An Eco-friendly post..

As said by Alex Witte on SocialMediaMom:

Green is the new buzz word for business innovation, from power companies, automobiles to airlines and mobile manufactures, all moving towards technologies that are environmentally friendly. So I decided to search for software that promotes green technologies on mobile devices.

I found a company based in New Delhi, India called MobiMonster (www.mobimonster2.com) that has designed software called GreenPhone for Series 60 (Symbian) mobile devices. This software helps you reduce your carbon footprint by managing several features of a series 60 device such as Backlight, Charger, WLAN and Bluetooth. I decided to download a trial version and see for myself. The application did kick into action and switched off my backlight, when I was not using it, alerted me to remove my charger when the battery of my phone was full, and when Bluetooth and WLAN were switched on but not being used for data transfer.

I think this application does help in reducing carbon footprint, but I was unable to find any such data on their website.

I contacted MobiMonster on why they don’t have such data on their website, and they responded back by saying the following:

“We are currently in the process of evaluating the numbers of several devices and will list an average of all tested devices on the site shortly.”

They also went on to give me some stats of findings so far:
“If the user does follow the ideal scenario, where backlight is auto switched off in 1 second, and charger, Bluetooth and WLAN are switched off on the first alert, this could results in savings of USD 10 per year in electricity charges, and a reduction in carbon emissions.”

I am not sure how they came up with this number, but this seems to be the average number that they are talking about putting on their website.

The innovation of this application seems to stem out from Nokia’s competition, CallingAllInnovators (www.callingallinnovators.com), Eco-friendly category. Nokia itself is pushing hard for Green Technologies and is also aligning itself towards eco-friendly solutions including recycling of used phones.

I see this application as a fit with Nokia devices, but would like to have some more features in the Green Phone which would shut down unwanted services, instead of notifying me. I do understand the benefits of notifications, instead of bluntly shutting down unwanted services, so I would still hail this as a first step in mobile software that aims to convert mobile devices into eco-friendly mobile devices.