The 360 Paper Bottle: On Guilt, Inspiration, a Better Idea, Birds & Oceans

Leave it to an 8 year-old. Specifically, the 8 year-old son of Jim Warner, managing director of design consultancy Brandimage, who took one look at a plastic bottle his dad had helped create and said, “Oh. You make trash.”
Once the sting of that nasty little unvarnished truth wore off, Warner set to work to make [...]

PopTech 2009 Take-Aways: On Amateurs, Mining Cross-Disciplinary Gold, FLAP Bags, Science Fellows, $12 (well, $10) Computers, the Solar Hope, a Few Ideas for Next Year & Some Darn Fine Fiddling…

It was a wonderful little bubble while it lasted. Getting up before dawn. Dressing in easy-to-peel layers for whatever the day might bring. Walking over to Boynton-McKay, a diner of rare perfection, where the wi-fi was as reliably good as the pancakes (a boon in connectivity-challenged Camden…) Ascending the stairs and more stairs of the [...]

PopTech: Day 1 – Reimagining and Beyond Imagining

Blame it on the birds. And the elephants, lions, biochar, Indonesian agroforestry, dirt batteries, mechanical caterpillar waves, global maps, messenger bag-cum-lighting systems, a cyber-dance experience and one very lovely essay about migration. But not too far into the first day of PopTech, the conference’s “Reimagining America” theme disappeared. Which was fine. It seemed too limited [...]

Phone Riff: Hope Phones, Healthy Texting, Conflict Minerals, Ecological Intelligence, Blue Sweaters and Doing the Right Thing

Hope Phones is one of those “Gosh, yes!” ideas:

Get people to donate old cell phones to a recycling company
Get recycling company to assign each phone a value
Use value to trade for refurbished phones
Donate refurbished phones to clinics in developing countries to use for sending health-related text messages
Good begets good

Stanford student Josh Nesbit, who came up [...]