My financial adviser notified me last month that our bank Wachovia is going to be 
acquired by Wells Fargo. It’s also been recently announced that Wells has exceeded $3 billion in environmental financing. Seems like they’re taking full advantage of this economic crisis and positioning to become a major player. Wondering what they’re gonna do with that 3 bil?
Wells Fargo, a bank on the rise
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Obama’s Energy and Environmental Team Completed
President-elect Obama has proven pragmatism and decisiveness with the completion of his energy and environmental team. He apparently understands the issues and is ready to lead.
His team includes:
Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy: Nobel physics laureate and head of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Lisa Jackson, Administrator of the EPA: former commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection
Nancy Sutley, Chairman of White House Council on Environmental Quality: former energy advisor to California governor, Gray Davis
Carol M. Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change: former EPA administrator under Bill Clinton
Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior: Colorado Senator
Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture: former Iowa Governor
Obama’s first stated target is to reduce U.S. GHG emissions to the level of 1990 by 2020. This is an incredibly bold goal and the wheels need to be put in motion immediately. The first course of action is deciding on a carbon tax and/or cap-and-trade system.
Glue semantic app
Here’s a demo of a cool semantic app from Adaptive Blue… it’s called Glue. The app lives on top of the browser as an add-on and intelligently recognizes whatever item you’re browsing on, whether it be a book, movie, song, restaurant, recipe, or wine, and lets you see what your friends thought of it to help you make a decision.
The most interesting part of the demo is at 0:58 where he asks who is involved in vertical/niche social networks for different things such as movies (Flixster) and virtually no one raises their hand. Facebook and Myspace have pretty much grabbed the whole social networking world as far as actual webpages that people visit to interact. Now where the innovation comes in is on top of the browser and on the phone. The only real websites that have a chance these days are dynamic marketplaces (Foodzie, Etsy).
LOHAS Philosophy of the Future
LOHAS - Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability
A holistic philosophy on products, services, businesses, organizations, and humanity as a whole that advocates growth and change through systems thinking. I recently found an amazing write up at the LOHAS website about how this philosophy will help the business culture of the future.
Here’s my favorite excerpt:
“For the last 250 years, we have been living in what Peter Senge calls the ‘industrial age bubble’, based on a ‘take, make, waste’ worldview. Behind this way of life has been a set of attitudes and beliefs about economics, wealth, and business. We tend to think of these beliefs as “common sense”, or even as objective natural law. But in fact, they are received knowledge, the inheritance of centuries of cultural, political, and philosophical tradition. Our way of business is based on learned behavior, not natural law.
With this worldview, we’ve created unprecedented wealth, knowledge and communication. And, we’ve created environmental toxicity, cheap throw away products, denatured industrially-produced food, and a culture of low self-esteem and spiritual poverty.”
So how do we change? How do we grow?
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Can iKan revolutionize home consumption?
A good buddy of mine recently brought my attention to a cool new company he’s been working with called iKan. He’s helping them develop a scalable business model for their flagship product, a counter top pod that 
allows you to scan your food items and create grocery lists. It scans your items with a UPC barcode scanner and wirelessly logs them into an online account, from which you can place orders with online grocers or print out a shopping list to take to your local store. Furthermore, it has great voice recognition software that allows you to simply say the name of the item in the event that there’s no barcode. iKan surely has the ability to revolutionize home grocery shopping, and yet, with a well executed user interface, it could offer so much more.