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[bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

No comment....( I am not thinking, at all, of governmental and corporate 
application)..........................bobford

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Mobile phones to track carbon footprint:
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Keeping track of your carbon footprint could become as simple as slipping a 
mobile phone in your pocket: a London-based start-up company has developed 
software for mobile phones that uses global positioning satellites to work 
out automatically whether you are walking, driving or flying and then 
calculate your impact on the environment.

Carbon Diem's inventors claim that, by using GPS to measure the speed and 
pattern of movement, their algorithm can identify the mode of transport being 
used. It can therefore calculate the amount of carbon dioxide that a journey 
has emitted into the atmosphere – without any need for input from the 
traveller.

The system's inventor, Andreas Zachariah, a graduate student of the Royal 
College of Art in London and chief executive of the Carbon Hero company, said 
that Carbon Diem is the world's first automated carbon calculator. 

Because it keeps a constantly updated diary of a person's carbon emissions, 
Zachariah said that a user can easily track their environmental impact and, 
if they choose, modify their behaviour to lower-carbon alternatives. 

"We're facilitating people to make little changes and allow those changes to 
be noted and registered and possibly shared," he said. "If lots of people 
realise we're in this marathon [in tackling climate change] and we're not 
running alone, then we actually think people will be motivated to stick to 
changes."

He has tested the software in Nokia and Blackberry phones, using computer 
algorithms to predict the kind of transport a person is taking. He claims 
that in tests over the past year, the software was almost 100% accurate in 
working out when people were on airplanes or trains; it was between 65-75% 
accurate at guessing when people travelled on buses.

Zachariah said he had the idea for Carbon Diem when he tried to work out his 
own carbon footprint using the many online calculators available. These 
usually involve manually entering the details of type of transport and the 
length of a journey. 

"The whole process is so painful," Zachariah said. "That's when I realised it 
had to be effortless."

Zachariah believes companies could also benefit from the software, as firms 
committing to reducing their environmental impact may need to collect travel 
data on their employees. He accepts there could be concerns over privacy but 
says the software can be used to record only the carbon impact, not the 
actual routes.

Friends of the Earth's climate campaigner, Robin Webster, said: "Individuals 
have an important role to play in tackling climate change - and technologies 
like the Carbon Diem could help people cut their carbon footprint."

The European Space Agency (Esa) gave the Carbon Diem software a regional 
award last year in its European satellite navigation competition. It will 
launch commercially in spring next year.