Jonathan Koomey

26 Sep 2013 • 1 min read

Our study of eBay's organizational transformation, just released

I and two former students of mine, Nicole Schuetz and Anna Kovaleva, just completed a wonderful case study of eBay’s transition to more efficient data center operations. As readers of this blog know, the barriers to achieving higher efficiency data centers are not primarily technical. Instead, they are mainly

14 Sep 2013 • 2 min read

Ken Brill: September 6, 1944–July 30, 2013

Ken and Margot Brill, with Ken reading to one of our sons, on May 8, 2011. Photo credit: Jonathan Koomey. My dear friend Ken Brill passed away on July 30th, and a few of his colleagues and I gathered with Ken’s family in Maine on August 17th of this

14 Sep 2013 • 2 min read

John Thornell's eulogy for Ken Brill

In honor of Ken Brill John Thornell St. Albans Episcopal Church Cape Elizabeth, Maine August 17, 2013 As the father of the data center industry, Ken has many accomplishments to his name. These accomplishments are the product of an insatiable curiosity, and an unrelenting passion, focus and drive. Sometimes this

14 Sep 2013 • 3 min read

Martin McCarthy's Eulogy for Ken Brill

Eulogy for Ken Brill Martin McCarthy St. Albans Episcopal Church Cape Elizabeth, Maine August 17, 2013 I loved Ken Brill. It took me 50 years of my life to get ready to meet this man, but I loved him. And in the last 5 years he’s been such an

14 Sep 2013 • 2 min read

My eulogy for Ken Brill

What makes a great man? Jonathan Koomey St. Albans Episcopal Church Cape Elizabeth, Maine August 17, 2013 We’re here to honor the life of a good friend and a great man: Ken Brill. In preparing for this event, I contacted many of Ken’s friends and colleagues, all of

14 Sep 2013 • 5 min read

Homily by Reverend Boggs at Ken Brill's funeral

Homily in Celebration and Thanksgiving for the life of Ken Brill The Rev. Timothy A. Boggs St. Albans Episcopal Church Cape Elizabeth, Maine August 17, 2013 Please pray with me for a moment. Gracious God, please listen this hour to our words of joyful thanks and our sighs of grief.

14 Sep 2013 • 1 min read

Ken Brill's statement of principles, describing the core values he encouraged his employees to embrace

What follows is the statement of values Ken Brill shared with all his new employees in the twelve years that I knew him. They reflect the kind of man he was: someone who cared about people and who valued truth above all else, even when inconvenient or unprofitable. Brill Family

12 Sep 2013 • 1 min read

Interesting tidbit on the airplane fuel needed to deliver iPhones from the factory in China

http://www.macrumors.com/2013/09/11/how-apple-ships-millions-of-iphones-for-simultaneous-delivery/

7 Sep 2013 • 1 min read

Why structured data is powerful and important

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how new computer tools can help us derive meaning from data that haven’t been pre-structured for ease of machine readability. Of course, all data are structured in some way, but some forms of structure are easier for computers to handle

6 Sep 2013 • 4 min read

Climate is no game, and it is never over

Dave Roberts had a wonderful post on August 30th, 2013 titled “Hope and Fellowship”, which addresses the question “Is there any hope? Or are we just f*cked?” Here’s his brilliant summary: And really, what else are we going to do? Remember, there is no “too late” here, no

4 Sep 2013 • 1 min read

Just because we've always done it that way doesn't mean we always need to

I just encountered another example of how re-imagining the way we deliver services can enable very low-cost access to communications. My friend RJ Honicky wrote a paper in 2007 with colleagues at UC Berkeley describing how a “voice message mostly” mobile phone system could lead to improved equipment utilization, better

4 Sep 2013 • 7 min read

How a brilliant entrepreneurial innovator thinks about climate solutions

I visited my friend Saul Griffith at Other Lab on August 9th, 2013. The lab is housed in the old Schoenstein & Sons pipe organ factory in San Francisco. It’s a beautiful building, with its offices and hallways straight out of a Dashiell Hammett novel. I loved visiting the

3 Sep 2013 • 1 min read

Kudos to Amazon.com for making Kindle recycling simple

My old Kindle 2 gave up the ghost awhile back, and I finally got around to doing something about it. I ended up getting a refurbished PaperWhite, which works fine, and has much longer battery life than the Kindle 2 (thanks to progress in battery, screen, communications, and computing technologies,

25 Aug 2013 • 2 min read

The electricity used by iPhones and refrigerators, take two

Joe Romm at Climate Progress was good enough to post my analysis of the recent claim that your iPhone uses as much electricity as two refrigerators. This issue was highlighted in Friday’s edition of NPR’s Marketplace program, which thankfully didn’t fall into the false balance trap that

23 Aug 2013 • 1 min read

Story on NPR's Marketplace about the fridge vs. iPhone comparison

Adriene Hill of NPR’s marketplace program did a nice job describing the fridge vs. iPhone story today (“No, your phone doesn’t use as much electricity as a refrigerator”). My favorite part of the story was my friend Bruce Nordman’s analogy about the three headed cat: “If I