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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.

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Posted by Anya Kamenetz at 9:00 AM | 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.

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Posted by Saabira Chaudhuri at 4:45 PM | 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:

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Posted by Chris Dannen at 12:14 PM | 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.

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Posted by Gloria Sin at 4:54 PM | 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.

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Posted by April Joyner at 4:02 PM | 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.

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Posted by Anya Kamenetz at 9:00 AM | 1 Comment