Forbes publishes list of Heroes of Philanthropy
Mar 8, 2009 Philanthropy and Corporate Initiatives, Social Initiatives
Even as the world battles the current economic crisis, there have been people who are still being very generous with their help for the less fortunate. It is not necessarily the richest who make the maximum impact with their contributions. Everyone knows about Bill Gates and Warren Buffett promising billions, but its is really encouraging to see Forbes magazine coming out with their annual list of Asian Heroes of Philanthropy, which contains names which not gracing the Rich List, still makes tangible contributions for social good.
“Many opened up their chequebooks to help the victims of the Sichuan earthquake and the Myanmar cyclone in May. Many more donated to health, education, cultural and other causes,” Forbes said in an accompanying report. The list contains 48 names: 4 from India, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand, besides another four from Australia and New Zealand.
Read the full article and find the full list here.
Tags: Asia, Forbes, India, Philanthropy
Global initiative to improve fuel efficiency flagged off
Mar 7, 2009 Carbon Trading Mechanisms, Stars, Policy and Finance
50 by 50
FIA Foundation, International Energy Agency, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and other international bodies recently initiated the 50 by 50 project on the sidelines of the Geneva Motor Show. Under this, the agencies will encourage initiatives for a 50% improvement in the average fuel
economy of all cars on the road worldwide by 2050 – thus, the 50:50 moniker.
Interestingly, the technologies required to improve the efficiency of new cars 30% by 2020 and 50% by 2030, and the efficiency of the global car fleet 50% by 2050, mainly involve incremental changes to conventional internal combustion engines and drive systems, along with weight reduction and better aerodynamics. To achieve a 50% improvement by 2030, the main additional measures would be full hybridisation of a much wider range of vehicles (possibly including, but not requiring, plug-in hybrid vehicle technologies).The differences in costs will be low enough to be recouped just by saved fuel bills in a couple of years, yet all this will save billions of barrels of oil every year if implemented. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Climate Change, fuel efficiency
Tweet-a-Watt wins Greener Gadgets competition
Mar 3, 2009 Green Technologies, Ratings and awards
Tweet-a-Watt
In the recently organised Greener Gadgets design competition, Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone’s Tweet-a-watt walked away with top honors and a cash prize of $3000. The Tweet-a-watt is an open-source power meter that broadcasts your home’s energy use through Twitter, encouraging energy conservation by publicly displaying your power consumption. A working model can easily be constructed using readily available materials by the DIY types.
The Greener Gadgets design competition had thrown a challenge to design gadgets that address issues of product lifecycle, energy use, and sustainability in consumer electronics. The competition saw everything from cardboard computers to the wacky piezoelectric energy-generating “Jiggly Bed”. Among the other finalists was the hand-powered laundry machine, Laundry POD.
Tags: Green, Greener gadgets
Diomede offers greener and cheaper data storage
Feb 28, 2009 Carbon Trading Mechanisms, Green Architecture
Diomede
Diomede is a new new online data storage company, that recently launched in private beta with the goal of offering low cost cloud-based storage with the added benefit of being energy efficient.
Diomede increases efficiency by allowing customers to designate files that they don’t need instant access to, and places them either as ‘nearline’ or ‘offline’. These files have an access time of five minutes or four hours, respectively, but cost only 1/12 as much as standard cloud providers to store and take as little as 1/60th the amount of energy! Additionally, Diomede offsets its carbon footprint through Carbonfund. Read the rest of this entry »
New York police gets hybrid patrol cars
Feb 26, 2009 Auto Tech, Stars, Policy and Finance
NYPD Nissan Altima
The New York Police Department is rolling out 40 Nissan Altima hybrids as patrol cars. The vehicles get around 35 miles per gallon, compared to the 16 mpg of the current fleet of Chevy Impalas and Ford Crown Victorias. The cars will be in operation within the next week and will be a small but significant greening step for the 3200 strong NYPD patrol fleet.
The NYPD will shell out more than $1 million, with 18 of the vehicles will be regular patrol cars costing 30 grand each, while the rest will be unmarked and come for 25 grand per car. More significant than the top speed of 113 mph will be their ability to cruise at speeds under 40mph solely on electric power, without consuming a drop of gas, ideal for inner-city driving conditions. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: hybrid, Nissan Altima, NYPD
Obama’s fresh push for cleantech
Feb 23, 2009 Information of the Day, Stars, Policy and Finance
In the massive $787 billion economic stimulus package from the US government, the cleantech sector was one of the bigger beneficiaries, walking away with $38 billion in government spending and about $20 billion in tax incentives over the next 10 years, according to various estimates. In a symbolic gesture, Obama had signed the stimulus bill, called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, into law at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science where he later took a tour of the museum’s solar-panel installation.
In his latest address, US president Barack Obama tried to further reasure the cleantech sector saying:
“Because of what we did, companies – large and small – that produce renewable energy can now apply for loan guarantees and tax credits and find ways to grow, instead of laying people off; and families can lower their energy bills by weatherizing their homes”.
Companies like electric carmaker Tesla, who are waiting for federal loans and Google, GE and IBM, who are betting large on smart grid technologies, must have already started celebrating. The green initiatives of the bill included: Read the rest of this entry »
Gates Foundation promises $48 million for African farmers
Feb 19, 2009 Philanthropy and Corporate Initiatives, Social Initiatives, Stars, Policy and Finance
Bill and Melinda Gates
The World Cocoa Foundation has announced a new, $40 million program funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other companies to significantly improve the livelihoods of approximately 200,000 cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon and Liberia.
A further grant of $25 million to the German development organization Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will support another project, which aims to help 150,000 small-scale cashew farmers in Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Mozambique increase their incomes by 50 percent by 2012 by providing them with processing facilities for their crops locally. Read the rest of this entry »
Gates Foundation donation to empower the unbanked with m-banking
Feb 19, 2009 Microfinance, Social Initiatives, Stars, Policy and Finance
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
The GSMA, a worldwide consortium of mobile communications companies and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have joined forces for the Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) initiative. Armed with a $12.5 million donation from the Foundation, the initiative aims at allowing folks in developing countries to carry out mobile banking from their non-smartphones and keep and grow their money in a safe and affordable fashion.
“There are over 1 billion people in emerging markets today who don’t have a bank account but do have a mobile phone,” said Rob Conway, CEO and Member of the Board of the GSMA. The paln is to work with mobile operators, banks, microfinance institutions, government and development organizations to encourage the expansion of reliable, affordable mobile financial services to the unbanked.
MMU initiative will support 20 projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with an ambitious target of empowering 20 million unbanked people with mobile financial services by 2012. The MMU programme will fund regulatory and market research to help overcome some of the barriers of providing these services and demonstrate the business case for serving this market.
Is it not ironic that today more people have access to mobile communication devices than organised banking or reliable power supply?
Read the rest of this entry »
After Samsung, ZTE to launch solar powered phone
Feb 14, 2009 Green Technologies, Philanthropy and Corporate Initiatives
ZTE Coral
ZTE, the Chinese manufacturer of phones and telecom equipment is going to launch the Coral-200-Solar, a solar powered phone that may bring mobile communication to communities not yet connected by reliable power supply.
ZTE is partnering Jamaica’s Digicel Group to roll out one of the world’s first mass-market solar cellphones to folks with “limited or no access to the power grid”. The phone gets its juice via an integrated solar charger that recharges the battery, so you don’t have to depend on power outlets at home . Coming in June, this handset may lack the flash of the Samsung Blue Earth, but low price would suit just fine to its target consumers.
Tags: Blue Ocean, Samsung, solar powered phone, ZTE
X PRIZE What’s Your Crazy Green Idea has winners
Feb 7, 2009 Green Technologies, Natural Resource Conservation, Ratings and awards
X-Prize
The X PRIZE Foundation has announced UC Irvine students Kyle Good and Bryan Le as the winners of “What’s Your Crazy Green Idea?” competition.
It was a $25000 competition to design the theme for a potential competition! The Foundation invited the public to develop and post a two-minute video describing a concept for a potential X PRIZE in Energy and Environment. More than 130 videos were received and more than 4,200 people voted for the winner.
The winners threw the gauntlet at potential entrepreneurs and engineers to build an capacitor which has energy density higher than average lead acid batteries, be fully rechargable under 1 minute and withstand half a million recharge cycles and at the same time use only non-toxic materials and cost less than 2 times an average lead acid battery.
The winning video is below:
Tags: Energy Efficiency, XPRIZE