Triplesourced

Ah the pressures of dealing with a communications industry in flux.

Next generation networks, internet bottlenecks, spectrum issues, mobile pricing, digital switchover, just some of the problems awaiting newly appointed Ofcom Chairman Dr Colette Bowe.

Yep - Colette. Showing my ignorance here but didn't occur to me that chairman goes for both sexes. I thought it was a typo on the Government press release - a late Friday mistake but no a quick bit of Googling reveals the following on that fountain of truth - www.thefreedictionary.com.

"USAGE: Chairman can seem inappropriate when applied to a woman, while chairwoman can be offensive. Chair and chairperson can be applied to either a man or a woman; chair is generally preferred to chairperson."

Anyway - whatever she is called Dr Bowe's salary shows little evidence of a glass ceiling (Couldn't track down an exact figure for her predecessor David Currie but he was on £133,000 in 2003 which will certainly have gone up but beyond £200,000? - hard to say)

"The Chairman's remuneration is £200,000 p.a. for up to three days a week"

So that means that some of the time she might not even do a three day week and still get paid £200,000. Nice work if you can get it, industry meltdown and global recession aside obviously.

See more here:
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/media/features/colapp

Given that it's the end of the financial world as we know (and yes I do feel fine - chipper even - put that down to banker-based Schadenfreude), I was expecting to see the number of press releases with "green" in the headline dry up.

It's all about the money baby - well it probably always has been for most "green initiatives" - but given that green also carries the connotation of paying more up front to save in the future (and save the planet possibly), I thought marketeers would be running from the term.

But bless my cotton socks but what should arrive in my in-box but an email from the lovely chaps at D-Link explaining how lovely and cuddly to the environment their new switch is.

Frankly, this may be greenwash but anything that makes the world of switching even vaguely approach the outskirts of interesting has got to be good thing - and the good folks at TechWorld obviously buy it as they gave D-Link an award for the planet-cuddling ways last year.

Along with other green tech makers, D-Link also uses the fact that its products comply with the RoHS and WEEE regulations as evidence of its green credentials - which is just annoying. IT'S THE LAW. Doing something you have to do is not an achievement. The fact their products don't blow up ever day and kill people is great too - but they don't shout about it - why? Cos building products that don't kill people is also the law.

Enough - here's the skinny:

"the second-generation D-Link® 5-Port Gigabit Desktop Switch (DGS-1005D) which provides up to 73% reduced power consumption* without sacrificing network performance."

And furthermore...

D-Link’s Green technology conserves energy by recognising when a port is active or inactive then adjusts its power accordingly, benefiting Home/SOHO users who may not need perpetual use of their computers or the use of all the ports on their switches. It is also capable of altering power usage in relation to the length of its cable, conserving energy use for both the user and the environment without any loss of performance



So there you are. Green it seems is still in - at least in the crazy world of networking hardware.

Not a specifically IT-related missive but given the amount of greenwash sloshing around the tech sector, IT companies should take notice.

Defra has just announced that its recruited a steering group to help update its green claims code:

"The code was devised to assist businesses to advertise their green products and services with confidence and help protect consumers from bogus or inaccurate claims" Defra claims.

Seems the code hasn't been update since 2003 - well before the world went crazy for green. The downturn means much of that buzz has been dampened down, with more focus on economics and cost-cutting that environmental altruism but anything that makes companies think twice before pumping out greenwash can't be bad.

The current steering group includes:

The current members of the steering group include:

Advertising Standards Authority
Advertising Association
BERR
BRC
CBI
Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM)
Chartered Institute of PR (CIPR)
COI
Consumer Focus
DFT
Forum for the Future
Institute for Practitioners in Advertising (IPA)
ISBA (Voice of British Advertisers)
OFT
Sustainable Development commission

Be good to see some environmental campaigners in that list.

I have been tracking the issue of illegal dumping of old tech in Africa for a while now and reported HP's first efforts to investigate this issue last year:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39289404,00.htm

The PC maker has just released the first findings from this study - conducted on the ground in Kenya and Morocco so far - which you can find below.

It is a complex issue and HP deserves credit for highlighting the problem. However when I told a contact of mine about the HP programme he was less than impressed.

Having worked on the ground in Africa for years, my contact is well aware of the problems of what happens to IT kit - sold new into the country by vendors like HP or refurbished machines donated by charities - at the end of its useful life.

Here are the points he raised when I told him about the HP programme - with the original language toned down a bit:

1. HP already knows exactly what needs to be done with eWaste. There is no mystery. HP already does it in many other countries that have Green lobbies and governments ready to enforce environmental protection.

2. In Europe HP builds multi-million dollar eWaste facilities and (more recently) pays for end-of-life disposal of PCs spending an amount calculated to be in direct proportion to the number of HP units sold into the European market (as it is required to do under the WEEE Directive). The question is then why, when HP is environmentally compliant within the European Community, does it pay for zero end-of-life disposal in Africa?

3. HP equipment is sold in virtually all of Africa's 53 countries - where it is market leader in printers and competes in the desktop and laptop segments - but it seems that whilst they are prepared to invest in Africa in pursuit of sales and profit - their concern for the environment ends at the Mediteranean Sea.

5. Will Africa have to force HP to take responsibility for end-of-life disposal by passing legislation or will HP volunteer funding of environmental recycling in Africa that is directly proportional to its
market share in Africa - as it already does in Europe?

6. Computers for Schools Kenya have set up a pilot recycling facility in Nairobi, Kenya.

http://www.cfsk.org/ewaste.html

Instead of bloating the research budgets of European 'think tanks' they [HP and its researchers] could just give CFSK the funding that

they need to recycle the tens of thousands of pieces of HP kit sold into Africa every year. That won't happen.

Instead they will now vote themselves a second round of research funding based on their primary finding that 'more research needs to be done'!!

Here's an excerpt from the HP release :

HP unveils conclusions and next steps of project to tackle electronic waste in Africa

BRUSSELS, February 17, 2009 – HP together with the Global Digital Solidarity Fund (DSF) and the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research (Empa) today unveiled the first results of a pilot project to tackle the problem of electronic waste (e-waste) in Africa. This initiative was carried out in South Africa, Morocco and Kenya and has allowed HP to gather vital information on how African governments, organisations and society are dealing with the rising problem of e-waste management, as well as test solutions on the way forward.

The information and experience gathered in this project, which also included contributions from local organisations and NGOs, will support the launch of the second phase of the project, which aims at engaging corporate and government partners to further extend e-waste management programmes to other countries and tackle the problem of e-waste in the entire continent.

“HP has a responsibility that starts with the design of a product and goes right through to its disposal and we take that responsibility very seriously,” commented Klaus Hieronymi, Director, Environmental Business Management, HP EMEA. “We see these projects in Africa as both providing employment opportunities for local communities and as a step towards a sustainable solution for tackling electronic waste in Africa.”

For more on this issue check out:
http://ewasteguide.info/

And

www.dsf-fsn.org/

Just seen a release come in from Red Hat promising to play nicely with Microsoft over their competing virtualisation approaches.

It smacks slightly of the kind of release you'd expect from the Novell/MS tie-up but it's unlikely that Red Hat would go that far - not without losing a chunk of its management, customers and support base.

More likely this is more a case of my enemy's enemy is my friend with both software makers looking to unseat VMWare from its perch atop the virtualisation tree.

Here's an excerpt from the Red Hat release:

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that, in response to strong customer demand, it has signed reciprocal agreements with Microsoft Corporation to enable increased interoperability for the companies’ virtualisation platforms. Each company will join the other's virtualisation validation/certification program and will provide coordinated technical support for their mutual server virtualisation customers. The reciprocal validations will allow customers to deploy heterogeneous, virtualised Red Hat and Microsoft solutions with confidence.

“The world of IT today is a mixture of virtualised and non-virtualised environments. Red Hat is looking to help our customers extend more rapidly into virtualised environments, including mixed Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows Server environments,” said Mike Evans, vice president, Corporate Development at Red Hat. “Red Hat listened when our customers asked us to provide interoperability between our respective guest and host virtualisation solutions. We are excited to announce these agreements today as the result of our collaboration with Microsoft.”

You can find more on Red Hat's blog here:
http://www.press.redhat.com/

It seems Red Hat's Scott Crenshaw is quite aware of what some people could read into this announcement:

One of the big questions on the minds of many members of the open source community is whether Red Hat has compromised its ideals. Nothing could be further from the truth. Red Hat’s growth, and its differentiation, come from its belief in and commitment to, the open source community model. It is our view – and this view is institutionalized throughout our company – that we have to serve the community, as well as our customers, shareholders, and employees. The moment we stop doing so, we eliminate the differentiation which drives our growth.

So we undertook this interoperability effort with strict adherence to our principles. The companies signed two agreements: One in which Red Hat joined the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP), which validates Windows Server guests running on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization technologies, and the other which certifies Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests running on Windows Server Hyper-V.

The agreements contain no patent or open source license components. There are no financial clauses beyond simple certification testing fees. These are straightforward certification and validation agreements.

I am excited about this step forward for the industry. And I am pleased we did it without compromising our commitment to open source. That’s leadership we can be proud of.