This 1958 short film by acclaimed director Frank Capra anticipates in its 79 seconds many visual elements now familiar from today's media.

Our e-devices contain all sorts of exotic materials, many of which, like tungsten, tantalum, and tin, are refined from ores that originate in central Africa. Called "conflict minerals", they fund warfare in the Congo and neighboring countries.

Ann Livermore, executive vice president of Hewlett-Packard's Technology Solutions Group, said in a recent Harvard Business podcast that IT organizations spend 70% of their budgets "just running stuff" and 30% on innovation. Observing that 40% of companies in the top quartile of their industries can loose their leadership positions during a recession,

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We're seeing a number of media facilities, an important part of ICT, pursuing LEED® (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification, including Plymouth Rock Studios, Second Line Stages, and The Weather Channel.

Readers who have followed Vertatique since 2007 know that I find the photographs of and film about Edward Burtynsky make compelling arguments for getting a handle on our e-waste/cyberwaste stream. I was reminded of this by the reaction his story and work received following my presentation today at the Hollywood Post Alliance retreat.

"Cloud computing" potentially offers the ultimate in virtualization: computing resources provided as a dynamically scalable service over the Internet. The hardware and system software exists as "cloud" from which one can buy measured services for application software based on changing needs and loads. The best known service is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). For more information, read the Wikipedia overview, check out IEEE Spectrum's quick spin through the terminology, and watch the video: