Does this mean I'm now a cover model?

Backbone Magazine has just published a great overview of the cleantech sector in Canada that contains quotes from a number of notable people in the space including Kirk Washington (Yaletown Venture Partners), Victoria Smith (BC Hydro), Rick Whittaker (Sustainable Development Technology Canada), Raul Pacheco-Vega (UBC), Helen Goodland (Lighthouse Sustainable Building Centre) and me. Thanks to the Globe team and Lisa Manfield the author for a great article. You can either jump to the article, to the table of contents of this issue, or to a list of all of the issues.

(click to go to the page with the animation, then hit PLAY)

]]> http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/04/07/walmarts-40-year-growth-curve-fantastic-animation-looks-like-viral-infection-writ-large/feed/ 0 http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/28/adam-werbach-to-youth-you-were-born-to-save-the-planet-you-get-to-clean-up-the-mess-get-on-it/ http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/28/adam-werbach-to-youth-you-were-born-to-save-the-planet-you-get-to-clean-up-the-mess-get-on-it/#comments Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:49:28 +0000 Troy Angrignon http://www.troyangrignon.com/?p=1011 Aside from the continuing use of the annoying “save the planet” meme (the planet will be fine – it’s really “save the humans from an ugly step-down crash”) this is a great talk that Adam Werbach just gave recently tothe Teens Turning Green conference. Adam is the Global CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi, author of “Strategy for Sustainability”, and the former President of the Sierra Club.

I’ve excerpted the beginning below. Click here for the full speech transcript over on Care2.com.

You were born to save the planet.

The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and it has all been leading up to you.  4.4 million years ago an ancestor we now call ARDI roamed the land of Ethiopia, and her life was leading up to you.  The last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, thawed, leaving the redwood forests to our North, and all of this was leading up to you.  The Earth needs you right now.

Your generation was born to save the planet.

Have you ever wondered when things started going wrong?  Our ecological systems are in decline, one-third of fish species stand at the verge of collapse, the glaciers of the Himalayas, which provide drinking water to over a billion people, are rapidly melting, the chemicals we’re putting in us, on us and around us are forming complex endocrine disrupting compounds that are in every one of our bodies.  Every mother who is breastfeeding in America today is probably passing a man-made chemical to their child.   There’s something fundamentally wrong when mothers need to worry about chemicals that they’re passing to their children.

We’re born with better sense than that. You learn basic rules in kindergarten. Don’t break your friend’s toys.  Share. Wait in line. Don’t hurt anybody. Robert Fulghum wrote a little book called All I Needed to Know I learned in Kindergarten.   But then we grow up.  We forget all of that.  The plague of Middle School is visited upon us.  We get focused on soccer practice.  And bands.  And ballet.  And sex. And STAR tests.  And SATs. And college.

I actually want to write a sequel to Fulghum’s book.  We could call it:  All I Need to Forget I learned in Middle School.

Whenever it started, the bad news seems to keep on coming.

Ten months ago the last wild jaguar in the United States was killed.  The last one. They called it Macho B.  Biologists had been seeing Macho B for years. The Arizona Department of Game and Fish killed it accidentally in a bungled attempt to save it, because the Federal Government had refused to give the jaguar Endangered Species Protection.

This is happening in your lifetimes.  This isn’t something you need to wait for a Kens Burns Documentary to hear about, the crash in biodiversity in our last wild places is happening now.

Click here to read the rest.

Kevin Kelly tells the epic story of technology from the birth of the universe until now.

Then Bill Gates asks for his one big wish for humanity’s technological development: an energy miracle to help the poorest 2 billion people on the planet thrive.

Thomas L. Friedman wrote an excellent post over here at the NY Times pleading with the climate folks to go on offense with a simple 50 page grade six english report on the state of the world. It’s awesome. Read it. I agree with all of it and particularly getting rid of the phrase “global warming” because idiots then say “well it was warm today here in Arizona so Al Gore is OBVIOUSLY a lying idiot.”(sigh)

Key quotes are below:

What’s real? In my view, the climate-science community should convene its top experts — from places like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre — and produce a simple 50-page report. They could call it “What We Know,” summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed footnotes.

At the same time, they should add a summary of all the errors and wild exaggerations made by the climate skeptics — and where they get their funding. It is time the climate scientists stopped just playing defense. The physicist Joseph Romm, a leading climate writer, is posting on his Web site, climateprogress.org, his own listing of the best scientific papers on every aspect of climate change for anyone who wants a quick summary now.

Here are the points I like to stress:

1) Avoid the term “global warming.” I prefer the term “global weirding,” because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.

The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.

2) Historically, we know that the climate has warmed and cooled slowly, going from Ice Ages to warming periods, driven, in part, by changes in the earth’s orbit and hence the amount of sunlight different parts of the earth get. What the current debate is about is whether humans — by emitting so much carbon and thickening the greenhouse-gas blanket around the earth so that it traps more heat — are now rapidly exacerbating nature’s natural warming cycles to a degree that could lead to dangerous disruptions.

3) Those who favor taking action are saying: “Because the warming that humans are doing is irreversible and potentially catastrophic, let’s buy some insurance — by investing in renewable energy, energy efficiency and mass transit — because this insurance will also actually make us richer and more secure.” We will import less oil, invent and export more clean-tech products, send fewer dollars overseas to buy oil and, most importantly, diminish the dollars that are sustaining the worst petro-dictators in the world who indirectly fund terrorists and the schools that nurture them.

4) Even if climate change proves less catastrophic than some fear, in a world that is forecast to grow from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion people between now and 2050, more and more of whom will live like Americans, demand for renewable energy and clean water is going to soar. It is obviously going to be the next great global industry.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Global Weirding Is Here – NYTimes.com.

It allows all of the stakeholders to have a dashboard that lets them input their goals, and then track their progress towards those goals.

Congrats VS team and City of Berkeley on the launch!

]]> http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/17/city-of-berkeley-launches-their-climate-action-plan-using-vancouver-based-visible-strategies-see-it-wow/feed/ 0 http://www.troyangrignon.com/2009/12/17/david-liittschwagers-marine-micro-fauna-photo-series/ http://www.troyangrignon.com/2009/12/17/david-liittschwagers-marine-micro-fauna-photo-series/#comments Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:39:26 +0000 Troy Angrignon http://www.troyangrignon.com/2009/12/17/david-liittschwagers-marine-micro-fauna-photo-series/ Wow. Check out the beautiful macro photography of David Liittschwager with his Marine Micro Fauna collection.

As I look at two trends that I’ve been part of in the past couple of years, I see Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 which was about reaching out beyond the firewall and interacting across boundaries, and I see cloud computing which is about moving systems and applications outside of the firewall into “the space in between.” Now we have both desire/intent (enterprise 2.0) and ability (cloud) to enable much broader and deeper integration of networks of actors, be those vendors, suppliers, partners, or press.

I’m as guilty as the next person of always wanting to move to the next next thing from Apple or pretty much any brand company I’m associated with. I was one of the first adopters of Mac OS 10.0.0 (what a nightmare that was), I had one of the earliest iPhones, I got rid of my CDs about a hundred years ago. I stopped using desktop applications about two years ago. I am the ultimate tech savvy early adopter.

The issue is that there are two important factors to consider:

• your buddhist wanting mind will never ever ever ever ever go away and you will constantly crave the next next thing from Apple (or BMW or Ford or Walmart or Amazon or …)
• Apple and most technology companies have pretty well established patterns of releases and if you know them, you can ride them appropriately so you stay productive.

Buddhists call the part of you that seeks to find new experiences and that drives the shopping urge the “wanting mind”. It is the bottomless pit of desire that says “if I just buy that one thing / upgrade to the new O/S, get that new app for my phone / etc., my life will be complete and I PROMISE I’ll be happy.” Don’t believe the lie. You can choose to be happy with nothing. Satisfying that urge gives you momentary relief until your seeking mechanism picks a new target. We’re wired this way in our DNA. Don’t listen to it. Or at least be aware that’s what is going on when you irrationally crave the leap to the new O/S, even when you don’t really know what it will do for you.

I’d like to suggest that Mac OS X 10.5.8 (the most up to date version of 10.5) is probably the best we’re going to get from Apple in the next nine months. With the leap to Snow Leopard 10.6.0, Apple is putting in a stronger foundation but breaking a lot of stuff above ground. That’s because of this pattern:

• Mac OS 9.0….9.x.y: the development years;
• Mac OS 9.x.y (the very last release of Mac OS before adopting the new NextStep O/S foundation):this was the penultimate Mac OS 9 O/S – fully featured, fast, multi-application. It was a thing of beauty.
• Mac OS 10.0: the nightmare beta. Unix based but they threw out 10 years of UI and started from scratch.
• 10.1.0: It sucked less
• 10.2.0: They sped it up.
• 10.3.0: Getting better! (but more apps broke)
• 10.4.0: Hey this thing is fast, solid, and runs really well (and some apps broke)
• 10.5.0: Wow, I love this stable, fast, lovely, beautiful Mac and all of my apps run so well.
  • 10.5.8: Even all the little patches and glitches are fixed!
• —— big O/S. foundational break point——–
• 10.6.0: WHOA – a whole bunch of applications broke here. The finder was rewritten from scratch (a good thing) but alot of applications are now borked. If your drive was partitioned incorrectly, you need to clone it to an outside drive, format/partition it to GUID partition tables (wtf are they? yes, exactly my point), and restore the drive and THEN upgrade it to 10.6. Quicktime is a frankenmonster and now has a crappy poorly thought out UI and still requires Quicktime 7 to live on the drive anyway. It now only runs on Intel macs so if you have multiple generations of Macs and move your cloned copy around to different machines or want to use them as emergency spares, you can’t do that with OS 10.6 unless they’re all Intel based. They gave us a few new features (like Exchange integration which is great for those who need it) but broke a lot of cool tools like Widemail/Letterbox that give  you 3 pane views in Mail.app or Windows Live Sync or Parallels Desktop and the list goes on and on. This is a big foundational change and not a user release. It is Apple’s attempt to defray engineering costs of their new O/S by getting a bit of revenue in now which is brilliant on their part.

If you want to stay productive, update your system to 10.5.8, run Alsoft Diskwarrior on your machine, free up as much hard drive space as you can so your virtual memory works better and stay happy and productive on 10.5.8 until 10.6 hits at least 10.6.1 or 10.6.2 or maybe even 10.6.3.  Unless you’re an Exchange user, in which case you should just suck it up and live with the pain and upgrade. The upside of having Exchange integration will far outweigh the minor UI niggles and the upgrade path pains. But for everybody else, I recommend staying where you are.

I want to step into my “office” which would be more like a World of Warcraft world and it could be in a giant hamster ball on wheels so I could run any direction I want. And I should be in a fully immersive environment where I can run in any direction, and interact with my applications with big motions (must jump onto 4 foot box so I can see my email!) or if I want to talk to somebody who is in a different system, I should have to “run” to the other room to answer the inbound message. I want to be completely utterly physically exhausted from my day at work, not sore from a complete lack of activity and too many hours of no motion in the joints.

Or I suppose I could quit and become a labourer. But my work is so damned interesting and I love interacting with all of the people I know. I just wish I could do it while running, jumping, leaping, climbing, and crawling so I could work, have fun, and stay in great shape all at the same time. Maybe I should be quitting work in the web industry and working as a firefighter but I know it wouldn’t hold my mental interest!

I made a couple of posts the other day (post 1, post 2) about my (our collective) nightmare with respect to calendar and contact and social network management. Boris Mann responded with:

Google Wave, under all the magic, is actually based around XMPP. I’ve been predicting the second coming of XMPP as a protocol to rival HTTP since before it was called that (or, about 3 years).

I have some ideas about the identity piece, and I actually think (yes, crazy, I know) that SXIP was partially headed in the right direction.

Troy is totally spot on about data flows, although it is logins (i.e identity + permissions) plus data flows that is important. “In the future”, one might imagine a composer like Yahoo Pipes where you can “pipe” data workflows between different apps. An email is an email is an email, whether in the billing system, the PM system, or the support system.

None of these are islands, they’re already leaking into each other. We just (for now) have this terrible tool of “synch” rather than connected flows.

First let me say that Boris has always been my  bellwether of what’s coming up next. He taught me about Drupal about 2 years before anybody else cared.  And he has done this repeatedly so I trust him when he says that real-time communication and XMPP based systems are coming.

In thinking about his comment above, I realized that I needed to start a meme in the Saas world:

Integration, Integration, Integration. It’s about the Integration. (Crikey, I sound like Ballmer.)

As a business, you DO want to move to the web, but in order to actually get more benefit than just the supposed (and sometimes difficult to realize) benefits of Saas vs. on premise, it’s important to minimize the number of platforms that you adopt because every extra platform you bring on gives you more identity headache and worse, more data flow headache so your ability to have your people use those systems and flow that data around in a meaningful business process are blocked.

You want MORE Saas on FEWER platforms where everything is PRE-INTEGRATED so you can have single-sign-on and flow the data in a simple way. Salesforce + Google Apps + Echosign = bliss. Google Sites + Dropbox? Nope. Can’t do it. They don’t connect. So to achieve what I wanted the other day, namely finding a simple cloud based file server that integrates with Salesforce and Google Apps in a clean way from an identity and data availability perspective – that sounds like a business opportunity for somebody because it’s not there (or I haven’t found it yet.)

KEEP IT INTEGRATED STUPID (KIIS) – pass on the meme.

And by the way, yes, I’m aware of the Cast Iron’s of the world who help companies with these issues but defaults are important. Something like 99.999999% use the defaults (yes, I made that number up) and so if it’s not built in, then it won’t get used by the broader market.

My question is this. For all of us uber connected networking, writing, blogging, conference-going wonks, is your system as horrendous? What great ideas have you found to tame the chaos?

Current view:

And here’s the resulting Venn diagram of how my stuff just DOESN’T stay connected in one large meaningful (and simple) way.

Will somebody fix this please? It’s only going to get worse. I’d happily pay somebody a monthly fee to manage all of this, keep it clean and de-duped, analyze my email to capture email and phone number changes, and let me never think about this ever ever again.

And Skype team: WTF are you doing way out there in space?

Well, I’m psyched to find out that Stephen Wolfram (head of Wolfram Research) has publicly announced WolframAlpha, a “computational knowledge engine” that can interpret your questions, go find the answers and then tell you the answer (or answers) to your question. This could potentially be a huge leap forward towards the realization of those science fiction characters. I can’t wait to see how well it works and to begin using and playing with it.

Thanks to Dave McClure for the link to this page by Nova Spivack.

• Day 1
• Enterprise 2.0
• SMB Session
• Launch Pad
• Keynote with Eric Schmidt
• Joi Ito on Worlds of Warcraft
• Ben Trott of Six Apart, talking about Vox
• Discussion with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. (Washington Post) and Barry Diller (IAC)
• Day 2:
• A Conversation with Jeff Bezos
• A Conversation with Bruce Chizen, Adobe.com
• Net Neutrality Debate with Vint Cerf and Robert Pepper
• Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker on the State of the Internet
• Fedex’s CIO talks about logistics
• Microsoft’s Debra Chrapaty “It’s all about the infrastructure”
• Korea’s MySpace Challenger: CyWorld Revealed
• Enterprise 2.0 mashups, with Marc Benioff
• Jeff Jonas explains how to give your company a Brain
• Don Tapscott discusses Wikinomics – his new theory of the global plant floor
  
• Meet Ning
• What GoDaddy knows, with Bob Parsons
• A Conversation with Ray Ozzie
• Day 3:
• The Database in the sky, with MySQL
• Yahoo! Technology Preview
• Disruption & Opportunity: Venture Capital
• From the eBay Labs
• Alumni Report: How did 2005s Launchpad companies do?
• Harnessing Collective Intelligence
• My Summary of the Summit

[My notes are in this square brackets.]

Harnessing Collective Intelligence with Jim Buckmaster (Craigslist), Owen Van Natta (Facebook), Toni Schneider (Automattic), and Richard Rosenblatt (Demand Media)

• On the panel:
• Jim Buckmaster / CEO, Craigslist
• Owen Van Natta, COO of Facebook
• Toni Schneider, CEO of Automatic
• Richard Rosenblatt, cofounder, chairman, CEO of Demand Media
• Buckmaster:
• We have made major business decisions (do we have sales people, do we get funding, do we expand the site) based on our customers discussions.
• We keep having people tell us we should be running text-ads. In theory we would make tens of millions of dollars. But so far…(in a deadpan voice)…none of our users are requesting those ads be there so we haven’t done it.
• [This got a great response from the audience. It's funny. As audience members, we all want to monetize the web, but as users of Craigslist, we appreciate his user-centricity!]
• We have taken no VC money at all.
• Rosenblatt:
• Demand Media is going to build tools that will let people embed their knowledge and share it with like-minded people and then get paid for it. We’re moving into all sorts of niches: hiking, outdoor sports, gradening,
• Question: You raised $220M. You bought 9 companies and rolled them into one big platform to start off with a solid base. So they bought “Trails” – that documents the 50,000 “professional trails” that are out there.
• Answer: Yes, we saw an opportunity and we moved to dominate it quickly and massively.
• Schneider:
• We only took a little bit of money (from Polaris)
• “User generated content” is too narrow of a term. It doesn’t capture the ranking/sorting/sifting functions.
• Spam is a huge problem for blogs. We have seen a doubling on the blogs in THE PAST THREE WEEKS alone. We built a completely adaptive spam system. When you mark something spam, that goes back to the server and the server learns going forward. That isn’t user generated content but it certainly is collective intelligence or community based ranking/marking/flagging.
• Van Natta:
•  We built some new stuff and our customers got very mad. We had to adjust very quickly. That’s good. It’s good to have your customers hammer you once in a while to make you realize how adaptable you need to be.
• Question: It sounds like you can be very adaptive. Talk about that.
• Rosenblatt: We consider product features as marketing. “Feature roll-out IS marketing.”
• [I **LOVE** that!!! What's our marketing budget? What marketing budget? You mean the money we're spending on talking with customers and making this product "kick ass?"]
• Question: what about giving up control. How do you do it?
• Schneider: We let our users do the language translation. We set up WordPress so that our users could hit the button and translate the page and post it directly and it went live that second. We reviewed thousands of lines of translation later and tweaked only a very few things and found only one intentional swap and it was a guy announcing his wedding date in German! It was BRILLIANT and allowed us to do a full language translation in 24 hours!!
• [That is a very powerful story!!]
• What advice do you have for new entrepreneurs?
  
• Schneider: Don’t build a business that people think is a good idea. People will always tell you that it is a bad idea. Focus on what you think is important and ignore the advice.
• Rosenblatt: Follow the users. Early.
• Question: There is a difference between knowledge and opinion; How do you deal with the fact that a large audience can say a lot of stuff that isn’t true?
• O’Reilly: Have you ever heard of Sturgeon’s Law? A science fiction writer named Theodore Sturgeon had an audience member once say to him, “95% of all science fiction is crap”, to which Sturgeon replied, “yes, but 95% of EVERYTHING is crap. So what?”
• [This parallells the comment in The Long Tail by Chris Anderson where he says: "The Long Tail is indeed full of crap. Yet it's also full of works of refined brilliance and depth and an awful lot in between." (p.116, The Long Tail)]
• Question: All of you have big communities. What is your role? Leader? Cop? Good guy? Bad guy?
• Rosenblatt: you are a guide most of the time but you also have the ability to police it to remove/sanction the damaging elements of the community. Your moderators need to have that ability to do that.
• Schneider: Your most involved people will begin to feel that they are helping you build your COMPANY, not just your product. You need to realize that ownership feeling is there and treat those people accordingly. You might not actually give them shares but you definitely need to let them be involved in your business.