GigaOM: Katie Fehrenbacher

We never need an excuse to hang out in New York city, but learning about earth-friendly business practices is a pretty good one. So we’ve been watching some of the speeches out of the C40 Climate Summit in Manhattan, with some interesting opinions from CEOs of United Technologies Corporation, Citigroup, Con Edison and mayors including New York’s Michael Bloomberg. So what if the lights in central park were on full blast on a bright sunny day.

There’s a lot of information being put out there on this subject, but we thought we break it down to 5 reasons why this mash-up of tech, business and green is going to be on massive opportunity for innovators:

1). Bigger business revolution than the Internet: Some analysts and investors are starting to call the business of clean technology a bigger opportunity than the Internet. Well, clean tech investor and Sun cofounder Bill Joy said that in an interview. Pip Coburn Consulting Clients also sent out a note recently that had a similar suggestion for investing: “I have suggested for 4-5 months that the opportunity in green-related [business] across 10yrs is potentially far wider than the internet opportunity has been so far.” Citigroup has also pledged to spend up to $50 billion over the next decade to invest in renewable energy and other green technologies. Yeah, that was FIFTY BILLION.

2). Web as the green organizer: Green is the latest fodder for social networks, web 2.0 services, blogging (us) and videoblogging. Learning about and collaborating on eco-friendly practices is easier now than its ever been with grass roots web tools, a broadband connection and a passionate community. Today Business Objects and nonprofit Zerofootprint Toronto launched an online footprint calculator and social network. Yahoo launched its green site yesterday. And if you’ve never read Hugg, the green Digg, then seriously, go check it out.

3). IT needs earth-friendly: The costs of powering computing is reaching close to the cost of the data centers themselves. Companies like Google that need massive data centers don’t like the sound of that. We wrote about this last week, when IBM pledged a billion a year on efficient data center efforts. As Michael Bloomberg said this morning, there is a lot of “enlightened self interest and preservation, when it comes to green business, but there is nothing wrong with that.” Nothing wrong at all, as long as it still reduces carbon emissions.

Continue reading the full article at GigaOM.