UCLA drills disabled vets on entrepreneurship
Posted on September 5, 2008
Filed Under UCLA entrepreneurship program | Leave a Comment
Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of Good Magazine and co-founder of Ethos Water, teaches a session at UCLA during the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans With Disabilities.
—
Former Marine Sgt. Shawn James has found moving from the military world to the business world a difficult journey.
Add a disability, and potential partners shy away in droves, said the 33-year-old San Diego resident, who dreams of starting a company involving hybrid vehicles.
“There’s a stigma attached, and while I could dispel a lot of that if given the opportunity, it’s that first initial access that’s the problem,” said James, who was left with respiratory problems and lower back pain from injuries sustained during a severe storm in the Indian Ocean.
So he’s spent the last several days with 14 other men at the all-expenses-paid Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans With Disabilities at UCLA. Offered for the first time by the UCLA Anderson School of Management, the program is based on a model launched by Syracuse University last year and replicated this year at Texas A&M University, Florida State University and Syracuse University.
From Aug. 2 until Saturday’s graduation, the veterans absorbed the basics of entrepreneurship from speakers and teaching assistants — many also veterans — and Anderson School faculty members. Participants also worked through online courses in the three weeks before they arrived and will be mentored by faculty members over the next year.
The program’s intense 12- to 13-hour days were no sweat, despite being crammed with one-on-one sessions and talks from people such as Richard Heckmann, founder of US Filter and Heckmann Corp. and a Vietnam veteran. After all, as former Army company commander Stephen Thomas said, “these guys have been to real boot camp.”
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The Management Development Institute
Posted on September 5, 2008
Filed Under UCLA management Development Institute | Leave a Comment
The Johnson & Johnson/UCLA Management Development Institute (MDI) for HIV/AIDS service providers is a one-week intensive program designed to enhance the management skills of program managers and leaders of African organizations devoted to the care, treatment and support of people and their families living with this disease. The program has been designed by world-class management faculty from the prestigious University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and delivered in conjunction with instructors from African universities. The program is funded by Johnson & Johnson, one of the most admired companies in the world today, and is offered in cooperation with AMREF, The African Medical and Research Foundation, and GIMPA, The Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration.
In 2008, three installations of the MDI are being held:
For East African organizations: 13-19 April and 7-13 September in Nairobi, Kenya.
For West African organizations: 31 August-5 September in Accra, Ghana.
Click here for more information on the application process. Click here to download the 2008 brochure.
The MDI was featured at a satellite session at the 2008 International AIDS Conference in Mexico City. Click here for more information.
MDI Sponsors:
Congratulations to the MDI Classes of 2007!
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Challenges for Biotech entrepreneurs
Posted on September 5, 2008
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Here is a report prepared by students at Kellog School of Management. The report is a student work but presents some key relevant data on challenges for start-up companies.
Click here for the full report
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New Frameworks for the Changing Face of America
Posted on September 5, 2008
Filed Under MetLife Foundation, National Arts Forum Series | Leave a Comment
Exploring Partnership Opportunities Between the Local Arts, Business and Creative Sectors.
Presented by:
LA Stage Alliance
September 10, 2008
3:30 - 5:00 pm
Doors open at 3:00 pm with refreshments!
Hosted by:
Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce
350 S Bixel St. Los Angeles, CA 90017
Parking and Directions
(Parking in the lot below the Chamber building will be validated.
Validation will be available at the registration desk!)
How can the arts, business and creative industries
in Los Angeles benefit from cross-sector partnering?
How can these partnerships help address the shared issues of
leadership, sustainability and workforce development?
What are the next steps for each sector?
Harvey Seifter, of Creativity Connection, will share insights
on successful partnerships between the arts, business
and creative industries.
Liz Ondaatje will lead a discussion
focused on the next steps for the Los Angeles community
and possible new models for an arts and business council.
Keynote:
Harvey Seifter, Author and Consultant, Creativity Connection
Moderated by:
Liz Ondaatje, Arts Policy specialist
Panelists:
Susan Gray, Cultural Arts Planner, City of Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency
Sammy Hoi, President, Otis College of Art and Design
Terence McFarland, Executive Director, LA Stage Alliance
Tickets: $25 For-profits, $20 Non-profits,
To RSVP or for more information visit:
www.LAStageAlliance.com/MetLife.asp
or call 213.614.0556 x40
Sarah Palin convention speech
Posted on September 4, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Socially Conscious Venture Capitalists
Posted on September 3, 2008
Filed Under social entrepreneur, socially conscious venture capitalist | Leave a Comment
Here is a good article on social entrepreneurship and the new wave of socially conscious venture capitalists who are more accepting to this idea once considered quite radical!
Can you do well by doing good? A growing number of New Radical Entrepreneurs think so, and are starting ventures whose core mission is to make a difference. Often called “social entrepreneurs”, some are offering world-changing goods and services, others are incorporating social responsibility into their operations, and a number are doing both.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been writing about what emerging New Radicals need to do to make the transition to their new role (for more on New Radicals, see archived articles). For New Radical Entrepreneurs, the challenges are similar to those faced by other start-ups, except when it comes to financing. Too often, venture capitalists hear “social investment”, think “philanthropy”, and quickly lose interest.
That’s changing, and fast. According to Venture Capital Journal, social venture investment funds are appearing in record numbers, and those that already exist are ramping up. VCJ reports that, in the U.S., “seven new and follow-on funds billed as mission-driven investment vehicles are on track to raise $750 million this year.”
Here are some examples of funds from three different countries, to show the range that’s out there. (And if you’re an emerging New Radical Entrepreneur who’s just starting to do your homework, several websites make good starting points, including skollfoundation.org, schwabfound.org, ashoka.org, changemakers.net, ssireview.org, and thirdsector.co.uk. Or google “social venture funds.” Some funds are for the non-profit sector only, while others invest in for-profit ventures.)
In the U.S., RSF Social Finance partners with investors, donors, and borrowers to create positive social change and environmental sustainability. RSF provides socially responsible lending in sectors including education, arts and culture, fair trade, sustainable food systems, organic agriculture, green building, and renewable energy — more than $100 million in loans to date. In 2003, for instance, RSF provided Organic Bouquet with a working capital loan, investing in the company’s critical early stage development. Organic Bouquet has bloomed, and, in a nice twist, recently announced that it will donate 10% of each purchase back to RSF.
Echoing Green invests in social entrepreneurs who are “developing new solutions to society’s most difficult problems.” Echoing Green acts as an angel investor in the non-profit sector, providing seed funding, as well as leadership, professional training, and technical assistance to help organizations develop a strong foundation. In just over 20 years, they’ve invested $27 million in seed funding to more than 450 social entrepreneurs and their innovative organizations.
In Canada, Social Capital Partners is a prime example of outside-the-envelope funding. They invest in enterprises that generate profits and create jobs for the hard-to-employ in Canada (such as street kids, aboriginal Canadians, and the homeless). “Hybrid companies — those that try to generate both financial and social returns — are a different and unique way to try and address some of our situational and social challenges,” founder Bill Young says. “We’re trying to make these hybrid organizations part of the mainstream.” SCP is investing in organizations such as TurnAround Couriers, which hires troubled youth as bike couriers. “I wanted to prove that you can help people by running a profitable business, without calling yourself a charity, and without asking for grants,” says founder Richard Derham.
In the United Kingdom, the brand-new Catalyst Social Venture Fund is attracting attention. Barclays recently announced it will invest [25 million pounds] in the social investment fund managed by Catalyst Fund Management and Research. The fund will focus on the burgeoning “ethical consumerism sector”, as well as on education, health, alternative energy, and the environment.
Catalyst believes that its fund is the logical next step in an emerging market segment. “By proving that you can make great returns in these sectors,” Rod Schwartz, Catalyst’s founder told me, “We will be attracting further investment from mainstream investors into an area where investor success and social returns go hand-in-hand. Anita Roddick proved this was possible at The Body Shop — now we need to find the next few examples.”
Although the numbers — of both funds and dollars invested — are still small when compared to the rest of the private equity sector, things are definitely moving in the right direction. And let me go out on a New Radical limb here and say that I believe that social investment will take off in just as spectacular a way as private equity did. David Chen, founder of the American fund, Equilibrium Capital, told Venture Capital Journal that since he began fundraising last fall, he’s seen a marked increase in interest from investors. Already, roughly $2.71 trillion — or 11% of assets under professional management in the United States — is held in social investments. Can widespread investment in social venture funds be far off?
What’s your experience? Have you seen evidence of compassionate capitalism? Have you been able to fund your new venture? Do you think that hybrid ventures are the way of the future? What kinds of support (financial and otherwise) do you need in order to make your New Radical Entrepreneur dream come true? Are you a potential investor, and do you see these funds as a wise addition to your portfolio?
(Already thinking about how you’ll catch the wave? You might want to check out a brilliant new book, The Back of a Napkin, by Dan Roam. He says that the best pitches and plans require nothing more than one page or picture to explain them.)
New Radical Entrepreneurs — and the financial partners who believe in them — are breaking important ground. I’ll leave the final word to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. “As we follow the presidential campaign, let’s not forget that the winner isn’t the only one who will shape the world.
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Best Green Twitter Feeds
Posted on September 3, 2008
Filed Under environmental twitter, twitter | 1 Comment
Twitter, the free micro-blogging and social networking site, enables its users worldwide to discuss (among other topics) all things green. From green living tips to local, national and international environmental news, users can follow the green musings of its 2 million users.
GREEN CITIZEN ACTIVIST TWITTERS:
* GreenNews offers international green news updates.
* Green Living notifies followers of green living tips from its affiliate website Eco Tech Daily.
* Check out Global Warming for top green news and global warming updates.
* Green Tweet provides interesting and useful green living advice tips, like these:
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteCyclists are the most punctual of employees: traffic jams do not affect them, neither do train delays. 12:34 PM August 14, 2008 from web
Place an insulated cover over your pool when it is not being used to help prevent water loss through evaporation. 11:44 AM August 13, 2008 from web* Grist’s twitter complements the green updates from its excellent environment, humor and politics site.
* The Green Options twitter compiles news from all of the website’s blogs.
* EcoGeek’s twitter offers news updates based on the website’s green tech postings.
* The Sprig twitter reports green living tips from the Sprig website, which advertises itself as “your daily green style guide.”
Sprig tip: turn the temperature on your fridge up a degree and fill the freezer with containers of ice to help lower energy use 12:07 PM July 02, 2008
* Sustainablog’s twitter features excerpts of the blog’s postings.
“[sustainablog] Back to School Shopping Madness 2: What an Environmentally Concerned Co. about 3 hours ago from twitterfeed
* The Eco-Chickie twitter is based on green news from Eco-chick’s website.
* The Green Wash Brigade’s twitter is based on news from the American Public Media’s blog:
“Michael Phelps :: swimming as renewables :: American energy? So says Dennis, with a stern glance at Congress: http://tinyurl.com/65af5d /jo Icon_star_empty” 3 days ago from web
Eco-entrepreneur Shea Gunther’s twitter features updates from his green sites EarthFirst and GreenOrder.
NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL PRESERVATION TWITTERS:* The National Wildlife Federation’s twitter compiles the latest green environmental news, like this unnerving fact:
Kids can identify more Pokemon than wildlife: http://tinyurl.com/6ftcza 09:49 AM August 04, 2008
* The Wilderness Society’s twitter enables readers to be constantly updated on news from the Society’s website.
LOCAL GREEN NEWS TWITTERS:* For Seattle green news updates follow the greenmedia twitter.
* From updates on local craft fairs to the newest local community blogs the EcoMetro twitter provides news updates for Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis.
* The GreenMichigan twitter offers news on the environment for Michigan, the Midwest and the Great Lakes.
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Planning for the Business owner
Posted on September 3, 2008
Filed Under New York Life Seminar | Leave a Comment
Join us for an informational seminar
Why VCs Should First be Entrepreneurs, and Why Entrepreneurs Should Stay Away From Venture Investing
Posted on September 3, 2008
Filed Under entrepreneur, venture capitalist | Leave a Comment
Nataly Kogan
I’ve been an entrepreneur for a far shorter time than I was a venture investor. But I already know that I should have arranged these two phases of my career in reverse. I would have been a much better venture investor if I started and ran my own company first and I would have an easier time starting my own company without my venture capital experience.
I think few people would argue with the first part: If you know what it takes to get a company off the ground you are better qualified to give advice to others about how to do it. After all, that is the ever-emphasized added value of venture investors who lure entrepreneurs with “smart money” and “significant operating experience” that can help a small company grow. I spent five years in venture and the only venture guys (yes, 99 percent were, in fact, guys) who could actually back up this fancy talk with action had been entrepreneurs at one point in their careers.
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25 Internet Startups That Bombed Miserably
Posted on September 2, 2008
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If the Internet could speak with one voice, it would probably groan “oh, not again!” That’s because every raving success story about Internet startups is tempered by dozens more that crashed and burned in a sea of wasted money, bad ideas, or unfulfilled hype. As venture capitalist Paul Graham writes, most of these failures are never written about. No one knew about them, so they were never really expected to go anywhere. But a select few had very public flame-outs - what Graham calls “the elite of failures.”
The list below celebrates not the failure of these companies, but presents us with a conservative reminder of a not-so-distant past and the lessons we can learn from it.
1. GovWorks
GovWorks may be the only startup failure compelling enough to have a movie made about it. The film “Startup.com” tells the tale of GovWorks’ tantalizing brush with mega-success as a website where everyday citizens could interact with their local governments. It had all the elements of a tear-jerking fall from grace: company is started by childhood friends (one of them a rainmaker, the other a technical wizard). Friends build multi-million dollar net worths only to lose it all to clashing egos and expectations. Throw in the obligatory theft of company technology and the departure of a crucial partner, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a storybook startup failure. GovWorks ultimately filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
2. Flooz.com
Flooz is a textbook example of a startup was pretty much doomed from the start. The idea was to create an alternative online-only currency (Flooz) that people would use instead of their credit cards. Once you acquired a hoard of Flooz, you were then free to use it at any number of retailers who had agreed, in advance, to accept it. There was only one problem. No one bothered to ask why someone would use a totally new and unproven currency instead of credit cards or gift cards, which were backed by trusted merchants. No one asking didn’t stop customers from answering, however, as lack of demand for Flooz plunged the company into bankruptcy in 2001. Apparently, dazzling TV commercials featuring Whoopi Goldberg couldn’t stop an astounding $35 million in venture money from being squandered.
3. Beenz
Beenz was a direct competitor to Flooze who was also forced to close up shop. Amazingly, Beenz raised $80 million over four rounds of venture funding, more than double what Flooz raised for the same, no-demand idea. Unlike Flooz, however, Beenz had the good sense to pull the plug before going under. Once Flooz announced that they were cutting their losses, Beenz followed suit by giving its customers a “spend your Beenz in 10 days or lose ‘em” ultimatum. It is believed that the twin failures of Flooz and Beenz spelled the end of the nascent e-currency market. As C/Net writes, the “collapse of a high-profile trailblazer such as Beenz shows that the Old Economy credit card companies have probably won the online shopping battle.”
4. WebVan
The online grocery shopping website didn’t fail for lack of a good idea. Rather, it was premature growth that dragged this company under the bus. WebVan’s deadly mistake was, as one Harvard professor wrote, “managing the company from the fiftieth floor when you only have a one-story building.” By creating a mammoth, $1 billion infrastructure of high-tech warehouses across the U.S., WebVan squandered the $375 million it raised at IPO on growth that its revenue simply could not justify. The other major problem facing WebVan was the already thin profit margins of the grocery business. All of this combined to deliver a decisive knock-out punch in the form of a 2001 bankruptcy filing that put over 2,000 people out of a job.
5. eToys
eToys.com committed what has come to be known as a Cardinal Sin of 90’s-era dot coms: spending tons of money on advertising, regardless of whether there is a market for your product or service. Nevertheless, the mere idea of an online toy retailer was enough to propel the company to a $166 million IPO in May of 1999. All went well early on, with eToys’ stock trading at highs of $84 per share in October of that same year. But by February 2001 the company’s outrageous spending in spite of revenues had caught up to it, sending its stock to an appalling low of 9 cents per share. Their assets were later acquired by KayBee Toys and is currently reincarnated, although not nearly as successfully as first hoped.
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15 Photovoltaics Solar Power Innovations You Must See
Posted on September 2, 2008
Filed Under Photovoltaics Solar Power Innovations | Leave a Comment
Looking Back at Recent PV Innovations
Energy. The lifeblood of modern civilization. Finding clean sources of it is very high on the green movement’s priority list, and one very promising field is solar photovoltaics (PV). We, at TreeHugger, have been covering the field for a while now, and we think it’s time to look in the rearview mirror at some of the top PV solar innovations from our archives.
Thin Film Solar Record: 19.9% Efficiency
A shortage of silicon in the past few years and the demand for thin and flexible panels has helped increase the focus on thin film solar recently, and a lot of progress is being made. The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has created thin film solar panels that are very close to competing with their more traditional silicon-based cousins. “The copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) thin-film solar cell recently reached 19.9 percent efficiency in testing at the lab, setting a new world record.”
CoolEarth Inflatable Solar Balloons
Solar photovoltaic cells are still relatively expensive, so many companies are trying to find ways to reduce the PV surface area that they use. One way to do that is to use concentrators to direct more sunlight to smaller (but usually more efficient) solar panels. But even if you do that, you still have high costs for support materials and the concentrators themselves.
That’s the problems that CoolEarth is trying to solve with its inflatable solar collectors. The balloons themselves are said to be 400 times cheaper than a concentrator of the same size made of polished aluminum, and they can be mounted on wires, reducing costs further. Maintenance is also easier: You can repair them with tape, and replace one unit in about 15 minutes. Read on for more details and a promo video.
Sunrgi Xtreme Concentrated Photovoltaics: Solar Power Competitive With Fossil Fuels?
Sunrgi recently made an impressive claim: They say that their system will soon be able to “produce electricity at a wholesale cost of 5 cents per kWh (kilowatt hour).” (!) They do it by concentrating the Sun’s light close to 2,000 times (!!!) into extremely efficient solar photovoltaic cells. Part of Sunrgi’s patent-pending technology has to do with the cooling of the solar cells, dual-axis sun tracking, and the way the whole system is optimized for mass-production. Find out more about it in our post about Sunrgi’s concentrated solar power.
‘Hairy’ Thin Film Solar Panels Using Nanowires
We often hear about new exotic materials and strange shapes, but this could be the weirdest announcement yet: Researchers at McMaster University (coolest name ever) have succeeded in ‘growing’ light-absorbing nanowires made of high-performance photovoltaic materials on carbon-nanotube fabric. In other words, hairy solar panels.
The aim is to produce flexible, affordable solar cells that, within five years, will achieve a conversion efficiency of 20%. Longer term, it’s theoretically possible to achieve 40% efficiency!
Moth Eyes Biomimicry for Solar Panels
Silicon is reflective, so a lot of light that could be turned into electricity is bounced back and lost. Anti-reflective coating is used, but its effectiveness is limited and it has downsides too. So while looking for a solution, researchers noticed that moths have very non-reflective eyes (”most likely an evolutionary defense against nocturnal predators”). The moth-eye process creates panels that reflect less than 2% of light. That’s a vast improvement over the 35 to 40% reflection rate seen without the anti-reflection coating layers.
See the full list
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Wind, Solar Investments In Jeopardy As Tax Credits Are Set To Expire
Posted on September 2, 2008
Filed Under solar investment, wind investment | Leave a Comment
JIM ABRAMS | August 31, 2008 09:28 AM EST | AP
WASHINGTON — Congress is putting the short-term future of renewable energy companies in jeopardy even as the presidential candidates and most lawmakers hail windmills, solar panels and biofuels as long-term solutions to high gasoline prices and global warming.
Some $500 million in investment and production tax credits will expire Dec. 31 unless Congress renews them. Without that help, solar and wind power companies say they will reverse planned expansions and, in many cases, cut payrolls and capital investment.
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Start a Green Business
Posted on September 2, 2008
Filed Under green business, green entrepreneur | Leave a Comment
Make money and be earth-friendly with a green products business.
By Amanda C. Kooser
Even Wal-Mart sells organic cotton T-shirts these days, but you definitely don’t have to be a retailing behemoth to take your business in a green or organic direction. In fact, entrepreneurs have an advantage when it comes to reaching customers who care about the cause as well as the products.
“It’s a highly underrated opportunity for small business,” says Dr. Karel J. Samsom, a specialist in environmental and sustainable entrepreneurship and author of Spirit of Entrepreneurship. A study by the Organic Trade Association shows that nonfood organic product sales reached $744 million in U.S. consumer sales in 2005, with supplements, personal care and household products leading the charge. For green entrepreneurs, passion is key, says Samsom: “People who are imbued with this kind of spirit have an incredible imagination to rebuild the value chain and inspire their customers in the process.”
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What is Geothermal energy
Posted on September 1, 2008
Filed Under Geothermal energy | Leave a Comment
Maybe you’ve been hearing more about geothermal energy lately — it gets mentioned more in the mix with solar and wind these days, especially when politicians are listing off, quickly as possible, all the forms of renewable energies they can think of. In case you don’t know much about it, HuffPost Green has compiled this little FAQ.
What is geothermal energy?
Geothermal energy is a cheap and largely untapped natural energy resource. It’s an intriguing sustainable energy source due to its unlimited supply, 24-hour availability and ability to decrease reliance on fossil fuels.
The EPA defines geothermal for us:
Geothermal energy is produced from the constant temperature of the earth. This can be accessed by drilling into the earth and extracting that heat and turning it into usable energy. Geothermal energy is an enormous underused resource that provides clean renewable energy in virtually unlimited supplies.
Blogger Michelle Bennett of CleanTechnica praises geothermal energy’s non-stop energy supply:
The potential return could be as enormous as the forces of nature at work: clean, green, unlimited energy for the rest of this geologic era. Unlike solar and wind, geothermal generates a steady supply of energy 24 hours a day, everyday. Anything so abundant and predictable won’t go untapped for long.
What geothermal energy is, can essentially be described with the sentence; heat contained and produced by the heating of the earth in two different ways. The more powerful geothermal energy comes from deep within the earth, where the temperature is hot enough to melt the surrounding rocks. The second source of geothermal energy is as a results of the suns rays beating down on the land surface. We shall now look into these two main sources.
How Does It Work?
One of the methods to generate electricity from geothermal energy is by pumping hot water into sedimentary hotspots. The steam generated by this method is used to produce electricity. The condensed steam is again circulated into the permeable sedimentary stream of a hotspot.
Another method is by using volcanic magma. The temperature of partially molten magma is approximately 650 degree Celsius. This heat is used to boil water to generate electricity.
Some geothermal plants also use the hardened magma that is extremely hot. This system uses hot dry rock. Pipes are looped through these hot dry rocks through which water is circulated. The heat of the rocks converts the water into steam prior to transferring the heat to a steam generator.
How Much Energy Could Be Generated?
Google will invest $10 million to the development of enhanced geothermal systems (EGS). According to Treehugger, it takes just 2% of the heat present beneath North American soil to fulfill the United States’ energy needs. Last week, scientists asserted that just 1% of Australia’s geothermal energy potential is enough to power the nation for 26,000 years. This change in Australia’s energy source will help to drastically reduce worldwide carbon emissions.
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New Orleans repeating deadly levee mistakes
Posted on September 1, 2008
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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Signs are emerging that history is repeating itself in the Big Easy, still healing from Katrina: People have forgotten what happened after the last hurricane, four decades ago, that caused catastrophic flooding and again believe the federal government is constructing a levee system they can prosper behind.
In a year-long review of levee work here, The Associated Press has tracked a pattern of public misperception, political jockeying and legal fighting, along with economic and engineering miscalculations since Katrina, that threaten to make New Orleans the scene of another devastating flood.
Dozens of interviews with engineers, historians, policymakers and flood zone residents confirmed many have not learned from public policy mistakes made after Hurricane Betsy in 1965, which set the stage for Katrina; many mistakes are being repeated.
“People forget, but they cannot afford to forget,” said Windell Curole, a Louisiana hurricane and levee expert. “If you believe you can’t flood, that’s when you increase the risk of flooding. In New Orleans, I don’t think they talk about the risk.”
Tyrone Marshall, a 48-year-old bread vendor, is one person who doesn’t believe he’s going to flood again.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Louisiana | Mississippi | Gulf of Mexico | Army Corps of Engineers | Ward | Big Easy | National Research Council | University of New Orleans | Hurricane Betsy | John Barry | Katrina People
“They’ve heightened the levees. They’re raised up. It makes me feel safe,” he said as he toiled outside his home in hard-hit Gentilly, a formerly flooded property refashioned into a California-style bungalow.
Geneva Stanford, a 76-year-old health care worker, is a believer, too. She lives in a trim and tidy prefabricated house in the Lower 9th Ward, 200 feet from a rebuilt floodwall that Katrina broke.
“This wall here wasn’t there when we had the flood,” Stanford said, radiant in a bright kanga-style dress. “When I look at it now, I say maybe if we had had it up it there then, maybe we wouldn’t have flooded.”
They’re not alone. A recent University of New Orleans survey of residents found concern about levee safety was dropping off the list of top worries, replaced by crime, incompetent leadership and corruption.
This sense of security, though, may be dangerously naive.
For the foreseeable future, New Orleans will be protected by levees unable to protect against another storm like Katrina.
When and if the Army Corps of Engineers finishes $14.8 billion in post-Katrina work, the city will have limited protection — what are defined as 100-year levees.
This does not mean they’d stand up to storms for a century. Under the 100-year standard, in fact, experts say that every house being rebuilt in New Orleans has a 26% chance of being flooded again over a 30-year mortgage; and every child born in New Orleans would have nearly a 60% chance of seeing a major flood in his or her life.
“It’s not exactly great protection,” said John Barry, the author of “Rising Tide,” a book New Orleans college students read to learn about the corps’ efforts to tame the Mississippi.
As a rule, any levee building makes people feel good in this unsettling landscape where the Gulf of Mexico can be seen gleaming from the top floors of skyscrapers and where the ubiquitous dynamics of a sinking and eroding river delta ripple through every aspect of life.
Levees tend to get built after devastating hurricanes: It’s happening now and it happened after Betsy struck and flooded much of the same low ground that Katrina invaded.
“We did go in and did a whole bunch of levee work right after Betsy,” said Philip Ciaccio, a New Orleans appellate judge and longtime former politician from eastern New Orleans, a reclaimed swamp transformed into the Big Easy’s version of the American suburban dream.
Between Betsy and Katrina, about 22,000 homes were constructed in eastern New Orleans out of an abundance of confidence.
“We were under the illusion that what we had done would prevent another Betsy from flooding the area,” Ciaccio said. “Hopefully the experts know what they’re doing this time.”
The corps says its work is making the city safer, but there are serious doubts.
At every step in the scramble to correct the engineering breakdowns of Katrina, independent experts have questioned the ability of the corps, an agency that has accumulated ever more power over the fate of New Orleans, to do the right job.
On the road to recovery, the agency has installed faulty drainage pumps, used outdated measurements, issued incorrect data, unearthed critical flaws, made conflicting statements about flood risk and flunked reviews by the National Research Council.
At the same time, the corps has run into funding problems, lawsuits, a tangle of local interests and engineering difficulties — all of which has led to delays in getting the promised work done.
An initial September 2010 target to complete the $14.8 billion in post-Katrina work has slipped to mid-2011. Then last September, an Army audit found 84% of work behind schedule because of engineering complexities, environmental provisos and real estate transactions. The report added that costs would likely soar.
A more recent analysis shows the start of 84 of 156 projects was delayed — 15 of them by six months or more. Meanwhile, a critical analysis of what it would take to build even stronger protection — 500-year-type levees — was supposed to be done last December but remains unfinished.
Another opportunity for setbacks: The corps says it will need more than 100 million cubic yards of clay and dirt to build up levees — enough to fill the Louisiana Superdome 20 times.
Also on the corps’ drawing board are gigantic pumps capable of pushing more than 20,000 cubic feet of water per second. For comparison, the biggest pumps in New Orleans move about 6,000 cfs every second and they’re among the most impressive in the nation.
That’s not all: The corps has awarded The Shaw Group a $695 million contract to build a massive barrier against storm surge in the Industrial Canal. It’s touted as one of the biggest public works projects ever performed by the agency.
Publicly, the corps says the work is on budget and will be done by 2011.
“The progress I see each time I visit is really remarkable. The region has a better hurricane and storm damage reduction system in place than ever before in its history — and it will continue to get better,” Lt. Gen. Robert Van Antwerp, the corps chief, wrote on his blog in April.
Al Naomi, a corps branch chief who’s worked for the past 37 years in New Orleans, said he was upbeat because Congress has shown a willingness to fund the work. In addition, he said, enough elements are coming together to make him “cautiously optimistic” the work will stay on track.
“We are in pretty good shape financially to do quite a bit of work in this area,” he said.
Doubts, though, weigh on those familiar with the game plan.
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7 Key Green issues for the upcoming Presidential Election
Posted on August 31, 2008
Filed Under 7 Key Green Issues, thedailygreen.com | Leave a Comment
# 1 Global Warming
Heat waves, wildfires, droughts and flash floods are among the weather phenomena that will become more intense and frequent due to global warming. There’s more in store, as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, primarily flowing from our tailpipes and smokestacks, build up in the atmosphere.
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# 2 National Security
National Security isn’t traditionally thought of as a green issue, but the nexus of energy demand, global warming and violent extremism has made it so. For many, the drive for energy independence — the goal of producing all the energy the country needs domestically, particularly by reducing imports of oil from the Middle East — is at its heart a national security goal.
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# 3 Nuclear Energy
The first nuclear power plant in the United States was built in Pennsylvania in 1957. The last began construction in 1977, before the Three Mile Island accident, also in Pennsylvania, in 1979 and the devastating Chernobyl meltdown, in the Ukraine, in 1986. Nuclear power plants produce nearly 20% of the nation’s electricity at 104 plants, and for the first time in a generation, the industry is trying to build new nuclear reactors — as many as 19 projects in 15 states.
Opposition to nuclear energy, which has traditionally included environmentalists, focuses on the potential for accidents or terrorist attacks at nuclear reactors, on atomic fission’s wartime uses and on the long-lived radioactive waste. Nuclear waste remains dangerous for thousands of years, and there’s no attractive way to store or recycle it. Economics is also in play: A new nuclear power plant costs as much as $8 billion to build, roughly four times as much as a coal-fired plant.
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# 4 Offshore Drilling
Offshore drilling became a campaign issue as gasoline prices hit $4 a gallon. Public opinion polls show that not only do Americans want their elected leaders to do something about it, but they think drilling for oil on the continental shelf is a great idea. Public opinion, however, isn’t made up of enough geologists, engineers, Wall Street traders or energy policy experts to have all the facts straight.
Drilling for oil in the outer continental shelf, primarily off the coasts of California and Florida, would yield about 200,000 barrels a day, but not for 10 years, according to an Energy Information Administration analysis. Even if companies drill more oil (some estimate there’s 400,000 or even 1 million barrels a day available, at current prices) or access it more quickly, there wouldn’t be enough, most experts agree, to have a significant effect on prices. That said, changing the offshore drilling policy might influence the futures market in the short term, since traders react to news about impending supply and demand changes.
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# 5 Ethanol
Ethanol means renewable energy and a domestic source of automobile fuel, but in America it also means corn, at least for now. And that means ethanol is a devil’s bargain.
Corn requires so much fertilizer — much of it derived from natural gas — and pesticides, derived from chemicals — that corn-based ethanol is only marginally less polluting than oil. Even if every arable acre of land in the United States was planted with corn, it would produce only about 12% of the gasoline we burn today. Congressional mandates for corn-based ethanol led Heartland farmers to plant more acres of corn than at any time in decades. That contributed to a near-record dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, a lifeless area the size of New Jersey that forms when fertilizer discharges from Mississippi Valley farms.
# 6 Energy Costs
The cost of oil peaked above $140 a barrel this summer, nearly double the price of a year earlier and 40% higher than worst-case scenarios discussed just months earlier. Gas prices followed suit, going well above $4 a gallon during peak driving season and sending drivers, carmakers and politicians into fits. Heating oil prices started climbing to record levels months before heating season.
The cost of coal, too, tripled in about a year’s time, leading electric power producers — who produce 50% of U.S. electricity by burning coal — to raise rates. Natural gas, also a major source of U.S. electricity, doubled in a year’s time before plummeting in July.
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# 7 Food and Product safety
The last two years have produced countless recalls of toxic products and contaminated foods. Evidence continues to mount that some common chemicals are harmful, and criticisms have mounted that the government watchdogs appointed to police consumer goods and food are unwilling or unable to do the job.
Congress has passed legislation to bolster the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. The Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, has repeatedly been accused of favoring corporations over citizens, and the USDA has struggled to keep contaminated meat out of stores.
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What makes radio commercials effective?
Posted on August 31, 2008
Filed Under What makes radio commercials effective? | Leave a Comment
By Jay Maharjan on October 25, 2007
We recently started a radio advertisement campaign on CBS KFWB Los Angeles. KFWB 980 is one of the largest radio stations in the city known for its second largest media market in the world. This was the first time we prepared a script for a station with million + listeners. So far, we have already run 2 separate spots. Interestingly, one worked and the other didn’t.
Use simple scripts
Using technical jargon or unfamiliar business terms in the script will confuse listeners. Our first set of ads was straight forward, with the terms in the script very easy to understand. As a result we received many responses. Our second spot didn’t generate as many responses because of the complexity of the words used in the script.
Free is always good
The word ‘free’ is an immediate attention grabber. The scripts that stand out should include phrases like “free assessment”, “free first consultation”, or “free passes”. We are including the term “free consultation” in our third spot that is starting in a week.
Direct to the website that has detail information
With the advertisement that didn’t work, we relied too much on receiving calls to our 800 number. Instead, we ended up getting many hits on our web site. As we did not have the most up to date content on our website, we lost some leads. Always have supporting information on the website. Try to create a custom landing page other than your main website for each advertisement that you air.
Come up with a catchy 800 #
Try to come up with catchy letters corresponding to your 800 number. Fedex uses 1 800 GO FEDEX. This works especially well on radio commercials because the chances are that people hear your ad while they are on the road and cannot stop in time to jot down the number. Fun, creative numbers can work wonders for businesses.
Do not miss the incoming calls
Too often companies spend large sums of money for advertisement, but fail to align the back-end fulfillment portion. Each missed call represents missed revenue. Be ready to take all the calls. Have people standby when the ads come out. Or, even better, have answering service pick up the calls 24/7 while you are busy or attending other clients. There are many good services out there. Companies like Global messaging Center in Hollywood have trained staff and good customer service to take calls 24/7.
In case you miss the calls, follow up promptly and offer to visit them in person.
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What does it cost to eliminate fossil fuels?
Posted on August 30, 2008
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The World Spends $300 Billion Subsidizing Fossil Fuels
The Cost of Eliminating Fossil Fuels? Maybe No More than the Cost of Burning Them
Dan Shapley, (thedailygreen.com)
The world is spending $300 billion every year to subsidize fossil fuels that pollute the air, wreck the climate … and run the world’s economy.
So what if we, as taxpayers, stopped spending $300 billion on coal, oil and natural gas, and started spending it instead on wind, sun and water?
That’s the question at the heart of a new report from the United Nations Environment Program, which concludes that eliminating fuel subsidies would not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but might just inspire new economic growth. (Further, it concludes that fossil fuels subsidies sold as a way to help the poor keep the lights on actually do more to help the rich.)
“In the final analysis many fossil fuel subsidies are introduced for political reasons but are simply propping up and perpetuating inefficiencies in the global economy – they are thus part of the market failure that is climate change,” UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said.
Isn’t it remarkable how subversive the U.N. can be?
The world spends about 0.7% of GDP on fossil fuel subsidies. The cost of curtailing carbon emissions to meet scientific goals by 2050 has been estimated at 1% of GDP. (The cost of not curtailing carbon emissions, measured in weather calamities, mass migrations and the like, could be 5-10% of GDP.)
The problem, of course, is that most nations are not willing to give up fossil fuels, their subsidies, or their profits. We focus on ourselves, and the addiction to oil we all admit to. But think about Russia, fat on oil wealth, and willing to thumb its nose at the international community. Can we reasonably expect that Russia will join in the latest United Nations talks, ongoing this week in Ghana, and agree to slash its carbon emissions?
Russian fossil fuel subsidies, at $40 billion annually, are the largest on the planet, according to the U.N. report. Others that top the list: Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, India, Indonesia, Ukraine and Egypt.
Wiping out oil subsidies, unfortunately, is akin to telling countries — many of them unwilling to listen to international opinion in the first place — not to act in their own national interest.
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Photo Credit: Don Farrall / Getty Images
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The Art of Bootstrapping
Posted on August 30, 2008
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From Guy Kawasaki’s blog
Someone once told me that the probability of an entrepreneur getting venture capital is the same as getting struck by lightning while standing at the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny day. This may be too optimistic.
Let’s say that you can’t raise money for whatever reason: You’re not a “proven” team with “proven” technology in a “proven” market. Or, your company may simply not be a “VC deal”–that is, something that will go public or be acquired for a zillion dollars. Finally, your organization may be a not-for-product with a cause like the ministry or the environment. Does this mean you should give up? Not at all.
I could build a case that too much money is worse than too little for most organizations—not that I wouldn’t like to run a Super Bowl commercial someday. Until that day comes, the key to success is bootstrapping. The term comes from the German legend of Baron Münchhausen
pulling himself out of the sea by pulling on his own bootstraps. Here is the art of bootstrapping.
- Focus on cash flow, not profitability. The theory is that profits are the key to survival. If you could pay the bills with theories, this would be fine. The reality is that you pay bills with cash, so focus on cash flow. If you know you are going to bootstrap, you should start a business with a small up-front capital requirement, short sales cycles, short payment terms, and recurring revenue. It means passing up the big sale that take twelve months to close, deliver, and collect. Cash is not only king, it’s queen and prince too for a bootstrapper.
- Forecast from the bottom up. Most entrepreneurs do a top-down forecast: “There are 150 million cars in America. It sure seems reasonable that we can get a mere 1% of car owners to install our satellite radio systems. That’s 1.5 million systems in the first year.” The bottom-up forecast goes like this: “We can open up ten installation facilities in the first year. On an average day, they can install ten systems. So our first year sales will be 10 facilities x 10 systems x 240 days = 24,000 satellite radio systems. 24,000 is a long way from the conservative 1.5 million systems in the top-down approach. Guess which number is more likely to happen.
- Ship, then test. I can feel the comments coming in already: How can you recommend shipping stuff that isn’t perfect? Blah blah blah. ”Perfect“ is the enemy of ”good enough.“ When your product or service is ”good enough,“ get it out because cash flows when you start shipping. Besides perfection doesn’t necessarily come with time–more unwanted features do. By shipping, you’ll also learn what your customers truly want you to fix. It’s definitely a tradeoff: your reputation versus cash flow, so you can’t ship pure crap. But you can’t wait for perfection either. (Nota bene: life science companies, please ignore this recommendation.)
- Forget the ”proven“ team. Proven teams are over-rated–especially when most people define proven teams as people who worked for a billion dollar company for the past ten years. These folks are accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and it’s not the bootstrapping lifestyle. Hire young, cheap, and hungry people. People with fast chips, but not necessarily a fully functional instruction set. Once you achieve significant cash flow, you can hire adult supervision. Until then, hire what you can afford and make them into great employees.
- Start as a service business. Let’s say that you ultimately want to be a software company: people download your software or you send them CDs, and they pay you. That’s a nice, clean business with a proven business model. However, until you finish the software, you could provide consulting and services based on your work-in-process software. This has two advantages: immediate revenue and true customer testing of your software. Once the software is field-tested and battle-hardened, flip the switch and become a product company.
- Focus on function, not form. Mea culpa: I love good ”form.“ MacBooks. Audis. Graf skates. Bauer sticks. Breitling watches. You name it. But bootstrappers focus on function, not form, when they are buying things. The function is computing, getting from point A to point B, skating, shooting, and knowing the time of day. These functions do not require the more expensive form that I like. All the chair has to do is hold your butt. It doesn’t have to look like it belongs in the Museum of Modern Art. Design great stuff, but buy cheap stuff.
- Pick your battles. Bootstrappers pick their battles. They don’t fight on all fronts because they cannot afford to fight on all fronts. If you were starting a new church, do you really need the $100,000 multimedia audio visual system? Or just a great message from the pulpit? If you’re creating a content web site based on the advertising model, do you have to write your own customer ad-serving software? I don’t think so.
- Understaff. Many entrepreneurs staff up for what could happen, best case. ”Our conservative (albeit top-down) forecast for first year satellite radio sales is 1.5 million units. We’d better create a 24 x 7 customer support center to handle this. Guess what? You sell no where near 1.5 million units, but you do have 200 people hired, trained, and sitting in a 50,000 square foot telemarketing center. Bootstrappers understaff knowing that all hell might break loose. But this would be, as we say in Silicon Valley, a “high quality problem.” Trust me, every venture capitalist fantasizes about an entrepreneur calling up and asking for additional capital because sales are exploding. Also trust me when I tell you that fantasies are fantasies because they seldom happen.
- Go direct. The optimal number of mouths (or hands) between a bootstrapper and her customer is zero. Sure, stores provide great customer reach, and wholesalers provide distribution. But God invented ecommerce so that you could sell direct and reap greater margins. And God was doubly smart because She knew that by going direct, you’d also learn more about your customer’s needs. Stores and wholesalers fill demand, they don’t create it. If you create enough demand, you can always get other organizations to fill it later. If you don’t create demand, all the distribution in the world will get you bupkis.
- Position against the leader. Don’t have the money to explain your story starting from scratch? Then don’t try. Instead position against the leader. Toyota introduced Lexus as good as a Mercedes but at half the price–Toyota didn’t have to explain what “good as a Mercedes” meant. How much do you think that saved them? “Cheap iPod” and “poor man’s Bose noise-cancelling headphones,” would work too.
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SDTCA Quick Pitch Competition
Posted on August 30, 2008
Filed Under Fast Pitch Competition, SDTCA Quick Pitch Competition | Leave a Comment
| Date: | 10/2/2008 |
| Location: | QUALCOMM Auditorium 6455 Lusk Blvd. San Diego, CA 92121 |
| Time: | 6:00 PM |
| Description: | Quick Pitch CompetitionDate: October 2, 2008 Time: 6:00 - 8:30 p.mLocation: QUALCOMM Q-Auditorium $65 for Non – Members |
| URL: | http://connect.kintera.org/tcaquickpitch2008 |
| Organizer: | Meghan Hope 858 964 1314 |
10 Facts About Sarah Palin
Posted on August 29, 2008
Filed Under Sarah Palin, TIME excerpt | Leave a Comment
The first woman to run on a Republican Presidential ticket (and the second woman, after 1984 Democratic candidate Geraldine Ferraro, to run for Vice President for a major party), John McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin was also the first ever female governor of Alaska — and its youngest when she was sworn in at age 42 in 2006. Born in Idaho, Palin’s family moved her to Alaska as an infant, where she grew up in Wasilla, a small town of fewer than 9,000, located 45 miles north of Anchorage. She first entered politics in 1992, winning a seat on the Wasilla City Council, before going on to become the town’s mayor four years later at age 32. After two terms in office, she earned statewide recognition by pursuing the nomination for lieutenant governor — which she lost by only 2,000 votes. Palin has no national experience and less than two years experience as governor, but she is unabashed about that. “That’s a healthy thing,” she told TIME. “That means my perspective is fresher.”
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who are Y combinators?
Posted on August 29, 2008
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By Michelle Kessler, USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO — If you must live on a diet of Lean Cuisine, try the Swedish meatballs.
So advises Wayne Crosby, a 29-year-old computer programmer who recently spent three months subsisting on the frozen dinners. He also slept on an air mattress, used a box as a coffee table, and worked about 14 hours a day.
And he gave up a good job at Amazon.com to do it.
Crosby participated in a unique program for aspiring tech entrepreneurs called Y Combinator. Founded by Paul Graham, a computer programmer who struck it rich during the dot-com boom, Y Combinator combines mentoring with venture capital in hopes of getting the next Google off the ground. (The name comes from a mathematical term.)
Graham and his team gather a small group of start-ups in Cambridge, Mass., each summer and California’s Silicon Valley each winter. Fledgling companies get a bit of money — usually no more than $20,000 — and access to Graham’s extensive network of tech executives, venture capitalists, lawyers and other industry insiders. In exchange, Y Combinator takes a share