Posts filed under 'environment'
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November 10th, 2008, 06:27pm
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Emerging economy innovators have been touted as a major threat to developed world legacy business models. The concept is simple – companies in emerging economies innovate in the face of extreme price sensitivity, although their customers have relatively low expectations. They are also able to operate using the latest technology and management practices. In the green sector emerging economy players have an additional motivation in the fact that they are often based in countries that are much more polluted than developed nations. There is market demand as well as government impetus to come up with inexpensive ways to clean up the air and water.
There is speculation that companies in countries like India and China will take the lead in terms of green innovation. Early examples support this notion. A project by the Center for Scientific and Industrial Research, an Indian organization, has resulted in a solar powered rickshaw with a top speed of 15 km an hour and a range of 50-70 km. The rickshaw runs on a 36-volt battery that can be replaced at a local solar-power charging station. The vehicle is now being tested in Delhi with the aim of replacing some of the city’s 500 000 rickshaws. If successful, the soleckshaw as it is called, will provide a clean and relatively speedy option for moving around Delhi’s crowded streets.
Another innovation in China produced an inexpensive solar powered car. The vehicle has a sticker price of just over $5000 with a range of up to 150 km. The tiny Chery QQ clone has been fitted with roof mounted solar panels that absorb 95% of the solar energy coming in. Although far from luxurious, the vehicle may be attractive to China’s rising middle class. It will be interesting to see if emerging economy companies and public sector institutions manage to leapfrog developed countries in both green technologies and their market applications. We would be interested to learn of any other green innovations from outside of the developed world that our readers might have come across.
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October 12th, 2008, 06:11pm
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We’ve been talking a lot about the Webification of the Obama campaign, but there are also some interesting things going on in our own backyard. As Canadians gear up for our own Federal election this week, Vote for Environment – a pro-environment lobby group - is looking to use Internet-enabled, grassroots organization to try and game Canada’s multi-party political system.
The initiative is appealing to those that believe the environment is the single most important issue. It paints the Harper government as the anti-environment party, and then specifically targets 39 ridings where the Conservative party won in the last election by less than 10%. Visitors can search for their riding and are given recommendations on who to vote for based on poll data. The goal is to consolidate the vote around the party that was the runner up; regardless of who that might be.
Read More »
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October 7th, 2008, 12:53pm
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For months several of us have posted about the impact of collaboration and social networks on the election south of the border. The allure of Obama vs. McCain, not to mention their respective approaches towards technology makes for an interesting case study.
But if you’re Canadian and concerned that either the current Conservative government will get a majority hold of Parliament, or conversely concerned that it will fail to do so, then there are several appropriate story lines to follow up North. The first is a growing Facebook group called ‘Anti-Harper Vote Swap Canada,’ which now boasts over 12,000 members.
The group works as follows:
“In a completely legal fashion, it allows voters in different ridings to swap votes to best ensure the Conservatives don’t win. Almost anyone who is opposed the Conservatives can take part. If your preferred party has no chance in your riding (or if they are absolutely certain of winning) you can use your vote elsewhere to help candidates from the same party beat the Tories, while at the same time voting strategically to stop the Tories in your own riding.” Read More »
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October 6th, 2008, 06:17pm
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A number of innovations in the payments industry are enabling customers to become more ‘green’ with their purchases. Credit card companies such as Visa are taking their detailed knowledge of an individual’s purchases to create incentives and programs to allow the cardholder to become more environmentally friendly.
The latest partnership involves Visa and RePay International, a company that helps manage carbon emissions of products. The initiative allows business customers to sign up for a carbon neutral card that will automatically calculate the carbon emissions and offset them with a green project. Similar initiatives run by Barclays, Co-operative Bank and Rabobank promote responsible purchases or try to neutralize the environmental damage of products.
With detailed information on a customer’s spending, financial institutions are in a unique position to evaluate an individual’s environmental impact. Knowing that someone has a mortgage for a 5000 sq.ft house, a loan to buy an SUV, spends $200 a month on utility bills and $500 on fuel will allow a rough estimate of their carbon footprint. Keeping privacy in mind, banks can and should use this information to help customers make more educated choices.
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September 19th, 2008, 05:07pm
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Back in January, nGenera colleague Derek penned an interesting post on the Eco-Patent Commons, a consortium of large private sector organizations each of whom pledged to release a portfolio of dozens of environmentally focused patents to the public domain. As many of these patents have been lying dormant in the R&D labs of these companies, releasing them to the public as a means of seeing whether outside experts might be able to do something with them carries little risk. But it does mark a departure from the usual process of monetizing unused IP/patents. In fact, given the thrust towards green-tech and environmental sustainability you might question why you’d give up valuable IP in this space, and subsequently one might question the quality/value of these now available patents.
That notwithstanding, the good folks at IBM (one of the founders of the consortium) sent us through a little update on the project that I thought was worth mentioning here:
“I wanted to give you a heads up that later today we will announce that Xerox, DuPont and Bosch have joined the Eco-Patent Commons, a first-of-its-kind business effort to help the environment by pledging environmentally-beneficial patents to the public domain. The newly-pledged patents include:
-A Xerox technology that significantly reduces the time and cost of removing hazardous waste from water and soil;
Read More »
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September 16th, 2008, 07:58am
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I am currently enjoying a holiday on Canada’s beautiful (and stereotypically conscientious) West Coast and after witnessing a debate that I would likely never have heard back home in Toronto, I’ve been turned on to a new site (www.goodguide.com) that’s shed some interesting, and troubling, light on many of the products that I use at home while going about my day to day routine.
The debate took place in the Whole Body aisle at Whole Foods and it was centred around which toothpaste was best - Tom’s of Maine or Burt’s Bees. The winner was ultimately declared to be Tom’s, and the trump card that was triumphantly played to seal the victory was “It’s definitely Tom’s - just check their enviro rating on GoodGuide.” Being the inquisitive person that I am, and also feelng a little embarassed to have been seeking the $2 toothpaste among other $6 - $10 alternatives, I had to ask what this “GoodGuide” was.
As it turns out, it’s a site that in its own words “provides the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of the products in your home.” Read More »
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September 15th, 2008, 12:56pm
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I wouldn’t normally encourage you to Google “studbooks”, especially for those readers that visit us while they should be working. (Crickets)
What is a studbook? I’ll let the FAQ at Studbooks.org, answer that one:
A studbook is literally a register in which the origin (descent) and characteristics of the registered animals of one race or species are drawn up. In case of the ESF, this concerns a group of reptile and amphibian species. A studbook can arrange a number of things: management of an animal species in captivity, countering inbreeding by working with breeding programmes and knowledge collection and publication.
This means that the studbook keeper keeps track of which animals are being cared for at which location and which animals reproduce, the goal of this being to guarantee the genetic health of the population on the long term. Animals and their offspring can be exchanged between (aspiring) studbook members, with the studbook keeper possibly playing a mediating / advising role. The studbook keeper can be consulted if there are questions regarding the husbandry and breeding of the species.
Once a year, the studbook keeper publishes an annual report, in which mutations and successes of the past year are noted.
The FAQ also explains why studbooks are important:
Especially for species that are in danger of extinction (in captivity and/or in the wild), it is vitally important to keep the gene pool of the population as broad as possible. The smaller the population, the bigger the chance of risks that come with inbreeding. With every individual animal that dies in a small population (such as the European captive population), part of the genetic variation disappears that is necessary for a genetically healthy population. The same applies for an animal that does not reproduce: this individual is genetically `dead` for its populations future existence, unless an effort is made to breed with the individual.
The collection and transfer of knowledge means that an effort is made to collect, and eventually publish, as much information as possible about the husbandry and breeding of a studbook species. This way, one person can be consulted instead of `the wheel having to be reinvented` again and again.
In essence, through collaboration, these zoology “dating sites” can best match breeding pairs based on data captured in various sources and tabulated in a common space. Steve Feldman, spokesperson for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums which oversees the majority of studbooks for exotic species in the United States was quoted in the Sunday New York Times “to paraphrase an old Jeff Foxworthy joke, it’s important that your family tree forks. This way we can have a genetically diverse population.”
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September 5th, 2008, 08:37am
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I’m in Krems Austria at the Talk of the Future Conference. I have the opening keynote this morning. Last night I heard an amazing talk from Dr Franz Joseph Radermacher, head of the Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing and the Chair of Computer Sciences at the University of Ulm. Member of the club of Rome and an expert in artificial intelligence.. It was a profound talk. My notes are below:
The issue is not the individual. The issue is human kind as an intelligent system. We’ve been living for 4 million years. What keeps us together? Communication.
Innovations are powerful mechanism to change input output mechanisms. There is a universal mechanism of communication where by superior innovations become part of standard procedure. It took 4 million years to get us to 20 million people. 8,000 BC. Up to that point we were hunters and collectors. Read More »
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August 5th, 2008, 01:36pm
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Lost in the quest for more data is the ever increasing cost of building and cooling server farms. A great article in Business Week proposes the idea of building a massive server farm in a small fishing village 35 minutes south of Reykjavik, Iceland. The location is ideal, because it has a lot of vacant land, it is naturally cold (Iceland), and it has access to cheap geothermal energy. The graphic below shows how servers are cooled, and how much the energy cost of cooling them has increased in recent years.
The demand for more server capacity will continue to grow exponentially as both the number of web users grow, and the data becomes more complex. Although energy costs are still relatively small, they have the potential to spiral out of control. Am I the only one who sees the Great Canadian North as the possible future server farm capital of the world? There is endless, cheap, land, plenty of wind for power, and it’s naturally very cold. However, Siberia may give it a great run for its money.
Do people see this as a problem in the future, or will more efficient alternatives replace the concept of the server farm for our ever-increasing data needs?
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July 28th, 2008, 03:09pm
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Can Wikinomics Create a Fifth Street Corner?
This week I will profile the Seattle based coffeehouse giant Starbucks. In case you missed my last report card on De Beers; you can find it here. You can now find all my previous entries, and posts relating to them on the new Regular Features tab on the top left side of the page. Like all my previous entries, I will be evaluating Starbucks on the Wikinomics principles of being open, peering, sharing, and acting globally.
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July 26th, 2008, 03:46pm
What’s the solution for the ever-increasing gas prices? No, you don’t have to stop driving. With the help of a Finnish Internet community, you can convert your used gasoline-powered car to run on electricity. The Finnish-language forum, eCars – Now!, is taking a chapter out of the open source book to create a community where people can collaborate to start a mass movement toward electric cars. They’re encouraging the conversion from gas-powered cars to run on electricity, with the first rollout due this year.
Their website is designed to provide a portal for buyers and sellers of suitable used cars and components, and mechanics who can make the conversion with an electric motor and lithium batteries. Users on the site share ideas on the message board and e-mail lists, with the best information being put into use by the nonprofit community.
The first conversion target of this community will actually be a Toyota Corolla which they say have a range of 93 miles and a top speed of 75 miles per hour. (As a Toyota Corolla owner, this news is exciting to me.) If this community can successfully convert full size gasoline-power cars to run on electricity, look for this trend to catch on in your area. I may even be one of the first to convert my car if this trend hits the USA.
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July 7th, 2008, 09:49am
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Item number two on Dell’s IdeaStorm (a popularity contest for new suggestions) is to standardize laptop power cables. Why do we have such a proliferation of power cords when we could improve efficiency and reduce waste with standards? The business case for a universal adapter already sits on ebay, where a search for “universal power supply” produces over 300 item listings designed to solve this problem. This year, the world produced another 3 billlion power adapters, a figure which is steadily growing (in 2005 it was 2.2 billion).
China is one of the countries pushing the environmental frontier in this case. The country has standardized cell phone adapters on USB power according to this article, a simple but terrific idea.
the government has regulated that all cell phone chargers, including those imported, have a standard USB interface and output voltage, so consumers don’t need a new one with every new phone.
That just makes sense.
How many different power adapters do you own? If I include obsolete ones in my basement, I’m guessing I have well over a dozen… anyone else? How many cords would you replace if you had a universal power adapter?
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June 2nd, 2008, 03:02pm
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A recent report on mobile technology use by NGOs that Paul blogged about last week included an innovative example of how mobile sensing technology is revolutionizing data collection.
“According to [Eric]Paulos [of Intel Research, California], in many cases our knowledge of ambient air quality is limited to ‘a small handful of government installed environmental monitoring stations that use extrapolation to derive a single air quality measurement for an entire metropolitan region.’ He argues that this ‘sparse sensing strategy does little to capture the very dynamic variability of air quality that depends on automobile traffic patterns, human activity, and output of industries.’”
A pilot program in Accra, Ghana overcame many of these issues by equipping seven taxi cabs with mobile, GPS-equipped carbon monoxide detectors. The merged data created a detailed and dynamic map of air-quality data across the city. Not only is this information valuable for researchers and planners, the taxi-drivers themselves started using the information to avoid high-pollution areas on their routes.
Read More »
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May 26th, 2008, 06:06pm
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With over half of the world’s population owning a mobile phone and with networks covering over 90% of people, the impact of these devices is set to be greater than that of PCs. A recent study highlights the potential for improving life in developing (as well as developed) countries through mobile communications. The study outlines several cases of how NGOs have adapted mobile technologies to deliver services.
The report lists 11 case studies in three areas: Global Health, Humanitarian Assistance and Environmental Conservation. Although I highly recommend reading the entire report here are a few highlights of the more creative ways that mobile phones have been used:
• A South African NGO called Cell-Life started an HIV/AIDS “Aftercare” program for rural and poor patients who have little access to healthcare services. A worker equipped with a mobile phone makes home visits to 15-20 patients. Data on each patient is captured and sent via text message to the organization’s database. It is then used to provide individualized care to the patient while yielding valuable information about the AIDS epidemic in each region.
• The World Food Programme piloted using text messages to alert refugees and displaced people about the availability of food aid. The project was launched in Syria, where many of the 1.4 million displaced Iraqis rely on the agency for survival. Whereas before, the WFP would need to rely on local NGOs to help with distribution, the text messaging campaign proved far more accurate and effective.
• FishMS is a service in South Africa that allows consumers to make more informed decisions about the seafood they buy. A user can text the name of a fish to FishMS and instantaneously receive a message indicating whether the species is sustainably harvested. In just over a year the service received 30 000 inquiries from concerned shoppers.
The report outlines several other case studies of how mobile technologies are allowing people to connect, self-organize or receive vital information to improve their lives. While initiatives such as the One Laptop per Child are commendable in trying to bring the information age to developing countries, it certainly seems that mobile technologies will remain one step ahead.
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May 5th, 2008, 06:04pm
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A recent study by McKinsey & Co forecasts that the world’s data centres will surpass air travel as egregious environmental offenders (as measured by greenhouse gas emissions) by the year 2020 if substantial improvements are not made. The cause of such emissions will be the tremendous amount of electricity required to run, and more importantly, to cool these ever-growing data repositories. The electricity required to power these data centres is matched, and often exceeded, by the amount of electricity required to cool these always-on, heat-generating beasts. For those having trouble visualizing what all this might look like in more familiar terms, a typical server rack is about the size of a refrigerator, and consumes as much as 30kW of electricity. This is the equivalent of 300, 100-Watt light bulbs running incessantly – a whole lot of power and a considerable amount of heat.
The study points to gross utilization inefficiencies as a particular cause for concern, pointing out that on average, servers are typically run at 6% of their overall capacity, with data centres as a whole running at less than 60% of peak capacity. Read More »
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April 21st, 2008, 09:05am
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Today’s Globe and Mail discusses a survey of 1,500 Canadians who were asked for their opinion on the economy. The most shocking part of the survey is what people ranked as the biggest “challenges facing Canada”. The “price of gasoline” was ranked an astonishing number 2, only “the state of the health care sytem” ranked higher. That puts gas prices ahead of issues such as “education”, “crime and safety”, “reduction of poverty” and “climate change” (which is ranked way down on the list at number 11).
I’m ashamed to see price of gas as number 2 on this list. Obviously when the contest is between our personal pocketbook and a variety of social and environmental issues (including climate change itself) we put our own interests first. If high gas prices are the biggest thing we have to worry about, then everything else in our society must be faring very well indeed.
With higher gas prices, maybe we’ll see more car pooling, fewer SUVs, trips that combine errands, and even more walking/biking/blading. Every $.05 in price in gas hikes brings automatic C02 redution with it. A $2 gas price would be the best thing that ever happened to mother nature.
I’d take improvements to education, crime & safety, and poverty reduction over cheap gas prices any day.
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April 2nd, 2008, 12:44pm
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This post is a couple of days overdue, but I just came across some neat pictures that I thought I’d share. We often talk about how climate change and the environment is the “first truly global cause,” creating a huge area of opportunity for Web 2.0 communities to bring global masses of concerned individuals together. That being said, the first global Earth Hour (2007 Earth Hour was in Sydney only), was very un-2.0. Over 20,000 businesses and some 300,000 individuals “signed up” on the official Earth Hour site, and almost a million people attended Earth Hour events on Facebook (there were several); however, the main clamour behind the event was as much a word-of-mouth effort as anything. Maybe it’s fitting, given that the goal of the initiative was all about putting technology aside for while to think about the planet and each other.
Read More »
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March 20th, 2008, 01:27pm
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In January, Anthony wrote a post on the potential for climate change to become the “killer application for mass collaboration.” In it, he speculated that,
An optimist could argue that we’re in the early days of something unprecedented—thanks to the web 2.0 the entire world is beginning to collaborate around a single idea for the first time ever: changing the weather. Climate change is quickly becoming a nonpartisan issue and all citizens obviously have a stake in the outcome. So for the first time we have one global, multi-media, affordable, many-to-many communications system, and one issue on which there is growing consensus. Around the world there are hundreds, probably thousands of collaborations occurring where everyone from scientists to school children are mobilizing to do something about carbon emissions. Read More »
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February 15th, 2008, 04:29pm
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Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the mass movement to curb global warming and all that…. But has anyone else noticed something interesting. There has been a lot of talk about it. (Almost) Everyone knows that it’s basically an inevitable truth … so why does it seem like nothing’s being done?
Well, to the contrary – there’s a lot being done. Perhaps, too much being done. Now, this is just a theory of mine, but I would argue that there are too many different ‘curb climate change’ initiatives going on. There’re so many, that people get confused, don’t know what to do, don’t know where to start.
For example, Al Gore gets credit for getting the ball rolling with his documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth”, and as I pointed out in a previous blog post– that really spiked people’s interest in the topic of global warming. Gore also has affiliations with the ‘Alliance for Climate Protection’, a web 2.0 initiative to raise awareness about global warming and things you can do. But here’s the thing - I was charged a little while ago to go searching for some ‘mass collaboration’ projects on the web dealing with climate change, and I found over 20 different websites, blogs, social networks and mashups.
Read More »
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February 11th, 2008, 05:11pm
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An innovative website called “Love Earth” is bridging the gap between the scientific world and people’s interest and concern over endangered species. The website tracks five species of animals along with the activities of scientists studying them. The result is an online blog and Google mash-up of the animal’s locations. An interesting way to bring home what mammalogists and cetologists actually do.
With the ever growing endangered species list, animal science and conservation could definitely use some popular support. The inaccessible nature of scientific work, however, makes it difficult for people to identify with the cause. While in some cases this may be mere apathy, there seems to be pent up demand for more accessible and interactive ways to learn about the environment. A perfect example of this demand is BBC’s Planet Earth series, a nature documentary, which was the most popular DVD sold on Amazon in 2007.
The work of thousands of scientists and conservationists is critical to the survival of many species. Finding a way to bring this battle into people’s living rooms could galvanize them to lend their support. Interactive, online experiences such as “Love Earth” might go a long way in doing this.
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