Supporting this view, Gregory Mone argues in the new Communications of the ACM that “leading companies have begun revising the way they design, maintain, and monitor data centers, from the physical building all the way down to the hardware…” While the industry attempts to balance inexorable economic forces with social and environmental responsibility, I’d like to view the debate from a broader perspective: perhaps we’re focusing on the wrong question.

Rather than focusing on the percentage of global energy that data centers use, suppose we focused on whether there is a net benefit in the use of IT, expressed and mediated through computing in data centers and the cloud. After all, if one knew the winning lottery numbers, one wouldn’t begrudge the dollar for the ticket purchase versus the millions in winnings. A variety of mechanisms would seem to generate net benefits: substitution, optimization, innovation, location independence, virtualization and multitenancy, and dynamic resource allocation.

For example, IT can deliver a net reduction in energy use via substitution. Examples abound. Conducting an audio or video conference, mediated by cloud data centers and cloud-resident multipoint conference bridges uses energy, but substantially less than the gasoline and jet fuel that would be required to drive and fly the meeting participants to their destination.

By one estimate, each meeting held this way can generate an average net benefit of nearly a half metric ton of greenhouse gases. Streaming a video out of a content delivery network takes energy, but less than the amount required to drive to and from the neighborhood video store, in the worst case for both pickup and return. Perhaps this is why data centers are responsible for less than 1.5 percent of global energy use, whereas transportation uses a reported 25 percent.

IT can also deliver a net reduction in energy use via optimization. UPS for example, has reportedly reduced both miles of delivery routes and tons of CO2 emissions by tens of millions using “package flow” software. In one recent study, mere feedback on energy consumption decreased energy use by several percent on average, but up to 25 percent among the “cybernetically sensitive.” Smart grids have been projected to reduce peak power requirements and thus achieve 4-to-6 percent efficiency improvements.

A related benefit is innovation. Compute-intensive simulation modeling is required to improve jet engines, automotive aerodynamics, molecular dynamics for drug discovery, and so forth, in virtually every domain of technology. And, open contests and innovation markets such as Innocentive leverage what Don Tapscott calls “networked intelligence” to accelerate collaborative innovation and crowdsourcing. These innovations, in turn, generate net benefits.

Location independence, a key attribute of cloud services, means that processing can be done where power is cheap. Restated, this means that relative prices, which express relative costs of generation plus costs associated with transmission and distribution losses, can signal globally optimal locations for processing and storage of information.

Virtualization and multitenancy drive additional efficiencies. Cloud providers don’t maintain a dedicated server for you personally on the off chance that you might want to send or receive an email. Rather, in the same way that thousands of people can enjoy Central Park, thousands of people can send and receive email via a single server, each using a small fraction of the available resources, generating orders of magnitude of efficiency. In the case of at least one SaaS provider, it’s been calculated that there can be a 65-fold savings Stanford’s Jonathan Koomey concludes that lower than projected growth rates in data center electricity use over the past few years are due in large part to adoption of virtualization.

A related efficiency gain in the cloud is due to dynamic resource allocation. In the same way that a hotel allocates and reallocates its rooms over time, a cloud provider can allocate and reallocate compute, storage, and network resources. When individual customer demands are independent, utilization can increase to nearly 100 percent, especially when given a boost by dynamic pricing. This is how the MGM Grand can achieve a reported average occupancy rate for over 5,000 rooms of 96.8 percent. Daily usage fluctuations impact utilization driven solely by interactive user demand, but this is where yield management and dynamic pricing through mechanisms such as spot instances can enhance overall cloud utilization.

Andreesen-Horowitz’s Mark Andreesen has famously argued that “software is eating the world,” and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers’ Mary Meeker has chronicled the “re-imagination of nearly everything”—news, photography, diaries, communication, etc.— to an Internet / cloud based model. The increasing transformation of the global economy from atoms to bits means that global productivity growth and therefore human welfare increasingly depend on harnessing IT, whether for the common good or for competitive advantage. And, yes, IT uses electricity. However, like preventative healthcare or education, in addition to optimizing the investment, perhaps we also focus on the return.

Joe Weinman is a senior vice president at Telx, the author of Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, and a regular guest contributor to GigaOM. You can find him on Twitter @joeweinman and he’ll also be speaking at our upcoming Structure:Europe event in October.

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DocuSign, the e-signature company that you probably used to sign your last offer job offer or mortgage application, has raised $50 million in additional funding and will add Mary Meeker to its board, as was first reported by TechCrunch and filed with the SEC.

Founded in 2004, DocuSign allows users to “send, sign, track and store” documents, and is best known for allowing users to auto-sign and send PDF documents without the use of printers or scanners.

Representatives from DocuSign would not immediately specify which investors were involved in the round, but said they would provide more information shortly. They said DocuSign has raised $50 million, although the SEC filing notes that DocuSign has raised $47.5 million so far.

DocuSign also confirmed that Meeker, formerly of Morgan Stanley and now a partner with Kleiner Perkins, will be joining the company’s board of directors as part of the financing. Meeker is a well-respected analyst whose reports on the state of the tech industry are widely followed. She last shared her latest thoughts in public at the D: All Things Digital conference in May, where she touched on issues relating to Facebook, the economy, and mobile trends.

DocuSign last raised a Series C round of financing in December 2010, closing with $27 million in funding.

Updated: Keith Krach, CEO of DocuSign, confirmed in an interview that Kleiner Perkins led the funding round, in addition to participation from Accel Partners, SAP Ventures, Comcast Ventures, and a “large global institutional investor” that would not be named under the terms of the financing. The company initially announced that it had raised $50 million, but later said that it had rounded the figure of $47.5 million, as the SEC filing indicated.

Krach said that DocuSign is growing rapidly, with more than 160 million documents signed so far, and the funding would be used to grow the company internationally, as well as performing research and expand the suite of products it already offers. “People are using DocuSign as a verb,” Krach said.

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It’s fair to say that the site, which provides game-like online courses to teach people how to code, has had a blockbuster year so far. It’s spent 2012 seeing enormous growth, adding new marketplace features, and gaining a legion of fans, including New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.

But even though the site has seen a breathless rise to prominence, the money isn’t just being used to keep the servers spinning while demand grows: it’s got ambitions too.

Ahead of an on-stage interview with me at LeWeb London on Tuesday, co-founder Zach Sims told me that the new funds “give us the ability to go international” — something useful given that 50 percent of the company’s user base already comes from outside the U.S.

And in a post on the company’s blog, he explains his belief that the latest investors are well-placed to help it achieve that expansion.

“A few weeks after we launched Code Year, we met Neil Rimer and Saul Klein of Index Ventures.  Saul told us, about the world he wanted for his kids – one where code was a foreign language as important as Chinese and English for people to learn.  Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins visited our office around the same time and painted a picture of a few industries that needed to be shaken up – education chief among them.”

“It became clear that we needed partners who both understood the importance of a global company… and the process of scaling a company far beyond the nine people we have grown to now.”

It’s actually the first investment from Index’s new €350 million early stage fund, but still, it’s only eight months since the business announced its last round of funding, a $2.5 million round from investors including Union Square Ventures, Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Michael Arrington’s Crunchfund.

This time round Union Square is following up, with Index’s Saul Klein leading the round and KPCB’s Mary Meeker joining in too.

So what do they see in it?

Index’s Klein told me that he was excited by Codecademy for many reasons, but not least because “it’s not a content-needy educational publisher” but “a marketplace for students and teachers.”

He also pointed out that with a global depression, it made sense to back a company that gives people the chance to learn new skills and potentially find jobs that they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to access.

That seems a proposition that is not just popular with VCs but also a magnet for billionaire tycoons: not only did Bloomberg express his support for the site, but investors include Russian Yuri Milner (who adds to his previous investment) and Virgin founder Richard Branson.

Here’s my chat with Zach Simms at LeWeb:

Photograph of Codecademy founders Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Hack NY

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The past few weeks have seen some fairly dramatic moves by newspaper chains in both the U.S. and Canada, who have chosen to stop printing their papers on certain days in an attempt to save money. But in most cases this has been a result of what Ken Doctor has called a “forced march” towards digital, rather than a choice to embrace the online world at the expense of print. A single chart used by veteran internet analyst Mary Meeker in a presentation this week illustrates why that decision is so difficult: because print is still a massive source of advertising revenue. But the chart also shows why the print-based media industry is so afraid of the future — because that source is rapidly dwindling.

The chart is fairly simple: it shows the amount of time spent by users on various forms of media — including print, television, the internet and mobile — compared with the amount of money spent by advertisers on that medium. Although there are obviously areas of overlap (since most newspapers have websites that include advertising, for example) the magnitude of the gap between the amount of time spent on print media vs. the amount of money spent there is fairly dramatic. Even though people spend less than 10 percent of their time with newspapers and magazines, advertisers devote 25 percent of their spending to them.

Although the statistics Meeker uses for her chart are current, the overall trend is not new. In the version of the presentation that she did in 2010, for example, the analyst noted that about $50 billion worth of advertising was going towards print and other forms of “old” media when — based on the amount of time spent — it should be going to internet-based media (at that point, print was getting about 12 percent of the time spent by users, so it has fallen another five percentage points since then).

As that gap closes, who benefits? Probably not print

As Derek Thompson at The Atlantic notes in a post about the Meeker slide, you can look at the data presented there in a number of different ways, but arguably all of them are negative for print-based media. The most optimistic view of the gap between time spent and advertising dollars devoted to print is to see it as an indication that print is orders of magnitude more effective for advertisers than virtually any other medium — otherwise why would ad agencies and brands spend so much money there?

That is certainly the message that most print-based media outlets would like to spread, since it justifies their continued attachment to the medium. But just as likely — if not more so — is that advertisers have been slow to move their spending away from the traditional media they are used to and into new forms of content. But as Jeff Sonderman at Poynter points out, using another Meeker slide, they are picking up speed fairly rapidly.

One of the big factors keeping that trend from accelerating even faster is that there is still a lot of doubt in the industry about the effectiveness of social networks such as Facebook when it comes to advertising. Certainly the performance of traditional methods such as banner ads on Facebook remains relatively dismal — even compared to the click-through rates on normal web advertising. The social network is experimenting with “sponsored stories” driven by user behavior, but there are still some large question marks around that as well, when it comes to the return-on-investment that advertisers are likely to see.

The fact that print still drives a massive amount of revenue for traditional media players also helps to explain why so many paywalls used by publishers like the New York Times are tied to Sunday print subscriptions or other print-related offers. In addition to producing revenue from loyal readers, those deals are also designed to protect the print-subscription numbers, so that advertisers will continue to feel they are getting their money’s worth. The multibillion-dollar question is: How much longer can print maintain that sense of superiority?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Zarko Drincic

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During her latest presentation on the tech landscape at D: All Things Digital, Meeker pointed out that the factors that caused Facebook to warn investors about how increased mobile usage is changing its business model are universal. Mobile traffic now accounts for 10 percent of overall traffic and overall mobile revenue is surging, but companies built around desktop-web economics are scared by the fact that mobile ads are seen as far less valuable: five times less valuable than desktop Internet ads, Meeker said. And even companies that have figured out how to get users to actually pay them for their products–think Tencent and Zynga–are taking in far less revenue per mobile subscriber than per desktop subscriber.

That implies that companies born entirely of the mobile era might have an advantage, but not necessarily, as those companies haven’t really figured this out yet either. “It’s early,” Meeker said. “The screen is small and the ad units haven’t been rolled out effectively yet.”

Meeker reminded everyone, however, that we went through many of the same questions a decade ago amid the rubble of the dot-com bust. Companies like Google and Facebook clearly figured out how to make real money off desktop Internet ads, and Meeker thinks that someone will come along that figures out how to do the same on mobile.

“The data in Japan proves that the users can be monetized,” she said, pointing to gaming companies like Gree and CyberAgent, who have seen strong growth in mobile revenue.

What supports her optimism? The mobile world is much more sophisticated and prepared for this transition than those who tried to monetize the desktop Web back in the 1990s, she said. With so many developers and business people focused so closely on mobile technology–and the fact that there are already so many people using smart mobile devices–at some point relatively soon someone will figure out how to connect the dots.

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Mary Meeker Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

There are very few analysts who make the tech industry stop and listen when they are given a microphone. Mary Meeker, formerly of Morgan Stanley and now with Kleiner Perkins, is one of those analysts, and on Wednesday she delivered one of her trademark presentations at D: All Things Digital touching on the global economy, the mobile opportunity, and Facebook’s unprecedented IPO.

Her 112 slides–which she somehow ran through in like 10 minutes–are embedded below, but here are a few highlights.

• Everybody knows China’s Internet usage is growing like crazy and that India is close on its heels, but the rest of the top five fastest growing countries are maybe a bit more surprising, Meeker said: Indonesia, Philippines, and Nigeria.
• There are a billion people using 3G mobile wireless connections, but that represents just 18 percent of all mobile users.
• Mobile growth has been strong, and much headroom remains, but people are still having trouble figuring out how to make money on mobile: eCPMs (a key advertising metric) are five times lower on mobile than on the desktop Internet, and the average revenue per subscriber on mobile services compared to desktop is just as bad in some cases.
• No “bubbles” were discussed, but Meeker did note that Kleiner didn’t invest a penny in private companies during the last quarter: they felt the prices were too high. As private valuations rise while public valuations of companies like Facebook and Zynga fall, there’s obviously potential for private investors to lose money.
• Meeker called Facebook’s IPO “a financial share tsunami,” noting that the sheer volume of Facebook shares traded on its first day exceeded the average daily volume of the entire New York Stock Exchange. She declined to criticize those involved, but said that if Facebook had conducted an auction instead of a more traditional IPO, its IPO price would have likely been a lot higher due to that demand.

KPCB Internet Trends 2012

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Well, not so much. I looked at the list and found that Fred Wilson, who is one of the most-successful venture capitalists of the post-social era, is listed at #20. Wilson is a general partner at Union Square Ventures, a firm he co-founded, and his investments include Twitter, Etsy, Tumblr and Kickstarter.

He invested in most of these companies during the early stage of their start-up life and long before they became household names and were successes. When investors put money in at this early stage, the returns they get from hit companies are much higher. His return on investment on those dollars is much, much higher than say someone who invested in Twitter at, say, a $3.7 billion valuation. I don’t know, say, John Doerr, for example, who is ranked at the #12 spot.

“Everyone in the industry knows USV is the top VC, so any ‘top list’ like Forbes that doesn’t include them is a joke,” tweeted Chris Dixon, an entrepreneur and partner at the Founder Collective. David Lee, who works with Ron Conway at SV Angel, added, “It’s like putting Andrew Luck at #20 in an NFL mock draft.” Bijan Sabet, who incidentally is #57 on the list and has invested in Twitter and Tumblr, added, ”Also list doesn’t take into account cost basis or ownership.”

The point is not to defend or talk-up Fred Wilson — he can do that himself on his blog, and frankly he doesn’t need to. The reason for bringing him up is that the list’s methodology is just weird and, well, ambiguous at best.

Do Forbes and its partners take take into account how much money was invested in Skype and how much of it was actually returned to the limited partners at Andreessen Horowitz? And how do they explain that Mary Meeker is on the list at #42 (ahead of say, Sabet), even though she has been in the business for — wait for the drum roll – 17 months. And well, if we are going to include Meeker on the list, then why not Brad Feld from The Foundry Group, who was an early investor in Zynga, one of the hot investments?

To be clear, I am not commenting on individuals, but more on the Forbes methodology:

For the Midas List, we created our data-based rankings again this year with TrueBridge Capital Partners, a venture capital-focused fund of funds. Also advising us on our final ranking was an expert panel made up of secret sources, including professionals from a premier global investment consulting firm and a leading foundation’s investment office.

The aim of the Midas List ranking is to identify the venture capitalists who are providing the best returns for their investors, while helping create the most valuable and impactful technology and life science companies. To assess performance, we looked at all venture-backed initial public offerings and mergers and acquisitions valued at more than $200 million over the last five years, since 2007.

When I worked at Forbes.com, I got to know a lot of people who worked on Forbes’ lists. There was a dedicated team that worked around the year and dug up little-known facts and details before assembling the final tally of America’s Richest or the Billionaires’ list. The effort that went into those lists was so comprehensive that you could take it to the bank. The  methodology for the Midas List, based  on Forbes’ own description above, is nowhere close to having that rigor. So, if Forbes is serious about this list, it needs to devote resources to it.

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SoundCloud, a Berlin-based web audio startup, has raised $50 million in new funding from investors led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mike Butcher reports. GGV Capital also participated. The company confirmed in a press release it raised the funds, but it isn’t releasing information about how much money it got from the investors. Previous investors in the company include Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures and Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures.

Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, will take a board observer seat at the company. Butcher reports the company is said to have pre-money valuation of $200 million. It’s yet another case of KPCB trying to invest in fast-growing web companies at valuations that can politely be termed “generous.” It seems to be part of a transition away from its big cleantech bets.

The company that was started by Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss in 2007 has signed up more than 9 million folks. SoundCloud started as a collaboration platform for musicians and deejays. In more recent times, the company has refocused on becoming a “web audio” platform and launched multiple mobile apps. Ljung in an earlier interview said the launch of mobile apps had added about a million new people to SoundCloud platform. It was also one of the  GigaOM Euro 20 startups to watch.

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Just like Morgan Stanley, KPCB is run like a traditional corporation, though in this case Doerr is the proverbial CEO. KPCB has been looking for a digital media partner for months now, as I reported earlier.

Meeker, now 51, was born in Portland, Ind., and went to school at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind.. She joined Merrill Lynch in Chicago, went to Cornell for her MBA, and in 1986 joined Salomon Brothers and later worked for Cowen & Company. By 1991, she was at Morgan Stanley and worked on PC stocks. Then came the Internet, and she became the “Woman in the Bubble” as The New Yorker famously put it.

Meeker, who is abrasive and charming in equal parts, depending on your station in life, has one thing going for her: She’s a true Internet believer. She wasn’t afraid to call the bull: She predicted that at least 70 percent of the Internet companies would go bust or end up trading below their IPO price. She was right. Meeker also championed eBay even when her firm didn’t get the business, and she rightfully saw the big potential of Google early on.

Lately, she has been championing the mobile web, and she’s right. As my readers well know, I’ve been calling for the shift to mobile for past six years. Regardless, in hiring Meeker, KPCB has made another big publicity splash, just as it did with the launch of its iFund for iPhone-oriented startups and more recently, the sFund for social web-focussed companies.

These funds help the firm put on carefully staged marketing events to attract entrepreneur attention and potentially return to relevance. For a while, KPCB has focused all its efforts on cleantech investments, but now (from the outside at least) seems to have decided to refocus its energies on the Internet.

Despite having successful exits such as Ngmoco ($400 million) and chest thumping by more vocal partners such as Bing Gordon, the firm is perceived to be part of the old Silicon Valley and not part of the new Valley, which is represented by angel investors such as Dave McClure, Keith Rabois and Chris Dixon.

In Meeker, the firm gets a workaholic who has dedicated pretty much all of her life to the Internet. That means she’s going to meet a lot more companies, which gives her an opportunity to meet the next black swan, and possibly score a big hit. Of course, one can’t ignore the fact that unless you’re incredibly lucky, it takes about six years to develop the kind of nose for investments that makes you, say, Michael Moritz. So Meeker clearly has a long slog ahead of her.

The big challenge for Meeker will be to endear herself with the early-stage digital media companies run by twenty-somethings, who have little or no institutional knowledge about her. Having spent her whole life as an analyst, she also has the challenge of being a non-operating person, and these days, startups demand more than just money.

Perhaps the best thing for KPCB would be to unleash her on its growth fund; it’s where she can add instant value and perhaps instant returns. Nevertheless, I’m glad to see her join the venture capital world. Now comes the hard part.

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If so, it’s been a long time in coming. Kleiner’s John Doerr has expressed concern over the firm’s greentech investments before. About a year ago, Doerr said during a speech that if Kleiner had seen how bad the market was going to crash, it probably wouldn’t have started it’s green initiative: (see Doerr videos from EETimes and the live stream of the event today on FORA.tv):

“If we’d been able to foresee the crash of the market, we wouldn’t probably have launched a green initiative, because these ventures really need capital. The only way in which we were lucky, I think, is that the government stepped in, particularly the Department of Energy. Led by this great administration that put in place these loan guarantees.”

For example, Kleiner backed 8-year-old fuel cell company Bloom Energy, which Doerr said in his speech has “required ten times as much capital,” compared to other venture companies. It took Google $25 million to get to an IPO, Doerr pointed out, and Bloom has already taken $250 million. Doerr said he’d wager Bloom will take “nine years to a successful public offering.”

The lack of exits of Kleiner’s greentech portfolio hasn’t been a secret to anyone who follows their investments closely. Yes, biofuel firm Amyris went public this year, but only produced a modest return. Power company Areva bought solar thermal startup Ausra, but terms of that deal were undisclosed and were likely also modest. That’s about it; the “bevy of successful exits,” as the Fortune article points to, certainly hasn’t been in greentech.

Has any high-profile investor made a lot of money yet from its greentech investments? Not yet. Last week, Sean Parker referred to greentech investing as a bubble in this New York Times interview: “It is not clear anyone will make money on their green-tech investing. It looks like it was a bubble.”

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and partner with The Founder’s Fund and Clarium Capital, expressed a similar sentiment earlier this year. Thiel said “cleantech companies for a variety of reasons don’t work . . . the one thing we haven’t done is an alternative energy investment. . . I think a lot [of alternative energy funding] has been misdirected.”

Last year, when Netscape founder and investor Marc Andreessen launched his $300 million fund, he went out of his way to note the fund would keep a wide berth from anything related to cleantech, energy and transportation. He told Fortune, flat-out: “No cleantech, no rocket ships, no electric cars.”

According to a widely cited report in Reuters, there’s been a sharp decline in investing in early-stage cleantech companies because of the lack of returns for investors. VC investment overall fell in 2009 because of the recession, but investments in new, early-stage, cleantech startups dropped even more compared to all investing: 35 percent of VC dollars went to early-stage and seed cleantech companies in 2007, but just 20 percent went to that group in the first half of 2010. Investors, lacking greentech exits, seem to be turning elsewhere.

But as I put it in this post a couple of months ago, I think there’s a learning curve happening for cleantech investors; it’s just taking awhile to happen. Yes, a bunch of the cleantech investors are getting weeded out, and some of the early funds have been misspent. There’s only so much LP money you can spend over so many years without giving some back.

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