The Next Big Thing:

You're thinking Apple, right? They just came out with a new iPhone (minus the Google Maps function that everybody wants, using their own version instead, which doesn't seem to work right), but that's not it.

The next big thing has got to be a way to harvest all that wasted energy that data centers use, and reduce the enormous amount of pollution their generators emit. According to a New York Times story today, world-wide, data centers use the equivalent of 30 nuclear powered energy plants. That's a staggering amount of energy use so that you can watch last week's episode of your favorite TV show on your handheld device.

In addition, as much as 90 percent of the energy use is wasted in making sure that the servers are running at maximum capacity whether they are needed or not. I'm guessing that energy use in cooling is also extremely high.

The next big thing, at least in computing, has got to be a way to harness or diminish all of this energy use and the accompanying pollution. You'd think with all the engineers the industry has working in the field that the answers would be just around the corner. I suppose the incentive just hasn't been there.

Come on Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook. You guys have tons of money. Start incentivizing this thing.