Yahoo is building a new customer care center and making big additions to an existing data center facility in Lockport, New York. The expansions will create 115 new jobs.

The Lockport data center, Yahoo says, is a flagship of its energy-efficient data center design. The facility first opened in 2010, and today’s news will add to the company’s commitment to developing environmentally conscious data centers.

“Yahoo! is committed to being an environmentally responsible company, and we thank New York state and local authorities for working with us to ensure we continue to power our data center with clean energy,” said Yahoo central technology EVP David Dibble in a statement to the company’s investors.

The data center will use low-cost hydropower from the Niagara Hydroelectric Power Plant as well as an outside-air cooling system to keep machines at optimal temperatures. All of this is part of the Yahoo! Compute Coop (YCC) architecture — what the company calls its hardware and infrastructure design.

Yahoo is one of a handful of large web companies placing more emphasis on efficient, innovative data center design. Google has long emphasized its green(er) data centers, and Facebook has taken the whole thing a step further with its Open Compute Project, a cooperative effort among some of the world’s biggest tech companies to create the best, cheapest, greenest data centers possible.

As part of Yahoo’s expansion into western New York State, the company will make a $3.5 million gift to the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo over the next seven years.

For those of us living on the digital edge, a paper-free office is a no-brainer, and being asked to print, copy, or fax a document will likely get a response of, “Suuuure chief, just let me go pop a couple Quaaludes and turn on the ol’ 8-track, and I’ll get right on that.”

Still, in the U.S. the average office worker will burn through around 10,000 pieces of 8-by-11 paper each year. So a bunch of companies that have a vested interest in getting us out of the paper habit have teamed up on a new campaign: Paperless 2013.

Paperless 2013 aims “to remove the need for paper” from all kinds of office work that would otherwise be called paperwork: billing, contracts, expense reports, collaboratively created documents and reports — you name it.

In addition to promoting its partners’ collection of paper-free work tools, the campaign will also start to introduce lifehacks and workhacks for paperless living via a monthly newsletter and a slate of social media accounts.

The campaign is being spearheaded by HelloFax, a Y Combinator company with a simple but ingenious product that lets you sign and send documents sans printer or fax machine. The startup launched its stupid-simple digital document-signing product, HelloSign, a few months ago; at that time, cofounder Joseph Walla told us that rather than being reluctant to go digital with their documents, enterprises were more than happy to jump aboard.

“If you look at a lot of corporations, there are really complex signature flows,” he said. “When we talk to corporations, they’re excited about this, and they’re willing to pay. Signatures are not a trivial technology to them, and they’re willing to invest.”

HelloFax had already partnered with Google Drive on the HelloSign launch, so teaming up with Drive again on the Paperless 2013 campaign wasn’t only a win-win for both products; it was also a no-brainer for two already linked companies.

Another Paperless partner is Fujitsu (promoting its ScanSnap scanner for the home office and small business); others include startups Xero (online accounting software), Manilla (web-based bill management), and Expensify (all-digital expense reports).

Image credit: 20th Century Fox

Allied Minds, an “alternative investment company” in Boston, has secured a partnership with the DOD to license military-developed technologies, build commercial applications, and create new companies. First-year investment will total $100 million.

“This is a historic opportunity,” Allied Minds CEO Chris Silva told me this morning. “It’s the first time the DOD has ever partnered with a private investment firm.”

Silva has already launched two companies in the new fund, including Allied Communications, which is commercializing high-efficiency spectrum sharing technologies invented by the DOD, and Broadcast Routing Fountains, which is bringing more secure and efficient routing solutions to consumer and government networks. Eighteen more companies will follow in just the first year.

Both exhibit what really excites Silva about the DOD opportunity: already mature technology.

Since one of the roles of the DOD is to provide high-tech solutions for America’s military, the technologies are already in use. They’ve been “enabled,” as Silva puts it, and much of the risk of a new startup — that it is not addressing a real problem, and that its tech doesn’t actually solve the problem — has already been taken out.

Allied Minds invests somewhat like a venture capitalist, but instead of creating a fund, the company forms subsidiaries. The company previously focused on technologies created by university research labs, creating companies like Spin Transfer Technologies, which is commercializing a new kind of “universal” memory chip, a cross between DRAM and Flash, and just took an additional $36 million round of financing.

With the new DOD partnership, Allied Minds has a rich new field of opportunity: innovations from those 50,000 scientists. Silva is focusing investment in five key categories that he believes are “ripe” for commercialization:

• Cyber-security
• Advanced materials
• Data analytics
• Energy
• Power storage

But the opportunity is bigger than Allied Minds, and bigger than its initial $100 million investment. So Silva intends to partner with other investment firms and venture capitalists to reach the goal of 100 companies a year.

“We want to be the spearhead, not necessarily do all them ourselves,” he told me.

Allied Minds is an interesting animal in the evolving world of startups. Not a VC, not an angel, not an incubator or an accelerator, Allied Minds takes an ownership stake in every company it starts, and focuses on speed to market. The relatively mature technology it starts with helps, but the company also provides all the back office support, accounting, legal, HR, and other needs a new company has, plus all the funding needed.

The goal, Silva told me is helping CEOs focus on building the business, not on raising money or building infrastructure.

If successful, those businesses will also return some value to the American consumer — and the American taxpayer.

photo credit: United States Air Force via photopin cc

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

On any given day, Golden Gate Park in San Francisco is a shining example of more or less pristine green space in a densely packed urban area. Its trees tower, pulling up the blankets of fog from the ocean; its human-made bodies of water flow in intricate systems of streams, waterfalls, and lake chains; its wild blackberry bushes create a juicy bramble beside bike paths. Voles and foxes (and the occasional person) make their homes among the nasturium.

Then, for three days in August, 60,000+ hipsters each day pour into a handful of meadows, as thick and viscous as the fog itself, and the park is transformed into a raucous, wild music festival. Amps are stacked like ziggurats where last week a family was picnicking. An endless row of food vendor booths has taken up the bike trail. The air surges with amplified guitar fuzz and obscenities from the mouths of performers, and you can almost feel the ground shake from the trampling feet of a herd of humanity.

click to see full-size panorama

Then, when the three-day rock orgy is over, Golden Gate Park is miraculously returned to its original state. Pristine. Clean. Foxes and voles and nasturtium. There’s no wasteland of tumbleweeds and greasy napkins, no deep trenches created by band vans’ tires.

Somehow, Outside Lands takes Golden Gate Park from the city each year, turns it inside out for the love of rock & roll, then manages to return it in its original condition as though nothing had ever happened.

Such small miracles involve a lot of planning, a lot of volunteers, a lot of work.

During this year’s festival, VentureBeat took some time to meander around the festival grounds and talk to the many people who make up Outside Lands’ on-the-ground eco team. Here’s what we learned (read the captions for the rest of the story).

Of course, no efforts to “green” any event are going to be perfect. The roads leading into the park’s heart were still lined with gas-guzzling tour buses. Diesel generators still powered some of the main stage equipment. Drunken revelers still mistakenly tossed recyclables into the landfill-bound trash bins.

And yes, among the sincere efforts of volunteers and eco-focused groups, there were still a few greenwashing attempts — most notably by large corporations that had spent tens of thousands (or more) on Eco Lands booths to lure the young and impressionable toward the idea that any multinational gives a rat’s hind end about the planet more than it does about its own bottom line.

But overall, as we walked and biked through Golden Gate Park in the days after the festival, we were grateful and impressed by Outside Lands’ successful efforts to, minimally, return the place unharmed to those who love it year-round.

Apple made a bit of a whoopsie last week when it withdrew from EPEAT’s green certification program. Now, the MacBook maker is back on board with the environmental organization and is eager to get its seal of approval for Apple products again.

EPEAT stands for Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool. It’s the de facto ratings system for environmentally friendly gadgets, and its seal certifies that products meet certain standards for recycling.

In an open letter posted to Apple’s website, hardware SVP Bob Mansfield wrote, “Many loyal Apple customers … were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the EPEAT rating system. I recognize that this was a mistake. Starting today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT.”

But not all Apple products will be eligible for the rating. Apple products are increasingly difficult to tear down, due to glued-in batteries and glass displays, and as EPEAT CEO Robert Frisbee stated last week, “If the battery is glued to the case, it means you can’t recycle the case and you can’t recycle the battery.” That was the original issue behind Apple’s withdrawal from EPEAT.

Apple continues to emphasize its own energy efficiency and recycling programs as part of its environmental policy, as well as its efforts to rid its gadgets of toxic materials. Mansfield’s letter stated (somewhat passive-aggressively, we might note) that many of Apple’s green innovations have been in areas as-yet unexplored by EPEAT.

“It’s important to know that our commitment to protecting the environment has never changed, and today it is as strong as ever,” wrote Mansfield. “Our relationship with EPEAT has become stronger as a result of this experience, and we look forward to working with EPEAT as their rating system and the underlying IEEE 1680.1 standard evolve.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple products will no longer bear the EPEAT seal of approval that adorns environmentally friendly tech products.

The iDevice maker has backed away from EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) because Apple products such as the new Retina display MacBook Pro are no longer designed to be recyclable or otherwise environmentally friendly by EPEAT standards and would be ineligible for certification.

“Apple has notified EPEAT that it is withdrawing its products from the EPEAT registry and will no longer be submitting its products to EPEAT for environmental rating,” reads an official statement from the environmental organization.

“EPEAT is more than simply a product rating – it is also a community effort by all interested stakeholders to define and maintain best practice in environmental sustainability for electronics. We regret that Apple will no longer be registering its products in EPEAT. We hope that they will decide to do so again at some point in future.”

While Apple does offer its own recycling programs, the Environmental Protection Agency-funded EPEAT requires that products be easy to disassemble so recyclable components can be recycled and toxic components can be properly disposed of.

Since Apple products are increasingly difficult to tear down, due to glued-in batteries and glass displays, EPEAT certification was at odds with how the products are designed — and how Apple is designed to turn a profit.

“If the battery is glued to the case, it means you can’t recycle the case and you can’t recycle the battery,” EPEAT CEO Robert Frisbee told the Wall Street Journal.

“They said their design direction was no longer consistent with the EPEAT requirements. … They were important supporters and we are disappointed that they don’t want their products measured by this standard anymore.”

To give an idea of how important EPEAT certification is, in 2009, President Obama signed an executive order mandating that the EPEAT seal appear on at least 95 percent of the electronics in federal and contractor purchases.

Also, many other major computer and smartphone manufacturers, including Asus, Dell, Samsung, LG, HP, and many others, are well on board with EPEAT and support the organization’s mission.

Still, Apple’s environmentally focused company page states it is the only company that can claim “every single… product not only meets but exceeds the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s strict ENERGY STAR guidelines for efficiency.”

And as for recycling, the company states, “Apple’s approach to recycling begins in the design stage, where we create compact, efficient products that require less material to produce… Apple has instituted recycling programs in cities and college campuses in 95 percent of the countries where our products are sold, diverting more than 115,504 metric tons of equipment from landfills since 1994. Our goal in 2010 was to achieve a worldwide recycling rate of 70 percent.”

IPE, which is based in Beijing, will look into one of Apple’s printed circuit-board factories to measure pollutants and their effect on the environment. The current audit is only a pilot, however, and is not an indication of further joint investigations between Apple and IPE. The organization will post the results of the audit on its website, and hopes they will open the door to further audits with other Apple suppliers.

This is not the first time IPE has looked into Apple. In late 2011, the organization released a series of reports called, “The Other Side of Apple,” (PDF) detailing a few of Apple’s suppliers and their offenses against the environment.

Recently, Apple allowed the Fair Labor Association to audit its Foxconn factories in China. Foxconn had been accused of providing poor working conditions to its factory workers. Many employees complained about long hours, little pay for overtime, and small dormitories. A rash of recent worker suicides (related to Microsoft’s Xbox assembly lines) that prompted Foxconn to install suicide nets on its buildings drew additional scrutiny. The FLA performed a thorough audit in January 2012, concluding that Apple was, in fact, violating some of the FLA’s standards, as well as Chinese law. Apple and Foxconn have since agreed to make necessary changes.

via Macworld; Apple tree photo via Shutterstock

“We want people to think about lightbulbs and the innovation behind them, we want you to throw away lightbulbs because ours are better and more energy-efficient,” Bill Watkins, Bridgelux chief executive and former Seagate CEO, told VentureBeat.

The company produces solid-state lighting, or light bulbs made of light emitting diodes (LEDs) that are more energy-efficient than traditional incandescent bulbs. LEDs are typically found in TVs, computers, and even car headlights, but the technology has previously been too expensive to be used in a simple consumer light bulb. Bridgelux changed that by releasing cheaper and more energy-efficient light bulbs that can be used in lamps and overhead light fixtures. The company backs up its products with a five-year warranty.

Bridgelux holds more than 600 patent filings worldwide and has developed many LED products including light bulbs that can be easily replaced when a diode burns out.

Bridgelux will use the fundraising to research and develop LED chips with silicon, which can be used in a larger LEDs for more light emission. Kaistar is teaming up with Bridgelux as a manufacturing partner for these new LEDs. The company also has several programs that the funding will go towards.

“We’ve recently rolled out a pilot program to give thousands of businesses and homes five free light bulbs that connect to a smart meter and be monitored by a utility company. The power company can then adjust the amount of energy flowing to the light bulb during peak and off-peak hours,” said Watkins.

Bridgelux is based in Livermore, California and has more than 130 employees. The company has been heavily funded in the past, with a $34 million investment in 2009 and $21 million in 2011 from Vantage Point Venture Partners, VC firm DCM, Chrysalix Energy, and El Dorado ventures.

Apple has released a list of hardware component suppliers (and many of their human rights and environmental violations) as part of its 2012 Supplier Responsibility Progress Report.

This list, the company says, accounts for more than 97 percent of Apple’s procurement expenditures for materials, manufacturing, and assembly of iPads, iPhones, iPods, MacBooks and various other personal computing products worldwide.

In this year’s report, Apple says it conducted more audits of manufacturers than ever — 229 audits altogether for various partners along Apple’s supply chain. The number of audits represents an 80 percent increase over audits conducted in 2010 and includes more than 100 first-time audits.

While the company says it has educated more than a million employees at Apple’s manufacturing partners around the world about worker’s rights, on-the-job safety and more, the audits unearthed some ugly facts about the companies making iDevice components.

In Chinese partners, Apple’s investigations found issues with payment of workers, benefits for workers and environmental practices. Some suppliers were found dumping waste-water at a farm near the plant, using unsafe machinery, forging payroll records and even administering pregnancy tests to some workers.

Perhaps most troubling of all from a human rights perspective is the continuing instances of child and involuntary labor in Apple’s supply chain. Although Apple says it maintains a a zero-tolerance policy for such labor and that the 2011 audits concluded instances of child labor “were down significantly,” the company can only verify that no underage workers were found at final assembly suppliers.

“I would like to totally eliminate every case of underage employment,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told reporters.

“As we go deeper into the supply chain, we found that age verification system isn’t sophisticated enough. This is something we feel very strongly about and we want to eliminate totally.”

In a email sent today to Apple staff, Cook wrote, “We are taking a big step today toward greater transparency and independent oversight of our supply chain by joining the Fair Labor Association.

“The FLA is a leading nonprofit organization dedicated to improving conditions for workers around the world, and we are the first technology company they’ve approved for membership. The FLA’s auditing team will have direct access to our supply chain and they will report their findings independently on their website.”

While it seems Apple is trying to tackle these overarching issues of international business and manufacturing, we are nevertheless disturbed by many of the things in this report. After all, 78 percent compliance with involuntary labor requirements still means 22 percent noncompliance, which translates to coercion and debt bondage being part of how your your iPhone was made.

Still, all our electronics come from plants such as these. At least Apple is making an effort to be transparent about the process, to find violations, to correct those violations, and in some cases, to stop doing businesses with companies that consistently ignore human rights and environmental regulations.

Here are other interesting parts of the report, as well as some graphs we created showing percentage of compliance, based on data from the report:

Overwork

93 facilities had records that indicated more than 50 percent of their workers exceeded weekly working hour limits of 60 in at least 1 week out of the 12 sample period. At 90 facilities, more than half of the records we reviewed indicated that workers had worked more than 6 consecutive days at least once per month, and 37 facilities lacked an adequate working day control system to ensure that workers took at least 1 day off in every 7 days.

Inadequate pay

42 facilities had payment practice violations, including delayed payment for employees’ wages and no pay slips provided to employees. 67 facilities used deductions from wages as a disciplinary measure. 108 facilities did not pay proper overtime wages as required by laws and regulations.

Slave & child labor

Two facilities were repeat offenders in the category of involuntary labor. Apple’s report states, “We terminated business with one supplier and are correcting the practices of the other supplier.”

[In] 15 facilities… we discovered foreign contract workers who had paid excessive recruitment fees to labor agencies… Some of our suppliers work with third-party labor agencies to hire contract workers from countries such as the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. These agencies, in turn, may work through multiple subagencies in the hiring country, the workers’ home country, and, in some cases, all the way back to the workers’ home village. By the time the workers have paid all fees across these agencies, the total cost can equal many months’ wages, forcing workers into debt…

We discovered a total of 6 active and 13 historical cases of underage labor at 5 facilities. In each case, the facility had insufficient controls to verify age or detect false documentation. We found no instances of intentional hiring of underage labor.

Health & safety

126 facilities did not have the appropriate administrative documentation or approval for at least one item in the health and safety protocol. Examples included workers who performed certain tasks without the legally required licenses, expired elevator permits, and lack of labeling of maximum load for shelving. 78 facilities had at least one instance where a workstation or a machine was missing the appropriate safety device such as a gear guard, pulley guard, or interlock. 58 facilities had workers who were not wearing appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE), such as earplugs, safety glasses, and dust masks. In some instances, the facility had not provided the appropriate
safety equipment. In others, the workers neglected to use the equipment or were using it improperly. Also, 72 facilities lacked procedures for PPE management.

In an interview with Bizjournal, Phil Angelides says his firm will invest first in real estate and green building projects, where he has experience. Over time, he’ll invest in other environmental projects and products, he said. As treasurer, Angelides led the state initiative four years ago to begin supporting investments in green technology — which helped spark interest in the area by Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists.

Thus continues the revolving door tradition in Sacramento. Like many other pension executives before him, Angelides should find it easy to draw on his contacts at California state pensions, such as CalPERS and CalSTRS, to help him raise money for his firm. He served on their boards for years, overseeing investment decisions.