Google Marketing - A Short Analysis

This is what happens when you dedicate a few hours to intensively trying to answer a single question about a single company (in a slightly modified version to remove work related info).

Thanks to Kwok Ng for his help on this.

 By the way... Does anyone know a GOOD way to get PPT slides onto the web with no conversion artifacts? Neither SlideShare nor Google Docs did it for me.

The Essence of Data Analysis

Cloud Computing, Virtualization, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS - Part 2

In part one of this post, I looked in to the question of why cloud computing is important. In this post, I will look into the question of what cloud computing is.

NIST's definition of cloud computing gives a useful model for deciding what is and is not a cloud deployment:
 "cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction."

But to understand what "the cloud" is really made up of, it helps to look at how cloud computing is packaged and sold.

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Software as a Service (SaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas)
In this cloud offering, the seller provisions virtualized compute, network and storage upon which the buyer installs his own operating system and software. This is most easily thought of as buying bare computers and storage onto which your own IT dept will put everything required for your specific uses.
A few major vendors who offer these products are: Amazon Web Services, RackSpace and AT&T Synaptic Hosting.

Virtualization software is key to making IaaS feasible. Without virtualization, physical hardware would need to be provisioned for each customer. This would make it prohibitively expensive to quickly provision, re-provision and scale resources to meet customer needs.
The major virtualization s/w vendors include VMWare (ESX), Microsoft (HyperV) and an open source virtualization solution Xen.

More on virtualization in another post.

Platform as a Service (Paas)
In the platform level cloud offering, the seller provisions some combination of operating system, middleware and runtime packages which enable the buyer to develop and run applications of their choosing. This can be thought of as buying access to services which enable programs to easily access the resources they need to run.
Vendors provide a variety of offerings in this space. A few major offerings are below:

• Google App Engine provides a number of runtime environments for web application developers.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides file based storage to any application which needs it while Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block level storage for applications the need direct storage access (like DBs).
• Microsoft Azure provides access to a few runtime envrionments,  SQL DB services for applications which need DB services and the virtual network fabric required to link together multiple server's services.

Software as a Service (Saas)
In this level of cloud offering, the seller provides the buyer with access to end applications while hiding the infrastructure, middleware and runtime components. Pretty much every time you hear about a "web application" being offered by a company, you are seeing a SaaS product.
There are probably thousands of SaaS offerings available so covering any significant fraction of the space here is futile. But here are a few examples of SaaS offerings:

• Web email - from google, Yahoo, etc
• Office 365 and Google Apps - On line productivity apps for creating, accessing and collaborating with others on a variety of document types (word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, picture editing, etc).
• Sustainable Supply Chain (SSC) - Supply chain survey management for corporate social responsibility reporting from CSRware.
• Facebook and Google + - public social networking tools for keeping tabs on your friends around the world.
• Socialcast, Clearvale , Jive and Spigit -  Enterprise social networking tools for keeping abreast of news and status, smoothing workflow, fostering collaboration and spurring idea generation in a corporate context.

One additional consideration is which user base a cloud deployment is intended to serve. This leads to the ideas of: Private, Public and Hybrid Clouds

• Private cloud = services and (often hardware) are strictly for a single company's use. Frequently this implies that the company consuming the services will deploy the cloud services on hardware behind their corporate firewall.
• Public cloud = services are available for all users anywhere. Though users may need to pay for services... This is the context in which most people experience the cloud because of the heavy reliance start-ups offering SaaS products have on public cloud services.
• Hybrid cloud = multiple cloud systems connected in such a way as to allow programs and data to be easily moved between private to public clouds.

Cloud Computing, Virtualization, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS - Part 1

What is cloud computing and why is it important?

On the question of importance, cloud computing addresses several business problems.

Perhaps the most mundane problem that cloud computing addresses is one of cost for getting applications up and keeping them running.

• Availability 
• Because of the underlying technology used in cloud computing (Virtualization - more on this next post.) it becomes relatively easy to implement failover and high availability for servers. This makes the customer experience better (fewer interruptions) and allows more routes to addressing business critical applications (lowers barrier to entry on some enterprise applications).
• Application deployment & maintenance 
• Depending on the level of the cloud you engage at (Infrastructure, Platform or Software - more on this next post), the level of IT expertise required to use the applications / services you want can be greatly reduced. Software patching, upgrades, hardware provisioning and maintenance is left to the cloud providers who have this expertise on staff.

These "mundane" aspects of cloud computing enable significantly less mundane capabilities. The most immediate of which are the new business models that become feasible.

• Software start ups galore
• Because compute power can be purchased on-demand and in relatively small units, capital costs for starting a software company are significantly reduced. This enables more players to try more things in search of the next big thing.
• F2P (Free to Play), Freemiums and ad-driven businesses
• Because the marginal cost of adding users to a centralized s/w application can be nearly zero when deployed in a dynamically scalable infrastructure such as the cloud provides, companies can explore business models that "give away" software, or more precisely: give away access to software, while closely tracking and tailoring the user experience more easily. This leads to businesses that thrive on micro transactions within the software or on ad revenue instead of from sales of the software itself.
• On-line special events
• Relatively low cost and rapid provisioning of compute, network and storage resources allows for companies to generate increased community engagement or media attention by using this burst capacity to host periodic special events. For a small fraction of the cost of buying and setting up the h/w and software required to gain this capacity, the same buzz generating potential can be realized.
• Mobile
• By using the relatively limited compute power of networked mobile devices to drive the user interface and pushing the computationally intensive tasks to servers in the cloud, the capabilities of mobile devices become nearly unlimited. This creates a new class of applications (e.g. voice recognition, navigation, etc) for entrepreneurs to explore and market, driving sales of mobile computing hardware (e.g. smart phones and tablets) or of the applications (as apps or as services) themselves.
• Distributed work force, virtual desktops and collaboration
• Because public cloud resources can be accessed from any internet connected device and data storage is easily centralized, the cloud makes it more feasible than ever to provision specialized applications to anyone, anywhere, to keep company data centralized and provide tools by which physically separated groups can easily interact and exchange information in real time in order to improve productivity.

As Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and sustainability concerns increase, the "green" aspects of cloud computing also become more important.

• Economies of scale in "green" data centers may mean that renting capacity via "the cloud" is greener than you can afford on your own.  
• Making an efficient data center requires high up front capital and expertise costs. Considerations like the ones below are more affordable by large businesses or by dedicated cloud hosting companies where the risk associated with the capital costs are more acceptable for the long term return.
• efficient server h/w
• low energy and passive cooling strategies
• occupancy based lighting, energy efficient lighting fixtures and daylighting strategies
• green power purchase agreements
• on-site generation via renewables (e.g. co-gen, bio-fuel based fuel cells, PV, Solar thermal, etc.)

Next time some details about the the "what" part of the question.

B-Corporations are Real in California

It looks like the legislation making B-Corporations legal in California has passed and one big name corporation has signed up.

Read this previous post for more thoughts on what this means.

It's a good step towards making it legal, by changing the focus on shareholder primacy, for a public corporation to even consider doing what you or I would see as mandatory in our dealings with other people and with our communities.

More on Virtual Daylighting

I posted earlier about an experiment with virtual daylighting on a small scale using indirect light.

Here is a post about a direct experiment where the designer replicates the sky, clouds and all, using arrays of LEDs.

Probably not an energy efficient use of LEDs but an interesting experiment that requires some thought about the trade-offs between energy efficiency and productivity gains.

Flexible Purpose Corporations - California making it legal for corporations to "care" about something other than money

In a previous post, I wrote about shareholder primacy (the law governing corporations actually requires the CEO to pursue shareholder profit even at the expense of other corporate goals or values) and how that makes it very difficult for a corporation to pursue goals that are not directly tied to increasing bottom line profits.

According to this Green Biz blog, California is getting ready to pass a law (2011 SB201) which makes it legal for corporations established in California "...to include a social and environmental mission that is given equal weight, perhaps even greater weight, than profits..." It protects CEOs and boards of directors in pursuit of such goals and it provides shareholder mechanisms to enforce the pursuit of the same.

That's an improvement.
If you can get companies to stop incorporating in Delaware.
By which I mean that "traditional" motives, training and culture need to change in addition to the law. Profit is so deeply rooted in American culture and history that it is difficult to even see how enthralled by the old ideas we are.

Saving the Savages = Breaking the System

I just finished reading The Wayfinders - Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World by Wade Davis. Besides being one of the best arguments I've read on why sustainability matters and where we might "relearn" how to achieve it, there was a section on the consequences, however well intended, of misunderstanding the context of a culture and of applying the wrong solution to a problem because of it.

The story is of the people of the Kasuit desert in northern Kenya. For hundreds of years, they lived in this desert. They developed a culture that embraced the difficulties of living in the desert and, therefore, did just fine. Until severe drought, combined with nearby wars brought this region to the attention of the West. At which point, the United Nations took actions to "save" them from themselves.
Following is my summary of Wade's story.

The culture the originally developed worked like this:

To ensure that enough livestock survived severe drought, large herds of livestock were required.
To maintain large herds required large families, stewardship of the land and a nomadic lifestyle (so that the carrying capacity of any one area was not exceeded).
The requirement to have large families resulted in polygamy being common. But to maintain social harmony among the young men in a group where there were not enough women for every man, the culture developed rites around sending young men away to tend the herds. These rites bound together the men involved in them, creating life-long social bonds which reinforced the "commonness" of their use of the land (avoiding the "tragedy of the commons"). These rites also instilled a large amount of prestige in the men, allowing them to accept the situation which supported the large families.

Then the UN intervened and added a few things:

First they added the idea of private ownership of the land and, thereby, permanent settlement. This required the reduction of herd size which quickly led to dependence of outside aid to keep the people alive.
Outside aid included western education. The education broke the traditional rites of passage (by instilling the idea that such a life was "beneath" an educated man), which broke the personal ties which were necessary, among the other factors, to allow life in the harsh environment.

The entire culture collapsed and, along with it, the ability to sustain life in that place.
All with the best intentions...
...but without sufficient respect for the wisdom of the people who had learned to live within the limits of the place they inhabited.

Sustainable business - Thoughts about Zero Growth

In a previous post, I was thinking about how the law almost prescribes that businesses grow and put growth ahead of any other social or environmental concern.

Recently I ran into this article about zero-growth economics: an area that is about understanding how an economy might work that is not based on constant growth. One in which productivity gains are used to reduce working hours while keeping output constant rather than using increased productivity to increase output and increase demand in a never ending cycle.

Below are several quotes that I took from the article that I found particularly interesting. The most important of which is probably this:

• no-growthers regard their job not as promoting specific policies, but widening the field of debate. 

That captures the idea of Dis-enthrallment rather well.
Other thoughts:

• "We've had 125,000 generations of humans, but it's only been the last eight that have had growth," Victor told me. "So what's considered normal? I think we live in very abnormal times.

• he [Peter Victor] created a computer model replicating the modern Canadian economy. Then he tweaked it so that crucial elements—including consumption, productivity, and population—gradually stopped growing after 2010. To stave off unemployment, he shortened the workweek to roughly four days, creating more jobs. ... It took a couple of decades, but unemployment eventually fell to 4 percent, most people's standards of living actually rose, and greenhouse gas emissions decreased to well below Kyoto levels. The economy reached a "steady state."

• Even Adam Smith, ...  acknowledged that it might be possible for an economy to max out its natural resources and stop growing.

• In 1930, John Maynard Keynes likewise predicted a period in the future...when the economy wouldn't need to grow (pdf) further to meet our basic needs. Man's "economic problem" would be solved, and people would "prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes." Things like art, child rearing, and leisure.

• When Franklin Roosevelt supported grappling with Great Depression unemployment by decreasing the workweek to 30 hours, the largest corporations fought back fiercely. America, they argued, would be saved only by the new "gospel of consumption." The administration would need to pursue flat-out growth, loosening labor laws and so forth, so that the industrialists could revive the nation. Roosevelt backed down.

•  it seemed obvious that when nations virtualized, shifting to service economies, they didn't stop gobbling natural resources or even, really, curb their appetites. They merely outsourced the problem to Asia, Africa, and South America or found cheap new sources at home

•  the happiness of Americans, as reported by social scientists, rose steadily after World War II as GDP grew. But by the late '50s, that connection broke down: Although our median family incomes have nearly doubled since 1957, the proportion of people who say they are "very happy" has barely budged (pdf). Daly thinks we simply hit the point of diminishing returns. Our growth turned uneconomic: GDP now keeps growing mainly because we are producing gewgaws and services that don't significantly add to our happiness. Or worse: It grows because we are spending money to solve problems that growth itself created.

•  no-growth economists agree with mainstream economists on one big point: Technological advances make workers more productive every year. In the mainstream view, these labor efficiencies make goods cheaper, which leaves consumers with more disposable income—which they invest or spend on more stuff, leading to more hiring to fulfill demand. By contrast, the no-growthers would do things differently; they would use those efficiencies to shorten the workweek, so that most people would stay employed and bring home a reasonable salary.

•  Indeed, some countries have already edged towards this vision. In 1982, labor unions in the Netherlands agreed to limit demands for higher pay in exchange for policies encouraging people to work less. Within a decade, the proportion of Dutch citizens working part-time soared from 19 percent to 27 percent, the average workweek fell from 30 to 27 hours, and unemployment had plummeted from 10 percent to 5 percent. (They called it "the Dutch miracle.")

•  Western consumption rates would need to shrink disproportionately so that citizens of countries like India and El Salvador could enjoy a lifestyle upgrade. Why? The no-growthers argue that a world with fewer yawning inequities between the rich and poor would be more stable; but quite apart from that, their models require stabilizing world population, and raising the economic lot of the poor is a proven way to do that.

• Given the shift in wealth needed to accomplish this, Americans would ... be pretty lucky even to find ourselves where we were in 1960—when the median family made $35,994 in today's dollars (versus $61,932 in 2008).

• technological advances mean that your dollar buys a lot more than it did back then. For a couple of bucks, you can score a pocket calculator that does things it once took a million-dollar university machine to accomplish. "We're better at making things now," Victor says, so our living standards would be considerably higher than this figure suggests.

•  But when you take the thought experiment a few steps further, no-growth theory raises a host of questions about psychology and motivation. ... Would innovation cease if entrepreneurs didn't think they would sell a million widgets? Could individual companies still grow—and if not, who would want to invest in them?

• There are other aspects of no-growth theory—like the population-stabilizing business—that could chill partisans of any stripe. To halt population growth, you need to reduce global fertility rates to an average of about two children per couple. But if boosting poor people's means doesn't defuse the population bomb, what then? Population control by mandate is essentially totalitarianism.

• Daly ... has begun to think that only the Earth itself will compel people to act. In a few decades, if basic resources become scarce, prices spike, and climate change is causing global conflict, no-growth thinking could arrive whether we like it or not. "It'll be forced on us," he says. In the end, when it comes to determining the shape of our economy, the planet may possess the most powerful invisible hand of all.

ESLs - Comparison to other lighting technologies

In a previous post I compared several light sources to understand why a person might choose one over the other.

I bumped into this story on treehugger about Electron Stimulated Luminescence (ESL) bulbs. These lights use an approach like a CRT television to cause a phosphor to light up.



Technical specs for the bulbs are:

• efficacy = 30.7 lm/W
• lifetime = 10,000 hrs
• CRI = 85
• Color Temp = 2700K, 2900K, 4000K

Other points which the makers heavily emphasize:

• Fully linear dimming with household dimmers (vs CFLs)
• Mercury-free, environmentally-friendly materials throughout (vs CFLs)
• Mount in any orientation [heat issues] (vs CFLs and probably LEDs)
• Instant on at full brightness (vs CFLs)
• Lasts approximately 3-6 times longer than an ordinary incandescent bulb

They don't post a price but do say about price: "it will be price competitive against LED products."
If I take "price competitive" to mean 25% less than an equivalent LED bulb, that leads to an expensive bulb... (~$136/klm ESL vs $5/klm CFL).

Plotting that information in the same charts I used earlier gives the following:

The ESL bulb falls into a pretty good space in terms of visual quality. However, its efficacy is quite low compared to the other choices in the space.

Assuming that the FAQ comparison with LED lighting is any indication of how they intend to price the bulbs, then a more serious problem emerges.

The price | performance ratio is quite poor for the ESL. Its lifetime and efficacy values are FAR too low to be priced anything like an LED light. To be competitive, the price would have to be closer to that of a CFL (1/30th the current estimate).
Being Hg free, made from environmental friendly materials, dimmable, providing instant on and lacking heat issues are all very nice but, given it is only about 1/3 as energy efficient as a CFL, a 30x price premium is not warranted ... it would be hard to justify a 2x price premium I suspect.

So unless the pricing comparison with LEDs is highly misleading, ESL is likey to be DOA.
Mass market will buy CFLs because of price | performance.
Specialty applications focused on "green" creds will use LEDs because they are far superior in those aspects.

Saving the World is Like a WoW Raid?

TED recently posted another interesting talk about games and social change by Tom Chatfield.


One big take away from his talk is seven lessons from games that you can take and use outside of games to engage people with game-like rapture.

1. Experience bars measuring progress - show progress towards a single, large, long term goal.
2. Multiple long and short term aims - lots and lots of different tasks at a level that is still engaging. Break down a huge problem into interesting slices.
3. Reward effort - credit for trying. No punishment for failure.
4. Feedback - link consequence to action. Even when they are distant in time and space.
5. Element of uncertainty - uncertain rewards at the right level of occurrence (intermittent reinforcement).
6. Windows of enhanced attention - provide the lessons at the right time when attention is focused.
7. Other people - doing things with your peers.

The mention of EverQuest did get me to thinking about games for sustainability in a slightly different way. I had been trying to answer how you bride the gap from games to changed behavior.

• In games about sustainability, there is some attempt to educate, but no real requirement to actually change. Here is an example ("Fate of the World") that lets the player experiment with different policies to understand how those policies affect outcomes that are not readily apparent in a short time frame.
• In crowdsourced efforts, like zooniverse's "old weather" project and the Great Backyard Bird Count,  people expend effort at processing data that can be used to understand our environment. That is arguably a change in behavior, but one that is of an information processing nature rather than a lifestyle change.
• In augmented reality, an objective is overlaid on some real environment as a way to change your interaction with that environment. But it leaves the problem of making sustainability related behavior changes exciting enough to play in and of itself on a long term basis.

The answer (of the hour): Raids.
A focused game mechanic that closely coordinates people to act towards a common goal that can require a large amount of preparation outside of the specific event in order to achieve.

• The game sets a target (e.g. kill bad guy X)
• People gather to achieve it (e.g. clan N and clan Y decides to take on this raid for the greater glory)
• The game could set up a mechanic whereby the first team to reduce electricity usage over baseline by 100kWhr opens the dungeon required to start the raid. Or the more energy saved by the group, the more powerful a summoned assistant the team gets (with tiers and drastic changes to powers and appearance as the tiers are achieved). As part of this mechanic, the game would:
• Show each player's contribution towards the goal
• Suggest approaches for achieving the goal
• Provide some in-game feedback about the effect of this goal 
• e.g. the saved energy builds up in a visual form somewhere in-game
• e.g. provide tiered but randomized rewards as players' contributions reach certain levels.
• Provide real world context of what the energy savings means (e.g. $x of savings)
• Keep a public record of what was achieved for all groups attempting the raid to see.
•  Rinse and repeat

Instead of trying to make a game entirely about sustainability, build it into a game that people want to play (like WoW).

One huge opportunity that comes from this is establishing the systems by which you get accurate feedback from the real world on the actions that you really want to drive. Smart meters are one example (leaving open the question of how you establish a "baseline"). But, as noted in this post, car mileage is a much larger contribution to overall energy usage. How would you monitor miles reduced? Similar questions for green buying decisions, water use, etc... some probably easier to solve (and easier to tie to a product promotional campaign) than others.

More Energy Efficiency and Leverage - It's STILL not about caulking.

I can't make a good decision about how to make my energy usage sustainable unless I know which activities are using the most energy. The chart presented here attempts to give an idea of the scales of energy I've been talking about in previous blog posts.

The total energy usage in the US per year (as noted in this blog post) is ~1x10^20J. For comparison, that is:

• ~1.8 million times the energy released by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and  
• ~2600 times the energy that the largest atomic weapon in the US arsenal would release if detonated.
• ~ 47 times the energy released by all nuclear tests conducted... ever...

Closer to home, the total electricity used per year by the average US household is about 4x10^10J. While media focus has been on making our homes more energy efficient as a good way to tackle sustainability, it turns out that driving a single car each year uses ~5x more energy than our homes consume*.
Increasing fuel efficiency or reducing miles driven by 20% would be the equivalent of reducing your home electricity usage by 100%. That's big leverage. Better than caulk or fluorescent light bulbs.

Flying is also pretty energy intensive. A single flight from SanFrancisco to Tokyo uses about the same energy as driving a car for a year** or ~3.5x the average annual electricity usage of a home. With about 4 flights per day 365 days/yr that is ~5100x the average annual electricity usage of a home per year of flights... and that's just one destination from one airport...

So shooting for 30% reductions in energy usage in the home may not be entirely where the leverage lies.

*assuming 15,000 mi/yr @ CAFE standard 27.5 mpg.
** assuming 5148 miles @ 5.29 mpg of kerosene.

Energy Efficiency and Leverage - It's not about caulking and insulation.

Lawrence Livermore National Labs published a very interesting diagram of energy usage in the US for 2009 (above picture).
One thing to take away from it is that most of the inefficiencies ("rejected energy") come from:

• transportation (37%)
• losses during electricity generation (48%)

Combined commercial and residential losses amount to about only 7%.
So even if I could make all commercial buildings and houses 30% more efficient through energy efficiency retrofits, new appliances, smart monitoring, lighting and HVAC feedback controls, etc, that would only reduce the rejected energy by 2%.

Leverage comes from addressing transportation and energy generation and transmission.

• Electric Cars:
• LLNL assumes 25% efficiency for conversion of petroleum energy to useful transportation energy. If you assume that electrifying all transportation could improve this to 90%, that would reduce rejected energy by 24%. That's 12x the impact of green building on energy usage.
• Distributed Generation: Solar panels and wind in your backyard.
• Transmission losses are estimated at about 6.5% for 2007. If those losses were eliminated (optimistically) by putting solar panels and wind farms near the consumers, that would reduce rejected energy by ~1.5%, or slightly less than making all buildings "green" with respect to their energy usage.
• A much bigger deal is the reduction in fossil fuel usage this would allow. Assuming that wind, hydro, geothermal, nuclear and solar are 100% "efficient"(no rejected energy), that means fossil fuels are only about 24% efficient. If you could replace all the coal with some combination of these other sources (preferably wind or solar to allow for distributed generation), that would reduce rejected energy by ~25%. That's 12x the impact of green building (albeit at potentially high cost).

This is not to say that green building is unimportant but, if this analysis is correct (or even in the ballpark), then it's far less important in the big picture of energy efficiency than I thought.
It is important to concede that the changing all transportation to electric drive and replacing all coal with solar or wind is a HUGE hurdle to overcome. Making buildings greener may not be the longest lever but it's one that is easier to deal with.