and many have taken on the challenge of retrofitting energy hogs--to save money, to make cities more efficient,
Dave Bartlett, the Vice president of IBM's Smarter Buildings Initiative, recently made predictions for the top five building trends that are going to make a big impact in 2012,
In a conversation with Smartplanet, Bartlett explained his predictions and let us in on some projects that are already taking place to help these predictions come to fruition.
Neighborhoods, said Bartlett, are a great place to gain momentum for what we need to do at a city level.
According to Bartlett, this system helped IBM identify carbon in unexpected places like in methane leaks from utilities.
said Bartlett. We use a lot of resources without really understanding how we can change. Seeing the energy or water we use per task, then
said Bartlett. He called this environmental crowd sourcing, or the ability of a citizen to use their smartphone to alert the city to building issues,
Bartlett said that IBM has found that people want to be involved in the improvement of their communities,
More energy options for buildings Bartlett predicts that in the near future, as we develop more low carbon energy sources,
Bartlett, because depending on your own needs and how much you want to be a part of this, it puts people in control instead of having to take
said Bartlett. Smart building initiatives will help them listen to how their buildings are wasting energy and money,
Bartlett said. Currently, the cost of energy use in New york city municipal buildings is more than $800 million per year,
and accounts for about 64 percent of the greenhouse gasses produced by the city's government operations.
is to reduce New york city's greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2017. What will it take to see these predictions happen?
Bartlett. The price of alternative technology is starting drop due to the technology getting more efficient,
and wait 10 years after municpialities to adopt technologies. 10 percent is in agriculture. On average, agriculture uses about 70 percent of the water in the world.
I'm talking to you from California. Eighty-five to ninety percent of the water in this state is used in agriculture.
Why would you conserve water in the urban environment when the farmers are flooding the fields?
Everything in Israel has irrigation--80 percent of the country. Not because it saves water;
 Then you start to see a baseline water need that is significant--and that's no fun, no agriculture, business, nothing.
You could make a world of difference if agriculture handled things better. But I just don't know how.
There are kiosks that identify us by our palms, check out our library books and even make pizza with customized toppings.
Briggo produces organic coffee (using fresh, hormone-free milk and natural syrups) with a precision and consistency wholly unattainable by humans.
But equally pioneering: Customers benefit from the innovative technology--remote ordering, personalization and notification when the drink is ready.
So just when we thought the coffee market was saturated, Briggo is filling a void--one that serves the coffee drinker who wants to use smart technology for a high-end, mobile-friendly coffee experience.
And the fully caffeinated Briggo team is thinking big. We â¢re not talking 10 to 20 kiosks
Yet even then, he expects Briggo to capture only a few percentage points of the coffee market.
Disrupting the coffee routine I visited Briggo early this year, at the end of student break, so the student center was quiet.
Still, customers occasionally wandered over to the kiosk to pick up their pre-ordered coffee drinks.
The kiosk was a large orange and white box with monitors that announced when a drink was ready
There are a half dozen traditional places to get coffee within about a five-minute walk of the Briggo kiosk.
First, a gourmet coffee company Mason handed me my chai, made from organic Pacific soy milk and organic Third street chai from Colorado.
There was a small receipt stuck to the side of the cup with my name, the name of the drink, the date,
Patrick Pierce is Briggo's director of coffee and kiosk operations. A former champion on the barista competition circuit
where coffee-making is an art, Pierce is now responsible for feeding the robot high-quality ingredients,
The Briggo mantra is that it's first and foremost a gourmet coffee company--not a technology or device company.
Inside the robot, every cup of coffee is ground fresh. Brewed coffee takes 15 to 30 seconds per drink,
and espresso takes up to two-and-a-half minutes. I watched the machine heating the milk
while the grounds were tamped with a real tamper. Metal arms moved up and down, twisted and rotated.
The right place for robotic coffee Terry Mahlum, regional director for Delaware North Companies Travel Hospitality Services,
It's the right place for robotic coffee. The kiosk is slated for a central location across from Gate 13 in the American airlines terminal.
whose clients include the top coffee chains, hasn tried â¢t the Briggo drinks, but he was impressed by the price--$1. 40 for a cup of organic coffee.
If the price of specialty coffee is lower the benefit is purely financial, he said.
It will provide a great cup of coffee to the world while saving on employee costs.
Nahmias is no stranger to food robots. He grew up in Mexico city, and his private school had a French fry machine.
I put my pesos in and it molded fries out of potato starch, he said.
but he said there's something special about the human touch with coffee. People like to go in
and ask for a touch more milk or another pump of syrup. When the machine is done,
the coffee kiosk owned by Redbox movie rental parent Coinstar, which serves Seattle's Best Coffee.
And Nahmias thinks Briggo could be successful in regions of the country that have high uses of mobile technology
A new conversation, new coffee culture I stepped outside of the robot vortex and Nater pulled out his ipad,
They can relate to a cup of coffee --and they get excited about it. As for Nater, he's fired up about the robot and the drinks,
There's such a sharing and communal aspect to coffee. This goes beyond what anyone else is doing in terms of allowing people to share an experience.
creating a way for customers to still have their morning coffee and conversation. And just like the neighborhood barista, the robot remembers what they like.
but my coffee, I want exactly the same way, Nater said. And as Briggo gets ready to expand,
whether other coffee drinkers concur. As for the Briggo team, working overtime to revolutionize the way we think about a coffee shop,
Greenthumb's latest gardening tool may just be...an iphone? Derek Peterson sure hopes that may someday be the case.
and mechanical systems for people who are looking to grow crops hydroponically, that is, an artificially-controlled indoor environment that provides lighting, mineral nutrients and water--but not much else.
and environmentally friendly way to grow crops in general, the one product that's garnered the most attention (not to mention controversy),
Metaphorically speaking, he's betting the farm that the next revolution in agriculture will be more about software and machines than soil and irrigation.
and buried the crops in the ground before they eventually switched to using trailers. This is pretty rudimentary,
and urbanization so more and more growing is going on in indoor farms, which is what's happening a lot in Europe.
Over there you'll see a lot of vertical stacked hydroponic systems used to cultivate lettuce, micro-greens, mushrooms and other produce.
And by going vertical you can grow a lot more crops without having to take up so many acres of land.
You mentioned Europe is ahead of the game on hydroponics, why haven't we gotten with the program?
New irrigation system helps farmers conserve water Infographic: What is the water footprint in the U s
Pepsico has improved potato crop yields while decreasing the amount of water needed for irrigation. That's just one of the high-level takeaways shared by Ian Hope-Johnstone, director of agricultural sustainability for Pepsico global operations, with whom
I recently chatted about mobile technology and its agricultural uses. The icrop experiment--highly dependent on various mobile technologies including notebooks,
and better manage irrigation needs. An infographic (below) created by Float Mobile Learning suggests that a growing number of North american farmers are now using smartphones
So-called precision agriculture of the type being embraced by Pepsico could help reduce water usage by up to 50 percent
Smarter home irrigation technologiescontributor s Note: This is an ongoing column in water sustainability, consumption and management issues.
I received in the past week from two companies seeking to provide smarter home irrigation technologies. These companies, Cyber-Rain and ET Water, have released both recently cloud services that provide guidance about
which integrates weather forecasts, via a computer or a free Apple iphone application. Cyber-Rain claims that the system investment might be covered in certain places by water utility rebate programs.
What we are providing is smart irrigation in the palm of your hand. XCI Cloud gives property owners
ET Water's GNOME Smart Irrigation Calculator, which is billed as ET Water's first consumer application doesn't rely on any particular sensor technology.
Plant types Soil composition Slope of the soil Sun exposure The type of irrigation you're using (hose versus sprinkler versus drip lines, etc.
there are many smart irrigation technologies, but these cloud-based services will probably become more ubiquitous.
and Glen Bull of the  Curry School of education at the University of Virginia, recently answered my questions about the project.
Bull: Producing and creating customizable manipulatives like base 10 rods, fraction cubes, geometric Tangram shapes all potentially support elementary students'mathematic proficiency and understanding in ways that the teacher controls.
Bull: The decision regarding participation by corporate partners will depend on the commercial outcomes. The decision regarding participation by academic partners will depend on
Bull: While the technology is in emergent state and there are certainly a number of technical challenges,
Glen Bull
At Crane and Co.,a greener greenbackmassachusetts firm  Crane and Co. has been supplying paper for U s. currency--bills, specifically--for the federal government since 1879.
We're really not tied in with the tree side of paper-making; we're really unusual in that regard.
A nice pine scent for detergent--take this essence of pine. Smoked hickory for your bacon--take this scent out of pyrolisized hickory wood.
The wood in the pyrolysis process comes out in this liquid--pyrolysis oil. They were extracting the chemicals for food additives from it.
The remainder they were simply giving away to whoever would take it. These things are located generally near saw mills or other timber sources.
They would give it back to the pulp and paper mill and those guys would mix it back in with their black liquor.
and giving it back to the guys who gave you the wood probably isn't the best way to deal with this.
prunes wastei finally had a revelation about the REAL difference between business intelligence and business analytics software this week.
IBM analytics technology helps Sun World use drip irrigation to decrease its water usage by 8. 5%.That difference is readily apparent in a new agribusiness case study that was brought to my attention by the IBM mid-market group.
that produces various fruits and vegetables on approximately 12,000 acres of farmland across the state of California.
The company has been acting on its water consumption to change irrigation techniques, a practice that has helped now it reduce water usage by 8. 5 percent per unit since 2006.
which specializes in table grapes, peppers, stone fruits and citrus varieties, can now look at everything from unit costs
And how that differs depending on the type of fruit. This information has helped it balance labor resources on the farm,
focusing first on the crops that yield the best return. This insight has helped cut labor and distribution costs by 10 percent to 15 percent in the past year
Steve Greenwood, Sun World's director of budgets and reporting, says the technology behind these changes was Cognos,
which helps provide information on crop yields, farm labor costs, water usage trends and growing patterns.
Before, we didn't know until 30 days after the month how our harvest crops were trending.
because the crops had already been harvested. We've turned raw data into business insight, improved our order fill rates
AGRICULTURE One major innovation: the development of nitrogen-based fertilizer at the close of the 19th century by chemists Carl Bosch and Fritz Haber.
A subsequent major development was the development of disease-resistant strains of wheat that could handle artificial fertilizer and produce higher yields.
but others criticized it for ushering in an age of monoculture in which farmers turned their backs on biodiversity in the interest of maximizing food production per acre.
and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.
he said of pollution and greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. It may not be quite as visible or an assault on our senses as horse manure
Cloning vs. conservationsuppose you knew the rain forests would be destroyed totally in 20 years, no matter what.
some future technology could miraculously reconstruct every living thing in the forests on demand. Would you then be willing to take those steps
and pave over the forests tomorrow in the name of faster human progress? Recently, an economist publicly floated a version of that proposal,
A subspecies of Pyrenean ibex was cloned momentarily back to life. Credit: Joseph Wolf (1898), via Wikimedia) But returning to the merits of Mulligan's proposal, remember that resurrecting dead
such as the Asian gaur in 2001, but often with limited success. In 2009 Spanish biologists cloned the calf of an extinct subspecies of Pyrenean ibex from tissue samples preserved for that purpose,
but minutes after its birth the calf died of lung abnormalities (which have been cloned common among animals to date).
Moreover, all those cloning efforts crucially relied on the use of egg cells or surrogate mothers from living species closely related to the ones being brought back.
We can make butanol from corn, but we've decided to avoid that route. Corn is expensive
so it's hard to make money. A second reason: corn is used for food. So we're using cellulosic biomass waste streams--corn cobs, treetops and limbs, dead pine trees from pine beetles.
We cannot convert municipal solid waste. That's a bit of too much of a challenge right now.
A tree is actually sugar. You need to do a bit of chemistry to get the sugar out.
Mother Nature has five types of sugars--we can use two types, six-carbon and five-carbon sugars found in nature.
The emerging trends are corn cobs--that's what Dupont, Denisco and Verenium are using.
Corn cobs are easy to break down into sugar. But that's not a solution to the cellulosic fuel problem.
though--every form of agricultural waste will show up. I don't know that we're ever going to go into a forest
unless the trees are dead already. The one place you might see wood harvesting is in the southeast U s
. because wood is cheap there. Our facility is going to be colocated with a pulp mill.
 There are over 500 pulp mills in this country and they're on their back. We're focusing on three areas:
pulp mills and ethanol plants in the Southeast, Northeast and Northwest, where we're not using forest trimmings.
It's a learning process. It's one thing to take wood chips in a lab and put them in my test tube,
but it's another to handle tree limbs, tops and logs and doing that conversion.
You start small and do it bigger. The way we're going to cross the Valley of Death is co-locate with a pulp mill.
butanol, cellulosic ethanol, omega-3 acidsnew YORK--Dupont wants to help raiseã Â sustainably-farmed salmon by offering them a diet loaded with omega-3 fatty acids that it manufactures from soybeans.
cellulosic, sugarcane, grain (mostly corn from the U s.)600 more plants are needed in next decade.
energy security, rural community growth, fewer greenhouse gas emissions, food constraints, green jobs. Binetti outlined the advantages of cellulosic ethanol:
60 percent reduction in greenhouse gases. Grown on marginal land. Good income for farmers. Then he outlined the advantages of biobutanol:
agriculture expertise and process engineering (not to mention marketing weight) to the table, while the latter brings its intellectual property around enzymes.
productivity with IBM analyticsanalytics technology that has enabled a Michigan agricultural cooperative better account for the source of fruits
and vegetables has helped reduce paper associated with ensuring food safety, improving productivity by 50 percent. The technology has allowed also the cooperative to better analyze its supply chain processes,
-based Cherry Central's supply chain business partners as the food makes its way to grocery or market shelves.
Cherry Central reported that its database was growing at a rate of 1. 6 million records per month.
Its ability to pull up that information more quickly differentiates Cherry Central from other organization that have weed to through paperwork
The technology that Cherry Central is using includes IBM DB2 Web Query running on the Power system platform.
We have had solutions in the agribusiness space for some time. We though it would help advance the food industry by offering these components together,
The low-hanging fruit is, let's reduce the amount of consumption. The higher fruit is changing the ways you run your plant.
Smartplanet: When we talk about the smart grid, we talk about the point where green starts to make business sense.
70 goes to agriculture, and 10 goes to you. What we need to look at is those first two markets
With agriculture if you think about a farmer today, typically they're getting their water free or highly subsidized.
With 70 percent of the world's water supply going to irrigation, the cheapest source of water is going to our farmers.
With low-flow irrigation and other off-the-shelf devices, we're reducing it by 50 to 70 percent.
A lot of what we're starting to see is pickup of much more efficient irrigation. They need the financial incentive.
and part of it is growing crops in the right places. Israel has been very proactive in this area--in the areas of olives and dates,
they can irrigate them with brackish or partial saltwater. Smartplanet: Why can't we use brackish water for cooling purposes?
There exists a state-level policy that prohibits the reuse of wastewater for agriculture --but we didn't have the technology then to do so safely.
because we didn't want untreated municipal wastewater in our lettuce. Now we have technologies to ensure those things don't happen.
What's the low-hanging fruit? Then there's the technology to do it. Then it's repairing stuff in place--companies like Insituform--how do you repair that pipe without digging it up?
The first outdoor technologies to be labeled under the effort will be irrigation controllers, which control the frequency
Watersense-blessed irrigation controllers will be tied into local weather data, so that plants and grass will be watered only when conditions call for it.
And not when it is raining; that is one of my pet peeves, seeing someone's sprinklers on during a rainy period.)
The new irrigation controllers could hit the market by spring 2012, just in time for next year's landscaping season.
the value of wastewater Greenpeace challenges apparel industry to come clean Pushing for more disclosure Smarter home irrigation technologies Smart grid gains ground with water managers 3 water
Meet the Maverick: the only fully legal flying carthe last time a flying car had shot a at making an impact was in 1956,
the Maverick Sport is powered officially a parachute. The Sport Pilot license required to fly it is much easier to obtain than a standard pilot's license.
For the first certified Maverick's vanity plate, FLY CAR seemed an appropriate choice. As for the hardware, it's a lithe, 900lb vehicle reminiscent of a dune buggy.
The Maverick Sport should be available for purchase in time for Airventure 2011 a yearly air show held in July.
the Maverick Sport has a unusual creation story. The mastermind of the project, a missionary named Steve Saint, created the Maverick not to indulge some kind of sci-fi whim,
but to solve practical transportation problems in the developing world. From CNN: What we're doing here at
'The Maverick flying car is just one piece of the puzzle for I-Tec. We've been working on this particular project for six years,
and tools and training systems so that we can train people that live out in the jungle areas,
and sees the Maverick's potential uses as extremely diverse, from security to recreation to search and rescue.
It's extremely difficult to replicate objects made in the 17th century using modern timber. They need to fell old growth trees of a certain dimension
and take the moisture out the traditional way, instead of drying the wood in a commercial kiln.
They must find carvers and joiners with the same skill level as imperial craftsmen. Then, they need to replicate the wear that comes with people sitting down with different amounts of force over a long period of time and the effects of exposure to light over several hundred years.
Guan Haisen (pictured top), an appraiser who works at Beijing Antique City, imports the Ocean Optics LIBS system from the U s,
Now, Picarro is working with agriculture and food products companies to apply the sensors to measuring the isotopes in foods.
So, for example, it would be possible to distinguish corn-fed cattle from Vermont from their cousins from Texas or Idaho.
whether or not cocoa beans are from a legitimate source or whether they might be from an area of conflict in the Ivory coast.
it turned out the honey had been transshipped from China. That's bad for two reasons. First, the importing company was not paying the proper tariff.
Second, the honey in question contained antibiotics that are regulated more closely in the United states. It turns out
however, that honey from China has a very unique signature. Technology for tracing food origins has been available for decades.
PG&E first utility to embrace new gas leak detection technology From predicting weather to tracking greenhouse emissions
Do not rely on Apple's ios 6 Mapsaustralian police have warned that motorists should rely less on technology
when relying on Apple's disappointing mapping system--especially as the number of drivers ending up in peculiar locations is on the rise.
Apple was earmarked for criticism this September when Google maps was removed from ios 6, forcing the firm's customers to use their own brand of mapping technology on gadgets including the iphone and ipad.
Apple's maps met with poor reviews and inaccurate data when compared to Google's software
The force has asked Apple to fix the issue, but in the meantime, perhaps rival firm Google's mapping service or a traditional A to Z would be a better option.
Foxconn plans U s. manufacturing expansion Apple will begin manufacturing Macs in U s. next year Apple says app store has generated 300,000 jobs so far Apple rejects Ëoequestionable US drone strike tracker
So in addition to the climate change we have raised greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere by about 100 parts per million (ppm)
but primarily it is our agriculture. All the corn, rice and wheat we grow to feed ourselves.
That is a huge change compared to only a third of the Earth surface was covered by ice at the end of the Pleistocene and the shift into the Holocene,
using it to irrigate our crops and then letting it run off into the ocean. And then it goes into the cycle
Like slowing the monsoon which has a significant impact on agriculture. SP: Are there any such schemes that hold some promise?
And methane is worse than CO2 on the list of greenhouse gasses. Patching those holes is a no-brainer.
or so people who are still burning wood or dung. Not only are these people creating emissions of greenhouse gasses
but are also literally killing themselves from inhaling the toxic soot. These are things we should be doing right away to buy us some time to solve the harder problem of how to stop burning fossil fuels.
Going from wood to coal took 200 years. And we still are not completely there!
there are still parts of the world where wood is the primary fuel source. We need to get started on our transition from fossil fuel burning
Strawberry pickers beware, the robots are comingon a windy morning in California's Salinas Valley,
a tractor pulled a wheeled, metal contraption over rows of budding iceberg lettuce plants. Engineers from Silicon valley tinkered with the software on a laptop to ensure the machine was eliminating the right leafy buds.
The engineers were testing the Lettuce Bot, a machine that can"thin"a field of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand.
The thinner is part of a new generation of machines that target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization fruits
and vegetables destined for the fresh market, not processing, which have resisted thus far mechanization because they're sensitive to bruising.
Researchers are now designing robots for these most delicate crops by integrating advanced sensors, powerful computing, electronics, computer vision, robotic hardware and algorithms,
as well as networking and high precision GPS localization technologies. Most agrobots won't be commercially available for at least a few years.
the Salinas-based fresh produce company that owns the field where the Lettuce Bot was being tested.
On the Salinas Valley farm, entrepreneurs with Mountain view-based startup Blue River Technology are trying to show that the Lettuce Bot can
"Using Lettuce Bot can produce more lettuce plants than doing it any other way, "said Jorge Heraud, the company's cofounder and CEO.
Another company, San diego-based Vision Robotics, is developing a similar lettuce thinner as well as a pruner for wine grapes.
In Southern California, engineers with the Spanish company Agrobot are taking on the challenge by working with local growers to test a strawberry harvester.
it allows the robot to make a choice based on fruit color, quality and size. The berries are plucked
and placed on a conveyor belt, where the fruit is packed by a worker. Still, the harvester collects only strawberries that are hanging on the sides of the bed,
hence California's strawberry fields would have to be reshaped to accommodate the machine, including farming in single rows,
raising the beds and even growing varieties with fewer clusters. Experts say it will take at least 10 years for harvesters to be available commercially for most fresh-market fruit not a moment too soon for farmers worried about the availability of workers
said Lupe Sandoval, managing director of the California Farm Labor Contractor Association.""If you can put a man on the moon,
"Sandoval said, "you can figure out how to pick fruit with a machine
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011