Everyone knows by now that we are in a recession, and 2009 isn’t going to be the greatest year economically. Most people expected it to happen because the economy is cyclical and only a politician could be arrogant enough to think they had sufficient power and ability to ensure constant growth. The question is: how do we all react? We Brits used to be pretty good at standing shoulder to shoulder during hard times and getting through things. I am not so sure how that is holding up at the moment, especially as the Media has 24 hours a day of news channel to fill and is hell bent on scaring the life out of us. And on the basis that fear breeds fear, I think we need to take our daily dose of media with caution.

Let me give you an example: the BBC’s Robert Peston has become something of a guru on this recession because of the accuracy with which he predicted this one and the veracity of the commentary he has offered as it rolls forward. But his blog on the 7th of January
offered a very interesting example of the point I am after here. He was reporting the like for like sales figures for M&S and Next. In both cases they were down for December. Peston reports M&S’s figures with a generous helping of ‘truly horrible’, ‘disturbing’ ‘ghastly’ and ‘pretty savage stuff’. Accompanied by the general media reporting on that and subsequent days, you would be totally forgiven for thinking that even getting out of bed and going to work was a waste of time. But he makes an interesting admission near the end of this blog when he was quoting Simon Wolfson, CEO of Next: “Quite rightly, he was at pains to point out that the difficulties on the High Street are a recession but not Armageddon – and that groups like his and M&S remain solidly profitable.” And there is my point: Marks profits are expected to ‘slump’ this year to £600m so reports of theirs and others demise are truly premature. The stores that have gone down in the last month were either already basket cases staggering to an inevitable conclusion or, as in the unfortunate case of Zavvi, reliant on one of those badly performing businesses.

So my advice to you is stay in touch, read it all but learn to sift and remove the hyperbole as it will do wonders for your sanity and judgement, as well as your ability to formulate a response to current events that will help your business to survive.

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“Blessed be the Geek, for he shall inherit the Earth.”

How’s your ego today? Not just driving the communication revolution, but dominating the processes behind technological, scientific, industrial and social development, the geek knows this statement is true. If all the geeks stayed in bed tomorrow, the world would grind to a halt. But if 'the geeks' are to ever inherit the earth, they will have to save it from themselves (and everyone else) first.

The IT industry is already one of the world’s biggest energy consumers, and certainly the fastest growing. The proliferation of computing equipment goes a long way towards explaining the huge carbon footprint of developed areas. When the convergence of digital communication and entertainment technology is added to the picture, the growth in energy use would be appalling if steps weren't also being made to increase efficiency. Streaming video, faster downloads, more and more bandwidth, graphically intensive applications and poweful games machines, phones that do everything… all these things need huge amounts of power that we simply did not need before.

One high-profile investor in renewables is Google, who have recently situated a new data centre in close proximity to a hydro-electric power station. They have saved themselves a lot of money by recognizing the benefits of ecologically sound policy and practise, actually living up to their much quoted slogan ‘don’t be evil’ rather than indulging in the usual 'green' corporate lip service. Amongst their clear achievements, Google is influencing the manufacturing industry with their huge buying power (do it this way and we’ll buy 3 million motherboards in the next 3 years?!?!) while advancing the technology needed to run and cool their mind-bogglingly huge data centres more efficiently. But of course we can trust Google to be at the cutting edge of all things big, cool, green and beautiful – how about a less likely candidate, the US Navy?

The military, green? Those guys stock-piling oil reserves, burning every kind of fuel, bombs and napalm, with 300,000 tonne vehicles with nuclear reactors for engines? Yes, the US Navy, no less. Google’s scale may be staggering, but this story blew me out of the water. The intimidating task of kitting out the world’s most advanced sea-faring war machine seems to have fallen to a man who not only recognises the potential of green IT, but is actually getting his way in what must be one of the toughest working environments going. Soon Brandon Kern, the infrastructure manager for EDS on this project, will have cut 3000 servers down to 300 using simple virtualisation. Do the maths.

So geeks; flexing your mental muscles doesn’t just attract the opposite sex, the accountants and generals can’t resist you either. And just like the worm experts, scientists and other weedy but clever guys in Hollywood movies about impending global disaster, we really can save the world.

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"The first 40 years of life is text, the rest is commentary," wrote Schopenhauer. And whilst you could argue about the age at which he set the bar, undoubtedly life is better understood for that commentary and reflection. The Ava blog has been created with the intention of offering commentary on running a business, what drives us all to do what we do and making new connections within Ava, as well as random pieces to make you think about how and why you do things . We will always welcome your comments on topics raised and you can post your thoughts at the foot of any blog piece you want to.
Please come back to us every day and see what our talented and diverse team of writers have to brighten – or challenge – the things you do.

Christina Grzasko
MD

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You can get pretty much anything online, but it is very hard to find a real sense of scale. So I set out to get some perspective on one of the smallest, quickest and easiest online activities, the Google search. How many times have you ‘Googled it’ today?

The average Google search (type obama wins, hit enter, see the results) uses around 5 Watt hours of electricity, enough to power a 100 watt lightbulb for 5 minutes. There are currently over 5,000,000,000 (5 Billion) Google searches a month – in the U.S alone. If the USA accounts for roughly half of global internet usage (a common estimate, many countries either don’t monitor or supply the figures) we can estimate 10 billion searches monthly, consuming around 50GWh.

Over a year, that’s enough electricity to power over 2 million homes.

Of course that was only an estimate of the search’s power usage – the Googler’s computer, network and Internet Provider will use far more in the same period of time. And then there is the energy required for the Google operation as a whole. That’s a very big thing, for another little post.

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