Most Green ICT focuses on hardware. That make sense, because hardware lifecycles encompass everything from environmentally responsible sourcing of its raw materials through energy efficiency of its use to sustainable disposal at its end-of-life. Special utility software such as desktop power-saving plays a central role in Green ICT, but less attention has been given to the application and system software in the gear, itself. Now, projects are looking at how to create more sustainable software.

Upcoming Green ICT conferences and workshops around the world through November 2013, including events just added for Beijing, China and for Pittsburg, USA. We have also included links to past conferences to aid your search for conference materials.

Pop Quiz: Which region has the most Green ICT conferences?

There is a rich global mix of advanced concepts and technologies emerging from research labs that may improve the future sustainability of ICT equipment and infrastructures. We'll regularly update this post with technologies to watch. (You can see all the technologies which hold the promise of greener ICT in the future by clicking the 'FutureTech' tag, above.) Our latest are two from IBM: the possibility of a liquid transistor and the the demonstration of a very high speed optical communications link.

Location is becoming increasingly important to the sustainability of ICT facilities. We've been tracking facilities in North American and Europe which try to leverage geographic features for greener operations. Our latest example has Apple benefiting from its Nevada (US) site's underground water and low risk of natural disasters.

Updates from Europe. Click on "Europe" tag above for all news about the region. Click here for regional Green ICT updates from around the globe.

Verne Global continues to publish useful information about why customers value green data centers. Automobile manufacturer BMW is the latest customer profiled by the company.

A number of sustainability rankings in the US and Europe let us take a look at how telecom providers perform compared to each other and to broader tech sectors. Vodafone is the top global performer; Sprint-Nextel is tops in the United States. Sprint was rank tops in the US for its take-back program.

This is solar-powered base station on top of a mountain in Lapland (Finland).

Remote ICT infrastructures are embracing renewable energy for everything from earthquake mitigation in Japan to CO2e reduction in India to military microgrids in Afghanistan. Asia leads world in renewable bases stations, according to MDI.

Liquid cooling was once a staple of large-scale computing, but has largely been replaced by air cooling. We identified several efforts to bring liquid cooling to the server world in our first version of this post a year and a half ago. Here is an update featuring a UK company.

A Microsoft/Accenture/WSP report compared three applications used in-cloud and on-premises. A Google report takes a similar look at Google Apps. Both claim CO2e reductions ranging above 80%. Pike Research says the move to cloud computing will decrease overall data center GHG emissions by 28%. The most recent report, a WSP/NRDC study, reinforces these themes but offers balancing perspectives.