green-tech

In Japan, for one week a year the spotlight of this gadget-obsessed country is shifted from the urban neon oasis of Tokyo's Akihabara neighborhood and trained on an expansive convention hall an hour's commute outside of the city.

On Tuesday the purveyors of TVs thinner than a credit card, cell phones pressed with 3D screens, humanoid robots, and the latest in electric car technology descend, along with media, analysts, retail buyers, and industry executives for the opening of the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies, known by the acronym Ceatec.

It's the Japanese equivalent of Las Vegas' CES and Berlin's IFA, and like those two shows earlier this year, attendance is expected to be good, if slightly contracted as companies have cut back on expenses in light of the current economy.

At Ceatec 2008, 804 exhibitors and 196,630 attendees flooded the floor of the Makuhari Messe, a dip from the 895 exhibitors and 206,000 attendees in 2007. The tenor of this year's show should be a bit less gloomy than last year's--which took place the same week banks were failing right and left and Wall Street seemed on the brink of collapse. We'll keep our fingers crossed for less economic drama during this year's show.

Things we are hoping for: more cute robots! Ceatec is unlikely to disappoint in this respect. Last year's expo saw the debut of automatons that did everything from perform front-office reception tasks to helping the elderly. But based on the crowds she drew, the star was undoubtedly Murata Girl, a unicycle-riding robot. This year, we hear she'll be back with even more tricks up her sleeve.

Like those robots, there's also an amazing array of stuff shown at Ceatec we'll never see in stores on this side of the Pacific--see our gallery of cool concept cell phones. But while Ceatec offers a glimpse into the future of gadgetry, the convention hall is also packed to the skylights with practical products.

Last year was the first time Ceatec established a separate pavilion for green technology, and it's back this year. Nissan, which takes its electric cars very seriously, will be there, as will Toshiba. Though not thought of traditionally as a car company, it believes its Supercharge ion battery (SCiB) is perfectly suited for electric cars and scooters. Besides green car technology, we'll also see electronic parts that make ordinary gadgets like TVs and digital signs greener. … Read more

Researchers have come up with a new way to route Internet traffic that could save big Internet companies like Google millions on their electricity bills, according to an article published by MIT's Technology Review.

Researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and the networking company Akamai recently published results from a study that suggest big Internet companies could save up to 40 percent on their electricity bills by using an algorithm to send Internet traffic to data centers where electricity is less expensive.

Data centers consume a lot of energy, which costs operators like Google and Amazon millions of dollars … Read more

NEW YORK--Green is the new black in wireless as companies like Sprint Nextel and Samsung announce new products and programs geared toward environmental sustainability.

At a press event Thursday at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum here, the companies announced a new eco-friendly device called the Reclaim and an overall strategy to green the wireless market.

The news comes as consumers are increasingly buying products and services based on environmental sustainability. From energy-saving light bulbs to hybrid cars and now environmentally-friendly cell phones, green is all the rage.

For Sprint, which has been plagued by a poor customer service reputation for … Read more

Look up above this article. A little higher, above the screen. Chances are that if you're on a laptop or even one of many desktops made in the last five years you'll see a Webcam built in. And that Webcam might end up saving you--and the environment--a little bit of power.

British inventor and self-described "ecogeek" Peter Hopton and his company VeryPC have come up with a piece of software, called PecoBOO, that uses open-source face detection to detect when you're looking at you screen and, more importantly, when you're not.

When you look … Read more

Clean-technology investing could be seeing a rebound.

Cleantech Group, a research firm backed by Deloitte, released a preliminary report on Thursday showing a slight uptick in clean-tech funding during the second quarter of 2009 in North America, Europe, China, and India.

After two quarterly declines, the increase is good news, but the Cleantech Group noted that the quarter-to-quarter comparison for the same period a year ago is still down.

"The (second-quarter) total is up 12 percent from the previous quarter, although down 44 percent from the same period a year ago. The average round size in (the quarter) was $… Read more

IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich plan to build a water-cooled supercomputer whose surplus heat will be re-used to heat the university's buildings.

The Aquasar supercomputer will be located at the ETH Zurich facility, and it will start operations next year, the partners said in an announcement on Tuesday.

The supercomputer will combine two rack-mounted IBM BladeCenter servers, each containing multiple blades with a mixed population of IBM PowerXCell 8i and Intel Nehalem processors. It is expected to deliver a peak performance of about 10 teraflops.

The installation will re-use heat directly for in-building heating. … Read more

It's been a long time since the Boston area could claim to be home to more than a handful of big high-tech companies. Now regional leaders are betting on green to restore cutting-edge luster to "the Hub."

The state already hosts a number of established green-tech companies such as Evergreen Solar and Conservation Services Group, which does building energy-efficiency retrofits. Of course, no green-tech companies have replaced former tech powerhouses like Digital Equipment (acquired by Compaq, which was in turn acquired by Hewlett-Packard) or Lotus Development (now part of IBM).

But that doesn't mean green-tech boosters … Read more

Scroll down to the bottom of our last six all-in-one desktop reviews and you'll find CNET Labs' latest addition to the desktop testing regimen. With the help of the Environmental Protection Agency's EnergyStar program, some impressive-looking power meters, and not a little trial and error, we're happy to report that we've finally published the first batch of power consumption results.

We have a few goals in mind with our new power tests. We want to help you make more informed buying decisions, for one thing. You'll see an annual energy cost chart in each review that compares the yearly estimated cost to operate a variety of systems. We don't expect the actual dollar amount will influence most of you one way or another (we're only talking about a range from $15 to $30 in this first round), but an annual cost figure also distills the relative efficiency between systems down to straightforward terms. You can also refer to our newly official Juice Box, located above the cost chart, for the individual power ratings across a variety of usage states for each system.… Read more

NEW YORK--"I'm anti-tax, but I'm pro-carbon tax," Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk said onstage at the Wired Business Conference here Monday--a remark that prompted interviewer and Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson to quip that he was a "true Silicon Valley libertarian."

Gasoline "should probably be $10" per gallon, said onetime PayPal co-founder Musk, who is also attempting to make sending satellites into space cheaper with a start-up called SpaceX. "I'm not paying for the true cost of gasoline at the pump...since nobody's explicitly paying for the CO2 capacity … Read more