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But there’s one solution to the climate crisis that we don’t need to wait for — energy efficiency.
The opportunity is enormous: A 2009 McKinsey report estimates that by 2020, the United States could reduce its annual energy consumption by 23 percent through energy efficiency measures alone.
This would cut greenhouse gas emissions by over a gigaton — that’s a billion tons — and cumulatively save companies and consumers over a trillion dollars.
Energy efficiency is doable right now, it’s cost-effective, and it’s absolutely critical to slowing climate change. But it’s not happening fast enough. To truly take energy efficiency to scale, we need a national movement that captures the imagination of people from dorm rooms to boardrooms across the country.
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As a result, in three to five years, there will be a second big enterprise IT migration from private to public infrastructures.
Don't believe everything you hear about private clouds. Just because you've finally fixed IT doesn't make you a long-term cloud computing provider. Plan accordingly.
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Private clouds are better than nothing but an investment in a private cloud is an investment in a temporary fix that will only slow the path to the final destination: shared clouds. A decision to go with a private cloud is a decision to run lower utilization levels, consume more power, be less efficient environmentally, and to run higher costs.
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Pictured below is Georgina Teye. She sells plastic housewares — baskets, bowls, mugs and the like — at an outdoor market in Somanya, Ghana. She'd like to install solar-powered lanterns at her shop, which is also her home, so that she can remain open later and so that her three children can study at night.
I'm loaning her $100.
I made the loan through a startup nonprofit called Energy in Common.
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It’s no secret that Google has been ramping up its enterprise offerings. The company has made a strong push for the adoption of Google Apps, launching the Apps Marketplace, allowing Apps users to add other layers to their environments from companies like Socialwok and Zoho. Today, Google is taking it one step further. At Google I/O today, the search giant has announced that Google App Engine, a platform for building and hosting web applications in the cloud, will now include a Business version, catered towards enterprises. The new premium version allows customers to build their own business apps on Google’s cloud infrastructure. Google is also announcing a collaboration with VMware for deployment and development of apps on the new cloud infrastructure.
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A group of investors argued heatedly about the value of open versus closed technology on a panel today at Google’s I/O conference in San Francisco. Dave McClure (pictured), a partner at Founders Fund, kicked things off with a provocative statement: “Open is for losers.”
McClure was answering a question from moderator Dick Costolo of Twitter, who noted that one of the big values celebrated in the tech community is openness, yet one of the hottest platforms, the iPhone, is completely controlled by Apple. In fact, McClure couched his answer by saying he was “channeling Steve Jobs.” He said that it’s important to have open standards as a foundation for technologies, but after that, proprietary technology motivates people to pursue “cool products and cool ideas.”
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