consumers

How best to make digital gadgets greener?

NEW YORK--There's a long way to go to make consumer electronics an environmentally sustainable industry and sometimes the best path isn't always clear.

Panelists and attendees at the Greener Gadgets conference here last week discussed the many ways that manufacturers could claim a greener product--a recycling program, less hazardous materials, and, increasingly, the embedded carbon footprint.

But to manufacturers--and the consumers themselves--what constitutes "green" is still a work in progress.

"I think that people are more focused on doing the right thing but there is very little for them to hang that on," said … Read more

Inventor: Gadgets need green design revolution

NEW YORK--The solution to climate change boils down to industrial design, contends entrepreneur and inventor Saul Griffith.

Griffith gave the keynote speech at the Greener Gadgets conference here on Friday where he ran through a flurry of numbers on energy and climate change to argue that the consumer electronics and IT industry needs to make drastic changes to curb its significant contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.

The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" and several patents, Griffith's "day job" is president and chief scientist of Makani Power, a company backed by Google.org to generate electricity from kites flying at high altitudes. He also co-founded other ventures, including Optiopia, Squid Labs, Potenco, Instructables.com, and HowToons.

Scientists are increasingly able to measure the carbon contribution of different activities and products. Having run the numbers on how much renewable energy can contribute to reducing carbon emissions, Griffith has concluded that the scale of industrial transformation is enormous.

"This is a lot like retooling for World War II when the U.S. made 300,000 aircraft from 1939 to 1945," he said, adding that refrigerator and auto factories were converted during the war effort. "The reality is that we can do it. We made 10 terawatts of power generation over the last 40 years. We need to do it again, a little quicker, but we have to do it radically different--not with pipelines and fossil fuels this time." … Read more

ID theft up, and 20-somethings suffer most

Update at 9:30 a.m. PST: A new chart has been added to the end of the article.

This was originally published in ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Identity theft cases surged in 2008, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

Last year, ID theft was by far the biggest complaint to the FTC, representing 26 percent of total problems reported. The next biggest one--third-party and creditor debt collection scams--represented only 9 percent of complaints.

The FTC's annual Consumer Sentinel Network report (PDF), released Thursday, details that ID theft complaints totaled nearly 314,000 in 2008, up from about … Read more

Podcast: Watchdog on Facebook's democratic foray

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on February 26 that, from now on, the company will post proposed changes to its terms of service and other policies for member input.

If more than 7,000 people comment, the policy will be put to a vote, and the result "will be binding, if more than 30 percent of all active registered users vote."

Based on Facebook's current 175 million user base, that's nearly 53 million people, which makes it questionable whether the company will ever get sufficient voter turnout.

CBS News and CNET Technology analyst Larry Magid discuss … Read more

Generation G: Wired to care, wired to share

Trendwatching gets it right (again): "Giving is the new taking, and sharing is the new giving." That's the key assertion in this month's trend briefing, which describes the characteristics of Generation G (for generosity) and offers eight ways for brands to join: from Tryvertising to Brand Butlers to Random Acts of Kindness (RAK).… Read more

Interaction design is not about computing technology

By Robert Fabricant, frog design

I just got back from Vancouver IxDA. Had a great time but seem to have kicked up a bit of a controversy by declaring that, as interaction designers, our medium is not technology – it's behavior. I must admit to a certain amount of surprise at the strong response, and I appreciate the immediate back up from my cohort, Jon Kolko (you can see my slides - mostly visuals - here). It is very interesting to me that this statement would seem controversial, even novel in this community. And I think it says a … Read more

Light at the end of the consumer-spending tunnel?

I was paging through the most recent economic report from Piper Jaffray when I came upon the above chart. It graphs the year-to-year change in American household net worth compiled by statisticians at the Federal Reserve. If that chart doesn't make you ill, then wow!

As grim as the picture looks, it's actually a lot worse. Piper explains:

"Americans' personal net worth declined 11% Y/Y from the end of 3Q07 to the end of 3Q08... the largest (year-to-year) decline in 56 years for which the agency has data available."

And we all know how great … Read more

How to predict gadget success

Sometimes even a well-designed and innovative product can still be a total dud. See the Apple Newton.

The industry analysts at Forrester Research now say they know why this happens.

In a new report released Friday, Forrester analyst James McQuivey zeroes in on what makes seemingly good products fall flat once they reach store shelves: lack of convenience. And he doesn't just mean "convenient" in that you can, for example, transfer a music device easily from your pocket to your car dashboard, but rather the entire experience using that music device--from buying the songs to putting them … Read more

Can we have an economy without spending?

You are familiar with Zen koans like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?". They are designed to open up consciousness with paradoxical or impossible questions. Well here's one: Can we have an economy that is not so dependent on rampant consumer spending?

After 9/11, Bush's solution was to exhort consumers to spend more as the way to propel ourselves out of the downturn. Today we are hearing similar advice.

Problem is, people are saving (or at least not spending, which I don't think is quite the same thing) rather than spending.

According … Read more