Sustainable IT | Ted Samson » iLinc reports CO2 spared through Web conferencing

February 19, 2008 | Comments: (0)

iLinc reports CO2 spared through Web conferencing

TAGS: Carbon emissions, Web conferencing

Not long ago, I wrote about ways tech companies have been incorporating green-hued features into their offerings in innovative and sometimes unexpected ways. I have another company to add to the list: iLinc, a Web-conferencing company that pits itself against players such as WebEx, Citrix, Microsoft, and Adobe.

It all started with Al Gore (as does any good tale pertaining to the environment). Over a year ago, Gore sat down for lunch with the iLinc CEO James Powers. When Powers returned to the office, he got his team cracking on the iLinc Green Meter.

Built in to the iLinc platform, Green Meter detects the locations of people attending a Web meeting, via IP address, and measures the distance between them. It then calculates how much CO2 they're saving by not traveling to meet face to face. This, according to iLinc, allows a company to monitor and track its actual carbon savings.

From my perspective, this Green Meter is a nice idea, and it's a clever bit of technology. It doesn't bring too much extra value to the product the way, say, BigFix's power management module does. (That module lets admins set up and enforce policies to ensure that end-user systems are put into low-power mode when they're not in use.) But that's OK: Web conferencing (like telepresence) is a green technology in and of itself. A feature like the Green Meter is gravy.

Posted by Ted Samson on February 19, 2008 12:23 PM

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