This video is a compilation of my harvests in the agroturismos of Italy, the desert of Argentina, and the sunshine of northern California. The music is one of my favorite songs of all time, it’s called Voyageur by Enigma. I moved out to California a year ago with a bottle of GrapeThinking, a bottle of ideas I guess you could say, that started filling up 5 years ago with conversation between myself, Jacob Bohall, Ruarri Rogan, Meghan O’Malley, and many others. Over the past year, those ideas have delightfully fermented, and the time has finally come for us to have a taste…

~circuit to cell, web to water, mind to vine~

There can be no doubt that we are seeing a transition at the moment – and I’m not talking about from capitalism to socialism, but rather something less tangible and equally pervasive. This change, I think, is from an age of objects into an age of ideas. Be it an iPod, a Blackberry or an iPhone, we as a society have come to depend on our objects, but the trend toward ‘one box solutions’ and centralising our PDAs, mobile phones, e-mail and music devices shows a longing to free ourselves of the objects, devices, countless power cables and the increasingly cluttered assortment of gadgetry churned out over the years. The inevitable movement towards cloud computing shows the urge of our society to become less dependent on material objects in favour of something more powerful and less immediately tangible. It is in this very transition from physical to ideological that we can see the beginnings of a permanent change.

The definition of an idea most relevant here is: a process of cognition fed by information that leads to a conclusion, which goes on to influences either our opinion or a course of action. We hold ideas above all else. The next time you look at a £10 note you will see the Queen of England, a living monarch on one side and on the other is Darwin, long since deceased and yet still going on to influence the world and appear on currency from beyond the grave. This is the ultimate testament to the power of ideas: where genius and ideology trump royalty. But before we categorise our current time as one defined by ideas – perhaps we need to step back once and look at the raw material behind ideas: information. More than ever in our history, as a society we deal with information, statistics and data on a daily basis. One has to only look at how Wikipedia expands, as it is constantly changed, added to, subtracted from and altered – to see a living, organic, expanding model of information. What is notable about our current time is the simultaneous multiplicity of ideas – and the fuel behind this all is information.

In Digital media we have first-mover advantage in dealing with an age of information, and are all lucky to have begun to work in creative ways in trying to understand and interpret the enormous amount of data that we receive. We have also realised that our biggest challenge doesn’t only lie in increased complexity, but also in the sheer quantity of information we have access to. For anyone who has tried to condense an ad-segmentation report into a single conclusion, or looked at trying to de-duplicate display impressions from SEM clicks will know – we face the challenges set out by an age of information on a daily basis, with the majority of our time being spent re-purposing data in order to make actionable business decisions. As marketers, we know that we cannot simply segment our market in terms of the objects they choose, leaders they follow or ideas they embrace, as these monochromatic measures are outdated. If you really want to understand today’s consumer, you must first look at the information they have access to and the way they use and interact with it.

No doubt this leaves us in a world of complexity. However if there is one thing we know about the world it’s that things rarely, if ever, get less complex. A perfect example of this is IP.6. At current most IP addresses are IP.4 – and we’re beginning to run out. When the infrastructure of the internet was first laid out it was inconceivable that we would need more than 10 addresses each – but we have pushed the boundaries by assigning IP’s to our iPhones, laptops, home computers, work computers, Xbox 360s and PSPs – and such has been the uptake and rate of adoption that we’ve needed to move to IP.6 – which basically allows every single human being to have as many internet addresses as there are currently internet addresses.

A saying we have adopted at Unique Digital is ‘the future is already here, it just hasn’t been distributed evenly’ and for a glimpse at what IP.6 and the future may look like, we only have to look at cows in Japan, which are amongst the first users of IP.6. which may not be as obscure as it sounds, because if you think about it, as digital marketers one of the first things we do in the morning is get a snapshot of the previous day’ activities. All of our future plans are based on trends of what has happened before. Much as we might look at click-paths or the previous days’ conversions, Japanese farmers are able to access information about their livestock remotely at any time of day. They are able to study the impact of weather, grazing patterns and land usage – and cross-tabulate such information to deduce whether they need more land or more livestock for the following year.

Already this may challenge our current assumptions – if search engines organise the world’s information… in a world of IP.6 will also organise livestock? Suddenly Eric Schmidt’s claim from last year that Google’s next focus will be the energy sector seems far less outlandish. We will all begin to get our first taste of IP.6 this year when it comes standard in electrical appliances – and we will find that our new kettles, toasters, microwaves and fridges will come equipped with their own data feed into the world wide web. Does this mean then that search engines and the algorithms that power them will not only give access to information on click through rates and agriculture… but energy grids and energy efficiency too?

What age are we in? As marketers with unprecedented access to an ever increasing amount of information, we are in constant search of answers most of our working day. In a discussion over lunch, James, our associate MD reminded me of the part in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book Life, the Universe and Everything, where we come across a group of scientists who are obsessed with looking for ‘The Great Answer of Life.’ The quest for this answer has consumed them to point of not being able to contemplate anything else. However, after years of searching they are mortified to find that the answer is 42. 42! What they realise is that in their obsessions with finding the answer, they had forgotten the actual question. And though answers are useful, without an accompanying question they are quite useless. I think therein lies an important lesson for marketers within the age of information… if we want answers, we first need to take a step back – and understand the questions.

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The LOHAS market in total represents $209 billion in consumer sales!

Personal Health: $118.03 billion

• Natural organic products
• Nutritional products
• Integrative health care
• Dietary supplements
• Mind body spirit products

Green Building: $50 billion

• Home Certification
• EnergyStar appliances
• Sustainable flooring
• Renewable energy systems (solar)
• Wood alternatives

Eco Tourism: $24.17 billion

• Eco-tourism travel
• Eco-adventure travel

Natural Lifestyles: $10.6 billion

• Indoor & outdoor furnishings
• Organic cleaning supplies
• Compact fluorescent/LED lights
• Social change philanthropy
• Apparel

Alternative Transportation: $6.12 billion

• Hybrid vehicles
• Biodiesel fuel
• Carsharing programs (pickup pal)

Alternative Energy: $300 million

• Renewable energy credits
• Green pricing

Biggest Market Growth:

• Retail Sales +28%
• Organic foods +15%
• Solar energy +20%
• Eco-tourism +23%

*Information provided courtesy of Lohas.com

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I’ve been thinking more about the future of the web, and I’m convinced what’s coming is not just another phase or version, but finally the real deal. Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 are going to be looked back on as alpha and beta versions of the real Web which is finally upon us. Techies refer to it as the semantic web, which is going to be a big part of it, but ultimately it’s going to come down to making money for businesses. Every enterprise out there is finally understanding the importance of engaging the online medium and utilizing the communities and tools built over the past decade that have captured the attention and time of the consumer. There’s a really cool site I’ve found that’s seeming to capitalize on this opportunity… fittingly enough it’s called Local.com

Local combines the worlds of the big local sites out there, namely Citysearch.com, Yelp.com, Superpages.com, Yellowpages.com, all of which Local.com is partnered with. It’s essentially a 1 stop shop for finding local businesses and services.

The Local.com experience is incredible. It acts like a local yellowpages, and yet so much more. It automatically picks up what city you’re in based on your IP address and then generates a list of local restaurants, local reviews, local coupons, local favorites, and even local traffic and local weather. I find it to be incredibly valuable, especially for anyone moving to a new city. The local search feature is awesome too, as it brings up a list of nearby brick and mortar businesses. I typed in ‘groceries’ and got a great list of small hole in the wall grocers in my area.

This stuff is fascinating to me because it’s paving the way for a real business model on the Internet. With local businesses beginning to build a web presence, new web services will be able to track all consumer purchases, not just those made online, and evolve the Internet from the CPC (cost per click) model Google pioneered to a CPA (cost per affiliate) model in which web services monetize by taking a cut off consumer purchases. To make this work, however, local businesses are going to have to integrate their system in with a player like Local.com so that consumers can easily generate coupons and redeemable points. When this occurs, coupled with the proliferation of mobile technologies, the process will be seamless. You’ll find discounts in real time on your phone as you walk around through whatever web service you use. Then’ll you show up at the store, pick out what you want, and validate at the checkout counter with your iPhone… and boom you get your discount that easy.

Portals like Local.com, as well as the obvious Google, Ebay, Amazon, soon to be Facebook Marketplace, and the one everybody is ecstatic about… Twitter (check out CheapTweet and TwtQpon… wow!), is what will pull local businesses into the mix, incentivizing them to offer deals, because they know it’ll result in more long-term converting customers. And the more local businesses interact and engage with the community, the more popular they will become and the more feedback they’ll gain on bettering they’re products. And consumers who engage will win big by finding discounts and deals constantly.

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January 14th, 2008

Team,

I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very personal with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well. In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.

In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully supports this plan.

I look forward to seeing all of you this summer.

Steve

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Life will always be a mystery, but can’t we agree the point is to be truly happy and free of suffering? And yet pondering this as an intellectual ideal or meditating on a mountain in Tibet for the rest of your life won’t cut it. We have to somehow feel it and incorporate it into the reality of our lives, which for good or bad largely centers around making money to provide a means to function in society. To many, money is perceived as the root of all evil and focusing on making a lot of it couldn’t possibly allow you to connect to something greater than yourself or benefit other people. It’s too competitive and you have to focus only on yourself or else you’ll be exploited by those that do.

But what if this is all wrong? What if focusing on spiritual growth, connecting to the force that powers you beyond your ego, and cultivating a sense of importance in benefiting other people, will actually give you an edge? What if the world is going through a dramatic shift from a linear system to a cyclical system, a renewable system, where a more, more, me, me mentality will lose, and a holistic, spiritual mentality will win? What will help traditional capitalism transcend into a new form of governance we like to call ecolism?

Currently, there are 3 types of entrepreneurship in our world.

Classical entrepreneurship is the essence of modern capitalism and engages a mindset of making as much money as possible within your business. Most entrepreneurs with this mindset are driven by status and materialism, and having great wealth to show a symbol of their personal power in the world. They tend to spend their profits on houses, cars, and luxury that they believe will buy them adoration and happiness. Classical entrepreneurs who reach the pinnacle, maxing out material indulgence, are ultimately reduced to the love of the deal and nothing more. Donald Trump is the prototypical classical entrepreneur. This method of entrepreneurship is not necessarily bad, in fact it was necessary over the past few hundred years to get us to the point we are at now. However, it tends to influence spiritual emptiness and results in the individual never truly finding the happiness or the inner peace they are looking for, no matter how much money they make. They always want more and don’t know why, and become confused as they gain more money and less happiness. This is what cultivates greed rather than love in peoples hearts and results in the chaos that our current economy is in. It’s this mentality built into the fabric of capitalism that is leaving our world in ruin with pollution, waste, depleted resources, and a stifled global economy. So to amend, this method has become obsolete and needs to evolve.

Social entrepreneurship on the other hand is driven by those who want to make a difference in the world, and are in a way, turned off by profits. The most practical example of successful social entrepreneurship is micro-credit lending, in which individuals create lending funds/banks solely for the purpose of helping communities and developing countries, while not focusing on profits. Muhammad Yunis and his Grameen Bank is probably the most successful example of social entrepreneurship to date. Yet the Grameen Bank has loaned out $5.72 billion since its inception 30 years ago and has only been paid back $5.02 billion. This type of enterprise is driven by a great social cause and hopefully will fulfill the individual in benefiting the world, but as a new form of economic governance how can it ever last if it doesn’t make money?

This leads us to spiritual entrepreneurship… the spiritual pursuit of profit. These types of entrepreneurs do not seek to make money to buy the fancy home or car or buy status and friends and fame. There isn’t a crave for more and more, but rather a cyclical, ecolistic way of perceiving the world. Instead they pursue money as a means to bring about great change to the world and become connected to the divine power. There’s a term known as ‘tithing’, which means that you give away part of your wealth, whether it be to charities or other projects, because that genuine act of giving will come back around in the form of luck or serendipity to help you gain more profit. But it is crucially important to understand that this doesn’t mean you give solely to make more money and gain more self-benefit. You give so that you can make more money and continue giving. This has to be the drive to truly transcend from classical to spiritual entrepreneurship, and it entails a spiritual growth and humility within the individual in which they feel a connection to a force greater than themselves and their personal ego. They feel one with the world around them.

But, I can’t emphasize this enough… there is no linear procedure to find this authentic will in your life. There’s no secret path. It’s a matter of opening yourself up and feeling the connection for yourself. Think of it as being a medium… you aren’t a closed entity independent of the world around you. You breathe air, you need food and water, you are interdependent with your environment. You are not a separate entity here to amass large amounts of wealth and hoard money to buy material possessions. You are here to take in to simply give back in a better way, and when you can feel that and practice it in your life, you should be surprised by the success that gravitates to you.

A transcendence into spiritual entrepreneurship is quite possibly what our new world needs to get through these tough times. Capitalism needs a major upgrade. My friend Lee Whitfield and I believe it to be Ecolism. Check out his stuff at Ecolism.org

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The wikis and search results were great. Here’s the ‘Gifts for All Budgets‘ wiki for Christmas presents. I love the organization and how it breaks it down for you to easily navigate and find what you’re looking for. We love our lighting here at GrapeThinking so I made my way over to the ‘Indoor Light Fixtures‘ wiki. I clicked ceiling fixtures, and it took me to a page with 1000s of different products it found. I loved the 3 filter tools: a scroll bar for price, a drop down for brand, and a color spectrum. The AJAX functionality was amazing in how it immediately updated the search results when a change was made in one of the tools. This was a huge helper in finding what I was looking for in the sea of products it churned up.

Another really cool thing is when you hover your mouse over the ‘See All Stores’ button, it automatically pops up 5 online stores and the price. You click the store price and it takes you right to the item on that store’s page, ready to buy. ShopWiki has the chance to develop a very healthy affiliate model if they succeed at gaining traffic and users.

Here are a few sustainable wikis/searches I found useful:

Green Guide

Organic wine

Energy Star Rated

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Here’s a company that’s doing something very special. I watched Ron’s presentation at VLAB (MIT/Stanford Venture Lab) Green Tech for the Consumer Market this past January and got very excited. Then after hearing Trae Vassallo’s glowing presentation at the Silicon Valley West Coast Green conference, I knew they were out to change the world.

Recycle Bank is influencing the creation of a cutting edge process called single stream recycling. They supply their customers with a Recycle Bank garbage bin in which they can throw all of their paper, plastic, metal, and glass. The bin has an RFID microchip inside, which is read by special levers retrofitted onto city garbage trucks that weigh the amount of garbage. This value is sent to each individual consumer’s online Recycle Bank account, where it is converted into Recycle Bank Reward Points at a ratio of 2.5 reward points for each pound of garbage. These Reward Points can then be redeemed at local businesses that consumers normally buy from, such as Whole Foods, Bed Bath & Beyond, and many more. What an incredible incentive to get people recycling!

With such a dynamic program that will certainly increase the recycling rate, RB gains the credibility to negotiate exclusive long term contracts with city municipalities to deliver garbage from Recycle Bank customers to material recovery facilities (MRF) and in essence divert trash from going into a landfill. This creates great economic value for the city by allowing them to sell the trash to manufacturers such as Coca Cola or Pepsi instead of paying landfills to take the garbage. Wow, make money instead of pay money? and Recycle Bank takes a cut off the money saved from landfill diversion rather than the money earned from sales to manufacturers. A very smart marketing decision that influences cities to broadcast how much money they made in a year, which in turn gets other cities excited about the Recycle Bank program.

This is big for 3 reasons:

1) high profitability with exclusive municipality contracts and a valuable online advertising engine

2) environmental health through the elimination of waste

3) the ability to influence consumption behavior

This 3rd reason is what really fascinates me.  With other green businesses, sure it’s great to benefit the environment, but obviously the price has to be right for adoption. And yet, even when the price is right, people are lazy and don’t want to change their behavior. They might call their utility company and say I want green power, if and only if its cheaper (Austin Energy). With Recycle Bank, the single stream recycling program that they’re pioneering is enough to influence people to actually start recycling. And even more so, RB gains the ability to influence consumer purchases with their Reward Points system. For example, they’re planning to roll out a program that gives people greater rewards for shopping at ‘green’ businesses.  Organic food stores, LEED certified establishments, and even specific products.

This is a business that’s right in front of the American consumer’s face… they can touch it, they can feel it, they can put more money in their pocket, while being guided to a healthier life and changing their local environment. Recycle Bank becomes an incredible solution to the entire consumption side of the sustainability equation. We still need the west coast to figure out solar and fuel cells so we can get off coal and oil, but this is a practical solution to get us moving in the right direction. I’m lovin it!

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I found this fascinating… is our world starting to wake up? Is the man’s way of thinking becoming outdated and even under-evolved? Very linear, physical, territorial, power obsessed… and yet now we’ve reach the edge, we’ve maxed out our world. There’s no more land to take over, nothing left to conquer, nowhere else for people to live, and no more resources to fight over other than oil (and this will be the last hoorah). Something has to change, and it starts with our thinking. I’ve been doing a lot of GT’ing about how that can happen, and the best thing I’ve come up with is a swift shift in global power from male to female.

We’ve always known that we think differently, but what does that mean? Traditionally, men have created a world in which they are the powerful being. This may be true in the physical sense, but as I alluded to before, the physicality of our world is at its max and is now ready for an emotional, mental, and spiritual transcendence.

I believe women have a more holistic way of thinking… thinking about the whole and leading in a way that can create holistic harmony. We’ve all heard that women tend to use both halves of their brain whereas men are locked in the left hemisphere, which is proven to be the linear, methodical, serial processor of the mind… the side that recognizes our self. Whereas the right hemisphere is the holistic, artistic, parallel processor, that sees patterns in nature and grasps the “whole” opposed to fragmented components… the side that recognizes the unity and oneness of everything.

Please watch this incredible TED talk from Jill Bolte Taylor. It is possibly the most moving presentation I’ve ever seen… brings me to tears. If you have time, I highly recommend watching the whole video. Click one of the buttons below to watch.

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1. Environmental Capital Partners, a private equity firm that provides long-term capital and management support to leading middle-market companies in the environmental industry.

 

2. Lumosity, brain training games to improve memory and attention. Jake turned me on to this earlier this year and we love it. Ironic that it showed up as an ad.

 

3. Ideal Bite, offers bite-sized ideas for light green living. Their Daily Tips cover everything from biodynamic wine to organic cosmetics.

 

4. Locallectual, a database and community that helps people find local products made closer to home. Shop at local stores, buy local goods, eat local foods.

 
 

5. Green Irene, a trained and certified eco-consultancy that offers Green Home Makeovers and eco-products for your home. They help you cut energy and utility bills and create a healthier environment for you and your family.

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