FC NOW: The Fast Company Weblog
The opinions of individual Fast Company Now contributors don't necessarily reflect the editorial position of Fast Company magazine as a whole.
February 8, 2008
Green (Fri)Day: Shedding Light on the Issue
Lighting accounts for just over a fifth of energy use in the US.
Fast Company gave compact fluorescent light bulbs the star treatment back in September '06, and by now it's common knowledge that they save both energy and money compared to traditional incandescents. Wal-Mart pledged to sell 100 million of the bulbs in 2007, and did it in just 9 months, with the estimated impact of taking 700,000 cars off the road, or saving the energy to power 450,000 single-family homes.
But the incandescent isn't dead yet. And the CFL may not be the last word in energy efficient light.
Continue reading "Green (Fri)Day: Shedding Light on the Issue"
Posted by Anya Kamenetz on 9:00 AM
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24 Comments
February 5, 2008
Coca-Cola Buys Honest Tea
The best thing that ever happened to organic tea company Honest Tea or a slow but controlled brand implosion?
Coca-Cola announced today that it is buying 40% of Honest Tea, the nation's largest selling brand of organic bottled tea. Coke's decision to become a majority player in the organic tea brand is in line with earlier decisions to cast its net outside the traditional soda industry with brands like Minute Maid (bought over forty years ago now), Powerade, Nestea, Dasani and most recently vitamin water producer Glaceau.
Coke's decision to invest in Honest Tea, although unforeseen is unsurprising, given the company's strong growth rate and increasing popularity in recent years on the one hand, and a rising demand for beverages outside the traditional soft drinks/soda industry on the other.
"In terms of sales trends, you can see there's a large uptake in health food and beverages. In 2006 for instance, the soda, water, sports and energy drinks sector earned about 35 billion," says Daniel Fabricant, Vice President of Scientific and Regulatory affairs at the Natural Products Association.
In fact, this is a great time to be in natural foods in general -- the industry is experiencing exponential growth, having gone from $2 billion in sales in 1990 to about $55 billion at the end of last year. The explosive growth, fueled by more educated, health conscious consumers and a bigger distribution opportunity, is dragging companies like Honest Tea along with it.
Honest Tea's own acceptance of Coke's investment comes from a desire to reach a broader audience, according to CEO Goldman -- to go from being simply "important" to acting as a "agent of change" by leading "a national shift toward healthier diets."
"Despite our 66 percent annual compound growth rate (70 percent in 2007), we still aren't reaching all the people we want to reach. We want to see Honest be an agent of change, not just through the example it sets but through its own actions as well," he says.
Continue reading "Coca-Cola Buys Honest Tea"
Posted by Saabira Chaudhuri on 4:45 PM
| Category: entrepreneurship + small business
| 2 Comments
February 4, 2008
Hacking Windows Mobile
iPhones aren't the only Internet-surfing phones that have gaping security weaknesses waiting to be exploited. In fact, all smartphones -- that includes Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Blackberry devices -- can be easily commandeered by malevolent nerds with a little bit of code and a dose of trickery. In the interest of fairness, we've gotten some security folks from Bluefire Security Technologies to show us what kind of mischief can be made on a regular Windows smartphone, just as we did with the iPhone in November. Or is mischief the wrong word? Perhaps "data and identify theft" are more accurate terms.
Check out the video below:
Continue reading "Hacking Windows Mobile"
Posted by Chris Dannen on 12:14 PM
| Category: technology + computers
| 1 Comments
February 1, 2008
Lifetime's Mastectomy Petition - More Surface Than Substance?
Whenever I see a beautifully crafted dessert, I am always hopeful it will taste as good as it looks. More often than not though, I am disappointed by the incongruity between the attractive exterior and inferior interior. This is precisely how I feel about Lifetime Networks’ sugar-coated online petition for an end to “drive-through mastectomy,” a 20-million-signature-strong petition that had actress Marcia Cross (of Desperate Housewives) lobbying Capital Hill last Wednesday.
Continue reading "Lifetime's Mastectomy Petition - More Surface Than Substance?"
Posted by Gloria Sin on 4:54 PM
| Category: healthcare + medicine
| 1 Comment
Microsoft and Yahoo: The Bid Heard 'Round the Web
Early today, Microsoft announced its bid to acquire Yahoo! for $44.6 billion. The offer amounts to $31 per share, a 62 percent increase over Yahoo's stock price of $19.18 on Thursday. The proposed deal, as widely reported, signals Microsoft's intensified aggression against Google, which dominates Internet search with 60 percent of the market, as well as online advertising. The bid, if accepted, would be Microsoft's priciest acquisition to date.
Can Microsoft and Yahoo's combined force, which would represent about 30 percent of the Internet search market, effectively rival Google? The answer remains to be seen, of course -- besides whether or not Yahoo will accept Microsoft's bid, there's the legal question of whether the acquisition would violate antitrust regulations. Most reports, however, suggest the inevitability of this effort. The New York Times outlines Microsoft and Yahoo's failed discussions of a merger in May, leading to Microsoft's current "hostile" bid and the possibility of mounting a proxy contest for control of Yahoo's board.
Continue reading "Microsoft and Yahoo: The Bid Heard 'Round the Web"
Posted by April Joyner on 4:02 PM
| Category: news + current events
| 2 Comments
Green (Fri)Day: How Big is the Green Economy?
On Wednesday the website GreenBiz.com released a big report on the "State of Green Business.(pdf)" Working mainly with government agency numbers, they scored the economy as a whole to be "treading water" in 10 categories, "sinking" in two, and "swimming" in eight--but for some of those, executive editor Joel Makower admitted they were "being generous." (I agree. Take LEED-certified office space construction--it may be a "swimming" category in terms of square footage, but as I argue in an October story, LEED certification is not the be-all and end-all of environmental design.)
It's dismaying to see that despite all the talk about "climate neutral" and "zero carbon," America is making insignificant gains in carbon intensity--the greenhouse gases emitted per unit of GDP.
But where Greenbiz really did a good job was in being honest about the questions they asked but couldn't answer.
Posted by Anya Kamenetz on 9:00 AM
| Category: sustainability
| 1 Comment
January 31, 2008
Werbach Sells Out to Saatchi
Those still on the fence about the sellout status of our September coverboy Adam Werbach--the youngest ever Sierra Club president who's now doing sustainability work for Wal-Mart--are about to be taken for another surprise twist. This morning Werbach announced that his San Francisco sustainability consultancy, Act Now, has been scooped up by none other than the lovemark-man himself: Saatchi & Saatchi's Kevin Roberts. The new company, called Saatchi & Saatchi S, in which Werbach will remain CEO, plans on bringing sustainability to the ad agency's clients, which include A-listers like P&G, Toyota, and Visa.
To be frank, I was shocked. The gut reaction: well, clearly Werbach has sold out. Pairing up with Wal-Mart was painful enough for the environmental establishment to swallow. Now Werbach will be owned by The Mad Men of Madison Avenue, the one place where greenwashing is most feared and excessive wastefulness still runs rampant.
Of course, a cynical take is easy. If you look at the decisions Werbach has made throughout his career, they may seem counterintuitive, contradictory, even hypocritical and lost. But in fact, the one thing that has stayed constant is his environmenal convictions--it's just the methods he's exploiting that have changed. (At least he believes). Instead of continuing to throw rocks at a company like Wal-Mart, he switched from outsider to insider, deciding that he needed to be inside the system to provoke change. Now with Saatchi, he's embedded himself in the fourth largest communications holding company in the world that holds the key to influencing the behavior of some of the most powerful global brands.
Werbach told me he sold to Saatchi because his little 50-person company was too small to reach the global scale he wants to impact. For example, in developing economies like China and India, he wants to be on the ground shaping consumer behavior with a built-in sustainability ethos. Publicis's ad shop has an army of 7,000, with over 150 offices around the globe--which means within a couple of months Werbach will have instant offices in New York, Chicago, London, Beijing--and don't forget Wal-Mart country's Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Like most of his moves, Werbach's latest experiment can be criticized for is being too optimisic, too idealistic, too ambitious. He can also be criticized for being too impatient--impatient to not allow his company to grow organically on its own terms not beholden to the pressures of a huge public company. It's a criticism he's received countless times before. But it's that very impatience--he believes--that's necessary if we ever want to make a dent in this thing called the climate crisis.
Posted by Danielle Sacks on 9:27 AM
| Category: sustainability
| 3 Comments
January 29, 2008
Design Thursday: When is a corset like a coffin?
Why, when fashion designer Hussein Chalayan feels like making one out of amber wood and metal, as he did for his Fall/Winter 1995-96 collection, that's when. And why is this relevant now?
Continue reading "Design Thursday: When is a corset like a coffin?"
Posted by Linda Tischler on 2:53 PM
| Category: design
| 1 Comments
January 25, 2008
Sports Business: The Future of Tickets
An article in today's Arizona Republic refreshed my memory about a cool start-up I heard about last year that hosts an online exchange of futures-like contracts for major sporting events.
The site, yoonew.com, allows sports fans to purchase a contract associated with a specific team that translates into a ticket to a championship such as the Super Bowl or Final Four if that team reaches the game.
Posted by Jason Del Rey on 4:00 PM
| Category: sports
| 1 Comment
Green (Fri)Day: Total Information Awareness
Dan Hill, living in Sydney, is the web editor of British magazine Monocle. He gave a fascinating talk at a conference called Interesting South last fall that he recently put up on his blog.
He calls it "The Well Tempered Environment." It's a sketch of a "public dashboard" to gather and publish information about energy and resource use, to get people competing on a household, neighborhood, citywide, regional, even global level to use less.
We know that technologies that make information transparent and provide real-time feedback can shape behavior almost effortlessly --for example, wearing a pedometer makes you walk more . Hill's idea applies this principle to environmental awareness. The talk included a half-dozen actual existing products along this line, and I've noticed a few more such ideas popping up elsewhere.
Continue reading "Green (Fri)Day: Total Information Awareness"
Posted by Anya Kamenetz on 9:00 AM
| Category: sustainability
| 1 Comments
January 24, 2008
CEO Lee Scott Speaks About Wal-Mart's New Strategies
Yesterday Wal-Mart's CEO Lee Scott presented a speech to over 7,000 store managers. Surprisingly, the focus of his speech was Wal-Mart's devotion to sustainability. Scott cited the store's selling over 145 million compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and stressed the company's mission of continuing its pursuits toward energy efficiency. He also announced that the retail giant would work with suppliers to make its more power-hungry products 25 percent more energy-efficient over the next three years.
Also in his speech, Scott announced Walmart's continued exploration of ways to improve its healthcare policies and practices. Of note, he said, was that Wal-Mart employees with health insurance has risen to 93 percent. Now, Wal-Mart will also promote electronic prescriptions, to reduce costs by using less material and to decrease potentially-dangerous prescription errors.
Since the media backlash against Wal-Mart a few years ago, the company has strived to remake itself and its image by embracing sustainability. Scott's speech illustrates a continuum along this trajectory. But are will these moves be enough? While these are great attempts, the world's largest retailer won't be able to change minds until it takes a more dominate leadership position and becomes an agent of industry change.
Here are a few things Wal-Mart could do:
- Give huge incentives to suppliers that reduce packaging materials and embrace sustainable practices.
- Spotlight on the store's greenest products. And the company should stress that such practices will probably reduce cost, increase profit, and increase demand.
What do you think about Wal-Mart's recent sustainable practices? What do you think the company should do next?
Posted by Kevin Ohannessian on 2:20 PM
| Category: sustainability
| 4 Comments
Design Thursday: What would a Mayan branding guru do?
In the middle of a cold, nasty January day, it’s hard to resist the lure of a beachy vacation in Cancun --- even if the closest you can get is a meeting room in New York’s Meatpacking District. So earlier this week I trudged over to the opening party for Nizuc, the latest hotel/condo/resort project by master hotelier Adrian Zecha, the head of tony Amanresorts and GHM Hotels (best known in North America as the company behind The Setai in South Beach.)
Continue reading "Design Thursday: What would a Mayan branding guru do?"
Posted by Linda Tischler on 12:22 PM
| Category: design
| 11 Comments
January 23, 2008
Innovation Wednesday: Meet John Donahoe, eBay's new CEO
This afternoon eBay made it official: Meg Whitman's stepping down, and John Donahoe's stepping up. No surprise, of course. When Whitman brought in Donahoe in 2005 to run marketplaces, which generate about 70 percent of the company's revenue, the move had succession plan written all over it - in indelible ink.
"I've known Meg for 25 years," he told me when I visited eBay a few months ago for a story in the magazine. Donahoe worked with Whitman at Bain & Company in the 1980s and prior to eBay served as worldwide managing director. "In our conversations [about joining eBay] the tipping point was the sense of purpose and mission," he said. "If I'm going to dedicate my energy to some form of work, I want it to be something I care about. The whole business model of eBay is around this premise that people are good. It's this marketplace where strangers who never meet can have transactions hundreds or thousands of miles apart for items of high value."
As president of eBay marketplaces for the last three years, Donahoe has proven his mettle by leading a series of sweeping and urgent changes to the company's core business, which I described here the other day. In late 2005, he began looking to hire a CTO who could “take eBay to the next level.” Given the site’s size and complexity, there weren’t many candidates with comparable job experience. Then he met Matt Carey, Wal-Mart's CTO.
Posted by Chuck Salter on 6:07 PM
| Category: innovation + creativity
| 4 Comments
Innovation Wednesday: Filming Dirty Jobs, A Behind the Scenes Look
Want a dirty job done right? Ask some dirty boys to do it.
That’s the takeaway from my visit to the “set” of Dirty Jobs, the runaway hit series from the Discovery Channel. Mike Rowe, the star and rogue philosopher behind the show, is profiled in this month’s cover story. But I would be remiss, and he would be disappointed, if I didn’t spend a bit of time talking about how it all comes together. Because it’s dirty work indeed.
Posted by Ellen McGirt on 2:24 PM
| Category: innovation + creativity
| 3 Comments
January 21, 2008
Ludacris -- Rapper Turned Entrepreneur?
When I overheard an excited murmur about how Chris Bridges was setting up a restaurant in Atlanta, I didn't think anything of it. Neither the name nor the act seemed worthy of much interest. A little while later the name popped up again – this time in the Atlanta Business Chronicle.
Apparently Chris Bridges aka, Ludacris (aha), is making his first foray into the restaurant business with plans to open three Atlanta restaurants in conjunction with Bay area restaurateur Chris Yeo, who already owns four California based restaurants.
The 30 year old rapper is reported to be expanding his entrepreneurial activity of late: a few months ago he paid $2.7 million for a building that formerly housed the restaurant Spice, in midtown Atlanta. He is the CEO of his own 8-year-old record label, Disturbing tha Peace Records, which has signed a number of prominent artists, including rapper Chingy.
Now this sounds terrible, but I have to admit I was taken aback at the idea that someone who I know only in context of his desire "to lick you from your head to your toes" and his overly-virile claims about having "a hoe in every area code," could be business savvy enough to be able to delve into the real estate business and make an attempt at being a real entrepreneur.
"I don't generally speak about it… I keep it to myself. I'm definitely into real estate. I'm a silent partner and an entrepreneur outside of music," said Ludacris in an interview with the Chronicle.
Apparently, Ludacris isn't the only rapper/musician who has dabbled in the restaurant business. Moby owns vegan restaurant Teany, Gladys Knight lays claim to Gladys and Ron's Chicken and Waffles, and Robert De Niro owns TriBeCa Grill in New York, Ago in L.A., and Rubicon in Sa. Youngbloodz own a Cuban restaurant at the Atlanta based Wyndham hotel, and Fat Boy Slim co-owns Greenwich Village based restaurant, the Spotted Pig.
More significant than the number of celebs who own restaurants however, are the number who have owned restaurants that have since gone under. Britney Spears's Manhattan based Nyla, closed its glitzy shutters and filed for bankruptcy a mere six months after launch. Wesley Snipes's Hollywood based China One, Puffy's restaurant Justin's, Jim McMahon's eponymous Chicago based restaurant, and J Lo's LA based La Boca del Conga Room, all went down, and hard.
Continue reading "Ludacris -- Rapper Turned Entrepreneur?"
Posted by Saabira Chaudhuri on 6:49 AM
| Category: entrepreneurship + small business
| 11 Comments
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