Craig Mundie is a geek, and I mean that in the best possible way. Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, the 17-year veteran of Redmond, WA, still talks like an engineer, throwing out terms like “heterogeneous machine architectures,” “GUIs” (graphical user interfaces), and “clouds and clients” like there’s no tomorrow. It’s kind of refreshing, given that he is in charge of setting the long-term agenda for one of the most powerful companies on the planet.

Mundie is in the midst of a weeklong tour of some top universities around the country. He called me yesterday from Cambridge, MA, where he had just finished a presentation to Harvard University students, faculty, and guests. He visits the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (my alma mater) today, and comes to Kane Hall at the University of Washington tomorrow afternoon. It’s similar to the college tours Bill Gates used to do.

From what I can tell, the goal is to stir up interest in computer science, give audiences a glimpse of future computing systems as Microsoft sees them, and stimulate discussions about how these technologies can help solve some pressing global problems. (You can read more about Mundie’s tour and demos in this Seattle Times story.)

Besides hearing Mundie’s thoughts on computer science education and the future of computing, I wanted to drill down and ask him about the challenge of taking on Microsoft’s strategy development (after Gates stepped down last year) in the most difficult economic times in recent memory. I also wanted to ask him about the deeper culture of Microsoft, the renewed role of research in the company’s future, and the importance of nurturing relationships around the world—and his secret ally in that quest.

Here are some edited highlights from our conversation:

Xconomy: What are you trying to get across to university audiences on this tour?

Craig Mundie: In these presentations, I’m trying to get them to think not only about how computing evolves, but with that evolution, what kinds of problems will become approachable, and what are the new methods? Several things are evolving in parallel [and leading to more heterogeneous and complex machines]. That begets the requirement of how to do programming around parallel computing. With very high-scale computing facilities, the cloud and the client come together to form one system that people will program. They will use those things together with new display and sensing technologies.

Just as the GUI revolutionized computing, we could see a similar revolution with more natural interactions with machines, rather than just “type and point and click.” That will expand the number of people who can interact with computers. With the diversity, rooms can become computers [for instance]. You won’t think of them so much as a computer.

X: What are some of the global problems you think advanced computing will help solve?

CM: Beyond the computer science realm, I’ve talked about energy and the environment. I show one piece of research work we’re doing to compose computational models, a simplified climate model, at Princeton and Microsoft Research. It shows linkages between deforestation in the Amazon and atmospheric temperatures around the rest of the world. If you were a policy person, these kinds of things would give you tools to support your decision making.

In energy, we’re doing computer modeling and direct visualizations. I showed a model, loaned to us from TerraPower [the nuclear power firm spun off from Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures …Next Page »

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Microbiologist Larry Feinberg has dug into piles of waste from paper factories and explored hot springs in the West for microbes that he calls “tough bugs,” because of their ability to thrive in adverse conditions. The fierce bacteria are now shipped to the new labs and headquarters of Mascoma, a developer of cellulosic ethanol, in Lebanon, NH.

This week, Mascoma scientists gave me an inside look at the Lebanon labs where Feinberg and his colleagues are developing microorganisms to inexpensively turn materials such as wood chips, switch grass, and corn stalks into ethanol for fueling automobiles and machinery. Mascoma’s plans for streamlining the process of making cellulosic ethanol have been known since it launched with initial venture financing from Flagship Ventures and Khosla Ventures in 2006, but these are particularly exciting times at the company. In April, scientists at the firm were able to demonstrate their streamlined process in a lab experiment. The firm is now scaling up the process at a pilot production facility in Rome, NY, and plans call for completing one of the first commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plants in Kinross, MI, by 2012.

Mascoma’s process is novel, for starters, because it would not require the use of food crops such as corn or soybeans, which are typically used to make ethanol. Ethanol production has driven up corn prices in recent years, and the total costs of producing such ethanol is high in part because lots of water and land resources are required to grow those feedstocks. Yet cellulosic ethanol production, which is Mascoma’s bread and butter, has plenty of challenges too. With traditional biochemical methods, enzymes are needed to digest the plant materials into sugars, and then yeast or bacteria are required to ferment the sugar to make ethanol. Mascoma’s key innovations include microbes that are genetically engineered to perform both those chores in a single step, making the process potentially more affordable than first thought.

Nathan Margolis, a lab manager at Mascoma, walked me through the labs that the company moved into about two months ago to explain how the firm is trying to harness a process which has been happening for hundreds of millions of years in nature, where bacteria are eating and digesting wood and grass and other plants to survive. “There’s a battle going on out there between the trees and the microbes trying to eat them alive,” Margolis said. “We’ve entered that battle on the side of the microbes” to produce ethanol from renewable sources.

We toured a lab where incubators were shaking up test tubes and glass bottles of yellow liquids that contained microorganisms. Here, the organisms are scrutinized and the genes that make them effective ethanol makers are identified. In nature, bacteria are particularly adept at digesting wood and other materials into sugar, but yeast are typically better at fermenting the sugar to make ethanol, or alcohol. Mascoma is reconfiguring the genes of yeast and bacteria so that each can perform both of those tasks in a single step. One of the firm’s leading microorganisms that can do this is …Next Page »

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One of MIT’s leading business professors, Richard Locke, came to Seattle yesterday to talk about the “S” word. Yes, we’ve been hearing a lot about sustainability lately, in the context of technology and business. Big companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Boeing are talking seriously about the issue. Smaller Seattle-area companies like Verdiem, Powerit Solutions, and R.W. Beck have been making progress in important areas like energy efficiency and water management. To Locke, and many others, sustainability is much more than a corporate buzzword.

Locke is deputy dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a professor of entrepreneurship and political science at MIT, based in Cambridge, MA. His research specialties include labor standards and practices, global entrepreneurship, and sustainable businesses. I sat down with him at the Westin Hotel downtown to get his perspective on Northwest companies’ green initiatives, and their possible partnerships with MIT. Locke was coming from meetings with Intel in the Portland area the previous day (the Santa Clara, CA-based chipmaker has manufacturing and development facilities in Hillsboro, OR). His other meetings in Seattle included a stop at Amazon to speak to Sloan School alums about the changing face of MBA education, and about sustainability in the corporate realm.

Locke defines sustainability broadly as “using resources today in a way that permits future generations to use them as well.” By this he means not just natural resources—energy, materials, water—but also social resources like people, jobs, and standards. “Let’s redefine sustainability in such a way that we can show the opportunities available, not just the constraints,” he says. “Once you broaden the definition, you expand the scope for individuals and organizations to try to do something about it.” (As I understand it, this definition of sustainability could include managing employees so they don’t burn out, creating jobs that last, and establishing fair labor standards that endure.)

Take Intel, for instance. Locke says the company is pursuing a series of initiatives to reduce its carbon footprint, improve its supply chain efficiency, and reshape the way it uses energy, water, and people. “Are there ways they can make, for example, new chips that might require less energy? They’re having a very interesting internal discussion about chip speed versus energy consumption. I find it fascinating that a large company in an extremely competitive sector, that still does manufacturing in …Next Page »

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Forget renewable fuels for a minute. If the world is ever going to get serious about avoiding a global warming catastrophe, then we need to capture carbon dioxide being spewed from power plants into the atmosphere and bury it underground, at least according to one school of thought. The technology to make this practical on a grand scale doesn’t exist, but Ramgen Power Systems, a small company in Bellevue, WA, full of aerospace engineers, says it has learned some things from jet engines that could turn this vision into reality.

Ramgen arrived on my radar in May, when it secured $20 million in federal stimulus money for its carbon compression technology. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu cited the company as a leader in the effort to make coal-fired power plants cleaner for the environment. This technology is complicated stuff, and the implications are potentially profound, so I visited Ramgen CEO Doug Jewett at his office last week to learn about it in greater depth.

The problem Ramgen is facing is so big, it needs to first be placed in proper context. To avoid melting of polar ice caps that would flood many highly-populated coastal areas around the world, the U.S. and the world needs to cut its carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050, from baseline readings in 1990, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Where to cut? That’s hard to say. Most of the energy Americans use goes to four primary sectors—generating electricity, transportation, industry, and residential and commercial use. So to reduce carbon emissions, people could switch to electric cars, buses, trucks, and electric heating and cooling in homes and offices, Jewett says. That means there’s going to be a lot more demand for electricity. And where does that come from? More than half of the nation’s electricity, and the leading source of air pollution, comes from the same source—coal. That isn’t likely to change anytime soon, Jewett says, so the real question is how to continue burning coal and natural gas to meet demand for electricity, without causing an environmental disaster.

“Most of what people are talking about with renewable involves incremental decreases in carbon emissions,” Jewett says. “Carbon capture and storage is key if we’re going to be effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

“It’s very troubling,” he says.

OK, so how does Ramgen fit into this picture? The company was founded …Next Page »

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This year marks a turning point in the debate on global climate change. The focus of the discussion is rapidly moving from a scientific analysis of how human activity effects climate change to a political process on how best to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. California is leading this shift with its 2006 Assembly Bill 32 (AB32) calling for the state’s GHG emissions by 2020 to be no more than 1990’s, roughly 15 percent lower than 2008’s.

The Climate Group’s Smart 2020 study reveals that the global Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry produces greenhouse gases equivalent to that produced by the aviation industry (~2-3  percent). Furthermore, the ICT sector’s emissions will nearly triple, in a business-as-usual scenario, from 2002 to 2020. On the other hand, the Climate Group estimates that transformative applications of ICT to electricity grids, logistic chains, intelligent transportation and building infrastructure, and other social systems can reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by about 15 percent— five times ICT’s own footprint!

This opportunity led the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) to co-host with the California Public Utilities Commission a workshop on greening the Internet economy. The two-day event, held at UC San Diego a week ago, brought together 200 leaders from industry, academia, and the public sector to discuss how to reduce ICT’s carbon footprint, while using ICT innovations to build out the smart grids, buildings, and transportation systems necessary to achieve the goals set by AB32. Webcasts of all the talks are available here.

The quality of the workshop discussions, starting with the keynote from Bill Wiehl, Google’s Green Energy Czar, was exceptional. IBM, Intel, HP, Sun, SilverSprings Network, CISCO, GM, and others from the private sector provided a great deal of insight into the “real world” challenges of applying ICT innovations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

What was most interesting to me was the near universal recognition that we need to re-invent into a digital architecture our telecommunications, transportation, building, energy, and entertainment systems if we are going to meet targets like AB32. That is, we must integrate the Internet with each of these pre-existing societal-scale systems, so that myriad connected sensors and actuators throughout the systems enable them to become self-regulating so that they use much less energy. Lights and thermostats will adjust if no humans are sensed in rooms of buildings, cars will spend less time in congestions (burning fuel but going nowhere), and consumers will adjust their use of electricity in response to real time knowledge of pricing.  

A recurring theme from the workshop is that we need more public/private “AB32 testbeds” that enable scientists to experiment with the complex tradeoffs required. The first testbed category is for determining methods for lowering the carbon intensity of ICT itself—as was discussed in the workshop’s “Greening the Power Hungry Data Center” panel. An  example is the GreenLight Project, recently funded by the National Science Foundation that provides an instrumented data center on the UCSD campus that allows for detailed, real-time data measurements of the critical subcomponents. The resulting data is then made available publically on the web, guiding users who want to lower their energy cost of computation and data storage.

The second category of testbed is for studying the application of ICT to reduce the carbon footprint of our society’s infrastructure systems. The last panel on “Academic ICT and Green Cyberinfrastructure” explored the use of university campuses as rapid prototyping “Living Laboratories for the Green Future.” Campuses are functionally small towns with their own power grids, commuter transportation systems, hospitals, and populations in the tens of thousands. They can function as at-scale testbeds. Calit2’s two campuses, UCSD and UC Irvine, are ideal for such work as they are among the most aggressive campuses in the country on becoming ”carbon neutral” – deploying green energy sources (solar, fuel cells, etc.), while also reducing their own carbon footprint through efficiency programs.

Perhaps infused with the enthusiasm from the inauguration earlier in the week there was truly a “Yes We Can” attitude among the workshop attendees. Now is the time for us to roll up our sleeves, reach out to the best and brightest, and as is the American way, innovate our way to a better and greener tomorrow.

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Whether it’s John McCain or Barack Obama, what should the new American president do to promote technological innovation and global competitiveness? Computerworld asked a collection of tech luminaries from around the country for their advice, and published their thoughts today. Here are contributions from three info-tech experts in Xconomy cities.

Rick Rashid, senior vice president at Microsoft and head of Microsoft Research, writes, “Over the past 10 to 15 years, there has been a retreat from the successful research investment strategies of the past—strategies that created modern computing and the Internet.” Rashid advises that the new administration “work toward restoring a balanced system of support for long-term basic research in science and technology with a goal of ensuring the future competitiveness of the U.S.” Specifically, he advises that the administration “work with Congress to eliminate or limit [noncompetitive] earmark funding for science, restore the ‘long-term risk-taking’ parts of DARPA to its 1970s/1980s form, and fund the American Competitiveness Initiative.”

Ed Lazowska, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington (and former chairman of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee), gives a five-point plan that begins with restoring integrity to U.S. science policy. “It is essential that federal policy benefit from the most complete, accurate and honest scientific and technological information available,” he writes. Lazowska also advises doubling federal investment in fundamental research over the next 10 years, making a “national commitment to science education at all levels,” making the R&D tax credit permanent, and using technology to address the critical challenges of the 21st century. That includes energy independence, climate change, global hunger, national security, and urban infrastructure. “None is optional,” he says.

Victor Zue, director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (and advisor to the U.S. Department of Defense and National Science Foundation), writes, “Advances in information technology and computer science…are the primary force that powers our economy.” Achievements like the Internet, mobile communication, and user interfaces “typically originated from university research and often took more than a decade to realize a $1 billion market.” So Zue says the new administration should “significantly increase its budget for long-term, fundamental research, e.g., by doubling the NSF budget annually for the next four years. We must invest in educating the next generation of [information technology] professionals.”

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Narcissists Easy to Spot on Facebook

Psychologists at the University of Georgia wondered if they could use online profiles to identify the personality traits of the people who posted them and found that, for narcissism at least, it wasn’t hard to do. As Ars Technica explains, the researchers had students take a personality test to identify narcissistic personalities, then looked at their Facebook pages for both objective and subjective clues. Then they asked other students to spot the narcissists, and the students did, focusing on items like the number of friends and the self-promotional value of the profile photo.

Consumers Want Companies to Fight Climate Change, Survey Finds

Companies should take the lead in fighting global warming, say the majority of 28,000 Internet users from around the world surveyed by the Nielsen Company. Reuters says that 51 percent of those asked felt it was very important for firms to take steps to improve the environment, while another 36 percent called it somewhat important. And 40 percent said government should regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Web-Linked Appliances Could Cut Energy Use

Tying your refrigerator, washing machine, and hot-water heater into the Internet could save energy and money. GigaOm reports that a number of startups are selling items such as in-home energy displays that tell how much energy a home is using and what it’s costing. A pilot project by Whirlpool that let devices decide when to turn themselves off, based on price and what they are doing, found that 98 percent of participants thought the program worked well.

Eye-Tracker Gives Surgeons an Extra Hand

A device that tracks eye movements to aim a surgical laser or other equipment could give doctors better control over procedures they’re performing. New Scientist reports on a device being developed that shines an LED onto a doctor’s eyes, and uses a camera to track where her eye is looking, then tells a robot to reposition a laser or an endoscope. The device frees surgeons, whose hands tend to be full, from having to move around additional equipment.

Planned Community Demonstrates Eco-Friendly Possibilities

An abandoned military base near San Francisco is being transformed into a new community, and planners are designing it to be a particularly “green” neighborhood. The area, known as Treasure Island, will have its street grid oriented to give rooftop photovoltaics maximum exposure to sunlight, while an organic farm would use fertilizer generated by the island’s waste treatment plant. Scientific American says this is just one of several projects planned in the U.S., China, and Abu Dhabi that aim to reduce the environmental costs of city living.

Oracle and Intel Collaborate on Cloud Computing

Oracle and Intel have announced they’ll work together to accelerate the development of cloud computing, in which software runs on an Internet-connected network of servers without regard to who actually owns them. The companies want to push computing and data storage into the cloud by improving the efficiency and security of such operations, CNET News tells us. Improving data encryption technologies will be a large part of the effort.

Game Hopes to Predict the Future

A new online game called Superstruct started running this week, and challenges players with “superthreats” such as disease pandemics, refugees displaced by global warming, and evil computer hackers, that threaten civilization. As Discover magazine reports, the game, from the Institute for the Future, hopes to harness the so-called wisdom of crowds to predict doomsday scenarios and come up with ways to deal with them.

Solar Panels Enter Black Market

Solar panels are becoming increasingly popular, with thieves who resell them on eBay, according to the New York Times. Although no one’s compiled statistics, police departments in California say they’re seeing a rash of such crimes. Outside of California, where fewer panels have been installed, thefts are rarer, but growing, the paper says.

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New Nanomaterial Cleans Up Broken Bulbs

Compact fluorescent bulbs are being touted as environmentally friendly, since they’re much more energy efficient than standard incandescents. Their only problem: Break them, and you spread poisonous mercury all over the place. Now, according to the Discovery Channel, a researcher at Brown University has developed a nanomaterial that absorbs mercury 70 times better, making clean up that much safer and easier.

Verizon Wants Right to Throttle P2P

Despite the Federal Communication Commission’s recent ruling that Comcast could not legally slow down peer-to-peer file sharing, Verizon is arguing it needs to be able to do just that. Ars Technica reports that Verizon’s chief technology officer spoke at the Progress and Freedom Foundation and argued that access providers need to be able to throttle back on speeds for these high-bandwidth users so other customers can get adequate service.

Gentle Approach Could Overcome Drug Resistance

An experimental drug that doesn’t kill bacteria but makes them less potent may be the solution to the growing problem of germs that are resistant to antibiotics. New Scientist reports that researchers from the University of Texas have developed a drug that blocks bacteria from detecting two hormones they need to spread infection through the body. The drug rendered the bacteria ineffective without doing the killing that spurs resistance, the researchers said.

Your Driver’s License May Be Watching You

Driver’s licenses in states bordering Canada or Mexico may soon come equipped with RFID tags that can be read as far away as 30 feet. Though they’re designed to decrease identity fraud, they and other RFID devices could also allow the government to track you without your knowledge. Scientific American says lawmakers so far have done little to address potential privacy invasions for citizens.

Cyber Crooks Find Ease in Distributing Malware

Continuing his series about cyber criminals tools of the trade, Brian Krebs of the Washington Post’s Security Fix blog talks about how the bad guys distribute their bad software. Whereas it used to be difficult to create a network of hacked computers, now online services make it easy for anyone with nefarious intent to spread data-stealing software around.

Scientists Say Global Warming Hurts Economy

Climate change could cost the U.S. economy $2 trillion, unless the next president starts spending money to address the problem. That’s the message from a group of eight scientific organizations, according to MSNBC. The scientists want the next president to spend $9 billion between 2010 and 2014 to protect the country from extreme weather.

States Can Impose Emissions Requirements, EPA Says

Individual states can now set their own requirements for utilities to monitor their emissions, after a court overturned an Environmental Protection Agency rule preventing it. Reuters reports that the Bush administration had wanted to keep control of emissions centralized in the EPA, but the court found that existing monitoring requirements do not insure compliance.

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Wireless Goes Mobile as Vehicles Tie into the Internet

A recent announcement by Chrysler that it will begin installing wireless connections in all Chrysler, Jeep, and Dodge models signals that the Web is truly going worldwide, argues the Christian Science Monitor. Meahwhile, several airlines hope to make money by providing wireless access on flights, and at least one Boston-to-New York bus service lets riders log on.

Comparing McCain to Obama on Climate Change

In a change from previous elections, both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates agree that global warming is a real problem. This time, the Environmental News Network points out, the debate is over what to do about it. The site offers a comparison between John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s stances on issues including cap and trade, nuclear power, and renewable energy.

Can Capturing Carbon Emissions Work?

One proposal to fight global warming is to capture the carbon as it is emitted at energy plants and pump it back underground, to depleted oil fields or other safe places, where it can’t affect the atmosphere. But the Discovery Channel asks if such techniques can be deployed on a wide enough scale to actually make a difference.

Company Aims to Sum Up the Web

A startup company is trying to cut through the vast fields of information on the Internet by producing easy-to-use summaries. Pluribo has developed an add-on for the Firefox browser that summarizes user reviews on Amazon.com. It looks for similar words in different reviews and picks out bits it thinks are important, Webware reports. The company hopes to expand its technology to other areas soon.

Freeze on Solar Plants Gets Industry Hot

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has placed a moratorium on permits for new solar energy plants while it studies their potential impact on the land in six western states. That decision angers some in the solar energy industry, who worry that such a delay could stunt the industry’s growth, the New York Times reports. The study is expected to take about two years.

Hotel Industry Getting Greener

Seeking to market themselves as more “eco-chic,” hotels are moving beyond the offer to let guests reuse towels and looking for ways to become more environmentally friendly, the Los Angeles Times reports. While only 11 hotels so far have been built to Green Building standards, many hotels are installing carpets made of recycled materials, using low-flow showers and toilets, and using non-toxic cleansers.

Biodiesel Waste Can Become Useful Chemicals

The waste produced when making biodiesel doesn’t have to be an environmental problem, reports Science Daily. Chemical engineers at Rice University have come up with ways to turn the waste into ethanol, another biofuel, or into succinate, which can be used to make plastics, drugs, and food additives. The discovery could change the economics of biodiesel production.

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Electrics Cars Coming to America

Think, a Norwegian company that makes cars that run only on electricity, has opened a North American division and hopes to start-selling its autos in the U.S. in 2009, Business Week reports. The Think Ox is about the size of a Prius, runs for 125-155 miles per charge on rechargeable lithium ion batteries, and goes from 0 to 60 mph in 8.5 seconds. One wonders if the Ox name, presumably designed to evoke clean air, will have the same effect on sales that the Chevy Nova—”no go” in Spanish—legendarily had on sales in Latin America.

Changing MPG Standard Could Save Fuel

The way we think about fuel efficiency could be undermining our ability to actually figure out how much a car can save us in gas costs, researchers at Duke University suggest. New Scientist reports that a study found that people think doubling the miles per gallon of a compact car has the same effect on overall fuel consumption as doubling it in an SUV: that is, going from 10 to 20 mpg saves five gallons per 100 miles, while going from 25 to 50 mpg saves only two. The scientists want to flip the Environmental Protection Agency’s standard on its head, from miles per gallon to gallons per (100) miles, which they say would make the picture clearer

Big Business Wants a Climate Plan

Ninety-nine large businesses from all over the world, including ALCOA and Shell, want global leaders to get together on greenhouse-gas targets and an international carbon market, Bloomberg says. The statement, prepared by the World Economic Forum, was presented ahead of next month’s meeting of the Group of Eight industrialized nations. The U.S. has said it won’t agree to any binding targets unless China and India do also.

DARPA Not Underperforming, Director Says

Following on a report that the Department of Defense took away $32 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency because the agency was having a hard time allocating the funds, DARPA’s director says the Pentagon doesn’t understand how the agency works. According to Wired, director Tony Tether says there was unspent money because of his heightened supervision of projects. Some finished early, before all the money was spent, and some were cancelled because of poor performance, he says.

Court Debates the Meaning of “Infringement”

A federal judge may grant a mistrial in a file-sharing case after conceding he may have given the jury the wrong information about whether an action was a copyright infringement, Ars Technica reports. The judge had told the jury that merely making a copyrighted song available on a peer-to-peer network counted as infringement. But a friend-of-the-court brief from nine professors of copyright law argue that “making available” isn’t the same as “distributing” someone else’s property. The case could help define the line between stealing and fair use.

Heart Imaging Drugs Can Cause Death, FDA Warns

The continued use of certain drugs, known as contrast agents, to improve ultrasound images of the heart is leading to deaths, the Food and Drug Administration says. An AP story on Forbes.com reports that the FDA put out a warning in October, but since then has received four reports of patients dying after being injected with Definity, a drug formerly marketed by Bristol Myers Squibb. Researchers have been developing agents that are easier to see on ultrasound or MRI scans as a way to spot hard-to-find defects.

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Here’s a new excuse for staying at home on a workday: You may be helping to reduce your company’s carbon footprint.

Framingham, MA-based PeopleCube makes scheduling software that’s used for everything from deploying tugboats in Seattle Harbor to sending Metropolitan Life insurance agents out to meet prospects. About five years ago, according to CEO John Anderson, the company began selling its system as a way to allocate “hoteling” space inside companies where mobile workers might need a desk just for one day. (In Europe the practice is known by the more descriptive term “hot desking.”)

Then PeopleCube engineers realized that they could link the hot-desk scheduler into office buildings’ environmental management systems, so that lighting, heating, or cooling could be adjusted to comfortable levels on floors where the hoteling space was filling up and turned down to save energy on floors with lots of empty cubicles. And now PeopleCube is partnering with a U.K. consultancy called Building Sustainability Ltd. (BSL) to add a “carbon dashboard” to the scheduler, so that facilities managers can see exactly how much carbon dioxide is not being emitted into the atmosphere thanks to their scheduling efforts.

It’s a case study in how resource management technologies that companies pursue primarily to save money can also contribute to efforts to blunt global climate change—and how the companies that create and adopt those technologies can themselves acquire a green sheen. “By doing office hoteling, you’re moving into a green area right there, by reducing the amount of real estate you have to heat or cool, which reduces your carbon footprint,” says Anderson. “We’ve been helping companies do that for years—but we never messaged it as green.”

PeopleCube’s Resource Scheduler is already used by 110,000 employees at General Motors, 80,000 at Procter & Gamble, and thousands more at other big companies to search for and reserve physical resources such as conference rooms, hoteling space, and teleconferencing facilities. It can be accessed over the Web or through calendaring applications like Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. The software includes an application programming interface that companies can use to send schedule information directly to a building’s (or an entire campus’s) HVAC system.

“Say you’ve scheduled a room from 8:00 to 10:00, and I’ve scheduled it from 3:00 to 5:00,” explains Anderson. “From 10:00 to 3:00, the system, based on the schedule, can make sure that the heat is off and the lights are down and you’re getting better energy efficiency out of that space. At ten minutes before 3:00, it fires the heat back up and the lights come on and the room is ready.”

Last year PeopleCube began to think about ways to help customers document the amount of energy they were saving (and, indirectly, the carbon dioxide emissions they were helping to avert) by using Resource Scheduler to manage HVAC and lighting systems. They knew the tricky part would be coming up with ways to establish a baseline—an informed estimate of the amount of power, fuel oil, etc. that a customer would have used if the scheduling system hadn’t kicked in. “If you don’t know what your baseline is, there’s no way to report how much you’re reducing energy use,” says Anderson. (Establishing accurate baseline methodologies also happens to be a key part of the business at EnerNOC, a Boston company we profiled in February that pays companies to join “demand reduction” pools, groups whose power usage can be decreased remotely when electrical utilities are short on supply.)

PeopleCube started to build its own benchmarking and energy-tracking application, but then learned about BSL, a small energy consulting company in Surrey, England, that was “building essentially the same thing we were, except they were 12 months ahead of us,” Anderson says. BSL’s Footprint Tracker software is organized around a “carbon dashboard” that displays consumption of energy and water in real time, energy savings and carbon emissions reductions as compared to a customized baseline, and historical trends.

The companies formed an agreement to collaborate, and over the next two months, says Anderson, PeopleCube will integrate the Footprint Tracker into its Resource Scheduler and begin to roll out the combined system with pilot customers. “We’re a full-scale company and BSL is a development shop,” Anderson says. “By marrying our assets we’re going to hit the market 12 to 18 months sooner than either of us could have on our own.”

PeopleCube’s customers have been able to save 10 to 25 percent on energy costs for facilities managed using Resource Scheduler, says Anderson. Now they’ll also be able to translate that savings into a measure of carbon emissions averted. Unlike their U.K. and European counterparts, most U.S. companies aren’t yet under any legal obligation to demonstrate emissions reductions—but that day may come soon. And meanwhile, workplace carbon tracking can increase environmental awareness among managers and employees, while also helping to boost a company’s green credentials.

“Obviously, if companies are saving energy they are reducing their carbon footprint, so there are good ecological messages they can send out to the world,” says Anderson. “There is a huge return on investment and also a social and environmental impact. We think it’s a win-win around the table.”

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