Teblog

A desirable and practical digital book?

Nothing is more satisfying, nor more wasteful of resources, than printing out some of the pdfs that land on my digital mat. Yet, if I'm to work on a train, I'll quite often set the printer going while I hop in the shower. There's no way I'm going to sit on the train with a laptop, squinting through the reflections, worrying about battery life and the remote possibility of being mugged. Remote because my laptop is definitely not at the sexy end of the spectrum.

Guilt-filled train trips are part of my life. Yet, I could change things at a stroke were I prepared to fork out a couple of hundred quid for a Sony PRS-505 electronic book reader when it hits the shelves - allegedly in September. Users of the existing model can upgrade their software from Sony and have the pleasure today. By the way, Macintosh users are out of luck, it only couples to Windows PCs

The new machine can hold the equivalent of 160 books. Many more if you add a memory stick or SD card. The device uses digital ink which is bi-stable and requires no energy to retain its state. Sony reckons you can turn 6,800 pages on a single charge. The screen is reflective, rather than back-lit, so can be read in normal book-reading conditions. The device is thinner and shorter than a paperback, but about the same width. The reading area is six inches diagonal with a display resolution of 170 pixels per inch showing eight levels of grey. Controls range along the bottom and down the right hand side and it comes in a tan leather-look cover. Very nice.

After a few false starts with copy protection schemes and lock-in to Sony formats, the company has announced that it now supports a variety of publishing standards: EPUB, BBeB, Adobe PDF, Word, txt, rtf, jpeg, gif, png, bmp and, for audio, MP3 and AAC. Both secured and unsecured formats are handled properly.

Most business readers are going to be very happy with the idea of reading native Word and pdf documents and, perhaps, playing their favourite music while reading. And, apparently, text-based Adobe documents can be reflowed to render them more readable. If, as I suspect, this means no more stupid columns of text then I will be thrilled beyond measure. Pictures get pushed to the end of the text, apparently, so it rather depends on the document whether you'd actually want to reflow. (Scientific papers and, probably, research reports would fall into this category.)

Noticing that Adobe Digital Editions is needed for getting Adobe eBooks onto the device, I installed a copy and what I saw pleased me very much. I could create libraries and folders and bookmark documents, as well as read them without any browser clutter. And, importantly for me, I could still select and copy text to the clipboard. (From whence it is collected by some software that I publish as a mad hobby - I'm not here to promote it, so no names and no links.) Digital Editions is now my PDF reader of choice on the PC. All the PDFs I need are now instantly on tap in the library - complete with mini preview icons. And they're ready for transferring to the PRS-505, assuming I take the plunge.

I'm sure there's a huge environmental angle to all this. The device is a low consumer of energy. My printer would become more or less redundant. All those pdfs can stay in digital form until I lose interest. And, instead of buying printed books, I can get the 'dematerialised' versions instead (yes, I've checked the availability of some favourite authors).

It might take a while to compensate for the embedded environmental cost so it's best to resist getting an upgrade until you've found a genuinely appreciative home for your cast-off, thus extending its life and salving your conscience.

A breath of fresh air. Eventually.

Many companies have spoken to me of their ambitions to become carbon neutral by some date - usually long into the future. Others talk of cutting or offsetting their C02 emissions in a shorter timescale.

While admirable in their intent, closer examination reveals that they are working to different criteria. They may choose a different base year. They may restrict their emissions by product or division. They may choose to ignore 'embedded' environmental damage caused by the mining, manufacture and delivery of the components they use. They might conveniently forget the in-use related emissions or ignore the end-of-life consequences.

Governments trumpet this that and the other ambitions for cutting greenhouse gases and they have plans to impose penalties and rewards based on the behaviour of large companies. But they stick to what they think they can (persuade others to) measure. And that, conveniently, is carbon, as I've mentioned before. (Sorry.)

What I want to concentrate on here is where the edge of policy lies. When the Carbon Reduction Commitment regulations arrive in 2010, the top 5,000 or so companies will be obliged to account for their direct and indirect emissions (from supplied energy). So all the accounting applies to what happens within the organisation. A company could theoretically dodge penalties by offshoring or selling off the nasty bits of its operations. But, given that the aim is to improve the earth's climate, this won't make a blind bit of difference. Indeed, if manufacture is 'offshored' then additional carbon (etc) costs will be incurred through transportation.

Once again, I feel I should make it clear that reducing humanity's impact on the environment is a good thing, quite regardless of whether or not we are actually the cause of climate change. There's no point in challenging the carbon orthodoxy, but there's nothing wrong with pointing out the narrowness of its vision and the timidity of its targets. Think of camels and committees.

Fundamentally, I'm suggesting that we accept the regulations but we don't treat them as gospel. If all we do is conform to the obligations set down, then the world is likely to become a much worse place in environmental terms. The difficulty lies in knowing quite what to do for the best.

Recently, someone at Vodafone was talking about teenagers and young adults changing their mobile phone handsets up to three times a year. They don't think about embedded carbon. Fashion is far more important. At the same meeting, someone made the astonishing assertion that Formula One motor racing is 'carbon neutral'.

A mobile phone shop might claim a clean environmental record based on its operations, quite ignoring how the stuff they sell came into being. Or, indeed, where it goes to at the end of its life. Max Moseley has been getting a lot of press lately, but not much with respect to his reforestation initiative in Mexico, something he kicked off in 1995, in close cooperation with Edinburgh University. The FIA Foundation's news archive from 2002 states that it, "offsets all the carbon dioxide emissions from racing cars in the Formula 1 and World Rally Championship series."

In an excellent guide for businesses called 'Getting to Zero', written by Clean Air - Cool Planet and the Forum for the Future, the authors state: "it seems unlikely that carbon-intensive activities such as Formula 1 motor racing can ever credibly claim neutrality." Interesting that it slipped the word 'credibly' in there. And, to be fair, the FIA does not trumpet its neutrality, even if (judging from press coverage) it once used to. This is probably because offsetting is perceived by many as a kind of cheating. For organisations which are serious about genuinely improving the environment, offsetting is seen as a measure of last resort. But, there again, if a business like Formula One has to continue, offsetting is infinitely better than doing nothing at all.

Sticking with Formula One, it would be nice to think that all the teams' private transport between events is included. But what about all the people who drive to these events? Not to mention the masses of non-team suppliers and support services. I have no idea what's included in the offset calculations.

And this seems to be a general problem, not just for Formula One. Where does accountability end? Where should it end? The 'Getting to Zero' report offers some good answers and plenty of food for thought. It refers to the three types of greenhouse gas emission: Scope 1 is the onsite stuff - direct emissions from company-owned or controlled sources; Scope 2 is indirect emissions, caused by the generation of electricity consumed (actually, it can include other energy sources); Scope 3 includes other indirect emissions resulting from the company's activities. This stretches upstream to the production, processing and transport of raw materials. It extends corporate emissions to include business travel, employee commuting and outsourced corporate support services. And it includes downstream emissions in distribution, retail, product use and product disposal.

Currently, most concerned companies set their responsibility boundary around the Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, with the addition of business travel from Scope 3. To strive for genuine neutrality, organisations would need to take all of Scope 3 into account. And, in the public eye, this is what they will be measured by rather than by their ability to meet regulatory obligations. If, as so many companies claim, they really want to address climate change, this is the only honest way to do it.

No-one's making out it's easy, but the 'zero' guide is a good place to start.

R. Todd Stephens on Enterprise 2.0

Sometimes it's easy to be overwhelmed by new ways of working. Enterprise 2.0, for example, has crept up on us over the past few years. Those who've tracked it from the start have something of an advantage in that they pretty much know what all the elements and issues are. Anyone coming to it cold might find themselves misled by evangelists or confused by the propellor-heads.

It's not easy to get on top of things and see all the elements in a sensible perspective. Three cheers then for R. Todd Stephens who is Senior Technical Architect of Collaboration and Online Services for the AT&T Corporation. He has been involved in corporate IT for 25 years with a high focus on enterprise information management since 1999. He has produced an Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint, a chart which can act as a checklist for all the elements of Web 2.0 for the enterprise.

Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint (click chart to get download)

The chart totally avoids product names, with the sole exception of 'Office', but even that is a functional description rather than an explicit plug for Microsoft. The chart is in five columns: Business Drivers (for investing in Web 2.0 technology); Actors (the people involved); Technologies (and related technologies); Methods (how the technologies are used); and Value-Add (to the employee, the department and the business).

The chart is enterprise-centric, in the sense that the final column doesn't mention value to customers. Or, for that matter, suppliers. Mentions of clients and customers are dotted around the chart, so it's not as if they're being ignored. But such an extension to the Value-Add column might help stimulate more consideration of who the business exists to serve.

Clues do exist in the minutiae of the chart. Sub-boxes contain items like Education, Training, Consulting, Self service and so on, but you sense that these are primarily seen as revenue or cost-saving opportunities. A box for 'Customers' has 'Consumers' and 'Producers' as sub-boxes. Quite often customers have their own forums where they help each other out. It costs the enterprise very little but is a tremendous value-add for the customers. But then again, you could argue that this drops the support costs for the company.

Perhaps I need to wake up to the fact that value-add for customers will nearly always brings a reciprocal benefit for the company.

The good thing about this chart is that it is pretty comprehensive in terms of identifying all the Web 2.0 elements and shows how they fit into an organisation's activities. While setting up an 'under the radar' blog, wiki, IM or whatever is a trivial exercise, to derive real business value someone somewhere has to look at the bigger picture and figure out how to turn skunk works initiatives into corporate processes while retaining the spirit that made them attractive in the first place.

I think it was Napoleon or Nelson who used to toss a coin when faced with difficult decisions. If, when the coin landed, he was disappointed with the outcome, he'd go with his instincts. A chart like this is similar. Without it, you'd be trying to make this stuff up. With it, you have a framework and if any of it jars, just alter it or extend it.

IMHO it makes a fine starting point.

Sustainability winner: SOAK

I'm not totally sold on the Microsoft environmental story (hint: lifecycle costs of replacing kit) but you have to take your hat off to the company for selecting the theme 'a world where technology enables a sustainable environment' for its 2008 Imagine Cup for students. The winners were announced this week and one of them, an Australian team from four universities, came up with project SOAK - a way of managing farm water resources using, of course, Microsoft software.

SOAK, by the way, stands for Smart Operational Agriculture toolKit). It contains no particularly original components, but they've all been put together in an innovative way - a mashup of hardware and software to eke out water resources.

When IT, or ICT really, is allowed to be part of 'real life' like this, then all manner of things become possible and I think that many organisations forget this. Many still regard ICT as a bit of a pain rather than a potential partner in solving environmental issues.

Anyway, enough of that, let's get back to SOAK. It amalgamates information from a number of sources such as ground moisture, water supplies, rain, wind, temperature and weather forecasts and uses this to fine tune the crop irrigation. It means that the crops usually get the just the water they need. SMS messages can alert farm managers of problems and the whole farm can be monitored through a good-looking web-based control panel which combines Virtual Earth displays with statistical information. This can be viewed through a PC or a PDA.

With almost drought conditions, Australian farmers suffered a 59 percent drop in yield last summer, despite irrigation taking some 66 percent of the country's water. The SOAK team chose their project well and it's highly likely to move rapidly to commercialisation.

Because the team members (Long Zheng, David Burela, Edward Hooper and Dimaz Pramudya) were studying at different universities, they kept in touch largely electronically. Practical as well as green. And, judging from their email addresses, they weren't totally in Microsoft's thrall. If you want to sense the excitement, take a look at David Burela's Twitter page. Or, if you want more project details, try this blog post.

These guys are on a roll. Well done Microsoft for choosing such a great subject. And well done guys for winning the software category.

[BTW: a Singaporean team won top honours for  Embedded Development and Brazil for Game Development.]

How ICT can help broad environmental initiatives

For some time, I've been banging on about the opportunities for ICT to improve the environmental performance of organisations, even if it results in more energy use by the data centre. The whole point is leverage. It's like spending a few hundred pounds on new tyres to avoid an expensive accident. Probably a lousy analogy, but it's enough to introduce a report called The potential global CO2 reductions from ICT use. The subtitle is 'Identifying and assessing the opportunities to reduce the first billion tonnes of CO2'.

If that sounds dull as ditchwater to you, then all you need to know is that ICT, instead of being that perceived gobbler of ludicrous amounts of energy, can help us turn things around and save even more energy elsewhere. In fact, the report identifies and explains ten areas of solid opportunity. It looks at both savings and side effects, not all of which are good. But, in general, the good outweighs the bad, usually by a substantial margin.

The ten areas covered are: Smart city planning; Smart buildings; Smart appliances; Dematerialisation services; Smart industry; I-optimisation; Smart grid; Integrated renewable solutions; Smart work; and Intelligent transport. If, like me, you're puzzled by I-optimisation, it's about designing production plants.

The report was written by Ecofys for the World Wildlife Fund and was sponsored by Hewlett Packard. Ecofys made a substantial contribution (eleven authors) to the report from the IPCC which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

This kind of backdrop made me nervous. Will HP force an IT industry view on the content? Will the authors be 'right on' environmentalists? Apart from a bit of a plug for HP's Halo teleconferencing, I've not read anything so far that makes me uneasy. Apart, of course from the obsession with greenhouse gases, and CO2 in particular. Judging from our (Freeform Dynamics) research, as long as environmental action improves operating margins and helps conform to upcoming regulations, then what's not to like?

The report (which, I confess, I'm still only two thirds of the way through) comments on, and draws from, all the important literature on the subject. It highlights the gaps in our knowledge, of which there are many. And it offers us an extensible taxonomony which will enable us to discuss and compare our information on the subject in a mutually comprehensible way. It also provides a number of tables for each application area with anticipated impacts under different scenarios. Where the future is concerned, some of it has to be of the best/worst/middle estimate variety. But, without question, this sort of thing provides a good framework for thinking about the issues clearly. And, indeed, for mapping what will probably be a growing body of ever more detailed knowledge on the subject.

Existing information ranges from the anecdotal to the specific. But each has its place - too much detail would be unwelcome if 'raising awareness' but vital if being used to set government policy. The report notes that most of the material (although not all - there's some good stuff from China) relates to the developed economies. Yet, many of the challenges and, indeed, the opportunities, lie in the developing economies. Cleverly-designed buildings can achieve zero or even a negative operational carbon footprint. But, of course, the construction materials cannot be side-stepped and both steel and concrete happen to be notorious contributors to CO2 emissions.

I have to say that at one point, I thought the report did go into la-la land. It started speculating about a future possibility of private cars doubling up as public transport. Can you imagine the issues: public liability insurance, the nightmare of an accident, the danger of predatory drivers or predatory ride-seekers for that matter? I'll put that one down as a 'no', no matter how environmentally desirable.

Having said that, this was the only time thus far that I felt the report veered away from a pragmatic assessment of the possibilities that face us.

Anyone who has to consider environmental issues in the context of ICT will find this report helpful. It provides a baseline for thinking about how ICT can help organisations achieve their fiscal and regulatory obligations at the very least. We know from our research that staff will generally welcome such measures, a potential PR benefit exists in the short term and shareholder benefit in the longer term. And all this with an environmental by-product.

I think these authors have done a fine job of parsing the current state of our knowledge into identifiable and potentially measurable components. Were we to forget our knee-jerk instincts to reject NIH (Not Invented Here) and accept this as a basis for future discussion, it will have served its purpose and raised the level of debate.