Tag: carbon_footprint

barcamp, Microsoft

Had a ball at BarCamp Galway

I went to BarCamp Galway over the weekend.

I arrived a bit late because I drove up from Cork on Saturday morning and then spent around 30 minutes wandering around NUIG looking for the DERI institute before I realised it is off-campus!

I eventually made it at 11 – just in time for coffee and muffins. Just as well, I was starving and needed to satisfy my muffin cravings.

I didn’t make it along to many talks because, although I originally only signed up to give one talk, a mis-communication had me down for two talks and a panel discussion! My first talk was about reducing ITs carbon footprint. I uploaded the slide deck to SlideShare. The second talk was more of a conversation around video blogging so no slides.

I did get to hear Ina‘s great talk on Social Networks and Alastair‘s also excellent talk on Internet Marketing.

I also met loads of interesting people there including Martha Rotter, Microsoft’s replacement for Rob Burke. I’m sure Martha is sick of hearing how great Rob was but, in fairness to Microsoft, it looks like they picked another winner with Martha (and if she allowed people to leave comments on her blog without having to register, I’d tell her that!).

The talks, the wifi, the food all worked perfectly – well done John, Aidan and Conor. Guys, you set the bar high.

cix, speaking

Just arrived in Copenhagen

I have just arrived in Copenhagen for Reboot 9.0.

I’m giving a talk tomorrow at 12:20 on “Reducing Information Technology’s ever-increasing carbon footprint”. This is in the context of the work we are doing building a hyper energy-efficient data centre in CIX.

There’s a meetup organised for tonight which I will be going along to. If you see me there, come up and say “Hi!”

cix, Climate Change, Global Warming

Yahoo! also going for carbon neutrality!

I see Yahoo! has announced that it is going to follow our lead in CIX *cough* and aim for carbon neutrality!

In the announcement David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo! said:

we’re going to invest in greenhouse gas reduction projects around the world to neutralize Yahoo!’s impact on the environment. While doing our homework on this, we measured our carbon footprint and discovered that Yahoo! going carbon neutral is equivalent to shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month. Or, pulling nearly 25,000 cars off the road for a year.

While buying carbon credits isn’t the ideal way to go carbon neutral (I can think of a couple of better ways – David, come along to my talk at Barcamp Dublin on Saturday if you want to know more!), it is certainly a step in the right direction and puts a financial imperative on the company to “clean up its act”, from a carbon point of view, at least!

Kudos to Yahoo! for taking this stance and hopefully we’ll see more companies going down this route sooner than later (though I don’t see Halliburton coming on board any time soon).