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Techies are seeking professional certifications in emerging areas like healthcare and green IT, and especially old standbys like IT security, according to a new survey.

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Having worked with an organization that got good press for saving money through an automated PC shutdown program, I've fielded a lot of questions from IT managers looking to make sustainability and green moves. I can consolidate my advice on the topic into two short points: First, remember that green is the color of money. Second, overseed.

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The answer to the Web's most annoying question has been revealed. GM's viral "what is 230?" marketing campaign littered Twitter and Flickr, YouTube, blogs, Facebook, and cable for days, and now we finally know what it means.

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We tag and track our laptop computers, our cars, and even our dogs. Now researchers at MIT are working on a project to track paper coffee cups, and last night's takeout food containers -- our trash.

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Before we pack up our laptops, Blackberrys, and various chargers for the holiday weekend, let's take a moment to reflect on what has come to pass over the last six months.

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Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, finally got a little revenge. He wasn't in the least spiteful. Rather, he was only guilty of repeating something his former boss, Larry Ellison, said about software-as-a-service and cloud computing. An audience of cloud cognoscenti at Structure 09 loved the performance.

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As one of the head counselors of Energy Camp (Tom Raftery of Greenmonk fame is the other; blog, Twitter), I pay pretty close attention to anything colored green; green organizations, green initiatives, green events, green vendor programs, green news, etc. It was only after the last Energy Camp at Interop in Las Vegas that it dawned on me why the overall green movement gets only pockets of traction, and what we should do about it. Hopefully, someone in Obama's administration is listening.

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CIOs are more challenged than ever to cut costs, do more with less, and "go green" (whatever that means, exactly). But identifying the IT hardware, software, and services that fit the bill is a challenge in and of itself.

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Internet microlender Kiva is extending its services to U.S.-based entrepreneurs for the first time.

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Energy is a big deal in the Obama administration. Billions of dollars in the economic stimulus package are earmarked for upgrading the power grid, paying for alternative energy credits, and developing clean energy sources. On Tuesday, a 'cash-for-clunkers' bill intended to get gas guzzlers off the road rolled through the House. But at the Department of Energy, it's been business as usual.

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Now hear this: MIT engineers have built a radio chip modeled after one of nature's most intricate designs: the human inner ear.

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On Monday, the U.S. took a 60% ownership in General Motors and President Obama described the government as a "reluctant" owner of the new company. That's exactly how I felt about the family station wagon when I was in high school.

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If you could pay less for a something simply by timing your purchase, you'd want to know about it, wouldn't you?

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What's as big as 100 Internets -- maybe 1,000 Internets -- and so hungry for routers, switches, and secure IP-based backhaul communications that it could gobble up $100 billion worth of networking technology?

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The offices of an AT&T call center in San Jose were evacuated Tuesday when refrigerator odors mixed with cleaning fluid smells created a hostile-to-the-nostrils work environment.

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An idea based on new uses for farm byproducts pushed Husk Insulation into the winner's circle Tuesday, where it was awarded MIT's $200,000 Clean Energy Prize.

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Springtime means two things in Cambridge, MA. Outdoors, public works crews are getting busy filling the city's overpopulation of potholes. Indoors, MIT judges are making their final decisions and writing jumbo-size checks to the winners of MIT's $100K Competition and its cousin, the MIT Clean Energy Prize.

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Cloud computing has a supporter in Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, who told me in an April 23 interview that he saw potential for big savings with the cloud approach. In fact, the fed's information portal, USA.gov, is being moved to a cloud-computing infrastructure within weeks.

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I dialed in recently to an online technology discussion sponsored by Wikibon.org, a community of technology professionals. Speaking was Rich Avila, director of server and network operations at California State, who said saving power wasn't a fuzzy, feel good goal for him. It was a necessity.

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If it's true that spam is killing the planet, then Twitter is one of its henchmen. And so are Flash, Flex, Ajax, AIR, Silverlight -- they're all soldiers in a zombie army of Watt-chompers.

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Paper recycling gets a lot of ink, if you'll pardon the expression. But while many offices and public places have bins for separating waste paper from trash, getting gunked up, empty ink jet cartridges back to the manufacturer is another story.

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IBM's thirst for higher margins has pushed it into a new line of business: clean water. Last week Big Blue announced a pair of clean water initiatives: new filtration technology and a line of water management services.

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IBM may have reached the height of opportunism with its Public Sector Energy and Environment Diagnostic consulting service and Strategic Water Information Management (SWIM) solutions platform -- two related efforts to cash in on our stressed environment. Good for IBM.

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Never mind what's in your wallet. What's in your Dumpster? If you're among the 15% of IT managers interviewed by Osterman Research, electronic waste is sitting there.

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Wal-Mart isn't waiting for the Obama administration to figure out how to digitize medical records. The World's Biggest Retailer hopes to do for electronic health records what it has done for dog food, plastic lawn chairs, and some generic drugs: make them widely accessible for a reasonable price.

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Fifty-eight percent of utilities surveyed by Oracle recently said that while they offer net-metering programs only 11% of their customers take them up on their offer. I'm hoping that 100% of those utilities know why: The up-front costs are way too high.

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When I read the Carbon Disclosure Project's (CDP) just-released Supply Chain Report 2009, I can't help thinking about Vinny Gambini's (Joe Pesci) question to the lard-scooping short-order cook in My Cousin Vinny: "Excuse me, you guys down here hear about the ongoing cholesterol problem in the country?"

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GM released its annual report Thursday, and while no one was expecting sunshine and unicorns to float off its pages, this is a dark document. Here's a taste: "There is no assurance that the global automobile market will recover."

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The Carbon Disclosure Project, which secured a remarkable 634 responses to the first supply chain questionnaire of its kind, is looking for fuller disclosure: Later this year it will issue a "lighter questionnaire" in hopes of convincing hundreds or thousands more suppliers to participate.

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Where do you draw the green line when it comes to buying a notebook? I may have crossed it with my purchase yesterday of an Acer Aspire One netbook -- ironically, to cover an environmental summit in Istanbul in two weeks. Between the jet fuel and Acer's poor environmental record, I may be doing more harm than good.

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Ask Toyota Prius owners what their average miles per gallon is and the answer you're likely to get is "50." Rounding is commonplace. The math can be fuzzy. But the 2010 model Prius makes the figure official.

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The Carbon Disclosure Project's first global supply chain report, due on March 5, should be an eye-opener –- not only for what it contains but for what it lacks. Acer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM are among the IT companies that joined the CDP Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration and will be represented in the report.

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On Tuesday, a failed NASA launch sent a satellite deep into the frigid sea near Antarctica. On Wednesday, the FBI searched the offices of a University of Florida professor accused of swindling the space agency out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. [Update: on Friday, the White House released its budget proposal, which calls for the space shuttle to be retired.] Luckily for NASA, the week's nearly over.

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PricewaterhouseCoopers says the winds of change that have blown a few clean-tech IPOs off course aren't strong enough to stop the renewable energy market from moving ahead. That includes wind power. Certainly, Intel, Cisco, Google, and other high-tech companies agree and continue to invest in wind and other renewables. There is, however, still that pesky question of a new, or revitalized, electrical grid.

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Compared with other job sectors, the IT labor force has been holding up relatively well during the recession. And now there's an extra boost -- the government's economic stimulus programs should fuel demand for new tech talent in several key areas.

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Former Gov. George Pataki delivered perhaps the most powerful assessment of the move to rebuild the national electricity grid yesterday when he called for a greater federal role in the permitting process. This was the same Pataki who had championed deregulation in New York state -- and later defended deregulation after the huge 2003 blackout of the Northeast.

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Did you know that power issues come in separate flavors, and that you need different kinds of UPS systems to deal with different kinds of power problems?

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Kansas has had a few shining ecomoments, most recently on Jan. 24 when Sedgwick County collected more than 500 tons of e-waste. But any hopes environmentalists have of really cleaning up the state may be no more than dust in the wind.

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It's difficult to see who is winning California's environmental war: the polluters or the polluted. Today, California lawmaker's passed a bi-partisan budget roundly criticized by environmental groups for loosening air pollution regulations. Elsewhere in Sacramento, the state Environmental Protection Agency was holding a symposium on the "greening of electronics."

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I'm hoping that somewhere tucked in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act are provisions for the General Printing Office to upgrade the servers it used to distribute the stimulus bill. I finally got through at 3 a.m., after six hours of trying. I could have accepted and withdrawn my nomination for a Cabinet position in less time.

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Sprint has made quite a call: It thinks that by 2017 it can get consumers to recycle 90% of the cell phones they discard annually. Right now, the industry rate is about 10%.

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The Syracuse Orange are looking to go green with Big Blue. Syracuse University's Office of Campus Planning, Design, and Construction says IBM "will sponsor the development and construction of a first-of-a-kind Green Data Center."

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A few hours ago the U.S. Senate passed its version of the economic stimulus plan. The plan will unquestionably -- depending on your economics ken and party affiliation –- either create millions of jobs or bury the country further in debt and hopelessness.

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As unemployment ranks swell -- 598,000 jobs were cut in January -- it's hard not to look hungrily at green collar jobs. They are the hope of millions, but the reality of few. And unless federal, regional and state policies on energy distribution and taxation change, that may not change.

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T. Boone Pickens is not an environmentalist. He may be a patriot. He is definitely a pragmatist. That may not turn out to be a bad thing for the environment. Unless Pickens finds environmental protection competes with the national security or his own business interests.

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Oil and water don't mix. That is, unless you're T. Boone Pickens and you're rounding out your investment portfolio.

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Cisco's new EnergyWise technology, which measures and manages energy consumption on just about everything on the network, is, indeed, wise. But it's going to get a whole lot wiser and useful early next year when it will be extended to the management of HVAC and other building systems.

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The debut of the Sun Modular Datacenter (nee Project Blackbox), a complete data center housed within a shipping container, is an important reminder that data centers can grow greener as they expand.

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Another January day in New England. Another several inches of snow. Faced with choosing between fume-spewing snowblowers and back-breaking green options (shoveling or letting the ice accumulate) I have just one question: Where are the snow-clearing robots?

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While many data centers and hosting providers tout their environmental concern by the dubious practice of trading carbon credits and purchasing green energy certificates, AISO.net, a solar-powered data center in Romoland, Calif., is one of only a small number of facilities powered by renewable energy that's generated on-site.

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