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Zurich-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider CloudSigma announced yesterday that it has completed implementation of its carbon offsetting program, claiming its "carbon neutral cloud services are the first of their kind in the industry."

The company boasts efficient, low impact cloud computing. The evaluation into the company's carbon neutral status was conducted by myclimate, a Swiss non-profit organization.

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to attend the Augmented Reality Event in Santa Clara, California, and it was there that I discovered some amazing uses being developed using AR technology. I've already highlighted how it is being used to help doctors save lives, and more recently how it could be used to level the battlefield for soldiers in the middle east. Another example has an even loftier goal: helping to fight the climate and energy crises and save the planet.

Another Earth Hour has passed by this weekend. Electrical systems across the globe were shut down to observe, for an hour, that energy is precious. In this moment, we also acknowledge that as humanity, we have the power to do better for ourselves. One great thing about Earth Hour is the photos. If you haven't yet, check out the brilliant photo essay at Boston.com on Earth Hour 2010.

If you haven't taken initiative to shut down your computer yet, read on to get a refresher on how better computing resource utilization creates a better world.

What if we took the leading sensor-based products currently being developed or already on the market, put them all under one roof, and added a typical American family? Would they just be the techiest family on the block, or would it have a significant impact on their lives?

Here are six ways this Internet of Things family can see their lives change. They exercise more, save energy and water, budget better, know where their kids are at any moment, and they'll always have the right lighting for activities in the house.

Google PowerMeter is part of a series of efforts by various large and small companies, including Green Goose and Microsoft, to launch better and smarter home energy monitoring services. Today, Google took the next step in its efforts to make PowerMeter a ubiquitous service by launching an API for PowerMeter that allows device manufacturers to create PowerMeter-compatible devices. This, according to Google, will allow hardware manufacturers to integrate "in-home/plug level energy monitoring devices with Google PowerMeter." Thanks to this, you may soon be able to check how much power your lamp or TV is currently using by simply checking the PowerMeter gadget on iGoogle.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) just gave Google the clearance to buy and sell energy in bulk. While it's interesting to speculate if Google wants to sell energy to consumers, the company has already declared that it has no plans to sell energy to consumers or to speculate in energy markets. Instead, Google says that it wanted this authorization from FERC in order to manage its own energy supplies better.

A few days ago, a group of enterprising bloggers discovered that Microsoft had just trademarked the name 'Hohm.' Today, we can finally reveal what Hohm is really about. At its core, Hohm is Microsoft's answer to Google's PowerMeter and similar services. Hohm is dedicated to giving consumer's information about potential energy savings, while at the same time connecting those consumers whose energy providers already use smart meter technology with real-time information about their own energy consumption at home.

It's also noteworthy that Hohm was developed on top of Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform.

Peter Troast, founder of Energy Circle, a company that sells energy-saving products, has created a new energy-monitoring system that sends his home's energy usage stats to Twitter. Inspired by the open source power monitoring kit from Tweet-a-Watt, Troast's system also sends his home's energy data to the web, but it's not in the form of once-a-day tweets like Tweet-a-Watt provides. Instead, his system uses a monitoring device called TED (The Energy Dectective) to create charts which are annotated by family members then tweeted for everyone to see. If you want to do the same for your home, we've got the info.

Tim O'Reilly spoke tonight at ETech in San Jose, on a theme he has been talking about for the past 6 months or so: working on things that matter in the web world. In this talk though he went into a lot of actual examples, as well as strategies people can deploy to work on meaningful things.

O'Reilly began by saying that we're in a bubble - but not an investment one, a reality bubble. The financial crisis was top of his list, but he also referred to health, climate and so on. However, he said that working on stuff that matters doesn't necessarily mean working on non-profits or social ventures. He said that the world's great challenges are also the world's greatest opportunities.