Microfiber and Miracle Liquids, The Future of Green Cleaning?
I’ve always been a sucker for pretty packaging, believing on some level that you can indeed judge a book (or a bottle of dish soap) by its cover. Most of the time I can resist the urge to buy products just because they’re aesthetically pleasing, but I am totally unable to say no to the allure of green cleaning products. I only have to walk by my favorite store, Spring on Polk Street, and before I know it, I’ve bought two different types of Method floor cleaners.
Although I’d like to say that the primary reason I buy green products is to actually be greener, I also really like the way they look and smell. They’re the sort of products I might leave out on the counter on purpose. I don’t think I’m alone in this – the Prius didn’t really take off until Toyota redesigned it 2003, giving the car a distinctive look and making it something of a fashion statement. And Manhattan is now home to the just recently opened Green Depot, a one-stop destination that is geared to (presumably affluent) consumers, who take pleasure from “being green.” Indeed, some green cleaning lines tout the “elegance” and “luxury” of their laundry detergents.
I recently read about some new technologies in green cleaning that don’t actually require chemical products at all, and I started to really think about buying habits and being green. These two technologies are microfiber and electrolyzed water, and despite being disruptive products, both are going to have to find a marketing strategy that will appeal to a audience that craves essential oils in their ecologically friendly counter spray.
Last year, BusinessWeek ran a terrific article about why microfiber hasn’t really taken off in the U.S., despite the fact that it’s reusable and cleans away dirt and even bacteria “mechanically, not chemically, by scraping them with microscopic precision.” It sounded too good to be true, but being an impulse shopper I went out and bought a microfiber cloth at Spring. Lo and behold it cleaned my bathroom mirror far better than my Method glass cleaner. It also did a fantastic job on window sills, counters, floors, etc. However, I was still left with a nagging feeling that I hadn’t truly cleaned. After all, where was the sudsing action, or the fragrance that signals “clean?” My windows sparkled, but it hadn’t really been “fun” to get them to that state.
Then this week I read about electrolyzed water, which the LA Times has dubbed a “miracle liquid.” It can degrease, kill e. coli and salmonella, soothe a sunburn, and is safe enough to drink.
It turns out that zapping salt water with low-voltage electricity creates a couple of powerful yet nontoxic cleaning agents. Sodium ions are converted into sodium hydroxide, an alkaline liquid that cleans and degreases like detergent, but without the scrubbing bubbles. Chloride ions become hypochlorous acid, a potent disinfectant known as acid water.
Electrolyzed water has a short shelf life, so it’s currently mainly used in hotels or in doctor’s offices to sterilize equipment. However, just as I had a desire for some tactile feedback from my microfiber cloth that said “clean,” the housekeepers interviewed in the article also doubted its effectiveness.
Rebecca Jimenez, director of housekeeping, heard grumbling from the cleaning staff when the hotel brought the machine in last fall. Housekeepers doubted that the flat, virtually odorless liquids were really doing the job. Some poured the guest shampoos into their bottles to work up a lather.
The potential of both these products is clearly huge. Microfiber is cheap, reusable, washable, and you don’t need to buy supplemental cleaning chemicals (or the plastic bottles they come in), adding to the cost and ecological benefits. For institutions, electrolyzed water will also save money and make workplaces cleaner and greener. In Japan, where they use the water to kill bacteria on sushi, companies like Sanyo have also utilized the technology for their soap-less washing machines, so hopefully more consumer-facing applications are forthcoming.
However, for these technologies to become widely adopted, it will take a paradigm shift away from a mindset that has valued consumption for the sake of consuming. This economy will certainly help with that transition, and although cleaning is a duller experience for me without my Caldrea Green Tea Patchouli counter spray, I draw enough satisfacation from saving money and cutting down on my exposure to chemicals to carry on with my microfiber. At least it comes in pretty colors.
UPDATED: Green Depot is not affiliated with Home Depot
The iPhone Musician
Music and technology. How the two keep introducing themselves to each other in new ways. As a musician though, finding another way to stream music and get song recommendations is cool, but actually not improving my ability to make music. I just discovered a few new tech innovations that are though: GigBaby and Cleartune for the iPhone.
Gigbaby is a digital 4 track recording application and Cleartune is a very simply designed, entirely functional tuner. Yesterday, I tuned my guitar and then recorded a spur of the moment chord progression, all with my iPhone. I actually then composed a beat directly in Gigbaby and synced it to the guitar recording – I tapped out the rhythm on the phone, which allowed GigBaby to register the beats per minute (BPM).
This is really cool. I have been recording guitar licks onto the voice memo function of all of my previous cell phones for years – they all sound terrible, and I could barely hear what I was playing. The exponential leap that the iPhone has allowed me to take with recording music on the fly is very welcome and genuinely stands to improve my songwriting process – I’m now able to develop songs more quickly and keep a better record of my ideas. Will this lead to better music being made in our increasingly tech-driven culture? Probably not. But Cousin Chris is geekin out and enjoyin it.
Boulder, I’m Lookin’ And I’m Likin’
Anyone I’ve talked to lately knows I’ve been rather obsessed with the Boulder (Colorado) tech scene, even revamping my REI-chic/enviro-hipster garb for the occasion. I voraciously started subscribing to the blogs and Twitter feeds of various tech enthusiasts like Andrew Hyde, a driving force behind rad initiatives like Startup Weekend and Techstars.org, Robert Reich who founded OneRiot, Micah Baldwin who runs business development for Lijit Networks and has a sweet blog and of course there’s Brad Feld, who planted the seeds that started it all. I even watched their live broadcast of Ignite Boulder 3 this last week. Yeah, I really did.
What is it about the Boulder scene that makes me yearn so to be a part of it? My curiosity-turned-fascination-turned-safe-distance (I swear)-obsession was probably fueled by the fact that I can’t be part of it. My location prevents it and they just don’t seem interested in pursuing me as a remote member of their clan, though, granted, no overt outreach was established from my end. Following them on Twitter started out cool because I got a window into their mountainous world, but turned into a curse when they never seemed to want to reach (or follow) back. OK, no big deal. The initial pain of rejection led me to conduct an investigation on the essence of Boulder’s “cool”. Furthermore, I wanted to bring to light why we should all pay attention to Boulder now because – and even Sarah Lacy was astonished by this – Boulder won’t tell us why it’s so rad.
Let’s take a quick look at Boulder itself – not the tech scene – just Boulder.
- College town – Colorado University’s there.
- We know that there are a lot of bikes in Boulder
- There’s natural beauty like you wouldn’t believe
- Apparently the US Curling Olympic trials are there this year, being held this week, I’ve been told
Now let’s think Tech:
- Startup Town
- The afore-mentioned forward thinkers
- The sweet green tech innovations happening there
- In Boulder, you can be a geek AND athletic
- Most of their tech events are beer-centric vs. cocktails– SO cool
- They are geographically flanked by the Rockies on one side and the Mississippi on the other, trapped from the two traditional coastal sources of technological progress and yet they continue to generate technology and media innovation at an astounding and intriguing rate.
But Silicon Valley’s got plenty of mojo, right? Developers and entrepreneurs flock to the Bay Area because they have the next big thing that’s going to take “it” to the next level, going to change the world! So what differentiates Boulder? Here it is: COMMUNITY. There is an electric current that runs through Boulder that is powered by the intense support system that can only exist in a tight-knit community. That’s what TechStars.org IS. It’s for the mentoring and guiding (and funding) of sweet startups. I don’t know how you couldn’t succeed with that kind of backing.
Community must play a huge role in the success and acceleration of the startups and even the stewing of brilliant ideas among the mountains of Colorado. Looking through their blogs, seeing their Twitter activity, even being friends with just one of them on Facebook (and happening to peruse their profile with envy on a weekly basis), you understand the respect and friendship that is the lifeblood of the innovation, creativity and savvy that flows in that town. It’s really palpable if you watch some of the videos of their tech events– I mean, they have inside jokes! Yes, I may have spent an afternoon watching videos of Boulder tech meetups. Not a big deal.
Commradery, though, brings up another factor (and huge asset0 lending to their tight-knit environment: They’re still a small city. The Bay Area could never attain that level of intimacy. People come to The Bay Area to build great businesses that they can ultimately sell to go live in Boulder or, if it comes to it, run from Boulder (or somewhere of the like, you get it). People in Boulder love Boulder and never want to leave Boulder.
As a native Oregonian, my obsession with Boulder’s tech scene might be misplaced (sorry, Portland), but I can’t help feeling a little jealous of this embracing socio-professional (petty sure it’s a real term) environment. It’s not even the technology that really gets to me. It’s the people who make up this community – bloggers, entrepreneurs, copywriters, software engineers, consultants, and developers – that love what they do and want to see each other succeed.
Tell me where that community/clique/coven (?) is in the Bay Area and I’m there. Until then, I’m waiting on the edge of my seat for the next installment of “Where the Fun’s At“.
UPDATE (1/24/09): Joining Fox News in an effort to be “fair and balanced,” I wanted to highlight a response post by Brian Burns, a Boulder resident and copy writer: “Boulder Is Nice. Not Paradise”. A great read, and brings some local insight to the subject.
Extending the Service in SaaS
Last month, I attended a great teleseminar on technology for fundraising hosted by non-profit consultant, NYU professor and my friend, Ruthellen Rubin. The big question? What role should technology play in a non-profit’s developmental efforts, and how can it be sustainable and valuable to the organization?
At a very high level, one of the main answers was that no matter what technology a non-profit chooses to purchase (Web development, donor management, etc.), there needs to be a plan, people need to be trained, and the technology needs to be ingrained in the processes of the organization.
On the surface, this may seem obvious. Perhaps being in the tech world, we think we understand what constitutes a successful technology implementation. But, what struck me during this presentation was that this is not just a non-profit problem, it most likely spans pretty much every industry that is purchasing any kind of technology.
For technology vendors, this problem is an opportunity. As most technology moves in the direction of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), big contracts and technology spends are a thing of the past — maintaining a happy customer is what’s most important. Leaving the training and integration of a technology up to the company that you just sold it to is probably not the wisest decision anymore. A few months down the road, if they are not seeing value or usage, that SaaS switch will most likely get turned off. Companies like IBM and Accenture have long implemented on-premise technologies, trained users and integrated them into business processes. They are hired to make sure the technology a company just spent millions on will be sustainable, valuable and actually used within the company. Now is the time for that model to be pared down a bit and applied by SaaS technology companies.
There is a huge opportunity for these companies to become consultancies and value-added resellers of their own to keep their customers happy — like a more specialized version of an Accenture or IBM. Yes, software itself is a service, but perhaps it’s time that service now needs to be extended well beyond just the technology.
UPDATE: Appirio appears to be a cool company that implements SaaS solutions much like a traditional IT consultancy would — initial strategy, implementation and eduction.
What Does the Blogosphere Have In Store For the English Language?
I had an interesting conversation with a client the other day about how the Internet is affecting humans’ reading habits and how we learn and how it shapes our thought processes. She believed that the way we get information now – bundled into condensed, small bits online – has steered people, and most particularly children, away from reading books, essays and substantive pieces of literature that really encourage deep thinking and analysis.
This is really interesting though, because I bet people – kids included – read a whole lot more than previous generations simply because they get so much of their information from a computer screen. The mainstreaming of blogs has literally created a whole new generation of readers who might not have ever bought a magazine, let alone a book. So, is it a double-edged sword? Do we really have more readers now, but with less comprehension?
An article in USA Today this week highlighted how kids’ book reading habits are evolving, using a study by Scholastic on childhood reading. Among the findings:
- From 1984 to 2004, the percentage of 17-year-olds who “never or hardly ever” read for fun rose from 9 percent to 19 percent;
- On average, one in four kids read for fun every day – but that 22 percent rarely, if ever, do;
- And as kids get older, the percentage who rarely read for fun grows from 8 percent to 37 percent.
But also, as this post points out, the study also showed that two-thirds of kids are extending their reading experience online by finding out more about the books and authors they do read.
So, kids are reading more online, but yet reading less offline. Does that mean that kids are getting less out of what they read? I’m not buying it. Certainly, what people are reading has changed over the years, but I take myself as an example. I was a voracious reader as a kid and still am (though not as much, admittedly), but I never got into the classics – or “lit-trit-chuh” as my English teacher friend calls it. I’ve only read one one Steinbeck book – which was great – and don’t have much interest in Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or even the heavier authors like Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy.
I like reading simple pulp novels, comedy or non-fiction about politics and just have never had the want or need to read the classics. Has this affected my comprehension and attention? Yeah, probably – I’m definitely a victim of the bite-sized information era. I consume an enormous amount of news and most of it is in condensed blog posts and have no patience for the bloated writing of magazines like The New Yorker or The Atlantic. Then again, I read every single thing that every political blogger on The Atlantic’s Web site posts – very smart, insightful stuff without fluffy, unnecessary writing.
There’s no question that the Internet is changing reading habits, but I’m not ready to accept that it’s for the bad quite yet. As long as more people are reading, that’s a good thing – the package it comes in is secondary.
Why Innovation Will Bite Back: An Interview with Andrew Razeghi
It’s been nine years since we started LaunchSquad and I’m still amazed at how excited I am by the innovation we see everyday. To use a popular phrase from the 1999 boom, I feel like we’re in the early innings of the Internet revolution. But when the bottom fell out of the market, when Silicon Valley VCs grabbed their bullhorns and told everyone to cut their spending, double their runways and batten down the hatches for a dire future, my faith in innovation was a bit shaken. I started to wonder: “Is it over? Is the dream of entrepreneurship and technology in Silicon Valley coming to a crashing halt?” “What future do we have?”
Back in 2000, it was an Internet thing and we knew we’d eventually come out of it. But this time it’s a global thing, a heartland thing, a recession of proportions we’ve obviously never seen. I began to reach out for perspective. I talked with people, read some articles and dug into the topic of innovation in a downturn. My goal was to find hope, to calm my fears.
It turns out that many of the most important, coolest products, companies and innovations were born in the teeth of recessions⎯companies like Apple and Microsoft and products like the iPod and the Clif Bar. And so were several of our own companies, including 3VR, NetBase and SuccessFactors⎯all thriving!
While we know the road ahead will have bumps and we’ll have to make some tough calls and exercise prudence, we also know that the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation is getting a huge shot in the arm. NOW is the time for great talent to come together, for great ideas to emerge and for the hunger created by less than great times to drive a whole new generation of companies, products and stories. I could not be more fired up about where we are today.
In my research, I happened upon a paper on innovation by Kellogg innovation professor Andrew Razeghi that helped calm my fears and inspire me to get back on the innovation horse. I reached out to Professor Razeghi and he was gracious enough to take the time to answer some questions I had around innovation. Here’s the interview. Enjoy. Continued…