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Viridity software manages energy use

Audrey Zibelman spent two years in the Peace Corps in the late 1970s, working in a village in Chad which had no electricity. She was struck by how the lack of power exacerbated poverty.

“For these people I was living with, about 80 to 90 percent of their day was spent just on staying alive,” she said.

Today Zibelman, 54, heads a Philadelphia startup backed by $24 million in venture capital that she hopes will eventually help light up remote areas. For now, the 56 employees at Viridity Energy make software used by dozens of large facilities in the United States, including commercial buildings and factories, to manage their energy, which is usually their second- or third-largest expense, according to Zibelman.

She started the company in 2008 after persuading Alain Steven, an expert in utility IT systems, to help build the software. While other power-saving technologies exist, she says, Viridity is the first in the United States that also lets power guzzlers sell their energy back to the grid. That’s an important feature for institutions with solar panels or generators.

Viridity installs software that works with a building’s energy systems to monitor and control heating and cooling, appliances, generators and more. The software constantly checks the variables that affect how much a facility pays for energy. This includes the price of electricity, which for wholesale buyers like factories can change every few minutes.

The software also takes into account weather forecasts and how much it costs a building to produce its own energy. Viridity then alters electricity use to minimize costs.

At Drexel University in Philadelphia, a Viridity client, the software knows that certain rooms are better insulated than others. When electricity prices rise, it automatically reduces heat in the law library, where the books trap a lot of warmth. Drexel could make money during those hours by selling electricity from its diesel generators to the grid.

The software builds on Zibelman’s more than 25 years in the utility industry, including as general counsel to the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission. Viridity doesn’t charge for its software; it takes a cut of any revenue its customers make by selling to the grid.

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Tableau Software Announces Aggressive Growth Plan for 2012, Makes Room for 300 New Employees

Following the announcement earlier this month that it nearly doubled its sales and grew its customer base by 40 percent in 2011, Tableau Software today revealed its plans to add 300 employees in 2012. The Seattle-based company, which also has offices in Kirkland, WA, Menlo Park, CA and London, added more than 160 employees in 2011 bringing its total to 350.

“We’re on a growth trajectory, and we need great people to help us make the most of our opportunity,” said Christian Chabot, CEO and co-founder of Tableau Software. “We have assembled a passionate and driven team of people who genuinely embrace our mission to help people see and understand data. We’re looking to hire more developers, salespeople, marketing and operations people who share our passion.”

In particular, the company is focused on hiring a wealth of software engineers with talent in key areas such as interactive analytics, mobile applications, internet scale distributed systems, high performance graphics, user experience and human oriented design.

The leader in rapid-fire business intelligence software got its start in the computer science department at Stanford in 2003 and moved its headquarters to the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle shortly thereafter. Tableau has had eight years of record sales, achieving 94 percent sales growth last year.

Tableau is also expanding its Bay Area office to a Menlo Park location that can accommodate 60 employees. The company will host an open house at the new office location, 800 El Camino Real, Suite 400 in Menlo Park on Thursday, March 1 at 5pm. People can register at www.tableausoftware.com/menlo-park-open-house.

Tableau will also hold an Open House in Seattle April 26. To register, go to www.tableausoftware.com/seattle-open-house.

This week, Tableau launched a new careers site to help attract talent and communicate its culture to prospective candidates. In addition to providing company background, the site profiles some current employees who have used Tableau products in innovative ways. It also makes a point to highlight what its staff does outside of the office, whether it’s visiting the Egyptian Pyramids or driving down the Oregon Coast. The new careers site and job listings can be found at careers.tableausoftware.com.

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Thunderbird email software shows lots of innovations

The last time I relied on email software for personal messaging, George W. Bush was starting his second term, Pluto was still a planet and the Motorola Razr was America’s most popular mobile phone.

I embraced Web email a year after Google’s Gmail came along in 2004. Until then, Web email had been inferior to stand-alone desktop programs. Gmail’s revolutionary approach to email prompted rivals to innovate. As a result, Web email now surpasses desktop software in many ways, particularly as people want their digital lives to travel with them as they connect from multiple devices and locations.

So I was skeptical when a new version of Mozilla’s Thunderbird came along. I had all but abandoned it years ago. I was surprised to see how much had changed and improved when I gave Thunderbird a fresh look.

Although it took me a while to get used to; I’m a big fan of Gmail’s way of grouping related messages into conversations. Before, you could group related messages into threads, an approach Thunderbird still uses. But messages you receive end up in one folder, and your replies are in another. With Gmail’s conversations, it’s all together in one stream, arranged chronologically regardless of who wrote what.

I’ve found that I can stay on top of communications more easily with Gmail’s approach, because I can see at a glance which messages I still need to read and reply to.

I can also dispose of entire conversations I’m bored with more quickly — with a single click of the trash icon. Deleting messages one by one seems so last century.

Thunderbird doesn’t support conversations, but it offers many other features that make it better than Web mail. Made by the same organization behind the popular Firefox browser, Thunderbird makes checking email almost as simple as surfing the Web.

One of my favorite features is the use of tabs. When you click to read a message, it opens in a new tab, just as new Web pages do in a Web browser. I can have several messages open at once and easily switch from one to another. I can copy juicy gossip from one message and paste it in another, for instance. Sure, you can open Gmail in a new browser tab, but that gets you the inbox, not the message you just opened.

And when you close Thunderbird, it remembers the messages you have open, so that you can continue where you left off the next time. Again, your starting point with Gmail is the inbox, whether you like it or not.

Source: http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com