Editor's Blog: The green revolution and Everything 2.0

I read this week that the former boss of wi-fi provider The Cloud has gone to a venture that has the lofty goal of tackling global warming. I think we'll increasingly hear the sound of execs exiting IT for what we'll soon call the 'green economy'.

(As a complete aside here, I noticed a BBC TV report the other day that saw a journalist visit Larry Hagman's farm/ranch, which is now completely powered by solar panels and other green tech. While the report made me cringe - 'From oil baron to green farmer', to paraphrase, leaving aside the fact that Hagman of course never was an oil baron, it's called acting - there was the serious point he made that going green will take off as people and companies realise they can make money from it.)

Biotech and life sciences in general will continue to grow in importance but now it feels as if green tech... is where we'll see some of the best brains go.

So, besides The Cloud's George Polk, it wasn't many weeks ago that we heard of SAP's Shai Agassi leaving that software giant to join the 'hot alternative-energy sector', to use the phrase in the silicon.com story of 29 March (and now we even hear Apple making green noises in public).

I remember one of our annual Agenda Setters panels, which we hold every autumn, back in 2001 or 2002. One of the VCs predicted we were on the verge of a biotech boom that would dwarf anything we'd seen so far in information technology - referring to the dot-com or telecoms bubble of the late 1990s.

I think now that he got it wrong. Biotech and life sciences in general will continue to grow in importance but now it feels as if green tech - from solar panels to tiny fuel cells and bio-fuels to wind turbines and more - is where we'll see some of the best brains go.

My colleague Will Sturgeon last week made the point at the annual InfoSec show that we'll soon hear the term 'security 2.0'. (Someone will probably point out how we already have, somewhere.) I've already come across nasties such as PR 2.0 and offshoring 2.0 and of course there's the now ubiquitous web 2.0, which you can read a media sector CIO comment on here, understandably name-checking guru Tim O'Reilly who coined that phrase.

In fact, many credit the largely coherent web 2.0 movement with spawning all the others. But while the use of 2.0 - aping the naming convention for the first major upgrade to packaged software - works well in some of these cases (in others, let's face it, it just doesn't), have we all forgotten the sometimes excellent publication that ran to hundreds of pages in the earlier mentioned late 90s tech boom called Business 2.0?

It's as if history has been rewritten and that never existed. Just as business came before the web, so Business 2.0 came before web 2.0.