A perfect end-run around online taxes. How long will it be before Facebook’s 400 million users, now armed with their own currency, start siphoning off material percentages of nation’s economies?

Add one more piece of evidence to all of those rumors about an impending launch of a Facebook virtual currency at the upcoming f8 conference in late April. Facebook recently applied for a trademark for its virtual currency platform, which is aptly named Facebook Credits.

via Trademark Application For Facebook Credits Reveals Globe Coin Logo And Other Details.

Developed by scientists at MIT, the desalination device is about the size of a postage stamp, and can be fit together into larger daisy chains. An eight-inch-wide array of the desalination chips can produce four gallons of clean water every hour, while only using as much electricity as a light bulb.

via Breakthrough Low-Power Desalination and Purification Technology Brings Clean Water To Remote Villages | Popular Science.

As a result, one has produced a fuel cell that can turn natural gas or natural grass into electricity; the other has a technology that might make coal the cleanest, cheapest energy source by turning its carbon-dioxide emissions into bricks to build your next house.

The thing I love most about America is that there’s always somebody who doesn’t get the word — somebody who doesn’t understand that in a Great Recession you’re supposed to hunker down, downsize and just hold on for dear life. I have a couple of friends who fit that bill, who think a recession is a dandy time to try to discover better and cheaper ways to do things. They both happen to be Indian-Americans — one a son of the Himalayas, who came to America on a scholarship and went to work for NASA to try to find a way to Mars; the other a son of New Delhi, who came here and found the Sun, Sun Microsystems.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Dreaming the Possible Dream – NYTimes.com.

“These MPs are building strong and engaged communities in the process, communities that could be important assets in future elections and leadership races.”

via How MPs use Twitter – The Globe and Mail.

I’m an innovation manager, and its my job to see the potential in things like Twitter. There’s lots there – as the quote above highlights, even if the value in “engagement” isn’t always immediately obvious. That being said, in a political context there needs to be thought put into how to use something like Twitter to support specific goals. Having a Twitter account without specific goals in mind is equivalent to standing on a busy street corner and shouting at passers-by. Are you…

• …trying to engage better with their constituents?
• …trying to achieve different media positioning & profile?
• …trying to engage with their peers?

Each of these is a different reason to try something like Twitter, with different tactics implied.

In any case, interesting to see. I’ll be bringing this to my next EDA meeting and suggesting that we create a “New Media Engagment” Committee to wrap some strategy around these things and start using them effectively.

The article linked below posits that Palm will be snapped up by a competitor sometime soon; I ask in response, why? They have two unremarkable handsets, no app or developer community to speak of, and a software platform that’s a niche at best. Reminds me a lot of Psion.

Handset manufacturer Palm has updated its guidance this morning, indicating that revenues for the quarter and full year will be “well below its previously forecasted range of $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion”.

via Palm Says Revenue Will Be Lower Than Expected, Cites Slow Sales.

A 42-year-old HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable HIV in his blood and no symptoms after a stem cell transplant from a donor carrying a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to the virus that causes AIDS, according to a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

via Man appears free of HIV after stem cell transplant – CNN.com.

Right now, its implicit that our choice of internet provider (Shaw) doesn’t impact our choice of, for example, news source – i.e.: I can open either the Globe and Mail or the National Post websites (or the BBC, Al Jazeera, etc.), and any will open with comparable speed. The proponents of network neutrality argue that if this “equal treatment” assumption isn’t codified into regulation, providers like Shaw are going to eventually seek to monetize their ability to control the traffic that they deliver – to consumer’s detriment. For example – what if Microsoft offered to pay Shaw XX million dollars to make Bing the only search engine available to Shaw customers at a certain price point?

Image Credit: AppleInsider

“It’s so terrible, it induces an entirely new emotion: a blend of vertigo, disgust, anger and embarrassment which I like to call “shitasmia”. It not only creates this emotion: it defines it. It’s the most shitasmic cultural artefact in history.” [The Guardian]

The World Needs More Data Centers

Let’s start with why making Manitoba into a high-tech hub piqued my interest. In my line work, part of my job is to stay on top of technology industry trends. In 2007, and then while I was in Asia in 2008, one theme that consistently emerged in tech news was massive investment in data centers.

Datacenters are where the internet actually resides. When you read this page, CNN.com, or DailyKos, check your email or upload a picture to Flickr, the computer that your web browser is talking to is in a datacenter – a large, warehouse-like structure full of towering racks of computers connected to the internet. Datacenters lease out space on the thousands of computers housed within their walls, making web hosting very inexpensive (compared to trying to do it yourself), and profiting on the margins that their economies of scale allow.

Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, Apple, Akamai, Limelight, and a bunch of other companies have all announced multi-billion dollar datacenter investment plans in the last few years, to support the burgeoning growth of the newly media-centric video and photo heavy web.

They Are Expensive

With the theme of investment in datacenters, the news carried increasingly dire warnings about the runaway costs of datacenters – land, but mostly electricity for running thousands of powerful computers and keeping them cool enough to keep running. Take the leg searingly hot base of your laptop, pack 10,000 of them into a small room, and run them at maximum capacity 24/7/365, and you begin to appreciate the magnitude of the air conditioning requirements.

Its not just the need for lots of inexpensive power, either. PR-sensitivity for media savvy tech firms means that it needs to be clean, renewable power. And in this era of rolling Californian brown-outs and fickle consumers, it needs to be reliable.

The responses to these challenges are what caught my eye. Microsoft signed a memorandum of understanding with Siberia, where the cold climate would reduce cooling costs for much of the year. Google proposed putting data centers on giant barges and pumping cold water from the ocean floor for cooling, and using wave-power for electricity. Google sited a $600 million dollar data center in Omaha, on the basis of cheap, renewable-sourced electricity. Yahoo thought hard about it too, and eventually put $100M in. Amazon built a $100M facility in Boardman, Oregon on the basis of proximity to cheap hydroelectric power.

Errrr – That Sounds a Lot Like Manitoba

Manitoba has the cheapest electricity in North America, and its as green as can be (hydroelectric). Were well connected to the Internet grid. We have the schools to provide the right staff. We have space to site data centers – urban (heritage buildings, The Bay), suburban infill, or open prairie. The dollar (generally) makes siting in Canada advantageous, as does an easier compliance and privacy environment. And, we have an economy that values diversification.

I wondered why Manitoba wasn’t reaping huge windfalls in datacenter investment like the states just south of us, like Kelowna (which got its own $100M project last year), or like Nova Scotia (here and the converted Diefenbunker!). I even went so far as to meet with Conservative MP Rod Bruinooge, who expressed his support for the idea. I wasn’t the only one that saw the fit either:

A number of large data center operators are evaluating Manitoba, Canada as a possible location for major projects. Why? Cheap, renewable energy, and tons of it. With power costs driving many data center site location processes, and corporate mandates for “green” facilities, the central Canadian province’s ample supply of affordable hydro and wind power is attractive.

[From "Manitoba: New Frontier for Huge Data Centers?"]

Wow, I thought – they’re already on it, and I’ve been wasting my time.

Nope.

I called the provincial department of Science, Technology, Energy and Mines (STEM), and had a very nice conversation with a representative who told me that Manitoba had, in fact, been contacted by a number of large datacenter investors, and that we had declined to compete for their investments. Here’s why:

1. Electricity: Manitoba Hydro would rather sell its power outside of the province (i.e.: the states), where it can do so at higher rates.
2. Staffing Levels: Datacenters don’t require huge numbers of staff; the Omaha center above, for example, created only 200 jobs. The Province chose to focus its competitive energy on industries that employed more people directly, like (this is the real STEM example) call centers.

So: the NDP and Manitoba Hydro chose to keep Manitoba a hewer of wood and drawer of water, exporting our power south as opposed to using it to create value within our borders, and employing legions of Manitobans in low-income, entry level jobs, as opposed to planting the seed for a new, high tech sector in the province. We gave up potential hundreds of millions of dollars of capital investment, and the long-term spin-off and support industries that would flourish around datacenters. We gave up the chance to keep hundreds of new grads in Manitoba.

There’s a reason that other provinces and states are willing to compete for datacenter dollars and play the incentive game – its because technology and datacenters are an important part of the future economy. Manitoba under the NDP has opted out of that future.

So: Am I off-base here? What’s your take? Is datacenter investment worth competing for? Am I wrong in pointing my finger at NDP ideology?

Image Credit: ECN Mag