Results tagged “cell phone”

Whoo-hoo! The lower-case "eco," capitalized everything else trend is finally taking off!

This ecoATM takes your old cell and gives you store credit for your troubles. Simple! The first ecoATM went to a furniture store in Omaha and things appear to be going great so far. According to the Twitter stream of Eric Rosser (@ecoATM), the outfit's VP of Sales and Marketing, the machine bought back over $100 in phones on its second day, including a "perfect" BlackBerry Curve. Not so perfect to the previous owner, apparently...

This CrunchGear post has more info.

[via Gizmodo]

They may have faded into the background (some pretty convincingly), but all those those cell sites require a lot of power!

In his new Pike Research report, "How Mobile Networks Can Cut Carbon" (subscription required), Clint Wheelock finds that with a little cleantech and some data center greening, mobile operators can cut their infrastructure CO2 emissions by 101 million tons, or 42 percent, by 2013.

Photo Credit: Flickr/TheTruthAbout...

It can be argued that mobile phones are inherently green. After all, they pack a hefty technological punch in a small package, reducing the need to keep a PC or laptop up and running to perform common computing tasks. Nonetheless, some mobile handset makers have are making an effort like reducing packaging and incorporating instruction manuals into the device's software.

But there's one area that's causing concern and there's: toxic chemicals. Maybe it's because we carry them with us all day and have them in close proximity to, or physically touching, our bodies. IT Pro touches on the problem:

Nardono Nimpuno, the international chemical secretariat for ChemSec, believes the main obstacle is the chemicals that are used to make the phones in the first place.

In an interview with IT PRO, Nimpuno said: "It is hard for anyone to accept a daily consumer product is harmful, as well as hard to prove. People and companies find it easier to go fair trade or eco-friendly with food as mobiles are complex enough as it is."

"However, in themselves the chemicals used to make the phones disrupt hormones and can disrupt reproduction. Yes, they are encased in the product, but what about during production if there are leaks, and what do you do at the end of a phone's life?"

There's a ways to go, but companies are taking steps. Take Sony Ericsson's C901 GreenHeart (pictured above), for instance, which has a housing made of recycled plastic and is made several toxic chemical compounds.

Hasn't set the world on fire, but it's a start.

Green servers cropping up all over - InfoWorld

The new HP ProLiant machines, for example, come equipped with a new feature that the company dubs "sea of sensors": 32 smart sensors that automatically monitor the heat created by the server and adjust fans accordingly. Employing sensors to adjust cooling at the datacenter level isn't new; bringing it to the server level, however, is, and it reflects just how significant a pain point cooling costs can be.

VMware, Terracotta To Scale Apps In The Cloud - InformationWeek

Terracotta links server memories with a system that treats random access memory as a shared pool. Terracotta uses the pool as a place to store software objects and data that are going to be used frequently by an application. The approach allows a Java software object -- or set of coded procedures and their related data -- to be unloaded from the database once, built into a functioning unit, and reused many times, rather than returning to the database each time the object is called.

Sony Ericsson's 'greener' phones - Stuff.co.nz

The new models, C901 GreenHeart and Naite, will be sold in smaller packages and have user manuals that are electronic. The devices use more recycled materials and consume less energy.

Virtual Instruments launches VirtualWisdom - Virtually Speaking - ZDNet Blogs

Mark Urdahl, CEO, and Len Rosenthal, VP Marketing, of Virtual Instruments stopped by to let me know about VirtualWisdom, a product the company launched while at EMCword. Their product is designed to help organizations moving to a virtualized environment gain insight into and manage their virtual storage infrastructure.

SSDs: the future of enterprise storage - Express Computer

Dave Hitz, Founder, NetApp in his blog puts it nicely how DRAM-based SSD and NAND flash-based SSD technologies differ from one another, and what is driving the innovation in the NAND-based SSDs. According to him, almost every measure of computer performance increases exponentially with the important exception of disk drives that keep getting bigger but are not getting much faster. As a result, the number of seeks-per-second available for each gigabyte of data (seeks/second/GB) is plummeting. He explained, from a human perspective, that seeks/second/GB have gone down by a factor of five hundred, but from the CPU perspective, it is five hundred thousand times slower.