Green Business. Clean Technology. Cultural Change.
Tesla Motors is getting ready to sell additional shares and some debt like securities to raise approximately $830 million to help finance its operations. According to The New York Times
The plans could raise questions about the company’s ability to generate cash flows from its operations. Last week in an investor conference call, Mr. Musk played down the notion that Tesla would soon tap the public markets to raise new money. “We don’t have any plans right now to raise funding,” he said.
Best-selling author, David Kidder, has come out with a new book, The Startup Playbook, which has interviews with many of today’s most successful entrepreneurs, from Caterina Fake (Flickr) to Elon Musk (Paypal, SpaceX and Tesla Motors). While you get their own personal stories in great detail, its also the story of the modern American economy. There aren’t too many manufacturing companies, except those started by Elon Musk. They, for the most part are Internet entrepreneurs. [Read more...]
When GM first announced the Volt would be offered under the Chevy brand, the promise seemed to be that the company would sell an electric car that middle America could afford. With a current sticker price of $39,145 before tax incentives, that is decidedly not the case. According to The New York Times
Last year, G.M. sold 23,000 Volts in the United States, less than 1 percent of its overall sales and well below the expectations set by the company.
With 2012 the hottest year on record in the United States, it would be pretty easy to predict more of the same in 2013. But in the new book What’s Next? by Marian Salzman, she takes things a step further. She points out that “Americans who believe in religious miracles increased by 22 percent in the last two decades.” Then forecasts that
If superstorms are going to stick around, look for a rise of faith when it comes to searching for meaning as to why all of this weather is happening.
Technology can have unintended consequences. The automobile was designed to get people from here to there. What perhaps wasn’t foreseen at first was the changes it would have on society. The car enabled people to flee the cities and move to the suburbs. The structure of how we all live and work was completely transformed.
The car certainly defined the 20th Century. What will define the 21st Century? Hand held devices like the iPod or iPad are off to the early lead. If you are sitting at home your iPad probably isn’t far from your reach. Outside, people no longer really look where they are going because they are checking their email on the iPhone. We have even had to pass laws to get people to stop talking on the phone while driving.
There have been a lot of direct consequences of the iPad and devices like it. It has already transformed our leisure life. It has taken all of the media and games we consume and brought them to us in a new way. One of the things that made it so effective was how adaptable it was and how much you could personalize it. [Read more...]
Eco-anxiety is clearly one of the defining conditions of our age. Every period seems to have something. In the 1950s there was the Cold War and the constant fear of nuclear holocaust. Daniel Smith in his New York Times column It’s Still the ‘Age of Anxiety.’ Or is it? wrote
The League of Conservation Voters just released their annual scorecard on the voting records of every member of Congress, just in case you missed a few votes. The report is an invaluable reference that has been published every year since 1970. The authors strive to be non-political in what has been such a politicized voting area. [...]
The time for mobile nature reserves has come. What, you haven’t heard of them before? They don’t actually exist yet. The idea was just proposed at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver. As reported in the Guardian, mobile nature reserves would work as follows: Instead of restricting areas by their [...]
In 2009 an old, abandoned above ground rail line reopened as a public park in New York City. It’s know as the High Line. As far as creative uses for public spaces go, it’s pretty much a ten out of ten. But who knew it was about to get more fabulous. Co.Design gave us a [...]
Just Google “Tesla Model X” and you will find all sorts of frothy reviews, with plenty of mentions of how fast the car accelerates. But by now I think we understand that an electric car will go from 0 to 60 faster than even a high prices sports car with a normal combustion engine. What [...]