Worldwide, investors put $1.9 billion into clean tech startups in the first three months of 2010. That is an 83% increase from the same quarter last year and a 29% increase from the fourth quarter of 2009. Additionally, the number of deals hit a record high.
Electric car-related startups and solar technology startups received the most investment. The results come from a survey of investments made in 180 companies from North America, Europe, Israel, India, and China.
(READ More from Reuters)
Unemployment can be lonely. “It’s isolating to be at home while most of the rest of the world is working,” said Jennifer Hong, a mother of three in South Carolina. So she did something about it.
“I’ve been unemployed for two years. I couldn’t find a forum or a place for people like myself to discuss unemployment issues so I created one,” said Hong, who launched www.unemployed-friends.com last July.
Hong said the site gets about 5,000 unique visitors a day and that there are 200 to 300 members online at any given time. People write in the forum not only about the frustrations of the jobless life, but also about what’s going on in Washington, D.C. with extensions of unemployment benefits — and how they can get involved.
(READ More from Huffington Post)
ABC News- In the dusty Afghan village where U.S. troops killed two pregnant women and three other innocent civilians in February, a remarkable scene played out this week between an aggrieved father and the most senior special operations officer in the United States military.
Vice Admiral William McRaven — the commander of Joint Special Operations Command — showed up with two sheep, and in the cultural understanding of the region, surrendered himself.
He didn’t literally surrender. But he didn’t have to. In the code followed by the southeastern Afghan family so devastated by the February incident, offering two sheep is the equivalent of begging for forgiveness.
And the father — who has lost two sons, two daughters and one grandchild — accepted McRaven’s apology.
A British Columbia city is overcoming a water problem by getting the oil and gas industry to pay for its daily sewage treatment.
Dawson Creek, in the heart of the province’s booming oil and gas sector, had a great plan for reusing its wastewater — they just didn’t have the $10-million they needed. But when they put out a request for proposals, Shell Oil said they would pay for the whole thing.
The town will become the first in North America to be equipped to sell its sewage for reuse in the gas industry. The new wastewater treatment plant will upgrade the quality of about 400,000 cubic meters of sewage every day to a standard that makes the water useable by industry.
(READ the news in Toronto’s Globe and Mail)
A solar-powered airplane designed to fly day and night without fuel or emissions successfully made its first test flight above the Swiss countryside on Wednesday.
The Solar Impulse, which has 12,000 solar cells built into its wings, is a prototype for an aircraft intended to fly around the world without fuel in 2012.
It took six years to build the carbon fiber aircraft, which has the wingspan of an Airbus A340 but weighs only as much as a mid-size car (1,600 kg).
(READ the story in Reuters)
The nation’s retailers reported their strongest monthly sales growth in a decade on Thursday, with robust gains in virtually every category of merchandise and every type of store.
The industry collectively posted a 9.1 percent sales increase at stores open at least a year, according to Thomson Reuters. That was the strongest result since the group began tracking the figures in 2000.
Analysts had lofty expectations for March, but the results released Thursday handily beat the 6.3 percent increase they had predicted.
(READ the report in the New York Times)
Imagine if the tens of millions who give time and money to tending their Farmville game on Facebook were instead working for social change. After six years in production, the non-profit Website, Armchair Revolutionary launched its new game-building infrastructure that combines social gaming and social activism in support of worldchanging technologies, like solar kits for poor people.
Armchair Revolutionary is a social gaming concept that’s based on real life social needs. Token investments of $0.99 fund charities and in some cases are invested in for-profit startups in exchange for an equity position.
The games incorporate new technologies/ideas like location-based software, embedded sensor networks, augmented reality, micro-transactions, virtual goods, and more.
(READ More at Gamasutra.com)
As the U.S. economy slowly rebounds, companies are increasingly relying on a decentralized workforce of home-based call centers — in America. The old mantra: route service calls overseas to cut costs in half. The new idea: bring call centers back home, but not to bulky, brick-and-mortar phone banks. Use hourly workers sitting in home offices, managed on someone else’s payroll.
Projections show the number of U.S. home-based call agents growing at an annual clip of 20% between 2009 and 2012, from about 50,000 to more than 80,000. That’s much faster than the growth rate for calling centers in India (4%) and the Philippines (9%), though foreign outsourcing remains a more popular and cheaper corporate option.
(READ more in Time magazine)
Chocolat, a belgian shepherd, is being hailed as a hero in his first year as a bomb-sniffing dog for the British military after his nose led soldiers to a Taliban bomb-making factory, saving the lives of soldiers in Afghanistan.
Handlers say a year ago the dog wouldn’t even sit when prompted.
WATCH the video below, or at MSNBC…
Good News Network doesn’t condone smoking cigarettes, of course, but we recognize that millions of people are addicted, and trillions of cigarette butts end up littering our sidewalks, roadways, and waterways. Greenbutts LLC chose to tackle the problem with a 100 percent biodegradable cigarette filter — that even sprouts into green grass or blooming flowers when contacting dirt.
(READ More in GizMag.com)
For years, Fred Pilder wondered if the twin sister that his adoptive mother told him about still was alive and, if so, where she could be.
Separated as babies at an orphanage in southern Russia, Pilder was adopted by an American couple in 1933 when he was 1. Last September, Pilder received surprising news with a letter from his sister and they will meet for the first time this week.
(READ more in TalkTown.com)
Last year, Americans turned in 11.7 million used cell phones, because recycling phones, PDAs, chargers, and batteries is so simple — easier than buying a phone.
Still, an estimated 58 million cell phones are rattling around in drawers or boxes, no longer being used. Here are some great options to spur you to finally turn them in…
With fun contests and educational campaigns, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in partnership with mobile phone companies is encouraging more people to turn in their phones for recycling this year.
They’ve published a list of links describing each company’s various recycling projects, most offering drop-off boxes at their stores. (Click here for the EPA effort)
Samsung is partnering with schools to offer prizes for the ones who collect the most phones. They estimate the program will reach 5.6 million students in 7,000 middle and high schools.
Last year, Americans turned in 11.7 million used cell phones, because recycling phones, PDAs, chargers, and batteries is so simple — easier than buying a phone.
Still, an estimated 58 million cell phones are rattling around in drawers or boxes, no longer being used. Here are some great options to spur you to finally turn them in…
With fun contests and educational campaigns, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in partnership with mobile phone companies is encouraging more people to turn in their phones for recycling this year.
They’ve published a list of links describing each company’s various recycling projects, most offering drop-off boxes at their stores. (Click here for the EPA effort)
Samsung is partnering with schools to offer prizes for the ones who collect the most phones. They estimate the program will reach 5.6 million students in 7,000 middle and high schools.
5-year-old Joshua Sacco has become a YouTube sensation with his rousing speech to Red Sox fans Sunday on opening day of the baseball season.
His little-guy version of the “Miracle” pregame speech by Herb Brooks during the 1980 Winter Olympics, was enough to deliver the spirit needed for the home team to rally and defeat the New York Yankees at Fenway Park.
This all-volunteer group is not quite one year old, and it has already built 50 fences and freed more than 60 dogs from chains. It started with a group of women who wanted to do something to help dogs. They formed Fences for Fido and planned to build one fence a month for a needy dog somewhere in the Portland area. But the idea captivated everyone who heard of it. Within months, the group’s volunteer ranks grew to several hundred and volunteers were building six fences a month all over Oregon.
Volunteers approach families with a simple offer: to give them a free fence, free veterinary care or spay/neuter as needed, and a free insulated dog house. Some fence recipients become the organization’s biggest fans, volunteering to help build fences for other clients.
For more info, visit www.fencesforfido.org
(READ the article in PortlandUpside.com)
Individual wind turbines and even whole wind farms remain at the mercy of local weather for how much electricity they can generate. But researchers have confirmed that linking up such farms along the entire U.S. East Coast could provide a surprisingly consistent source of power.
In fact, such a setup could someday replace much of the region’s existing generating capacity, which is based on coal, natural gas, nuclear reactors, and oil.
(READ More in ScienceMag.org)
Narayanan Krishnan was a bright, young, award-winning chef with a five-star hotel group, short-listed for an elite job in Switzerland. But a quick family visit home before heading to Europe changed everything.
Krishnan visited a temple in the south Indian city of Madurai. “I saw a very old man eating his own human waste for food,” Krishnan said. “It really hurt me so much. I was literally shocked for a second. After that, I started feeding that man and decided this is what I should do the rest of my lifetime.”
Now 29, he has served more than 1.2 million meals over the last 2 years — breakfast, lunch and dinner every day — to India’s homeless and destitute, mostly elderly people abandoned by their families and often abused.
WATCH CNN Heroes video below, or read the story on their website…
Last week the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency tightened water-quality standards for Appalachian streams affected by mountaintop mining. The new standards would likely curtail many future permits filed by the coal industry.
The surface mining technique of mountaintop removal, uses explosives to blast off large volumes of rock, generating piles of waste that bury nearby streams.
Peer-reviewed studies have shown that the unused dirt and rock, which is dumped into valleys and streams can significantly compromise water quality, often causing permanent damage to ecosystems and rendering streams unfit for swimming, fishing and drinking.
“The people of Appalachia shouldn’t have to choose between a clean, healthy environment in which to raise their families and the jobs they need to support them,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson.
It is estimated that almost 2,000 miles of Appalachian headwater streams have been buried by mountaintop coal mining, a practice which accounts for about 11% of total U.S. coal production.
The wobbly housing market showed a rare sign of strength in February: pending home sales were up significantly, a report released on Monday said, suggesting that Americans took advantage of a tax credit for home buyers set to expire April 30.
Sales rose 8.2 percent, the National Association of Realtors said. Analysts had expected sales to stay flat.
(READ the report in the New York Times)
Stephen Goosney, 29, and Tommy Larkin, 30, were born a year and a half apart. They were both adopted and began life knowing they were missing vital pieces of their lives.
They soon uncovered their past — just across the street from one another.
The pair discovered from an adoption agency that they had been within shouting distance for seven months.
(READ the story at the Globe and Mail)
