The contract, I’m told, is worth $7.7 million and covers the first part of a three-phase project called CITIServe, which will ultimately see the consolidation of 50 different municipal data center operations scattered around the city over five years. The city hopes to save $100 million on its IT budget over the five years. Helpful, yes, but it’s not likely to put much of a dent in the city’s budget deficit, which is expected to be $2.4 billion in the fiscal year beginning July 1.

It might not occur to the average New Yorker that the city has so many data centers. It certainly surprised me, though calling them data centers may be overstating it a bit. A few are groups of servers in back offices no bigger than 1,000 square feet. The plan is to get them centralized both physically and from a management perspective. Each agency has its own staff handling the management.

The first things that will be streamlined in this phase of the project are the help desk, hosting, storage, email, virtualization and network for several city departments, though neither IBM nor the city is saying yet exactly which departments are involved. A statement from the city last March said the departments of Education, Buildings, Housing Preservation and Development, Sanitation and Finance would be among the first involved. Finance itself will be a pretty big job. It collects $25 billion in taxes and other revenue, and assesses about a million individual properties collectively worth more than $1 trillion. Then there’s the matter of the 10 million parking tickets the city issues each year.

The agency in the spotlight is the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, which will be in charge of managing the migration and then will run the new data centers once they’re operational. The plan is the result of a top-down 30-day study of the city’s IT infrastructure that Mayor Mike Bloomberg ordered last year.

Getting these services centralized will make them easier to protect and reduce the power needed to run them, thus reducing the city government’s carbon footprint, says David Cohn, program manager of the Smarter Cloud program at IBM Research. It’s not uncommon for servers that are set up to run just one application to use only 10 percent of their computing capacity, and then sit idle the rest of the time, burning electricity throughout that idle time.

“Getting a smaller number of systems running more applications and using less power is just the beginning,” Cohn told me. “After that you start developing deeper insight into where all your information is going that you couldn’t get before.”

It’s a positive sign for IBM on the cloud computing front. You may remember that Ric Telford, IBM’s VP of cloud services, said government is a segment it considers a priority this year. If New York successfully adopts the cloud, more will probably follow.

Calculating one’s carbon footprint may be all the rage, but in the case of spam, it’s serious, according to a study released Wednesday by computer security company McAfee (MFE) Avert Labs. The report found that an estimated 62 trillion spam messages are sent each year. Each email is associated 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide released as greenhouse gas, the equivalent of driving three feet–but given the total volume of spam each year, it’s like driving around the earth 1.6 million times.

Read the rest of this post

A study out Tuesday by the Carnegie Mellon Green Design Institute offers a scientifically rigorous estimate of e-commerce’s green benefits. E-commerce not only uses less energy, but its carbon footprint is also a third smaller than bricks-and-mortar retail, the scientists found.

Lead researcher H. Scott Matthews and his team compared the energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions required to deliver a small flash drive to a shopper via a trip to a traditional store versus buying and shipping the flash drive via Buy.com.

Coming up with these calculations required many assumptions by the scientists–but they’re a lot more informed than past attempts to account for the environmental benefits of e-commerce, say the researchers. That’s because the e-commerce site Buy.com made available to them information about its data center, last mile delivery practices and other sources of energy consumption. (Buy.com is a member of the Green Design Institute’s Corporate Consortium, but didn’t pay for or direct the study.)

The scientists found that by far the largest environmental cost of traditional shopping is a consumer driving his or her own car to a store. (They assumed that the average person drives about 14 miles round-trip per shopping outing, and buys about three different items on one trip.)

Read the rest of this post

The G1 is built around a model of openness, enabling developers to create applications — software programs, called “apps” for short — that will succeed or fail according to the feedback from the online community. Naturally, these community-contributed programs need a marketplace where G1 users can find them, and the Android Market provides just that.

This week, I installed various applications from the Android Market on a G1 and tested them out. Google (GOOG) says it will launch with around 40 to 50 applications in this virtual store, and these and all other apps will be available free of charge from now until at least the start of next year.

BreadCrumbz makes maps.

I found these apps to be useful, entertaining and mostly straightforward. There were a few that I felt tried to jam too much into one application, such as BreadCrumbz, an app that asks users to add pictures, instructional arrows and labels to maps that they make for friends. Other apps kept it short and sweet, like Wi-Fi Toggle — a one-touch button that turns wireless capability on or off to save battery power.

The G1′s apps are more utilitarian than most apps I’ve tested for Apple’s iPhone — and not quite as visually pleasing. I even compared one G1 program, Plusmo College Football, directly with the same app running on the iPhone, and I missed the artsy touches of the Apple (AAPL) version — like menus that flipped 180 degrees when selected rather than simply opening.

One downside: Only a measly 70 megabytes of internal flash memory are reserved on the G1 for storing these third-party applications. Once you fill that limited internal storage space, you have to delete some of your apps to add more. You can’t currently store apps on the phone’s roomier removable memory card. (A one-gigabyte microSD comes with the G1.) The iPhone doesn’t set such an arbitrary limit on application-storage space. The Android Market, like Apple’s iTunes, keeps a record of each user’s installed apps so they can be easily downloaded again later at no extra charge (if they carried a fee). But, unlike the iPhone, the G1 can’t back up your apps to a PC or Mac.

The G1′s open model means extra setup steps during app installation. For example, if an application will access certain information — such as a user’s Internet connection, location data (as identified by GPS) or other personal information (calendar, contacts, etc.) — warnings appear during installation, and the user must grant permission. In addition, many apps come with license agreements that must be okayed before users can continue. If something goes wrong with an app, people can post complaints on community boards or email developers, whose email addresses appear during installation.

The Android Market home page.

To offer a general idea of what’s available, I’ve highlighted a handful of apps that I like. I broke the applications into three groups: Functional, Fun (if occasionally kitschy) and Frills.

Functional

Wi-Fi Toggle: This does what it says. Once installed, it adds an icon to the G1′s desktop that provides a quick way to turn Wi-Fi on and off without digging into the settings menu.

Locale: Like Wi-Fi Toggle on steroids, this app allows a user to set up a G1 so it dynamically changes its settings in specific conditions. The settings can respond to calls from certain people or changes in the phone’s battery power, calendar, the user’s location or the time. For instance, the Wi-Fi can automatically turn off, ringer volume can go up or down, desktop wallpaper can change or a post can be sent. Just think of all the churchgoers who could ensure their cellphone ringers are turned off on Sunday mornings or when the church’s location is sensed.

Ringdroid: Make ringtones from your own songs by adjusting bars to mark the start and end of each ringtone. Hitting Save automatically keeps the ringtone, labeled with the song’s name by default, for use on the phone.

Video Player: The G1 doesn’t have a built-in way to play videos, and this app does the trick in a clear-cut, reliable way.

Fun

Movie ShowTimes: This lets people use a finger to flick across the G1′s touch screen to page through movie poster images, titles and brief descriptions. Below each movie description, an on-screen button labeled “Showtimes Near You” uses GPS to generate lists of nearby movie times.

Pac-Man: The classic arcade game never gets old. You can move Pac-Man through his maze with one of three methods: tilting the G1 so its accelerometer moves the Pac-Man, swiping with a finger to point Pac-Man in the right direction or using the trackball to move him around the screen. I preferred the trackball.

Cooking Capsules: This program demonstrates food-making without being either too intimidating or too dull and simplified. Though there were only six “capsules” when I tested it, each includes steps for watching (an instructional video), shopping (using an on-screen list of items) and cooking (with numbered instructions on how to cook the food).

Bonsai Blast is a gaming app that’s now available for the G1.

Bonsai Blast: This colorful, Asian-themed game directs people to shoot colorful marbles at other chains of marbles, with a goal of getting three matching marbles lined up beside one another so they’ll disappear.

Krystle II: Turns your G1′s entire screen into a picture of fur that purrs and vibrates as you touch it. There’s no real point, but Krystle II is addictive and strangely comforting during long conference calls.

Frills

Ecorio: This well-intended app aims to track users’ travel carbon footprints in order to make them more responsible for the environment. It asks users to enter things like recent transit routes and carpools and suggests ways to reduce and offset people’s footprints.

Maverick: An IM program that allows people to add scribbles, location data or even photos to active instant-messaging conversations. Maverick signs users into Google Talk and Picasa simultaneously, adding IM images into an auto-generated Picasa album for later viewing.

PicSay: Add word balloons, titles, props and effects to digital photos captured and/or stored on the G1, then send the images via multimedia messaging service or email, or save one as a caller ID.

There are many more G1 apps to try, and developers are expected to keep making them for this new device. As with the iPhone, apps obtained for the G1 from the Android Market enable it to morph into a different device with different tools every day.

– Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

[quote=]