Urban Planning
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 [...]
Jamie Oliver pleads with us to stop killing our kids with crappy food: www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html Blaise Aguera y Arcas will blow your mind with the next generation of augmented reality mapping tools. Makes Google Maps look like crayons and paper. www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html Running more effective board meetings. Not rocket science but good basic article. www.cloudave.com/link/running-more-effective-board-meetings-at-startups It turns [...]
(EDIT: I said Milton Friedman who is of course, no longer with us, may he rest in peace. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.) 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 [...]
Check out the newly launched Climate Action Plan Indicators tool from the City of Berkeley that is based on Vancouver’s own Visible Strategies‘ “See-It” application. 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 [...]
Cool looking little commuter concept car from Rinspeed. Cute! It’s like a pug. Imagine owning a pug dog and a Rinspeed? They’d be the perfect Yaletown accoutrements. Rinspeed UC: Want to Get More Miles Out of Your Electric Car? Take It on a Train | Technomix | Fast Company.
Daya Baran has written two excellent posts over at WebGuild on the people, ideas, and capital that are fleeing Silicon Valley as the geographic center becomes less relevant. He quotes Jim Clark (of SGI, Netscape, and Healthon fame) who exited 10 years ago to Florida. Here are the posts: Part 1 Part 2 I have [...]
Thanks to Brad Feld for pointing out this excellent article by Jonah Lehrer titled “How the City Hurts Your Brain…and what you can do about it.” Having recently moved from the Bay area back up to relative country side where I see trees mountains and birds all day, I can attest to much of what [...]
30 days of Sustainability is once again happening in Vancouver. This year it runs from April 22 – May 21, 2007. I highly recommend that people go check out the temporary site and sign up for updates. The full site will launch sometime in the next few weeks.
I would like to offer up a business idea to an enterprising young engineering student. Develop something that operates a bit like a speeding ticket camera but that is for sound level instead. Build it so that it can sit in intersections and detect noise levels of Harley Davidsons and other bikes with modified exhausts [...]
My friend Boris Mann had some great things to say about Vancouver being an excellent place to join or start a company here in this posting. However, I would add “capital efficiency”, great education system, and an awesome talent pool to to the list of reasons that Vancouver is a great place to build a [...]
I’m intrigued by stories such as this one in the ABC News about the plumbers union in Philadelphia who claim that no-flush green urinals are a health threat. I wonder if the union sees them more as a health threat to the UNION DUES than to the USERS. Does anybody have any information on negative [...]
Here are the details on one of the first Sustainability Cafés: When: Monday, March 6, 6:30 – 8:30 pm Where: BCIT Campus (CHBA BC, Building NW5), 3700 Willingdon Ave, Burnaby, BC SUSTAINABLE HOMES Description: What do you consider a “sustainable” home? What do you need to get there? Where is “there”? An innovative dialogue hosted [...]
(If you are looking for the 2007 event information, please click HERE.) I am very excited about our launch of the 30 Days of Sustainability. For the month of March, Vancouver will host a cornucopia of events and activities, all focused around bringing sustainability to our lives and our city. One key component of the [...]
Here are some of the gems from this week’s excellent article:
My mother, she had this car. It was …
This is an extremely long post on Massive Change, the multi-media exhibition that is intended to be the starting point for a global discussion on the role of design in creating our world. Here is a bit from their website that gives you a sense of the goals of the project.
Fred Wilson over at the A VC blog originally noted sometime back in September that Philadelphia had launched an initiative to provide wireless internet access across their entire city. Now he has written about San Francisco undertaking a similar venture. I think that this is something that Vancouver, Canada should absolutely launch. Having wireless internet [...]
The Universe is 14 billion years old and will either either re-collapse into itself, expand into a completely diluted state, or rip apart in its 36th billion year in a runaway expansion so violent that galaxies and planets will be torn asunder in a fraction of a second. How do we manage the polarity inherent [...]
