Geeko friendly's List: Business

• Yvon Chouinard
• • sam filing je cist hud
• While he acknowledges that "sustainable manufacturing is oxymoronic," Chouinard's aim is to minimize waste and damage to the environment.
• Employees earn clothing credits for carpooling to work, where benefits include flex time, on-site child care, paid parental leave, and, for those so inclined, training in nonviolent civil disobedience. (Patagonia pays the bail of anyone arrested in the course of applying the training.) The Patagonia catalogue, famous for heart-stopping portraits of customers putting gear to the test, is bringing Chouinard's environmental message to millions of people.
• Having recently stepped down as Patagonia's CEO, Chouinard is pursuing what he refers to as his "MBA"--management by absence. He attributes his outlook to a long interest in Zen, a philosophy that emphasizes the process rather than the result. "Patagonia is an experiment, an attempt to prove that being ecologically responsible works," Chouinard claims. "Every time we've done the right thing it's ended up making us more money."
• We spoke at Patagonia's home office, where toddlers were noisily at play in an adjacent child-care facility, and surfboards occupied the roof racks of cars in the employee parking lot.
• • ni tko pomembno, ama vseen zanimivo
• Now I'm working on a project I call the "One Percent for the Planet" club, and I'm trying to get other businesses to sign on.
• • zajebano dobr!!!!
• I think of it as a kind of "earth tax" for being polluters and using up natural resources.
• I believe that all of our taxes should be resource taxes. We should be taxing oil at the barrel rather than at the pump.
• • Ne morm verjet kok huda sef firme je to!
• I always say that there's no difference between a pessimist who says, "Oh, it's hopeless, so don't bother doing anything," and an optimist who says, "Don't bother doing anything, it's going to turn our fine anyway." Either way, nothing happens.
• About 30 years ago we started making small grants to grassroots groups. And every one of those people tells us how a $5,000 grant from us made all the difference in the world. We also teach environmental activism workshops on how to run an effective activist organization. So often these folks are fighting against some big corporation, trying to stop pollution or clearcutting or some huge development. Sometimes they're ostracized in their communities. And they're thinking, "Is it worth it?" Or "Maybe we just ought to move out of here." And then they come to our workshop and they find out that other people are facing the same problems. And all of sudden they see: "I'm part of a greater whole." It makes a huge difference in their lives.
• Well, we're healthy and we thrive in a recession. Where every other company goes up and down with the economy, we don't.
• Probably not. I think we could be a huge company right now if we grew at the rate we could have. But you know, I never wanted to be a businessman in the first place. I'm kind of a craftsman that just happened to become successful. Once I realized that I was a businessman and kind of doomed to be one, I felt a certain freedom to try anything. That's the fun part. We break all the rules. You look around this place, you'll see half the people barefoot. There's at least one little baby stashed underneath somebody's desk in a cardboard box. We have a rule here that's called Let My People Go Surfing. When the surf comes up, you go surfing. You don't plan to go surfing next Tuesday at two o'clock because you may go out there next Tuesday and find that the water is flat. So anytime the surf comes up, people just clear out and go surfing. But then they're back here at eight o'clock at night or working on the weekend. I really don't care when they work as long as the work gets done and it doesn't screw up the people depending on them. I just leave people alone and they're totally responsible. No one takes advantage of us.
• Well, for those that do we have an internship program where any employee can take two months off and go to work for a nonprofit, and we continue to pay their salary. For instance, some employees in our Reno warehouse took an interest in creating more wilderness areas in Nevada. It seems that no one had ever done an inventory of potential wilderness there. So they went out hiking and backpacking every weekend and identified nearly 10 million acres that could qualify. Patagonia provided an office for them at the warehouse and made a small grant to the local groups working on the project. They went to Washington, D.C., lobbied Congress, and got a bill passed to create the 750,000-acre Black Rock Wilderness. I say that was a good investment.

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• • Wii & Google Earth mashup
• • Google, Yahoo, Mozilla different mashup ideas
• Think it, find it, match it, mash it!
• 'Mash-ups' refer simply to the end result of bringing together two or more different creations or applications that were not originally intended to work together, and the concept is a firm part of the Web 2.0 world.
• Mash-ups date back as far as the 1960s with the mixing and sampling of different songs, and like those creations, the first computer-based mash-ups were largely music or image-based.
• mash-up culture is also booming with software and application mixing.
• The Wii remote control and the Wii fit board have been coded by mashers to be used with Google Earth, enabling you to use it as a flight simulator so you can 'fly' over the globe using the Nintendo controls.
• There is also a Web site which showcases the best of the Web's mash ups and gives out a daily and monthly award. Past winners include "twitzu" where users can send out invites to friends and they can RSVP via twitter. "Typobuddy" users can find misspelled eBay auctions and Craiglist items to get the best deal.
• On a more practical note, the Chicago Police Department uses a system called "Clearmap," a mash-up web application that integrates the department's reported crime database with Google Maps.
• Google and Yahoo both have mash-up editors where users can mash what they will. Just last month the Mozilla Lab announced Ubiquity, an experiment in using natural language to invoke Web services.
• But all of this excitement isn't without controversy. Much of the content that is mashed is done so illegally.
• The largest support for mash-up culture comes from the Free Culture movement and organizations such as the Creative Commons.
• "Mashing up is a good thing... people are being creative and expanding peoples' works.

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• Personal knowledge management
• Reflection. Continuous improvement on how the individual operates.
• Information literacy. Understanding what information is important and how to find unknown information.
• Organizational skills. Personal librarianship? Personal categorization and taxonomies.
• observational 'cultural anthropology' skills
• Communication skills. Perception, intuition, expression, visualization, and interpretation.
• Understanding of complex adaptive systems.
• innovation,
• pattern recognition,
• Collaboration skills. Coordination, synchronization, experimentation, cooperation, and design.
• Personal wiki
• weblogs (with a Web feed)

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• 
• The iPhone has seen tremendous success in the market thanks to Apple's fanatic dedication to good user experience, its willingness (and ability) to strong-arm its carrier partners, and Apple's easy-to-use App Store
• Some developers have already used the platform to make serious money, to the tune of $250,000 in just a couple of months.
• But Apple keeps tight reins on its developers. It has a slow and seemingly arbitrary process for vetting App Store software, it shackles developers with a restrictive NDA, and it charges $99 just to get access to the developer's kit.
• It's a sure bet that many developers, given the opportunity, would flock to a less restrictive environment.
• A big part of the iPhone's success is due to Apple's clout, which enabled it, in effect, to tell AT&T to sit down and shut up about this or that feature requirement. Once other carriers saw the iPhone's success in the United States, they wanted in on that action, so Apple was able to dictate terms globally, just as it had a year before in the U.S.
• Carriers typically retain fanatic control over every aspect of the customer, from the menus on the phone to the applications that customers are permitted to download. Carrier feature requirements dictate the laundry-list of useless gewgaws that most phones sport. (Does anyone ever actually use the "calendar" app on a Nokia or Motorola phone?) And it's that dysfunctional relationship that means most phones are so horrible to use: They're doomed from the start by companies that care more about their own requirements than those of their customers.
• That's why I predict that Android will soon have as many different flavors as there are carriers.
• And that's their right. Because Android uses the Apache license, anyone is free to take it and customize it to their heart's content, even if such customizations are appalling to the open source community.
• (There's also no requirement that customizations be themselves open-sourced for the benefit of the whole Android community.)

  • well that sucks
• In short order, "Android" will become meaningless to consumers, and most carriers won't even advertise the fact that their phones use the operating system. Instead, they'll advertise their phones' features, as they always have, and emphasize the benefits of those features to the users.

• It should designate a few core applications that all Googlephones must have, including Gmail, Google Calendar and other Google apps, such as Google Maps. It should specify minimum requirements for processor capabilities, memory and wireless data access. Perhaps GPS and Wi-Fi support should be required, as well as a minimum 2 megapixel cameraphone (the better to interface with Picasa).

    

  Then Google needs to set up a carrier/handset certification program to guarantee that phones in this program meet the requirements it specifies. Those that qualify gain the right to be called "Googlephones," regardless of which carrier or handset manufacturer they come from. Qualifying phones may sport a Googlephone logo on the phone and in advertisements about it.

    

  The result: Googlephones will become a trusted, branded subset of the Android phone marketplace. No matter what other features a phone may or may not have, consumers who buy a Googlephone from any manufacturer will know that they have guaranteed access to their mail, calendar, contacts and Google Maps. And that guarantee -- which is based on the capabilities and benefits that consumers actually care about -- will help drive the growth of the mobile Google market.

  • what Google shoudl do to successfully compete with the market
• There's just one way Google can forestall this eventuality and triumph in the handset market. The company needs to set up an aggressive "Googlephone" partners program
• If Google doesn't do that, Android will quickly disappear into the morass of poorly-branded smartphone operating systems that consumers don't give a damn about, alongside Symbian, Windows Mobile and the Palm OS. And Google will have lost the mobile game.

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• Larry Page, co-founder of Google, lobbied the Federal Communications Commission and members of Congress Wednesday to open up the "great resource" of unused broadcast spectrum for a new generation of mobile and wireless devices.
• "The time is now for the FCC to act, and I think this will happen before the election," Page told a meeting on Capitol Hill hosted by the Wireless Innovation Alliance, a coalition seeking the unlicensed use of unused TV spectrum often called "white space."
• The FCC has been running field tests to determine whether various devices might interfere with TV or wireless microphone signals on portions of the spectrum.
• The debate over the future of white space pits Google, Microsoft, Motorola, Dell and other tech companies against the broadcasting industry and some cell phone companies.
• Page and other tech leaders argued that the interference issue is not real, and that broadcasters simply want to hold on to unused spectrum for future use.

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• Google's patent filing describes "devices, systems and methods" that would automatically poll nearby wireless services to find the best price for a voice or a data connection for a "portable communications device." That connection might come via a cellphone carrier, a WiMax provider, or even a Wi-Fi hotspot. According to the patent, users can either manually select the bid they like best or they can allow the device to connect automatically with the lowest-cost provider.
• The upshot? Just as advertisers know they're always getting the market price for keywords on Google's AdWords system, wireless users would always get the market price for wireless data service -- or phone calls. The system could potentially free users from cellphone contracts and locked phones that tie them to one service provider and allow them to switch from one carrier to another, seamlessly, based on which carrier had the lowest price at that moment.

  • RA
• Granted, a lot of obstacles stand in the way of this vision, not least of which would be the unwillingness of entrenched cellular carriers to play ball. Also, the system would require compatible software not only on handsets, but also on any potential wireless connection points -- a major infrastructure hurdle. But the patent is striking for its scope -- and for the glimpse it gives of Google's lofty wireless ambitions.
• The advantages to the system are clear. It would help users have access to the lowest cost network at all times.
• "In addition to cost as a factor in selecting appropriate telecommunications providers, users may opt for alternative auction models based on maximal bandwidth offered, best coverage/reliability, or some combination of options," says the patent.
• To be sure, the patent may not amount to much. Even Google with its might may not be able to break the stranglehold of telecom carriers in North America, and it is unlikely most wireless carriers or telecom service providers would play ball.

  • RA
• But even if telecom carriers don't sign on, Google can potentially pull this off -- albeit slowly. Last year, the company participated in the federal government’s auction of wireless spectrum in the 700 Megahertz band. Though Google failed to win any licenses, it bagged a commitment from the Federal Communications Commission that spectrum owners, Verizon and AT&T, among others, can't block out internet or telecom rivals.

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• LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and is a performance-based rating system for green buildings established by the U.S Green Building Council. It has come to be accepted as the benchmark for green building, and covers all aspects of a building, from materials, to energy, water and building operation.

  • RA
• I studied for about a month to pass the exam, which consists of 80 questions

  • exam
• The way LEED works is that the points are broken down into 5 topic areas: Sustainable Sites; Energy & Atmosphere; Water Efficiency; Materials and Resources; and Indoor Air Quality. A final category rewards efforts that don't fall under the other topic areas. Within each category, points are awarded for achieving environmental performance. For instance, 1-10 points can be earned under Energy & Atmosphere, depending on the energy-efficiency of the building. Each category has pre-requisites that must be met, and depending on how many points the project is awarded a building can be rated anywhere from LEED certified to LEED platinum
• I took the LEED for Existing Buildings exam (LEED has different rating systems, including LEED for Neighborhood Development, LEED for New Construction, etc.) and I read through the entire 400 page study manual twice

  • exam
• For more information about becoming a LEED AP, check out the LEED AP candidate handbook, LEED AP exam preparation, and the Green Building Certification Institute web site .

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• The recently announced alliance between technology giants General Electric and Google may provide the lobbying arsenal necessary for the U.S. to overhaul an outdated electric grid widely considered as a barricade to a low-carbon future.
• GE and Google seek to fix an electric utility grid that the American Society of Civil Engineers has described as being "in urgent need of modernization" in its infrastructure report card. Existing transmission lines are overburdened, while the country's electricity demand continues to rise. Congested power lines prevent utilities from accessing cheaper sources of generation that may be located farther away, and instead they often rely on natural-gas facilities that are easier to site near urban areas.
• The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that wind power could supply 20 percent of the country's energy needs if efficient transmission lines are built across the country. Large amounts of renewable energy sources are currently located too far off-the-grid to be tapped, such as the windy mountains of South Dakota or the geothermal hot beds of Nevada's deserts. The department estimates the additional transmission capacity would cost $60 billion, spread out between now and 2030.
• "Our vision is a 21st century U.S. electricity system featuring hundreds of thousands of megawatts of renewable power, millions of plug-in vehicles, and tens of millions of energy efficient homes and businesses," Reicher said. "The biggest impediment to achieving this vision is not technology or finance; it's policy, particularly on the national level."

  • RA

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• William McDonough aims to create buildings that produce oxygen, sequester carbon, and produce more power than they use.
• Ford Motor Company gave him $2 billion in 1999, with which he transformed the company’s ancient Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, into an icon of green design, complete with the largest living roof on the planet: a 10.4-acre assembly-plant roof blanketed with sedum, a drought-resistant ground cover.
• there will be a large-scale trend to buildings that start to act like organisms. The green-roof movement, for example, will be promulgated so that buildings make oxygen. We’ll also see roofs that make energy, as in solar energy. In effect, the buildings will become photosynthetic and make either oxygen or energy, or both. We’ll see materials that are derived from healthy sources and are designed for reuse and recapture.
• What kinds of healthy materials will we be using?
  Well, sustainable forestry, recycled metal, things like that. They’ll be characterized in terms of where they were sourced. Right now when you order wood, you don’t necessarily know where it came from. If you order metal, you don’t know if it’s recycled, you don’t know where it came from. But I think in the future, materials will have passports. We’ll know where they came from and where they’re going.
• renewable energy is potentially the largest job-creation program in the history of the planet.
• hese forms of energy are inherently local and are not exported. In the deserts, for example: solar thermal. In the Great Plains: wind

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• The scale of making turbine blades from fiberglass and carbon fiber is amazing, physically and financially. An industry expert interviewed for article stated that he "expects the global wind energy market for composites to be worth about $6 billion by 2012."
• The manufacturing process has similarities to the manufacture of kayaks, truck fairings, bathtubs, shower stalls, bumpers, speed boats, trailers and RV bodies. Some key ingredients: epoxy and polyester resins, glass and carbon fiber, balsa wood, and PVC foam. Glass is the big one.

  • manufacturing process
• Typically composed of 70% to 75% glass by weight, these aerodynamically designed blades must meet very strict mechanical requirements such as high rigidity and resistance to torsion and fatigue. High static and dynamic loads over a wide temperature range are typical during a 20-yr service life. A standard 35- to 40-meter blade for a 1.5-MW turbine weighs 6 to 7 tons.
• I wasn't sure, so I ran the numbers. A new 1 gigawatt nuke plant is about US$7 billion. That produces an average of 900MW of electricity. Since on shore wind turbines have a capacity factor of about 30%, you'd need 3 gigawatts to produce 900 MW on average. On shore wind costs about US$2m per megawatt, so 3 GW is $6 billion. THere are extra costs to both, but I counted them as a wash. Essentially, they cost the same, but wind turbines have had their costs driven up recently due to high demand. This should come down as more players enter the market. So, overall, wind is a bit cheaper now, and will more so in the future. And no nasty messes to clean up and store for 10000 years.

  • prices of wind farms compared to nuclear plants

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• How do you create a Results-Only-Work-Environment (ROWE) for yourself or a company — and increase profits — by tweaking your surroundings?
• Thanks to a sophisticated office structure, the headquarters of Interpolis insurance in the Dutch town of Tilburg has freed up 51 percent of their working areas, cut 33 percent of construction and equipment costs, and reduced office usage expenses by 21 percent.
• The man behind this revolutionary and visionary concept of the 7000 square metre and “Tivoli” project was Gijs Nooteboom of the consulting firm Veldhoen + Company. In an interview, he explains to me why the Interpolis concept represents all future office building, the reasons why we will spend more time working from home and on travel and why offices are basically old-fashioned but still needed:
• he man behind this revolutionary and visionary concept of the 7000 square metre and “Tivoli” project was Gijs Nooteboom of the consulting firm Veldhoen + Company. In an interview, he explains to me why the Interpolis concept represents all future office building, the reasons why we will spend more time working from home and on travel and why offices are basically old-fashioned but still needed:
• What are the new tasks of the management ? No longer to check whether someone is there, but to define the output and control it. It takes months to incorporate this culture into a company.

  • !

• A considerable effort. What are the benefits for the company?

   

  Nooteboom: The company requires 50% less square meters. All cleaning and other maintenance costs will be reduced accordingly. In addition, Interpolis increased 20 percent in productivity through flexibility and sick leave, by nine percent 10 years ago, now dropped to two and a half percent. Thirdly, it is good for image and culture of the company - Interpolis receives 90,000 visitors a year. The office is marketing tool number one.
• freedom of choice: What to do when and where? You can freely decide on work time and place more or less, depending on the function. Secondly, it is now festive to come into the office. It is an open and transparent work space designed for meetings and exchange
• During the telephone call one will be able to see the image of each other, exchange data, show presentations and work together on documents. Therefore there will be less business travel than today.
• The concept of the office is basically old-fashioned, but we still need it. It will be used almost solely for meetings in the future. More and more companies will let their employees work from the home or while traveling.
• First, I want positive emotional associations with each object within my visual field. Limiting associations is often better than careful selection.

  • !!!
• The greenhouse you see is essentially a private rain forest with automatic ion generators and timed water systems. It is entirely self-contained with eight sun roofs and no openings. This is the morning oxygenation chamber where I have breakfast. I love it.
• Second, I limit misbehavior by limiting options. Notice that I have no shelves. This discourages accumulating papers and encourages both elimination and immediate digital note-taking. When in doubt, I take a digital photograph of documents (I prefer this to a scanner, which consumes real estate).

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• proprietary solar technology printed with a copper, indium, gallium, and selenium (CIGS) mixture on glass tubes.  Solyndra also announced over $1.2 billion in orders and a successful installation using the cylindrical solar tubes on the roof of their corporate headquarters.  With the glass tube design and easy installation, the company expects to provide commercial customers with higher electricity output per rooftop and significantly reduced installation costs.   

   

     

   

  Unlike other thin-film CIGS solar technology, Solyndra panels capture sunlight across a 360-degree surface through direct, diffuse, and reflected light.  As a result, the company claims their cylindrical panels capture more sunlight than traditional flat-surfaced panels.

  • !
• 
• At least for the time being, Solyndra is focusing on the commercial market
• "By eliminating the need for roof-penetrating mounts and wind ballasts, PV arrays with Solyndra panels can be installed with one-third the labor, in one-third of the time, at one-half the cost.

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• Headwinds in the rest of the economy—and some potential impacts from the new law—appear to be to blame for the sector’s woes. Now that homeowners can finally get tax breaks for 30% of home-solar installations—breaking down hefty upfront costs, one of the biggest barriers to solar power—the credit crunch means homeowners are struggling to land loans to cover the other 70% of the cost of installation. " ::Wall Street Journal
• Nobody is going to get a loan when their house is already worth less than their mortgage, so innovation, alternative energy and green renovations will require cold, hard cash from rich purchasers. Everyone else will just have to wait. As the Journal concluded: "Clean energy may yet have its day in the sun—but as long as the financial-market turmoil lasts, it isn’t going to be an easy ride for anyone."

• Every year NASA publishes a new edition of their Spinoff magazine, a periodical that outlines NASA-based technologies that have disseminated into everyday devices, improving our lives beyond giving us some nifty new desktop wallpapers.
• Lithium Battery Power Delivers Electric Vehicles to Market
• Aerodynamics Research Revolutionizes Truck Design
• Software Performs Complex Design Analysis
• Polymer Fabric Protects Firefighters, Military, and Civilians
• Immersive Photography Renders 360° Views
• Aerogels Insulate Missions and Consumer Products

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• In purely aesthetic terms, architectural history has recorded the 1929 crash as surprisingly benign.
• The crash happened when the last of the great Gotham skyscrapers were already half-way up: the Chrysler building, its hubcaps stabbing the clouds, was the tallest in the world until the Empire State Building trumped it in 1931.
• Well, much as British architects in the early nineties were said to be Filth (failed in London, try Hong Kong) and as today businesses ponder upping sticks to Dubai, the profession was migrating — but to the only country untouched by the crash. Between 1930 and 1934, modernist architects departed en masse for the USSR. Ernst May, Andre Lurcat, Bruno Taut and a whole “Bauhaus Brigade” decamped to Moscow. After Hitler came to power in 1933, these architects became stateless. Some ended up in Britain, breaching this last citadel of antimodernism.

• New Deal.

  Its huge public spending went on public works, not handouts to banks. There was social housing and infrastructure on an unprecedented scale. Architecturally some of it was revolutionary, some not, but socially these measures averted disaster.
• There’s a campaign now for a green New Deal — a plan to build a less destructive and wasteful economy as a way out of the crisis.

  • !

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• have just been named one of the top ten British clean tech companies by the Guardian, Library House CleanTech 100, as well as being featured in the Sunday Times Tech Track 100 a few weeks later. The Times’ feature claims that Solarcentury has seen sales soar from UK£6.0m (approx.US$12m) in 2005 to UK£19.4m
• Solarcentury has seen sales soar from UK£6.0m (approx.US$12m) in 2005 to UK£19.4m
• officially the UK’s fastest growing energy company”

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• commercial buildings account for more than 60 percent of the nation's electricity consumption, according to government estimates, and generate 30 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.  
  
• LEED for Existing Buildings, or LEED-EB, the three-year-old program provides a laundry list of steps that building owners and managers can take to operate and manage their properties more efficiently.
• Clinton Climate Initiative of the William J. Clinton Foundation in 2006 created the Energy Efficiency Building Retrofit Program to facilitate the retrofitting of existing buildings.
• by retrofitting buildings, owners can save 90 cents a square foot annually, on average, in energy and other costs and earn back their investment in 2 to 2 ½ years.
• one of the most successful retrofits to date: the headquarters of the software maker Adobe Systems, which received a platinum LEED-EB rating for its three towers in December 2006. Adobe spent $1.4 million on the project, but earned that back in savings in less than 10 months, the company said.

  • !
• market activity of the last several years - when buildings were bought and sold at a frenzied pace - discouraged long-term initiatives.
• LEED-EB is just gathering steam in the broader market.
• When Merchandise Mart Properties Inc., which manages the building, decided to seek LEED-EB certification in early 2005, it had to work with and train hundreds of designers, architects, contractors, painters and even demolition crews. "Working through that was super-complicated,"

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• New York City, though feeling the market collapse, is also projected to be a place to head for green jobs. Generating 25,000 green jobs in 2006, the city may generate 200,000 more by 2038 in engineering, architecture and design.
• Washington, DC makes it to the top of the green jobs list with the federal government aiming to lower energy costs for the more than half-million buildings it oversees, according to Forbes.
• Houston houses two of the nation's most polluted economies and is a master of making profit off of energy.
• Boston houses leading universities that will bring the city into the green economy. Harvard, MIT and other institutions are at the forefront of renewable energy academia.

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