FiReStarters

Hosted by David Willis, Senior Foreign Correspondent, BBC: CSRHUB: Cynthia Figge, Co-Founder and COO; Easy Energy Systems: Mark Gaalswyk, Founder and Chairman; Terremark: Chris Drumgoole, SVP; Vantage Data Centers: Greg Ness, VP Marketing

Greg Ness, Vantage Data Centers — Finance data centers. Half energy of cooling data centers is wasted en route to stacks. Have invested $300 million in Leed Platinum data centers, which significantly reduces IT costs. Forcing other data centers to be more competitive. Data centers represent about 1/2 IT expense and 2% of energy use in the US.

Chris Drumgoole, Terremark — Cloud computing. Provides infrastructure as a service. Customers have ability to turn up or turn down infrastructure exactly on demand. Recently purchased by Verizon. 16 centers around the world. Run several government centers. No magic bullet to solve cyber security.  Bring efficiency and access. Providing massively more efficient computing power than traditionally.

Mark Gaalswyk, Easy Energy Systems — Modular energy production system, about the size of a small-scale shipping. Transmits waste into energy. Units for paper, milk, corn, etc that can be coupled and decoupled at will. Markets — developed and developing countries. We can eliminate our dependence on Middle Eastern oil by converting waste into energy. Bringing electricity to villages in developing countries, which allows kids to study, cuts violence against women.

Cynthia Figge, CSRHUB — Business has the power and innovation to solve social problems, but there’s no standard of measuring how companies are doing environmentally or socially. CSRHUB provides a rating of social, environmental and governance performance that is as simple and powerful as a stock price. Spent several years bringing in 3 million data elements on 5000 publicly-traded companies in 65 countries. Younger generations expect a rating when making a purchasing decision. Launching a widget to be hosted on the Huffington Post.