Video Conferencing saves money, time and carbon.
This is the first time I have ever had a 5 way chat on iChat - now of course the two developers, Tom and Bruno, were in the one room together but still it’s impressivly simple to get Dallas (graphic designer) who’s at home, Jesse (incoming CTO) who’s in the Sydney Carbon Planet office, Tom and Bruno (Ruby Developers) in the Adelaide office and me (CEO) in the Canberra office all able to have a one hour tech meeting.
Here’s some numbers:
To hold this meeting in person it would have caused about 3 tonnes of CO2 to be emitted into the air, due to car travel, flights and power use. It also would have cost thousands of dollars and taken up most of a day with flights, bad food, boring security queues and so forth. As a contrast holding that same meeting via iChat caused around 1Kg of CO2 (Macs and lights basically) and no-one had to go anywhere.
Deploying iChat in your organisation is a great way to cut your company’s travel bill, power bill and carbon emissions. Apple’s computers are amazing. They have just released whole new range of low-power use, high-power-user MacBooks that are faster and greener. I am an unashamed Mac fan, and indeed we decided back in 2000 when Carbon Planet was first set up that we’d standardise on Mac. This decision has held us in great stead. Now, with a global workforce of over 20 people, we still have no need of a full-time systems support person. Indeed we predict we’ll hit 50 staff before we need someone in a role like that.
Carbon Planet always tries to practice what it preaches. Reducing atmospheric carbon is our mission. Better engineering, better design and thinking green before acting is the core way we achieve that mission.
You can be the change® — DS
Technorati Tags: Apple, Carbon Planet, climate change, emissions reduction, energy efficiency, global warming, iChat
