Userful, a green technology company based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada recently made headlines (See Shared Computing For A Greener World) with the announcement that its DiscoverStation solution has prevented over 13,000 tons of CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere.

 

I had a chance to ask Userful President Tim Griffin, several questions about Userful; who they are, where they’re headed, and so on… The results appear below.

 

TG: Userful Corp. is the world leader in public computing technology. We are a privately held company that was started in 1999 and has since burst onto the scene with a number of innovative products including our green technology — software that turns one computer into ten by simply attaching multiple monitors, mice and keyboards. Userful was recently named Alberta’s 10th fastest growing company under $20 million in revenue.

 

TG: DiscoverStation is the green public computing solution that drastically reduces both CO2 emissions and highly toxic computer waste by turning one computer into ten. It takes the headache out of public computing by providing a safe, secure and virus free setting that’s easy to use and administer. Its features include a powerful Web-based management portal, over 40 applications supporting over 50 languages and the ability to charge per use

 

TG: Our target customers are anyone who wants to save money and the planet by multiplying their desktop as well as anyone who needs a powerful and hassle free public computing system.

 

TG: DiscoverStation is ideal for the call center market. The ability to turn one computer into ten drastically reduces hardware and administration costs, and the interface is completely locked down so that call center employees stay on task. To learn more about DiscoverStation for call centers visit here: http://userful.com/products/call-center

 

TG: DiscoverStation is built around the Fedora Linux distribution, which provides a lot of flexibility and compatibility with a ton of open source software such as Open Office (DiscoverStation can also run Microsoft (News - Alert) Office). Through the development of DiscoverStation, Userful has also contributed much to the open source community, for instance Pre-Book — our PC reservation software — is open source.

 

TG: We pride ourselves in being one of the greenest tech companies in the world. In fact the ability to multiply the number of users working from a single PC was invented by us originally for internal use so that we could cut costs and our own environmental footprint. It worked so well that we made it into a product. We also use only ROHS compliant hardware and take every measure we can to reduce our environmental footprint, right down to little things like keeping the lights off whenever possible and using a wiki for documentation instead of paper.

 

TG: One new initiative that just came off the drawing board is our new kiosk solution. DiscoverStation Internet Kiosks provide all the benefits of DiscoverStation and add to it a number of features including: charge per use options, the ability to brand the entire user interface using a simple Web-based control panel, and digital signage capabilities. We also have a very exciting initiative on the drawing board which will allow us to have virtually unlimited workstations running off a single PC, stay tuned for this one, it’s going to be big!