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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

Analysts: New Software Won’t Save Blackberry

In the trend-setting North American market, BlackBerry phones have gone from must-have messaging toys to outdated clunkers —all in the space of a few years. The new CEO of Research In Motion Ltd., the company behind the phones, says it can claw its way back to the top with new software, but analysts are deeply doubtful.

The two co-CEOs of the Canadian company resigned Sunday. The new CEO is Thorsten Heins, who was the company’s chief operating officer.

Even though the company is in deep trouble and has seen its stock price fall 89 percent from the all-time high it hit in 2008, Heins said Monday that his appointment means “no seismic change” for the company. He’s confident in the course laid out by his predecessors, which hinges on the software revamp.

The new software is called BlackBerry 10, and it’s due in new smartphones late this year. For BlackBerry fans, it should be a welcome upgrade. It’s based on QNX, an industrial-grade operating system that runs devices that need to be very reliable, like core Internet routers and anesthesia monitoring devices.

That means it’s a stable platform that can give BlackBerrys a new look and new capabilities. BlackBerry 10 will have a completely new user interface, built from the ground up for touchscreen input and “very fluid,” Heins said in an interview.

But it amounts to BlackBerry tossing out its own quirky, outdated software, first introduced in 1999, and adopting a slick, touch-oriented operating system, much like Android, Google Inc.’s popular smartphone software, and the software on the iPhone.

Heins said BlackBerry 10 is “extremely competitive” and insisted that RIM is “not in a catch-up race” with the makers other mobile operating systems. He emphasizes that BlackBerry 10 will offer “multitasking,” or the ability to run several applications at the same time. This is something Google Inc.’s Android software and the iPhone operating system offer in a limited fashion.

Phone software developers generally stay away from full multitasking because it can shorten battery life considerably. Improved multitasking was one of the hallmarks of Palm Inc.’s webOS when it launched in 2009, but that didn’t save it from obscurity.

One thing that could entice buyers: the new software will expand the choice of applications greatly, by running ones written for Android. There are hundreds of thousands of such apps, but it’s unclear how many of them will run on BlackBerry 10 without modification.

The PlayBook, RIM’s tablet computer, already runs an early version of BlackBerry 10. RIM had huge hopes for the device when it put it on sale in April, but quickly had to slash the price. In December, the tablets that originally cost $500 were selling for $200, below the cost of making them. RIM wrote off $485 million worth of inventory.

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Why History Needs Software Piracy

How copy protection and app stores could deny future generations their cultural legacy.

Amid the debate surrounding controversial anti-piracy legislation such as SOPA and PIPA, our public discourse on piracy tends to focus on the present or the near future. When jobs and revenues are potentially at stake, we become understandably concerned about who is (or isn’t) harmed by piracy today.

I’m here to offer a different perspective, at least when it comes to software piracy. While the unauthorized duplication of software no doubt causes some financial losses in the short term, the picture looks a bit different if you take a step back. When viewed in a historical context, the benefits of software piracy far outweigh its short-term costs. If you care about the history of technology, in fact, you should be thankful that people copy software without permission.

It may seem counterintuitive, but piracy has actually saved more software than it has destroyed. Already, pirates have spared tens of thousands of programs from extinction, proving themselves the unintentional stewards of our digital culture.

Software pirates promote data survival through ubiquity and media independence. Like an ant that works as part of a larger system it doesn’t understand, the selfish action of each digital pirate, when taken in aggregate, has created a vast web of redundant data that ensures many digital works will live on.

Piracy’s preserving effect, while little known, is actually nothing new. Through the centuries, the tablets, scrolls, and books that people copied most often and distributed most widely survived to the present. Libraries everywhere would be devoid of Homer, Beowulf, and even The Bible without unauthorized duplication.

The main difference between then and now is that software decays in a matter of years rather than a matter of centuries, turning preservation through duplication into an illegal act. And that’s a serious problem: thousands of pieces of culturally important digital works are vanishing into thin air as we speak.

The Case of the Disappearing Software

The crux of the disappearing software problem, at present, lies with the stubborn impermanence of magnetic media. Floppy disks, which were once used as the medium du jour for personal computers, have a decidedly finite lifespan: estimates for the data retention abilities of a floppy range anywhere from one year to 30 years under optimal conditions.

A floppy stores data in the form of magnetic charges on a specially treated plastic disc. Over time, the charges representing data weaken to the point that floppy drives can’t read them anymore. At that point, the contents of the disk are effectively lost.

This becomes particularly troubling when we consider that publishers began releasing software on floppy disk over 30 years ago. Most of those disks are now unreadable, and the software stored on them has become garbled beyond repair. If you’ve been meaning to back up those old floppies in your attic, I have bad news: it’s probably too late.

To make matters worse, software publishers spent countless man-hours in the 1980s preventing us from archiving their work. To discourage piracy, they devised schemes to forever lock their software onto a single, authorized diskette. One popular copy protection method involved placing an intentionally corrupt block of data on a disk to choke up error-checking copy routines. It worked so well that it also prevented honest attempts to back-up legally purchased software.

If these copy protection schemes had been foolproof, as intended, and copyright law had been obeyed, most of the programs published on those fading disks would now be gone forever. Many cultural touchstones of a generation would have become extinct due to greed over media control.

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