Sergey Brin and Larry Page are of course the founders of Google.  That fact, in and of itself would be enough to respect them and praise them.  Simply based on influence, Google has become practically oracular in today’s world.  Not since the oracle of Delphi stood astride the rift in the ground has something had such power of affecting perception of the present and the future.  At least sometimes it feels that way.

When Sergey and Larry – and I use their first names with great respect, as when said together everyone knows who is being discussed – speak, a whole lot of people listen.  What they have spoken about this week is to be praised by all of us who realize that solving our energy problem is the single most important issue of today. For those that missed it, the two of them came out very strongly for creating a simpler and much more efficient electrical standard for computers.

Standing on a white paper by two Google engineers, Urs Holzle and William Weihl, entitled “High-Efficiency power Supplies for Home Computers and Servers” the founders of Google are lending their considerable weight to the notion that all computers can be electrically wired in such a way as to save billions of dollars in energy costs annually.

Evidently, at the birth of the PC in 1981, standard power supplies, which converts high-voltage alternating current to low-voltage direct current was required to provide “multiple output voltage” which is no longer necessary with today’s PCs.  The …

This week in New York I attended the OMMA Conference, produced by Media Post.  The acronym stands for On-line Media, Marketing & Advertising.  Basically this was a gathering of those who work in the Internet space and focus on delivering marketing messages to people.  The title of the conference was “The Internet:  Back on Speed”, which of course references the fact that we are now in the Internet 2.0 stage of development when broadband and video have started to deliver the promise of the Internet that was first glimpsed in the late 1990s before the bubble burst on Internet 1.0.  Because of that crash, there is still a bit of nervousness about the current explosive growth, but the general consensus, certainly seconded by this observer, is that this time it is not only for real but it is transformative.

A dominant theme put forth was the speed of change.  One of the most respected thought leaders in the industry, Rishad Tobaccowala, suggested  that making long range plans was no longer valid.  With a slide that showed everything that has happened in the last three years on the Internet, and then a slide showing all that has happened in the last three weeks, he made it clear that it is impossible to have a three year plan, let alone a five year plan.  Improvise, adapt and go with the flow is what is now called for to stay up with such rapid change.

This struck a particular chord with me.  …

In the last half of the twentieth century many of the major social, political and cultural trends in the United States started in California.  The worship of the car and the surrounding car culture, the glorification of suburbia via sitcoms, surfing, music, the drug and counter-culture,  free speech and student protest, progressive public higher education, the Silicon Valley explosion of technological innovation, and of course, right turn on red.  Later the negative issues of traffic gridlock, illegal immigration, brown outs and state budget deficits started first in California.  Now, on one of the most fundamentally important issues of the day the state has once again asserted its leadership position.

A couple of weeks ago the state legislators passed one of the most important pieces of legislation in recent memory: the California Global Warming Solutions Act.  This is the first time that any state has approved legislation that caps emissions for all the economic sectors of the state.  This legislation mandates that major industrial producers must reduce admissions by 25% by 2020.  That means a reduction in annual carbon dioxide emissions by some 175 million tons.  The inverse math is staggering: 700 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year in the state of California alone!

In a country where the Federal (lack of )leadership is not only asleep at the wheel but has its foot on the gas pedal, it is wonderful to see a Republican governor and a Democratic legislature come together to start the absolutely essential process of changing our …

Just when you thought you had caught up with the ever increasing speed of technology, along comes another breakthrough to make you feel unnerved by the speed of change.  This week it was the stunning announcement of a breakthrough in chip technology that turned my head.  As I read the articles about this, the thought balloon over my head would have been a big “WOW!!” with multiple exclamation points had I been in a comic strip.

Researchers from Intel and the University of California, Santa Barbara announced they had been able to create a silicon based chip that can produce laser beams.  This means that it will be possible to use laser light rather than wires to send data between chips. For the first time, researchers were able to bond a silicon chip with a wafer that emits light when electricity is applied. To translate, this means that information will move 100 times faster at a fraction of the cost.  There has been recent discussion as to whether Moore’s law – that computing power doubles every 18 months and also drops by half in cost – which has driven the growth of computing over the past few decades was finally coming up against limitations of physics.  Well, this answers that question!

Lasers have been used to transmit vast amounts of data via fiber optic cables over long distances, but the speed of data transmission between chips in the computer has been much slower.  Now, with this breakthrough computer engineers will be able …