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December 26, 2008
- Coal Industry Spent Tens of Millions On Marketing ‘Clean Coal’ As Eco-Friendly
Coal industry magnates, who stand to lose big if new pollution standards become law, reportedly spent between $35 million and $45 million on advertising this year pitching “clean coal” as a new environmentally friendly fuel, Washington Times reports. Dan Weiss, who co-authored the study on how much the coal industry spent on advertising and lobbying for [...]
- 11 days
source: (Environmental Leader) - China’s Recycling Rate Plummets
China’s Resource Recycling Agency says the the national recycling rate has fallen by 70 percent.- 11 days
source: (Environmental Leader) - Coke CEO Talks About Sustainability Efforts
Admitting that “sustainability is critical,” John Brock, chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola Enterprises, told Wharton’s business journal about some of the company’s environmentally and socially responsible decisions over the past few years.
Among them:
A new fleet of hybrid delivery trucks. Brock says Coca-Cola boasts the largest fleet of large-scale, hybrid electric trucks - 142 in total. [...]- 11 days
source: (Environmental Leader) - Winter: Not A Good Season For Renewable Energy Production
Winter may not be a good time for renewable energy production: biodiesel congeals in tanks, solar panels generate less power because there is less sun and wind turbine blades ice up, New York Times reports.
Last year a Summit Stage bus stalled in the middle of the night on Interstate 70 in the Colorado mountains because [...]- 11 days
source: (Environmental Leader) - Eaton Launches Sustainability Microsite
Eaton Corp., which recently changed its tagline to “powering businesses worldwide” to reflect a change in focus to hi-tech power management products, has launched a special section of its website devoted to sustainability.
The section lists the company’s sustainable practices in the following areas: environmental, health and safety performance, workplace and business ethics, technology development, and [...]- 11 days
source: (Environmental Leader) - U.S. Navy Cuts Energy Consumption 12%
Pushed by federal legislative mandates and the need to save money on energy costs, the U.S. Navy has reduced its overall consumption level by 12 percent as of this year, reports the Federal Times.
No additional funds were allocated for the effort, so the Navy is using “share-in-savings” contract systems: Companies pay for the energy upgrades [...]- 11 days
source: (Environmental Leader) - UN: CDM Increasing Emission-Saving Initiatives, Critics Disagree
The United Nations claims that its Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is causing an increase in emission-saving initiatives around the world, BusinessGreen reports.
The UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) year-end snap shot of CDM projects (PDF) reveals that the number of projects between 2004 and November this year increased to more than 4,200 projects from 61 four years [...]- 11 days
source: (Environmental Leader) - Well Fargo Passes $3 Billion Mark in Environmental Financing
Wells Fargo has provided more than $3 billion in environmental financing, two-thirds of which has gone toward projects for LEED-certified buildings, the company said.
Other projects supported by Well Fargo investments are in renewable energy ($700 million) which combined are expected to generate enough clean energy to power nearly a half million households.
About $500 million went [...]- 11 days
source: (Environmental Leader) - Ford to Pull Back Curtain on New Hybrid in ‘09
In what may be a huge marketing coup for a US auto manufacturer, Ford will unveil a hybrid that claims to be the most fuel-efficient midsize sedan on the market and the second-most fuel-efficient vehicle on the road, USA Today reports.
The Ford Fusion will get 41 miles per gallon in the city and 36 mpg [...]- 11 days
source: (Environmental Leader) - Eco-friendly Detergents Boosting Unilever’s Sales
Unilever’s eco-friendly detergents started as a way to boost the company’s green credentials, but is now driving growth in the company’s once-lackluster laundry unit, BusinessWeek reports.
The company says much of its know-how in creating more environmentally-friendly products comes from its experience in developing markets. In 2004, Unilever launched Surf Excel Quick Wash in India. The [...]- 11 days
source: (Environmental Leader) - San Francisco International Airport To Offer Carbon Offset For Fliers
San Francisco International Airport will soon be offering travelers the option to buy certified carbon offsets at airport kiosks, San Francisco Chronicle reports.
The airport commission has approved the trial program and SFO has invested $163,000. The airport is teaming up with 3Degrees, a San Francisco firm that sells renewable-energy and carbon-reduction investments.
In June, Denver International [...]- 11 days
source: (Environmental Leader)
December 25, 2008
- Happy Holidays!
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year! Posted via email from Jay’s posterous
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source: (4 entrepreneur) - Branding lessons from Will Smith
USA Today recently ran a cover story on Will Smith that spells out how the affable actor has amassed over $2.45 billion in North American box office receipts. I’ve grabbed some excerpts that should provide guidance to just about any type of brand.
Spend seven seconds sitting across from Will Smith, and you’ll never wonder why he’s a superstar. He’s charming and attentive, observant and clever — without ever seeming to try. When he talks, he makes eye contact; when he laughs, it takes over his whole body.
Smith, 40, is consistently in charge, on point and thinking ahead. Here’s how he does it:
1. Think globally
Any film Smith makes, as a star or through his Overbrook production company, “has to be extraordinary, it has to be entertainment, it has to be art.” And be “delivered to all people of the world.”
“If we don’t know how to sell it, we’re not going to begin — no matter how extraordinary I think the entertainment art is going to be.”
2. Talent at the top
Smith handpicks his directors.
“He takes me to places that I’d never choose myself,” Smith says of director Gabriele Muccino, who directed him to an Oscar nomination for 2006’s The Pursuit of Happyness.
3. Mix it up, to a point
“I have to challenge myself and push myself,” Smith says. “My only job is to make sure I don’t leave anything on the table, that I maximize what a young dude from Philly can do in the world of cinema. There’s no telling what I can create at this point.”
Two scripts he’d love to star in that Overbrook is developing are the stories of Nelson Mandela and Marvin Gaye. “I’m not certain I’m actor enough yet,” Smith admits. “I love both of those, and I need to make sure I’m man enough.”
4. Preserve the Smith brand
Smith doesn’t get busted for DUIs or punch or scream at paparazzi.
“By being famous, you’re afforded rights that other people who aren’t famous aren’t afforded,” he says. “If I’m going to walk to the front of the line (at the restaurant) because I’m Will Smith, then I have to sign all the autographs. If I don’t want to sign any autographs, I don’t walk to the front of the line. It’s that simple. Stand in the line with everybody else.”
5. Cross color lines
Growing up in Philadelphia, Smith attended a mostly white Catholic elementary school and a mostly African-American high school. He lived in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, attended a Baptist church and admired the Muslim girls who lived one street over.
Along the way, Smith learned that laughter is collective and unifying. “Those universal elements became really clear in my experiences growing up.”
6. Be master of your domain
Since 1996’s blockbuster Independence Day, Smith has generated a movie a year, sometimes two. When he signs on, he’s fully committed.
“He’s very firm with his own ideas and considerations about things,” Muccino says. “He doesn’t change his mind easily. If he says no, it’s no. If he says yes, it’s yes. He’s a man of his word. In Italy we call them men of honor.”
7. Leave nothing to chance
“We talked through all the elements of where we want to be so we can start, in this moment, designing our life toward that.”
Read the full story
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source: (4 entrepreneur) - Frank Gehry
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source: (4 entrepreneur) - Frank Gehry: Turning your passion into a great career
Frank Gehry was born Ephraim Owen Goldberg in Toronto, Canada. He moved with his family to Los Angeles as a teenager in 1947 and later became a naturalized U.S. citizen. His father changed the family's name to Gehry when the family immigrated. Ephraim adopted the first name Frank in his 20s; since then he has signed his name Frank O. Gehry.
Uncertain of his career direction, the teenage Gehry drove a delivery truck to support himself while taking a variety of courses at Los Angeles City College. He took his first architecture courses on a hunch, and became enthralled with the possibilities of the art, although at first he found himself hampered by his relative lack of skill as a draftsman. Sympathetic teachers and an early encounter with modernist architect Raphael Soriano confirmed his career choice. He won scholarships to the University of Southern California and graduated in 1954 with a degree in architecture.
Los Angeles was in the middle of a post-war housing boom and the work of pioneering modernists like Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler were an exciting part of the city's architectural scene. Gehry went to work full-time for the notable Los Angeles firm of Victor Gruen Associates, where he had apprenticed as a student, but his work at Gruen was soon interrupted by compulsory military service. After serving for a year in the United States Army, Gehry entered the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he studied city planning, but he returned to Los Angeles without completing a graduate degree. He briefly joined the firm of Pereira and Luckman before returning to Victor Gruen. Gruen Associates were highly successful practitioners of the severe utilitarian style of the period, but Gehry was restless. He took his wife and two children to Paris, where he spent a year working in the office of the French architect Andre Remondet and studied firsthand the work of the pioneer modernist Le Corbusier.
Gehry and his family returned to Los Angeles in 1962, and he established his own firm, Gehry Associates, now known as Gehry Partners, LLP. For a number of years, he continued to work in the established International Style, initiated by Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus, but he was increasingly drawn to the avant-garde arts scene growing up around the beach communities of Venice and Santa Monica. He spent more of his time in the company of sculptors and painters like Ed Kienholz, Bob Irwin, Ed Moses and Ed Ruscha, who were finding new uses for the overlooked by-products of industrial civilization. Frank Gehry began to look for an opportunity to express a more personal vision in his own work.
He had his first brush with national attention when some furniture he had built from industrial corrugated cardboard experienced a sudden popularity. The line of furniture, called Easy Edges, was featured in national magazine spreads, and the Los Angeles architect experienced an unexpected notoriety. Although Gehry built imaginative houses for a number of artist friends, including Ruscha, in the 1970s, for most of the decade his larger works were distinguished but relatively conventional buildings such as the Rouse Company headquarters in Columbia, Maryland, and the Santa Monica Place shopping mall.
Gehry found a creative outlet in rebuilding his own home, converting what he called "a dumb little house with charm" into a showplace for a radically new style of domestic building. He took common, unlovely elements of American homebuilding, such as chain link fencing, corrugated aluminum and unfinished plywood, and used them as flamboyant expressive elements, while stripping the interior walls of the house to reveal the structural elements. His Santa Monica neighbors were scandalized, but Gehry's house attracted serious critical attention and he began to employ more imaginative elements in his commercial work. A series of public structures in and around Los Angeles marked his evolution away from orthodox modernist practice, including the Frances Goldwyn Branch Library in Hollywood, the California Aerospace Museum and the Loyola University Law School. A number of his works in this period featured the unusual decorative motif of a Formica fish, and he designed a number of lamps and other objects in the form of snakes and fishes.
By the mid '80s, his work had attracted international attention and he was commissioned to build the Vitra furniture factory in Basel, Switzerland, as well as the Vitra Design Museum in Weil-am-Rhein, Germany. These projects established him as a major presence on the international architecture scene. His buildings displayed a penchant for whimsy and playfulness previously unknown in serious architecture. Most distinctive of all was his ability to explode familiar geometric volumes and reassemble them in original new forms of unprecedented complexity, a practice the critics dubbed "deconstructivism." His international reputation was confirmed when he received the 1989 Pritzker Prize, the world's most prestigious architecture award.
Although he originally completed his design for the proposed Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles in 1989, funding shortages and political infighting delayed construction of the project for many years. The Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, completed in 1990, was to be Gehry's first monumental work in his own country, a billowing fantasy in brick and stainless steel. Meanwhile, his interest in collaboration with other artists was expressed in the fanciful design for the West Coast headquarters of the advertising firm Chiat Day, in Venice, California. The entrance to the building took the form of a pair of giant binoculars, created by the sculptors Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.
Although his main project for Los Angeles went unbuilt through the '90s, he completed major projects in a number of other countries. His playful side reappeared in the "Dancing House" in the Czech capital, Prague. Comprising two undulating cylinders on a corner facing the river Vltava, the Czechs nicknamed the building "Fred and Ginger." His proposal for a museum in Seoul, South Korea, which he discusses in his 1995 interview with the Academy of Achievement, was ultimately rejected, but an even more ambitious undertaking lay just ahead.
Gehry's most spectacular design to date was that of the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, completed in 1997. Gehry first envisioned its form, like all his works, through a simple freestyle hand sketch, but breakthroughs in computer software had enabled him to build in increasingly eccentric shapes, sweeping irregular curves that were the antithesis of the severely rectilinear International Style. Traditional modernists criticized the work as arbitrary, or gratuitously eccentric, but distinguished former exponents of the International Style, such as the late Philip Johnson. championed his work, and Gehry became the most visible of an elite cohort of highly publicized "starchitects." He drew fire again with his design for the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle, but in his adopted home town of Los Angeles, a long-delayed project was reaching fruition.
The year 2004 saw the long-awaited completion of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. The building opened to great public celebration and immediately became the sprawling city's landmark building. Although built after his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the design actually predated it and featured a similar panoply of exploding titanium. The splayed pipes of the hall's massive pipe organ were likened by more than one writer to a packet of French fries, but the public response was ecstatic. Gehry's earlier experience building and renovating concert halls and amphitheaters had paid off in a facility that not only attracted international attention with its striking appearance, but thrilled musicians and listeners with its acoustically brilliant interior.
Over the years, Gehry has lent his imaginative designs to a number of products outside the field of architecture, including the Wyborovka Vodka bottle, a wristwatch for Fossil, jewelry for Tiffany & Co. and the World Cup of Hockey trophy. In 2006, the architect and his work were the subject of a feature-length documentary film, Sketches of Frank Gehry, by director Sydney Pollack.
As of this writing, Gehry is deeply immersed in a number of projects, including the new Barclays Center sports arena in Brooklyn, New York, a concert hall for the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, and a new branch of the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi. Most ambitious of all is the massive Grand Street project, a plan to entirely remake the thoroughfare leading from Los Angeles City Hall to Disney Hall. When it is completed, a wide swath of downtown Los Angeles will bear the indelible stamp of its adopted son, Frank Gehry, and his restless imagination.
Click here to listen to his interview at Academy of Achievement
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source: (4 entrepreneur) - Top 10 Ecopreneurs of 2008
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2008 has been a year signifying economic depression culminating in the worst holiday retail season in years. However it has also been a year of entrepreneurs burgeoning a variety of exciting new green businesses. Ecopreneurist has covered many of them over the course of the year. Here is a review of our favorite Ecopreneurs of 2008.
1. Van Jones - Pioneer of the Green Collar Economy
Van Jones is undoubtedly the Ecopreneur of the Year. He has spoken out against our unsustainable economic model that is based on consumption not production, run on debt vs. savings and thrift, and environmental destruction vs. preservation. But he has also shifted the rhetoric to one of hope by building a new economy with clean energy power centers and a clean enemy corps.
Read Jennifer’s post Van Jones’ Ecopreneurial Vision for the full story.
2. Derek McLeish - Transforming Carbon Emissions into Fuel
Carbon Sciences’s CEO Derek McLeish tells us that his company is the developer of a breakthrough technology to transform CO2 into the basic fuel building blocks required to produce gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel and other portable fuels.
Reenita gives you the full story in her post A Breakthrough Technology to Transform CO2 into Fuel
December 24, 2008
- Happy Holidays
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source: (4 entrepreneur) - cool pics
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source: (4 entrepreneur) - Top 10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation
Dan Schawbel is the author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success, and owner of the award winning Personal Branding Blog.
Brand monitoring has become an essential task for any individual or corporation. Years ago, when people talked about our brands, it was behind our backs and we almost never found out about it. Today, most of these dialogues are right in front of our own eyes and the number of locations where our brands may be cited is astronomical!
We must remember that conversations are being held on the web with or without our consent. That means we can choose whether to be observers, participants or outcasts. Before you select observer or outcast, remember that these conversations can have a negative impact on your brand. Also, when conversations start on the web, like a forest fire, they travel very fast and wreak havoc along the way; what might start out as a mere tweet, may turn into a blog post and then make national news.
Here’s a basic reputation management system that I’ve been using, as well as a list of the top 10 free tools you can start using today.
How to Begin
Depending on how popular and well-known your brand is, there may be few or many people talking about it. If you’re looking to start a blog, position yourself as an expert or start networking actively in your desired topic area, then listening is an important research routine. As you become more well-known, more conversations will be held around your brand name, so you’ll spend more time listening and possibly responding to blog posts, tweets, etc. If you’re a large and popular company, you may need to hire someone to manage these monitoring tools daily.
The first thing you need to do is acquire a feed reader. I personally use Google reader because it’s easy to sort feeds, bookmark/favorite them and share (give value) them with your network.
I would also register for a Delicious account, which can help you sort and organize blogs that mention your brand. Think of Delicious as your own research and development plant. Once you’ve set up these two accounts, the following tools will help you locate articles that mention your brand, feed them right into your central hub (Google reader) and allow you to manage them (Delicious).
1. Google
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your choice of query or topic. You can subscribe to each alert through email and RSS. The alerts track blog posts, news articles, videos and even groups. Set a “comprehensive alert,” which will notify you of stories, as they happen, for your name, your topic, and even your company. Yahoo! Pipes is also a good tool for aggregating and combining feeds into one central repository.
2. Blog Posts
If you have a blog, then you have to be on Technorati, which is the largest blog search engine in the world. They say that if you don’t claim your blog in Technorati, then you don’t own it! When you register with it, Technorati tracks “blog reactions,” or blogs that link to yours. Search for your brand on Technorati, and subscribe to RSS alerts so that when someone blogs about you, you find out.
3. Blog Comments
Backtype is a tool for monitoring blog comments. If people commented on various blog posts, citing your name, you never used to have a way of tracking it, until now. Backtype is a service that lets you find, follow, and share comments from across the web. Whenever you write a comment with a link to your Web site, Backtype attributes it to you.
Use it to remind yourself where you commented, discover influencers who are commenting on blogs that you should be reading, and continue conversations that you started previously. You can even subscribe to these comments using RSS. coComment is another tool that will help you manage your comments across the web.
4. Social Comments
Yacktrack lets you search for comments on your content from various sources, such as Blogger, Digg, FriendFeed, Stumbleupon, and Wordpress blogs. For instance, if you comment on a blog, you can locate other people who are commenting on that same blog post and rejoin the conversation.
My favorite feature of this tool is the “Chatter” tab, which allows you to perform keyword searches on social media sites and then notifies you of instances of your brand name. Yacktrack’s search page results also give you an RSS feed for the search term. You can also use Commentful and co.mments to track your social comments on the web.
5. Discussion Boards
Along with blogs and traditional news stories, discussion boards are another channel where people can gather in a community and talk about you. Most people disregard discussion boards until they see other sites commenting on information viewed on them. Use boardtracker.com to get instant alerts from threads citing your name.
Boardreader and Big Boards are other tools that work similar to this one
6. Twitter
Twitter messages (tweets) move at the speed of light, and if you don’t catch them they will spread like a virus. Using Twitter search, you can locate any instances of your name and decide whether you want to tweet back or ignore them. It really depends on the context and meaning of the tweet.
Conduct a search for your name, your company’s name, or various topics you’re interested in and then subscribe via RSS. Twilert and TweetBeep are additional tools you can use to receive email alerts.
7. FriendFeed
FriendFeed is a social aggregator. You have the ability to take all of your social accounts, such as YouTube, Delicious, Twitter, blog, and Flickr,
and pull them together into a single (Friend) feed. You can conduct searches on your brand throughout all social networks at once using this search engine.Aside from learning about the latest video or tweet related to your topic, you can analyze comments that people make under them. FriendFeed users tend to favorite and comment on what you share and tracking it will become more important as this service grows in population. You can also receive alerts straight to your desktop with Alert Thingy.
8. Social Search
Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. It allows you to track mentions of your brand across all of these areas.
The results are aggregated from the top social media sources, such as Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Delicious, Twitter and more. Like the other services, you can subscribe to your results by RSS or email. Other social search engines include Serph and Keotag.
9. Interactive Search
While all the other tools listed are quite rudimentary, this one is rather complex and intelligent. Instead of being hit with hundreds or even a thousand results for your brand name, Filtrbox only delivers the most relevant, credible mentions of things you need to track. Its “FiltrRank” technology scores content based on three dimensions: contextual relevance, popularity and feedback. You can look back to previous searches 15 days out for free as well.Posted via email from Jay’s posterous
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source: (4 entrepreneur) - Newsweek’s 1997 Gadget Shopping List: Merry Christmas Past
A snowy Christmas in Chicago has given us time to dig through our parents' Newsweek archives, including some amazing Bill Gates covers — see photos below.
More topical: Gems like this year-end gadget shopping guide from the Nov. 24, 1997 issue. (Cover story: "Can we stop Saddam?") On the Newsweek editors' Christmas lists:
- PalmPilot (PALM) Professional, $369. And don't forget a bevy of accessories, like the Metricom Ricochet wireless modem — another $349, plus $30/month for service.
- Seiko MessageWatch, $79.95 to $189.95. For $14.95 a month, you get unlimited local paging and email up to 16 characters long. By the way, where's our Casio TwitterWatch?
- Sony (SNE) Playstation, $149. Better than its rivals, the Nintendo N64 and Sega's Saturn, says Newsweek. Wacky 1997 rumor: Sega will be working on an "affordable but ultrahighend 128-bit system possibly in partnership with–guess who–Microsoft" (MSFT).
- Motorola (MOT) StarTac 8600 Cellular Phone, $800 to $1,200. Motorola's big hit of the late '90s, this phone was even "wearable" with the right armband or necklace accessory. Includes a built-in answering machine!
- Midisoft Family Music Center, $199.95. Four octave programmable keyboard, doubles as a digital studio mixer.
- Canon PowerShot 350 Digital Camera, $599. No mention of megapixels, but enough memory to store 47 pictures at once. "For even more pictures, snap in the 2MB CompactFlash memory card."
- "Austin Powers" DVD, $25. "For those early adopters on your Christmas list who already have Digital Video Disc (DVD) players hooked up in their home entertainment centers."
- Rolodex Rex PC Companion, $129 to $179. Tiny, read-only pocket organizer "so small you could conceal it under a credit card" — "the equivalent of a stuffed Filofax."
- Alphasmart 2000 Keyboard, $249. A keyboard with a built-in word processor that can store up to 64 pages of single-spaced text. Synchs up with an Apple (AAPL) Mac or PC.
- Sony SPP-SS960 Digital Spread Spectrum Phone, $199. Cordless home phone.
- Fritz 5 Chess, $88. PC chess game with a talking coach, database of 100,000 games and a "dazzling library of opening moves."
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source: (4 entrepreneur)
