Gentle on nature, hard on Jedi. (More great Eco-Boba pics here.)
Boba Fett was always my favorite Star Wars character.
Here’s your chance to emulate him and become a bounty hunter. Prizes go to the bold.
According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), more than 125 million cell phones are thrown away each year, which amounts to about 65,000 tons of waste. That’s just in the US.
I have four old phones sitting in a drawer because I want to recycle them but… well, it’s damn inconvenient. Most people are green only when it is more convenient, cheaper, or faster than the alternatives, plain and simple.
But what if recycling a phone were as easy as “throwing it out” in a public mailbox?
The Solution – Hunt Them Down
How do we convince companies, like LG or AT&T, to make good behavior convenient, helping us and the planet? Simple. Call them on it. Literally.
This fireside chat at Google in London was also simulcast to their offices in Ireland, Sweden, and Moscow. It was a blast.
It covered tons of topics never discussed on the blog before: proposed improvements to Gmail (please!), the real original book title, using telephone vs. e-mail, principles and case studies, metrics (including exercise), analysis vs. intuition, the declining dollar and personal outsourcing & geoarbitrage, and much more.
If you’re bored at work, you can listen to the audio while you browse Facebook :) My collection of 55 odd videos on YouTube can be found here if you want more semi-productive distraction before 5pm.
Napping after lunch at the new Vang Lam preschool in Vietnam. So cute a lumberjack would cry.
Remember LitLiberation, the social media educational experiment I ran with bloggers not long ago?
With zero financing or hard costs, this new model ended up raising more than $250,000 in less than a month, more than Stephen Colbert, TechCrunch, and Engadget combined during that same period.
Hundreds and thousands of you participated and spread the word, helping thousands of children in fundamental life-altering ways.
Here is one fun new example: our first school in Vietnam has been completed and is now full of pre-schoolers! … Read More
In fact, I volunteered for TiE when I first moved to Silicon Valley in 2000 to observe some of the best and brightest in action. I’m not Indian, but entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship. Consider this:
Today, TiE events are a parade of the Who’s Who among CEOs and VCs of Silicon Valley, from founding Sun Microsystems CEO… Vinod Khosla to former McKinsey CEO Rajat Gupta to former Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia, who sold his company to Microsoft in 1998 for $400 million. “TiE is the best kept secret,” says Bhatia, who in April launched a new startup InstaColl. Others jokingly call TiE “the Indian Mafia”, the invisible hand behind at least 300 startup companies at any given moment…
In expectation of TiE’s annual conference on entrepreneurship, TiECON 2009 (May 15/16), I asked four of its members, all accomplished venture capitalists at some of the world’s most prestigious firms, to answer questions about start-ups and finance that 35,000+ of you suggested via Twitter, plus a few I wanted to add. The questions include, among others:
What is the best pitch meeting that you remember and why?
What are the most common mistakes or assumptions smart founders make in pitch meetings with VCs?
What unfavorable terms do founders often miss or underestimate in term sheets?
How can someone get you to look at a business plan if they don’t know anyone in your network (e.g. outside Silicon Valley elite, didn’t go to Stanford)?
Liz fidgeted, then leaned forward, eyes wide-open, “But the worst—the worst—is that I find myself saying things like ‘how are you guys doing?’. ‘You guys’! It makes me sick to my stomach.”
My roommate on Claddaugh Key was Irish down to her last Guinness-drinking bone.
Alas, sitting along the harbor among the swan flocks in Galway, she was still shaking off the after-effects of a year of study in the US. More than the big cars and big people, it had been the word “guys” that drove her nuts, and now she couldn’t stop it from rolling off her tongue. She had become a counterfeit Yank.
“So what do you say then?”
“You lads.”
“Oh, that’s much better.”
Beauty may be in the ear of the listener, but “you” in the plural (second person plural for you linguists) just ain’t as simple as it should be in English, particularly in the US. That is, except in the South.
“You all” or, more commonly, “y’all” is neat, clean, and logical. It is similar to Japanese, in which you simply tag a plural indicator after “you” (anata) to make it y’all (anata-tachi), just as “I” (watashi) becomes “we” (watashi-tachi). Chinese is the same (ni –> ni-men, wo –> wo-men). Read More
Is that a woman or a 12-year old drinking beer? I don’t know, but they’re happy about it.
Denmark has recently emerged as the world’s happiest country, beating out Bhutan, the long-time favorite of anthropologists everywhere.
The birthplace of LEGO–a contraction of leg godt or “play well”–offers even the first time visitor an incredible sense of hygglige: amiable cosiness.
“I remember you mentioned in your book,” my Danish editor said over lunch in Copenhagen two weeks ago, “that you had a big head.” I do have a huge head. I took a bite of delicious Esrom cheese and nodded for her to continue, keeping one eye on the wienerbrød.
“But you don’t have a huge head. You just have a healthy, normal-sized Danish head.” I smiled–home at last.
Even if you don’t have a Danish bloodline like I do, there are some good reasons to visit Copenhagen, the capital of the world’s happiest country… Read More
What happens when you say “laugh at all my jokes and I’ll breakdance for you at the end”–and someone calls you on it?
This is exactly what happened to me two months ago at the Nielsen Training Conference in Atlanta. I didn’t choose the music.
The fine art of distraction… and sore hamstrings sans warm-up.
Ahhhhh… public speaking!
A fate worse than death for some, but the pay-off can be tremendous. The 4HWW hit its tipping point with one presentation at SXSW, and in a digital world, one thought-provoking or rousing speech can propel you or your brand into the stratosphere.
But what are the basics for persuasive content and a delivery that makes evangelists out of disbelievers? I think Dan Pink is the right person to ask… Read More
Bestselling author David Bach used to use Flonase, Alegra D, and Singulair. He used Advair for almost ten years before he made one change that eliminated all of these medications.
He moved into a The Solaire, a green-optimized building in NYC.
Going green is something we all know we should do, but somehow most of us never quite get around to it, unless an accident or experiment shows us clear personal benefits. David moved into The Solaire for the location, for example, not the green effect.
But what if you could help the world by being self-interested? Self-interest and contribution need not be mutually exclusive, after all.
One great method for taking an expenses-paid “mini-retirement”–or adding more time to your travels without adding costs–is to work with an international volunteer organization.
Some volunteer groups charge a participation fee, but there are some that will cover your food, housing–and provide you with good meaningful work–at no cost. I would like to share with you a few stories from friends who have all taken mini-retirements with Hands On Disaster Response, one such group.
A Little Back Story
Breakdowns of any sort can be great experiences: nervous, communication, etc. They allow us to return to center and to refocus on what it is that truly matters. For Tim, it was a one-way ticket to London in June 2004.
My breakdown came just a few months later and took me to Thailand to find anyone or any place I could help recover from the Tsunami that had just destroyed tens of thousands of homes and lives. I had been living in L.A. working as a freelance designer, treading water and occasionally getting mouthfuls of it, and my adventure to Thailand was a conscious decision to give up treading and to dive down deeper to explore just what was around me… Read More
