Notes from a Sustainopreneur | on Sustainability Entrepreneurship

What should you do with 3.5 million dollars?

From my network comes a question to LinkedIn Answers, a new feature inspired by Yahoo Answers, but where you limit your respondents to your network with closed questions, or the whole LI Community through open questions.

Ronald Woepereis was asking today:

"How will you spend 3.5 million dollars?

My first question on linkedin was "how can i promote doing nothing?". My former collegue Sandeep Kundra said:

'Hi Ron:

I think I am with David Keim on the answer to your question. When there are no other obvious answers, show how large amounts of money can be made doing nothing. That should be a sufficient push for more creative answers on how to promote doing nothing.

Best regards
Sandeep'

This was such an inspiration, that i decided to create my first multi-million dollar deal this summer 2007. I read the story of YouTube, and decided 3.5 million dollars is a wonderful amount of money.

So now i am looking for an outlet. I have all the contacts. Now it is up to you.

What will you do with 3.5 million dollars? Remember, money must flow.
First there is an outlet. Next there is a need for the money. Third is where the money flows in.

How will you spend 3.5 your million dollars?"

Since the links supporting your "expertise answer" is three in the form there, and since the answer is limited to 4 000 characters, I repost the answer here, with link references directly attached!

Peace,

Anders

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Reposting and addendum with links:

"Spending corresponds to consumption.

Investing corresponds to production.

Is there a conceputal fusion luring in the Spending vs Investing?

Invending?

Sevesting?

Without falling deeper into the trap of neologisms, it's better to go from esoteric to exoteric:

Downright Practical!

Channeling in eight spots (there might be five or three as top X, but definitely not top ten since that is outmoded as a brand and also is not a Fibonacci Number :). And the dendrites in our nervous cells gives inputs, but there is only one output to the Axon, so you should limit yourself for every roadblock to maximum eight, otherwise you get a information traffic jam :).

You communicate to my intuition, Ron, so now I just call attention from it all the way and make a further Top Of Mind flow.

Focus: Institutional Transformation and Creating Arenas for Dialogue - especially offline. Online is a bliss, but offline really makes it go Deep in change!

So:
Investing in the World Citizen Investors that focus Creating Global Prosperity would be best use!

1. Scholarship foundation to get start capital for those who want to start a local Muhammad Yunus Support Association/Ashoka chapter to spread further inter-action for micro-entrepreneurship wherever applicable!

• http://www.muhammadyunus.org
• http://www.ashoka.org

2. Campaigning !!Google+Skype+Fon+FirstMileSolutions+Ebay!! to make every hundredth of the Google share of the daily commercial sponsor clicks move towards a new joint investment fund where the investment in Local Communities - 2 million villages/parts of towns comes of maybe 3 000+ people each in average - goes towards micro-entrepreneur/education/health hot-spots empowered with Wireless Internet!

• http://www.google.org
• http://accessories.skype.com/landingpage?p=4570&page=wifi
• http://www.fon.com
• http://www.firstmilesolutions.com
• http://pages.ebay.com/storefronts/seller-landing.html

3. Innovating a system add-on to make a good leverage of Wikipedia as the global free textbook for teacher's everywhere, by have a new Wikipedia platform for teacher's guides and pupil's exercises given away for free!

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education
• http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=n_negroponte&gclid=CNyls8Xum4kCFSc7MAodLWNcPQ
• http://laptop.media.mit.edu/

4. Investing in E+Co to have their fund recruiting managers increasing capacity to generate more financial capital for their Solar Home System's/Micro-Hydro/whatever small-scale distributed renewable energy everywhere mission and self-committed assignment!

• http://www.eandco.net/

5. Campaigning Virgin new franchise on new climate investment fund to invest in susainable biodiesel flight fuel!

• http://www.virgin.com/news/default.asp?sy=2003&ey=2006&sm=6&em=9&cid=0&nr=12&p=1&kwd=-&newsId=786
• http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004164.html
• http://www.changethis.com/9.Biodiesel

6. Campaigning RED team to not only invest in Global Fund for AIDS, tubercolosis and Malaria, but also to increase capacity with fund recruitment managers with the International Aids Vaccine Institute to get a Long-term, sustaining, solution to the HIV/AIDS catastrophic and devastating range of implosion of the whole African Continent!

• http://www.joinred.com
• http://www.joinred.com/globalfund.asp
• http://www.iavi.org

7. Investing in innovative solutions for manufacturing, distribution and marketing of the agricultural modernization tool step One - the Pickaxe - going together with small-scale water innovation cleaning, desinfection and distribution - micro watershed and UV radiation through Soda Pop Pet Bottles lying on the ground water-filled in eight hours!

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickaxe
• http://www.sodis.ch
• http://www.irn.org/index.php?id=basics/reports/WaterWealth/main.html
• http://www.gramvikas.org
• http://www.gramvikas.org/lfs.php#mnr

8. Increase the purchasing power of the Bottom of the Pyramid of 4 billion poeple living below $4 a day, to create and spread the word of Sustainable Trade Everywhere to cut all the agricultural subsidies in OECD and all the trade barriers in these countries for agri- and forestry products, value-added in the long run by reinvesting in the supply chains to impose local job creation, through the national organizations associated to IFAT and FLO!

• http://www.fairtrade.net
• http://www.ifat.org

With a general demand that the secondary increase of money flows should be at least hundred times the original capital in three-to-five years! And the primary demand that the financial capital should be returning to the original fund 7 to 10 years from the original investment - i. e. patient capital, a little more enduring capital than the Venture Capital demand - i. e. Sustainability Venture Capital. Along the road you can increase the speed of the exit also for SVC to move towards "VC-as-usual".

• http://www.sustainablefuturesfoundation.net/
• http://sustainablefutures.sossoon.net/blogs.aspx?g=516

Why this? /.../"

Because - it is with Prosperity omni-present as it is with Peace everywhere: Everybody gains from it!

Peace & Prosperity,

Anders

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Addendum [Jan 20]: The intuitive flow made some typos and under-explained items here. But the main result of the exercise (private brainstorming), was that I was forced to prioritize using rather intuition than intellect. Now I use the intellect to sort things out here, and what now tells me is that there is a need to dedicate each and everyone in the 1 to 8 list above specific attention to make wider clicks and hopefully trackbacks with people who care. I'll be back, no time promises, but in the right time! What? When it comes is the right time :) !

Time to INVEST IN PRODUCTION CAPACITY for Solar PV Modules - demand picking up!

News!

Component shortage of US Solar PV Shortage!

Give your input here!

http://www.solaraccess.com/news/story?storyid=7145

I cross post my posting there, here;

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ISSUE: U.S. Solar PV Module Shortage?
From Anders Abrahamsson on 2004-07-28
Position: Advocate and financial solutions designer of SHS:es for systems distribution in Uganda, investment funding through SEEDS Fund financed with marigin of Sustainable Trade of Sustainability Profile Clothing.

Question:
Where and what is the MAJOR bottleneck?
Financing for production capacity increase desperately seen as solution, of course, and a thorough speedy in-depth reporting of the reason(s) of this occured component shortage!

Please mail me, to get me informed of what's up, with this! Anyone having any input?

Otherwise a possibility to get the industry visible to investors, with this indirect result of demand side picking up speed, as proven!

Peace,
Anders
Sustainopreneur and Global Knowledge Nomad
http://www.andersabrahamsson.net (Blog)

Sustainable Development needs Commercialization of Sustainable Innovations

Inspired by an article in MIT Technology Review, I wrote a comment in the forum there that I cross post here.

What the author Michael Schrage argues is that innovations are not the lacking resource, it is the way to have them to reach mass market.

See "Much Ado about Invention".

Let me take one example of a much needed mass commercialization with all it takes, that suffers from the good point and problem he identifies there.

Why is it that a technology from 1954 - Solar PV Panels that transforms solar energy to electricity (the first satellite provided with that technology, together with another technology from late 19th century showing the same groundbreaking revolotionary potential - fuel cells - and suffering the same problematic process of reaching mass market) - still have only found niche market, not mass market?

Or in general in the strive to reach a mass market for good ideas on how to make this world more ecologically, economically and socially more sustainable?

In this area especially, there isn't even a good dominating culture to bring Sustainable Ideas to Market, since there is not even a a dominant part of the social construction surrounded the world of creating a Sustainable Society. The majority of the peeps in this movement rather view Business As Such as the Enemy, when in my belief you could much faster reach increasing Demand for a Sustainable Global Community if you unite

People, Planet and Profitability

(another way to put social/ecological/economical sustainable development)

...in one big harmony.

What we need is Sustainopreneurship.

Thanks for reading my blog this time. I hope you want to bookmark it and come back.

The Practice of Sustainopreneurship is and will be in focus (some hints of theory resources is enough with the generic PDF posting "Some resources" I made earlier this month).

I do not want to have the same thing end up with this concept as the trapped Decentralized Renewable Energy technologies. Thus not just having my blog to end up being just another Sustainobabble spot in the world.

Enough talk. Let's Act. Together.

A9 - the Search Engine World last contribution

[this post was originally posted as a comment to John Battelle's Searchblog - http://battellemedia.com/archives/000575.php]

NOTE: Editing of the posting has been made coming to ease up structure and readability. One relevant aspect for the Sustainopreneur is to find her or his way thru the Information Universe in order to survive the info overload that is bombarding, and filter what is relevant for just his or her. Thus this posting of a new search engine, that focus more on providing "Knowledge" rather than "Information", combined with the excellent "Collaborative filtering" that comes with so many shop-sites - "People who XXX this, also YYY this". Here in the form of, "People who visited this website, also found interest in this one.". This is unique coming for the A9 that maybe will make Google disappear as a pure provider to other engines. The web search for this A9 venture is powered by Google, but the business is a subsidiary of Amazon.

For short summary of features of A9, turn to the John Battelle's blog posting above, and the Engine itself and review it there.

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Beta version.

Room for improvement, and progressive use of initial user's comments filling that room, I guess. So, following with a guess the A9 management reads the line of intelligble comments that was dropped in the comment I did on John Battelles posting in his blog, I rather was putting my instant first use improvement suggestions there - and here in my own blog, rather than using some feedback form or so.

- Firstly, moving into more "intelligence" in the World of Searching the World Online. That's the thing.

Remember the Apple early vision of "Knowledge Navigator"? We're migrating to that more and more now. Depth in searches and including the searching inside the book feature makes sense. And the "memory" added. History. The more simple AI engines coming forward, the more learning from my searchers, that this opens the door for with intelligent database usage with an interaction done, now permissed to track my search history, the better. Some excessive datamining here, the information also could improve the "generic" world of searching. It's an open door for some groundbreaking improvements in the world of Search Quality. Remember that it was the key feature, only to include one thing to improve the world of searching that made Google stick out - tracking how many web sites that link to this, and improving the search position as one of the parameters. Two or three intelligent uses of these kinds of features, would make A9 to stand out totally. Even if its Amazon commercialization is obvious, and perhaps annoying, if you let yourself be annoyed of those who wants to grab your bucks. But don't rely on my convenience and laziness only. I can find Amazon stuff elsewhere. You don't HAVE to buy it there, because price comparison European leader Kelkoo is for my prospective buying anyways (http://www.kelkoo.com).

- Secondly, to increase the number of users switching to A9, if you want it, the Tell A Friend thing using email, and tracking that email with a permission from you to see if your friend also is an A9 user, including it next time you log on to A9 (or if not - a mail saying - "Hey, use A9"), the obvious community of your friends around you, that special community that everyone is trying to have yourself to speed "remarkable" stuff talking to Seth Godin, would increase the number of users. A9 as in itself a strong ideavirus, I would say. It surely created a buzz this week! (http://www.sethgodin.com) But just a lame tell a friend referral, the obvious sharing of "This page might be of interest of you, since I remeber that you are in the Biz of YYY" or "Hey, look what I find for your paper/blog/magazine/book to come/birthday present to ZZZ". Whatever. Remember one thing - the best search engine still is the People. More efficient to ask a person to get the Real Quality coming from an entity having I-N-T-U-I-T-O-N. That's why Human to Human Interaction should be of use for this! With this "Searches suggested by XXX" on top when logging in to A9 for your morning cup of coffee and another day in the networked world. Soon wireless everywhere ultrawideband.

- Thirdly, that sure brings me to the final thing to say.

"What shall Google do?"

(in the same breath this Amazon page ha ha - "Googlemania" from Wired in the Amazon spot - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005N7TL/ref=pd_ecs_mag_eb_a/002-5014890-9545626?v=glance&s=magazines&n=)

That eBook by the same Godin, a collaborative effort by many (me included...yeah, ok, shameless self promotion is not the case, promise!), maybe A9 would be the one implementing the stuff I suggested there (that's the reason of me mentioning it, the issue was in central :);

And searching A9 on that phrase; :) - the top result from "What shall Google Do?" brought it to my little joy;

http://www.on-a-mission.org/google.htm

From our business website, where this suggestion was in that published eBook all the way relevant to download in this context!(http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2003/08/word_on_the_str.html)

So, I run it here. Again. Why? Let it talk for itself.

"I'll just make it simple. For every search you do, 1 cent goes to an investment fund for long term poverty eradication and empowerment. Like the fund we are in the loop to build up. There is in global interest of having poverty eradicated. My mind is all too set on it to think of anything more than above :)."

Period. End of story. Thanks for having you following me to here.

Peace,
Anders
"sustaionpreneur"
Blog - http://www.andersabrahamsson.net - this note posted as a comment to http://battellemedia.com/archives/000575.php blogpost of Search Engine Guru John Battelle in the first place
Business - http://www.on-a-mission.org - this being the Walk of the Talk of the last suggestion for improvement (waiting for the Full Version of A9 to include this feature) :)