What is Cash for Caulkers? 01/01/2010
“Cash for Caulkers” is a federal program, currently making its way through Congress, that will provide homeowners with incentives for investing in energy efficiency.  Like “Cash for Clunkers”, its auto industry cousin, the program aims to stimulate consumer spending on energy efficient products with point-of-purchase rebates. “Cash for Caulkers” will offer rebates on a lot more than just caulk, though. Dozens of products and services, from new light bulbs to professionally installed insulation, will be eligible for rebates through HOME STAR, the program’s official name. Individual homeowners could receive more than $10,000 in rebates to cover up to half the cost of projects. All told, as much as $23 billion over two years could become available. How will “Cash for Caulkers” a/k/a HOME STAR work? According to the latest dispatch from advocates, homeowners will have two options when taking advantage of HOME STAR incentives. Silver Star Option Offers homeowners up to $1,000 rebate for each of the following qualified projects, capped at $4,000 for any 5 projects, so long as the Federal incentive does not exceed 50% of the homeowner’s contribution.  (Credit: Center for America Progress) Qualified Projects
GOLD STAR OPTION Offers homeowners a $4,000 rebate on certified contractor services that reduce energy use by 20%, plus $1,500 for each incremental 5% reduction. There is no cap, but the Federal incentive cannot exceed 50% of the homeowner’s contribution. Services must be scoped and performed by a certified contractor and the reduction must be verified by an independent auditor.  (Credit: Home Performance with Energy Star) Typical Engagement 1. Energy Assessment 2. Retrofit Fundamentals -Weatherization -Insulation Major Systems -Heating/Cooling -Water Heating The typical GOLD STAR engagement will kick off with a comprehensive home energy assessment, setting an energy usage baseline, and then moving into “low-hanging fruit” or the less expensive projects that deliver immediate results, like weatherization and insulation. Homeowners may choose to progress onto major systems, like replacing HVAC and water heating equipment, depending on their budget and reduction goals. The GOLD STAR option offers a lot more flexibility to homeowners and contractors by taking a whole house approach. Homeowners will work with certified contractors to develop a customized energy assessment and a set of projects that makes sense for their budget and reduction goals. The whole house approach has been proven to deliver targeted reductions in smaller-scale programs across the nation with Home Performance with EnergyStar. A new Home Performance industry is forming to stimulate and meet demand from HOME STAR and follow-on programs. When will HOME STAR incentives become available? HOME STAR is not yet available to homeowners – the details are still being hashed out on Capitol Hill – but policy analysts expect the program to kick off in March. President Obama is leading the charge to pass HOME STAR into law. Here is at a Home Depot last month, letting us know why he thinks insulation is “sexy”. Climate activists and ordinary people around the world came together on October 24th to urge world leaders to slow climate change. The event, organized by 350.org, was described by CNN as "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history." The 350 organization understood early that putting together a widespread international day of action, with limited resources, would require a media strategy that went way beyond celebrity public service announcements or even traditional analog-based grassroots organizing.  "Whatever the opposite of intellectual property rights is, that’s what we want people to do with 350—adopt, steal, do whatever with it,” said Bill McKibben, renowned climate activist and 350 leader. "The goal is to gather as many actions as possible and broadcast them through the 350.org website, blogs, YouTube, Facebook and other social media and networking platforms." 350 needed network effects, the process of viral growth that has propelled the likes of Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook into the internet giants they are today.  Instead of distributing information from central broadcast or a clandestine network, 350 enabled digital distribution, investing in an active presence at several key social media sites. As supporters picked up the 350 message, they left comments on blogs, became fans on Facebook and retweeted on Twitter. They spread the 350 message to their own social connections, who in turn did the same, driving exponential growth of the overall network. The results are on Flickr - thousands of photos from around the world of individuals and groups displaying the numbers 3-5-0. The same social networking strategies that worked for 350 on a global scale can work for grassroots climate activists at the local level. The tools and tactics are the same; the only difference is that local organizers work closer to home. This post presents the most effective, free social media services availableto grassroots climate organizers, which fit into the following 5 categories: Social Networking Hubs Email List Management Events Media Distribution Blogs Next to each social media service is a feature highlight and example of a practioner who "gets" how to use that service. Examples are drawn from local grassroots teams in Cambridge, MA like Green Decade to international juggernauts like 350. General Hubs  Site/Service Feature Highlight Example Facebook Pages Centralize everything Boston Localvores Twitter Real-time conversations Cambridge Energy Alliance These are indispensable platforms for organizations wishing to grow a web presence. They serve as the backbone of the social graph by formalizing connections as “Friends”, “Fans” or “Followers” and distributing the ongoing conversation or “stream” between connections. More people spend more time on these sites (or services, in the case of Twitter) than anywhere else online. Email List Management  Site/Service Feature Highlight Example Vertical Response Popular, Free for nonprofits MCAN Newsletter MailChimp Slick and easy, Free for smaller orgs N/A Email is the original social media. Studies show that emails still get the greatest response of any online marketing tactic. Just be careful not to SPAM your community. Set an expectation as to how often they will receive emails from you. Personalize emails by using the recipient's first name in the opening. Events  Site/Service Feature Highlight Example Google Calendar Scheduling ahead Green Decade Facebook Events RSVP with Friends & Fans 350 Boston Eventbrite/Upcoming Index in Google results, Ticket sales Good event sites show an RSVP list and prompt attendees to share details of the events with connections. People respond to popularity signals, so try getting as many friends to sign up for an event as soon it's announced. Google Calendar lets users share entire calendars, so teams don’t need to update revisions or new additions. Media Distribution  Site/Service Feature Highlight Example Flickr Photos 350 Global YouTube Videos Hopenhagen Vimeo High-quality vido Idealist Scribd Documents Climate Frontline Slideshare Presentations Green Business Network All of these sites make it super easy to upload and distribute certain content types across a range of social networks like Facebook, Twitter or email. Blogs  Site/Service Feature Highlight Good Example Blogger Most popular Bldg Blog Wordpress Many nice templates Energy 2.0 Weebly Search engine optimized Digital Verdure These blogging platforms are extremely easy to get started, requiring no web design or development skills whatsoever. Several even let you purchase independent domains or URLs (ie, "www.yoursite.com") so you don't have to fiddle with domain registration. All offer HTML editors in case you do want to do a bit of customization. Conclusion There are many web services out there they help along grassroots climate efforts, but these are the ones most likely to get traction. Note that I intentionally did not advocate building your own social network, such as on Ning.com. It’s an incredibly difficult task to get visitors coming back to your own social network with any regularity. It’s much easier to bring your message to your community where it already spends time vs. get them to come to you. Did I miss any social media sites you like? Let me know in the comments below. Assuming you were suddenly given $10,000 for home improvements, which of the following would you do?
 Here’s another question: did you factor the home improvement’s ROI in your decision? That’s actually a concern for many homeowners when it comes time to invest in remodeling, yet it’s not clear today which option leads to greater resale value and why. Homebuyers are a finicky bunch and may pay more for marble counter-tops than a high efficiency hot water heater, even though the latter pays for itself in energy savings in just a few years. Of course, a home buyer isn’t going to throw a housewarming party in her basement to show off her new EnergyStar boiler… but how much cash does a boiler need to save before it wins investment over sexier renovations? A heck of a lot, according to energy efficiency experts, who note that consumers are very irrational when it comes to home improvement decisions. In the latest example, the Shelton Group found that consumers would endure up to $129/month increase in utility bills before investing in energy efficiency renovations, demonstrating what Shelton Group calls the “Apathy Gap – the price people are willing to pay to do nothing.” The Apathy Gap The Apathy Gap is notorious among energy policymakers and economists, who cite the average consumer’s ridiculously high internal discount rate for energy efficient projects – as high as 70 – 80% in a recent study by Efficiency Vermont. By comparison, most consumers extend a 5% discount rate to Uncle Sam when buying US Treasury bonds. Do people really think that investing in retrofits (essentially the laws of physics, as proofed in building science, plus some installation risk) is 16 times more risky than the Federal Government? The Apathy Gap is extremely irrational. In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely asks, “Why do people splurge on a lavish meal, but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup?” Similarly, energy efficiency advocates should ask, “why do house hunters scrutinize mortgage rates, but ignore utility bills?” In both cases, the reason is that consumers make decisions emotionally, in conformity with social norms. Bank and broker advertising have taught home buyers to rate compare, but no one has shown them how to negotiate on utility bills. Around Boston, where I live, a winter heating bill may only be a few dollars shy of a monthly mortgage payment. Installing an efficient boiler can lower a heating bill by tens of thousands of dollars over the 30 year span of a typical mortgage. Yet many home buyers would discount that payback so much as to make the boiler less valuable than the marble countertops. There are similar forces at work across the full range of residential energy efficiency products and services. Even low-cost and no-cost behavioral changes, like replacing lights with free CFLs or running dishwashers at night, have unreasonably high hurdles to adoption given their easy savings. Roadblocks on the Bridge We need to bridge the Apathy Gap and we should start by clearing the major roadblocks: the reality that energy efficiency is not a social norm and the perception of energy efficiency as a “Big Brother” utility-backed priority. There are others, but these are particularly bad because they are fundamental obstacles to consumer recognition and internalization of energy efficiency priorities and because they can be broken down with the cost-effective digital media and social marketing strategies. Energy efficiency is NOT a social norm Consumers make decisions that align with social norms while home energy consumption largely exists in a vacuum. We don’t behave as if home energy is a scarce resource today because it has been delivered “cheap, reliable and plentiful” to us for generations. Obviously this needs to change if we are going to become a more energy efficient society. Interestingly, academic research shows, and social marketing experience validates, that the most effective way to get consumers to change their behavior is to demonstrate that others like them already have. There are many ways to do this (see the “Big Brother” point below), but the most effective enable consumers to tell their own stories of becoming energy efficient on a real-time ongoing basis, ideally to a target audience that closely identifies with them, such as friends or self-selected peers, and already emulates them in other ways. OPower (formerly Positive Energy) has taken another approach by analyzing utility company data and adding messaging to utility bills that compares customers to efficient neighbors. The company also gently prods customers to make no- and low-cost behavioral modifications to conform. The approach essentially transforms the utility bill into a teacher’s report card and well-meaning nudge, but I wonder how effectively it motivates consumers to deepen their commitment to energy efficiency, like by investing thousands of dollars in home performance renovations. Perception of energy efficiency as a “Big Brother” utility-backed priority In human communications, who is saying something is usually far more important than what is being said. Unfortunately, utility company brands are typically faceless, boring, and irrelevant. Decades of television advertising and direct mail campaigns in some states have trained consumers to associate energy efficiency with utility companies. Consequently, consumers process conventional energy efficiency outreach as “the boring old utility company bugging me again.” Instead of focusing on transforming their brands at this time of unprecedented concern over privacy and the environment, utility companies are taking on major reputation risks by treating their customers’ energy consumption data like it is proprietary, by pressuring their customers to conform to fstandards and by considering default control of in-home appliances and HVAC systems via smart grid technology. All these strategies expose the already lackluster brands of most utility companies to significant reputational risk, principally in the form of customer backlash. Look no further than PG&E’s PR fiasco with its Bakersfield smart meter rollout. Utility companies need to learn to navigate today’s hyper-connected community networks if they aim to convince consumers to embrace smart meters and energy efficiency. “If the American people could see what I have seen... there would be a revolution in this country.” – Robert F. Kennedy My iPhone is a pretty much constant presence in my life, from checking my email first thing in the morning to watching my nephews play with the DoodleBuddy app. But until last week, I never seriously considered its impact on the environment. That changed when Apple published greenhouse gas emissions from its operations and products for the first time. The report, available at www.apple.com/environment, goes farther than other consumer tech companies have by accounting for product usage. It turns out that my iPhone produces greenhouse gases equivalent to about 55kg of carbon dioxide over the full course of its lifecycle, from sourcing to recycling. My use of my iPhone produces about 27kg of carbon dioxide.  To put that in perspective, 55kg of CO2 is equivalent to burning 22 gallons of gasoline in a car or 8 propane cylinders on a backyard grill. If I planted 5 tree seedlings in my backyard tomorrow, it would take them 10 years to sequester the amount of carbon my iPhone produces. OK, so what? Twenty-two gallons of gas and 10 trees ain’t such a bad trade given that the iPhone is... well... downright awesome. Truly. The iPhone is one of the most successful consumer tech products in history. Apple has sold 21M iPhone units since Q3 2007, shattering sales records. All those iPhones have produced a lot of carbon emissions, about 1.16b kg to be exact, or roughly the same amount as a coal-fired power plant in one year of operation.  So what? We can just plant more trees, right? Well, it would take about 40% of the total land area of the US to offset just the iPhone’s emissions. Not to mention the hundreds of other personal technology devices that are accelerating our electricity consumption. Bottom line: there isn’t enough land enough in the world to offset America’s carbon emissions by planting trees. But let’s set aside what would happen if we didn’t do something about all that carbon for a moment and look at what our electricity consumption has already done. Meet Donetta Blankenship. Donetta Blankenship has lived in Rawl, West Virginia for about six years. Before she and her family moved to Rawl, they had no health problems. Since moving there, Donetta has been hospitalized for liver failure twice in the last year. Whenever anyone in the family showers, they get a headache from the rotten egg smell caused by nitrogen sulfate in the water. Donetta has two children, a thirteen-year-old girl and a fourteen-year-old boy, and two stepchildren. Her stepdaughter, at the age of 19, had her gallbladder removed. Since they've moved to Rawl, both her children have developed asthma. Her daughter has stomach problems; her son has bumps all over his back and refuses to bathe in the contaminated water that makes it worse. He also has trouble sleeping at night, worrying that the sludge impoundment above their home will give way. Donetta stays because she can't afford to move her family elsewhere. So what’s the connection between our nation's electricity consumption and Donetta Blankenship? Thanks to www.ilovemountains.org, we now know.  This map comes from a Google Earth layer produced with Appalachian Voices. The red line cutting across the center shows how the electricity that recharges my iPhone comes to my house from power lines maintained by my local utility company, which plugs into the regional grid that services New England, which carries electricity generated by the Somerset Station power plant in Bristol County, Massachusetts, which purchases coal directly from the same patch of West Virginia that the Blakenships call home. This is typical. Our nation’s power infrastructure is a horribly inefficient and complex web of technology, law, regulatory and private interests, but at the end of the line, there is very likely a little community in the rolling green hills of Appalachia that you too have had a hand in devastating through coal mining. No, it’s not intentional. Few of us have the freedom today to go off the grid or elect to receive power from renewables like solar panels and wind farms… but our connection is real nonetheless. See for yourself by entering your zip code below. When we recharge our iPhones, what are we doing to the Appalachian Mountains? Here is a pretty good example:  Courtesy of Graham Mountain Foundation Imagine if this happened to a mountain that you know and love. For me, the thought of this happening in the White Mountains of New Hampshire or the Green Mountains or Vermont is painful. And that’s just the view from a helicopter. The impact on the ground is equally devastating. Again, Donetta Blankenship. Ten years ago, a blast powerful enough to shatter windows in a nearby church and homes resonated throughout the Rawl area. Shortly after, the water started to go bad, and residents believe the same blast that destroyed the foundations of dozens of homes may have cracked the barrier between the buried sludge and the aquifer that provides Rawl's city water. Currently, Donetta says, sometimes the water, "runs out of the pipe like tomato soup: thick with orange sediment." According to Vanity Fair, Appalachia's mountains are being blasted at a rate of several ridgetops each week. But the truth is that, for most of us, once we surf away from the activist sites, put down the magazine expose or, indeed, finish the outraged blog post, we return to our iPhones, check email and leave behind the story of Appalachia… or do we?  Courtesy of Architecture 2030 This is a picture of what Boston would like if the sea level rose just three meters. My house would be in the center of that blue lake that used to be Cambridge, across what used to be the Charles River Basin. Experts expect the sea level to rise by four to twelve meters over the next century unless we cap carbon emissions. The story of mountaintop coal removal does not end in Appalachia. We may never experience the hands-on destruction of the mountains we love, our health and communities, but if we continue on our current course, we will not escape the second-hand impact of the coal industry. There is nowhere to hide from climate change. We must act now by investing in energy efficiency and committing to carbon caps. Otherwise, it will be my nephews, our children, who wake up in the middle of night, worrying when the levee will break. With Consumer Interest in Energy Efficiency Rising Online, Some Utilities May Be Missing Out 08/04/2009
When Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu visited the Daily Show with John Stewart last week, he couldn’t give Stewart an honorary membership to the National Academy of Sciences, so instead Chu gave Steward a “Nerds of America Society” t-shirt.  Secretary Chu, a Nobel Prize winner who recently joined Facebook, was on Comedy Central boosting the administration’s $60 billion investment in American clean energy and energy efficiency in front of a big, young audience eager for change. That kind of money is no laughing matter and dozens of technology companies, from GE to Google to a spate of newly incorporated startups, are lining up to compete for their slice of the pie. Google announced Power Meter in February to help utility companies display electricity consumption data to customers via the web. Studies have shown that when consumers have real-time data (via a smart grid or home rig), they tend to consume less electricity and save money. Microsoft fired back in June with Hohm, which doesn’t wait for smart grid deployment to begin helping homeowners save money. Give Hohm an exhaustive set of details about your home (pun intended – an Ohm is a unit for measuring electrical current) and it returns a tailored set of energy efficiency improvement recommendations. Companies haven’t begun marketing all this fancy new smart grid technology and data to consumers yet, but that hasn’t stopped consumers from getting increasingly interested in renewable energy and energy efficiency.  Visitors to more than 50 leading energy sites like energysavers.gov and consumerenergycenter.org reached 3.5M in June, 2009, up 68% over the prior twelve months. (Note the spikes just after December and February, when temperatures drop and bills rise the fastest.) With all of this money and interest flowing toward energy efficiency, I became curious about how people evaluate their energy consumption today. Most people purchase electricity through a utility company (although quite a few generate their own with solar panels and windmills, even selling their surplus back to the grid) and many visit their utility online to pay bills, enroll in services and research renewable and efficiency options. The ‘green pages’ of utility company websites are one of the most significant channels for consumers to engage in renewable energy and energy efficiency. On green pages, utility customers can elect for up to 100% of their electricity to come from clean sources, analyze their home energy efficiency, sign up for free home energy audits and more.  To learn how effectively these green pages are at reaching and engaging energy customers, I looked at visitation to over 100 utility sites, handily listed at UtilityConnection.com. Collectively, this group received 10.7M unique visitors in June and grew 26% versus a year ago. The top 10 utility sites accounted for 57% of the total and grew 30% in June versus a year ago. Interestingly, though, visitors to green pages at the top 10 utility sites are actually declining.  Only 2.3% of unique visitors to the top 10 utility sites visited green pages in June, down from 4.4% a year ago. In volume terms, that’sonly 124K of the 6M visitorsthat went to PGE.com, NationalGridUS.com and other leading utility sites. So it would seem that utilities are not doing a great job at capturing their share of rising consumer interest in renewable energy and energy efficiency. This is consistent with a recent study by Gartner, which found that “energy efficiency programs are poorly marketed by utilities.” To anyone familiar with energy issues, this is not so surprising. That’s because government regulation too often enables utilities to earn greater revenue by selling more electricity and natural gas. Attempts to “decouple” this misaligned incentive through tax credits and legal mandates have been successful in only a few politically progressive states, like California and Massachusetts. “This is particularly disturbing,” Earth2Tech’s Katie Fehrenbacher has written, “because it reminds me that those billions allocated from the stimulus package would be much more effective if they were being pumped into a market where all utilities had financial incentives to implement them.” I have hope, however, that broad consumer interest in energy efficiency will continue rising, encouraged by savvy marketing from big tech and edgy startups, until less-than progressive utilities and legislatures answer their call. This post was originally published on the Compete.com blog. Microfinance Gets Social with Kiva 06/16/2009
When I was travelling around India two years ago, I took a 1,500-mile detour to Hyderabad, a high tech boomtown but not much of tourist spot, to visit my old high school friend Chris Turillo. (Read more on my India adventure here.)  "Poverty is not created by the poor. It is created by the structures of society and the policies pursued by society. Change the structure as we are doing in Bangladesh, and you will see that the poor change their own lives. Grameen's experience demonstrates that, given the support of financial capital, however small, the poor are fully capable of improving their lives." Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor Nor is microcredit small. In 2006, McKinsey & Co. reported that there was $17bn in outstanding microloans, and estimated that to be roughly 10% of the available market. Much of that money is controlled by the largest microfinance institutions, the so-called Tier 1 organizations like Grameen Bank, and distributed in small amounts, typically from $25 - $100, to vast networks of millions of borrowers in the developing world. Lastly, microcredit is not ineffective. The personal impact stories of borrowers are tremendous. “I never expected to be able to benefit from a loan, because I come from a very poor background. But thanks to [a microfinance organization], all the women of our group have received the same loan amount, which allows us to work with dignity and to earn our living honestly. The most important thing is the feeling of independence we have gained from this affair. We are all very happy.” Mareme Seck, Senegal Meanwhile, the repayment rates for microloans are extraordinarily high, often in excess of 99%. However, many Americans, including those who give to international charities like Save the Children, don’t know about microcredit. The usual explanation for this is that Save the Children and it sponsorship model peers have appealed direct-to-donor via TV advertising (those old Sally Struthers commercials) and direct mail, whereas microfinance has operated mainly behind the scenes – able to collect capital from investment banks and provide a stable return. So-called “barefoot banking” is big business on Wall St. Only the largest Tier 1 microfinance institutions have had the loan distribution networks and governance resources to tap into Wally St. Meanwhile smaller Tier 2 and 3 MFI’s have lacked the marketing budgets to appeal to individual lenders directly. That is changing rapidly thanks to Kiva.org Kiva is an online peer-to-peer lending community that’s bringing together individual microcredit lenders, borrowers and Tier 2 and 3 MFI’s. The non-profit startup has received a lot of media attention, including the adoration of Bill Clinton, who discussed the nonprofit in his book Giving and on Oprah. I recently went on the site and found it well worth the hype. I liked it so much I ended up making 4 loans at $25 each – to a florist in Nicaragua, a farmer in Tajikistan, a taxi driver in an Armenian-disputed territory and a woman repairing her home in Cambodia.  And that is the beauty of Kiva, which means “unity” or “agreement” in Swahili. Through a variety of search filters on region, gender, economic sector and fundraising progress, I sought out borrowers that fulfilled my desire for a personal connection. My sister-in-law is from Nicaragua, my mother is a florist, my friend is studying in Tajikistan this summer, I’m half-Armenian and I liked like description of onsorm cakes the woman from Cambodia makes… “Onsorm is a kind of Cambodian cake that has rice, coconut with soybean and pork in the middle.” More often lenders will "discover" borrowers according to cultural norms. As Kiva's Co-founder and CEO Matthew Flannery writes, “Lenders showed unambiguous preferences according to region, gender, and business type: Africans first, women first, and agriculture first. A female African fruit seller? Funded in hours. Nicaraguan retail stand? Funded in days. A Bulgarian Taxi Driver? Funded in weeks.” Whether searching with intent or discovering, Kiva nails the best practices of social networking, combining multi-attribute search and discovery tools with data-rich profiles, stories and of course photos. As my favorite web 2.0 guru Dave McClure likes to say, “The Faces! The FACES! It’s ALL About the FACES!”  The effect of is two-fold. The photos and stories entice the visitor to participate, while the data transparency assures them it’s safe. Flannery writes in his product philosophy, “Lending is connecting. At Kiva.org, lending money is all about information exchange. In a sense, money is a type of information. Lending to someone else creates an ongoing communication between two individuals that is more binding than a donation.” On Facebook, you friend. On Twitter, you follow. And on Kiva, you lend.  What’s cool too is that I can also see who else gave to this borrower (or “entrepreneur” in Kiva parlance), so we can share in the lending experience. I can join Lending Teams like “Kiva Christians” and “Team Obama.” Not only does this reinforce my sense of community, it serves to validate my trust in Kiva and the individual borrower – if these other lenders took the plunge, why not me? Of course, this would all roll up very nicely in a Facebook App, which is in development. Kiva is another example of the web making the world small and flat – enabling users to get extraordinarily granular in borrower criteria and do an end-run around the larger institutions that would previously intermediate the lending experience. I made my 4 loans last week and already two are in repayment. And this tidbit of knowledge encapsulates yet another key feature: organizational transparency. Sites like Charity Navigator, a kind of Morning Star for charities, have put pressure on organizations like Save the Children to be more transparent. Today, I can visit Save the Children and learn exactly how much of every dollar donated goes toward beneficiaries versus overhead. Kiva is taking it a step further. The site continuously updates a full body of organizational data in near real-time, including loan fundraising/repayment status and risk statistics.  Kiva warns of three types of lender risk: entrepreneur, field partner and country. Each type comes with its own special hazards. Entrepreneurs might get sick and a war or natural disaster might hit a country. But Kiva excels at managing field partner risk by aggregating and publishing data on field partners – typically Tier 2 and 3 MFIs – which traditionally have been excluded from capital markets. In this way, Kiva enables lenders to perform due diligence and creates market intelligence on the invisible smaller MFI segments.  As Flannery says, “we are giving organizations the ability to prove themselves through performance in a similar fashion to how Ebay allowed lesser known individuals and businesses to become major e-commerce players through credibility scores.” How does Kiva do all this? Originally it was conceived as a for-profit startup, but when Flannery and his co-founder discovered the SEC and regulatory hoops they would have to jump through in order to charge interest on loans, they switched to a non-profit model. Kiva still collects revenue on the float (or interest accumulated while the loans sit in a bank account waiting for dispersal) and with an appeal at the end of the lending process. This revenue is non-taxable and goes right back into the organization (instead of paying out investors). Kiva’s most direct competitor is MicroPlace.com, a for-profit which offers interest-bearing loans via a variety of MFI's, but does not feature lender/borrower social networking. MicroPlace is owned by eBay, which provided the financial and legal resources to navigate the SEC and regulatory process. In a way, MicroPlace does not compete with Kiva, because it focuses on investment performance instead of social networking. Flannery still wants to add interest to Kiva loans and evolve the borrower/lender relationship from charitable to financial. More capital will flow to borrowers in the developing world if there is a return available. Also, there’s the opportunity to evolve our understanding of poverty and “the poor” (as if that were a permanent state of being). Kiva recently introduced lending to small entrepreneurial businesses in the US. Encouraged by Maria Shriver, this is a bold risk to the Kiva brand that I think they are brave but right to try. A theme of the Kiva experience thus far has been connecting visitors with far-away borrowers. Now a Kiva lender might donate to an entrepreneur down the street. This brings Kiva into direct competition with Prosper.com, a younger but already larger for-profit online P2P lending network that is in an "official" quite period while its regulatory status is under review.   When was the last time you went to a farmer’s market?  Right now the site focuses on restaurant buyers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and inventory comes in bulk quantities. But clearly the bigger opportunity here is consumer – the upside for revolutionizing farmers markets into disruptive rivals to chain grocery stores is huge, both economically and environmentally. Not many shop for produce or even groceries online. Peapod and Local Harvest, the largest online grocery shop and farmer’s market/CSA portal, respectively, show between 150K and 400K visitors. Note Local Harvest’s peak in April, when most CSA’s sell out. 
You may have heard about President Obama's recent pledge to bring 40 million smart meters into American homes and wondered if this would affect your home. That’s certainly the idea, with $11billion from the stimulus plan allocated to a nation-wide smart grid rollout. As a electricity consumers, the smart grid promises to modernize our electricity networks, cutting down our consumption and hopefully our bills.  Right now most Americans have "dumb" meters - that jumble of dials and indicators encased in plastic that are decipherable only to the electric company employee who walks through your yard every month.  Enter the Smart Grid, a layer of technology over existing power grids that exchanges demand and pricing information between the end user residents and the power companies. With Smart Meters, consumers can monitor their energy consumption, even at the appliance level, and set controls to minimize consumption and costs. In terms of user experience, the goal of the Smart Meter rollout is not to force consumers to sacrifice comforts, but to give them the data they need to make informed decisions. While the technical standards and pricing models for the smart grid are still being worked out by regulatory agencies, Obama has taken the important first step of incentivizing the industry with stimulus money. Fortunately, utilities have responded positively and pledged to roll out the Smart Grid, despite their seeming conflict-of-interest. Today, the more electricity a utility company delivers, the more revenue it earns. Together, industry and government are working on ways to “de-couple” incentives.  CEO Seth Frader-Thompson recently explained the decision to focus on the device UI by asking, "If you were cold would you go online to turn up your thermostat?"  Avego is a two-year old startup that plans to take carpooling into the fast lane. The carpooling space has become hot in the past few years, with a number of new companies cropping up that plan to use the web and mobile tech to make it easier to find and share rides.  Avego, a spinoff of Mapflow, has probably the most sophisticated technology of the bunch, with a nice iPhone app that lets you find drivers or passengers in your area and catch or offer a ride. The company has developed an innovative incentive system, with micropayments transferred between rider and driver via iPhone. Meanwhile, Avego takes a small cut of every transaction.  iCarpool is another ridesharing startup, but it focuses on serving companies and organizations with carpooling needs for their employees. For users, this approach eliminates much of the anxiety of riding with strangers.  For those groups, which I think include most students, there is Zimride, which gets my vote for best user experience. (Just to be clear, I created a profile and played around with each carpool startup app and website, but did not actually carpool... I don't need to drive around that much!)  All these efforts are commendable though. And here's hoping that they can change consumer behavior. As Robin Chase, a founder of Zipcar, said in her TED talk last year, "we need to reduce C02 omissions in 10 to 15 years by 80% in order to avert catastrophic effects... in 10 years, fuel-efficient cars will reduce our fossil fuel needs by 4%. That’s not enough." Welcome to Digital Verdure 02/16/2009
Digital Verdure is about breakthrough startups and marketing ideas that bridge the digital-environmental opportunity gap.  ZipCar stands out as an early winner in combining digital technology and a sustainable business mission. The innovative car rental company empowers customers to find available vehicles in their neighborhoods through real time inventory tracking and a squeaky clean Google Maps integration. You can search by available time, location, price or model. When you find a nearby vehicle, you simply wave your RFID "ZipCard" and Viola! You've got wheels. RecycleBank is an incentive-based approach to recycling that connects households with the technology to manage their own recycling programs and rewards from well-known marketers for participating.  The company provides households with specially-designed recycle bins that contain an RFID chip. Bins are collected weekly and weighed by collection trucks, with credit attributed to each household via the RFID chip and updated in real time to the web. |  Digital Verdure explores the startups and ideas that
power up energy efficiency, clean energy and sustainable development with digital media and social marketing. Digital Verdure is written by Alex Patriquin. Read his bio here. Blogroll
Green Inc. Green Ink/Environmental Capital Energy Circleearth2tech Triple PunditCozy Blog Efficiency First Home Energy Magazine Predictably Irrational Nudge Springwise Treehugger Energy 2.0 CategoriesAll |
RSS Feed