Representatives from 19 North American utility companies met in San Francisco on Thursday to explore ways of cutting IT energy consumption by offering rebates and other incentives.

The effort has been led by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), which serves much of the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley, areas replete with technology companies and datacenters that have some of the greatest need to reduce energy consumption.

Thursday's meeting marked the first time utility representatives from across North America have met to discuss how to implement such incentive programs, which focus largely on datacenters but also include desktop PCs and other equipment.

Following a brief lull after the dot-com bubble, energy consumption at datacenters has been surging again, particularly at colocation facilities that provide capacity for other companies, said Mark Bramfitt, PG&E's principal program manager of customer energy efficiency.

He estimated the current total demand from data centers in the PG&E region is 400 to 500 megawatts at any given moment. That has increased by between 50 and 75 megawatts in just the past 18 months, he said, driven partly by new colocation facilities.

"We had tremendous growth in datacenter capacity in the dot-com boom that never got filled. I can tell you that that capacity is now full to the gills, and they are asking us for more power," he said.

The programs being developed use different techniques to encourage efficient power use, with utilities offering to cover as much as 70 percent of the cost for companies that meet program requirements.

Seattle City Light will launch a program in the coming weeks that rewards companies for installing network-based software that manages PC power consumption. Such products cost between $11 and $25 per PC, and Seattle City Light will contribute $8 per PC, said Greg Whiting, manager for energy conservation. Vendors offering such products include Verdiem and 1E. Companies that take part in the program should get a return on their investments within 18 months, according to Whiting.

BC Hydro, which serves British Columbia, hopes to introduce its first datacenter initiative in the coming months. It will offer to pay up to 60 percent of the cost of implementing virtualization software to consolidate servers, said David Rogers, an IT adviser at BC Hydro Power Smart.

Besides reining in escalating demand for power, the utility companies have a financial incentive to offer such programs. "Our goal is to avoid the capital cost of building new power plants," Whiting said. "Encouraging companies to conserve power makes more sense than for us to keep spending to add marginal capacity."

PG&E's program, launched in 2006, also rewards companies for using server virtualization. The company has 60 customers in the program and has made payments so far to seven companies, said Randall Cole, senior project manager for PG&E's server virtualization incentives.

The number of utilities offering such programs is still low, however. No more than a dozen utilities offer incentive programs for IT today, Bramfitt said, out of perhaps 200 utilities in North America. Other utilities at Thursday's meeting were from Southern California, the Pacific Northwest, Texas, and New York.

One challenge is that utility companies are not IT experts, so one goal of the meeting was to educate them about energy usage in datacenters. "One of the companies in our region is Microsoft, and they probably know 50 times more about the technology than we do," Whiting said.

PG&E also had some teething problems. Some customers complained at first that it was too hard to calculate how much energy they would save, and therefore how much of a rebate they would be entitled to, so PG&E greatly simplified the formula, Cole said.

Interest among customers is high, according to Rogers. "I've visited 50 datacenter customers, and there's tremendous support for this program," he said.

Paul McGuckin, a Gartner research vice president who spoke at the event, said companies are interested in the programs for financial reasons and because they are "really frightened" about running out of datacenter capacity. Concerns about the environment are rarely mentioned, except for public relations purposes, he said.

A report last year from the Environmental Protection Agency said datacenters account for 1.5 percent of the total energy consumed in the U.S. "This may not sound like a lot, but the escalation is truly frightening," McGuckin said.

Most datacenters are run very inefficiently, he said. Some easy ways to conserve energy are to consolidate industry-standard servers, turn servers off when they are not in use, raise the temperature of data centers and, when possible, use natural air for cooling.

Joe Skorupa, another Gartner vice president, said networking equipment is often ignored but accounts for perhaps 10 percent of datacenter power consumption. Customers should explore high-density switches offered by several vendors, he said.

He advised against Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop, which he said consumes more power than lower-capacity Ethernet and is not required by most users. And he urged people to think twice about fancy VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phones. "Eight-line color display VoIP phones suck up more power, and all anybody looks at is the last two numbers dialled," he said.

T-Mobile USA will provide Yahoo's OneSearch search engine on its phones, a Yahoo executive said Wednesday.

T-Mobile is placing a OneSearch button on its phones in a deal that is to be announced soon, said Marco Boerries, executive vice president and head of Yahoo's Connected Life Division, at the Open Mobile Summit conference in San Francisco. The carrier's decision to place a OneSearch button in the software of its subscribers' handsets is a much-needed win for Yahoo as it struggles against Google and Microsoft for search advertising dollars and looks for a successor to outgoing CEO Jerry Yang.

[ Take InfoWorld's guided tour of T-Mobile's G1, the first phone to carry Google's Android operating system. | Get the latest on mobile developments with InfoWorld's Mobile Report newsletter. ]

Yahoo's latest partner has a close relationship with Google in at least one area. Last month, T-Mobile USA became the first mobile operator to offer a phone based on Google's Android software platform when it put HTC's G1 handset on sale. T-Mobile could not immediately be reached for comment, and Yahoo's Boerries didn't say specifically whether the OneSearch button would appear on the G1.

Yahoo let Google take away most of its market share in PC search and is working with carriers to make sure the same thing doesn't happen in mobile, Boerries said. So the company is working through mobile operators to get OneSearch set up on their phones in hopes that subscribers will go straight to Yahoo's search engine rather than calling up a competitor's, he said. Yahoo has deals with 26 mobile operators around the world, which have 850 million subscribers, he said.

OneSearch is available by download to users of many phones. However, since mobile users traditionally don't download applications to their phones often, Yahoo can reach more users by preloading the button on their phones.

In March, T-Mobile in Northern and Central Europe dropped Google search for Yahoo, and the U.K. carrier O2 also is a partner, Boerries said. Those deals have helped Yahoo gain a market share of 25 percent in Europe and more than 30 percent in the U.K., he said. The company had "lost all footprint on search" on PCs in Europe, he said.

OneSearch is designed to return useful answers, instead of just a series of links, for easier use on mobile devices, and earlier this year was opened up to allow content from third parties such as reviews site Yelp. Voice search, which just this week became available from Google as an iPhone application, already was available for OneSearch, Boerries said.

In 2009, Yahoo will concentrate on making it easier for advertisers to set up effective mobile advertising, Boerries said. For example, it's hard to make ads look good on a wide variety of mobile devices, and Yahoo wants to help solve that problem, he said. The company is exploring how to give advertisers the tools they need to create the right ad experience for consumers and to reach as many people as they want without having to make deals with many operators, he said.

Mobile search advertising has to be built from the ground up, and not all Web search advertisers will want to make the leap, Boerries said.

Advocates for the Ruby programming language on Wednesday hailed its usefulness as an enterprise application development option, especially in a down economy.

The Merb framework for Ruby also was championed, during a session at the QCon conference in San Francisco. Speakers also defended Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework against critics citing slow performance and scalability problems.

Ruby serves as an alternative for companies seeking more affordable software development, said speaker Greg Pollack, CTO at Rails Envy, which offers Rails-related services.

"With Ruby, I can write less code to do more things, and I can probably give them a more affordable option," offering a smaller initial investment and less risk, Pollack said.

Rails applications can be scaled via techniques such as the memcached application, Pollack said in an interview after his presentation. "Really, the way you scale Rails is just like you scale any other Web app," he said.

Ruby reaches beyond the Web, Pollack said. It is being used to generate music and to maintain Linux boxes, as well as for graphics and desktop clients, he said.

Merb, which is based on Model View Controller (MVC), offers an option to the widely known Rails framework, according to speaker Matt Aimonetti, a Merb evangelist.

"Merb meets the enterprise needs because of the cost, adaptability, and scalability," said Aimonetti, who nonetheless defended Ruby on Rails in benchmark tests he detailed. Aimonetti said he tested it against other frameworks such as the PHP-based CodeIgniter. Rails scored 88 requests per second (rps), while CodeIgniter was 98.2 rps, he said.

"Really, Rails is not that slow. It's actually pretty close to the fastest PHP framework," Aimonetti said.

Ruby, meanwhile, is fast in real-life Web benchmarks, he said. "Ruby as a language might be a bit slow, it's true, but when you use it on the Web, it's actually fast," said Aimonetti

Merb, he said, is "very suited for the enterprise world but not only [the enterprise]." It is "the fastest Ruby framework we have right now," Aimonetti said.

The technology offers the concept of Merb "slices," which serve as stand-alone miniature applications that can be mounted inside other applications, he said. Merb offers modularity and flexibility, said Aimonetti.

Merb 2.0, due within a year, will feature optimization in how requests are served and also target rapid prototyping.

Toshiba Storage Division? announced a breakthrough half-terabyte hard disk drive in a 2.5-inch form factor on Wednesday.

The mini-drive is targeted for inclusion in mobile devices by OEMs.?

The high-capacity drives are expected to enhance the capabilities and thus the interest in the new class of sub- and mini-notebooks coming into the market.

Toshiba Model MKxx55GSX? will most likely also be included in game consoles and printers.

The drive might also be designed as an external storage devices if an OEM is willing to wrap a plastic shell around the drive, add a connector like USB, and sell it as an external storage device. Weighing only 3.6 ounces as produced by Toshiba even with the additional weight of an external shell, the device could be easily packed in carry-on luggage.

Although the units will ship in volume in December, OEMs may not have products incorporating the devices until the spring.

The Serial-ATA 2-platter drive features 8MB of buffer memory, 3Gbps transfer rate, and a rotational speed of 5,400 RPM.

Additional drives using the same form factor in the product line will include 400GB, 320GB, 250GB, 160GB, and 120GB models.

How much is spam costing your company? Google unveiled a nifty little calculator Wednesday to help you add it up.

It's part of a marketing campaign for Google Message Security, the online spam-filtering service based on the Postini technology Google acquired last year. "We know in these tougher economic times that companies are trying to figure out how they can save," said Adam Dawes, a Google product manager.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

To figure out the cost of spam, you enter things like the number of workers at your company, how much you pay them, how much spam they have to deal with, and presto: Google figures out how many days (and dollars) in lost productivity this represents. Of course it also tells you how long it would take for Google's service to pay for itself at your shop.

For companies doing their spam-fighting in-house, there's also a "Total Cost of Ownership" calculator to show how inexpensive Google thinks its service really is.

Last year, Nucleus Research reported that spam costs U.S. companies $712 per employee each year. A $31,000-per-year employee spending 16 seconds each on 21 spam messages per day would cost about this much, according to Google's calculator. That adds up to about $70 billion per year in lost productivity, Nucleus said.

While Google may be helping people figure out how much spam costs, the company could do a thing or two to lower spam itself, said Richard Cox, chief information officer with the Spamhaus antispam group.

He would like to see Google do more to block spammers from using Gmail service and to start including the IP addresses of Gmail senders in its message headers. "If you could see how many anonymous Gmail drop boxes are being used as the registration addresses for domains that are being used in spam, you'd understand just how much this is costing the community," he said of Gmail spam.

Marking the two-year anniversary of their controversial interoperability agreement, Microsoft and Novell this week are announcing upcoming availability of both the beta version of Moonlight, which puts Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application technology on Linux, and the general release of Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.

The November 2006 agreement has had the two companies cooperating in having Microsoft offer Suse Linux support certificates from Novell and agree not to sue each other's customers over intellectual property issues. Some have protested that the agreement legitimized Microsoft's claims that Linux violates its patents.

[ For a two-year retrospective on the agreement, featuring comments from Microsoft, Novell and an opponent of the arrangement, see The Microsoft-Novell Linux deal: Two years later. ]

But the two companies are marching on with the two milestones. Moonlight is an open-source implementation of Silverlight, offering Linux users high-definition media capabilities, according to a Microsoft representative. The project is being shepherded by Novell.

Moonlight will be provided as an open-source plug-in for the Firefox Web browser, Microsoft and Novell said. The first source code for the project was released in May. The beta release will be available free of charge.

Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 is due the first half of 2009.

Microsoft and Novell have collaborated on systems management to ease customers' management tasks associated with mixed IT environments, Microsoft and Novell said. Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise extends cross-platform Linux monitoring capability of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. It enables management of Windows and Linux servers from a single console.

In another development in the open-source realm, Yahoo said this week that its BrowserPlus Web development technology will be offered in an open-source manner.

BrowserPlus features a plugin framework for building Web applications that contain desktop capabilities. It can be extended with JavaScript APIs to access desktop facilities.

"By releasing BrowserPlus as an open source project, Yahoo will enable open development on the platform for in-browser desktop applications across the Web," a Yahoo representative said. "This will allow developers to rapidly extend the platform in a distributed fashion. Yahoo's hope is that community contributions and review will ensure BrowserPlus stays a secure, robust platform running on all popular operating systems and browsers."

Yahoo said that the two-year-old project was a failure in some respects. The company had been looking to uncover innovative ideas in native clients applications and massage them into reusable client libraries. Yahoo was extracting good solutions to problems with wide appeal and making them easy for anyone in the company to apply, Yahoo said.

"At the end of our two-year run we had many C++ libraries, which ran on every operating system under the sun, to perform tasks ranging from the mundane (say, logging) to the exotic. To our dismay, we didn't have client teams all over Yahoo scrambling to use the stuff we built. We did, however, learn a lot from this experience," Lloyd Hilailel, of the Yahoo BrowserPlus team, said in a statement.