is at least one thing here that can work for your company. Have a look!

1. Reduce Power Consumption. This is perhaps the easiest to accomplish. The average worker is at their desk for 9 hours per day, 5 days a week. When their day is over, their PC’s are left on and are using energy. Utilizing applications to manage desktop power settings can save close to $60 per PC per year on energy costs. With the advancement in virtualization technologies, it is possible to reduce physical hardware necessity buy up to 65% and therefore reduce overall energy consumption. It is estimated that up to 9% of the percent of energy costs are generated by IT hardware like PC’s, Servers, switches, printers and the like.

2. Reduce Paper Waste. The average employee can waste over $80 in paper and ink per year. This is due to the unnecessary printing of email documents and websites. Implementing printer management software requiring users to be at the printer at the time the job runs through, or that prevents users from printing websites and other unnecessary item with expensive color ink can save these costly resources.

3. Buy responsibly manufactured and energy efficient hardware. Purchasing hardware that is manufactured from more environmentally friendly plastics, or containing lower levels of toxic elements like mercury, lead and cadmium creates less of a footprint and can make great strides in reducing the flow of toxic e-waste into landfills. Energy efficient hardware reduces the overall energy consumption for the life of the hardware and can save hundreds of dollars over the life of the computer.

4. Virtualization and the cloud. With the advancement of virtualization and cloud based business technologies, server hardware can be reduced by up to 65% and energy consumption can be reduced by up to 80%. This in turn reduces energy consumption and prevents tons of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere. Also, there has been a new movement towards green datacenter design that promises to reduce energy consumption even further. The EPA rates enterprise datacenters on set of criteria called Power Usage Effectiveness. PUE ratings lower than 2.0 are considered to be good for the environment. Following these guidelines, and keeping the average datacenters PUE rating below 2.0 will help make great progress towards a greener future.

5. Remote Workforce Initiatives. The average commuter travels 32 miles per day on their commute to and from the office. With the average gas mileage at around 20mpg this translates into roughly 2.9 metric tons of CO2 per employee per year. A remote workforce is a great way to reduce energy costs and usage by eliminating Desktop PC’s from the office. The reduction of hardware and electricity costs, are just the beginning. All of the computers and monitors create excess heat which can add to the energy costs of climate control within the office. Utilizing secure remote connections as well as cloud based solutions, VoIP phone systems that work anywhere you can plug in, and conference bridge lines allow for the completion of almost any business critical task.

Green IT Practice

In the last few years, there has been an enormous movement towards Greet IT practice. The advancements in virtualization technologies, energy efficient datacenter design, and cloud based solutions have provided us with an excellent springboard to reduce the environmental impact of our business technologies. The downside to the increased adoption of these technologies is the inevitable increase in corporate e-waste.

Reducing energy consumption is an important first step in Green IT practice. Calculated hardware life cycle management is critical to minimizing the flow of e-waste into our nation’s landfills. A 2008 whitepaper by IDC , Beyond Power: IT’s Roadmap to Sustainable Computing ,stresses the idea of thinking about more than energy consumption when it comes to hardware utilization. Proper and secure disposal of hardware that is no longer of use to is important in minimizing e-waste. For Example, the old workstations you phased out because your marketing department switched to a new design software that is too resource intense, may no longer be of use to you, that doesn’t make it completely useless. There are schools and non profit organizations that are strained for cash as a result of budget cuts or just the overall expense of technology. Donations to organizations like this not only stem the flow of toxic e-waste, but also can provide opportunities for better education for underprivileged children, or more opportunities for adults attempting to re-enter the workforce.

That takes care of the Environmental and Social impact of Green IT practice. What about the financial aspect of it all? When procuring new hardware, purchasing from a perspective of longevity is the best option for your bottom line. Maximizing your hardware longevity and minimizing costly data loss are both excellent arguments for Green IT practice when making your point to those who hold the purse strings.

iPass Mobile Security Report

Last night, I read the iPass Mobile Workforce Report. It was interesting and provided me with some insight as to where the smartphone market was headed. Clearly, RIM® and their dominance over the Mobile workforce, is slowly waning. iOS® and Android® usage are on the rise in both the mobile workforce and personal communications. As a result of this, new and creative security measures must be implemented to address additional security flaws that the multitude of smartphone operating systems that are available, will bring.

Companies who specialize in content filtering products should take from this that they need to investigate secure smartphone email clients utilizing the latest in encryption to insure that today’s mobile worker adheres to industry privacy standards and company data protection policy. Companies like MobileIron, based in Mountain View, California, have developed technology to secure the transmission of sensitive company data over mobile devices. MobileIron is one of the highest ranking companies in the Gartner Reports Magic Quadrant for Mobile Device Management Software.