Long gone are the days when clean air targets and reducing environmental impacts were viewed as the concerns of flower power, tree hugging liberals. The buzz words of 2008/2009 have most definitely been international climate change. Every company seems to be conveying their allegiance with controlled carbon emissions and Corporate Social Responsibility targets. It has become cool to care.

This week saw climate change move further up the scale with NASA partnering with Cisco to develop an online global monitoring platform called the “Planetary Skin”. This platform will capture, collect, analyse and report data on environmental conditions all around the world.

Everyone can get in on the act as the data will be made available for the general public, governments and businesses to measure, report and verify environmental data. The aim is to allow access in near-real-time to help detect and adapt to global climate change. Take a look at the NASA and Cisco develop climate change monitoring platform article to hear what the director of NASA’s Ames Research Centre had to say about the partnership.

Another unlikely collaboration has come in the form of the University of Cambridge and Infosys. They have signed an agreement to undertake research in engineering, management and business, architecture and pharmaceuticals (that should keep them busy).

Both the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge and the Chairman of the Board at Infosys Technologies have been quoted raving about the partnership and its benefits. Though nothing as yet has been said about what they hope to get out of the research…

And finally, after the controversial launch of 2009’s Outsourcing Black Book last week, this week the Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative has launched research entitled the “Central and Eastern Europe IT Outsourcing Review 2008”. This time Central and Eastern Europe will be under the spotlight with the research looking at the state of the IT outsourcing market there.

The report will cover market volume, number of professionals, number of IT companies providing outsourcing services and individual labour costs to end users. This research will also look at the expert opinions about the impact of economic recession on global outsourcing development, particularly on the development of outsourcing in CEE region. All round, a pretty informative study in an area largely lacking relevant data.

See you next week, same time, same place.