Marketing/ branding. Building Your Brand With Your Brand-New Website. By Taryn Southern | Posted March 21, 2013, 6:18 p.m. Photo Source: Nick Bertozzi “Before I jump into social media, I want to have a professional website. Where do you recommend I start?” Unfortunately, unless you’re a Web designer (or sleeping with one), building and maintaining a website is a seemingly never-ending, costly, and time-consuming work in progress. If you want to save yourself thousands of dollars, days of hassle, and handfuls of hair, it’s important to know how to avoid the top five most common actor website mistakes: 1. 2. 3. 4. Nike and Adidas take a green step: Water-less dyeing technology the new global textile trend | Consumer Instinct. Did you know that the amount of water used every two years by the textile industry to dye clothes is equivalent of the whole of Mediterranean sea?
On an average, 100 to 150 liters of water is required to process a kilogram of fiber. According to industry analysts, an estimated 39 million tons of polyester will be dyed annually by 2015. With the world water crisis getting worse, these are not a very welcoming statistics. If technology creates the problem, technology itself is the solution. The solution is provided by a Dutch company DyeCoo (first the sustainable dance floor and now this, the Dutch are truly eco-genius!). Although Nike was the first to announce that it is working to scale the technology for larger production and would roll out its first DyeCoo products at events later this year, Adidas has already started using this technology to dye 50,000 of its T-shirts. 1. 2.
Feature image: 0digg Comments. Coke ‘joins’ the anti-obesity fight — will fast food take note? Coca-Cola is on the offensive with its new ad campaign entitled “It’s not our fault you’re fat” “Coming Together.” A two-minute web ad kicks off a marketing blitz designed to help address the problem of obesity … a problem caused in no small part by the company’s products. Apparently, the solution involves drinking a soda and going for a run. I hope Michelle Obama is taking notes.
Watch: Was that so hard? Of course, the new campaign is not without its critics. This is not about changing the products but about confusing the public … They are downplaying the serious health effects of drinking too much soda and making it sound like balancing soda consumption with exercise is the only issue, when there are plenty of other reasons not to consume too much of these kinds of products.
It’s not just the public health advocates who are skeptical about the new campaign. But a bad reception from the business press isn’t likely to change Coke’s strategy. The reason is simple. US electric car industry poised to overtake Europe. Renewable energy. Build your own Electric Car! Cheap Solar Comes to Boston. Residents and businesses in Boston can pay less for electricity produced from solar energy than conventional sources, thanks to the Solarize Massachusets (Solarize Mass) program.
Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) CEO Alicia Barton McDevitt on Aug. 23 announced that Boston residents will now pay 11 cents per kilowatt-hour as compared to the 15 cents per kWh state average for electricity from traditional energy sources as a result of Boston’s participation in Solarize Mass. Massachusetts utilities and power providers rely on a mix of coal-fired, natural gas and nuclear power to meet the state’s electricity needs. That’s changing – rapidly – due in large part to state and federal government renewable energy incentive programs and stimulus funding.
Solarize Mass: A national model for bulk purchases of solar power Added Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who’s having solar panels installed on his home, “I encourage everyone to join the clean energy revolution in Boston. Wind (the answer is blowing in the wind) New Report Finds Installed Cost of Solar Power Dropped Significantly. Here’s some good news if you’re thinking of installing solar panels on your property. According to a new report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the cost of installed solar power dropped significantly in 2011, going into 2012, compared to 2010 prices.
The facts and figures are all in the latest edition of Berkeley Lab’s annual photovoltaic price report, Tracking the Sun, which also includes historical trends going back to 1998 for more than 150,000 solar installations in 27 states. The “soft costs” of installed solar power The report zeroes in on the overall cost of installing a photovoltaic system rather than on just the cost of the solar cells themselves, and that’s an important distinction. The Department of Energy has estimated that solar cells currently account for only half the total cost of a typical solar installation.
The other half consists of “soft costs” including permits, inspections, grid connections and other add-ons. How far did the cost of solar power fall? Renewable Sources Provide All New Generating Capacity in January — Three-Fold Increase From Same Period Last Year. The latest Energy Infrastructure Update released yesterday by the Office of Energy Projects at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission reports that the US had 1,231 megawatts (MW) of new in-service generating capacity come online in January of 2013 — all of it from renewable sources including wind, solar and biomass.
The new capacity for January represents a three-fold increase from the 431 MW of new renewable generating capacity that came online in January of 2012. Wind energy led the pack with six new units providing 958 MW, followed by 16 new solar units generating 267 MW of electricity and six new biomass units for 6 MW of new generation. Nuclear, hydro and all fossil fuel sources, including coal, oil, and natural gas offered no new electrical generating capacity last month.
Most generating capacity still comes from coal and natural gas, contributing 29.04 percent and 42.37 percent respectively. Article continues at Renewable Resources. Solar image via Wikipedia. Plant Your Phone | Get Paid to Recycle Your Cell Phone. New Technology for Hybrid Car Motors Leaves Rare Earth Behind.
China’s sprawling Baiyan Obo mine, which provides a substantial amount of today’s rare earths. There was a time when the hybrid car was considered the coolest thing on the block. Its electric motor, which utilized rare earth minerals – something that was once found in plentiful supply in many parts of the world – seemed like the simple answer to a dependence on fossil fuels. Electric vehicles are still in growing demand. But China’s announcement last summer that it would reduce its mining of rare earths (China currently generates more than 90 percent of the world’s usable supply) and the increasing cost of the minerals have forced manufacturers to rethink their design of the conventional electric motor.
And there has been no short supply of innovators for the task. Researchers throughout North America have come up with possible prototypes that get around the use of the precious and environmentally costly magnets that are produced from rare earth. It received funding through the U.S. Fast Growth in LED Industry. By Danielle Stewart LEDinside published an expansive report in November about the state of the LED industry. While some of the findings were expected, other results were surprising, to say the least. The LED industry generated $2.66 billion in 2012, which was a 23.5 percent increase over the previous year.
Decreasing prices and technical improvements in color quality and luminosity have led to increased demand in all sectors, but architectural and indoor lighting saw the biggest increases. LEDinside expects low- and mid-power lighting products to dominate the market in 2013. For example, Samsung’s 5630 LED can generate up to 50 lumens of light with 0.5 watts of electricity. Technical improvements Price, rather than efficiency or color quality, drives current growth. The 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami increased LED market penetration in that country up to 50 percent, and LED shipments to the country doubled in a single year. Increased competition Commercial LEDs market. Incandescent Light Bulbs have served us well but now it is time to turn them off! After more than a century lighting up the world, the switch will be flicked off across the EU for the final time on incandescent bulbs on Saturday as the phased ban on their sale is completed.From 1 September, an EU directive aimed at reducing the energy use of lighting means that retailers will no longer be allowed to sell 40W and 25W incandescent bulbs.
Similar bans came into effect for 60W and 100W incandescent bulbs over the past three years. The restrictions are predicted to save 39 terawatt-hours of electricity across the EU annually by 2020. Earlier this year, the UK government said the ban would bring an "average annual net benefit" of £108m to the UK between 2010 and 2020 in energy savings.
But the phase-out of incandescents has been met with resistance by some users who say replacement technologies, such as CFLs, halogens and LEDs, do not perform as well. "The phase-out has been very smooth," said Peter Hunt, joint chief executive of the Lighting Industry Association. Science & Technology. Apple. Apple Blog. iMac App. iPad. iPod. iPhone. Apple returns to EPEAT environmental ratings list. What’s inside your iPhone 5? [VIDEO] Tablet PC. Printing 3D Houses. Google's self-guided car could drive the next wave of unemployment | Technology | The Observer. Almost without noticing it, our world crossed a significant threshold last week. Jerry Brown, the governor of California, signed into law a bill that will allow driverless cars on to his state's roads from 2015. Insofar as most people noticed this event at all, they probably sniffed derisively.
For some, it'll be seen as an example of techno-hubris – "flags on the moon stuff" – as one of my acquaintances put it. For others, it will be seen as yet another confirmation of the proposition that the continental United States slopes gently from east to west, with the result that everything with a screw loose rolls into California. Governor Brown signed the bill at Google's HQ in Mountain View. At the ceremony in Mountain View, Google's co-founder, Sergey Brin, announced the company's intention to bring autonomous vehicles to the market in five years. Ignore the evangelism for a moment and think about what Google has achieved. This isn't just about cars, by the way. So where did the jobs go? Will Robots Create Economic Utopia? The robots are coming! Every day it seems we hear another story blaming robots and automation for the disappearance of not only menial jobs, but middle-class ones as well—the kind of work that pays enough to fund a pension, a health-care plan, and a home mortgage.
The deepening gloom over jobs runs deeper than robots. The rapidly spreading digital economy has reached critical mass, transforming industries and replacing workers of all kinds. Think high-speed trading on Wall Street. The lightning-quick trades account for most of the volume on the major stock exchanges, yet the action is driven by computers and software communicating with other computers and software, supervised and monitored by at most a relative handful of highly compensated workers.
(As a Wharton School report put it, “In the time it takes to read this sentence, tens of thousands of high-speed, computer-automated transactions can occur.”) Forget these jeremiads. Will there be jobs?