Its a fascinating read, find the full article here

We’ve all seen the lists right? “25 Ways to Help Curb Climate Change”, etc.. etc and these usually contain things like “Recycle your newspaper” and “Take the bus as often as possible”. Firstly, who still reads the newspaper? we geeks are all about RSS feeds and Kindle’s anyway and if you live in a city, chances are you already take the bus daily.. don’t get me wrong, I think these little tips are important, but, I think its time some of these get revised.

I am a great believer that technological innovation will contribute significantly to reducing the effects of climate change. Other factors, like population growth on the other hand is often overlooked in this debate. Continuous population growth and an expected increase of 2.3 billion people on the planet by 2050 is multiplying the impacts of climate change. Perhaps greater access to family planning is the key? in fact, according to a London School Of Economics study, money spent on contraception is five times more efficient than money spent on clean energy technologies.

Lets look at little ways technology can help. LCD monitors.. not only do they look cooler and take up less room on your desk, they use less than half the power of a traditional CRT.

One of my personal favourites is Blackle. “Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search”. But why? here’s why.. An all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. lets do a little math and see what could be saved by moving a high volume site to the black format.

Google gets about 200 million queries a day. Let’s assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode on a CRT monitor, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8 300 kilowatt-hours per day, or about 3 000 000 kilowatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that’s $75,000.

If you are reading this off my actual blog (not via RSS) you are probably looking around right about now and thinking something along the lines of “this site is not black!” well, yeah.. and I don’t get 200 million hits a day either, if i did, it would probably be black.. black is the new white after all.

Other links:

• Cisco EnergyWise
• Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year
• Blog Action Day

Last week I attended TechEd Australia in the Gold Coast.  I had a great time learning, connecting, talking, networking, teaching, socialising and presenting.  Having said that I left the Gold Coast both drained and a bit frustrated.

While there was a lot of content there, there was an awful lot of content that was not there.  I was lucky to be one of the speakers in the UC track.  There were 12 sessions allocated for the UC track.  Nine were focused on Exchange 2010 and three went to OCS 2007 R2.  Now, granted, Exchange is a flagship product and 2010 is an exciting release.  I would not take anything away from Exchange.  But OCS 2007 R2 needed much more coverage.  Rewind a year to TechEd 2007 and all the OCS 2007 R2 content was still under embargo so the result of the lack of sessions at TechEd 2009 is that R2 content has not really had a good airing at a large public conference in Australia.

This is not due to a lack of speakers – I submitted two other sessions that did not make the cut.  I know other external speakers who put sessions forward that did not get a slot at all.  I know the Microsoft UC guys could of done more sessions.  Nor is it due to a lack of things to talk about.  In pulling together content for our overview session Derrick Buckley and I drew content and inspiration from no fewer that 5 TechEd US sessions!  Oh the detail we could of gone into if we had had the time.  Edge Services, Conferencing Solutions, Group Chat Architecture and UC Applications could all easily be sessions in their own right.

So if we need more room in the UC track (among others) and we can’t trim back on the existing content because we need that too, what’s the solution.  Simple really.  TechEd Australia should be five days long, like the one in the US is.

Now, I know that events cost money and extending TechEd Australia to five days would not come cheap – but there must be a way.  One suggestion I would put forward would be to combine TechEd Australia and TechEd  New Zealand into one ANZ event.  Surely it would be cheaper to run one event for 4000-5000 people than two for 2500 each.  Also with fewer flights and nights of accommodation for the US speakers that hit Australia and New Zealand perhaps we could get more US speakers out here for the same money?  More days, more colleagues, more experts and more content.  It sounds like a winner to me.

Now – in reality this would probably mean canning TechEd NZ and just having one in Australia since there are no venues in NZ big enough to host an event that size.  I use to live in NZ and I would of crossed the Tasman to attend TechEd in Australia if need be, but I’m sure there will be plenty of naysayers.  Even now, if NZ builds a venue I would happily cross the ditch in the other direction to attend an ANZ TechEd in New Zealand.

I tweeted this thought the other day and got a few comments back from people who thought two more days would be great if their livers could hold out.  What say you Microsoft?

Some of the great new things we can look forward to are web filtering, URL filtering and it also has built in Exchange Edge Server functionality which means if you have an Exchange Edge Server role deployed and also use ISA server, you can now consolidate these into a single server. Another cool thing is, like Exchange Server 2010, TMG will only be available in 64bit.

TMG is currently available as beta3, click here to download it. It is expected to be RTM towards the end of the year.

What’s BPOS? click here

Firstly, I would definitely recommend that you get to registration as soon as possible to avoid the rush! Registration will be open until 9pm tonight and then again from 7am tomorrow morning. Once registered you can also pick up your HP Mini Notebook (of course I am writing this post on it!), there is an “unpacking area” in the convention centre if you would like to dispose of the box and packaging.

There is a welcome reception at the exhibition hall betweenn 6pm and 9pm and the opening keynote is tomorrow at 08:15am. All this info is in the mini-guide.

As far as sessions go, here are some of the ones I am looking forward to attending:

Wednesday:

09:45am – 11:00am UNC201 – Introduction to Exchange 2010 with Johann Kruse and Roger Lawrence

11:30am – 12:45pm UNC302 – Exchange 2010 Architecture with Scott Schnoll

Thursday:

08:15am – 09:30am UNC305 – Exchange 2010 Voicemail with Mario D’Silva

5:00pm – 6:15pm UNC309 – OCS 2007 R2: Overview & Architecture with Derrick Buckley and Craig Pringle

Friday:

08:15am – 09:30am SEC310 – IAG… the success story with Jean-Pierre Simonis

11:30am – 12:45pm – UNC311 – Telephony in OCS R2 with Brendan Carius and John Smith

There are of course other events going on, one of which is Sydney UC and Melbourne OCS User Group get together on Thursday. click here for more info

Cant make it to tech-ed this year? no need for tears… many sessions are available on live meeting, click here for more info

and finally, yes, of course I will be tweeting all week! be sure to follow me on twitter!

The event covered a large part of their portfolio from Messaging and Collaboration, UC and Web Portals to Cloud Computing. As a consultant, I have always taken an interest in what “the other guys” are doing, but, being honest, the last time I saw Domino was back in version 6.

I was most impressed with how slick the Notes 8.5 client looks and the fact that they have integrated everything into a single client whether it be IM, voice & video, document libraries, opening and editing MS Office docs with Symphony, even SAP integration, it can all be done via the Notes 8.5 client.

One of the themes that became immediately obvious was value.. ROI is important, especially in today’s economic climate and IBM seem to be on top of that, a great example is Lotus Symphony which is a free, MS Office compatible suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet editor and presentation editor. I was also impressed by the fact that IBM have realised that (as predicted by Gartner) Apple’s market share in the desktop space is growing and that Windows may not always be the desktop OS of choice, and I think they have catered for this really well by making their software platform independent so it will run on Windows, OSX, and Linux.

In the Cloud Computing space, LotusLive is their solution to online collaboration and it is available now, offering online meetings, hosted email and more.

So, what about UC and more specifically, voice stuff? does “the pbx killer” a.k.a OCS R2 have some competition? IBM are calling it UC² and, well.. I liked what I saw, they certainly have some innovative little features, very easy to use and will certainly make collaboration “child’s play”. They are certainly working with an impressive list of business partners as well. I would say though, that with the maturity of OCS R2 and the fact that it is available now I think IBM may just have missed the boat a little. UC² will be available “later this year” and given the momentum OCS already has, it’s going to be interesting..

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications

Those of you who frequent my blog (or follow me on twitter) will know that I am strongly to any form of internet censorship. Here in Australia the government is currently trailing new ISP level filtering which threatens to reduce our internet to a state comparable to China, read more here

In New Zealand, they have recently pass some crazy copyright law that calls for internet disconnection based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny. This is due to come into effect on February 28th unless immediate action is taken by the National Party.

Join thousands of New Zealanders (hey, I am not even kiwi!) already against this law by blacking out your Facebook photo, your websites, your Myspace pages, your Twitter account, in protest against this unjust new law that may come into effect on February 28.

I have "blacked out" my blog and twitter avatar to show my support!

for more info and to sign the petition, click here