Posts Tagged ‘energy consumption’

Ever wanted to track your energy consumption? Well, Whirlpool and Direct Energy might have the answer with that.

In a test going out to 40 homes, energy retailer Direct Energy will test how these Appliances will save and how consumers react. The system will automatically figure out how to manage the devices.

Andy McCaskey talks with Whirlpool about this pilot project and how the system works. Using the Zigbee network, the appliances will talk with each other. The test is being run this year and the system will be launched in stores by 2011.

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It’s that time of year again. The 3rd annual Geekazine yearly predictions are coming in. People are letting me know what they think will happen in 2010, along with my thoughts.

But before we get to 2010, we want to see how well we did for 2009. So here it is: Last years’ predictions and what actually happened.

Green Technology –Green IT will continue to be a focus for the enterprise, not only because of green issues, but also because of the cost of power. For the first time, businesses are really looking at their energy consumption and examining where they consume energy in the network. To reduce energy costs, enterprises will focus on virtualization in the data center and on Power Efficient Ethernet (PEE).

Metroethernet in WAN – We will see a move to metroethernet and managed services. This is already happening in EMEA but we will see the trend develop in North America. Service providers will have to look at how to generate revenue. In addition, the bandwidth scaling required by video,  SaaS, and cloud computing will drive organizations to demand new access solutions to enable these transformational technologies to be used effectively.

Social Systems in the Workplace – The adoption of IM and presence is opening the door to more social networking to enter the workplace.  Technologies once thought of in the “play” space such as virtual environments will begin to see adoption into the “work” world.  As the requirements for user acceptance are different, these new iterations of social technologies will be optimized for the work world.

- Phil Edholm, CTO Nortel’s Enterprise Networks group

Phil kept things general, and although the Green Technology is continually happening, I don’t think we reached the Metroethernet nor the Workplace Social Systems just yet. They are still in infancy, so these things will be true eventually. For now, we sit and wait.

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In Part 1, we looked at last years predictions. The numbers weren’t too shabby. This year, we’ve expanded the list to anyone that wanted to contribute. And Contributions I did get. 250 of them.

I spent most of Friday night and subsequent morning filtering the list to a couple pages worth of information. We have CEO’s, CTO’s, Marketers, Podcasters and even a Psychic helping us with this years list.

Of course at the end of the list I will be adding my 2 cents worth for 2009 on Page 2.  So without any further ado, let’s get started.

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