The Green Frog from Silicon Valley

Book readers are “sticking it to the man”

The week after Borders closed its last stores, Amazon is growing its tentacles by launching a new Kindle and adding video to book titles. The fall of the book store chains – Barnes & Nobbles is also for sale – happened so quickly this year that it shook the publishing industry.

We heard about it for years and argued whether it would really happen or not… Digital books have taken over their printed ancestors. Amazon announced last May that e-book sales surpassed printed sales for the first time. Books have been around for thousands of years and are not going anywhere. Below is a hilarious video from Norway showing the "first help desk".

US greentech movement is moving forward in Bay Area but struggles to lead internationally

GoingGreen 2011 gathered executives and investors from Silicon Valley during the last two days at the City Hall of San Francisco. The mood was decisively optimistic in response to numerous questions on the cleantech market after the fall out of Solyndra. Vinod Khosla explained that green tech has generated huge profits for its fund. “The greentech revolution is alive and well” according to Tony Perkins, the founder of AlwaysOn that organized the conference.

The conference also confirmed the difficulty of Silicon Valley’s “innovation engine” to see beyond the Bay Area. Out of the global 200 top private companies in greentech, the AlwaysOn editorial team picked 110 companies based in California and only 12 outside the US. Apart for bio fuels, where Sand Hill VC firms have done well, Silicon Valley does not dominate the cleantech sector. It was the case in the level of Government funding before; it is now the case with M&A and IPO with many liquidity deals happening lately in China and Europe.

From finding her path to tapping innovation in water: do you know Julia Bucknall?

Ahead of the World Water Week last month, I connected with Julia Bucknall who is the Manager of the World Bank's central unit for water, known as the Water Anchor.  Julia has been involved in water investment projects and analytical work in North Africa, Central Asia, Central Europe, Cambodia and Central America for the past 15 years. Despite her long tenure she does not have a typical trajectory for someone working at the World Bank.

“I feel grateful every day that I am working on something that I dreamed of when I was eighteen years old. It is very gratifying to be able to explain the value of what I do to my kids”. Julia did not want to live in a world that destroys its natural resources and where too many children die of malnourishment. She wanted to do something about it, even at the risk of sounding idealistic.

Her first degree in German literature did not prepare her for the job, but her writing talent served her well when she was the lead author of Making the most of scarcity, a flagship publication on water in the Middle East and North Africa region.  Julia Bucknall first worked for a few years in the private sector as a management consultant. However, she continued to feel the pull to understand global environmental and developmental issues.