(CNN) — When Rita Bryer sees 300-foot-tall wind turbines sprouting up from the prairie near her home in western Oklahoma, she can’t help but wonder about the view from the top, where blades the size of semi-trucks spin.

“Out here, you can see the wind turbines from 10 miles away,” she said. “Think about how far you’ll be able to see when you’re at the top.”

So, partly out of curiosity, partly because she wants to be part of something new, the 51-year-old is leaving behind a career of odd jobs and oil-field work.

She’s going back to school to become a wind turbine mechanic — one who’ll have to scale the turbines to make repairs.

Across the country, people like Bryer are looking to the renewable energy sector in hopes its “green-collar jobs” will offer them stability in this shaky economy. Some are signing up for community college or apprenticeship programs that train students to be wind turbine mechanics, solar panel installers, fuel-cell engineers or energy efficiency experts. Watch how the green economy is growing in Pennsylvania »

Government support has rallied excitement for the prospect of a green jobs corps, as President Obama’s stimulus package puts about $20 billion into greening the economy, according to the White House.Obama says country will double renewable energy in three years »

In his recent speech to Congress, Obama said the U.S. will double its supply of renewable energy in three years. To do so, he’s calling on a new class of workers to be trained in environmental fields. Green jobs training programs will get $500 million from the stimulus.

At a summit in Philadelphia on Friday, Vice President Joe Biden said people who make $20 per hour before a green jobs training program can make $50 per hour after. On average, the clean-energy jobs pay 10 to 20 percent more than similar work outside the field, he said. Watch how to land green jobs »

Adding to the enthusiasm, Biden cited a recent case in Chicago where a maker of energy-efficient windows intends to gradually rehire 250 workers who were laid off when their window company closed late last year.

There is a “very direct” correlation between the stimulus package and Serious Materials’ ability to reopen the plant, said Sandra Vaughan, chief marketing officer for the California-based company.

But not all signs for green industries are so positive.

Wind and solar companies have cut staff and stalled new projects as the credit crisis has tied up money, meaning banks are less able to invest in renewable energy.

In the short term, that will make things difficult for the newly trained green work force, said Kathy Werle, dean of applied sciences and technology at San Jose City College, in California, which offers associate degrees in solar panel installation.

“Right now, money is so tight. People can’t borrow money to put solar on their homes,” she said.

Werle said she expects Obama’s stimulus plan to help jump-start the industry. Within a year or so she expects the graduates to be able to find plenty of green jobs.

The uncertainty appears not to be tempering student demand for green education, though. Earlier this semester, 260 people showed up for 44 seats in solar panel installation classes at San Jose City College, Werle said.

“Anything green is very popular,” she said.

Meanwhile, some schools that train the green-collar work force are billing their programs as near-guaranteed ways to find stable jobs.

Sidney Bolfing, chairman of the Texas Renewable Energy Education Consortium, an association of community colleges, said nearly 100 percent of his graduates find jobs in the fuel-cell industry — many before graduation.

“Typically all of these students all get jobs,” he said.

Bolfing is so confident in the idea that he markets green-collar careers to high schools and elementary schools in the area.

He hopes that the standard list of childhood dream jobs — astronaut, firefighter, police officer — soon will include things like wind technician and fuel-cell engineer.

Even if there’s trouble in the short term, green jobs are needed to fight climate change and spur economic growth, he said.

“We need to develop these new technologies like there’s no tomorrow,” he said.

Matt Raines, 31, of West, Texas, had a career as an auto mechanic. But that didn’t seem to be going anywhere, so now he is enrolled as a community college’s hydrogen fuel program.

He said local people look at him funny when he tells them about the decision because they don’t understand what he’ll be doing.

“I had one lady who actually asked me if I was building hydrogen bombs. I was like, ‘No ma’am, it’s energy production, green energy,’” he said.

Raines finds the program exciting, and says he’s been contacted about jobs by three companies, even though he is yet to finish his two-year degree.

Maria Kingery, co-founder of Southern Energy Management, a North Carolina company that installs solar energy panels, said schools need to catch up with the changing industry.

She applauded money in the stimulus package that will go to green job training programs, but said “training is going to be a real challenge” in the coming months.

Her company has a hiring freeze in place at the moment because of the economic downturn, but expects to grow in 2009, she said.

Some green jobs are low-tech and require little or no specialized training.

A former construction worker could easily take up a career in home weatherization and energy efficiency, said Bob Logston, owner of Home Energy Loss Professionals (HELP) in Baltimore, Maryland.

Some weatherization steps are as simple as shoving newspaper insulation in a home’s attic, caulking windows and repairing ductwork.

More than $11 billion of the economic stimulus package is intended to help people make their homes more energy efficient, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Because of those efficiency provisions, Logston said he expects his business to quadruple.

He employs six people now and expects to hire at least 12 more, he said. He also plans to offer his employees insurance for the first time.

“Everything’s budding, so to speak, everything’s in bloom even though it’s winter,” he said of green jobs in the home weatherization business. “The energy costs are so high people can’t afford” not to increase efficiency.

Part of the trouble with estimating the profitability of green jobs is that no one seems to be able to agree on a definition for the term. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics does not separate data on green jobs or jobs in renewable energy, and economists disagree on how many new green jobs the stimulus package will create.

In such a murky situation, community colleges often network with the local business community to gauge their interest in students from green-jobs programs. Many have banded together to dig up regional knowledge.

“The students always ask, ‘Can you guarantee job placement?’ No, I can’t guarantee it, but I can tell you I’ve spoken with local wind farm managers and everybody I’ve spoken with says there is a need, (and) there will be a need,” said Kimberlee Smithton, director of business and industry services at the High Plains Technology Center in Woodward, Oklahoma.

That school, where Bryer is taking classes, is offering a wind turbine technician program for the first time this year.

Bryer said she doesn’t know how much money she’ll make in the wind business. She doesn’t much care.

“To me, especially, it’s going to be a job — a good job I think I’ll like, and I just look forward to doing it,” she said. “It’s always nice doing something different, not the same old thing.”

The woman who’s always been seen as a rebel because she was the lone female working tough jobs in the oil fields now feels like she’s part of a movement for change.

[via CNN.com] by John Sutter

For the above entrepreneurs, wearing pajamas for a day at the office isn’t far from reality. From pet care to virtual assistants and even online dating, we found entrepreneurs who are not just enjoying work from their living rooms and bedrooms, but they are also making a good living at it. In one case, a business owner grossed $10 million in a year, and cleared half that amount. Here’s a look at the hottest industries for home-based entrepreneurs — illustrated with some fun CEO self-portraits.

Pet Care — Paul Mann, Fetch! Pet Care

Virtual Assistant — Tawnya Sutherland, VAnetworking.com

Bargain Hunting Website — Karen Hoxmeier, MyBargainBuddy.com

Accounting Services — Melissa Nash Andrews, Accounts Receivables

Technical Staffing — Bill Foster and Ruben Santana, XRoads Consulting

Home Improvement and Organization — Allan Young, ShelfGenie

Green Construction — Nic Darling, Chad Ludeman, and Courtney Ludeman, Postgreen

Graphic Design Services — Sam Feuer, Mindsmack.com

Resume Writing — Kathy Sweeney, The Write Resume

Corporate Educational Services — Joseph Pickett, Experts Briefings

Online Dating Site — Markus Frind, PlentyofFish

“It’s time to bail out the people and the planet,” says Van Jones [1], author of The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems [2]. We agree, and this guide to to sustainability-focused career paths will help retrofit and solar-charge your work life.

The TOP TEN GREEN JOBS FOR THE NEXT DECADE:

Farmer

America has only two million farmers, and their average age is 55. Since sustainable agriculture requires small-scale, local, organic methods rather than petroleum-based machines and fertilizers, there is a huge need for more farmers — up to tens of millions of them, according to food guru Michael Pollan. Modern farmers are small businesspeople who must be as skilled in heirloom genetics as marketing.

Schools: University of Vermont: Center for Sustainable Agriculture; Stone Barns Center For Food & Agriculture in New York State; University of Oklahoma: Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture; Evergreen State College: degree in Sustainable Agriculture.

Related careers: urban gardener; farmers market and CSA coordinator; artisanal cheesemakers; and other food producers.

Forester

Modern forestry is a complex combination of international project finance, conservation and development. According to the World Bank, a staggering 1.6 billion people depend on the forest for their livelihoods. Foresters help local people transition from slash-and-burn to silviculture–teaching cultivation of higher-value, faster-growing species for fruit, medicine or timber, for example while carefully documenting the impact on the environment. Deforestation, which causes around a quarter of all global warming, is also likely to be a leading source of carbon credits worth tens of billions of dollars [3].

Schools: Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies; Duke University: Nicholas School of the Environment; University of Michigan: School of Natural Resources & Environment.

Companies/organizations: The Nature Conservancy; New Forests Inc.

Solar Power Installer

Making and installing solar power systems already accounts for some 770,000 jobs globally. Installing solar-thermal water heaters and rooftop photovoltaic cells is a relatively high-paying job–$15 to $35 an hour–for those with construction skills. And opportunities are available all over the United States, wherever the sun shines. Currently over 3,400 companies in the solar energy sector employ 25,000 to 35,000 workers. The Solar Energy Industries Association predicts an increase to over 110,000 jobs by 2016 — even more if anticipated tax credits are accelerated [4].

Companies: Akeena Solar; Sungevity; Sunpower; Full list at SEIA.org.

Energy Efficiency Builder Buildings account for up to 48 percent of US energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. LEED, the major green building certification, has over 43,000 accredited professionals [5]. But the cutting edge in efficient buildings goes far beyond LEED. Buildings constructed according to Passivhaus and MINERGIE-P standards in Germany and Switzerland, respectively, use between 75% and 95% less heat energy than a similar building constructed to the latest codes in the US. Greening the US building stock will take not only skilled architects and engineers, but a workforce of retrofitters who can use spray foam insulation and storm windows to massively improve the R-value (thermal resistance) of the draftiest old houses. A study by the Apollo Alliance recommended an $89.9 billion investment in financing to create 827,260 jobs in green buildings — an initiative supported by the Obama stimulus package, which specifically mentions energy retrofits [6].

Schools: Arizona State University School of Architecture: Energy Performance Climate-Responsive Architecture; University of Michigan: Alfred A. Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning; The Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Wind Turbine Fabricator

Wind is the leading and fastest-growing source of alternative energy with over 300,000 jobs worldwide. Turbines are 90% metal by weight, creating an opportunity for autoworkers and other manufacturers to repurpose their skills. According to the American Wind Energy Association [7], the industry currently employs some 50,000 Americans and added 10,000 new jobs in 2007. Their job board [8] is an excellent place to start looking for opportunities.

Companies: Vestas; Siemens; GE Energy.

Conservation Biologist The granddaddy of diversity, E.O. Wilson, famously called conservation biology — a discipline with a deadline. The urgent quest to preserve the integrity of ecosystems around the world — and to quantify the value of — ecosystems services — leads to opportunities in teaching, research and fieldwork for government, nonprofits, and private companies. The forthcoming economic stimulus package from the Obama administration offers the prospect of increased federal support for science and research [9].

Schools: Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington and the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. At the small College of the Atlantic [10] every student gets his or her degree in human ecology; it’s been called the most sustainable college or university in the world.

Green MBA and Entrepreneur

The concept of the triple bottom line [11] has migrated from the margins to the mainstream of the business world. A recent report by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Mayors Climate Protection Center found that business services like legal, research and consulting account for the majority of all green jobs — over 400,000. This includes everything from marketing to the LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) segment, to serving as a VP of sustainability within a large company, to piloting a green startup like Method or Recyclebank.

Schools: Stanford School of Business; San Francisco’s Presidio School of Management; Leeds School of Business; University of Colorado at Boulder — Deming Center for Entrepreneurship; the Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Wash.

Recycler The total number of recycling jobs in the United States is at more than 1 million, according to recent reports [12] (PDF, right click to save). Although the market for paper and plastic has slowed down recently due to the economic downturn, demand for steel is still strong — 42 percent of output came from scrap in 2006 — and recycling remains the economical alternative to high disposal fees. Worldwide more than 200,000 people work in secondary steel production, and the US is a major center of production. New laws and regulations [13] are also creating a need for specialized companies that can close the loop by recycling and repurposing e-waste, clothing, plastic bags, construction waste, and other materials.

Companies: Rumpke; Greenstar North America.

Sustainability Systems Developer The green economy needs a cadre of specialized software developers and engineers who design, build, and maintain the networks of sensors and stochastic modeling that underpin wind farms, smart energy grids, congestion pricing and other systems substituting intelligence for natural resources. Coders with experience using large scale enterprise resource planning have an edge here, as well as developers familiar with open source and web 2.0 [14] applications.

Companies: IBM, V2Green, WindLogics

Urban Planner Urban and regional planning is a linchpin of the quest to lower America’s carbon footprint. Strengthening mass transit systems, limiting sprawl, encouraging use of bicycles and deemphasizing cars is only part of the job. Equally important is contingency planning, as floods, heat waves and garbage creep become increasingly common problems for metropolises. Employment in this sector is projected to grow 15 percent by 2016, and the jobs are mainly in local governments, which make them a slightly safer bet for the downturn.

[via Fast Company] by Anya Kamenetz

In 2009, the job market will be full of contrasts: some industries will be eviscerated while others face shortages of workers. The good news is that despite the recession, there are still real jobs to be had. The bad news is that you may have to change fields to find one.

The trick to job hunting in 2009 will be to figure out how your skill-set can translate across industries, says Elaine Varelas, a managing partner at Boston-based outplacement firm Keystone Partners, so that you’re not confined to searching one sector of the economy. “People are frustrated because it’s taking them a while to assess the job market,” she says. “They’ll have to figure out other things they can do and want to do.” Successful job-seekers will be the ones who can figure out how to take skills learned in one kind of job and translate them into assets in others.

Here are the top eight areas where work can be found in 2009:

1) Nursing & Medical Services

Perhaps the best bet in 2009: Becoming a registered nurse or medical technician. With over 50,000 new nursing jobs to be created this year alone, med techs and nurses will have their pick of jobs and salaries, the latter averaging about $57,000 per year.

Social services jobs will see a boom too, as a swelling number of retirees check-in for medical care, says the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report. But not all health care jobs will see equal growth. “The growth here will be more about the services and delivery people–nurses and technicians–than administrators,” Varelas explains. “Hourly workers interested in changing roles should get into any role that services the elderly,” she suggests.

2) Computing & Engineering

Computer-related jobs are projected to grow by more than 20 percent in the next decade, and 2009 will be no exception. Software engineering is particularly in demand, with network systems and data communications analysis also booming. These jobs also had some of the highest median salaries in 2006, according to the BLS, with computer software engineers earning a median income of $79,000 a year.

These positions are expected to grow at nearly double the rate of other types of jobs, but that won’t last forever. “As the software industry matures, and as routine work is increasingly outsourced abroad,” fewer computing jobs will be available in the next decade, the BLS notes.

But for now, technology workers are still in high demand, says Varelas. Most of the open positions will be found at smaller companies, where employers will be looking for a versatile, multi-faceted worker that can fill more than one role. “You have to be a business person who’s also a tech person,” to be an ideal candidate, Varelas explains. That could give an advantage to seasoned workers over recent grads.

3) Education

“To a great extent, education is recession proof,” says Roy Krause, President and CEO of recruiting and staffing company Spherion. In 2009, roughly 38,000 of our economy’s new jobs will be created in colleges and universities nationwide. As more students wait out the recession in college and graduate programs, the need for teachers, administrators, assistants and other staff will expand.

The demand for primary and secondary-school teachers will be booming as well. “There always seems to be a shortage there,” says Krause. Some of the most in-demand teaching roles will prepare workers for the most in-demand jobs. “There are literally not enough educational programs to generate the volume of health-care workers we’ll need,” Varelas explains. As high schools and universities expand to meet demand for nurses, computer engineers and teachers, the demand for teachers and professors will grow commensurately.

Post-secondary teachers can expect a media salary of about $56,000, according to the BLS, while kindergarten through 12th grade teachers can expect between $43,000 and $48,000.

4) Green Jobs

So-called “green” jobs haven’t been measured in BLS reports to date, but some experts have predicted they’ll shake up the list of the fastest-growing jobs before the end of the decade. “More and more companies are adding dedicated staff to focus their environmental efforts,” says Alison Doyle, About.com’s Guide to Job Searching. Green jobs are arriving in two breeds, she explains: some will be at specialized firms that reduce human environmental impact, like environmental consultancies; others will simply be jobs at environmentally-friendly companies looking to improve their eco-image by hiring specialized “green” officers to audit and improve the company’s environmental impact.

But the recession might slow the corporate world’s eco-makeover, as many companies’ transition to green-hood is delayed by financial problems. To see any growth in green job demand, we’ll also need to see some “very creative new organizations,” Varelas explains. Upstart green-services companies may be hiring, she says, but otherwise this sector will be what she describes as a “slow-growth industry: high demand but high competition.”

Companies that can afford to go green will hire staffers like Traceability Managers, who will examine global supply chains and check for suppliers that might be excessively pollutive or carbon-costly to buy from. Environmental consultancies will seek to hire engineers or architects who are LEED-accredited, understand HVAC systems and can help guide developers through the LEED approval process for their buildings.

5) Energy

“There’s a big buzz on campus about renewable energy,” says Chris Higgins, Senior Associate Director of Career Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Outgoing students are particularly interested in startup companies, he says. “Biofuels seem to be the biggest area of investment.” Those venture-backed businesses should still be in good shape to hire in 2009, since they are more insulated from the broader economy.

“Obama’s talking a lot about green initiatives, so alternative fuels are going to be big,” agrees Spherion CEO Krause. But those renewable energy jobs might also see a glut of interest from workers in traditional energy, thanks in part to increasing volatility and competitiveness in the market for oil and gas jobs that has resulted from wild oil-price fluctuations. “We’re seeing a slowdown in Texas and Canada,” Varelas says of North America’s two biggest oil-producing areas. Workers in the energy industry have very specific skill-sets and knowledge that don’t translate well to other industries, she notes. She predicts that many of these workers may “be jumping at a green energy job” if they have the opportunity.

6) Infrastructure

With the president-elect vowing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on internal improvements like roads, bridges, broadband infrastructure and financial oversight, some experts are predicting niche job booms. “We work with a couple of companies that build bridges, and they’re expecting a lot more business.” says Krause.

Financiers might also find new lives as a part of the government’s new regulatory apparatus, which will need auditors, accountants and compliance officers. Obama’s energy-independence programs will also require electrical and mechanical engineers, grid managers, biofuel chemists, and civil engineers. Electrical, mechanical, chemical and civil engineers made median salaries of about between $68,000-$79,000 in 2006, according to the BLS Median salaries for power plant operators were about $55,000, or about $70,000 for operators at nuclear power facilities.

7) The New Finance

Financiers should prepare to be especially flexible in 2009. “Those people will need to take a look at reinventing themselves. They’ll have to figure out where else they can use their skills, and move into other industries,” Varelas says. For many bankers, that will mean applying their middle or back-office operations knowledge in other businesses. How long before they can move back into their former careers? “This consolidation is going to be long Ð at least three-to-five years,” Varelas says.

But don’t discount finance yet. “We’ll simply see shifts. There will be a shift from originating mortgages, for example, to collecting on them,” Krause explains. “If interest rates go down to 4.5%, you’ll also see a lot of refinancing.” This will require underwriters, actuaries, and administrators.

For financial workers switching fields, an initial pay cut may come with the transition. A financial analyst who made the median 2006 income of about $66,000 and decides to become, say, a commercial loan officer will probably net about $10,000 less in 2006 dollars. However, after three years of experience, that loan officer’s salary would jump to between $61,000 and $100,000, according to the BLS.

Self-Employment & Small Business

Replacing farmers in the self-employment demographic are growing numbers of people “who don’t want to be employees anymore,” says Katy Piotrowski, a career counselor and author of The Career Coward’s Guide to Changing Careers. “I’m seeing a lot of people buying franchises, or setting up arrangements that involve multiple online businesses,” she says.

As a career counselor who assists adults interested in mid-life career switches, Piotrowski reports growing numbers of workers “trying to escape the desk job format.” Experienced career jumpers are also wary of taking new positions that promise little job security Ð jobs Piotrowski likens to “black holes” of employment. Top prospects for small businesses will be Internet companies that can get funding while the venture market is still well capitalized, as well as green consultancies and international sales, which could benefit from the volume generated by a weak dollar.

The BLS does not calculate income estimates for self-employed workers of any kind.

9) Retirement, Reconsidered

The BLS says that over the next ten years, “the need to replace workers who leave a field permanently is expected to create more openings than growth will.” But with retirement accounts losing value, many baby boomers could postpone leaving. Could this affect turnover?

“This recession will delay retirement, but not the traditional way,” says Krause. “Retirees will come back into the workforce on contract or part-time basis, but not keep their old positions.” Because longevity means larger salaries and a lower cost-basis, companies will still pressure older workers to retire, but will also need their experience to weather a recession not equaled in decades. If retirement is your next stop, look for firms where your wisdom could be useful on retainer.

10) Telecommuting

The first quarter of the year will be rough for job-seekers. But the upside will be more employer flexibility. “Candidates will have to market themselves,” says Krause, “but more employers are open to job sharing and telecommuting as gas prices fluctuate and there is more emphasis on getting the candidate with the right suite of skills.” Which means that it’s wise to expand your geographical search, and inquire about whether working from home on a part-time basis is an option, regardless of the job you are seeking.

“What’s heartening,” Krause says of the incoming administration, “is that there’s a recognition that there’s a problem.” If the president-elect’s stimulus package works as intended, American job-seekers could see the creation and preservation of about 2.5 million jobs before 2010.

[via Fast Company] by Chris Dannen

In November, not two weeks after winning the election and still two months from becoming commander in chief, Barack Obama brought the government into the 21st century. Or at least that was what we were told when he released his first Web video address as president-elect. The clip, billed by some as a modern fireside chat, was embedded as a YouTube video on Change.gov, the incoming administration’s Web site. Sitting in a leather chair, framed slightly off center from his chest up, Obama delivered a three-minute talk on the economic crisis, vlog style.

The video quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of views, and within a few days hundreds of blogs were linking to it. Obama’s foray into viral video, the story went, heralded the beginning of a new era in government communication and transparency—”Franklin Roosevelt 2.0,” in the words of The Huffington Post. The Washington Post proclaimed the advent of the “YouTube presidency.”

1 million:
The number of views received by Obama’s first YouTube address as president-elect.

It wasn’t long, however, before savvy observers noted what was missing from this and other Obama videos: the chance for ordinary citizens to talk back. The campaign initially disabled the comment function on YouTube and prevented response videos from appearing alongside. A YouTube video without comments, some pundits groused, is more like a monologue than a chat, fireside or not. “I don’t see how one-way messages provide any more transparency for the work of the White House or government than the current old-style radio addresses,” blogged Ellen Miller, director of the Sunlight Foundation, a government-transparency watchdog group. “Is Obama ready,” challenged TechCrunch, “to be a two-way president?”

Of course, Obama’s transition team had good reasons for disabling responses. For starters, YouTube comments are typically the intellectual equivalent of truck-stop graffiti. (When the team belatedly allowed comments a couple of weeks later, the site was flooded with insights like “USA susks.”) Also, his team would have zero control over the potentially critical or embarrassing response videos that users would post next to the address. The real reason, however, was that Obama wasn’t actually trying to have a conversation with Americans via YouTube. Like every president before him, he was simply harnessing the latest tools to talk to them, one-way.

Technophiles who watched the campaign closely expected more, and now they are putting pressure on the White House to govern with unparalleled transparency and citizen interaction. Dan Froomkin of the Niemen Watchdog Journalism Project and The Washington Post summed up expectations in a blog post calling for Obama to embrace “wiki culture” in which “major policy proposals have public collaborative workspaces.”

150,000+ subscribers
follow Obama’s Twitter feed.

0 tweets
have been posted by Obama staffers since the election.

Obama has himself to blame for raising such expectations. During the campaign, he embraced every form of social media. At My.BarackObama.com, supporters could create profiles, talk to each other, and—by election day—plan some 200,000 offline dinners and living room fund-raisers. Users could log in from home to get lists of swing-state voters to telephone; this generated 3 million calls in the final four days of the race. Those efforts were combined with massive database-crunching to identify potential voters who could be approached door-to-door by last-minute canvassers, myself included.

As for John McCain’s efforts, well, he didn’t really have any. According to Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, cofounders of the Personal Democracy Forum and the blog TechPresident, Obama had four times the number of Facebook supporters, 24 times the Twitter devotees, and three times the visitors to his site in the final campaign week. The public watched about 15 million hours of Obama campaign videos on YouTube. Along the way, Obama collected 13 million email addresses, more than a million cell phone numbers, and a half-billion dollars in online donations.

There’s also another reason to expect a tech-driven presidency: Obama promised it. He said he would expand government transparency by putting more data up on the Web, streaming meetings live, and letting the public comment on most legislation for five days before he signs it. He said he would bring blogs, wikis, and social networking tools with him into the executive branch—all overseen by a new national chief technology officer. Indeed, Obama’s transition site, Change.gov, offers glimmers of a potential digital presidency with its YouTube addresses, issue-based discussion forums, and inside-the-transition videos featuring future cabinet members responding to comments.

But turning his innovative campaign and transition into Government 2.0 won’t be easy. The nimble Obama startup is about to be absorbed into a stodgy, technologically backward behemoth: the federal government. Ahead are bureaucratic obstacles the campaign never imagined, along with the political land mines that transparency brings. Obama will have to preserve the enthusiasm of his supporters while engaging the larger group of people who either didn’t vote for him or didn’t vote at all. His task is to rebuild the personal connection that supporters felt they had with Obama the candidate, assuring them that he is listening to them—without being deafened by the cacophony. If he can do that, Obama can alter how the government engages its citizenry and accomplish what he really cares about: his own policy goals.

Building that intimacy from the Oval Office will be a delicate and complex task, and just letting “AcidTrout” respond to a YouTube address with “Who’s the black guy?!?” isn’t going to do it. “One of the things that gives me ulcers is that there are a lot of high expectations,” says an Obama aide. “But we’re going to have to change how government thinks about the Internet before we can do the things we want to do.”

500+ PDFs
submitted by third parties for viewing and public comment are available on Change.gov.

Still, Macon Phillips, the campaign’s deputy director of new media, who has served in a similar role for the transition, warns: “Day one is going to be a lot different than perhaps day 100.”

The basement of the General Services Administration building in Washington, with its maze of identical hallways and frosted glass doors, reeks of generic federal bureaucracy. But if the new administration plans to reboot the system, it will find a pair of guides here in Bev Godwin and Sheila Campbell, cheerful doyens of the executive branch’s Web strategy. Godwin, director of USA.gov, the federal government’s all-purpose information Web portal, and Campbell, head of the government’s Web Best Practices Team, know every manacle and chain shackling the government to the 20th century. In a drab conference room one afternoon in late November, they discussed their optimism—and detailed their concerns.

For starters, the federal government operates more than 24,000 separate sites, many of them years out of date. “Nobody stepped back and asked strategically, how do we do this?” Godwin says. “Whenever there is a new initiative or program, they put up a new Web site.” And the first thing they usually do on that site, she says, is post a bandwidth-hogging picture of the bureaucrat in charge.

3,701 comments
on health care were submitted online to secretary of health and human services designate Tom Daschle.

Godwin and Campbell have been pushing government agencies to treat citizens more like customers, rebuilding their sites to help visitors do things like find loans or obtain passports—rather than serve as static repositories for press releases and personnel photos. “At Housing and Urban Development, for example, one of the missions is to reduce homelessness,” Godwin says. “If you go to HUD.gov, can you find shelter? The answer is no.” If the government can improve itself in these little ways, they say, great. Don’t worry about trying wild stuff, like setting up federal social networks. Many agencies bar employees from even looking at sites like Facebook at work, much less building their own versions.

Progress has been achingly slow. There have been some notable exceptions—like a blog on the Transportation Security Administration Web site, open to comments and manned by five agency staffers, and NASA.gov’s numerous social media initiatives, including Twitter feeds from 20 missions and projects. But the successes are rare and isolated. “We know that there are a lot of people advocating for more open government,” Godwin says. “We’re saying, absolutely, put the data out there. But I think we have to be realistic.”

For example, many of Obama’s online campaign techniques would be impeded by a collection of obscure and well-intentioned rules. Amendments to the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, for example, require that all government Web content be made reasonably accessible—in real time—to disabled users. Also, six months of negotiations between the General Services Administration and Google to establish a federal YouTube channel have stalled over similarly intricate legal issues. Meanwhile, a Clinton-era law called the Paperwork Reduction Act requires that an agency undergo a laborious approval process any time it “surveys” more than 10 people. The result: “Agencies tend to avoid doing these kind of surveys,” Godwin says. Would having users submit information to a social network or wiki count as a survey? Nobody knows.

20.3 million:
The number of visits to Obama’s YouTube channel since its September 2006 launch.

Even triumphs like Obama’s 2006 Google for Government bill, cosponsored with Republican senator Tom Coburn, have been caught up in red tape. The bill led to the creation of FedSpending.org, a site allowing the public to track federal contracts and grants. Instead of building it in-house, the Office of Management and Budget decided to license something similar from a nonprofit watchdog group, OMB Watch—for just 4 percent of what the government had expected to spend. It was a striking victory for government efficiency, but the process behind the scenes “was extremely difficult,” says Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch. After floating the idea of donating the system to OMB (“the government can’t take things for free,” Bass quickly learned), the nonprofit had to sign on as a subcontractor and undergo three rounds, and six wasted months, of bidding before the deal was complete.

Changes to what is effectively the president’s homepage, WhiteHouse.gov, will encounter similar obstacles. David Almacy, a PR executive and new media consultant at Waggener Edstrom who served as the Bush administration’s White House Internet director from 2005 to 2007, recalls that following Hurricane Katrina, he posted the transcript of a speech to the site. In the text, where Bush had directed people to Redcross.org, Almacy helpfully inserted a hyperlink. “Within a few hours,” Almacy says, “I got a call from the White House general counsel’s office saying I needed to take out the link.” Some federal government Web pages, it turns out, are virtually barred from linking to nongovernmental sites to avoid the appearance of endorsing one product or organization over another.

The incoming administration is still working to assess the implications of the Presidential Records Act, the post-Nixon legislation requiring the preservation of all White House written communications. But that means that once any page goes up on the White House site, it can’t be altered, only archived and replaced, greatly slowing down the process of modifying and enhancing pages.

The Obama team was able to sidestep these kinds of troublesome rules on Change.gov, in part because, as a quasi-governmental site, it’s not subject to executive-branch restrictions. They were able to post videos on YouTube, link to outside sites, and even publish content under a Creative Commons license, allowing it to be freely shared.

24,000 Web sites
are operated by the US government.

When he does arrive at the White House, Obama or his CTO can lift some of the Internet restrictions with the stroke of a pen. Others will require congressional action or clever technology.

Even if Obama’s tech team gets a free hand to rework the federal webosphere, things can still go awry. Take the 2006 race of Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. Both David Axelrod, Obama’s top campaign strategist, and David Plouffe, his campaign manager, worked for Patrick, a little-known candidate who used Internet-driven grassroots support to win. In a precursor to My.BarackObama .com, the Patrick campaign placed the state’s voter list on its Web site, allowing its supporters to download phone numbers and call neighbors. “We believed in people’s ability to organize themselves and get involved,” says Charles SteelFisher, who ran the campaign’s Web operation.

No We Can’t

Barack Obama wants to transform the way the White House connects with the public. But there are plenty of obstacles standing in his way. After the election, the governor’s team launched DevalPatrick.com to keep supporters engaged. On a MyIssue page, registered commenters could propose, comment on, and vote for legislative ideas.

But the administration was immediately blasted when a database feature designed to verify Massachusetts residency was alleged (incorrectly) to reveal unlisted phone numbers. The privacy flap lured a collection of trolls and conspiracy theorists to the site, crowding out earnest discussion on gambling bills and income taxes with 9/11 chatter and religious debates. Critics, meanwhile, said that Patrick’s efforts were less about engaging the public than about running a permanent online campaign.

Eventually Patrick’s Web site recovered, developing a more sophisticated way of moderating comments and creating forums around the governor’s plans to reduce property taxes and add public kindergarten programs. The site also allowed people to create grassroots communities to work on issues they cared about. Still, the public isn’t exactly burning up the site: The leading vote-getter, a bill to promote fathers’ custody rights in divorce cases, had just 1,100 tallies as of mid-December. Offshore wind power, meanwhile, was losing, 16 votes to 15.

Obama’s team has moved carefully as it transitions from campaigning to governing. Between two wars and an economy in shambles, building an Oval Office social network has not topped the priority list. “Day one, do we need a White House My.BarackObama? I don’t think so,” says the Obama aide, who was required by the transition press office to speak anonymously. “It’s more important to step back and ask, what are the goals for the White House? And I think that making the government more accountable and transparent is more important than getting people to act.”

To that end, the transition team served up small accountability stuff first. Change .gov supplemented Obama’s weekly YouTube addresses with periodic videos from inside the transition process, everything from staff meetings to vlog-type updates from advisers. In early December, Obama’s public director of liaison and intergovernmental affairs announced—via video—a Change.gov feature called Your Seat at the Table, through which the transition would post every document received from every interest group and outside person throwing it advice. Users were allowed to comment next to the documents, while the Open for Questions feature let them submit and vote on questions for the transition team. The latter experiment illustrated the double-edged nature of feedback when the Senate-seat-selling scandal involving Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich broke. Supporters began flagging related questions “inappropriate,” and then Obama staffers buried the queries. ABCNews.com jumped on the story and the apparent hypocrisy. Obama Transition Web Site ‘Open for Questions’—Except on Blagojevich read the headline.

Change.gov does feature some Slashdot-like issue forums where user rankings send the most popular comments to the top. The first forum, in which two staffers appeared in a short video on health care policy and asked for comments, garnered thousands of horror stories and policy prescriptions. A week later, one of the staffers reappeared with future health and human services secretary Tom Daschle in a rehearsed-looking YouTube video response. “We are just so pleased that so many of you have written in,” Daschle said, appearing extra-pleased. “I spent a lot of the weekend actually reading the comments … We want to make sure that you understand how important those comments and your contributions are.” The comments the pair selected to discuss, however, seemed serendipitously aligned with Obama’s proposed initiatives.

550,000 responses
came in from supporters after Obama adviser David Plouffe requested feedback about the campaign.

In other words, with everything he’s done so far, Obama has been acknowledging feedback but not necessarily heeding it. And that’s what we can expect from Obama’s plan to post all pending nonemergency legislation online and allow the public to comment for five days before he acts on it. By mid-December, technology advisers were still struggling to determine the best way to implement the idea. The bigger question is, what will it accomplish? Even the system’s own architects concede that it’s unlikely that online comments and voting will sway the decision to sign or veto.

Nor should it. The Obama team, for all its Web enthusiasm, recognizes that an online community—no matter how vibrant—doesn’t represent all of the American public. “A lot of people consider online interactions and communications as representative of Americans. But we have a lot more high-speed Internet lines to drop before that’s true,” the Obama aide says. And even with ubiquitous broadband, online voting would remain the ultimate in self-selected polling. There’s no reason to believe that commenters would reflect Americans as a whole or even that they’d be Americans at all. Citizens also may not be as interested in the daily machinery of Obama’s workaday government as they were in his novel campaign. Case in point: By mid-December, views of Obama’s weekly YouTube address had dropped by half.

Still, the new administration wants to be able to marshal its supporters to act. Obama himself suggested as much last April. “Our database has a couple million people on there who are activated and inspired,” he told a small group in Indianapolis. “And so what I want to do is to continue that after the election.” In mid-November, Plouffe sent out a series of emails to supporters. The first directed them to a detailed survey of their campaign experience and policy interests and told them, “It’s up to you to decide how we move forward.” Later, a Plouffe missive declared that “you’ll be instrumental in generating support to pass legislation that puts America on the road to recovery.” At a closed-door meeting with its leading activists in Chicago in December, the Obama team took it a step further and told activists to be ready to pressure Congress on economic stimulus, health care, and energy legislation. A couple of weeks later, the campaign encouraged its supporters to organize “change is coming” get-togethers to discuss the future of the Obama movement, online and off.

Obama doesn’t want his 13 million-name email list to serve as just another political interest group. He needs it to be a tool to keep people engaged with his politics and policies. “Even if you push through the best government programs,” says Michael Cornfield, a political-science professor at George Washington University, “it’s hard to solve the actual problems” without effort from regular people. A national health care plan, for example, will work a whole lot better if former precinct captains are willing to explain it to their neighbors, just as they explained how to get to the polls. And a presidential Twitter feed, Flickr photos, or WhiteHouse.gov video Q&A sessions may not vastly increase transparency or deeply inform policy, but they create a valuable intimacy with citizens. “People who think they are being listened to tend to respect more the person talking,” says Rasiej.

That may not sound like a big deal. But contrary to what Web evangelists and the incoming administration would like to believe, Obama’s campaign was never a bottom-up endeavor. The incoming president didn’t crowdsource his view on the Iraq war or use Digg to determine how to allocate campaign dollars. He ran one of the most tightly controlled, top-down campaigns in modern history, to the point of pressuring outside advocacy groups not to advertise on his behalf. Rather, he asked his supporters for money and inspired them to get involved, giving them the tools to organize themselves and a message to sign on to.

Instead of turning WhiteHouse.gov into a governmental synthesis of Facebook and Wikipedia, or running a permanent campaign off the White House email list, Obama’s best shot at rebooting the government is to remember how he got there: making people feel that they were part of the solution and then enabling them to talk to one another and take action. “There is a relationship between Barack Obama and each individual, and that’s multiplied tens of millions of times over,” says Joe Rospars, the campaign’s director of new media. “But there are also millions and millions of relationships between our supporters. Both of those kinds of relationships didn’t end on Election Day.”

[via WIRED] by Evan Ratliff

ATLANTA, January 14, 2009 – Just like an old neighborhood as it gentrifies, so the residential construction industry is undergoing a significant shift from old ways of building to new sustainable (green) practices. With this change, comes a requirement to insure healthy indoor air for those inside, while protecting the natural resources of our planet outside. Architects, homebuilders and contractors are learning that a homeowners’ right for non-toxic, healthy indoor environments ranks right up there with energy and environmental conservation.

Results of a recent survey conducted by the National Home Builders Association (NAHB) and McGraw-Hill bear this out in terms of market share and homeowner attitudes. For example, the US residential green building market is expected to double to 12% to 20% ($40 billion to $70 billion) market share by 2012. The survey results also showed that 70% of homebuyers were more apt to buy green even in today’s economic conditions, and 87% were at least moderately knowledgeable about green home construction. Homeowners cited lower operating costs through energy savings (91%), having a healthier place to live (84%) and environmental concerns (80%) as the top three most important reasons for buying green homes.

Yet, according to the survey results, which were reported in the McGraw-Hill Construction 2008 SmartMarket Reports, builders still tend to focus more on energy and environmental conservation in their selection of green features, such as tight construction, insulation, Energy Star® products and water-efficient plumbing. While these features are excellent choices for lowering energy costs and conserving water, they may inadvertently contribute to poor indoor air quality (IAQ).

“As with commercial buildings, super tight, insulated homes with minimal ventilation and low air change rates can result in indoor mold growth and indoor air pollutants building up to levels that threaten occupant health. Conversely, pursuing good IAQ without considering the efficient use of energy may unnecessarily increase construction and energy costs, create financial hardships for families, and increase emissions of greenhouse gases, thereby contributing to outdoor air pollution” said Tony Worthan, President of Air Quality Sciences, Inc. (AQS).

A new white paper from AQS, titled Energy Conservation and Indoor Air Quality: Benefits of Achieving Both in Homes, explains the importance of balancing the efficient use of energy with good indoor air quality. It also emphasizes that all those involved in building and renovating homes must strive towards adopting one defining common set of green principles that place equal emphasis on energy efficiency and protecting occupant health (good IAQ). The two must go together. In addition, this white paper reviews who is most at risk from indoor air pollution, common indoor air contaminants found in homes, their sources, health impacts and what steps can be taken to achieve efficient use of energy and good IAQ.

This white paper completes a three-part series on energy and indoor air quality. The other two papers in the series, Energy Conservation and Indoor Air Quality: Partnering to Protect Human Health, and Energy Conservation and Indoor Air Quality: Lessons From the Past Have Relevance for the Future, are recommended reading to gain a valuable perspective on the interdependence of IAQ and energy conservation and the benefits of considering them as primary and complementary goals for healthy indoor environments. All three white papers are available free of charge from the Aerias-AQS Indoor Air Quality Resource Center at www.aerias.org, Premium Content tab / White Papers.

Air Quality Sciences, Inc. is a fully integrated indoor air quality (IAQ) company that provides solutions to create healthy indoor environments and avoid potentially dangerous indoor pollution. As the only indoor air quality firm with laboratories that are ISO 9001:2000 registered, AIHA EMLAP accredited and ISO 17025 accredited, AQS sets the standard for effective diagnoses and reliable solutions. The company provides product emissions testing for the GREENGUARD Certification Programs, German Blue Angel Eco- label, Green Guide for Healthcare, LEED EQ credits, and other key IAQ and green product criteria requiring third party verification. To learn more about AQS, Blue Angel and GREENGUARD, visit www.aqs.com, www.blauer-engel.de or www.greenguard.org, respectively. For more information on indoor air quality, visit Aerias-AQS IAQ Resource Center at www.aerias.org

When he won the gold medal in snowboarding at the 2006 Olympics in Torino, everyone knew how Shaun White’s story would end. The corporate advertising complex would line up to capitalize, just as it has with every gold medalist since decathlete Bruce Jenner. And White, with his strange equine beauty and crazy pile of long red hair, would assume the position, allowing his action-sports cred and new America’s-darling status to be sucked out of him and slapped on every can, box, and cookie bag in the nation. All the elements for cashing in and selling out were in place: Take a kid with working-class roots (his mom was a waitress, his dad worked for the water utility in San Clemente, California); add Olympic gold and huge endorsement checks; run the cliché. Heinz would offer six figures to put White on everything from ketchup bottles to stewed tomatoes (White’s then-nickname: the Flying Tomato). Maybe a toothpaste company would come pushing tubes of new Shaun Extreme Whitening. Throw in some potential heavy-rotation spots for Schick Xtreme Shaving and Doritos Extreme Nacho Cheesiness and the caricature is close to complete. As a final inspired bit of packaging, someone would lay down the big bucks to insert Mr. White in a straight-to-DVD production of Faster Times After Ridgemont High, where he would be cast as a snowboarding Spicoli attending a junior college somewhere near Banff. White would then spontaneously combust into the most awesome! bitchin’! rad! gnarly! D-list spokes-celeb ever.

But Shaun White took a pass on becoming the Crown Fool of Gnarnia. “I was so fortunate to have had some success before the Olympics,” he says. “So when the time came for everyone to come at me, I was able to step back and say, ‘Do I really want to do that? Do I want to be known for airing over some dude who is going aaaahhh! with his teeth gleaming?’ ”

Considering the risks involved in his day jobs — in 2003 he added pro skateboarder to his résumé and took gold at the 2007 Summer X Games — control is a survival instinct. (At 11, a midair collision with another skateboarder left him with a cracked skull, a broken arm, and a fractured foot.) Even as a teenager, White understood the power of his image — his pre-Olympic sponsor list included Mountain Dew and T-Mobile — and felt compelled to protect it. “A photo would go out that I didn’t approve, and a kid would come up and have me sign it,” says White, now 22. “And it’s an awful photo, and I know because I’m signing it he’s going to put it up on his wall. Now he’s got this awful photo on his wall. That stuff would get to me.” So much so that at 15, he made sure his agent wrote a right of approval into all his contracts to control the use of his name or likeness. “A lot of people will just put their name on anything, and you can tell,” he says. “I just can’t do that.”

Unlike gymnast Shawn Johnson with McDonald’s, or human fish Michael Phelps with Subway, White has sought out companies he truly connects with. Working with a tight team of advisers that include his 29-year-old brother, Jesse, and his agent, Mark Ervin of IMG, White sees these deals as a long-term investment portfolio, something that will outlast his knees. Each corporation meshes with a discrete slice of his actual life, and with each one, White dives in and takes a central role, from the design of specific products to pulling deals together among his various partners. Last fall, his street-wear line appeared in Target stores across the country. This year, he expanded his best-selling Burton collection of snowboarding gear to include a stand-alone extension for women. There are marketing deals with HP, Oakley, and Red Bull. He collaborated on a snowboarding video game with Ubisoft that went on sale just before the holidays. And whether it’s the quirky commercials for Target, the reality-style video shorts in the back-to-school Web campaign for HP, or the high-energy ads for Ubisoft, the ecstatic look and feel of the White DNA comes through. “Every week, we get presented with a big opportunity from someone,” says Ervin. “Shaun turns down a lot of money. And I couldn’t be more proud of him.”

The companies that do make the cut look to White as a tractor beam to the $150 billion youth market. “Shaun White has this ability to juggle his authentic world and the corporate world and be that third platform between the two,” says DeeDee Gordon, a trend expert whose L.A.-based company, Look-Look, focuses on youth culture. “He is living by his own code, and young people admire that. He has definitely stayed true.”

White’s most valuable asset of all, the key to that $150 billion, may be an eccentric charisma that is an irresistible draw for kids — and, more important, their parents. In a post-Olympics interview on CNN, White marveled at the attention flight attendants lavished on him after seeing his gold medal: “I had unlimited service after that. I was gettin’ drinks. I was gettin’ snacks. I was taking photos in the back… .” The anchor interrupts, “Wait a minute, drinks? You’re 19 years old!” Without missing a beat, White drawls: “I’m talking about Mountain Dews, baby.” And with that, a little backstage bragging was transformed into boy-next-door wholesomeness. A little sass to impress the kids, an apple-cheeked smile to win over parents everywhere, and for his sponsor at the time, Mountain Dew, a plug money can’t buy.

“Blood wicking.”

White has just returned from a surf trip in Bali and the Maldives, and he looks tan and fit, though his rolling SoCal twang is hoarse from a previous night’s karaoke party in Los Angeles. He and Jesse are tucked into a booth at Freemans, a restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side with a vintage zinc bar and a taxidermy collection that ranges from a white goose in a landing approach to a wall of jackelope skulls.

White is describing the properties of the fabrics in the clothes he designs with brother Jesse, noodling an inside joke about the amount of blood snowboarders and skateboarders tend to spill. “With snowboarding, there are only a certain number of fabrics that are waterproof. It’s a lot of function with the fashion,” he says. “For Target, it’d be nice, but my cotton doesn’t need to be blood wicking.”

The Whites have been building their professional partnership since 2002, around the time when Burton Snowboards offered Shaun a chance to design his own pro boot. He had been riding for Burton since he was 7, when the company expanded into kids’ gear, but after several years on the pro circuit, he was looking to throw his leash. “I was getting older and didn’t think I could roll with Mom and Dad anymore,” he says. “So what’s the next best thing? Older brother.”

In his new role as quasi-adult supervision for a 15-year-old, Jesse handled the travel schedule, shot promo photos, and explained to the occasional New Zealand rental company how the car got wrecked. “I was 22 and just learning how to be an adult myself,” he says. “It was way too much responsibility.” Adding to it, Shaun asked him to take on the design work: “I’ve always loved Jesse’s art, so he designed the boot. It sold out in the first hour of a trade show, and we had to do a re-release. That’s where it all began.”

For four seasons now, the Whites have created boards, boots, bindings, jackets, pants, and underwear for Burton. Together, they brought a radical reinterpretation to the boxy, baggy snowboard style by incorporating splashy colors and menswear elements: lapels, asymmetrical zippers, motorcycle-jacket cuts. “When I first started, I didn’t have a clue about the difference between houndstooth and herringbone,” Shaun says. But he had ideas that Jesse was able to translate into patterns.

“I’d say, ‘Why don’t we do a jacket like this?’ ” says Shaun.

“And then I’d draw it and say, ‘Like this?’ ” says Jesse.

“And I’d say, ‘Yeah, but with a pinstripe lining,’ ” says Shaun. “We wanted it to fit well and be different. It worked.”

Already in touch with their inner marketers, they even titled the pieces: Puff the Magic Jacket, Jacket of the Gods, the Most Unholy Jacket Ever. “I wanted parents to have to call and ask, ‘Do you have the Most Unholy Jacket Ever?’ ” laughs Shaun. It’s a classic White touch, a way for rebellious kids to feel like they’re buying from a peer. But since the rebellion stopped well short of Satanic cults or Columbine jokes, parents could laugh along. And drop the $200.

Despite the immediate success of the Whites’ early gear, it took some convincing to get Burton to produce the women’s line. “At first we were like, yeah … no,” says Greg Dacyshyn, Burton’s creative director. “But then they came at me with full creative boards, showed me the presentation, and it wasn’t about Shaun. It was about this design aesthetic Shaun saw. He was like, ‘You’re not making clothes for the girls I want to hook up with.’ ” The line tapped a market no one had targeted. “We always kept a smaller size of my pro model board because a lot of girls rode it,” says Shaun. “There was this void. The clothes were all built for men, and in my experience, I think chicks … ladies … er … they know what we call them … special lady friends … they want to look hot.”

His instinct for pushing sponsors into new ideas and new territory is becoming part of White’s value. He worked with Oakley to create its first signature goggle, which quickly became a best seller, and today, the company’s top athletes all have goggle and sunglass models. Similarly, when HP decided it wanted to connect to the youth market, it saw White as a logical choice to star in the first of what it hoped would be a series of commercials. “This first ad was very difficult because we had to explain what this thing was going to be,” says HP marketing VP David Roman, describing what became the “Hands” campaign. “We were saying, ‘We’re going to show who you are by what’s on your computer and have all these graphics and animations, and you’re just going to stand there and move your hands and it will all come together.’ It was an act of faith. Shaun got it immediately.”

The campaign eventually featured Jerry Seinfeld, Serena Williams, Jay-Z, and Pharrell Williams. “We’ve done 10 of those commercials and Shaun White got the biggest pickup of all,” says Roman. When asked about the experience, White just laughs. “They had this hand stunt double for me in case I couldn’t do it,” says the first person to pull a 1260 (three-and-a-half rotations) at the Winter X Games. “It was hilarious.”

As a mogul in training, the White mantra is to keep it light. But as his medals pile up — and as his various ventures post big numbers — getting him to sign on has become an increasingly high-stakes moment for his pursuers. In the run-up to NBC’s new Winter Dew Tour last December, for example, the mood at 30 Rock was tense. “It was really important to get a commitment from Shaun,” says Kevin Monaghan, a senior vice president at NBC Sports. “I remember telling Dick Ebersol [NBC Sports' legendary chairman] when White had signed on and was going to appear. Dick said, ‘He has to appear. It can’t be called the best winter tour if you don’t have the best athlete.’ ”

But the easiest way to calculate White’s commercial draw may be to listen to video-game maker Ubisoft. “We wanted to move our portfolio to include sports and create a snowboarding product,” says Tony Key, SVP of sales and marketing. “Our only condition was to get Shaun White attached to the project. If he signed on, our plan was to build a billion-dollar franchise. If not, we wouldn’t pursue it.”

During our long lunch, Jesse and Shaun finish each other’s sentences and follow random thoughts to illogical conclusions. Blood wicking evolves into an imaginary album title and often ends their sentences as a kind of exclamation point. “I would not have gotten where I am if it wasn’t for Jesse,” says Shaun in a serious moment. “There are so many people who want to pull you in the wrong direction. Jesse keeps me straight.”

******The red neon sign of Hollywood’s Roosevelt Hotel casts a monochrome glow over a rooftop party after the X Games last August. Mark Ervin, White’s agent, is wearing jeans and a dress shirt, tails out, and sipping a Budweiser. Even though his client didn’t win the vert skateboarding competition earlier that day, he’s in a fine mood. He should be.

Seven years ago, while primarily representing skiers at IMG, Ervin was advising Target on how to gain access to the action-sports world. His recommendation was simple: sponsor Shaun White. On this night, that part of White’s life is coming full circle and expanding in a widening gyre. Throughout the packed crowd of attractive Southern California skate groupies, pieces from the Shaun White 4 Target collection can be seen on various members of the White inner circle. “When Shaun and his mom approached me to represent him, my only hesitation was whether I could devote the time it would take to do it properly,” Ervin recalls. “Even back then, I believed what was possible for him.”

The two met for lunch at an Italian restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway to discuss working together. Was it weird to be a 31-year-old man talking to a kid about managing his career? “Shaun makes that part of the equation easier,” he responds. “He’s spent so much time with adults that he was more articulate than half the people my age.” Ervin was surprised to find a 15-year-old who could make him laugh. He also saw how driven White is. “I knew Shaun well enough and what his expectations were going to be. He was the perfect storm: a prodigy in two sports, plus a magnetic personality in front of the camera. I also knew that he would hold up his word.” Bemused at how easily it all went down, Ervin laughs, “He and I shook hands, and I never looked back.”

There’s a calm about Ervin that must appeal to White. He’s no Ari Gold. And he refuses to slag any of the proposals he has received for Shaun, including the Flying Tomato routine from Heinz: “Look, it’s fun to see corporate America embrace a kid like Shaun, and I appreciate that these people are willing to step up, even if the idea is totally wrong for him.

“We look at everything through a long-term lens,” he continues, “and ask, How does this affect us in three years? Five years? Ten years? I look at my job as allowing Shaun to make informed decisions. I give my opinion, but never tell him what to do.”

As evidence of White’s expanding ambition, Ervin points to White’s decision to leave his sponsor Volcom, a $216 million action-sports cult brand, to design the Target line. “The Volcom-to-Target transition is an example of how Shaun had to choose between two long-term relationships,” he says. “It was tough, but he saw that Target was a better platform to pursue an entrepreneurial drive and also fulfill a dream of creating cool, affordable clothes.” That move also highlights White’s understanding of brand balance: Target’s line focuses on street wear and skateboarding for a mass market, and is therefore completely differentiated from the more sophisticated and expensive technical winter outerwear he produces with Burton. Instead of creating a situation where one deal could cannibalize another, White cranks up his exposure in a new market without diluting his presence in the first. Even his former boss reluctantly understands. “I looked at it and said, ‘I can see it from his perspective,’ ” says Volcom CEO Richard Woolcott. “We had a great run with Shaun. He has an extraordinary opportunity to pioneer a name and a brand and to connect with a lot of customers. It’s like when Nike and Michael Jordan took it to another level. I would rather have him, but he’ll always be family.”

As the party ramps up, Joe Prebich, a team manager at Red Bull, is goofing with White and some special lady friends. Prebich, 25, looks like Jesus if the Son of Man had a stylist; for White, he’s a kind of work-life-balance guru — packing a lifetime supply of caffeine. “Joe is like a guy from the hippie days,” says White. “I just look at him and think, What would it be like to live back then? Then I realize he is from back then, just somehow transported here.”

Prebich, who wears gold-rimmed aviators and blond hair down to the middle of his back, often helps White choreograph his runs in both snowboarding and skateboarding. “Unlike other riders who just wing it or have a vague idea of what tricks they’re going to pull,” Prebich says, “whether it’s in snow or skating, Shaun has three runs worked out in his head that build from serious to crushing.”

In contrast to other beverage brands, Red Bull likes to think of itself as a cultural company that encourages creativity in its athletes. “We try to identify where Shaun hasn’t been and make it happen for him,” Prebich says. As on a recent trip to Japan: “He’s been, like, 27 times, but he’d never gone just to shred powder. So we took him to this remote island, stayed in a traditional ryokan and just lived it.” Of course, Red Bull also brought along a small film crew and shot the whole experience, releasing it on MTV as Shaun White Big in Japan — and later reselling it as a DVD, The Ultimate Ride: Shaun White.

******A look at the structure of White’s network reveals a pattern: He sits at the epicenter of a multipronged onslaught. After the party, Target’s head of lifestyle marketing, Troy Michels, recounts a trip he took to Costa Rica with White in 2006. They were on a boat in the Pacific, he says, sore from the previous day’s surf session, hot and salty from a morning of chasing dorado and bigeye tuna. Taking a break from their labors, he and White hung their legs over the side of the boat and had an informal meeting. White had just signed his deal with Ubisoft and mentioned the Target chalet in Aspen, where the company puts up White and other riders and clients during the annual Winter X Games. “Shaun was just riffing on how he thought the chalet would be a good virtual meeting place in the game,” says Michels, remembering how White looked out on the sun on the water and said, “You guys sell a lot of video games, right? I think it would be a good fit.” Michels shakes his head and laughs. “It was so casual, but at that moment, I knew it was going to happen.”

Weeks later, during the Dew Tour skateboarding final in Portland, Oregon, the announcers heckle Jesse White for getting married that weekend and preventing Shaun from competing (White played Led Zeppelin’s “Over the Hills and Far Away” on guitar as Jesse’s bride walked down the aisle). “There is a Shaun factor,” says NBC’s Monaghan. “When he competes, not only do the events seem much more important, but the crowd gets into them much more, and there are more people.”

As the sports of snowboarding and skateboarding have grown, so too has the power of Shaun White and his impact on the action-sports industry. It’s now hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. Shaun has drawn in outside players who have helped expand once-fringe pursuits into multibillion-dollar endeavors. And charting his gravitational field has become akin to the Kevin Bacon game: Shaun White meets Mark Ervin through IMG and connects with Target. Target sponsors White, spends millions on advertising, raising awareness of skateboarding (and, because it’s Shaun, snowboarding), and eventually produces his clothing line. White’s Target connection eventually leads to a limited-edition Ubisoft game in which players not only meet in the Target Chalet but also outfit themselves in gear from Burton and Oakley. Meanwhile, White sponsor Red Bull produces a documentary that appears on MTV, which has a partnership with NBC to produce the Dew Tour that NBC is broadcasting live in multiple cities for both summer and winter events. And here come the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, which could just crank the whole cycle up another notch.

On hearing these connections laid out, White responds, “Impactatious!”

He is sharing his admiration for Don King’s facility with the language. “That’s the way he described a boxer’s punch. Impactatious. You can just see him making a fist and holding it there way too long,” White says, holding up one of his own.

White is aware of the double-edged nature of exponential growth. He knows he has critics, those who see size as the enemy of cool. But he’s okay with it. “I’m still pretty young and just winging it, but on a different level. I’m not really worried about the haters, the Buzz Killingtons,” White says. “I had a friend come up to me, an older guy whose wife is in the industry. I’d tell you his name, but he’d love it too much. He’d be like, ‘Yeah, that’s right!’ But he’ll know who he is. Anyway, he came up to me after all the Olympic interviews and he said, ‘Thanks for making it look legit.’ I didn’t get it at first, but it was respect. He said I was ‘solid’ as the voice of this group. It was wild. I have friends who are pro photographers who have shot snowboarders for years and years, and their moms would call them and say, ‘I saw that Shaun guy. That’s what you do?’ It was just a weird take on it. It made me nervous. I thought I could have blown it so hard so many times. I could have said anything. Blood wicking!”

White knows that size can be the enemy of cool. “I’m still pretty young and just winging it, but on a different level,” he says. “I’m not really worried about the haters.”

******Before Shaun White was a year old, he had open-heart surgery three times to correct a congenital defect known as tetralogy of Fallot. Surgeons had to open a ventricular tract, repair valves that were leaking blood, and suture a number of holes to increase blood flow through the cardiac circuit. “Obviously, I don’t remember any of it,” says White. “And maybe one day, I’ll be more interested in the details, but I haven’t been that curious.” It could be argued that what didn’t kill him has made him stronger.

After lunch in New York, White heads next door to Freemans Sporting Club, a menswear shop heavy on tweeds and boiled wool, operated by the restaurant’s owners. In the back is a traditional barbershop where customers can get a straight razor shave or a haircut. Before doing anything, White asks about retail protocol, adding with a laugh that he’s only just begun buying clothes. “In the past, nearly everything I wore came from sponsors,” he says.

White picks out a fitted flannel shirt and a peacoat made from the same fabric used in British Royal military jackets. He emerges from the dressing room wearing the flannel unbuttoned, rocker style. If you look closely, you can faintly see the beginning of a scar that as an infant must have run the length of his torso.

Earlier, a question had come up about that scar, whether it had any special, mystical powers, like Harry Potter’s lightning bolt. Did it tingle or burn when he was approached by companies that are the wrong fit for him? At the time, he just laughed and said, “That’s funny. I definitely understand tingles …” and then artfully changed the subject.

As he tries on the peacoat, the salesman explains that the buttons are made from ox horn and are basically unbreakable. (Jesse laughs, “If anyone can break them …”) White flips up the collar and checks himself out in the mirror. The coat fits like it was custom-made; he looks at Jesse, who confirms its coolness. Shaun breaks into a broad, confident smile — the same smile he flashes when he eventually comes back to the question he seemed to be trying to avoid. “Actually,” he says, “my scar starts to tingle when I connect with companies I want to work with.”

[via Fast Company] by Mark Borden

Inquiries, Sales and Funding Rise in Anticipation of New Regulations — and Spending — From Obama Administration

While many small businesses continue to struggle with tight credit and declining sales, one fledgling industry is seeing a boom in investment and sales growth: alternative energy.

Alternative-energy firms are reporting an influx of inquiries and business from a wide range of companies looking to increase their energy efficiency, especially from those that believe the Obama administration will impose stricter regulations requiring them to conserve energy. President-elect Obama has spoken often of the importance of alternative energy, also known as clean technology, and his federal stimulus package is expected to include plans to beef up alternative-energy infrastructure and improve energy efficiency in government buildings. In a speech last week, he called for the U.S. to double the production of alternative energy in three years.

So start-ups across a variety of areas — solar power, biofuels and energy conservation among them — are getting increased financing from venture capitalists and lenders at a time when other small companies are cutting back and being turned away by investors. And many are hiring more staff, boosting marketing efforts and expanding geographically.

Alternative energy “has been the brightest sector in venture capital over the last year,” says Brian Fan, research director at Cleantech Group, an industry trade organization in San Francisco. “Everyone is thinking it’s going to be a big priority of the incoming administration.”

While the overall volume of venture-capital deals sank last year, investments in clean-technology companies totaled $8.4 billion, up nearly 40% from 2007, according to Cleantech Group. In the third quarter alone, venture capitalists poured $2.6 billion into clean technology, a quarterly record. In the fourth quarter, they invested $1.7 billion.

Some venture capitalists think clean technology is the next big thing — the innovation that will drive the economy, much as Internet-related ventures did a decade ago. “Anytime big innovation comes along, it brings the chance to build big companies,” says Erik Straser, general partner at venture-capital firm Mohr Davidow Ventures in Menlo Park, Calif., which has investments in several alternative-energy start-ups.

But whether the administration will turn to energy initiatives quickly enough for all these companies to reap the rewards remains to be seen. And unlike with other new types of technology companies, the growth of clean technology “depends on the right kind of government policies and incentives,” Mr. Fan says, because implementation requires a certain amount of infrastructure and tax credits to offset the expense for users.

“The policy side is absolutely critical,” he says. “If [the right policies] don’t get pushed through, we will see a good number of these start-ups suspend operation.”

Just the anticipation of a new administration has been enough to spur interest among companies. Green Panel Inc., a solar technology and installation company in Brighton Mich., is planning to add four employees to the 14-person, two-year-old firm over the next few weeks to handle new business that has come in since the election. Even though no new energy regulations are in place yet, big companies are starting to take a look at alternative-energy options, says Adam Harris, Green Panel’s chief executive. He says one industrial firm held off on an order of solar panels until after the election. And he has heard from other firms whose executives want to have systems in place ahead of any regulations for big companies.

“What’s really changed is the push from the top — the fear of what could happen if they don’t” put plans in place to cut dependence on nonrenewable energy like fossil fuels, Mr. Harris says. The firm expects to double its revenue this year to nearly $4 million.

Executives at venture-capital backed Greenline Industries Inc., a Larkspur, Calif., maker of biodiesel production equipment, believe the Obama administration will create a huge demand for biodiesel and other advanced biofuels. The president-elect has said he’ll require that 60 billion gallons of advanced biofuels are produced by 2030, spurred by tax incentives and government spending. The appointment of former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack as agriculture secretary makes increased demand even more likely, Greenline executives say, because of his commitment to ethanol production in his state.

Greenline, which has 35 employees, declines to offer specific projections but plans to triple its sales staff in the coming weeks. “It’s a reaction to the administration change and to changes we expect as a result of the people [Mr. Obama] has picked — the policies that will be happening and the growth in demand we expect,” says Donn Tice, Greenline’s chief executive. The company’s latest round of venture-capital financing was in March, for $20 million.

Mr. Tice says calls from potential customers have picked up in the weeks since the election, and he expects the pace to accelerate once Mr. Obama takes office. In December, Mesilla Valley Transportation signed a deal with Greenline for a 10 million-gallon processing plant, part of a multistage, $25 million project of a company offshoot called Global Alternative Fuels. The election “expedited things,” says Dean Rigg, chief financial officer of the transportation company in Las Cruces, N.M., which started processing biodiesel fuel with Greenline equipment about 2½ years ago. “We’re all betting” that a push toward new biofuels will come quickly from Washington, he says.

Two weeks after the inauguration, Greenline plans to launch a new corporate logo and a new tagline: “Ask Greenline.” Michael Brown, the firm’s founder, says it’s a response to the idea that more and more people are asking how to develop alternative fuels.

Some small companies are counting on the government itself for new business. Verdiem Corp. sells software that provides centralized control over power consumption, such as remotely turning off computer monitors left on overnight. Over the past year and a half, most of the Seattle-based company’s growth has come from corporate customers. But with Mr. Obama’s declarations that he plans to improve the government’s own energy efficiency, Verdiem Chief Executive Jeremy Jaech sees opportunity. The 60-employee company is planning to add three or four new salespeople to its 20-person sales staff in the weeks ahead to focus specifically on federal operations in Washington, D.C. The company hopes to win the business through the information-technology companies that play a role in managing government buildings.

Mr. Jaech believes Mr. Obama will need to practice what he has preached, reducing energy consumption on the federal government’s estimated 6.5 million personal computers. And Mr. Obama will have to start with his own offices, he believes. For his company, Mr. Jaech adds, “it’s low-hanging fruit.”

But while Mr. Jaech anticipates quick growth from Washington, Verdiem is hiring in stages. “I know the federal government can take a while to do things,” he says.

[via WSJ Small Business] by Simona Covel at simona.covel@wsj.com

Would you like power with those fries?

A new garage-engineered generator burns the waste oil from restaurants’ deep fryers to generate electricity and hot water. Put 80 gallons of grease into the Vegawatt each week, and its creators promise it will generate about 5 kilowatts of power.

That’s about 10 percent of the total energy needs of Finz, a seafood restaurant in Dedham, Massachusetts, where the first Vegawatt is being tested. At New England electricity rates, the system offsets about $2.50 worth of electricity with each gallon of waste oil poured into it.

Vegawatt’s founder and inventor, James Peret, estimates that restaurants purchasing the $22,000 machine will save about $1,000 per month in electricity costs, for a payback time of two years.

“You take this waste resource and make it a profit center,” said Peret, who spent four long years cooking up the project in his garage. “When I started telling people, they said, ‘Someone’s gotta have done this.’ I’d run into more people. They’d say, ‘Why hasn’t anyone done this?’ My only response was, ‘I don’t know; it seems like a good idea.’”

While Vegawatt is a small solution, Peret’s invention is a very clever embodiment of several long-cherished alternative-energy ideas: capturing both the heat and power from fuel combustion, making energy where it’s used, and recycling used resources. Big industrial plants that make paper, for example, have long taken advantage of these concepts to save on their utility bills, but the Vegawatt will be the first product that could turn thousands of fast food restaurants into mini power plants.

“Now the restaurant owners are going to be motivated to put every single drop of waste oil into this thing, because it will pay for itself,” Peret said.

And importantly, it provides convenience for restaurateurs or Burger King managers, instead of subtracting it, like so many green solutions seem to.

Restaurants that fry delicious things like chicken and french fries generate dozens of gallons of waste oil that have to be stored in barrels out back. Because used cooking oil is considered a low-grade hazardous material, they haven’t been allowed to just throw it away; they generally had to pay rendering-plant operators to come. But it is now a sellers’ market for grease.

Higher crude prices have made other types of oil more expensive. Biodiesel makers and renderers have become increasingly willing to pay up to 40 cents a gallon for the stuff. There have even been reports of “biodiesel pirates” stealing fryer grease.

In fact, Vegawatt is derived from the home-brew fuel movement that many trace back to Dr. Thomas Reed, who popularized a recipe to convert waste cooking oil into biodiesel more than 20 years ago. Peret converted his truck to run on straight vegetable oil, or SVO to home brewers. But he was troubled by the inefficiency of the process.

“If you want to run waste vegetable oil in your car, it’s not as simple as going behind a restaurant and filling up,” Peret said. “People that do this spend the majority of their free time collecting fuel from restaurants.”

Peret realized he could use the same engine technology to power an on-site generator and defray a restaurant’s electricity costs.

“It’s not difficult to go from spinning tires to spinning magnets,” he said

So he created a test unit — which you can see at the back of his garage in the top photo — that’s basically a diesel generator hacked to run waste cooking oil. It feeds power directly into the restaurant’s electrical system through a 30 amp hook-in.

Vegawatt is more efficient than a typical coal or natural gas plant. Peret said it can capture 70 percent of the fuel’s caloric value. That’s because the generator captures and uses the waste heat it generates.

“All the water [the restaurant] would send to its boiler, instead of sending it straight there from the city, we run it through our heat exchanger first,” Peret said. “Depending on the flow, [the water] can go into the hot water heater at 120 degrees.” (This non-electrical energy savings is included in the 5-kilowatt rating cited above.)

The big power plants, though technically very efficient, waste most of the fuel they burn. After accounting for all the sources of energy waste “what you are left with … is just 27.6 units of usable energy out of every 100 units you started with,” energy researcher Benjamin Sovacool explained in his recent book, The Dirty Energy Dilemma. “In terms of making toast, it would have been nearly four times more efficient just to burn a lump of coal and place your bread over the flame.”

Biomass energy sources — like waste wood, switchgrass or cooking oil — are best when used right near the source of their creation. Dragging the stuff creates more emissions and raises the cost of the fuel. Vegawatt doesn’t have that problem. By company estimates, the Vegawatt generates 50 percent less carbon dioxide than a comparable amount of electricity from a coal power plant.

“In terms of the amount of energy that it takes to transport this waste, it’s a french fry,” Peret said. “You just feed the guy who is picking up the bucket and pouring it into the system.”

Forest Gregg, an alternative-fuels expert and author of last year’s SVO: Powering Your Vehicle with Straight Vegetble Oil, called it a “nifty application and a great business idea.”

Gregg also drew attention to a strong part of Vegawatt’s pitch: that it won’t require “intervention or maintenance by restaurant staff.” That’s because when users buy a system — or lease it for $450 a month — they get a service contract with the company for cleaning and maintenance.

The owner of the very first Vegawatt, George Carey (pictured above), seems pleased with the unit, too. He heartily endorses the company on its website, saying, “The Vegawatt system enables me to significantly reduce my energy costs, generate clean energy on-site, and very importantly, reduce the heavy energy footprint of my restaurant.”

See Also:

• Tapping the Vortex for Green Energy
• Global Energy Network Depends on a Few Vulnerable Nodes
• How A Google Engineer Hacks His Energy Usage
• Biofuel Startup Strives to Meet Obama’s Green Ambitions
• Obama Voices Biofuel Doubts
• Biofuel Solution at Sea, not on Land
• DOE Invests $125 Million in Synthetic Life to Develop Biofuels …
• Food vs. Fuel: Saltwater Crops May Be Key to Solving Earth’s Land …

[via WIRED] by Alexis Madrigal

When Vestas, the world’s largest wind-turbine manufacturer, announced plans for a new U.S. research center, 42 states lined up to make sales pitches. The winning location would be rewarded with hundreds of jobs, millions in tax revenue, and green-business cachet. Finn Strøm Madsen, president of the Danish firm’s tech division, wanted a site near big-name universities, so Massachusetts (MIT) and California (Caltech, Berkeley) seemed obvious choices. Portland, Oregon, was already home to Vestas Americas’ headquarters. But in June, Vestas picked Houston.