How much gear is attached to the edges of our global ICT infrastructure? Our latest estimate yields over 14 billion items, driven by mobile devices.

Vertatique includes GreenICT progress and issues from outside the United States. Here are some updates from the Asia/Pacific region. Click here for more GreenICT news and analysis from this and all regions of the world.

The Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) notes that "Taiwan is ranked as the world number 6 and Asia's number 2 country by IMD's 2010 World Competitiveness Yearbook in terms of the potential in utilizing green ICT to create competitive advantages." TAITRA has launched Green ICT, Taiwan Lets You See! to showcase its Green Tech products.

It appears that Victoria (AU) is working to establish a Green ICT leadership position with its "Green IT CLuster", its "Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET)", and its "Green ICT Initiatives" to enable government ICT facilities to be more environmentally sustainable. (There are 132 EPEAT Gold computer products registered for Australia, more than for Japan but less than for China.)

The Greenpeace Cool IT Challenge assesses the external impacts and internal efforts of fifteen global IT companies to mitigate climate change. It originally took the unique approach of identifying by name each company's chief executive in its listings, but appears to have backed off in its recently-released its third round. The good news is that scores continue to improve, but continuing conflicts with another Greenpeace ranking illustrate the complexities of assessing tech company green behavior.

The Green Electronics Council launched an international EPEAT purchasing registry which "enables the world’s leading electronics manufacturers to list ‘green’ computers and monitors in over 41 countries across the globe." The registry is revealing about the distribution of EPEAT product availability.

We recently added Greenpeace and Newsweek green rankings to our directory of companies making products used by the media industry. This side-by-side comparison reveals the divergence among rating systems.

Newsweek has released its Green Rankings 2009. It provides a rank for each the 500 largest US companies and a "Green Score" normalized to a 100-1 scale. How did companies in industries of interest stack up?

The number, size, and energy consumption of television displays has increased despite competition from computers and mobile devices. The International Energy Agency (IEA) puts the number of sets at 2 billion; that pushes Vertatique's count of the edge gear we've attached to the global ICT infrastructure up over 11 billion items.

The recent "Carbon Reduction Through Digital Delivery" analysis of WSP/Microsoft data generated a comment about vendors passing on energy cost savings from the reduction to download customers. How much are those savings and how much motivation would they provide?

The WSP study of Microsoft Office distribution concluded that "digital delivery reduced total tonnes of carbon emissions by 88%." Is this a realistic savings for digital delivery of movies and large software/game packages from most sellers and distributors?

We learned that the 11 billion consumer devices attached to our global ICT infrastructure is expanding the Green ICT focus outside of the core. Now, there is growing awareness how device use can impact the energy consumption and carbon footprint of the network and core. Jenna Wortham writes in The New York Times: