Month: June 2007

Trying to grok carbon offsets

Post ImageThere’s been a lot of talk about carbon offsets in the news lately, and a whole crop of companies have sprung up to cater to the environmentally-conscious westerner. One such company, Zerofootprint, is Canadian was profiled today at TechCrunch:

Their chief goal, says the company, is to raise awareness among individuals and groups that everything we consume has some impact on the environment. The company is fighting global warming in two ways: encourage carbon reduction, and sell offsets for the remainder.

You can pretty much ignore the first goal. It sounds great, but there’s absolutely no way to measure whether or not they have encouraged reduction. Zerofootprint could fire off a few press releases a month that suggest they having a positive impact, but there’s no way to know. That makes them primarily a vendor of carbon offsets.

The anti-TechCrunch, uncov, also wrote about the company today:

These hosers have even set up their own market for these offsets, outside of the official exchanges. So okay, Zerofootprint is the one selling you these carbon offsets, and they’re also the ones validating that the offset in carbon actually takes place. This doesn’t sit right.

No, it doesn’t sit right.

In fact, the whole concept of carbon offsetting just doesn’t sit right with me. Environmentalist and writer George Monbiot explains the problems with carbon offsets very well in his article titled Selling Indulgences. He compares purchasing carbon offsets to the 15th and 16th century practice of selling absolutions:

Just as in the 15th and 16th centuries you could sleep with your sister and kill and lie without fear of eternal damnation, today you can live exactly as you please as long as you give your ducats to one of the companies selling indulgences. It is pernicious and destructive nonsense.

I have absolutely no doubt that humankind will figure out a way to survive global warming. I’m also fairly certain that carbon offsetting is not the solution. In fact, I think purchasing carbon offsets could actually make things worse because doing so enables us to ignore the root causes. We need to do more than just make ourselves feel better.

Read: Monbiot.com

Drobo: Infrant's ReadyNAS NV+ with better marketing

Post ImageHave you heard of Drobo? It’s a new storage device billed as “the world’s first storage robot.” I am not quite sure what that means, because there doesn’t seem to be anything robotic about it. Drobo has been receiving a ton of press lately, but I don’t know why. Take for instance, Michael Gartenberg’s post:

For the past few weeks, I’ve been using a new device that totally changed the way I think of external storage that finally does works the way I want and lets me leverage low cost and high capacity drives in their sweet spot. It’s called a Drobo and while some have called it a RAID array, it’s really much more than that.

What he likes about it is that everything is automatic. Drobo provides all of the advantages of a RAID array without having to do any configuration. Furthermore, you can replace drives with larger ones and your data is automatically migrated.

Thing is, there’s already a product that does all that. It’s called the ReadyNAS NV+ and it’s made by Infrant Technologies (recently aquired by Netgear). Their “automatic” RAID technology is called X-RAID, and it works like a charm. Actually, it does quite a bit more than the Drobo, and it’s only $150 more ($649 vs $499 USD). For instance, it allows you to specify a RAID-configuration if you want, and it also has a wicked management tool to configure monitoring, automatic backups, and more.

I guess the main difference between the two (besides the price) is that the Drobo is connected to your PC or Mac via USB, whereas the ReadyNAS is connected to your network via ethernet. But seriously, network storage is a much better choice. Most people have more than one computer, so all of them can access the ReadyNAS at once. Furthermore, if you turn off the computer that the Drobo is connected to, your data is no longer accessible. Not so with the ReadyNAS – your data is always accessible. Also, you’ll probably get better data rates over ethernet than over USB.

All of these points are mentioned in Engadget’s excellent review of the Drobo.

We’ve had both a ReadyNAS NV+ and an older ReadyNAS 600/X6 here at Paramagnus for over a year, and I have absolutely no complaints. I would highly recommend Infrant products if you’re looking for a storage solution.

I suppose the Drobo is positioned more as a consumer device, whereas the ReadyNAS NV+ has not been (at least not until being acquired by Netgear). I think Drobo probably has a wicked marketing team too, and props to them, they’ve managed to garner a lot of positive coverage.

That said, the ReadyNAS NV+ is a much better choice in my opinion. It’s too bad it hasn’t received the press coverage it deserves.

Read: Engadget

Guy Kawasaki and Truemors

Post ImageEver hear the name Guy Kawasaki before? If you’re at all involved in the tech or marketing industries, chances are you have. He’s a pretty famous guy, credited with “bringing the concept of evangelism to the high-tech business.” He made his name at Apple, where he was responsible for marketing of the Macintosh.

Lately Guy has been blogging, and launching a new company called Truemors. Here’s a description from the website:

The purpose of Truemors is to democratize information. We made it so that people don’t need to be a journalist or even run a web site or blog to “tell the world.” Think of Truemors as a friction-free news site.

Reaction to the site has run the gamut from extremely positive to extremely negative. That doesn’t seem to bug Guy though, who recently posted “By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09.” After listing a bunch of facts and figures, he says:

One thing is for sure: no entrepreneur can tell me that he needs $1 million, four programmers, and six months to launch this kind of company.

He then ends with:

I end with a truism (as opposed to truemor): There’s only one way to find out if your idea will succeed, and that’s to try it, so go for it.

Lots of people have written about his post already, but I just have to add my two cents.

He’s absolutely right with that last point – if you have an idea, you have to go for it! There’s no other way to determine if it will fail or succeed. And you’ll learn a lot in the process too, as Guy pointed out.

The idea that you can launch a company for $12,000 is bullshit though. Guy may only have spent around $12K on Truemors, but that doesn’t take into account the value his name brought to the whole project. He knows it too:

Many bloggers got bent out of shape: “The only reason Truemors is getting so much coverage is that it’s Guy’s site.” To which my response is, “You have a firm grasp of the obvious.”

It’s obvious, but it is worth mentioning. TechCrunch wrote about the site three times, and that was before it even launched! Even ignoring the rest of the press Truemors got, those three posts are invaluable, and Guy can thank his name for them.

Guy makes it sound like it’s now dead easy to build and launch a company for hardly any money. From my own experience, and from everyone I have had the opportunity to learn from over the last few years, that’s just not typical.

I’m not saying you need $1 million, and I don’t want to discount the fact that Guy earned the value his name carries over 24 years of hard work, but his experience is clearly unique. I find it hard to believe that most entrepreneurs will have a similar experience. I sure haven’t! I’d love to have over 260,000 page views at Podcast Spot in a single day.

Anyway, I’ll stop now. If you’d like to read an interesting counterpoint to Guy’s post, check out Valleywag.

(This is a total aside, but I think my friend Alex looks a lot like Guy. He’s an evangelist too!)

Read: Guy Kawasaki

Notes for 6/3/2007

Can you believe it’s June already? Here are my weekly notes:

  • For a computer geek, I sure have spent a lot of time outdoors this weekend! I walked about 32 blocks on Friday in the scorching heat with Sharon to check out Famoso (it was kinda like “Quizno’s for pizza”). Went to a BBQ/water fight yesterday. And today I spent a lot of time planting flowers.
  • On that note, I have new-found appreciation for gardening. Not only is it time consuming and laborious, it’s expensive! Who knew flowers could cost so much?
  • Last week I mentioned the giant wild pig, and wondered how it got so big. This week, the answer: it was raised on a farm and recently sold to a hunting preserve.
  • Don’t you hate it when you order something from a fast food restaurant only to discover that it looks nothing like what you saw in the commercial? Here’s a collection of images showing just that.
  • This news is a bit old, but apparently you can send an email to Canada Post and they’ll turn it into snail mail for you. The service is called EasyPost.
  • Facebook Polls launched recently, and initially it blocked “restricted text” like MySpace, Orkut, and Friendster from being used in the poll. Kinda funny…a rep for the company said it was due to “outdated code” – riiiight.