discuss Unified Communications

Today I was reviewing a teleworking guide from the Denver Regional Council of Governments RideArrangers program, titled Green Commuting at you Business: A guide to quick and easy promotions. This resource was forwarded my way by the local green team at our Westminster location, by far the largest location in the Avaya global real estate portfolio. As part of their work, the local green team is looking at ways to encourage teleworking at that site.

Recent headlines about a vendor recording bits of content from WiFi networks brought to light a longstanding business practice – WiFi sniffers. Discovery and sharing of WiFi location data isn’t new. In fact, access to it has been standardized. Google, for example, has offered geolocation information in its Gears browser extensions since October, 2008. And driving around to find the location of WiFi hubs is already common enough to have earned a cool name - wardriving.

Later today, I will be happily flying to Colorado to go backpacking with my father over the weekend, followed by a week working from our Westminster facility. Then, it is on to Chicago before returning to San Fran. This very pleasant work/personal 10-day itinerary highlights the flexibility that modern air travel infrastructure affords, but it must be noted that there is an environmental downside to the ubiquitous nature of travel. You see, air travel is a highly carbon and resource intensive mode of travel. It takes a lot of energy to propel these massive apparatuses up to 500 miles an hour all over the globe. This article from the New York Times, Air Travel and Carbon on Increase in Europe, gets right to heart of the paradox between increased freedom to travel and the environmental cost.

Alerting has been a core communications service since a little after the first day phones were invented. We’ve all heard about the first call: “Mr. Watson, come here I want to see you!” (Thanks to the magic of the internet, you can see it in Edison’s own writing : Click here.) For a while they continued to license phones in pairs so you were directly connected to the person you wanted to talk with, just like Bell and Watson. And to get their attention you’d shout into the phone or tap on it. Thankfully, though, a bell got added to these things pretty soon, and the whole system was re-designed to get reliable bell alerting – the foundation for Notification.

One of the groups that has been particularly active in our sustainability program over the last several weeks is the packaging/logistic team. For instance here is an older post from the team on the Green Impact of Avaya Packaging Redesign. This team has done work over the last 18 or so months to project eliminated 14.4M feet2 (1.3M m2) of corrugated fiberboard (enough to cover 300 American football fields), eliminated 8300 wooden pallets and abate 661 tons of CO2 emissions in 2009 alone. They have not sat on their laurels and continue to drive efficiencies into our shipping and logistic operations.

Billions of people are coming together for the ongoing World Cup in South Africa, and I suspect that the global phenomenon is hard to miss wherever you are reading this post. I know I have greatly enjoyed the games and been especially riveted by the United States games as they have fought out two tough, come from behind draws and are on a knifes edge going into their last group game to decide if they will advance into the knockout round. I am a big fan of the US team, and even traveled to Trinidad last year to watch the team compete in an away qualifier in which they won a tight 1-0 game that was very helpful for advancing to the World Cup Finals.