appliances

Masdar City to test GE 'smart' appliances

Abu Dhabi's planned green community, Masdar City, will be testing General Electric's smart appliances in a handful of residences and coordinating them with its power grid, GE said Monday.

GE's Consumer & Industrial division announced in October 2008 that it was developing home appliances that could ease the strain on electrical grids by coordinating with a grid's off-peak hours to perform flexible functions.

A refrigerator equipped with a "smart" meter, for example, communicates with the local power utility. That refrigerator then waits to run its automatic defrost cycle until it has received a signal … Read more

Green washing machine saves some green

For those of us who pay per load to do the laundry, the simplest way to save money is to scour the neighborhood for the cheapest machines. But those who have washers and dryers in their homes have to find creative ways to save on spending, whether it means stretching a pair of jeans for an extra day or two, air drying towels and sheets, or investing in a green washing machine. The Zanussi washing machine will not only wash your clothes and look stylish, but it will also save you money.

If you're wondering how it saves money, … Read more

Home appliances to get Cash for Clunkers-like rebate

Now that you've dumped your gas-guzzling pick-up, maybe it's time to move that old fridge from the garage.

The Department of Energy is sponsoring a $300 million program, funded by the economic stimulus plan, that will let consumers get a rebate on an EnergyStar-rated appliance. It's modeled roughly like the Cash for Clunkers program, which is now ending, although trading in older home equipment isn't required.

The Energy Department has begun awarding funding for individual states. Maryland is getting a $5.4 million slice and will run the program through the Maryland Energy Administration, according to … Read more

The short stack gets automated

For the chef planning on feeding a big breakfast crowd, the ChefStack Automatic Pancake Machine is a lifesaver.

The automated flapjack maker is able to produce a pancake every 30 seconds, stacking them in a neat little pile on the side while you spend your time frying eggs and sausage. And you needn't worry about preparing the batter either, as the machine is designed to use ready-made batter pouches.

Understandably, this type of machine lends itself well to larger crowds, as in cafeterias and convenience stores. Taking up about as much real estate as a microwave, it provides a … Read more

Combination mixer makes everything

Someday, in the probably-too-distant future, our kitchens will be completely automated above and beyond anything we can now imagine. Our meals will be prepared at the press of a button, and instead of passable microwaveable food, the meals will actually be nutritious and delicious. While whatever magical all-in-one unit that would create these meals out of thin air might not yet exist, appliance makers are doing all they can, now, to cram every conceivable appliance into one unit.

The Kalorik All In One Mixer takes the lowly hand mixer and elevates it into an appliance practically capable of making dinner … Read more

Novell makes Linux easy with SUSE Studio

Microsoft, for all its faults, has significantly lowered the bar to IT development, offering tools like Visual Studio that help make average developers more productive. Linux, on the contrary, has been supercharged with powerful capabilities, but has often required significant experience to harness that power.

Enter Novell's SUSE Studio Online, a cool new way to develop software and virtual appliances online. I wrote about SUSE Studio Online back in January 2009 when it was still in alpha stage, but Novell has now officially released this tool that "enables ISVs to customize a fully supported, mission-critical operating system and … Read more

Google appliance now searching by the billion

Google sells hardware, too, and announced Tuesday that its Google Search Appliance can now find documents by the billions.

Google Search Appliance 6.0 (GSA) is the company's product for helping enterprises locate and manage the reams of internal corporate data that doesn't get indexed by Google's search bots, but which needs to be found by managers and employees. The latest version is all about scaling, or the ability to link dozens of these appliances to allow even the biggest companies to search their networks for presentations, spreadsheets, and other documents.

There are two hardware models that … Read more

Hitachi's 'green' refrigerator turns out blue

Going "green" is a huge movement, with companies around the world releasing products that have less and less of an environmental impact--or, at least, that's what they want us to believe. As consumers' interest in eco-friendly products gets higher, so does the temptation to embellish a product's green credentials.

According to The Mainichi Daily News, Hitachi Appliances, a subsidiary of Hitachi and currently Japan's biggest refrigerator maker, seems to be the first company to have fallen for the temptation to claim a product is green when it isn't.

Of nine refrigerator models the company released between September and November of last year, including the "Eiyo Ikiiki Shinku Chirudo V" and the "Big & Slim 60", six are not eco-friendly at all and the other three are far from the level of eco-friendliness the company advertised them to be.… Read more

Server start-up taps IBM-Intel tech, eyes Web 2.0

A start-up founded by former Sun Microsystems computer scientists is tapping IBM and Intel hardware to accelerate the enormous server workloads of burgeoning Web 2.0 businesses.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based Schooner Information Technology announced Monday that it is readying a server appliance based on Intel's newest Nehalem processors and its solid-state drives. The first products are due by the end of May with volume shipments in the third quarter of 2009.

Hewlett-Packard and Fusion-io said recently that they are working on analogous technology and had achieved extremely high performance using Fusion-io's solid-state drives running on HP servers.

Schooner Information Technology's President and CEO John R. Busch was formerly research director of computer system architecture and analysis at Sun laboratories. Chairman and CTO Tom McWilliams was a lead engineer at Sun, working on server architecture and advanced CAD tools. Prior to that, McWilliams was a director in the MIPS division of Silicon Graphics. Both men were involved in moving Sun to multicore server architectures, according to Busch.

The company is funded by CMEA Capital and Redpoint Ventures. The current total investment is $15 million.

In a phone interview Monday, CEO Busch explained that the company has set out to fuse standalone high-performance server technologies into a faster organic whole. "Computer companies are pretty much selling boxes while others are selling networking. They're basically just selling component technologies," he said. "If you just speed up the processor or speed up the interconnect or add in flash drives, it will have a small effect."

"The observation I had when we started the company was that we really need to make a shift and we really need to put the middleware application and (our) new operating environment together with these technologies--tightly coupled with parallel flash memory and with Intel multicore processors. As opposed to loosely coupled, in order to bring their real inherent benefits through," Busch said. … Read more