IBM isn't building sensors, but it expects to see wide adoption of sensor technology that can cover an office complex or a city like a blanket. The sensors could gather information about the health of physical systems and, for instance, discover leaks in pipes by detecting changes in the environment near the pipes. Sensors in manhole covers could detect problems there as well.

Neat, right? However, for such a vision to become reality, many of those sensors will need to communicate wirelessly and have long-lived on-board stores of energy. Or put simply, batteries that are in it for the long haul. Fortunately, there's good news on that front from Michigan.

A startup called Ambiq Micro won a $27,000 grant at the Michigan Business Challenge hosted by The University of Michigan's Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies. Sure it's peanuts compared to some of the awards and funding rounds I typically cover, but this one could have a huge impact. According to Lora Kolodny at the You're the Boss blog at The New York Times:

Ambiq Micro plans to sell low-power microprocessors that could substantially extend the battery life of a range of tiny wireless devices. The start-up's technology could be used in smart credit cards, computers, sensors that control temperature or detect motion in smart homes and buildings, and a variety of medical and mobile devices.

The day may soon arrive that you can unbox a sensor, pop it into place regardless of how far its from a power source and not have to worry about it for years. Also imagine being able to turn your "vintage" digs into a futuristic smart home without paying for a costly rewiring job.

Excited yet?

Why does it matter? Obviously, updating hospitals and healthcare concerns to handle the data will be an IT-intensive effort, which might also prove to be a boon for SaaS providers and cloud computing firms that already know (or should know) a thing or two about running energy efficient data centers. The best part? Hospitals and doctor's offices stand to save a ton on paper, not just buying it, but also filing it, storing it, and eventually disposing of it.

According to the press release, below are some of the firms to watch for as the market racks up those billions. (Note the healthy sprinkling of IT companies.)

Key players profiled in the report include Agfa-Gevaert Ltd, Ascribe plc, Cambio Healthcare Systems, Cerner Corporation, CompuGROUP HOLDING AG, Computer Programs and Systems, Inc, EBIT AET S.p.A., Eclipsys Corporation, Egton Medical Information Systems Limited, Epic Systems Corporation, GE Healthcare, Hewlett Packard Company, IBA Health (Europe) Ltd, IMS MAXIMS plc, Indra Sistemas SA, iSoft Group plc, McKesson Corporation, MDS Medical Software, MedPlus, Inc, Medical Information Technology, Inc, Medasys SA, Nexus AG, Noemalife SpA, Profdoc AB, QuadraMed Corporation, SAP (UK) Limited, Siemens Medical Solutions GSD GmbH, and System C Healthcare plc, among others.

It will be interesting to see if the estimates change if and when healthcare legislation wends its way through Congress and whether records portability finally takes off.

Image Credit: Flickr user virtualis - CC

Pursuing energy efficiency strategies for the data center is often viewed as a process that takes a while to pay off. You sacrifice a little extra now, for a big return on that investment down the line. But what if you can cut costs all around in the near term?

Cindy Waxer at ComputerWorld tackles one of the rarely discussed aspects of green data center builds and retrofits: taxes. It turns out that the government (both federal and some states) provides businesses some juicy tax deductions if they outfit their facilities with energy-saving tech.

Here's one example:

Companies can claim a tax deduction of $1.80 per square foot on new or existing buildings by installing interior lighting, heating, cooling, ventilation or hot water systems that reduce a building's total energy and power costs by 50% or more.

The lesson here is to research and take advantage of those tax breaks. Combined with some utility incentives, it can lead to huge savings all around and smaller power bills for years to come. Here are some more online resources to help you get started:

• DSIRE - Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency
• Federal Tax Credits for Energy Efficiency - Business.gov (see the Tax Deductions for Commercial Buildings section)
• Tax Breaks for Businesses, Utilities, and Governments - Energy.gov (primarily renewable energy generation - i.e. solar panels, wind turbines, etc.)

NetworkWorld's Jon L. Jacobi takes FlashFire for a spin and discovers a genuinely solid little piece of software that works wonders on SSD access times. How it works exactly only the utility's author knows, but Jacobi thinks it boils down to some clever little trickery (in the best sense). He writes:

The author's wiki describes FlashFire as a ram buffer. I'm not certain of the details, but since SSDs perform at their worst when reading and writing simultaneously, my guess is that the software caches and delays writes. Delaying writes means there's a small chance for data loss or file system corruption if your system crashes before data in the buffer is written.

As with all software of this type, use it at your own risk.

Source: NetworkWorld