Updates from Africa and the Middle East. Click here for regional Green ICT updates from around the globe. Click on 'Africa-ME' tag above for all news about the region.

Bahrain's Royal University for Women is sponsoring a Greener & Smarter ICT Conference 16-17 May.

A Pike Research report says that the trend to greener data centers will yield a significant GHG slowdown as well as drive a substantial market opportunity. Here are some of the top-line numbers from Pike.

Updates from Asia-Pacific. Click here for regional Green ICT updates from around the globe. Click on 'Asia-Pac' tag above for all news about the region. (Information about the ICT implications of Japan's earthquake and tsunami have been moved to its own post.)

2012

GCG 2012, China's Second International Conference on Cloud and Green Computing, will be held on 1-3 November in Xiangtan, Hunan Province. Paper submission closes 30 May.

Visits to the 2011 and 2012 National Associations of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show and conference yielded a pointed lesson in the importance of green innovators telling their stories early and vigorously.

Measuring the carbon or greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint of an organization is a sophisticated undertaking. Traditional audit methodologies allow participants to "reduce" their footprints through externally-hosted IT and through "cloud" (SaaS) applications. This needs to change as more organizations become ICT-intensive.

Electronic media infrastructures and gear are important components of global ICT as movies, television, music, and books all go digital. This post offers a global sampling of sustainability in e-media; see much more by clicking on the "Green media" tag, above.

The ecoATM is "...an automated self-serve kiosk system that uses patented, advanced machine vision, electronic diagnostics, and artificial intelligence to evaluate and buy-back used electronics directly from consumers for cash or store credit." What happens to the collected e-waste?

Samsung's transparent LCD panel "utilizes ambient light such as sunlight, which consequently reduces the power required since there is no backlight...The transparent LCD panels have a high transmittance rate, which enables a person to look right through the panel like glass, and it consumes 90% less electricity compared with a conventional LCD panel using back light unit." Samsug's panels won a Eco-Design and Sustainable Technologies award at CES 2012.

Two technology advances point to the promise of more more energy-efficient memory. One is described as "nanoscale", the other "atomic scale". The latter comes with a video.

Asian supercomputing has clearly arrived on the world stage, taking leadership in both power and energy efficiency.

The latest Top 500 Supercomputer Sites (Nov 2011) gives the top spot to Japan’s K Computer. It displaces China's Tianhe-1A (below), which now occupies the #2 position. The Top 500 site notes that, "The K Computer is also one of the most energy efficient systems on the list."