Green Options

The Geek Squad is partnering with IdeaFestival to promote a contest for ideas that help with e-waste, power conservation, and untapped resources. The Geek Squad is a national 24-hour computer support service that is offered by Best Buy stores around the nation.

The Idea Festival is a 3 day event from September 13-15, 2007 in Louisville, Kentucky, that gathers together leaders and thinkers across the nation to explore and celebrate innovations and ideas. [...]

Panduit Corp released a new Net-Access Server Cabinet System that features IBM’s Rear Door Heat Exchanger Water-Cooling Technology. It uses a five-inch deep cooling door that uses chilled water to dissipate heat generated from the servers. It does not utilize any other cooling system and can reduce server heat output by up to 55%.

Water cooling has existed for desktops for a while now, but has not been used in the server environment. [...]

Western Digital launched a new line of environmentally conscious hard drives on monday that can use 40% less energy. The GreenPower drives can save more than $10 per drive per year in electricity costs. WD estimates that for a datacenter with 10,000 hard drives, this can add up to $100,000 in annual energy costs and reduce CO2 emissions by 600 metric tons. Obviously, a datacenter of that size would not switch out all [...]

Global warming and saving the environmental has recently been a very hot topic in the media. It was only a matter of time before it entered the video game industry. There are plenty of games that are filled with action and violence that get attacked and get blamed when you hear about kids and violence in the news. Maybe if we hear about kids doing something good for the environment, we can contribute [...]

According to the US Department of Energy, businesses and industries consume more than twice the amount of power as residents in states such as California. As a California company of 35,000 employees, Sun Microsystems is one of those companies that play a big part in power consumption. The power consumptions from datacenters have doubled between 2000 and 2005 and many of those datacenter have Sun Microsystems servers. Sun Microsystems has realized that it has been a [...]

Shakira Performs at Live Earth: Image credit: APLive Earth officially set the record for the most simultaneous concert viewers at 30 million streams on MSN on Saturday. It was the largest global entertainment event in history with an estimated 2 billion attending the events on 7 continents and 10,000 affiliated events. Having the technology of live streaming video has allowed the event to be easily accessible to people who can choose to watch [...]

There is a new generation of super-thin displays that produce sharper images using less power. Organic light-emiting diode (LOED) screens use more than 40% less power than a LCD display and are also twice as thin, since they do not need backlighting (they glow on their own). Currently, Samsung Electronics and Kyocera are already using this technology for music players and mobile phones. Sony will soon be selling OLED in Japan as early as 2008: [...]

Editor's note: Yes, we're bringing on the new writers! Alex Ho is the latest to join the group. Alex blogs regularly at Generation Exe, and lives in the Bay Area. He'll be covering the green tech field for us. The BMW Hydrogen 7 Series Sedan is not currently available for purchase, but I am sure it will be eventually. It has started a limited production run and will currently only be [...]