The price of implementing clean energy by Tony Green

I read an article written by Michelle Kraus as a Special to the Mercury News titled,” Clean tech in the future but funding is another story” which talked about the challenges of investing in clean tech. The piece reported the credit needed to fund renewable energy projects, which are extremely capital intensive, has become a challenge with the struggling economy.

Many of the ventures, in spite of their fascinating technology, are not making any money, really profit, and contain no guarantees their technology is scalable, i.e. able to be adopted in large scale.

Unless a company enjoys access to wealthy people or banks willing to loan money into these ventures or provide an available line of credit surviving it may be difficult to get these businesses to generate enough sales to sustain them, let’s be honest, bootstrapping can only go so far.

The fact remains without the financial support the alternative energies need promising technologies and companies who can change the way we live such as Google, Cisco, and Microsoft might not become the companies they are today.
The reality is VC’s, angels and other institutional investors built Silicon Valley from its beginnings as much as the innovators who founded companies and their dedicated employees are the investors whose money to allowed these innovators to chase their dreams.

Now what? The current circumstances require innovative solutions to these problems be determined. Necessity is the mother and father of invention. People will find a way. Our energy future depends on it.

Back to High school by Tony Green

Last month I had the opportunity to visit Woodside High School on Woodside, California to discuss Green careers with 10th graders. My trip was a part of an engineering outreach program sponsored by the Silicon Valley Engineering Council (SVEC) where an engineer took an hour to speak with students.

My presentation walked through what types of energy could be classified as renewable, the definition of a green job, as well as the factors which will result in four million green jobs by 2038 and why they wanted to be on the side of folks with the skills required to be hired in these jobs.

In short, I recommended the students, “Live it, learn it, and hit the books”.
While I was at Woodside I got a chance to visit a garden the tenth graders planted and landscaped and even included a chicken coop. The plan involved growing vegetables organically and learning the principles of composting. The on-hands approach seems to be an excellent way to learn a bit more about the environment the green movement is intended to protect.

A while later another student stepped into the classroom, he was not in either of the classes I spoke with, who wanted to share his idea to create a method to generate energy using the water that came from the water company. What would be achievable if everyone aggressively pursued ways to make the world a better place?

In my view, it is wonderful the renewable energy awareness is beginning to creep into our schooling. Ultimately the adoption of green will be dependent on everyone being educated about alternative energy and are aware of the value of protecting the environment.

I felt, upon leaving, if this is the future of our education system and these students in the long run become the concerned green consumers of tomorrow everything this just might turn out alright.

Maintaining your PC by Tony Green

If you are like me when you are working on your computer you are not working with one window using one program. In general I use multiple programs with multiple windows open. Why would I need so many windows in use at once? First of all, your email program is a must so you can keep track of any incoming messages that require your immediate attention, your Internet browser which allows you to keep up with any late breaking news, and any other programs you may be using.

Occasionally the performance of your computer slows down to where your ability to get things done without waiting for programs to respond becomes a challenge. As you would expect, this “lockup” always occurs when you are up against a time limit where something needs to get done using your personal computer (PC). More times than not this could all have been avoided by taking these simple steps.

I have found performing these five steps save a good amount of time wrestling with performance issues. The first step is the defragmentation of your hard drive. This process moves the files which are located in various locations on your hard drive to more centralized location. This makes the task files of finding any files which may be stored easier by preventing your computer from searching the entire hard drive. The next step is to from time to time perform virus scans on your computer. These programs check for viruses which can affect files, degrade the performance of the computer.

Another excellent step is to now and then clean the files on your computer. Over time many temporary files can accumulate and removing these can speed up the operation of your computer. Next backing up files every so often is very important in preventing uncommon occurrences from causing you to lose all of your data in the event of a catastrophic failure of your system. Finally, you should start only the programs you intend to use. On many occasions all of the programs that are installed on the computer are automatically launched with the computer starts up. Over time this causes your PC to boot up at a snail's pace due to the time required to start all of the installed software. Start up only the ones you need during a session. This way you prevent wasting large amount of CPU and memory using programs you are not using.

Here is a link, as an example Windows 7 TuneUp ,to a program which I believe is useful in helping me maintain the performance of my computers. Perhaps these programs may help you to increase you unit’s performance as well.

Content Marketing by Tony Green

Through the years several self proclaimed versions of marketing which have caught fire, gained popularity and sold millions of book for their authors. The most famous ones are “Guerilla Marketing” by Jay Conrad Levinson, “Punk Marketing” by Mark Simmons and Richard Laerner, and “Duct Tape Marketing” by John Jantsch. I might define midnight marketing as conducting marketing activities under the radar against management against using the latest technology/techniques to reach customers. I am sure you might name a few or create your own.

When I saw the term “content marketing” on the view projector as I arrived slightly late after the beginning of the breakfast due to the usual Silicon Valley Traffic on Route 101 I was wondering if I would take away something I could use. The reason I came is I knew for the high tech marketer, particularly the Internet marketer, content was the endgame. Any some insight I had the opportunity to take away on topic would a good thing.

Any website manager will tell you we are all in the eyeballs business. Everyone is competing for viewers, page-views, click-through, which are all activities which use our eyeballs. Has anyone ever thought of what draws those eyeballs? That’s right the eyeball magnet is content.

Content provides useful or entertaining information through the preferred delivery medium the reader uses. Additionally, the content and its delivery correspond with the customers buying cycle. Optimizing the process is done by talking, reading, learning the business pains point, getting to customer to engage. The devil is in the
details is determining content which works best.

In my view this sounds like a reasonable take-away over some bacon and coffee. Once breakfast was finished and its participants were beginning to move to the next part of their day I thought to myself. What are my customers looking for and what is the best means to make their requested information available to them when they are most receptive? Alas, that is what content marketing at all about. You heard it now keep your eyes open for content marketing to join the other marketing version at a book store near you.

The idea for this posting came from workshop conducting for the Business Marketing Association BMA by Jon Assilian, CEO of Viewstream Company Website: http://www.viewstream.com

What is it with this Twitter stuff? By Tony Green

In the last few days I have seen the explosion in terms of Twitter. Seemingly everyone is mentioning Twitter in the same fashion where Facebook became huge and My Space usage exploded.

Just last night on ESPN the sportscasters were commenting after Shaq O’Neal sent a message on Twitter at half time of the game.

So as you would expect what do I do, log on to my Twitter account and signed up to follow him. Perhaps I can catch Shaq ranting’s in real time instead for waiting for SportsCenter to air its report.

Who wants to wait for anything nowadays? Everyone is so busy who wants to sit down and process anything? That is the ultimate reason Twitter is catching on. The format is consistent with real life. Life is a snapshot of small events. Twitter captures those small snapshots in real time. Regardless of where you are and what you may be doing.

Now I can receive Shaq’s updates without waiting for anyone. And I can receive them uncensored. Can you beat the immediate access? (assuming Shaq does writes his own tweets, which may be the subject of another blog).

I’ll check on what you are doing in real time if you do not mind me peeking through the mundane snapshots of your life. Feel free to capture mine, my Twitter profile is Tony_Green. Follow me and I’ll send you a Tweet!