The world’s first digital vacuum cleaner, the “World Wide Vac,” was recently unveiled by its developer, Electrolux, via a press release sent to CleanTechnica.
This new “vacuum cleaner” offers a means of getting rid of the “digital dust” on your online home, as the company puts it — thereby reducing server running costs, thusly reducing energy costs and the associated carbon emissions.
http://youtu.be/JJjr44RoBTc
What the new World Wide Vac actually is, is a widget that can be connected to your gmail account and used to clean-up your inbox rapidly and selectively. The product was actually developed internally at Electrolux in connection with the development of a new (real-world) analogue vacuum cleaner.
Guess that someone thought that it might be nice to have a similar tool for the online world.
The press release provides more:
…an average e-mail in your inbox equals 4 grams of CO2 during its lifetime, and generally people tend to keep thousands. The size of an average inbox is 8000 emails. (Reducing these thereby reduces these energy/emissions costs.)
Each level of digital cleaning is built on different algorithms, allowing the user to set the cleanup ambition. The S level targets unread social and promotional e-mails. The M level targets social, promotional, unread e-mails older than three years except from those sent from your own account or personal contacts; spam, trash can e-mails and all e-mails in the inbox filtered through a set-up of negative words (eg “offer”, “discount”) saving the ones containing positively relevant words (eg “receipt”, “password”). The L level targets the same e-mails as the M level, plus all e-mails older than three years.
That sounds useful enough that I wouldn’t be surprised to see the “vacuum” carve out a niche in the market.
Something to note — according to the company, while the World Wide Vac widget accesses your account during the cleanup process, its saves no data. So you’re personal data should be safe (according to the company anyways), if that’s a concern for you.
Those interested can find out more at the company’s website.
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