The A160T Hummingbird comes in for a landing May 9 at the U.S. Army's Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona after a high-altitude hovering demonstration.
(Credit: Boeing)A disparate pair of aviation R&D projects at Boeing have hit milestones recently.
The A160T Hummingbird, a helicopter-style unmanned aerial vehicle, last week flew for 18.7 hours without refueling, an accomplishment that Boeing described Wednesday as an "unofficial world endurance record" for UAVs between 500 and 2,500 kilograms (about 1,100 to 5,500 pounds)--a record that's pending certification by a key aeronautical sanctioning body.
But the record books aside, the flight also helps to show the Hummingbird's mettle as a potential aircraft for military use. During the flight, the turbine-powered unmanned rotorcraft carried a 300-pound internal payload--which in eventual real-life operations might be supplies for ground troops or gear for in-flight surveillance--and flew as high as 15,000 feet. When it finished, it still had about 90 minutes worth of fuel in reserve.
In a test flight last September, the Hummingbird carried a heavier load for a shorter period of time (1,000 pounds and eight hours). The A160T variant first flew about a year ago, taking up where an earlier piston-powered version left off.
Another May milestone for the A160T Hummingbird, which is designed to fly autonomously, involved so-called hover-out-of-ground-effect flights at 15,000 and 20,000 feet. The ability to hover at the relatively high altitudes would make the UAV more effective for missions in mountainous areas and help keep it out of range of some ground-based air defense weapons, Boeing said.
Measuring 35 feet long with a 36-foot rotor diameter, the Hummingbird in service is expected to fly at 140 knots for more than 20 hours. Boeing Advanced Systems is building the UAV for DARPA and for the Army and Navy.
The Advanced Tactical Laser aircraft in flight.
(Credit: Ed Turner, Boeing)Also this week, Boeing said that on May 13, it fired a high-energy chemical laser--in ground tests--aboard a C-130H aircraft, a step toward in-flight tests later this year in which the laser will fire at ground targets from on high. The directed-energy weapon is designed to fire through a rotating belly turret in the aircraft, known as the Advanced Tactical Laser.
And in a me-too missive straight out of the Cold War, the Russian news agency Novosti reported a patriotic response to the ATL test from an unnamed Russian defense industry "expert." Boeing, it would seem, is late to the game.
"We tested a similar system back in 1972. Even then our 'laser cannon' was capable of hitting targets with high precision," the expert is quoted as saying. "We have moved far ahead since then, and the U.S. has to keep pace with our research and development."
The data centers used by tech companies to run their Web sites and corporate networks are notorious energy hogs.
The information and communications technology sector currently accounts for about 6 percent of the nation's power consumption, up from about 2 percent to 3 percent in 2000, according to a report in February from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.
In a report to Congress last August, the Environmental Protection Agency predicted that the amount of power used by U.S. data centers would more than double over the next five years, at a cost of $7.4 billion each year. The EPA also suggested that the nation could save up to $4 billion in energy costs, if it made its data centers more energy-efficient.
Those figures have led many tech giants, such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Dell, to get behind efforts to reduce power consumption in data centers. Now IBM is ramping up its business of selling power-saving technologies with new tools designed to track and cap data center energy consumption, including power for air conditioning to cool server computers, according to a report from Reuters. The products were announced at an IBM conference Wednesday in Los Angeles.
IBM is also expanding to 27 countries a program begun last year as part of its Big Green Innovations that lets companies earn and trade certificates awarded for verified energy savings, Reuters reported.
"Energy efficiency has become a critical business metric, like product reliability and customer satisfaction," William Zeitler, head of IBM's systems and technology group, told Reuters. "This is a critically important problem in the industry."
Certainly, Big Blue is landing a lot of the Big Green by helping other companies go green.
The initiative has generated nearly $200 million of technology services contract signings in the first quarter and about $300 million in the fourth, Reuters quoted Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge as saying during recent earnings presentations.
Updated 2:05 p.m. PT: Dell PR provided us with a photo.
How apropos: On Earth Day, a PC company says it's going to make a greener PC.
The yet-to-be-named ultra-small green consumer desktop PC.
(Credit: Dell)We already know Dell wants to be the greenest company on the planet, or in the solar system, or something. So as part of his remarks to the Fortune Brainstorm: Green conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Chief Executive Michael Dell previewed a desktop PC aimed at consumers.
The PC will be 81 percent smaller and will use 70 percent less energy than one of Dell's mini-tower desktops. And the packaging will be totally recycled. Though there's no name for the PC and no pictures (a Dell representative insisted they didn't just come up with the idea on the flight from Austin to LAX, and in fact have been working on it for "a while") the desktop is supposed to be available by the end of the year.
Dell is targeting consumers first with this energy-efficient desktop, which is notable since the company normally rolls out green initiatives on business machines first.
Click here for more Earth Day tech news.
It already makes Office. Now, Microsoft wants a hand in controlling your office.
Like IBM, Microsoft has launched an effort to make itself a major player in the rapidly growing energy-efficiency market. The company is recruiting developers and is eyeing opportunities to produce software itself for building control systems, traffic management systems, or even the software that gets used by water quality management districts.
It's a strategy driven by opportunity and need. Climate change and rising power prices are forcing corporations and individuals to seek out ways to curb energy consumption. Besides costing more, energy is highly inefficiently used. Some studies note that about half of the electricity produced does not get used for a productive purpose. Carbon taxes, or cap-and-trade systems, are likely inevitable: all three U.S. presidential candidates support them.
On the other hand, building management and water control systems aren't exactly perched on the cutting edge. Many companies still sell closed, proprietary systems for controlling heating, lighting, etc. Two of the biggest clean-tech IPOs last year were for companies--Comverge and EnerNoc--that have devised systems for automatically curbing electricity consumption. IBM, meanwhile, is in the midst of conducting trials with utilities to control thermostats and appliances remotely.
"The whole transportation sector has huge inefficiencies that can be reduced by software," said Rob Bernard, Microsoft's chief environmental strategist, in a phone interview. When I asked him how big the need is for modern software for building management, he laughed. Years ago, he worked in commercial real estate.
"I am highly familiar with the massive opportunity for software and intelligence to optimize energy control systems," he said. "I think that buildings account for something like 37 percent of greenhouse gases around the globe. If you look at the big sectors--transportation, buildings and building management, deforestation, electrical grid, and utilities--in every one of those we are looking at how software can enable innovation."
As in other markets, Microsoft will rely heavily on third-party developers. The developers will come up with the applications, and these will run on MSFT platforms.
"We will build some applications ourselves and we will try to accelerate the entire market to address this problem," he said.
In December, it kicked off a program, called Ingenuity Point, in which developers submit applications or ideas for applications. Microsoft then gives awards each quarter to the best ideas and tries to promote the most promising in the marketplace.
One of the winners, OSIsoft, for instance, has devised business intelligence applications for tracking how much water gets lost from the reservoir until it finally hits the tap. The company is also involved in a desalination project in Australia. The country is currently wrestling with a prolonged, severe drought. Another company in France has come up with a traffic management and monitoring application: this can help delivery companies avoid clogs and thus save gas.
Stay tuned for my upcoming, related article: Microsoft's plan to make more efficient products and curb energy in its own operations.
An artist's rendering of the company's wave system
(Credit: Orecon)Right now, wave power is in the early experimental stages, but venture capitalists are lining up to be on the ground floor.
Orecon has lined up $24 million in funding from Advent Ventures, Venrock, Wellington Partners and Northzone Ventures to build a full scale prototype of its wave power machine and, if the results are positive, move toward commercial deployment.
The U.K.-based Orecon has devised a large-scale buoy for harvesting power from waves. In a nutshell, waves striking the device create pressure in a chamber, which is used to turn a turbine and create electricity. A single device will be capable of producing up to 1.5 megawatts of power. Orecon's system in part is based around the engineering devised to build offshore oil rigs. The system will produce power for a minimum of 25 years, the company says.
That's similar to the buoy being built by Ireland's WaveBob. WaveBob has a 1/4 scale prototype in the waters off Galway now and hopes to insert a full-scale device, which will produce over one megawatt of power, in the water in the next few years.
Most wave systems produce far less power--maybe 250 kilowatts. Although smaller devices are cheaper to make, larger devices have certain advantages. For one thing, because they are large, they can survive rugged seas better. Each device also produces more power, which means fewer devices and potentially less maintenance.
Both the UK and Ireland want to build local wave industries and harvest energy from the sea. Both countries bear the brunt of strong waves that cross the Atlantic. WaveBob CEO Andrew Parish also pointed out in a recent interview that this section of the Atlantic is awash in maritime engineering know-how.
Still, wave energy, like tidal energy, remains mostly in the potential stage because of the environmental challenges and the costs. Over the next two to three years, expect to see larger prototypes and more testing. Commercially produced wave power may begin to start crossing the grid sometime between 2010 and 2015.
It is interesting to see Venrock in the deal. The firm mostly concentrates on more exotic technologies that could go commercial. Recently, it has put money into fusion and clean diesel.
WASHINGTON--Dell chief Michael Dell and other high-profile technology company CEOs descended on the nation's capital Wednesday with a message for policymakers: do more to encourage energy-efficient practices, but don't spell out specific standards for the products that companies like theirs build.
On behalf of a lobby group known as the Technology CEO Council, Dell, EMC chief Joe Tucci, and Applied Materials head Mike Splinter suggested the government should do more to "lead by example." They said it can do that by reevaluating its own power consumption, setting "high goals" for energy efficiency, awarding presidential medals to companies that excel in using information technology to boost their energy efficiency, and minimizing trade and tariff barriers and maximizing tax incentives for companies with a track record of efficient energy use.
"The industry is moving, the market is moving, but it could and should be moving faster," Bruce Mehlman, the Technology CEO Council's executive director, told reporters during a morning briefing. "This is a good place to help get that message out."
Often, when business leaders ramp up Capitol Hill lobbying, they're attempting to stave off burdensome new regulations, but Mehlman and the executives said there's no particular proposal floating around that troubles them at the moment.
Still, Dell, whose remarks began with a boast about his company's "commitment to being the greenest technology company on the planet," pointed out that there are some things government shouldn't do, such as attempting to establish a "one-size-fits-all mandate for development and design of IT products."
The executives also touted two new studies that convey what some may consider to be a paradox: by their estimation, the rise of technology use has actually helped improve energy efficiency.
One of those reports, commissioned by the Technology CEO Council and produced by economists at the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), argues that for every kilowatt hour of electricity consumed by computers, servers, telecommunications technology, and all manner of gadgets, the U.S. economy increased its overall energy savings by a factor of about 10.
Although that conclusion may seem counterintuitive, it's based on the idea that those gadgets are displacing the need for other energy-consuming activities, resulting in energy savings, said study co-author John Laitner, an economist and former Environmental Protection Agency official. He described an example from his own life: rather than flying to Sweden for a meeting, he recently partook in it from a local office via videoconference. (Laitner also nevertheless acknowledges in the report a "lack of precise data" to back the findings.)
The second report, produced by the Technology CEO Council, lists dozens of examples of products made by its member companies and others that have managed to improve power consumption over the years.
According to the ACEEE report, the information and communications technology sector currently accounts for about 6 percent of the nation's power consumption, up from about 2 percent to 3 percent in 2000. But CEOs like Dell and EMC's Tucci said they're confident that improvements in technology will keep that percentage from growing exponentially in the years to come.
The suggestions, for the record, aren't exactly new. In a report to Congress last August, the EPA suggested the nation could save up to $4 billion in energy costs if it made its data centers more energy-efficient. The agency also predicted that the amount of power used by U.S. data centers, which consumed 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2006, would more than double over the next five years, at a cost of $7.4 billion each year.
Belkin Ceylon Bag
(Credit: Belkin)Here's something blasphemous: My favorite booth at Macworld was not Apple's, but Belkin's. It knocked my socks off.
Think back a few years: Belkin was a ho-hum manufacturer of unsexy cables and nondescript PC accessories. Then came the iPod, and the company recognized a good thing when it saw one. Belkin jumped on the iPod shooting star and produced a nice line of interesting, well-conceived accessories. But essentially, the company outsourced its aesthetic to the iPod, piggybacking visually as well as functionally on that core device.
Now, Belkin is turning into a design and innovation powerhouse in its own right.
At its attractive booth, the company was showing an amazingly wide array of products, including a hip messenger bag, an HD TV "beamer", a Skype phone, and Podcast Studio. All were interesting, stylish, and well-made. The company has an emerging aesthetic that, while not totally unique, is starting to create a strong Belkin personality.
One item that caught my eye because of its genuine innovation in a totally boring product was its Conserve Surge Protector. It is a thin eight-outlet surge protector (stifled yawn)...with a remote control. Huh?
Belkin Conserve power strip
(Credit: Adam Richardson)Actually it's brilliant: You use the remote to turn off the powerstrip when you don't want it sucking vampire energy. The remote can be used to control one or multiple strips (they have selectable RF channels), so conceivably you could turn off a whole bunch of them in one go in an office or house.
There are two nonswitched outlets so you can turn off your energy-sucking plasma and leave your TV on to record The Colbert Report. Ironically, the power strip itself becomes a source of vampire energy, but it is far less than what is connected to it.
Lastly, the remote looks like a giant on-off switch, about the size of a playing card. It can be attached to a wall-mount, so you don't have to worry about losing it:
Power strip remote on the wall
(Credit: Adam Richardson)Let's hope Belkin can keep up this pace. My hat is off to the company.
The Advanced Tactical Laser aircraft flies over Albuquerque, N.M.
(Credit: Ed Turner, Boeing)The first ray guns to be used in combat may well be aerial weapons, and not phaserlike side arms in the hands of foot soldiers.
Certainly Boeing is working in that direction. For several years it's been providing regular updates on the (notably slow) progress of its marquee directed-energy effort, the Airborne Laser, to be carried aloft by a heavily modified 747 that's intended to stop ballistic missiles during their launch phase. Now the defense contractor is touting the steps it's taking with a smaller counterpart designed to strike ground targets, the Advanced Tactical Laser.
As of this month, the high-energy chemical laser that is the actual weapons portion of the ATL is now installed in a C-130H airplane, a well-proven design taking on yet another new mission. The 12,000-plus-pound chemical laser system is taking up residence alongside a separate beam control system, installed at an earlier date, that functions as the tracking and targeting apparatus.
This would hardly be the first time that the C-130, primarily a cargo and troop transport aircraft, has functioned as a gunship. The well-armed AC-130 variant saw much action in Vietnam, and has also flown in subsequent conflicts.
An earlier incarnation of the ball turret, in restored B-17 Flying Fortress aircraft flying in 2002.
(Credit: SSGT William Greer, USAF )The business end of the ATL will be a rotating turret in the belly of the fuselage--reminiscent of the one-squished-man ball turret of the B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator planes used in World War II, hauntingly depicted by poet Randall Jarrell in his "Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner." By contrast, the 747-borne Airborne Laser will fire through the nose of the aircraft.
Sometime in 2008, the ATL is expected to demonstrate its prowess in flight, directing the high-energy laser at what Boeing calls "mission-representative ground targets." In tests at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., earlier this year, a surrogate low-power laser hit targets on more than a dozen occasions, and laboratory testing of the high-energy laser wrapped up after more than 50 firings, according to Boeing.
Aerial tests of the bigger, ballistic-missile-minded Airborne Laser are scheduled for 2009.
Boeing doesn't just have its head in the clouds when it comes to directed-energy weapons. It's also working on a more down-to-Earth Humvee-mounted laser shooter.
Incandescent bulbs are getting it from all sides these days.
Taiwan may soon join the list of national and state governments to impose regulations that lead to the demise of traditional incandescent bulbs. Neal Hunter, CEO of LED Lighting Fixtures (LLF), says there are rumors in the lighting world that Taiwan will pass legislation that would phase out incandescents by 2011 or 2012. Sporadic reports in Taiwanese papers have come out saying that the Ministry of Economic Affairs wants to get rid of incandescents too.
Taiwan will also promote LEDs as the light source of choice for the future, he added during a presentation at the ThinkEquity ThinkGreen conference.
While Hunter said he hasn't been able to confirm the status of any bills, it makes sense. Incandescents consume quite a bit of energy. Close to 95 percent of the power gets converted into heat, rather than light. Taiwan, like other Asian nations, is struggling with ways to get consumers to cut down on electrical consumption. LEDs and compact fluorescent bulbs use considerably less energy and last longer, although they cost more.
Taiwan also plays a key role in the LED market. LEDs are chips, after all, and Taiwan remains one of the chief centers of semiconductor design and manufacturing. Supporting LEDs would be another of the country's job and export creation measures.
LLF, by the way, is a company worth keeping an eye on. It makes light fixtures based around LEDs. It has installed LED lights at McDonald's, Denny's, Starbucks, Marriott, Best Western, and Microsoft.
At $75, LED light fixtures cost more than standard light figures, but they use a lot less power. LLF just came out with a fixture that puts out the same amount of light a 65 incandescent bulb would, but it only uses 5.8 watts.
"Last year the best we could do was 11 watts," he said.
The quality of light is getting better, as well. "The current perception is a bunch of little lights shining through a fixture," he said. "The only way to make it (commercially) is so that people don't know the difference."
To take the sting out of the cost of the fixtures, utilities have begun to issue rebates to customers to encourage them to buy LED lamps. One is offering commercial building owners a little over $22 for each LED lamp they install. LLF also has LED lamps for the residential market, but the market will take a little longer to take off.
The company is also staffed and run by LED veterans. Hunter himself used to be the CEO of Cree, a large LED manufacturer.
Last week, the FBI announced the end of the second phase of Operation Bot Roast, an ongoing investigation into botnets, and the criminal activity associated with them. I recently asked Dr. Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks where in the world the bot herders, the people who control the botnets, might be. Here are some excerpts:
We see a few major groups. We see Americans and Western Europeans often interested in using the botnet to make money either directly or indirectly by selling services, or stealing information from those botnets to sell and use credit card information bank information, etc.
There are some botnets out of South America, but mostly South America seems dominated by the Brazilian, what folks used to call the banker Trojan, the browser helper object that steals information right out of the browser from banks from online banking or e-commerce transactions. Some of the more high-profile botnets we've dubbed TeamUSA and Peruvian Power. These have been long running and relatively successful. But they're not exactly household names.
The botnet community is also taking off in the Russian language part of the Internet. Lately I've been watching a lot of DDoS attacks come out of Russia, commanded by Russians. Possibly for pay, as retribution, or as punishment to those who try an stop some of the other illegal activities, such as fraud and theft.
I have been tracking lately Russian DDoS bot code run by different groups. The code itself is bought and shared between them. One of the big ones is a code base called Black Energy. The author is a Russian language speaker who offers his help files and other things in the Russian language and sells it on the Russian language forums anywhere from $40 on up. Black Energy is strictly a DDoS botnet
We have watched some botnets from China but I don't see a whole lot of botnet activity coming out of there.
You can read more of Nazario's comments in this Security Watch column. And you hear more of my interview with Dr. Nazario in this Security Bites podcast.
