Reduce 10% by 2010: 10:10 lauches today

The 10:10 campaign, born out of the Age of Stupid film, launches today, September 1st.

Great film.  Please go and see it or put on a screening if you haven’t seen it already.

It puts the case for doing something to avoid a future climate disaster.    But what can you practically do now?  That’s the question that 10:10 answers.   Reduce your carbon footprint 10% in 2010.  Not that hard, just takes a small behaviour change or two and there you are, part of the (positive)  future.

Sign up, take on the future and Do Something:

http://1010uk.org

One of the actions you can take on as a part of you 10:10 action is to join an EcoTeam, to work with you community or group of friends to measure and reduce your energy, water, waste and travel in a small group working together.  By measuring your resource use, and making your results visible, you get to see how you can change your behaviour.  Doing this in community helps you make a change and feel good about it, by doing it together.

I spend most of my days building and enhancing the EcoTeams website and measurement and reporting tools, so I’ve seen it work and have seen the positive, carbon saving, money saving results that people get from it.   10% is achievable and worth doing. You save the planet and save money and feel good. Beat that.

Our official name change to Nodestone Limited

A note for our clients that are into the corporate details:  As of 19th November, we officially renamed our company to Nodestone Limited from the previous name, Presence Labs Limited.  Bank accounts and cheques and all of that are now in the process of changing.  We’ll let you know on invoices and by letter if there’s anything you need to know or change.

Yay!

Bringing in the New

We are in the middle of adding redirects for authenticblogging.com and presencelabs.com over to our new home at nodestone.com.

Surprise!

Hopefully it isn’t a surprise that you’ve landed here, but if it is, let me explain.   Libby Davy (of authentic blogging) and I (Graeme Sutherland of presencelabs.com) are putting our work and blogs together into nodestone.com.  So, we’ve built a new blog with the content of both of them, and I’m just now cutting over to the new site.

Basically, it should be business as usual once the transfer is complete. In the meantime, there might be a few little issues wih locating your favourite pages. Bear with us for the next few hours on that.

We hope you enjoy the new site.  We’ve had fun making it.  (Except for the late nights and the hard bits :-)

Technical Stuff

Don’t read this unless you care about the technical details of the changeover.

We’re basically putting in permanant redirects (301s) from the old domains to nodestone.com, with a bit of special redirect magic applied to make sure that old url parts map to the new ones.  This means (at least in theory) that google will still like us in the morning, and all our old paths will go somewhere relevant.  Permanent redirects also mean that records get updated permanently, so things like feed readers should get the new feed address if they have half a brain.

That’s all.  I’m off to arrange the nameserver changes for authenticblogging.com.   Ciao.

Shine weekend

We’re just back from the Shine Unconference. Lib was there for the lot, but I was only there for Sunday. I’m a bit tired to say much about it this evening.

But.. it was great and inspiring hanging around and chatting with a lot of people who are really going with their passions and doing great and good things. It was a very warm and friendly space, and I really enjoyed the sessions we did today.

Lib ran a short discussion on Authenticity Online which sparked a robust discussion of a bunch of issues around social media, free content, risk management, online reputation and online tools. There are a lot of questions out there around social media and the third sector. We collected some meaty questions which we’ll post over on the authentic blogging community in the next couple of days along with the beginnings of some answers. Thanks to all who participated in that discussion and hope you join us over on the community to work through the issues.

Busy afternoon — we then whizzed over to the “What’s in a Name” session being run by Neru. Lib and I are working on rebranding, so wanted to get some tips on choosing a new name for us. Interesting ideas from there. Thanks to the Neru team and all who threw in their thoughts. We’ll keep working on that new name and see what happens.

It always seems a long train ride home to Brighton on a Sunday, but when we got home it was still sunny and the air was fresh. It was quiet. You got the sense a lot of people had satisfying weekends and were now relaxing at home. I sure did.

Recommendation Ventures powers ahead: IceTV recommendations live

I haven’t talked a lot about Scouta for a bit… We’ve been internally capacity building. And we’ve been focussing on providing recommendations as a web service to web and media companies with members and content that can be enabled for recommendations.

We do this under the banner of Scouta’s real company name, Recommendation Ventures, which you’ll hear a lot more about in the coming months.

There’s a lot of specialist knowledge around providing good recommendations, and packaging a recommendation services as a set of web services makes a lot of sense. We can take a set of content (URLs) and some identified members and visitors, and produce personalized recommendations in real-time to embed in a website or provide on a set top box, mobile etc.

But, the big news today is that our recommendation services are powering IceTV’s new IceTV Recommendations. IceTV say:

IceTV customers can now automatically receive intelligent suggestions on TV shows that may interest them based on their favourite TV shows, series recordings and similar recording decisions made by fellow IceTV users.

IceTV Recommendations are provided to IceTV users on an ongoing basis thanks to a recent partnership with Perth based Australian start-up, Recommendation Ventures Pty Ltd. The two pioneering companies have teamed-up to give users intuitive recommendations, based on the individual user’s tastes. When combined with the existing value-add features of IceTV, Recommendation Venture’s intelligent technology will allow user’s to receive truly personalised suggestions and as a result, an even greater TV viewing experience.

We’ve had some good press coverage. It has been picked up by TechCrunch and Gizmodo

Moved to The Werks

I’ve moved offices and joined the emerging coworking community The Werks on Church Road in Hove. A dynamic and interesting space full of dynamic and interesting people werking away.

For those that know the space a little, I’ve got a permanent desk on the First floor in the back corner, sitting across from Jim Callender.

Week off next week

Just to let you all know, am taking a short break next week (14th – 18th April 2008) — off the the Isle of Wight with family for a few days of (hopefully) sunshine and spring air.

I’ll still be around for emergencies, but am really trying to get a little break in before school goes back and the big work push towards summer begins.

Recommendation web services

We’re starting to roll out recommendations as a web service as a part of the Scouta product set. See more info at the new Recommendation Ventures website.

Lib at Lift08

Lib has headed off to Lift08 in Geneva. Here she is giving some reflections so far…

Empower Controls

I’m really pleased to say I’m embarking on some interesting work with Empower Controls to help them with some stuff that I can’t talk about yet.

From their home page:

There is a significant waste of energy in home offices, home theatres and office workstations. Devices are often left on or in a standby state. We often fail to realise that devices such as a TV, DVD player, PC, scanner, printer or mobile phone charger consume power all of the time, even when not being used or when they are in a standby state. Hundreds of millions of devices all left in a standby state adds up to a lot of wasted energy.

Empower Controls solutions allow everyday people to intelligently switch off these types of products when not in use and to significantly reduce their energy consumption, with a minimum of fuss.

It is so nice to see this awareness coming to automation. I’m delighted to be a part of this.

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