Fuel efficiency is the No. 1 factor in equipment purchases within the trucking industry, a new report from IBM says.
At the same time, brand name has fallen to the bottom of the criteria list and "faces the risk of slow death," according to the report.
The combination of those two factors means that new players in the trucking industry will give established brands a run for their money.
(Credit:
IBM)
"The truck ecosystem will thrive because of--rather than in spite of--a chaotic introduction of new players," the report said.
"Truck 2020: Transcending Turbulence," which came out of IBM's Institute for Business Value, was based on interviews of 91 executives from 13 countries and from across the industry, including truck and bus original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), suppliers, regulators, and industry associations.
The trucking industry has been faced with financial hurdles, higher energy costs, and the image as a polluter in recent years, according to IBM. And the necessary advances for the industry are not restricted to strides in fuel efficiency.
Telematics will also be key, the report said. Evaluating and diagnosing vehicles remotely and in real time will be a useful tool in preventative maintenance. It will cut down on unexpected breakdowns that disrupt service and that cost trucking companies time and money, according to the report. Telematics tools that collect real-time data can also be useful for curbing litigation over accidents, the report noted.
While the growing significance of telematics may be entirely true, it should be noted that IBM has a vested interest in that field.
Big Blue has said it sees automotive computing as the company's next frontier and has been actively developing telematics and infrastructure technology for at least the last six years.
As far back as 2003, IBM began developing XML-based data retrieval architecture that would allow vehicles to receive real-time traffic and speed data from highways. In 2005, it signed a $125 million telematics deal with United Arab Emirates. And in 2006, it began partnering with manufacturer Magna Electronics to develop smart car parts.
Correction at 9:20 a.m. PDT: The time span for Office Depot's figures is one year.
Last year, Office Depot recycled almost 1.5 million pounds of old tech equipment through its service for consumers, the company said Wednesday.
That sounds like a lot. It makes you realize how quickly all those landfills must be filling up since that figure represents only the junk from people who 1) actually bother to recycle, and 2) chose to go with Office Depot's recycling program.
For a comparison, I decided to check how other company-sponsored recycling programs are doing. Unfortunately, as sustainability expert Kevin Wilhelm told CNET, there is yet to be a standard way for companies to calculate such statistics. What's included in recycling statistics varies from company to company, but the data I dug up offers a rough idea of what's going on in this arena.
Staples, an Office Depot competitor, began offering an in-store recycling service in May 2007. It charges $10 per large item regardless of where you originally bought it; recycles small items like keyboards, mice, and speakers for free; and offers $3 in Staples rewards for Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark or Dell brand printer cartridges.
By the end of the 2007, Staples had recycled 2 million pounds of tech junk, including almost 24 million printer cartridges in the U.S., according to the company's 2007 sustainability report.
What about the computer manufacturers themselves?
Hewlett-Packard has had a recycling program since 1987 and in January 2009 launched a new program that offers money for old tech equipment. As of June 2007, the company had recycled more than 1 billion pounds of electronics and printer cartridges and expanded to include consumer programs in 50 countries. HP's new goal is to reach 2 billion pounds by the end of 2010.
Unlike Office Depot, which asks customers for pay $5, $10, or $15 for a box they can fill with everything from printers to digital cameras, HP offers credit that can be put toward the purchase of an HP product.
Apple has consumer recycling programs in 95 percent of the countries where it sells its computers. In 2007, it collected about "21 million pounds of e-waste," according to the company's 2008 environmental report.
Dell offers consumer recycling programs worldwide. In the U.S., it's free. Between 2006 and 2008, Dell recycled about 255 million pounds of its own products. Its goal is to recover about 275 million pounds by the end of 2009, according to its 2008 Global Corporate Responsibility Report.
Big Blue seems to have recycled the most, or at least calculated the most.
Between 1995 (when it began keeping track) and the end of 2007, IBM "collected and recovered (resold, refurbished, or recycled)" more than 1.5 billion pounds of product and product waste worldwide, according to the company's latest corporate sustainability report.
In the U.S., IBM offers consumer recycling programs on a state-by-state basis.
While recycling tech equipment is definitely a positive way to do your part for the environment, it's also important to keep your computer information secure. Always remember to properly wipe computers clean of your personal information before giving away or recycling them. Coincidentally, CNET's Seth Rosenblatt did a piece on wiping hard drives clean earlier this week.
Scientists from the IBM Zurich Research Lab and the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin are working on a microchip that uses micropipes of water to cool itself, IBM announced Thursday.
The chip's components are built in a 3D stack instead of side by side on a silicon wafer.
This diagram illustrates the chip-cooling concept. Water in a cooling container (purple) is pumped through integrated spaces between the chip's layers (orange).
(Credit: IBM)Chips built in a three-dimensional stack formation offer more pathways for info to be processed and can shorten the distance chip information needs to travel by as much as 1,000 times, according to Thomas Brunschwiler, a senior engineer in the Advanced Thermal Packaging Group at the IBM Zurich Research Lab who has been working on the chip for almost two years.
The trouble is that this type of experimental chip structure also generates a large amount of heat.
To address that problem, the team has developed a cooling system consisting of micropipes of water as thin as a human hair (50 microns) that are interspersed between each chip layer.
To prevent an electrical short, the hairlike water pipes are hermetically sealed from the chip's other components first with a silicon wall and then with a layer of silicon oxide, according to Brunschwiler.
To bond the individual pipes from layer to layer without damaging other chip components, the scientists used a solder consisting of a mixture of gold and tin, which has a low melting point.
"This process enabled us to completely seal off the joints. Then we can use water, which is superior to other coolants," Brunschwiler said.
The water-cooled chip, which is intended for use in supercomputers, is 5 to 10 years away from being commercially available. "But before that, one would probably see chips with one core layer and a memory layer sitting on top that can still be cooled with (an) outside system," Brunschwiler said.
While unique in its microscopic scale, IBM's use of water to cool down the heat generated by computer processing is not novel.
Companies like IBM and Hewlett-Packard sell server racks with liquid cooling systems. Researchers at Ireland's Tyndall Institute and University of Limerick announced in March that they are working on a liquid cooling system incorporated into the packaging that encases chips. And in April, IBM announced a supercomputer that uses water alongside its processors to cool them.
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