At long last
Tata Motors has started selling its vaunted Nano. [For more on the launch, read "Tata Nano: Meet the World's Cheapest Car."] Market research suggests that the Nano may bring safer, four-wheeled transportation within reach of an additional 14 million Indians who now make do with overcrowded bicycles and motorcycles, but what about the environmental impact.
Fast Company was among the chorus declaring Tata "most innovative" for developing the Nano. But in the six years since Ratan Tata first announced his plans, the landscape has shifted. With minimal exhaust filters and an engine that can burn kerosene--even dirtier than gas, but heavily subsidized by the indian government--the Nano stands to make a disproportionate impact on greenhouse gas emissions and to increase traffic on India's already choked roadways.
The controversy over the Nano is a preview of a debate the whole world will be having come December in Copenhagen, when the Kyoto global warming agreement is renegotiated: To what degree should developing countries be asked to pay the price and curb excess emissions, when richer nations have already reaped the benefits?
Comments from Indians on the BBC's website show that the car will definitely find an audience.
Madhurjya P Bora of Guwahati writes: "Nobody can prevent anybody from owning a car and the
Tatas have that way made the big dream come true for many people.
There's no point in appealing to the morality to not to drive a car
because of environmental issues. It is like trying to stop those
Hamburger joints as they help increase obesity! Educate people to use
the public transport system, make it more efficient etc. etc. It's my
right to buy a car." Bora is correct, but Nano buyers may not be right.
Podcasting. Live concerts on-demand. Full previews of albums. Original performance videos. Curated streaming in 100 different genres. It's not on YouTube. It's on Npr.org/music, a fast-growing site launched by the nonprofit as a way to unite and expand its work as curators of music for curious music lovers. It's one of the many ways NPR is surprisingly finding itself on the digital cutting edge, as I wrote about for the Fast 50: there's an interesting affinity between public media and social media.
I sat down yesterday afternoon at South By Southwest, as the Interactive conference gave way to the Music festival, with Anya Grundmann, Executive Producer of NPR Music, Bob Boilen, host of the popular podcast All Songs Considered, and Carrie Brownstein, formerly of the band Sleater-Kinney, who writes the quirky, literate and introspective Monitor Mix blog for the site.(Fun fact: She is a huge fan of NPR and originally tried to get a job on Car Talk). Also joining us, and representing the member stations, was Jody Evans of KUT in Austin.
Two themes emerged in our conversation: one, public radio people have a deep and sincere and absolutely all-encompassing love of music and of sharing it as widely as possible; and two, they are not interested in monetizing it. They shot down the audience's questions one by one: no, we aren't going to start a record label; no, we aren't interested in exploring new cross-platform advertising or promotional deals; no, we aren't trying to compete with iTunes or Pandora. I respect and even applaud their integrity, but I still wonder how, under a nonprofit model, artists are gonna get paid. I guess part of the answer comes from celebrating and elevating live music, as a complement to the online experience.
Nicole Wong, dubbed "Google's Gatekeeper" by the New York Times Magazine and "The Decider" by her colleagues, is the person at Google with the ultimate responsibility for deciding whether to honor takedown requests for YouTube videos, blog posts, and other content that world governments or private entities deem offensive or illegal. Google and its various properties have been blocked in 24 different countries over the last few years.
Interviewed by prominent legal scholar and journalist Jeffrey Rosen at South By Southwest, Wong sounded brilliant, articulate, and pretty overwhelmed by the demanding responsibilities of her job--15 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute--and its enormous leverage over free expression rights, which can be a matter of life and death in countries around the world. "YouTube has been blocked in Turkey for almost a year," she said. "I’m at that point where I feel like we’ve played all our legal cards, all of our technology cards--there are only so many tools in the toolbox for a single company." That's why Wong took a surprisingly lenient view of the Australian government's controversial "blacklist" of censored sites. She said she was "temperamentally against filtering," but the fact that filtering is happening in a country with a government that's acknowledged as democratic and legitimate allows us to have a public debate about how to "push government to be transparent, accountable, and narrow," in deciding what speech is so harmful that it deserves to be excluded from public discourse.
Wong, it emerges, doesn't want to be the sole Decider anymore. She wants to bring governments, civil society groups, and other companies to the table to defend free expression and privacy rights worldwide. She spoke about the Global Network Initiative, an attempt to do just that, and about a hope that the US government, whose First Amendment is the global gold standard for free speech, will incorporate the principle into trade talks.
But talking to some young Googlers afterwards, I got a sense that maybe the best safeguards of free speech online are neither states nor companies-- but activists, artists, hackers, and other rulebreakers. James Powderly of Graffiti Research Labs, yesterday made the same point in his terrific keynote.
Nicole Wong, dubbed "Google's Gatekeeper" by the New York Times Magazine and "The Decider" by her colleagues, is the person at Google with the ultimate responsibility for deciding whether to honor takedown requests for YouTube videos, blog posts, and other content that world governments or private entities deem offensive or illegal. Google and its various properties have been blocked in 24 different countries over the last few years.
Interviewed by prominent legal scholar and journalist Jeffrey Rosen at South By Southwest, Wong sounded brilliant, articulate, and pretty overwhelmed by the demanding responsibilities of her job--15 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute--and its enormous leverage over free expression rights, which can be a matter of life and death in countries around the world. "YouTube has been blocked in Turkey for almost a year," she said. "I’m at that point where I feel like we’ve played all our legal cards, all of our technology cards--there are only so many tools in the toolbox for a single company." That's why Wong took a surprisingly lenient view of the Australian government's controversial "blacklist" of censored sites. She said she was "temperamentally against filtering," but the fact that filtering is happening in a country with a government that's acknowledged as democratic and legitimate allows us to have a public debate about how to "push government to be transparent, accountable, and narrow," in deciding what speech is so harmful that it deserves to be excluded from public discourse.
Wong, it emerges, doesn't want to be the sole Decider anymore. She wants to bring governments, civil society groups, and other companies to the table to defend free expression and privacy rights worldwide. She spoke about the Global Network Initiative, an attempt to do just that, and about a hope that the US government, whose First Amendment is the global gold standard for free speech, will incorporate the principle into trade talks.
But talking to some young Googlers afterwards, I got a sense that maybe the best guardians of free speech online are neither states nor companies-- but activists, artists, hackers, and other rulebreakers. There's an arms race between those who build walls and those who break them down or tag them with digital spray paint, and the best technical minds tend to be on the side of freedom, not censorship. James Powderly of Graffiti Research Lab yesterday made the same point in his terrific keynote.
People around the world are radically changing their attitudes towards saving and spending, and alternative financial services sites are reaping the benefits. That was the message from the young founders of Mint, SmartyPig, and Billeo (bill pay and receipt organizing) who all headlined a panel at South By Southwest (SXSW) today.
I've written before about Mint, a free online money management program that is like Quicken for the Facebook set, and SmartyPig, a social savings program that makes saving more approachable with cute cartoon pigs and retailer reward cards, not to mention an industry-leading 3.25% APR. Both reported that the economy's loss has been their gain. Aaron Patzer, Mint's founder, said their sign-up rate has tripled since the downturn last fall, and they just passed their 1 millionth customer and hope to hit 2 or 3 million by the end of the year--they are bigger than all the competitors in their space put together. Mike Ferrari of SmartyPig said their rate of acquisition has gone up five-fold; they've expanded into partnership with a very large Australian bank and are looking at several other markets around the world.
While these companies have been very innovative in making life easier for users (I blogged about how Mint saved me from a fraudulent charge), and making money management seem less intimidating, a lingering question is their business model, specifically their relationship with banks and other primary financial providers. Distrust of the big banks is growing but these Finance 2.0 companies can't really claim to be independent of them. SmartyPig essentially serves as a vendor licensing their service to one bank in each country, while Mint, despite Patzer's anti-bank bravado, depends on revenue derived from lead generation for, you guessed it, banks and credit card companies.
One scenario of truly consumer-friendly banking would be for small community financial institutions and nonprofit credit unions to step it up in the tech area and add these types of tools--the panel took a question from a credit union tech guy who had won awards for his money management. Another alternative is for these companies to assist in helping consumers be "bank-agnostic", mixing and matching their mortgages, savings accounts, and credit depending on who offers the best deal.
The South by Southwest festival in Austin hosted the world premiere of Objectified, a film by Gary Hustwit, the celebrated director of Helvetica, the fascinating and unlikely story behind a font you see absolutely everywhere.
Objectified is the equally fascinating and unlikely story behind the objects we see everywhere: industrial design, so invisible to most of us, shapes our lives every day with delight or frustration.
Hustwit anchored a packed panel with some of the design world luminaries who appeared in the movie and will be very familiar to Fast Company readers: Tim Brown of IDEO, Stuart Constantine of Core77, Davin Stowell of Smart Design, and journalist Rob Walker. Focused as it was on stuff, the panel brought a welcome breath of realism into an Interactive conference that at time has frankly felt curiously disconnected from the market-melting, credit-crunching, world-warming reality out here.
The panelists gave credit to companies like Amazon, Wal-Mart and Mattel for promoting more sustainability in packaging and longevity. Stowell talked about getting out of the planned obsolescence trap and designing objects that last and inspire an emotional connection.
Brown talked about not designing objects at all--designers can design services and brands instead. Interaction designers with the Design Council UK are being hired by the British government to design social programs like health care, and IDEO worked on a project to make people excited about energy conservation. "Frankly, these new types of problems are what the young hires want to work on," he said.
Hustwit said that in the process of making the movie (which you can catch in a series of screenings in several cities) his own relationship to consumption has changed, so that now he's more committed and considered in his purchasing choices.
And, he suggested, one beneficial implication of ubiquitous technologies like Facebook, Twitter, etc. is that even the most consumerist or brand-obsessed of us are spending more time constructing our identities by doing things, rather than buying things.
A message we can all relate to these days.
Top to bottom: Objects included in the film were an IKEA chair, Muji CD player by Naoto Fukasawa, Leica camera, OXO Good Grip vegetable peeler by Smart Design, and some kind of laptop computer.
By next Easter, your Creme Eggs may be a little less of a guilty pleasure. Cadbury just completed a deal to source fair-trade cocoa from Ghana by the end of summer 2009. The cocoa will come from a cooperative with the delightful name Kuapa Kokoo.
The cocoa trade in West Africa has a long list of problems including labor trafficking and child labor. In the U.S., fair-trade chocolate is available from a handful of mostly boutique premium makers who subscribe to the International Labor Rights Forum's Commitment to Ethical Sourcing. But the entry of a mass-market player like Cadbury has a major impact--tripling the market for fair-trade cocoa from Ghana.
I sat down yesterday with J. Wayne Leonard, the New Orleans-based CEO of Entergy and the latest utility executive to get on the climate-change train. Leonard, native to my state, ravaged both by Katrina and by the petroleum industry, waxed sincere about the need for strict cap-and-trade and 100% auction of allowances, as he wrote in The New York Times last month. "We can't eliminate the risk to your generation," he told me. "We have two degrees of warming already in the pipeline. The best we can do is reduce the risk of catastrophic effects--keep it down to 20% instead of 80%."
Where Leonard departs from environmental correctness is in his denigration of a renewable portfolio standard--a mandated percentage of renewable energy, which exists already in several states--in favor of funding research into clean coal. Entergy has partnered with researchers at MIT on several demonstration projects. The integrated energy company plans to ask the Department of Energy for funding to build a full-scale plant, even though it relies largely on nuclear and natural gas.
The activist attitude towards still-nascent, and extremely expensive, carbon capture and sequestration technologies is summed up in the chant heard at the Capitol last week: "Unicorns, leprechauns, clean coal!" But one point Leonard made stuck with me. "China has two million megawatts of coal production. Billions in sunk capital. Are they going to shut that down voluntarily? Not unless carbon goes to $150 a ton. Are we going to make them shut it down?"
[Image: Untitled (Louisiana, Cancer Alley) Courtesy Les Stone/Pierogi 2000 Gallery ]
Imagine you could go to Home Depot and for a few hundred dollars purchase an appliance that plugs in like a blender and generates a chunk of the energy your home needs, renewable and emissions-free. This dream may be just 12-to-18 months from stores.
Once a pioneer at RealNetworks in Seattle, Chad Maglaque was at Google HQ last week talking informally with engineers about his invention The Jellyfish. It’s a 36-inch-tall rooftop wind turbine that you can plug into a socket in your home--no fancy setup required--and generate up to 40 kWh a month, about enough to power a home-full of LEDs or a room full of CFLs. It also comes Wi-Fi and WiMax equipped. He calls it the PC of renewable energy. "We could have 10,000 of these sitting in a city, networked—it’s like a virtual utility," he told me. His idea is that the utility or the city will subsidize the $400 cost down to $199 or less with tax rebates. He estimates it’s 12-to-18 months from store shelves, provided it clears all safety inspections. The Jellyfish is a semi-finalist for the Google Project 10 to the 100th contest--$10 million for the 5 ideas that helps the most people. You can see the other entries and vote starting on March 17 here:
College tuition has risen more than any other component of the cost of living for the last 18 years. But in the Internet era, information is free and ubiquitous. To the extent education is a knowledge industry, it would seem to be ripe for completely disruptive change. Ideas like the Open Courseware Consortium, which started at MIT, point the way; Gaming, blogging, tweeting, open-source programming projects, information marketplaces modeled on Etsy, peer-to-peer tutoring that works like BitTorrent; all may have a place in--or REplace--the classrooms of tomorrow. That's the heady thinking behind "Hacking Education", a gathering at Silicon Alley VC powerhouse and Twitter backers Union Square Ventures today, with thinkers like Jeff Jarvis, Danah Boyd, and Steven Johnson all chiming in. Follow the discussion in real time on Twitter today; the transcript will be up on Union Square Ventures site by next week.
Podcasting. Live concerts on-demand. Full previews of albums. Original performance videos. Curated streaming in 100 different genres. It's not on YouTube. It's on
By next Easter, your Creme Eggs may be a little less of a guilty pleasure. Cadbury just completed a deal to source fair-trade cocoa from Ghana by the end of summer 2009. The cocoa will come from a cooperative with the delightful name 
