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Chan­nel Register is car­ry­ing a story about some new For­res­ter research into IT buy­ers’ atti­tudes to greener products.

In a sur­vey of 124 IT buy­ers in North Amer­ica and Europe, they found good news in that 85% said green factors are import­ant. How­ever only 25% had writ­ten green cri­teria into pur­chases and only 15% were aware of vendors’ green initiatives.

For­res­ter senior vice pres­id­ent Chris­topher Mines said:

We heard two reas­ons why green mat­ters: effi­ciency and cor­por­ate respons­ib­il­ity. Most IT decision-makers told us that a green pur­chase would only hap­pen in the con­text of cost reduc­tion. These are hard-headed, ROI-driven busi­ness decisions.

Now of course we have to be care­ful because this a pretty tiny sample size spread across mar­kets which have quite dif­fer­ing atti­tudes to any­thing green. But if we take it as rep­res­ent­at­ive should we still agree that actu­ally it’s all down to cost?

If this was true then we could expect that all IT pur­chases (green or not) would go to the cheapest vendor. This of course is not the case. There are a range of factors that come into play. And, as the sur­vey shows, it is still the case that most vendors have not made cus­tom­ers suf­fi­ciently aware of the green options or the wider benefits.

There are often effi­ciency bene­fits to green products. Tra­di­tional PCs for example use shed-loads of power – and power isn’t cheap. They also gen­er­ate loads of heat which then requires air con­di­tion­ing to cor­rect (more power). Many are massively over-spec’d for their users (big­ger pro­cessors, more heat, more power, more cost).

A single PC left on all day is respons­ible for about 1,500 lbs of CO2. Greener altern­at­ives use less power and gen­er­ate less heat (sav­ing around £50/$100 per com­puter per year). They cre­ate less car­bon to start with and off­set what little there is. And they are com­par­able on price. That’s before we get to the cor­por­ate respons­ib­il­ity part of the equation.

Pretty com­pel­ling. Now if only the mes­sage could be com­mu­nic­ated effect­ively (call us if you need some help).

Basic­ally this all means that the hard-headed, ROI-driven busi­ness decision often is a green one (and that there is a huge oppor­tun­ity in the market).

Happy new year, I hope Santa brought you everything you wished for (obvi­ously if you opted for peace on Earth you may have been some­what disappointed).

It’s cus­tom­ary at this time of year to make pre­dic­tions for the 12 months ahead. Of course, this is largely an exer­cise in ensur­ing you look pretty stu­pid at the end of the year. (It’s almost as if, simply by pre­dict­ing the future, you can guar­an­tee that it won’t come to pass.) So with that in mind, and not want­ing to pass up the oppor­tun­ity of look­ing stu­pid, here are mine:

• I’ll start on safe ground. Dis­en­chant­ment with the Win­dows OS (its cost, secur­ity prob­lems, new licens­ing issues etc) will con­tinue a pace. Vista won’t live up to the Long­horn vis­ion seen here (I love the “Com­ing Octo­ber 2003″ line). Of course, loads of people will still buy it and it will a boon for PC and memory upgrade vendors.
• As a res­ult, PCs and laptops pre­loaded just with Linux (and a shed-load of open source apps) will begin to take off, prob­ably with a new brand / sub-brand begin­ning to make a name for them­selves by spe­cial­ising in this area.
• HD DVD will win the format war. Yes it’s early days but I think Blu-ray will suf­fer from Sony’s proprietary/lock in tend­en­cies des­pite being tech­nic­ally super­ior (funny how every art­icle about this brings up the spectre of Betamax).
• The Google brand image will wobble as it struggles to live up to the “don’t be evil” prom­ise all while try­ing to utterly dom­in­ate the mar­ket. (As an aside, while people point to this man­tra as some­thing highly aspir­a­tional, I can’t help think­ing that not being evil is the very least a brand can prom­ise.) The Google OS and Google Office how­ever will take off big time (see the Win­dows pre­dic­tion above).
• Social search (eg Wink and StumbleUpon) will become ever more appeal­ing to many people who already trust their net­works more than any old school search engine.
• Clean tech will be huge with the largest area being energy pro­duc­tion. The big money will go into large national-scale pro­jects but micro gen­er­a­tion will become a grow­ing polit­ical issue in a “let’s stick it to those black­mail­ing us over oil” kind of way.
• Last but not least, I will get my run­ning time down to a reg­u­lar 9min mile pace (yeah right).

Check back in a year for a good laugh at my expense. In the mean­time, have a won­der­ful 2007.

I pre-ordered World­chan­ging’s User’s Guide for the 21^st Cen­tury some time back and promptly for­got about it (as you do). Then, last week, the Amazon fairy came and every spare minute since has seen my nose bur­ied in it.

It’s a book that emphas­ises the dire situ­ation the world finds itself in but is then both inspir­a­tional and prac­tical in chart­ing a path for­ward. From the introduction:

If we face an unpre­ced­en­ted plan­et­ary crisis, we also find ourselves in a moment of innov­a­tion unlike any that has come before… Humanity’s fate rests on the out­come of the race between prob­lem solv­ers and the prob­lems them­selves. The world is get­ting bet­ter – we just have to make sure it gets bet­ter faster than it gets worse.

Tech­no­logy, of course, is not the only solu­tion (des­pite the head in the sand asser­tion by some that it is). But it is a part of the solu­tion as is help­ing and cajol­ing people, organ­isa­tions and gov­ern­ments to change their beha­viours. Com­mu­nic­a­tions pro­fes­sion­als have a key role to play, as I put in an earlier post, this is the kind of task we’re well equipped to take on.

The book is 600 or so pages which, as I was read­ing through, made me think: that’s a lot of dead tree. In the back, how­ever, is a break­down of how they’ve kept the dam­age to a min­imum. Here’s one of the labels:

They have also pur­chased wind power cred­its equi­val­ent to the amount of elec­tri­city used to pro­duce the book. I won­der what would hap­pen if all prin­ted mater­ial had to carry the same declaration.

As I say, it’s a great book which should be on everyone’s book­shelf. You can buy yours here.

Inc.com has a nice fea­ture pro­fil­ing 50 (US) com­pan­ies doing inter­est­ing stuff in the green space.

A com­pany called Nanosolar seem to have cracked a way to, in effect, “print” solar cells, redu­cing the cost and offer­ing a more ver­sat­ile altern­at­ive to tra­di­tional panels.

Grist has an inter­est­ing art­icle, Trans­form­ing the auto­mobile about the future of the car and some of the options avail­able and another on how the media is chan­ging its approach to cli­mate change reporting.

Tree­hug­ger fea­tures a new solar powered phone from DoCoMo as well as a link to The Waste Book, a dir­ect­ory of recyc­ling businesses.

Sources: Inc.com, Cor­por­ate Knights, Grist, Tree­hug­ger

So, 0 to 60mph in 4 seconds, 130mph top speed and… it’s elec­tric. This is the Tesla Road­ster and I want one.

To me, it looks a bit like a Lotus Elise – which is no bad thing (the site has some nice eye candy on it). It has a 250 mile range which coun­ters one of the real lim­it­a­tions of pre­vi­ous elec­tric cars. The only prob­lem is that it’s left hand drive… oh, and comes in at about $100k… and it’s sold out any­way. But if it wasn’t for all that…

Here’s some video taken at the launch:

So if you see Santa…

Tree­hug­ger has an item on IBM’s new green research unit.

From Tree­hug­ger:

The cur­rently unnamed busi­ness unit will focus on ideas that will dir­ectly bene­fit the envir­on­ment, develop them, mar­ket them and imple­ment them.

Read the rest here.

(BTW, if any­one involved on this at IBM would like some help from a really good cre­at­ive agency I know, click here to get in touch.)

A press release from the Cleantech Ven­ture Net­work has star­ted to place some estim­ates for the VC oppor­tun­ity for clean tech over the next few years. From the release:

…the Cleantech Ven­ture Net­work® fore­casts that cleantech ven­ture cap­ital invest­ment oppor­tun­it­ies for major insti­tu­tional investors glob­ally through 2009 are estim­ated at $17 bil­lion, with $10 bil­lion in North Amer­ica, $5 bil­lion in Europe and $2 bil­lion for the rest of the world.

Although, all these kinds of fore­casts must be taken with a pinch of salt, Cleantech Ven­ture Net­work has pre­vi­ously shown that in Q3 2006 alone $933 mil­lion was inves­ted in clean tech – so the fig­ures don’t appear too far fetched. The cur­rent release goes on to claim that this invest­ment could deliver 500,000 new jobs and $85 bil­lion in related eco­nomic growth.

As the Stern report in the UK has shown, purely on a prag­matic, eco­nomic level the costs of inactiv­ity are far more ser­i­ous than those of get­ting to grips with the prob­lem. I guess ulti­mately it will be these hard dol­lar factors that will determ­ine whether the will and com­mit­ment can be mustered by industry. While this may be sad for those of a more altru­istic bent, this one is surely a case of whatever gets the result.

Source: Triple Pun­dit

The con­clu­sions of the Stern Report are fright­en­ing by anyone’s standards:

• a 2˚C rise in tem­per­at­ure could mean 4 bil­lion people suf­fer­ing water shortages
• it would mean 40% of spe­cies facing extinction
• it could lead to a fur­ther 200 mil­lion people going hungry
• if we don’t do some­thing very ser­i­ous, very soon (ie now) cli­mate change could shrink global eco­nom­ies by 20%

And this is just the beginning.

The cata­logue of dooms­day pre­dic­tions goes on and on (and is noth­ing new). In some ways this is part of the prob­lem – while it’s para­mount to con­vey the urgency of the situ­ation but at the same time many people feel over­whelmed. There’s a learned help­less­ness creep­ing in. Vox pop sur­veys routinely return com­ments to the effect of “What does it mat­ter whether I recycle, it’s just a drop in the ocean…”

There are, of course, no easy answers. An effect­ive response must be hol­istic and global. One part (although cer­tainly not the whole) is tech­no­logy. “Clean tech­no­logy” offers increas­ing options to mit­ig­ate some of the prob­lems and poten­tially elim­in­ate oth­ers. And with the pace of change, it has to be one of the most excit­ing areas in tech­no­logy at this moment.

It also provides some of the most chal­len­ging tasks for mar­keters. All too often mar­ket­ing and com­mu­nic­a­tions are char­ac­ter­ised as the ‘fluffy’ end of busi­ness that spins empty prom­ises and half truths for a fast buck. Well, here is the chance to bury that accus­a­tion once and for all.

Clean tech adop­tion is about chan­ging beha­viour (whether at con­sumer, busi­ness or gov­ern­ment level). This is what tal­en­ted mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als do best. All too often the lan­guage of cli­mate change is the lan­guage of aca­demic or polit­ical debate (of the worst kind). It quickly des­cends into hair-splitting and plaus­ible deni­ab­il­ity. What a great way to dis­en­gage people.

What’s needed is a lan­guage of hope and pos­sib­il­ity. One that coun­ters help­less­ness and offers a vis­ion for the future that brings the issue alive, stirs people into action and, yes, cre­ates prof­it­able busi­nesses for the clean tech industry.

To me, this sounds like the kind of thing many in our industry were born to do.