“Awesome” was the word used by the judges to describe the winner of the Innovation prize.

Having attended many hack events, I was very impressed by the extremely high quality of the output.

Over 130 people registered for AMEE’s first Green Hackathon, and around 100 participated over the weekend (including a hard-core of all-night coders).

Interestingly, this Hackathon wasn’t just for coders. We put a lot of effort into creating themes and bringing together domain knowledge about enviornmental sustainability with developer skills: some participants simply turned up with an idea, and found a coder to help them build it!

As a result, almost all of the hacks focussed on business problems, not consumer problems, and all focussed on the notion of CleanTech-meets-Web (also coined as CleanWeb in the USA).

We are extremely happy with the energy and outcomes produced, and hope to see at least one of the projects attempt to build out into a business. We are obviously also delighted that many of the winners and projects used AMEE as part of their solutions – we know from experience that hackdays are extremely unpredictable (in fact our own James Smith added an API to AskAMEE during the weekend so that it could be used more easily in one of the projects!)

Watch the videos here

Thank you everyone for your time, effort and, for our financial supporters, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) and our sponsors:

• Gold: 

Autodesk, UCL Adances, and UK Department for Business Innovation & Skills (BIS)

• Silver:

Amadeus Capital Partners, European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT), Forum For the Future, ITOworld, Opower, Trucost, and 2degrees

 To read more about the event click here >>

The Winners

The Hack Day judging panel selected winners based on the following categories:

• Best Hack and Peoplefund.it Prize recipient: Mastodon
• Innovation Prize: Kindle Energy Dashboard
• Built Environment Prize: Energy Efficiency in Buildings
• Transparency Prize: Company Carbon Death Map
• Behaviour Change Prize: AMEE in Excel
• Visualisation Prize: One Tonne

Other Presentations

Everyone was excellent, but unfortunately not everyone can win! Here are the other hacks built over the weekend:

• Greensta
• Is your washing machine rinsing your wallet?
• Localista
• London’s Invisible Smog
• Nanode Ambient Energy Display
• njenje
• Play4Decades
• Real Time Carbon Emissions
• Realtime National Grid
• Retrofit

Over 120 participants

10 Fantastic Sponsors

Over 20 participating organizations

And Great prizes!

This will be the cleanweb London event of the year! Beyond the fun and learning our sponsors are also making it well worth your while by providing cash prizes!

• Best Hack – £500
• Innovation – £200
• Built Environment – £200
• Transparency – £200
• Behavior Change – £200
• Transport – £200
• Visualisation – £200
• PeopleFundIt – Free listing on crowdfunding site PeopleFundIt

If you haven’t grabbed you ticket yet get them while they last – only 29 left! We also have just released an additional 50 tickets for the presentation session only starting at 2:30 PM Sunday.

Make sure to visit the Hackathon website for more details and get ready for and exciting weekend of hacking for climate change, sustainability, energy and resources.

In the previous post I outlined how standards publish at present and how AMEE represents them. In this post I’ll concentrate more on how AMEE can be used and how we approach updating AMEE.

How can I access standards in AMEE?

AMEEconnect allows software to interact with the AMEE platform over the web using a secure connection. This can be used to extract data or text, store all kinds of information and retrieve calculation results, including time series data. This information can then be presented to the user on a variety of clients, from phones to tablets, from desktop applications to web pages.

AMEEapps also provides a number of web applications than you can use or customize and also open source tools to speed up development of software with AMEE.

AMEEdiscover provides a human readable interface for AMEEconnect, allowing any user to search, browse and even perform calculations with AMEE’s content. It also serves as a good source of documentation for all the world’s standards that AMEE represents, even if you have no need of AMEEconnect itself.

Behind the scenes, AMEEdiscover uses AMEEconnect, so all content that you can see including all text documentation, is available for extraction via the AMEE API.

How does AMEE decide what standards to include?

Ultimately, AMEE’s goal is to include all relevant standards, but this of course takes time, particularly to ensure quality. We choose to bring a standard into AMEE if one or more of the following is true:

• there is a clear demand from multiple AMEE users that it’s needed
• we feel the information is likely to be useful once AMEE gives it greater exposure
• the information will add unique value when combined with other standards AMEE holds
• a single user sees significant value in it

AMEE’s platform, through AMEEconnect and AMEEdiscover products, offers online services that help make environmental information and data more accessible. Many standards come from governments or NGOs and are available freely and no license is required for them. Because AMEE’s business model is centred on providing online services around data and not selling the data itself, we can readily accomodate proprietary data sets which require the purchase of a specific license, such as the vast ecoinvent database used for Life Cycle Analysis (LCA).

AMEE’s remit extends beyond greenhouse gas emissions data and closely related energy efficiency data. With the inclusion of ecoinvent and other datasets, AMEE covers all kinds of environmental information, including land use, air pollution, land and water contamination amongst many others.

I’m very excited to announce that this month AMEE surpassed 30 million calculations performed on our platform. What that means is that AMEE has provided 30 million answers to 30 Million environmental questions. That may seem like a big number to you. That may seem like a small number to others. Part of the significance is clear from the fact that we only recently surpassed the 25 million calculations — so we cruised by 30 million! What’s clear is:

Growth in calculation transactions on the AMEE platform and the underlying demand for environmental data that drives those calculations are both accelerating.

We anticipate that this growth will further accelerate for two main reasons:

1) The pressures on organisations to manage environmental information efficiently are evident and clearly increasing.

Recent regulation in the airline and shipping industries will create even more demand. Companies are also looking to become more resilient to resource security shocks both in their organisations and supply chains by improving intelligence, efficiency and performance. As consultancy McKinsey notes, a “Resource Revolution” is upon us.

2) We’re doing a number of things to deliver the intelligence businesses need — better, faster, cheaper.

• Better service: We are making a whole host of improvements to the AMEE service ranging from a new platform release (v3- stay tuned @ameedev) to user experience, interface design and simplifying our API
• More Demonstration: Late last year we launched AMEE Labs and its been a great success. Our integration with Minecraft, for example, has had over 28,000 views on Youtube since October. Labs are helping more users imagine solutions and engage with the data and platform.
• Increased Engagement: We’re aggressively engaging key partners and hosting events which all benefit from our open source policy that eases collaboration. Our upcoming Hack Day is sure to deliver some great new creations and insight!

The challenges ahead for businesses are daunting. One thing that is inevitable is that the better information businesses have the better they will perform. AMEE is delivering that information in a efficient and useful way. That is why 30 million matters.

How do you think we could improve our service to make environmental information more accessible and useful for you? Feel free to comment or contact us.

I want to thank all of AMEE’s users, customers and partners for their support over the past year, share some highlights, and key announcements.

AMEE is now free. We strongly believe Environmental Intelligence – Everywhere means being accessible and ubiquitous, lowering barriers to entry, and stimulating innovation. This means developers can build more great apps, consultants can help their clients, teachers can help their students, and everyone can engage in helping to footprint everything!

To aid this we have also launched Ask AMEE, our computational search engine, making it easy to do calculations and discover answers, are hosting our first hackathon in London January 28th – 29th at University College London.

Join us at this unique event to engage our sustainability and developer communities around innovation.

 2011 highlights

– BP’s 2012 Olympics Target Neutral initiative
— Sun Edison and Bergen Energi (embedding AMEE intelligence into energy efficiency technology)
— Siemens TTB (powering real-time emissions liabilities in manufacturing processes)
— The UK broadcast industry from BBC to Sky (footprinting every TV show in the UK)
— International Universities (joining our education programme)
— Innovative partnerships with IBM, Autodesk, Minecraft and Foursquare

AMEE Labs showcases continued innovation

– AskAMEE – Find answers to your questions easily >> read about it in Techcrunch
– AMEE Location Footprinter -  Try out ALF to link travel emissions data to your Foursquare account
– Autodesk – Watch the video of our Inventor demo: delivering Environmental Intelligence into product design.
– ClimateCraft – James Smith, our Platform Evangelist, integrated AMEE with Minecraft, the popular video game. The YouTube video we posted as had over 27,000 views so far!

Continued recognition for AMEE’s mission and our team

With your support, we have again been recognised as world-leaders in the CleanTech industry:
- Guardian CleanTech 100 (for the second year in succession), placing us in the top 2% globally
– Our team attended industry technology leadership summits at the White House, Number 10 and Buckingham Palace. 
– In October I joined the UK Government’s MiData Energy Sector Board – an open data initiative for energy information.

Adding to our exceptional leadership team, Tim Murphy has joined us as CEO. Tim brings a wealth of experience of growing and managing data and internet businesses, with board level tenure at Dun & Bradstreet, Alphyra, and Branded Payment Solutions. Stuart Coleman joined us as VP Sales & Marketing having grown and led early stage business models within start-ups and global technology businesses. I’m now Chairman. In recognition of this GP Bullhound CleanTech Connect ranked us in their top 10 and awarded us their Unique Leadership Award

We all know we have many challenges ahead: to address and accelerate our collective transition to a more environmentally efficient society. We promise to continue to deliver innovation and relevance and play our part in that journey.

Thank you again for your continued support.

(note you can follow AMEE on Twitter: @ameeHQ – @ameeDev – @agentGav)

Just type “10lb turkey” into AskAMEE, or use AMEEdiscover for more details.

Fancy a weekend of hacking on climate change, sustainability, energy & carbon emissions? Here at AMEE, we’re very excited to announce that we’re hosting our first hack day, looking at exactly that sort of thing! 

January 28-29 2012, at University College London. Register now to book your space!

It should be more than just the usual hack event; we’ll be getting some really interesting people along to present some of the challenges that are out there at the moment, so you can get your teeth into a real problem and show off to the experts!

We’ll be announcing the challenges (and prizes!) during December, so stay tuned for more information via this blog, @ameedev or @greenhackathon.

In a previous post I discussed how AMEE was offering a Standard for Standards. In this post and the next one, I will elaborate on that theme and fill out some of the details.

How do standards publish information?

Every standard has its own way of presenting its information. For data sets there are almost always spreadsheets of data. Sometimes these simply contain cells of numbers, e.g. the kg CO₂ emitted by driving 1 mile, and other times they contain formulas defining a calculation methodology, e.g.

emissions = emissions factor  * miles per gallon * gallons diesel consumed

Usually there are also text documents (often PDFs) that describe the data set and how it can be used and its provenance (i.e. where it has come from and how it is been pre-processed). These text documents are very variable in quality and depth and sometimes it is difficult or impossible to determine essential assumptions or provenance.

In extreme cases standards may provide no documentation at all or else provide only text documents and numerical data in an inconvenient format, i.e. the numbers are locked inside a text table and must be manually copied and pasted out.

What value does AMEE add?

AMEE removes the numerous inconsistencies introduced by the different ways standards bodies publish their information and AMEE’s science team invests time to research and document the assumptions and provenance of the information.

The AMEEsure process

Also, all information present in AMEE has been through AMEEsure, a rigorous quality assurance system. This ensures that:

• the data in AMEE is the same as in its source; no errors or artifacts are introduced
• the data has a clear provenance; we can tell where it came from
• it is consistent with similar data in AMEE
• no obvious errors are present in the source data; for example, incorrect units

How are standards published in AMEE?

AMEE’s platform can store both text and numeric information. This information is organised into categories depending on

• the standard it comes from, e.g. GHG protocol or IPCC
• the type of data it is, e.g. aluminium processing or plane transport

AMEE offers ways to search data, browse it by category and to retrieve it. These functions are common to most databases, but AMEE goes further and allows you to store and process data. In this sense AMEE is a platform in that it allows you build your own uses on top of it. For example, you can submit data on a type of building (its age, heating system etc) and AMEE can return the energy consumed and emissions associated with heating it. Or you can specify two airports and AMEE will return the flight distance between them and the emissions produced by a typical flight between them.

A unique feature of AMEE is that we represent all standards using the same format and a similar structure, so that you switch from reporting in standard, e.g. DEFRA in the UK, to another, say EPA in the USA.

The AMEEsure process has in the past successfully identified errors in the information published by standards bodies and AMEE now provides quality assurance services directly to the standards (GHG protocol and DEFRA) themselves, before they publish any new versions.

We may still publish information in AMEE if AMEEsure finds problems. In this case:

• we will correct mistakes and provide feedback to the source
• document the nature of the problem
• assign a lower “authority” rating to the data

AMEE was recognised as in the “Top Ten fastest growing Cleantech companies in Europe”. In addition, AMEE won the “Unique Leadership” award, which recognises the depth and breadth of the AMEE leadership team.

Growth, leadership and potential recognised at Cleantech Connect’s awards ceremony
 
•         The top 30 companies have collectively grown their turnover from €534m to an impressive €1.1bn
•         Annual growth rates for companies with revenues below €10m averaged 105% per annum
•         Companies with revenue above €10m doubled their turnover on average
 
Cleantech Connect 2011, organised by leading investment bank GP Bullhound and sponsored by Berenberg Bank, Barclays Corporate, Morrison & Foerster, Bird & Bird, RUSTON wheb and the Carbon Trust, took place last night at London’s Sketch. The awards honour the Top 30 Fastest Growing cleantech companies, as well as the 30 ‘ones to watch’. GP Bullhound believes some of these companies could go on to become the global players of tomorrow.
 
A great turnout on the night echoed the strong response GP Bullhound had to the awards, with entries considerably up on last year to nearly 100 from across Europe. Attendees included investors, large corporates, government, and representatives from the nominated companies. The US electrical vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors was also present, and showcased its Tesla roadster outside the venue.
 
Andre Shortell, Partner GP Bullhound, said, “This year’s awards have demonstrated that there is a growing number of cleantech companies, not only with innovative products and solutions, but healthy profit as well. GP Bullhound is delighted to demonstrate its long term commitment to the cleantech sector through our annual Cleantech Connect Awards. We hope that our role at the coal face of cleantech growth will play a part in the rise of the leaders of tomorrow.”
 
The winners of the Cleantech Connect 2011 Awards are:
One to Watch: Nexeon
Fastest growing company: Solarlite
Fastest growing larger company: PowerWind
Unique leadership: AMEE
Best global potential: Powersense
Most innovative: Nujira
Judges’ award: Nualight
 
Finalists for the ‘One to Watch’ chosen by the Judges were: Bluewater Bio, Eight 19, SCFI, Kiwi Power and Innoveox

We also know, throughout our history, that we need both a carrot and a stick to change. Where legislation fails, or without a clear benefit, we are slow to “do the right thing” . Where there is a clear rationale, we can act in our own interests to improve things.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that our challenge isn’t necessarily that we need to know what to measure, or how to measure it, but that to combine the right metrics with the right systems needs an easily accessible, scientifically grounded, and transparent network solution. We need to think about this problem differently to provide scale.

The (overused) “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” phrase faces a fundamental challenge – that our current systems (financial or otherwise) simply don’t treat the environment as a metric.

Our single biggest attempt to create the second pillar of triple-bottom-line accounting has been the carbon markets – and while they are successful on one set of metrics (driving $billions into CleanTech), they fail miserably on others: credibility and transparency to name just two.

One of the many issues that businesses face is how much to count, when and how to count it, and what it means. As we’ve tried to navigate to a credible, transparent and scalable set of systems and metrics, we have opened a Pandora’s box of questions.

We aren’t using the right systems-thinking to change things.

In parallel to these issues, we are continuing to see exponential rise in data, connected systems, ubiquitous computing, the internet of things and linked-data. As we move unstoppably to instrumenting the world, I and many others (e.g. IBM Smarter Cities, OEPI) have seen huge opportunity to make the most of these new data sets to address sustainability.

However, I still see a huge challenge in achieving Environmental Intelligence – Everywhere, namely;

1. sustainability professionals are not network-data professionals, and
2. data-network professionals are not sustainability professionals

Combining, and building new skills in the intersection of these professions had to be part of the solution.

Where we are

 Where we need to be

AMEE (obviously) aims to help bridge this divide….

Coming in Part 2: What do we need to map?

At one level, there is the obvious point that we are consuming our environment at an ever greater rate of change… and now that our population has surpassed 7 billion people (as of 1 November 2011 according to the United Nations), this will only get worse. So, as Adam Smith (a Scotsman like Stephen Leonard) implied, the “invisible hand” of capitalism must have a profound impact on our ability to find solutions that address sustainability. Alternatively, sustainability and capitalism are linked in that if we do not find solutions for creating a sustainable world with the system (capitalism) that has enabled more wealth creation and creativity than any other by far… well let’s just say it will get very ugly.

At another level, what does one do with the statement? I actually view it as a call to action, and there is one segment of the “capitalist” community I believe can have the most significant impact on clearly demonstrating the positive linkage between sustainability and capitalism: THE CFO! In some organisations the Chief Sustainability Officer reports to the CFO and certainly there are some fiduciary responsibilities on sustainability reporting in larger companies. However, this is not what I mean. Basically, I believe that

if CFOs of the world treated sustainability reporting like financial reporting, we would create a level of clarity that would drive behaviour — quickly.

In essence, environmental information should be treated with the same level of transparency, accuracy and integrity as financial information. There should be pounds/pence or dollars/cents attributed to all environmental data and all decisions. Environmental information should be measured and assessed over time… just like financial data.

In other words, CFOs of the world should bring core skills that they already have to environmental decisions: Understand, Report and Manage! It is time to take the confusion and haze out of measuring the impact that decisions have on our environment and get serious about treating environmental information with the same level of scrutiny as financial information.

This is not rocket science, CFO’s have centuries of accumulated knowledge to bring transparency, accuracy and consistency to the reporting of the impact that our decisions have on the environment.

This behavior change will help CFOs and other leaders do what they do best – find and exploit opportunities, mitigate risk, and create value.

Tim Smit (CEO, The Eden Project) was another interesting speaker (amongst many) at the conference. Firstly, Mr Smit said that be believes we have a fifteen year opportunity to make a profound impact on sustainability… or it will be too late. Whatever the time frame, time is not our friend as we think about addressing sustainability. Secondly, he encouraged us to think about what our descendants will think about us in 120 years time if we do not do something now to fix an obvious problem.

So for my bit, I will push hard with CFOs to leverage learning from financial reporting and apply them to sustainability in order to make environmental reporting as transparent, accurate and actionable — so we quickly drive changes in behaviour. And yes, at AMEE we are really trying hard to make money by ensuring we deliver accurate, transparent, and consistent environmental intelligence… an example of sustainability and capitalism going hand in hand!

This morning, AMEE deployed an updated version of AMEEconnect to the live AMEE platform.

The main changes in this release of the AMEE platform are:

• Support for a new unit, the “pound-mole”, which is required for planned data updates;
• Support for empty return values, which is also required for planned data updates;
• Improvements related to ecoinvent data;
• Internal system logging improvements; and
• Security improvements to the user/permission system.

This deploy follows on from the same version having been deployed to the stage AMEE platform last week.