Penny per lumen. It's a good slogan and one Mark Swoboda, CEO of LED maker Bridgelux, says his company will live up to early next year. In early 2009, the company plans to release a series of white light LEDs that will allow manufacturers to make LED light fixtures that cost 50 percent less than current LED fixtures, he said in an interview. The discount might even be larger. One of Bridgelux's white light LEDs that exhibits a "cool" light will cost around 1 cent per lumen. An 85-lumen LED, therefore, would cost about 85 cents in volume and a number would be packaged together to make a light. Similar white LEDs with neutral and warm light coming out at the same time will cost...

Think of Dynamic Power Capping from Hewlett-Packard as a circuit breaker for the circuit breaker. The company has devised a technology (embodied in software and hardware) that effectively prevents servers and other equipment from exceeding a pre-set electrical threshold and thus tripping the breakers. If a datacenter (or some portion of a large one) is only supposed to get 1,000 kilowatts of power, that's all it will get. Setting a finite limit on power consumption in turn allows datacenter managers to reduce their margin of error, explained Peter Gross, CEO of EYP Mission Critical Facilities, a company that designs datacenters. (Hewlett-Packard bought it and made EYP a...