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Technology for Good – episode thirty seven with Mike Maney

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Welcome to episode thirty seven of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s show our guest is independent spin doctor Mike Maney. Mike is a regular attendee, and supporter of our annual Monktoberfest conference, and an all-round good guy!

Some of the more fascinating stories we looked at on the show, included a look into the latest developments in mobile payments, Microsoft making Office free on all mobile platforms, and Facebook launched it’s own Tor site.

Here is the full list of stories that we covered in this week’s show:

Climate

Energy

Hardware

ePayments

Apps

Security

Wearables

3d Printing

Transport

Sustainability

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Technology for Good – episode thirty six with Esteban Kolsky

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Welcome to episode thirty six of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s show our guest is independent analyst Enterprise Irregulars, but this was the first time Esteban and I had had a face-to-face conversation (or screen-to-screen, more accurately!).

The change of clocks in Europe the weekend before the show almost derailed us, and there was a mix-up (my fault) whereby Esteban didn’t get to join the show until twenty minutes in, but still, it was a great show and we had some awesome discussions.

Some of the more fascinating stories we looked at on the show, included some major moves on the energy storage front, big announcements from Google and Microsoft on the health/fitness front, and the new partnership between Twitter and IBM.

Here is the full list of stories that we covered in this week’s show:

 

Climate

Energy

Health

Transparency

Social

Apps

Hardware

Wearables

Comms

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Technology for Good – episode thirty four with Salesforce’s John Tascheck

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Welcome to episode thirty four of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s episode our guest was SalesForce SVP of Strategy, John Taschek. John and I are both longtime members of the Enterprise Irregulars, but this was the first time John and I had had a conversation outside of email!

Some of the more fascinating stories we looked at on the show, included a very successful Kickstarter campaign for a small router which can completely anonymise your internet activity, Lockheed Martin announcing that they’ve made a breakthrough on nuclear fusion technology, and Satya Nadella’s response to his gaffe last week about women seeking a raise.

Here is the full list of stories that we covered in this week’s show:

 

Climate

Energy

Hardware

Internet of Things

Wearables

Mobility

Comms

Privacy

Open Source

Sustainability

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Sustainability reporting in tech companies – the hardware vs software divide

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Nature's fragility

Photo credit Koshyk

I wrote (and subsequently updated) a post a few weeks ago reviewing the Sustainability Reports of various companies in the technology space.

I updated the review again this afternoon (see the updated review below) with the 2009 reports from IBM, Adobe and SAS.

Something which struck me previously, and which hasn’t changed with the new rankings, is the yawning chasm in attitudes to sustainability reporting between hardware versus software companies.

Obviously this divide has a lot to do with risk – hardware companies who have significant manufacturing facilities, with massively complex supply chains, often containing toxic substances have far more exposure to risk than software companies.

This is reflected in the table below where eight of the top ten listings are hardware companies.

On the other hand, the bottom of the table is all software companies (with the exception of Apple – because they refuse to produce a sustainability report!).

The real odd one out though is the leader, SAP. Their sustainability reporting is out on its own. It is way ahead of any other organisation I have come across and this despite the fact that they are a software company!

One factor may be that they have a significantly European representation in senior management – they have a very different thought process when it comes to sustainability. SAP say they want to be an exemplar and an enabler – and, so far, they seem to be delivering on that.

None of the other software companies seem to take sustainability reporting anywhere nearly as seriously as the hardware companies.

Why do you think that is?

[table id=11 /]

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