consumption
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Renewable energy is on the rise, but so is demand for fossil fuels
Recent reports from major climate organizations are painting a very mixed picture for the future of global energy use. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) says that renewable energy now forms one-third of the world's total energy capacity -- its highest level ever -- but at the same time, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that energy demand is growing at the fastest pace this decade, and fossil fuels are leading the charge.
Tesla trumps Audi and Jaguar EVs in independent efficiency test
Tesla has had no end of production troubles in recent times. Even the roll-out of the Model 3 in Europe was marred by logistical issues. But there's a reason its EVs are still so widely-lauded despite these challenges: they're efficient. And that efficiency in comparison to Tesla's competitors has now been confirmed in a test conducted by German electric car rental company nextmove.
Court rules accessing smart meter data constitutes a government search
Smart meters are designed to reduce energy consumption, lower household bills and, by extension, help the planet along a little bit. But could they also be used by the government to spy on you? This is the question that was thrown into the spotlight this week when the Seventh Circuit handed down a landmark opinion ruling, stating that data collected by smart meters is protected by the Fourth Amendment.
Japan to reduce rare earth consumption in response to China's export controls
Japan took another step toward lessening its rare earths dependence today, announcing plans to drastically reduce consumption levels in response to China's continued market dominance. Of particular concern to the Japanese government is dysprosium -- a rare earth used in the production of high-powered magnets. China, which accounts for about 95 percent of the world's rare earth supply, has been tightening export controls on the metal in recent months, sending global prices skyward. With its domestic supplies dwindling, Japan has now committed to reducing its dysprosium consumption by 30 percent over the next few years, as part of a $65 million initiative. Much of that money will presumably go toward helping manufacturers develop alternative production and recycling methods, as some already have. Toyota, for instance, has found a way to produce hybrid and electric vehicles without using dysprosium, while Mitsubishi, Panasonic and TDK are currently looking at ways to extract the metal from old air conditioners. If effective, the government's program would reduce domestic consumption by between 200 and 400 tonnes per year.
Russian carrier gives $5,000 vacation to its most data hungry customer
Use more data, win more prizes. It may sound counterintuitive, but that's exactly what Russian operator MegaFon is offering to its subscribers, as part of a curious 3G promotion. It all began back in November, when the provider announced a rather straightforward contest: customers who downloaded the most data with their 3G modems would be awarded prizes worth up to one million rubles (about $33,000), including a $5,000 vacation. According to Russian news site C News, MegaFon launched the campaign in order to showcase the expanse of its data network, which apparently covers more than 80 percent of northwestern Russia and offers speeds of up to 21Mbps. The promotion came to an official close on January 31st, with the coronation of a lucky winner who, over the course of a single week, managed to scarf down 419GB of data on the company's 3G network. MegaFon didn't offer usage statistics on the second and third place winners, nor did it say what they won for their efforts, if you wanna call them that.
iOS app Viggle trying to turn second screen TV watching into cold, hard cash
I've posted about the "second screen" idea before -- there is a growing trend among iOS and other mobile device users to both watch television or play games, and have their tablets or iPhones open and running apps related to that TV or gaming content, essentially using two screens at the same time. Viggle is another new app that is apparently going after that user, according to this article in the Denver Post, but with a new twist: They want to allow users to earn money by watching television. As you might imagine, the math doesn't quite work out yet; at Viggle's current rates, you'd need to watch a few days worth of television to earn just one $5 gift card. But Viggle's real potential is in the "check-in" aspect -- the app is also working on ways for users to "check-in" to the TV shows they're watching, and participate in promotions like earning a certain bonus for watching a certain show, or more bonuses for various ads. Now, Viggle's method of going about this seems a little shifty (you earn points that can be redeemed for deals), but I could definitely see a company working along these lines and creating sort of a Foursquare for media -- checking in whenever you happen to be watching or listening to something, and getting associated badges, deals, or whatever other offers on display for doing so. In fact, some apps like Dijit are aggressively pursuing a more social viewing experience. Viggle isn't quite out yet, and we'll have to watch and see how it does, but there's definitely lots of potential in the realm of apps that work in conjunction with and support the consumption of other media.
Fujitsu, SuVolta push SRAM to its efficiency limits, demo 0.425 volt chip
Get the power requirements down for your next generation of RAM and you can have a raise in your allowance. For the perfect example of two companies that learned to play nice together and deserve a little something extra, Fujitsu Semiconductor and SuVolta today announced the successful demonstration of their ultra-low-voltage SRAM blocks at the International Electron Devices Meeting in Washington, DC. The new SRAM, which sips a mere 0.425 volts (nearly half that of previous chips), uses SuVolta's PowerShrink CMOS platform with Fujitsu's energy-efficient process technology. The companies showed that a 576Kb block of SRAM can run at just 0.4 volts by cutting its CMOS transistor threshold voltage variation in half. It's all very technical and, speaking of which, you'll find all those science-y details and diagrams in the PR after the break. Now, whip us up a crucial component that sips half the power it used to and you'll get a boost in your allowance and an approving tussle of the hair.
LG panel puts LEDs along a single edge, achieves more nits with fewer watts
Confining LEDs to the edges of an LCD TV cuts its energy consumption, particularly if you can get away with just lighting up one or two edges instead of all four. LG claims its latest Full HD 47-inch panel is the "world's most energy efficient," using a single vertical edge backlight to achieve 400 nits of brightness with just 28W of power -- less than any other HDTV bigger than 40-inches and even less than many 20-inch PC monitors. That's all good so long as there's no head-lighting or other tell-tale signs when the panel built into a final product. We hope for LG's sake that the washed out right side on the picture above is due to burning rubber. Full PR after the break.
Mobile apps leaving the web behind in usage
Mobile ad company Flurry has released a new analysis on its official blog stating that customers are making the transition lately from using the mobile web to spending more of their daily time in mobile apps. In the early days of smartphone prominence (and by "early days," we mean about three years ago), the main feature on mobile phones was the web. You could check email, look up web pages, or browse the web on your smartphone, and that's how most people used them. Since the rise of iOS, however, mobile apps are picking up that time spent. And as you can see from the chart above, customers are now putting more time into mobile apps (about 9 percent more, it turns out) than browsing the mobile web. It should be noted that both stats are still growing -- customers are spending more time on mobile phones than ever. But mobile app usage is growing even faster. It's not hard to see why this is, either. Mobile apps are maturing quickly, and it's easier to get information from many of them now than it was just browsing around the web. Mobile apps also offer features like offline access and other things that the web doesn't, so this shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone.
EnerJ power-saving system prioritizes CPU voltage, may reduce energy consumption by 90 percent
It takes a lot of energy for computing systems or data centers to patch up critical errors, but what if we devoted less power to fixing less urgent issues? That's the basic idea behind EnerJ -- a new power-saving system that could cut a chip's energy consumption by 90 percent, simply by prioritizing critical problems over those that are less threatening. Unlike, say, liquid cooling techniques, the University of Washington's framework focuses exclusively on the programming side of the equation and revolves around two interlocking pieces of code: one that handles crucial, precision-based tasks (e.g., password encryption), and another designed to deal with processes that can continue to function, even when facing small errors. The system's software would separate the two codes, meaning that energy from one section of the chip would never be used to fix a major problem that the other should address, while allowing engineers to more efficiently allocate voltage to each region. The system has already cut energy usage by up to 50 percent in lab simulations, but researchers think the 90 percent threshold is well within their reach, with computer engineering professor Luis Ceze (pictured above) predicting that the system may even be able to increase battery life by a factor of ten. The team is hoping to release EnerJ as an open-source tool this summer, but for now, you can find more information in the PR after the break.
Our annual data consumption estimated at 9.57 zettabytes or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
The internet is a mighty big place that's only growing larger each day. That makes it a perfectly unwieldy thing to measure, but the traffic it generates has nonetheless been subjected to a rigorous estimation project by a group of UC San Diego academics. Their findings, published online this month, reveal that in 2008 some 9.57 zettabytes made their way in and out of servers across the globe. Some data bits, such as an email passing through multiple servers, might be counted more than once in their accounting, but the overall result is still considered an under-estimation because it doesn't address privately built servers, such as those Google, Microsoft and others run in their backyards. On a per-worker basis (using a 3.18 billion human workforce number), all this data consumption amounts to 12GB daily or around 3TB per year. So it seems that while we might not have yet reached the bliss of the paperless office, we're guzzling down data as if we were. Check out the report below for fuller details on the study and its methodology.
Bloom Electrons' pay-what-you-consume service thinks outside the Box
Bloom Energy's aptly-titled Bloom Box made a splash last year with much hooplah, bringing the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Colin Powell to its unveiling. But while the promise of efficient fuel cell technology is great for the eco-minded and even the long-term penny-pincher, the mid-to-high six-figure upfront cost limits the potential customer base to only the upper echelon of the environmentally conscious. Cue Bloom Electrons -- instead of paying for the Bloom Boxes and owning them outright, you can lease a 2MW installation for no money down and pay only for the electrons you use. A 10-year contract is required, which yes does put your smartphone commitment to shame, but Bloom hopes this Credit Suisse / Silicon Valley Bank-backed plan opens the door for educational institutions and non-profits to join in on the fun. Press release after the break.
TUAW's Daily App: Times for iPad
We posted about Times way back in April of last year. Back then, it was an RSS reader for Mac that organized your feeds into a newspaper-style page, so you could quickly and easily scan and browse a lot of information. Nowadays, of course, the iPad is one of the main devices for consumption of online content, and the team at Acrylic has finally brought that reader over to Apple's tablet (and the 2.0 Mac version is due out soon as well). It doesn't hurt, I'm sure, that apps like Flipboard have made it cool to consume RSS content in a programmatically designed form again. Times is pretty smooth, as you can see on the website. It will seamlessly bring in content from all of your feeds, as well as Facebook and Twitter, and organize them all in an easy to read newspaper/blog format. Unfortunately, it doesn't sync up with the Mac version (or any other readers that you may already have set up), so you'll probably have to rebuild whatever group of feeds you're already reading. And personally, I have the same problem with this that I have with all of these "nice" feed readers; it's cool to see your feeds all prettied up and formatted, but sometimes I just want to make sure that I see important news or hit a certain site first. But that's not the kind of reading you'd do with an app like this anyway. (Since I write for TUAW, a lot of my RSS reading is systematically combing for interesting stories and posts.) As a simple iPad reader that makes multiple feeds pretty and easy to read, Times for iPad is worth checking out if you haven't landed on a good solution yet. It's US $7.99 on the App Store right now.
Microsoft partners with Blue Line Innovation for Hohm-compatible monitoring device, we go hands-on
Microsoft's Hohm service has been going wild on the internets for just over a year, letting people who have signed on with partner utility companies to track their usage straight from the source. But, if you didn't find yourself in one of the 4.5 million homes currently covered by one of those utilities you were stuck counting electrons on your own. No more. Blue Line Innovations has launched its $249 Power Cost Monitor WiFi Edition with the ability to feed directly to Hohm, and we have all the details, plus some early impressions, after the break. %Gallery-98265%
Futurama critiques modern gadget and social media obsession using 1950s technology (video)
Like gadgets? Ever stand in line for one or over-consume just to slake your obsession? Yeah, us too. Then prepare for a humorous yet brutal look at yourselves, and the impact of your lifestyle, in the newest Futurama episode that aired tonight on Comedy Central television. We suggest curling up into a protective fetal position before clicking through for the video scraps. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Yahoo!: iPad users skew male and middle-aged
Yahoo!'s mobile blog has shared some interesting demographic data about the iPad users they've seen so far. Some of the results are unsurprising. Given that the iPad is still in its youthful days, the users tend to match the typical early adopter profile: male, older, and wealthy enough to afford and use a cutting-edge piece of consumer technology. Compared to the average Yahoo! user, iPad users on Yahoo! skew higher in the 30-54 age range, peaking between 35 and 44. In terms of interests, Yahoo! notices that iPad users on its sites go for Flickr more than anything else, which they say lines up with the iPad as a content consumption device. The Finance, News, and Sports sites also got more traffic than the rest of the network (which, again, makes sense with a male 30-54 audience). And Yahoo! also finds that many iPad users also have iPhones -- nearly half of them had visited Yahoo! with an iPhone previously. They're also finding that even though international users are getting the iPad late, a good portion of them didn't bother waiting -- 10% of traffic from the iPad audience comes from overseas. Interesting. Of course, this is only looking at those iPad users who have visited Yahoo! sites, and certainly these numbers are probably a little different from the iPad's audience in general. But as a pretty large cross-section, these numbers mostly match up to expectations. [via Techmeme]
Study finds Americans consume 34 gigabytes of information per day
Well, it's a good thing life comes with an unlimited data plan, as a recent study conducted by the University of California, San Diego has found that Americans consume plenty of gigabytes in the average day. Thirty-four gigabytes, to be specific, which translates to a grand total of of 3.6 zettabytes of information consumed by American households in 2008 (or 3.6 billion trillion bytes). Of course, that doesn't just consist of gigabytes "consumed" the traditional way, but instead encompasses everything from TV (still the leader by a wide margin) to phone calls to newspapers. In terms of time, the study found that Americans spent about 11.8 hours a day consuming information in one way or another, the majority of which was spent staring at a screen of some sort -- and, yes, they did take HD content into account, but its growth apparently hasn't yet resulted in a huge jump in data consumption.
TWC moves consumption-based internet billing to more markets
No, folks -- this is no prank. Time Warner Cable really is throwing caution (and public opinion) to the wind and moving forward with its evil consumption-based internet billing. If you'll recall, we heard that the operator was trialing the method -- which imposes premium rates on big broadband users -- back in early 2008, but now it seems it's quietly hoping to roll it out into more major markets. Starting this month, TWC will start gathering information on its customers' internet use in Austin, TX, San Antonio, TX, Rochester, NY and Greensboro, NC; if all goes "well," consumption billing will hit those markets this summer or sooner. We'll point you to the read link if you're interested in just how outrageous these capped plans look (particularly for internet TV viewers), but we'd be remiss of our duties if we didn't share this gem of a quote from TWC CEO Glenn Britt: "We made a mistake early on by not defining our business based on the consumption dimension." Thanks for clarifying, Glenn-o.[Thanks Kevin, image courtesy of Corbis]
Will mobile carriers charge different rates for data during peak / off-peak times?
Yes friends, your worst nightmare could indeed come true. With companies looking for every last way to nickle and dime their few remaining loyal customers, it's now being suggested that mobile operators could start charging different rates for mobile data depending on the time of day. And, let's face it, it makes total sense in a sick, sadistic way. Reportedly, carriers will soon start having a tough time keeping up with all the data-using cellphone and laptop owners, with the latter crew obviously causing the greatest strain on existing networks. A mocoNews report suggests three main ways of dealing with the uptick in demand: 1) keep building out the network and burning cash, 2) using new technology (read: LTE) with more capacity or 3) create rate plans that discourage usage during peak times. We've always heard that history repeats itself, but we'd be just fine with never hearing the words "peak time" ever again.
Making/Money: Economic Equilibrium is MIA
When I first started playing MMOs I was in college. I'd bounced from major to major but ultimately settled on Economics (from a starting point of Medieval and Renaissance Studies - how'd that happen?). Like other economists in games like EverQuest and Ultima Online, I was thrilled to find a lively economy and interested to apply classical economic models in the study of it. The most basic of these models is the typical supply and demand curve. Any economic model starts with price and quantity. The higher the price, the more suppliers want to sell but the less consumers want to buy. As the price decreases, more consumers are interested in purchasing, but fewer suppliers are able to produce profitably. In theory, there is a magical level in the middle where supply and demand meet. That is equilibrium (see graph). What I have since found, which is furiously debated by other economists in the field, is that the typical supply and demand curves do not fit well with the economies of most MMORPGs these days. Depending on the game, add-ons used, and availability of additional market data, there may be sort of invisible caps to the price, and thereby the quantities, of goods traded. Furthermore, auction house fees and vendor sales act much in the same way as taxes or subsidies in real world economies.
