Even while working within office hours, Google engineers have an advantage of tapping their ingenious skills further in the field of their interest as they are allowed to spend 20% of their time working on innovative projects of their choice. Isn’t that an outstanding incentive? And look what Google engineer Aaron Spangler, from the Google Seattle office conjured up. Upset by the paper abuse in his office, he set on a task to find a remedy for it. its happens such that conference rooms at Google are managed within Google Calendar, allowing Google employees to schedule rooms via the Google Calendar interface.
Room reservations are printed on pieces of paper which are then placed on the conference room doors each morning. Eager to invent an inexpensive device that could display the room reservations, and in turn save all that paper, he invented a Radish. A project to replace this manual process with a portable device that can wirelessly retrieve and display scheduled events for conference rooms. This working prototype is built entirely from scratch and assembled using generic, off-the-shelf hardware components.
It is capable of helping Google save about six reams of paper a day, not to mention the printer resources and manual labor required to deliver the paper schedules to the conference room doors. Aaron has also determined that about 20-30% of all reservations are changed during the day, hence the Radish also overcomes the static nature of a paper display with real-time data. You can read more about its working and components here.
However, it no only saves trees, by cutting down usage of paper, but also leaves lesser carbon footprints to power it self up. Inspired to make it more green, the Radish team members decided to use solar energy as a fuel.
Via: IT News Wire
